Chapter Text
Now that he was a Prefect, Harry thought it was best if he set a good example.
What it actually meant to set a good example in this case was a bit unclear, admittedly, but after thinking about it Harry decided that the most important parts would be to arrive at the station nice and early, and to keep an eye out for anyone who was looking a bit lost or confused.
That decided, Harry set off at about half past eight in the morning on September the First, waving a temporary goodbye to Sirius and Kreacher – Sirius just mumbled, because it was quite early in the day as far as he was concerned – before spreading his wings and flying towards Kings Cross.
Harry had been careful today, and worn his T-shirt with a dragon on it that he'd got up in Skye years ago. It still fit, though it was a bit tight and it probably wouldn't fit after his next growth spurt, but he thought it was a good idea.
He hadn't even reached the entrance to Platform Nine And Three Quarters when it turned out to be a very good idea indeed. Someone said "Dragon!", drawing Harry's attention, and when he looked around he saw an eleven year old boy and an eight year old boy walking next to someone who was almost certainly their father.
The dad was pushing a trolley with a trunk, and there was a cat snoozing on top of the trunk.
"A dragon?" the dad repeated. "Oh, on his shirt? Josh, that doesn't mean he's-"
"No, dad, you're not listening!" the eight year old repeated.
Harry had a moment of uncertainty over whether he should just lead them through the portal or explain, then decided to tell them what was going on.
"It's nice to meet you," he said, offering a paw to shake. "I'm Harry Potter."
"Richard Martin," the dad replied. "This is my oldest, Mickey, and this is Josh."
Mickey seemed to be quite astonished by Harry, which Harry supposed was fair enough if he was right and both boys were magical. It had to be an unusual sight to see a dragon in the middle of Kings Cross Station, even if you did know about magic now.
Harry put a talon to his muzzle, in a shush gesture. "I am a dragon, but it's a secret," he told the two boys. "I'm very well disguised."
"But we can see-" Josh began.
"You're what?" Mr. Martin interrupted, sounding amazed. "I couldn't even tell – I still can't. That's very impressive."
"It's magic," Harry explained. "And because Josh can see it, I know he's magical too, so he'll be coming to Hogwarts in a few years. But remember, it's all a secret, so don't tell anyone."
Josh looked stunned, then nodded meekly.
Harry nodded in the rough direction of the doorway to Platform Nine and Three Quarters. "The train's this way. You're nice and early."
While it was nice to be able to help someone, once he was on the platform Harry wondered if maybe he should come in through the train entrance for his final two years.
The T-shirt had helped, because it meant there was an easy explanation for why someone would point at him and call out that he was a dragon, but it might not be enough of an explanation. There was meant to be magic around Kings Cross that made it easier for people to overlook that sort of thing, but… it was still something he had to be worried about.
For the next hour or so Harry stayed on the platform, keeping a look out for his friends and for anyone else who it might be a good idea to speak to.
He did catch sight of Isaac, who was Apparated in by Professor Sinistra, and who appeared to already have some bags that were bigger on the inside because he didn't really have much stuff with him. Just a pair of what were sort of like panniers, slung under his wings, and a bandolier sort of thing with a pouch on it.
That distracted Harry into wondering whether a First-Year could actually carry all the things they needed in bags like those without expansion charms, then he remembered things like the potions kit and telescope and collapsible cauldron and decided that they probably couldn't.
Dean was the first of Harry's close circle of friends to come through the portal, then Neville, and the three of them spent a bit of time talking about what was it was going to be like in Fifth Year.
Neville pointed out that it was the last year they had to do the core subjects, which was going to be interesting, while Dean said that this year the sports were going to be back to normal. He also said that the Irons hadn't done very well so far this year, but it was only four games in and they'd had a difficult starting line up. With Tony Cottee back they should be doing better.
Harry tried his best to decipher what Dean had said, and concluded that it was probably about football.
Then Ron came through the gate to Kings Cross, took one look at Harry, and slumped.
"Thank Merlin," he said.
Harry looked faintly puzzled, and behind Ron the rest of the Weasleys came through the gate as well. Ginny, Fred, George, and then Mr and Mrs Weasley to bid their children farewell.
"I knew Hermione was a Prefect," Ron explained. "And I got the chance to ask Dean and Nev, but both of them weren't and by then it was too late to send out Pigwigeon again. And last night I was imagining Seamus being the other Gryffindor Prefect."
