Disclaimer – I solemnly swear that JKR owns everything Harry Potter. Whether or not I am up to no good with her characters is for you to decide.

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Harry Potter: Dragon Whisperer

Chapter 13 – We Come To A Land Down Under

3:50pm

Tuesday, 9 August 1995

Just outside the Australasian Dragon Preserve, Australia

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He tried. Really, he did. He knew what he was supposed to do; after all, not only had both Remus and Sirius been instructing him all day but he'd also experienced it twice already that day. And this time should have been easier, being the shortest of the three trips.

But, despite his attempts, he failed. Spectacularly.

Harry felt his body being flung forward as the portkey released him. His arms and legs flailed about as he tried to stop himself only for him to taste dirt and grass as he landed face first and skidded to a stop.

"That's your worst landing yet!" Sirius barked with laughter.

Spitting out the last of the grass, Harry glared around and up.

"Really, Harry, it's quite simple," Remus added, not even appearing to hide the broad grin on his face. "Keep your legs moving when you feel the portkey approaching its destination and you'll stay on your feet.

"Easy for you to say," Harry groused. "I think magical travel just hates me."

"You did fine between England and Romania," Sirius commented. "Maybe you just need more practice."

Harry speared him with as loathsome a look as he could manage as he climbed to his feet. It was only then that he noticed that the three of them weren't alone. Nor were the other two the only ones seemingly amused by his less-than-graceful landing.

"G'day. Welcome to the Australasian Dragon Preserve. I'm guessing you're Harry Potter? And you two are Sirius Black and Remus Lupin," the man said. "Charlie Weasley, good ta see ya again."

Harry gave the man a once over as Charlie stepped forward and shook the offered hand.

He was a small man, much shorter than any of the other three there and wiry. But even with that, he gave off a feeling of strength, as though his sim build, thinning grey-streaked black hair and dark leathery skin was but a façade that most people would be fooled by.

"Guys," Charlie said, turning back to look at them. "Meet Andrew Wululu."

"Call me Andy," he said.

"Nice to meet you," Sirius said. "How do you two know each other?"

"I did a stint over in Romania a few years back as part of my Mastery," Andy replied, slapping Charlie on his shoulder. "Guess it's your turn now, hey?"

"I guess it is at that," Charlie grinned. "Although I'm mainly here with Harry."

Andy's coal-black eyes settled on Harry then and he had an urge to shudder at their intensity.

"I've been hearing stories about you, Harry Potter. 'Speaker' they call you."

"That's what the dragons call me," Harry shrugged. "At least the ones in Romania. I haven't met any dragons from any other Reserve so I'm not sure what they'll think of me."

"You've got that Mark," Andy said, nodding at Harry's forehead. "I'm betting that'll give you all the 'in' that you need."

"Besides, you can talk to dragons, Harry," Sirius said, clapping him on the shoulder. "You'll be right."

"Why did you need me to come? Is something wrong with the dragons here?" Harry asked.

"That's for tomorrow. Let's get you lot settled and grab some grub," Andy said. "Here. Put these on."

Harry reached out and took one of the leather thongs that Andy held out to him and looked it over curiously. The piece of wood that dangled from it wasn't one that he'd ever encountered so he assumed that it was native to Australia. It was a deep reddish-brown and felt coarse to his fingers.

"Eucalyptus," Andy stated and Harry looked up and nodded at him.

He'd heard of eucalyptus, usually in relation to koalas. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going get a supply of it while he was here; probably even see about using it to carve a native animal as well.

"Woah!"

At Sirius' exclamation, Harry looked up and felt his eyes instantly widen.

He'd thought that they'd arrived on top of a grassy hill. On one side had supposedly been forest that stretched as far as the eye could see; the other ocean, although from this vantage point he couldn't see the beach itself.

Now, though, now the forest was gone. In its place were miles of undulating hills and valleys, most made from sand and grass. And just to one side was a cluster of half a dozen buildings, all with wide verandas and plenty of windows.

"Where'd the forest go?" he blurted.

"Magic," Andy chuckled. "This entire section of the coast is blanketed in wards and charms that'll stop everyone – magical and not – from seeing this place or wanting to go anywhere near it."

"These key us into the wards?" Remus asked, touching the piece of eucalyptus that dangled from his neck.

"Sure do," Andy beamed. "Come on, then."

A bare half dozen metres down from the top of the hill, Harry felt a tingle wash over him – the magic of the wards, he reasoned. Shortly after that, their feet encountered the path that meandered down towards the buildings below.

Once past the wards, the dirt path that they'd been treading morphed into cobblestone, a much more practical material than the dirt and gave infinitely more assurance when walking compared to the sandy hills that surrounded them.

The walk down took a surprisingly long time and Harry found himself sweating, a phenomenon that he simply couldn't reconcile.

