A/N: Thank you to all of you who have reviewed, favorited, and followed this! I appreciate you all so much! I hope you all enjoy this chapter!
"We're going to have tea with that big oaf of a gamekeeper? Why?" Draco demanded of Harry on Friday afternoon as they walked through the castle grounds towards the borders of the Forbidden Forest. "Yes, Draco, he's my friend. And he invited us." Harry's voice had a slightly annoyed undertone and he glared at the blond out of the corners of his emerald eyes. "Technically he invited you, Potter, Neither myself or Weasley were mentioned in that letter, so why are you dragging us off with you?" Draco couldn't help but sneer slightly as he said it and Harry abruptly stopped walking to turn and face him, now very clearly angry and not just mildly annoyed.
"I want you to meet him because you obviously have some sort of problem with him that has no reasoning behind it. Whatever terrible thing you think he is, you're wrong. He's the one who brought me into the Wizarding World and who took me to get my Hogwarts supplies, he's not some terrible person, Draco. I don't know who told you such things about him, but I'm taking you with because I want you to realize they're wrong." The young Malfoy blinked in surprise at the sudden venom in the other boy's tone and raised his hands in a sort of "I surrender" gesture, his eyes a bit wide and his eyebrows raised. "Merlin, Potter, calm down. Alright, I hear you." Harry continued to glare at him for a few seconds before turning around again with a huff and resuming his stride toward the relatively small wooden hut which was now visible in the distance, standing out amongst the simple trees and gloom of the Forbidden Forest.
Draco hesitated for a moment before following the raven-haired boy, ignoring the slightly smug look on Ron's face at him having been called out by Harry. "Slow down, Potter!" He yelled, jogging to catch up with the other boy, who slowed his pace ever so slightly, but still made it to the hut a good two minutes before Draco and Ron did. "Did you have to run ahead, Harry?" Ron demanded, for once thinking the same thing as Draco, as he clutched the stitch in his side from running. Harry shrugged slightly and then, without saying a word, knocked on the front door of the hut, which had a crossbow and a pair of galoshes standing on either side of it. Why does he need a crossbow?! This is a school, there shouldn't be anything dangerous here! I mean, there's a forest that's supposedly filled with dangerous beasts, but they didn't come out of there… did they?
"Get back, Fang - sit." Draco heard a deep, rumbling voice say from inside after a loud barking and scratching noise drifted outside and a moment later the door opened just a crack to reveal a large, very hairy, scruffy looking face, blocking out almost all light coming from inside the hut. The very large man, most likely four times taller and wider than Draco, opened the door completely, only to raise a hand, that was the size of a garbage bin lid, to stop them before they could enter. "Wait, sit, Fang!"
When the large, black dog he was speaking to didn't respond to his command he just let the three young Gryffindors in and grabbed hold of the dog's collar to stop it from jumping any of them. The inside of the hut consisted of one large room with nothing separating it into sections. Meat hung from the ceiling by string, something was boiling over a fire in a cauldron, and a huge bed, at least five times bigger than any normal human needed, stood in the far corner with a quilt covered in insanely strange patterns thrown over it.
Draco looked around himself, feeling a bit out of place with his ever so slightly gelled back hair, fine tailored robes and spotless shoes in this rather unorganized room full of slightly dirty looking things. He had never been somewhere quite like it before in his life, not that he was all too surprised by that fact, his parents after-all rarely took him anywhere but other pure-blood families' houses. The hut, despite the mess, seemed strangely comfortable and warm to Draco, like the place was made and enchanted to feel like a perfect home. The feeling he got from this place was foreign and confusing to him, yet also somewhat reassuring for reasons he couldn't fully comprehend. Every house he had ever lived in had been far too big for the three people and their house-elves that lived in them and had felt far too cold and dark to make it easy to feel at home in any room beside his own and the living room.
"Make yerselves at home." Hagrid said, pulling Draco out of his thoughts and causing him to look up at the large man as he let go of the large dog he was holding back. Instinctively the blond flinched back, trying to get as far away from the animal as possible so that it wouldn't even think about jumping on him. Maybe his idea worked, or maybe the dog just thought Ron looked more interesting, because it pounced at the redhead and began licking his ears as it tackled him to the floor. "Ey! Get off me!" he yelled, though a smile was spread across his face as he roughly shoved the dog off his chest and scrambled to his feet before the dog could do anything else.