"I'd be a fan of that," Fred said. "That'd be fun."
"That is pretty much exactly why I was worried," Ron countered.
"I'll have to be in the meeting at the start of the train ride," Harry warned. "Not sure how long it's going to be, but we know it can't be all train ride… I was going to leave my stuff with you guys, and then come back once the meeting was over."
"No problem for me," Ron decided. "Hey, Nev, you want to make sure Fred and George don't prank Harry's stuff, or should I?"
"Don't make us invent a trick acorn," George warned.
Hermione arrived a few minutes later, and they all got on the train to find a compartment. Fred and George duly expanded it, making enough space for everyone and plenty more besides – Neville said that it was good to have a train compartment you could use for exercise – and Harry quickly set up his tent to go in and change into his robes.
That way he could put his Prefect badge neatly on the robes to make it easier to tell.
With that done, though, there was still a wait of nearly another hour before the train left. Harry would have said that that was a downside of setting an example, but everyone else had shown up early as well and it wasn't like he had a lack of books to read.
Today's one was a Redwall book, Outcast of Redwall, which started in a slightly unusual way by talking about a kestrel instead of about Redwall. He was sure it was going somewhere, though, and when a badger with a big mace turned up it felt nice and familiar.
More of their friends filtered into the compartment or looked in and waved as Harry read – with occasional pauses in his reading to say hello – and it wasn't until the train trembled and started moving that Harry finally put aside his book.
"We'd better get going," Hermione said, thinking the same thing. "It hopefully won't be very long."
"See you," Ron waved, then looked back down at the board between him and Neville. "And, finally, if they break through then use the rooks. Ready?"
His little chess men all nodded and waved.
"Go!" Neville ordered, and all thirty-two chess pieces got moving at once. The pawns crashed into one another, struggling and bashing, and then Neville's two white knights broke through the melee only to get countercharged by Ron's black knights and bludgeoned by a bishop into the bargain.
"What opening gambit is that?" Tanisis asked, looking over with a frown.
"Agincourt, I think," Ron replied, as his queen did a judo throw to one of Neville's rooks. "I think we're both being French though."
On the way along the train to the prefect's carriage, Harry fielded a couple of questions from the younger students he ran into. Someone wanted to know the way to the bathroom (Harry was able to point him in the right direction, which was nice) and then two different people asked if he was really a dragon and a prefect.
Harry said that yes, he was both, but that the prefect thing was new. Dennis Creevey sounded like he was slightly surprised to discover it worked that way, but that might just have been how Dennis sounded about everything.
Most of the rest of what they heard on the way, though, was congratulations. It was kind of nice, really, and it gave Harry a warm feeling as he and Hermione reached the door to the prefect's carriage.
Then he saw what was inside.
Really, Harry shouldn't have assumed anything less. While most of the compartments on the train were sort of mundane, only really made anything unusual because they were compartments instead of the sort of seating you got on British Rail trains, this carriage was a complete carriage and astonishingly luxurious.
There were a bit more than a dozen armchairs scattered throughout the room, and the walls held at least ten fine gilt-edged paintings – all of them enchanted and magical, so that in one a horse reared and pranced while in the next one along a ship fought its way through a squall. There were some stuffed animal heads on the walls, which was a bit odd, and every bit of the wall that wasn't covered by plush red curtains or paintings or animal heads was panelled in deep, rich mahogany.
Harry saw a plant pot in one corner occupied by a large yucca, and another corner of the room was the entrance to a white-tiled bathroom that seemed to have an actual bath in it.
"Harry, Hermione!" Cedric called. "It's nice to see you both."
He got up and shook Hermione's hand, then Harry's paw. Harry noticed that Cedric's P badge from last year had gone, replaced by one that announced that he was Head Boy.
"Oh, congratulations!" he told the older boy, then noticed the Head Girl was there as well – Patricia Stimpson, he thought was her name. "And you as well, of course."
"Shall we skip the congratulations?" Draco drawled. "Or we'll still be making them when we're in Scotland."
Looking around again, this time at the people in the armchairs instead of the décor in the carriage, Harry mentally listed off the people he recognized. There were all the prefects who were now in their sixth and seventh years, who hadn't changed – Remus said that that could happen if someone misbehaved enough, but apparently nobody had – and then as well as Draco there was Pansy Parkinson from Slytherin, who eyed Harry in a slightly odd way.