"I know that it's winter here," he commented, "and I also know that it doesn't snow here in Australia but I honestly didn't expect it to be this hot!"

"Temperature's relative," Sirius laughed. "I'm sure that the natives think this is cold, whereas, from our perspective of England, Scotland and even Romania, this is almost balmy."

"And you aren't quite correct about the snow, Mister Potter," Andy said. "It snows in this country, just not up here. Head a couple of thousand kilometres south and you'll find plenty."

"A couple of thousand?" Harry goggled. "Just how big is Australia?"

"To put it in a perspective that you'll understand," Remus said from the rear, "you could easily fit the United Kingdom into Australia more than thirty times over."

"Woah!" Harry replied, his eyes wide.

"Thus why it's not so hard to hide this Reserve here," Andy commented.

Harry's eyes were drawn once more to the great undulating hills of sand and grass that stretched as far as the eye could see, all the way to the ocean. There were dragons here. There. He was certain of it, even if he couldn't see them.

There were no obvious caves for them to sleep in but Harry knew that they'd still want to have a nest or a patch of ground, a place that they called 'home'. It was an integral part of who they were.

"Where are the dragons?" he asked.

"Tomorrow, Mister Potter," Andy replied and Harry could hear the smile in his voice.

Knowing that he had no choice, Harry tore his gaze from the horizon and focussed on the here and now.

The small settlement wasn't greatly different from the one at the Romanian Reserve. There was a cluster of a dozen buildings on one side of a great green area; another grouping of huts opposite it and a huge building at the far end. But where the Big Building in Romania resembled something out of the time of Vikings, this one was much more open and airy with a wide veranda that spanned the length of the building.

The barest of thoughts was enough for Harry to understand and approve, not that his approval meant anything. In Romania, the cold prevailed, even in the height of summer and thus, the warmth that the close stone and thick walls of the Great Building would be needed. Here, where even the winters were warmer than some English summer days, the lighter, airier design of this building made perfect sense.

"We have set aside the building on the edge for you, Harry Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin. As you you, Charlie, you're in the hut beside them," Andy stated, pointing out the cabins that he meant. "I understand that the time difference for you means that it's likely that you won't be hungry right now, however, once you've settled, please come up to the Lodge and meet the rest of the Handlers."

"We'll do that. Thank you," Remus replied for them. "Thank you."

With that, Andy nodded and walked on, leaving the three of them standing on the edge of the settlement.

"Come on, you two, let's see how different it is here in the Land Down Under," Sirius grinned before striding off along the path.

Quickly, Harry followed. Much like the now-named Lodge, these small cabins also had a veranda attached and Harry paused to run his hand over the wood. Pine; he'd thought so.

As with the cabin back in Romania, the inside of this one was not reflected in the outside dimensions. It had been magicked to be the size of a house approximating the house on Privet Drive, if Privet Drive had been a single level instead of two.

Noting the candles set on sconces at regular intervals around the walls and the lack of a fireplace, Harry willed fire and beamed when every candle in the large open-plan living room burst into flame. Professor Flitwick would be so proud of him if he could see him now.

"There are three bedrooms and a bathroom back here," Sirius called. "Shotgun the master!"

"Don't you think that Harry should get first option of that room?" Remus replied with a frown. "After all, without him, none of us would be here."

"It's okay, Uncle Moony; he can have it. I don't need much," Harry replied.

Harry knew that Remus was frowning at his back but he chose to ignore it in favour of finding a room for himself.

After wandering along the corridor and noting which room Sirius had appropriated, Harry decided to choose the one furtherest away. It wasn't that he was deliberately picking the smallest, not at all. The truth of the matter was that he was deliberately choosing the room furtherest from Sirius' snoring. Really, for a grown wizard, one would think that he could put up a simple silencing charm!

The room was simple: bed, dresser, side table, large window. Adornments were also simple: light blue curtains, an oval mirror over the dresser, and a painting of a dragon in flight.

Unsurprisingly, Harry was instantly drawn to the painting. Oil, he recognised before he'd even taken a single step. And not magical he realised before he'd taken the second; after all, it neither moved nor had a magical 'feel' to it.

The dragon it depicted was unlike any dragon that he'd ever seen at the Reserve or even at the TriWiz (the Chinese Fireball and Welch Green both being dragons that the Reserve didn't house.

No, this dragon was, in a word, breathtaking. Its scales were the purest shades of pearl, giving off soft pinks and creams primarily with a hint of reds and orange where the artist had captured the reflection of the unseen sun. Its wings were spread wide as it glided over the ocean, its head pointed down as though it was examining the waves below. And its eyes! They were stunning! Multifaceted in both design and colour.

Slowly, he reached out a hand, stroking the dragon's back, the feel of the oil beneath his fingers textured enough to fool him into believing that he could, in fact, be touching the actual dragon.

