The Dursleys were quite upset to see Harry turn up on their doorstep again, especially with a collection of weird books and objects and even a live owl, but Harry volunteered to make dinner and that seemed to take the wind out of Uncle Vernon's sails a bit.

Harry's pile of books and other things turned out to not fit in his cupboard, even without Harry in there, and so after putting together a chicken and leek pie Harry brought up the subject of where he was going to sleep.

To his surprise – perhaps prompted by how recently it was that Hagrid had visited – his aunt and uncle were quite receptive to the idea of Harry changing where he slept. Perhaps it was the reminder that he still lived in a cupboard and that Hagrid could quite easily have become very angry about it, or perhaps just the incontrovertible fact that keeping an owl in a cupboard would be functionally impossible, but before the evening was out Harry and all his things were moved up into the bedroom he'd suggested instead. Not Dudley's second bedroom, which was kept as an overflow for his toys, but the loft of the house.

At some point in the past a roof window had been fitted to Number Four, Privet Drive, and Harry had pointed out – politely – that it would let his owl fly out to hunt, it would keep him out of the way, and that they would have the loft completely available for the whole of the rest of the year when he was at his school.

Faced with the prospect of Harry living in the loft – which got very hot in the day and very cold at night, as it was outside the house insulation – or of him taking one of Dudley's bedrooms away from him, Aunt Petunia had decided that the loft was the better option and had cajoled Uncle Vernon into accepting it. So Harry took his things up the ladder into the loft, clearing himself out a space not far from the window, and piled up his books, his school things and the few hundred letters he'd gathered up that Hagrid had provided.

The window was swiftly propped open so his owl could fly out and hunt, and as his birthday drew to a close Harry lay down in starlight on an irregular pile of paper, paperbacks and hardbacks which felt entirely comfortable and right and his.

All in all, it had been a really good birthday.

Harry's new lair had one major advantage over his old one downstairs, and while it was one he would have had in a bedroom as well it was still one he was very happy with.

Namely, the window was large enough and he was small enough to let him sling on a backpack early in the morning, climb out the window, and fly off into the sky. It wasn't something he did every day, because he had a lot of books to read, but with a full month to wait until his first day of school it was a valuable way to vary up his day.

Another way of doing that was to continue to do the chores. Aunt Petunia seemed to be completely baffled by his willingness to still cook and clean, and Uncle Vernon seemed to harbour faint suspicions that Harry was just playing along until he did something awful.

Harry wondered if Uncle Vernon was a bit paranoid, really. It wasn't as if Harry had ever done anything to him.

Well, admittedly Harry was a dragon, but Uncle Vernon didn't know that bit.

"Hmm..." Harry pondered, tail flicking idly from side to side as he lay on his back in the dawn light. "I think we really need to decide on a name for you, girl."

His snowy owl hooted softly, fluttering out from her perch to land on a foreleg, and he smiled and touched her back – pleased by how quickly the intelligent owl had become used to him.

"The first idea I had was Ruth," he went on softly, in deference to how it was still quite early in the morning. "He's a white dragon, but it's more of a boy's name than a girl's name."

The owl clucked disapprovingly.

"Not what you want?" Harry asked, and the owl bobbed her head slightly. "Then what about one of the other names from those books? Ramoth?"

This time she seemed slightly more interested, and Harry clarified that Ramoth was a large golden dragon who was very much in charge. The name was ultimately rejected, though, and so was the similar Wirenth.

"Not interested in gold dragons, then?" Harry checked, and the snowy owl confirmed his guess with a quick nibble on his talon. "Okay, what about Imraith?"

That one took a bit more explaining, and the owl considered it carefully before rejecting it as well – specifically when Harry got to the bit about how she'd fought a dragon.

Smiling at that, Harry moved on – though the snowy owl seemed very picky indeed, rejecting name after name as it came up. Polgara and Sephrenia went by, as did Rhyssa, Esmerelda and Asheth, and as dawn broke over Surrey she rejected every one.

Harry actually ran out of names to suggest and had to ask his owl to take off while he rolled over – letting him dig his schoolbooks out of the pile and search through them, paging back and forth randomly. There was a lot of interesting history that he was skipping past, things like a man born in the fourteenth century with no listed death date or how Merlin apparently was a real, historical person – did that mean King Arthur was as well? - but after several more suggested names like Nimue and Pythia Harry finally stumbled upon one which his choosy owl seemed to like.