Ernie Macmillan and Padma Patil were there as well, for Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw respectively, but there were still two missing.
"Harry," Hermione said, sounding confused. "Look."
Harry followed where she was pointing, and had to do a double-take as well.
There was a television in the corner of the room. It wasn't a very big one, and it was sitting there on a little table, but it was definitely a television – and it was working, showing the blue and white text and numbers of Ceefax.
"That turned up last year," Cedric said. "I think the driver said that he'd heard from Dumbledore that some Muggle things worked around magic, but it only works while the train's moving and it goes off when we're nearly at the station."
He walked over and gave it a poke with his finger. "About all it really does is say a bit of whatever the Muggle news is."
"Well, I think we can fix that," Hermione decided. "Where's the remote?"
The seventh year Ravenclaw prefect, Marcus Turner, snorted at that. "Good luck. I looked last year and I think the driver didn't know you needed one."
Anthony Goldstein arrived about three or four minutes after Harry and Hermione did, and the final new prefect – Hannah Abbott – arrived a little after that, about when they were into what Harry was fairly sure qualified as the outskirts of London.
They weren't yet at the bit where it was just fields going past on both sides, into what Harry thought was the Green Belt, but it wasn't far.
"All right," Cedric said, once everyone was sitting down. "First of all, welcome to all eight of the new prefects. A lot of this is going to be for your benefit because you haven't done it before, but I'm sure I don't have to remind you to pay attention."
Since he was thinking about that sort of thing, Harry noticed that Cedric had managed to remind him while saying he didn't have to remind them. It was quite a clever way to do it without making them feel like Cedric was being condescending.
"Being a prefect means that you have to try and keep things under control among the other students," Cedric informed them. "That doesn't mean stopping people having fun, but it means making sure they follow the rules – and helping people out if they have a problem, too."
Harry put up a paw, and Cedric nodded. "Go ahead, Harry."
"I wanted to ask about the Weasley Twins," Harry began, and there was a ripple of laughter through the carriage.
"Believe me, I totally understand," Patricia told him. "Just do your best."
"If it's just the usual pranks back and forth with the Smiths, you don't even really need to give them detentions," Cedric added. "Obviously don't tell them that, but it was decided at least two years ago that otherwise some prefects would just be spending every evening in detention with them."
He snapped his fingers. "Which reminds me about the things you can do and the things that come with that. Prefects can't give house points, but they can take them unless it's from another prefect. If they feel that points should be awarded, or if a prefect has broken the rules, thenthey can ask a teacher to review the situation. Prefects can assign detentions, but if a teacher isn't available then the prefect has to supervise the detention themselves."
Hannah Abbott put her hand up this time, and asked whether that was because of concerns about people abusing authority. Cedric confirmed that it was, and warned that if they did abuse their powers then they might end up losing their positions as prefects, then moved on to the patrols.
It turned out that the patrols thing wasn't as bad as Harry had been expecting. There were two prefects doing it on each night for the first two hours after curfew, and each term there was a schedule sorted out. Twenty-one of the twenty-four prefects would be on the schedule, doing two weeks of patrols and then one week without them, which Harry went over in his head and decided probably did work out, while the other three prefects – and the Head Boy or Girl, if they hadn't already been a prefect, but that didn't apply this year – would be kind of filling in for if someone couldn't do their patrol for some other reason.
"We don't want to take away so much time you don't do well on your exams," Cedric clarified. "Any questions so far?"
Harry had another one, which was about what they were meant to do if there was an argument or disagreement between people from different houses. That got the answer that they were meant to ignore what house someone was from when they were doing things like handing out punishments, which was sensible enough if it could be done, and that their job was to try and handle things that didn't need teachers rather than try to do everything without teachers.
A few of the others had questions as well. Apparently prefects had to know where all the teachers' offices were – which was okay with Harry, he was pretty sure he already knew – and if the weather was bad they had to keep an eye on the younger students who were stuck indoors.
Once the questions were over, Patricia told them it was time for the benefits.
Harry didn't remember hearing about the Prefects' Bathroom before, but it sounded nice – the password, apparently, was 'Minty Fresh' - and Patricia also said it was usually easier to get a pass to the Restricted Section as a prefect. That sounded helpful, though Harry reminded himself that he wasn't supposed to just go in there and read everything in sight.
