A/N: And here is where things gradually start getting out of control for Harry.

Chapter 2

The newly-installed doggy door that Hagrid had put in not long ago flapped loudly before settling in place after Harry closed the front door behind him. Fang hopped up into the armchair once again and rested his head on the left arm, fixing his lazy gaze on Harry. Harry stood still in front of the hut's main door, the pumpkin guts and seeds remaining in place all over his school uniform, almost giving the impression that Harry had just done battle with a magically transformed pumpkin and won rather than simply falling backwards into one. Two sets of messy footprints lay behind him, cutting off at the spot in which Harry currently stood. He finished giving himself a once-over and glanced at Fang.

"Good thing I have my wand," he remarked wearily.

Harry stepped carefully out of his stained shoes while retrieving his wand from his back pocket. It came out attached to a long line of stretchable pumpkin muck, which Harry merely flecked off with a quick flick. He then trained the wand on himself.

"Scourgify," he enunciated clearly.

With a purposeful trace all down his person, the pumpkin mess gradually vanished off his clothes and evaporated into nothingness. Not a minute had passed before Harry's school uniform looked as clean as if it had been freshly laundered.

"Let's not do that again, alright?" Harry directed at Fang, who positioned his head down on top of his two curled front legs as if to say, "If you say so."

Harry went over to look out the front window of the hut, which had a clear view of Hagrid's garden and the now ruined Pumpkin which lay in the center of all the other vegetables. But given the darkness of the sky and the reflection of the lights from inside, Harry could barely make out the sight.

"I'll deal with that in the morning," he concluded.

The remainder of the night was spent with Harry beginning work on a Transfiguration essay due the next week. At one point, Fang got out of the armchair and came over to lay in a ball at Harry's feet while he sat writing at the dining table and occasionally, Harry would take a moment to pause and either rub Fang on the head or give him a nice belly scratch, with Fang clearly enjoying both.

Before Harry knew it, it was nearly 11:45, and his eyelids were starting to droop. That was when he decided to place his quill in his ink bottle and call it a night, making a mental note to ask Hermione to read over what he'd written for his essay so far. Harry sighed and pushed his chair out from the table, stretching slightly as he got up and made his way over to Hagrid's enormous bed.

The bed looked like it could easily fit three people Harry's size, owing to Hagrid's own size. At least there'd be plenty of room to move around during the night, as Harry would tend to do while sleeping. Normally, he'd start the night lying on his side, but would find himself flat on his stomach by the time he awoke in the morning. From the looks of it, Harry wouldn't doubt he'd perhaps find himself on the opposite side of the bed by the time the sun rose.

He quickly changed out of his uniform, placing his wand on the bedside table in so doing, and slipped into his pajamas. While he did, Fang slunk over to his cage and went inside to plop down on top of a large cushion.

"You know, you don't have to sleep there," said Harry, feeling slightly sad at the assumption on Fang's part that his crate was where Harry wanted him to sleep. But Fang didn't seem to mind at all, because he just shifted around momentarily to get more comfortable. Harry sighed, shook his head, removed his glasses to put them down beside his wand, pulled back the bedsheets and settled down in between them. He groped for his wand and when he found it, used it to extinguish all of the lights in the hut, thereby plunging everything into a darkness broke only by the moonlight filtering in through the windows.

Harry put his wand back in its resting place, turned over onto his left side, and fell asleep soon after.

Harry would be woken up on three separate occasions during the night.

The first came when he was awoken by an uncomfortable feeling, which had to do with the fact that Hagrid's bedsheets were so thick and large, that they were causing Harry to sweat considerably underneath them. So, Harry threw them off of him and groggily got up to strip out of his sticky pajamas until he was just wearing his pair of light blue boxers, which had a pattern of Golden Snitches on them. To help matters, Harry walked over to the nearest window and opened it, to let the cool night air relieve the heat of the covers. It worked, as Harry had dozed off again in under five minutes.

The second time was a result of the sound of Fang's doggy door flapping, signaling that Fang had gone out, most likely for a call of nature, and the third time was when Fang returned a few minutes later.

The next time Harry woke up, it was officially morning. But it wasn't the bright sunshine filtering inside from the open window and thus bathing the hut in natural light that awoke Harry. Instead, it was the incessant tongue of Fang, which applied a layer of warm saliva over Harry's face so that he was pulled from his dreams abruptly.

Once he had gotten his bearings, Harry shifted his head back away from Fang's and wiped his face off on the covers. "Good morning to you, too," Harry said before letting out a large yawn. When finished, he regarded the blurry lump of black directly in front of him. "I suppose you woke me up because you want breakfast?" Harry asked in a manner similar to that of a parent asking their young child the same question.

The black blur let out a deep "Woof!" of confirmation, prompting Harry to throw back the bedsheets.

"Alright, then. Just let me get my glasses on."

He reached for the bedside table and snatched up his glasses once his fingers found one of the sides. Fang was already over by the cabinets, on top of which sat the large bag of dog food he normally ate. Harry had inquired yesterday why Hagrid didn't simply just leave the bag in a place where Harry could more easily reach it, to which Hagrid had replied, "If I do tha', Fang'll jus' rip it open first and eat it all." So, Hagrid had left a footstool by the base of the cabinets, a footstool Harry could use to easily raise himself higher and retrieve the dog food. Also at the bottom of the cabinets was Fang's feeding bowl, which was silver and had his name engraved along the side.