"This is Ron." Harry said and Hagrid looked intently over at the redhead as he poured the boiling water from the cauldron hanging over the fire into a green teapot and put quite frankly burnt looking biscuits onto a plate. Before Harry could continue, most likely to introduce Draco, Hagrid spoke again. "Another Weasley, am I right? I've spent half me life chasing those twin brothers of yers away from the forest." Without having completely meant to Draco found himself snorting with barely suppressed laughter. Hagrid immediately looked over at him, slightly bewildered, as if he hadn't realized he was there before. "An' who might ye be?" The gamekeeper asked and Draco's laughter died as spontaneously as it had begun.
"I'm Draco, I'm in Harry and Ron's dorm." He said, deliberately not mentioning his surname due both to the fact that he knew the man wouldn't like it and also the fact that he no longer truly felt like he was a Malfoy. "Ye know yer name means Dragon, don't ya?" Hagrid asked and Draco blinked, not having expected that or the slightly curious and excited glint in the man's dark eyes at all. "Yeah, I think that might be why my mother chose it. She always thought they were fascinating." He reluctantly said, slowly lowering himself into the chair besides Harry's, wishing he could somehow sit through the ground with it.
"Well, yer mother'd be right about that. Dragons are some of the most fascinating and interesting creatures in the world. I've always wanted to have one." Hagrid said, his voice taking on a slightly dreamy tone which freaked Draco out a bit. Who in the world would want a dragon? They may be interesting but they were much more dangerous than it was worth, for Merlin's sake! Instead of saying this however he just nodded along as if he agreed and reached towards one of the biscuits, just so that the man didn't think he was trying to be impolite, even if the idea of simply putting the burned thing in his mouth absolutely disgusted him.
The second he bit down on the "treat" the Hogwarts Gamekeeper had placed on the table in front of them he could've sworn a soft crack resonated from at least three of his teeth and he almost choked. Oh, Merlin's beard… The blond thought and pursed his lips, trying his best not to spit the bite he had in his mouth right back out. Hagrid was looking at him somewhat expectantly, though whether it was because he thought he would continue talking about dragons, or because he wanted to see his reaction to the biscuit, Draco didn't know. Just to see if he could get the man's gaze off of him he painfully swallowed the biscuit, feeling it scratch up his throat on the way down.
He tried his best not to begin coughing until it all came back up again and placed his biscuit back onto the plate in front of him, forcing himself not to push it away. Hagrid smiled and then looked over at Harry, giving Draco the chance to gulp thickly and massage his throat a bit in an attempt to make the pain better. Ron cast him a slightly amused glance and the blond returned it with a glare, which only seemed to amuse the Weasley further, seeing as he almost began snickering and quickly covered it up by pretending to nibble at his own biscuit.
"So, how was yer first week at Hogwarts?" Hagrid asked and immediately Harry and Ron went into full-blown tales about everything that had happened over the past five days, their dorm-mate staying mostly silent throughout this besides making a few small comments and corrections every five or so minutes. Harry and Ron told the gamekeeper about how tiring Astronomy class was, how boring History of Magic was, and how much Harry despised Potions.
"Don't worry about Professor Snape, Harry. From what I've seen he treats all the students like that if they're not in Slytherin." Hagrid ended up telling Harry in a reassuring tone when the raven-haired Gryffindor brought up the way Draco's godfather -not that the other boy was aware of this fact yet- had acted towards him. "But he seemed to really hate me." Harry insisted and Draco glanced down at the table in front of him, picking at a small part of the wood which had begun to splinter slightly, really wanting the subject to change before he got angry. He may not necessarily like his godfather at the moment, he had after-all most likely been the one to tell his parents of his sorting, and he really was being an awful jerk during his Potions lessons, but he still cared about him and really didn't want to hear people talk bad about him.