It wouldn't be polite.
Then they all got the passwords for their specific Houses so they could lead people to the dorms that night – Gryffindor's first password of the year was 'Swordfish', apparently – and Cedric told them that they just had to ask him if they had any questions, then said that that was it for the meeting but that they could stay in the Prefects' Carriage if they wanted.
Harry declined, since he wanted to get back to his friends (and back to his books). Hermione declined as well, but Draco got out a pack of cards and asked if anyone was interested in a bit of a game.
It sounded like Draco at least was going to be enjoying the rest of the journey. Which was nice.
On the way back through the train, Harry kept an eye out for any of the sort of trouble prefects were supposed to stop. Mostly there wasn't anything, but there were a few younger students who kept peeking into Isaac's compartment every twenty seconds – Harry counted – and by the way the young griffin looked it seemed as though they weren't giving him a moment's peace.
Harry could think of several ways to solve that, but the simplest that came to mind was just to ask the second-years politely to stop, before letting Isaac know which compartment he and Hermione were going to be in in case it happened again.
It didn't seem like the second-years would be doing it again, though. For some reason when Harry asked them politely to stop they'd looked extremely impressed, though, and promptly scurried back into their own compartment.
Maybe it was just that they hadn't thought a prefect would notice.
"So I was thinking that I should have a rune sequence for cooling around the side of the engine bell," Ron was saying, as Hermione opened the door. "Then the usual Rune stuff to make it unbreakable."
That got a nod from Tanisis, who had found her way into the compartment along with Luna during the time Harry was out, and they all looked up for long enough to say hi before going back to the discussion.
"Why would you want the cooling bit if you're going to make it unbreakable?" Neville asked, nibbling on a pasty. "Seems like melting would be, you know, breaking."
"Yeah, but I don't want this thing ending up so hot that when it lands it melts its way through the ground," Ron pointed out.
"It would be a marvellous economy, though," Luna said. "You could have one thing to explore both the moon and the centre of the Earth."
"Like a Jules Verne package holiday," Hermione added, sitting down.
Harry had to snigger.
"Meeting went all right?" Dean checked.
"Yeah, it was about duties and passwords and stuff," Harry replied. "It doesn't seem like the patrols and stuff are going to be too bad."
"That's good news, at least," Dean said.
Ron then suggested that they should put a mirror into the nose of the first test rocket, and that made Harry ask how much of the rocket assembly Ron was planning on making unbreakable.
It seemed like a good point to him, because he was doing the engine nozzle bit and he needed to do the fuel tank (at least if he was going to be using it to magically keep making more fuel) but if you had those two bits and you couldn't change them the rest of it would be pretty much molding a rocket around two surviving pieces every time.
"I did think of that," Ron said. "...I didn't solve it, but I did think of it."
"Oh!" Neville added, rummaging next to him, and produced a small pile of food. "I got stuff from the trolley – this is yours, Hermione, and I got you some as well, Harry."
Harry was touched, and took what Neville had got for him before settling down in a corner to eat.
"What about if you make the engine and fuel tank for a really powerful rocket, and you have a thing in there that makes it less powerful?" Ginny asked. "That way you can make a new one, or change it, for each rocket. And you can make it so it gives as much power as you need."
"Nice!" Ron replied, writing that down.
Harry had sort of wondered where the Twins were (either or both sets, though mostly the Weasley ones). He'd confirmed they weren't with his luggage, or indeed in the room, and it wasn't until most of an hour later that he found out – when the door opened again, this time admitting Fred, Lee, and the in-Animagus-form George.
"That worked out great," Lee declared. "The mascot thing is definitely a plus."
"Yeah, that was twenty tests already," Fred agreed, as George jumped off his shoulder and changed in midair to land as a human.
"What have you been getting people to try?" Hermione asked, a warning note in her voice, and Harry leaned forwards a little as well – interested to see how this interacted with the Being A Prefect thing.
"Nothing they're not okay with," George assured her. "We tell all our test subjects what they're actually testing."
"Unless it would be funny," Fred said.
"Unless it would be funny," George agreed.
"And even then we make sure they know it's a test," Lee completed.
"Hey!" George protested.