"Ah, there you are, Harry."

Remus' unexpected voice startled him and had him jumping out of his trance with a shake of his head.

"Hi. Yeah. Sorry. Were you calling me?" he babbled.

"It is beautiful, isn't it?" Remus smiled, coming to stand beside Harry and gaze at the painting with him. "And to think that, tomorrow, you'll get to meet some of its kind! Very few wizards in the world get to see dragons at all, even fewer get the opportunity to experience an Antipodean Opaleye up close. You are extremely lucky."

"Yeah, I am, aren't I?" he grinned. "I'll have to get a camera or something sometime."

"Camera?" Remus asked.

"Yeah," Harry nodded. "I mean, you know that I'll be painting an Opaleye while I'm here; probably even carve one too but I can't exactly send a painting or a carving back to Daphne or Neville, can I? Photos, though, that I can do!"

"You do know that there are magical cameras that, when mixed with the right potion during developing, allow the pictures to move?" Remus asked.

"Magical cameras?" Sirius asked from the doorway. "Are you picking up another hobby, Pup?"

Harry blinked at the idea. "Maybe?"

"Well, that's something that we can look into another day," Remus said. "The reason that I was calling you was so that we could go up to the Lodge. Are you about ready?"

"Sure," Harry shrugged, giving one last look around the room.

It wasn't as though he needed to put his bags down; they'd be safe in his pocket for a while longer. A glint of red from the dying sun hitting a vial on his nightstand caught his attention and Harry frowned.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing at it.

"Ah, that," Sirius grinned. "The wonders of magical potions. That, my dear Harry, is an elixir which will allow you to get a proper night's sleep tonight and banish the concept of 'jet lag' – that's what the muggles call it, isn't it? I remember Lily correcting me on it once – when you wake in the morning."

"It does that?" Harry asked, eyeing the vial with surprise. "Cool!"

"Make sure you take it just before you're ready for bed," Remus instructed. "It'll allow you a full eight hours' worth of sleep. Now, are we all ready?"

Harry nodded and led the way towards the door and thence to the wider world. After all, the sooner that he'd met everyone and got this evening over with, then the soon he could sleep and bring on tomorrow when he'd finally find out why he was there and, most importantly of all, get to meet some new dragons!

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6:05am

Wednesday, 10 August 1995

Australasian Dragon Preserve, Australia

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Harry awoke all at once, ready and more than eager to face what the day would bring. As he sat up in bed, he assessed himself. No headache, no sense of still being exhausted. He felt full of energy combined with a gnaw of hunger in his belly.

Idly, he attempted to work out what time it was back home. This part of Australia was … ten hours ahead of England. Which meant that it would be … Harry's brain froze.

Home.

England.

But was England Home?

He guessed that it was. After all, that's where he'd spent the first fifteen years of his life. That was where Daphne and Neville and Hermione and Susan were. His friends. His best friends. But did that make it Home?

He had friends, too, in Romania – human and dragon. Not something that many people could say. True, he hadn't been there long but he felt a definite affinity for the place and a real connection. Idly, his hand reached up and traced the Mark on his forehead. That Mark connected him to all the dragons of the world but, most especially, to the Weyr in Romania.

That Mark, his Mark, had garnered quite a lot of attention the previous night. He'd caught everyone staring at it, not just the dragon handlers but every person there. It seemed that they'd all heard about it and wanted to see it for themselves. And it was the Mark that they were looking at, Harry was certain of that. Not the famous lightning bolt, but the Mark of the Dragon.

If it hadn't been for Sirius and Remus doing their best to distract both him and everyone there, Harry was certain that he would have either gone mad or run screaming from the room.

Sirius and Remus. They, too, were special. More than friends. Family, in an odd sense of the word. And family meant Home.

Which brought him back to his original question: where was Home? England? Romania? Wherever Sirius and Remus were? Somehow, he suspected that the answer was all of those places. And anywhere a dragon was. He might not have met many yet, but Harry was sure that, if a Home was wanted, a dragon, a Weyr, would provide.

With a shake of his head, Harry shoved the question from his mind, instead deciding to keep it simple.

A flick of his wrist at the same time that he 'burst' his fingers open produced a flash of yellow-gold magic that quickly morphed into a set of numbers.

Six oh nine.

It was still early, maybe too early, but Harry didn't care.

Shoving his blankets aside, he rolled out bed and began to get ready for the day.

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8:25am

Wednesday, 10 August 1995

Australasian Dragon Preserve, Australia

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Harry'd always been a fast eater, a consequence of his upbringing; after all, if food remained on his plate too long, then it was always guaranteed to be gobbled up by a baby killer whale. Or moustached walrus. Not even a year at Hogwarts where you could eat as much as you liked and, provided you stayed away from one particular redhead at the Gryffindor table, food was always readily available had completely changed that.