"Hedwig of Silesia was a witch born into a Muggle noble house," Harry read out. "Despite her position of great importance in Muggle society, Hedwig was able to use her magic with subtlety to avoid being seen as a witch – something that was not essential in the time before the Statute of Secrecy. Hedwig was also involved in fighting the Mongolian Invasion in twelve forty-one to forty-two, defeating the Mongolian grand shaman in single combat at the end of a large magical battle and forcing his Muggle army to retreat."

He looked up at the owl now perched on the fold of his right wing. "What do you think, girl?"

She paused, then hooted in agreement.

"All right, Hedwig it is," Harry decided.

One of the things Harry had had to move out of the way to pile up his bed was an old luggage trunk. He sort of recognized it from one of the Dursleys' old holidays, back from before he was a dragon he thought, and it was what they'd used to transport Dudley's toy collection at the time.

Dudley's collection of toys was now far too large to actually carry even in such a big trunk, and so it had been up here for years – so Harry duly appropriated it for his own, planning on using it to carry his things to the train. It didn't have wheels, which was a bit of a problem, but Harry was pretty sure he could move it around a bit at least – and most of the journey would be by train anyway.

That prompted Harry to open the envelope Hagrid had given him, to double-check on the details of his train journey, and that made him stop and stare at the ticket.

It said that the train left from Kings' Cross station at eleven o'clock on September the first, but it also said that the train left from platform nine-and-three-quarters.

Harry looked again, and it still said platform nine-and-three-quarters.

Then he put the ticket back in the envelope, set it aside, shifted the heavy trunk so it covered the loft hatch, and climbed out of the window.

Hedwig barked sleepily at him, and he reassured her with a nod before taking flight.

Flying all the way to Kings' Cross was about as far as Harry had ever flown in one go before – normally he went to visit the Barbican Library in London when he was going that far – and when he backwinged down to land outside the station his wings had the kind of pleasant burn you got from long but not-too-long exercise.

Furling them with a clatter of wing membrane, Harry made his way into the main station. There were no signs for platform nine-and-three-quarters, indeed it took a while to even be sure he'd found platforms nine and ten because the platform numbers started at zero instead of one… but after half an hour or so Harry had to pronounce himself stumped. He'd even asked at the desk, and the lady there had been nice enough but totally confused by the question.

After one last count of the train lines coming out of the station from the air, Harry admitted defeat. He turned for home, then remembered just how much flying he'd done so far today, and adjusted course for the familiar Barbican Library instead.

Perhaps he'd find a nice book to read while there, and anyway he needed to rest his wings. Normally he was okay to head back home after perhaps two hours of rest, so that would mean he'd be back by the middle of the afternoon.

When Harry made his approach before landing on the Dursleys roof, he noticed that the greenhouse roof was smashed. He wondered if he was going to get the blame for it, and was a little nervous about what his relatives would think up as punishment, but it turned out that it was actually Dudley's fault – apparently he'd thrown his tortoise through it for some reason or other.

Harry mostly felt sorry for the tortoise, but he had something else to do – a new plan he'd thought of on the way home, to solve the mystery of the train and how to get on it. His school supplies included plenty of paper and rolls of parchment, along with three or four quills and some ink, and after a little practice in using a quill Harry wrote a letter.

Dear Neville,

I hope you're well. I don't think we actually talked about what you got for your birthday – I hope you enjoyed what you got for it. I'm mostly the sort of dragon who likes having books, but I've not had many birthdays where I get presents so far so maybe I'll get bored of them some day.

I was wondering if you could help me out. My Hogwarts ticket says that I need to take the train from Platform 9¾ at eleven o'clock, but I had a look at Kings Cross station and I can't actually find that platform. Do you know how to get onto it?

Thanks for the help. I can't ask my aunt and uncle because they don't really know much of anything about magic.

Yours,

Harry.

Looking it over, Harry thought about whether he'd need to rewrite it before deciding that it said what he wanted it to say.

Waiting a few minutes for the ink to dry, he folded it up and put it into an envelope from the local post office.

"Hedwig?" he asked, and the snowy owl fluttered her wings – bright and alert as the sun set. "Can you get this letter to someone called Neville Longbottom? I don't know where he lives."

Hedwig gave Harry a tolerant look, like a school teacher being asked if she could do the simple maths problem on the board, and stuck her leg out. Smiling at her confidence, Harry tied the letter to her leg before standing aside to let her swoop silently out of the window.

If that was all it really took to send letters in the magical world, he could see why they used owls. It probably made sending parcels a bit more difficult – or did it? Maybe it depended on the owl – but he could never have posted a letter in a normal postbox with just a name and expected it to arrive.