"Let's get you fed, then."

Still in only his underwear, Harry moved the footstool to the front of the cabinets and quickly eyed the distance between it and the food, judging he'd indeed be able to reach it once on top of the stool. Harry carefully climbed up onto the stool while Fang eagerly watched his every move, even licking his chops in anticipation.

Harry's hand was slowly coming into close proximity to the bag. "Almost ... got it." Suddenly, a thought occurred to him. Why don't I just use my wand? He was almost ashamed that the idea hadn't come to him beforehand. Then again, he was still in the middle of properly waking up. So, Harry turned around and made to step down off of the footstool, but Fang obviously wasn't having any of that.

He let out another bark and stood up on his hind legs and used his front paws to lightly shove Harry back towards the cabinets in a gesture that said, "No! I'm hungry! Feed me!" In the case of Fang, though, there was no such thing as "lightly shoving."

Fang pushed against Harry with such force that he was practically knocked roughly backwards into the cabinets. He collided with them hard enough so that not only did the footstool go skidding out from under his feet and ultimately topple over on the floor, thereby causing Harry's feet to plop down with a thud, but also a few items contained in the cabinets, such as dinner dishes, precariously rocked back and forth but fortunately did not go crashing down and breaking. However, Harry bumping into the cabinets did have an effect on the bag of dog food, wherein it shook violently along with the cabinets until it finally tipped over while Harry slid and slumped down. He rested safely against the bottom of the cabinets for a moment.

This wouldn't have been so much of a problem if the bag had been properly sealed, but as it turned out, Hagrid had neglected to do so before leaving.

What made the situation even worse was that it was the kind of dog food that was thick and sloppy, rather than just a collection of bite-size snacks. As a result, the gooey food cascaded down on top of Harry in lumps that pelted every bit of him they could find. The downpour of dog food was topped off by the bag itself falling off of the cabinet and landing right in the middle of Harry's lap, accompanied by a grunt of frustration and discomfort from Harry.

He certainly wanted to get up and cleanse himself of the mess, but was stopped from doing so by Fang, who just saw Harry covered in his breakfast and figured that his sitter was just as good as his bowl, so he wasted no time in licking every bite of food he could off of Harry.

"Talk about a wake-up call," Harry mumbled to himself before Fang licked a large portion of dog food from Harry's face. "You're welcome, by the way," he grumbled to the dog.

Harry tolerated being covered in the dog food for one more minute as he took the opportunity to properly put food into Fang's bowl, whereupon Fang made the switch from person to dish without missing a beat. Heaving a big sigh, he turned around and peered through the gaps of dog food smeared on his glasses to make his way over to the bedside table, where Harry intended to use his wand again to clean himself, except there was one problem.

His wand was missing.

"What the bloody hell? I left it right there!"

Doing his best to remain calm, Harry decided it was best to first get the dog food off of his glasses, owing to the possibility that the muck was obstructing his view to where his wand currently lay. Slowly and carefully, he made his way over to the sink, where there was a rag Harry moistened up and then used to wipe away the smelly dog food from his glasses. Finally having them be clean again, Harry replaced his glasses on his face and looked directly at the bedside table. However, that meant he could properly take in the interior of the hut in its current state, which was not what he'd seen just minutes earlier.

The benefit of now being fully awake meant that Harry spotted the trail of dirt which zigzagged all around the floor, and even was on the armchair by the front door. His mouth slightly open, Harry tracked the dirt to its source, the source being Fang.

Harry glanced over and out the front window, where he could see the front yard and garden, but more importantly, he could see at least three fresh dirt mounds in the grass. Those dirt mounds appeared to have something buried underneath them, and suddenly, everything fell into place.

"Did you ... bury my wand?!" Harry exclaimed in utter shock. "It's not a bone!"

He didn't even wait for the possibility of Fang answering his question. Harry tore out of the hut and hurried over to the dirt mounds outside. There, he fell to his knees and wasted no time in undigging the closest one to him. Nothing. Harry immediately went to the next; nothing there, either. That could only mean that his wand was underneath the third dirt mound, but his hopes were dashed when he was met with the same result as the last two times.

Harry had to breathe in and out heavily in order to keep himself calm, or at least as calm as possible. "FA-"

His cry of outrage was cut off by a furry mass, obviously the dog in question, knocking into Harry from behind and making him go flat on top of all the fresh dirt with an, "Oooof!"

Fang was still hungry, as evidenced by his mouth finding every bit of dog food left on Harry's body that it could. Harry was too angry to just lie there, so he scrambled to his feet and wordlessly made his way back inside the hut. There, he used the wet rag to wash off his hands and arms before collecting a clean set of clothes, which he tossed into his empty bag. Harry's next order of business was to step into his shoes and throw his outer school robe around himself, which adequately covered up his half-naked state. Next, he gathered up Fang's leash and carried the items he had in hand outside.

"I need to get clean!" Harry snarled at Fang. "Then I'll deal with all this!"

And so Harry and Fang began their trek up to the castle, where Harry fully intended to use the shower in the Prefects' bathroom he'd been granted access to by Dumbledore for the weekend. The hot water, he figured, would help him unwind.