Today, though, today Harry ate even faster than normal. He was simply far too excited to get his chance to see some new dragons to waste time eating.

"Morning, there, Mister Potter," Andy said.

"Good morning, Sir," Harry replied, looking up eagerly into the smiling face of the dragon handler looking down at him from across the table.

"It's Andy, Harry, remember?" Andy laughed. "May I?"

At his gesture at the seat across from Harry, he nodded quickly, not even bothering to check with Sirius and Remus on his left and Charlie on his right.

"By the look of it, you're quite eager to get started," Andy observed, nodding at the empty plate that Harry had pushed aside.

"Yes, I am," Harry replied. "You said that I had to wait until this morning until you'd tell me why you asked me to come to the Australasian Dragon Preserve."

"Well, you would have always spent some time here, young Speaker of Dragons, even if the circumstances pushed up that timetable quite considerably," Andy replied.

"Alexander mentioned that you were having a problem with the dragons," Charlie put in. "Something about having difficulty getting close to them?"

"That's it in a nutshell," Andy replied.

"I'm guessing that there's more to the story?" Charlie guessed.

"Indeed, indeed," Andy replied before turning to face Harry. "As you probably would have guessed on the walk here, our dragons don't live in caves like they do in Romania. Instead, they create for themselves giant nests in the sandy hollows between the dunes. It's much hotter here and the sun heats up the sand quite nicely during the day for them. Normally, that makes it much easier for us to keep an eye on our dragons."

"I'd imagine that it would," Charlie stated, making notes in a blank book that he'd pulled from his pocket and resized. "A simple broomstick flight over the top and you'd see them all."

"Correct," Andy nodded. "Normally."

Harry cocked his head at that. Dragons, he knew, loved flying, in fact, today was the first day that he hadn't greeted the sunrise with his dragon friends as he had done for the past week. They'd never minded that he had to use a broom while they used their wings. And he'd never had the impression that they had a problem with any of the other dragon handlers flying over the canyon either.

"Normally? I'm guessing that they're stopping you from flying over now. Is that what they're doing?" Charlie asked.

"Indeed they are," Andy confirmed.

"That doesn't make sense," Harry frowned.

"How long's this problem been going on?" Charlie asked.

"The better part of a month now," Andy replied. "Any time that we approach them on broomstick, they converge and force our flyers away from their nests."

"And you've never had this problem before?" Remus asked.

"Never," Andy replied with a shake of his head.

"How old is this Preserve?" Sirius asked.

"Coming up on one hundred and twenty years," Andy replied proudly. "Of course, my people, the Aboriginal people have known of dragons for thousands of years and lived with them and respected them. Not that there were many dragons here for much of that time: Antipodean Opaleyes are actually native to New Zealand. But when the white men came, they very quickly encroached on the dragon's natural habitat. It took many years but eventually, instead of Australia being an extra hunting ground for the Opaleyes, they were relocated here in this area that my people had always declared off-limits to man and as sacred to the dragons where they could spread their wings with less chance of the muggles seeing them."

"This Preserve was created that long ago?" Sirius asked, looking incredibly impressed. "The wards here must be impressive!"

Andy laughed. "While it's true that this Preserve is one of the older ones, our wards aren't that old. The ones that we have now are fairly new – installed by a team of goblin warders after our original wards that my ancestors had sung into being had suffered centuries of dilapidation."

"That's incredibly interesting, Andy and I'll want to ask you all of the questions that I have bouncing around inside my head later," Harry interrupted, "but would you mind telling me more about the dragons and why you think they're acting so strangely?"

Again, Andy laughed. "Right you are, young Speaker of Dragons; history lessons later, the here and now for now. Let's see, what else to tell you? We only have the one species of dragon here, the Opaleye. They're one of the rarer breeds of dragon in the world and we don't know of any others out in the wild, making our forty-seven extremely important. They primarily eat fish that they catch themselves, although they're also partial to sheep, cattle and kangaroos."

Unexpectedly, Andy snapped his fingers.

"About the only other thing that we were wondering about is whether it has something to do with their eggs."

"Eggs?" Harry asked, interested.

"Yep," Andy nodded. "Four of our females laid clutches in the Autumn and the eggs are due to hatch in about six weeks. They're the first clutches that we've had for a few years so it's possible that they're being overprotective?"

Harry nodded. That sounded plausible. He'd had to wrap his brain around the change of seasons in this hemisphere which would account for the different hatching months but that was simple enough.

"Okay, then I think that all that's left is for me to meet your dragons," Harry said, causing Sirius to laugh.

"I'm surprised you were able to stop yourself from going out searching for them the second you woke up this morning, Pup."

Harry gave him a nonplussed look before sighing.

"I was tempted. Believe me, I was tempted," he admitted.