"Nonsense!" Hagrid argued, though he avoided Harry's gaze quite deliberately. "Why should he?" The tone with which he said that made it seem like the professor really did, though what that was, Draco had no clue.
"How's yer brother Charlie doin'?" Hagrid seemed to have quite purposefully changed the subject, hoping to avoid further questioning, and even though Harry looked slightly confused, Draco couldn't help the small wave of relief that washed over him at them not having to speak of his godfather anymore. "Liked him a lot, really knew how to get along with animals."
Ron immediately began telling Hagrid all about his older brother's job working with Dragons in Romania, obviously not having enjoyed the conversation about Snape all too much himself. The gamekeeper seemed to be so immersed in Ron's story of how Charlie had sent his family an owl once saying he had both of his eyebrows singed off by a baby dragon that he wouldn't notice if someone slammed the door open and marched in with their wands raised.
Harry, like Draco, didn't seem all too interested in Dragons and Ron's brother and was staring intently at the surface of the table in front of him. Suddenly he reached forward and slipped a piece of paper Draco hadn't noticed before out from under the teacap lying on the table and his eyes flitted over it quickly, his eyebrows getting closer and closer to each other the longer he stared at the small slip of paper which seemed to have been ripped out of something like a newspaper. "Hagrid!" Harry suddenly yelled and said man flinched so hard he nearly knocked over the teapot sitting on the table in front of him. "This break in at Gringotts was on my birthday! Maybe even while we were there!"
Once again Hagrid avoided Harry's gaze, though why would he need to? Did he know more about this break-in he had heard his father speak of before the beginning of school than he should have? Instead of responding to Harry he simply groaned loudly and then offered him another biscuit, which Harry looked at like it could kill him if he so much as touched it, which it quite possibly could in Draco's opinion. That lack of answer only raised Draco's suspicion of the gamekeeper. What could the man be hiding?
After returning to the castle and having dinner, the three young Gryffindors all went up to Gryffindor Tower, deciding that it would probably be a good idea to at least start on the loads of homework they had. "It's the first week of school, and we already have so much homework I could bury myself in the amount of books and scrolls it'll take to finish." Ron said in exasperation, practically throwing himself onto a chair at an empty table which was located just below a window in the far left corner of the common room. "It's not that much, Weasley." Draco said, rolling his silver eyes as he himself sat down in the chair opposite Ron, leaving Harry to sit down in the chair between them, his back facing the rest of the room.
"We have to write a whole foot of parchment on what we're doing in Potions right now! That's a lot!" The redhead retorted as he took his textbooks out of his bookbag and placed them all in an uneven stack on the table beside him. "A foot is barely a scroll of parchment, Weasley, that really isn't much. And besides, all you have to do is copy down information from the textbook into paragraphs, it's really not that difficult." Ron scowled over at the blond, but didn't say anything in response, instead simply taking out a piece of parchment and a quill, along with a bottle of ink.
It took Ron ten whole seconds of staring at the open pages of his Potions book before he looked up at Draco and said, quite simply: "I don't understand a word of this." Harry snorted slightly from beside him, but otherwise didn't respond as he continued scribbling down sentence after sentence of facts about the potion they were supposed to be writing about, even though he had no real clue what any of what he was writing meant. Draco on the other hand looked up at the redhead, exasperation and annoyance written clearly all over his face as he scowled. "Well, too bad for you then, Weasley." He snapped and then went back to writing his own essay, leaving Ron to glare at him.
For a few moments that's all he did, then he growled, the sound seeming almost defeated and definitely annoyed. Draco glanced up at him for a second, sneering slightly at the other boy. "What?" He demanded and Ron pursed his lips for a moment before huffing and glaring at the Malfoy again, his blue eyes seeming to shoot ice at him. "Can you help me? You seem decent enough at Potions, Snape certainly didn't make any snide comments on yours, unlike practically every other Gryffindor in the entire classroom." Draco rolled his eyes and sighed a few seconds later. "Fine, I'll help you, but you do not get to copy any of what I'm writing, you have to phrase it differently so that the teacher won't realize I helped since we're supposed to do this on our own." Draco scowled and shoved Ron's books out of the way so that he could sit in the chair that faced away from the window and towards the common room, pulling his parchment, ink, and book with him.