Neville's letter arrived the following evening, carried by a smug-looking Hedwig, and Harry assured her that he'd never doubted her as he untied the envelope and opened it.

There were a few nervous blotches on the parchment, and one or two crossed-out words, but skipping over those Harry read with interest.

It turned out that Neville hadn't known how to get onto the platform, but he'd asked his grandmother and she'd informed him of the trick. It seemed you simply ran at the dividing line between platforms nine and ten, the faster the better, and if you got it right you could run right through the wall and end up in the special magical platform nine and three quarters.

Harry supposed that with how many people needed to get the train – even if Hogwarts was a really small school – he'd probably have run into one of them at some point, but it was nice to be sure.

Neville also mentioned how he'd got several presents for his birthday, but that the one he liked the most was some plants (only some of which Harry had even heard of), and from there the rest of the letter was questions about what it was like growing up in a Muggle house.

Time passed, as it did.

Harry read through Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, first the shorter version and then the unabridged one Hagrid had pointed him at, and also read a good chunk of One Thousand Magical Herbs And Fungi just looking for the plants Neville had mentioned in his letter. From there he moved on to a book about the wizarding perspective on dragons, which vaguely disquieted him when he read about just how many things wizards made from bits of dragon, and dipped in and out of his other textbooks as the fancy took him.

But those weren't the only books Harry owned now, and he read some of the others as well. The detective novel had been quite fun, with the twist focused not on whether the murder weapon had been a dragon but on which dragon had done the deed, and while it looked like the other books didn't involve dragons Harry was interested enough to make a mental note.

The next one along was more of a disappointment than anything. Harry had hoped it was going to be about how dragon tamers handled their charges, but it was actually much more about a love triangle between a young woman from somewhere in the USSR, a dragon tamer, and the magical government employee she was engaged to be married to.

It was all very disappointing, with dragons only showing up once in the entire book despite their prominent place on the cover, and Harry had decided not to chase up any future books from that series – even without the slight surrealism caused by reading a book where the main character was from a country visibly falling apart in the news as he read it.

Then there were four small books, all from the same large series, which were just baffling as far as Harry was concerned. They were all about young witches who learned to ride dragons, and the dragons appeared not so much as actual animals (let alone the complex, brave characters that were the dragons of Pern or the sly, wrathful Smaug) but a little more like motorcycles – there to be ridden about or cooed over, not to do things for themselves. Most of the books covered the friendships and arguments between a dozen or more of the girls at the school, often over quite unimportant-seeming things, and after much puzzling Harry had decided that they were probably not for him.

The same could not be said for Tooth and Fang. Not only was it about dragons, but it was about an entire society of intelligent dragons who had to hide themselves away from wizards in the same way that wizards hid away from Muggles. Complicating this already difficult task was that the entire dragon population appeared to live inside Beauxbatons, a wizarding school in France, and that naturally simply moving out was completely out of the question.

It was both relatable and very entertaining, from a scene where two twenty-foot dragons had to hide inside a single broom cupboard not remotely big enough for one of them to an entire major plot point hinging on how none of the Beauxbatons wizards ever looked up, and Harry had to stifle his giggles to avoid waking the Dursleys too early in the morning.

The small collection of wizarding fiction he'd acquired in Diagon Alley was carefully kept separate from the larger pile of books Harry had picked up from Muggle bookshops – mostly second-hand, though with a few new paperbacks from series he'd read up to that point – and which, along with the rest of his collection and his robes, would just about fill up his newly acquired trunk.

Harry was fairly sure that he'd be working hard once he reached school, and so he did his best to fill the days with memories to take with him up to Hogwarts – sunning himself on the roof of the tallest building in Little Whingeing, flying home through a summer downpour with the rain drumming on his wings and all four legs clutching his rucksack below him, sharing a nighttime flight with Hedwig under the full moon, and reading books which sent him to Eosia and Valdemar and Krynn and a dozen other places.

The black dragon wasn't sure whether knowing that magic was completely real made the books better or not, or whether that was just that he was reading for hours on end in his room rather than in the library, but there was something about it which gave every book an extra spice.

AN:

August.

Not all that much to it, but it was shorter in the original book – and I wanted to show Harry's new sleeping arrangements.

I did seriously consider a lot of the names that Harry brings up, but I was making so many mistakes of calling her Hedwig by accident that I decided to go with an expanded explanation of why he picked the name.

Also, it is actually canon that Harry's trunk turns up at some point in August - he doesn't get it in Diagon Alley. Thus I assume it's one of the Dursley ones.