Ron looked over at the neatly written paragraph that was already scribbled onto the parchment in front of Draco and frowned, looking thoroughly confused again. "That still looks like a bunch of bloody nonsense to me!" He snapped and the blond huffed in annoyance again and began explaining how the simple Cure for Boils they were supposed to have made in class worked. He spoke in a slow voice, with one dark blond eyebrow raised as if he expected the redhead not to understand a word of what he was saying.
By the time he was done, Harry had already finished up his essay and had taken out his Charms homework, beginning to answer the questions Professor Flitwick had given them earlier that day. "You understand now, Weasley? It's really not that complicated. Just write down what I told you and you'll be just fine." Draco said and then turned back to his own parchment, quickly writing down the rest of his own essay as Ron sat there and blinked before quickly scribbling everything down in fast, messy handwriting before he forgot all of the information he had just been given.
"Y'know, I heard there's going to be quidditch try-outs next week." Ron suddenly said after he had, not exactly quietly, closed his History of Magic textbook, obviously wanting to move away from the subject. Once again, though Draco would never admit it to a living soul (or a ghost for that matter), the blond found himself agreeing with the young Weasley. Seriously, who knew the history of the Wizarding World could be so boring? You'd have thought their history was dark and terrifying, going off of the stories Draco's father had told him about what the Muggles used to do to Wizards. Nope, all they were learning about was the bloody invention of wands and the beginning of the owl post! Who cared about any of that stuff? No wonder the whole class sleeps during those lessons. Draco had thought the one time that week he hadn't fully dozed off during Professor Binns's long lecture on how a wizard had once stumbled across a stick which had a unicorn's hair wrapped around it and how the moment he had touched it a tree had exploded nearby. We're not learning about anything interesting!
"Yeah, and what use are try-outs for us besides to make us first years jealous because we aren't allowed to play?" Draco retorted as he too slammed his book shut, causing a girl in their year with bushy brown hair to look up from her book and glare over at him for being loud so late at night. "We could watch, Fred and George are always saying how fun it is to see the people who are no good fail and sometimes even fall off their brooms." Harry looked up at Ron at that, looking slightly confused and surprised along with a bit disturbed. "Isn't that a bit mean?" He asked and Draco snorted, smirking slightly as he shook his head in disbelief. "Perhaps, Potter, but it really is funny to watch people fail at things as simple as Quidditch or flying." The blond said and Harry's eyebrows scrunched together in confusion and his lips turned down at the corners.
"I… you guys are probably going to judge me on this," Harry started and paused hesitantly for a second, nervously pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and running a hand through his already messed up hair, tugging distractedly at the dark strands. "What exactly is Quidditch? Hagrid didn't do all too well at explaining it to me when I asked him in Diagon Alley." Harry's voice sounded slightly scared as he asked the two other boys this, and looked down at the table, slightly embarrassed judging by the small splotches of pink on the boy's cheeks.
Without being able to stop themselves, both of them gaped at Harry for a solid fifteen seconds before both starting to speak at once. Ron however, glaring at Draco, quickly shut up when the blond's voice got loud enough to drown out his own and almost wake up all of Gryffindor Tower. "Quidditch is the most popular and widespread wizarding sport in existence! A Quidditch Team has seven members: The Seeker, who catches this small, incredibly fast golden ball that's worth 150 points and it being caught ends the game, The Keeper, who protects its team's goals, two Beaters, who protect their team from the two bludgers which are metal balls that whiz around the field and try and knock people off their brooms, and three Chasers, who pass the Quaffle, a leather ball that scores ten points each time it goes through a goal, around and attempt to make goals. Every Hogwarts House has a team, and they compete for the Quidditch cup every single year. The whole school goes to the matches, sometimes classes even have to be cancelled for it because it goes on for so long. I've heard the longest game Hogwarts has ever had lasted for a whole week and a half!" Draco's explanation came out quickly and ended up sounding like he was rambling, but instead of saying this Harry simply nodded along silently, trying to process that information.