"We were going to make her work for fifteen minutes for that," Fred pointed out.
"Oh, yeah, right," Lee agreed. "Anyway."
"Anyway," George concurred.
"Sorry," Hermione said, raising her hand. "Let me rephrase that."
She cleared her throat. "What have you been getting people to try?"
"They're prank sweets," Fred said, holding one up. It looked a lot like a Muggle Black Jack to Harry, though not quite the same. "This one's got the complete taste of a three-course meal."
"The idea is, you give it to a friend like it's a normal sweet," George added, rummaging in his pockets and producing a lollipop. "But then they taste it, and it's completely different to what they expect – this one's actually pasta flavoured."
"What sort of pasta?" Ron asked.
"...pardon?" Lee blinked.
"Well, pasta is kind of a big category," Ron explained. "Is it salted? Buttered? Do you have any sauce?"
He spread his hands. "These are the big questions."
"They're the bistro questions, you mean," Dean snorted.
"Anyway!" Lee said, not for the first time. "Let's talk Quidditch, because it's actually happening this year."
"That's right," Fred agreed. "And with five of the eight Gryffindor team members in this compartment, this is technically a team meeting."
"Sorry, what?" Tanisis asked. "Eight team members?"
"They mean Lee Jordan," Luna told her friend. "The eighth team member is a member of the fourth estate who's a fifth columnist, even if they sometimes have a second opinion."
"That's a first," George noted. "And I hope you're not going to give away any of our plans?"
"Almost certainly," Luna told them. "But it'll be in the Quibbler, so most of my house mates won't take it at all seriously. They really are quite close-minded sometimes."
"Can't say fairer than that," Fred decided. "So, Ron, we're going to have to get you back up to speed on saving. And we need to check the rules, Ginny, to see if you can just ditch the broom and spend the match flying around as a falcon."
"It's rules legal to use an Animagus transformation," Hermione supplied. "I checked in Third Year after Ron started doing squirrel transformations. And it's never been disallowed for someone to jump off their broom, it's just officially 'really, really stupid'."
"That's all you have to do to be officially really, really stupid?" George asked, interested. "Oh brother my brother, we should make ourselves some mustelid parachutes and finally get official recognition!"
Harry still more-or-less followed what the others were talking about with Quidditch tactics and who was whom in the other teams.
For obvious reasons, nobody had done any official matches for a year, but despite Dean's best efforts to introduce Muggle sports to Hogwarts using the Quidditch training equipment there'd still been some impromptu games that kept people from just completely forgetting how to play.
It was Cedric's last year, and he was now the Hufflepuff Quidditch captain as well as being Head Boy and a Triwizard Champion, which made Ron ask if Cedric was single-handedly trying to get rid of all those stereotypes about Hufflepuffs.
Then something in the Redwall book caught Harry's attention, and he lost the thread of the conversation a bit. There was something in there about how maybe the team should take sealed envelopes up into the air so they could open them and then find out what the plan was, but Harry wasn't sure, and then when he had to put down the book for a bit of a breather it was to find that the conversation had moved on completely.
"What I'm wondering is when Hogwarts is going to have to make some changes," Hermione was saying. "It's going to have to happen some time in the next decade, and the sooner people start thinking about that the easier it's going to be."
Ron frowned. "What kind of changes?"
"Yeah, everything seems fine now," Neville contributed.
"Well, think about it," Hermione said. "Nora's the mascot now, but she's more than three years old, and in another eight she's going to be getting her Hogwarts letter. And you can't fit a dragon in the Potions classroom, for a start."
Dean stared. "Wait, hold on. Nora's going to Hogwarts?"
"I don't see why not, it's not like she'd be the first dragon," Hermione pointed out. "And she's quite obviously intelligent – she's certainly more mature than I was at three years old – and she was certainly born close enough to Hogwarts to be in the catchment area."
"That's a good point, but Defence class is going to be weird with a big dragon in it," Ron mused. "Actually, it must already be weird with a sphinx or a centaur in it."
"Or a Black Backed Bookwyrm," Luna contributed.
"Well, yeah, but Harry's just Harry," Ron said.
"Actually, what is our Defence class going to be like this year?" Neville asked. "We've had good luck the last couple of years, but is that going to stick?"
"I do hope so, it's our OWL year," Hermione fretted. "That's the year it matters most, well, apart from the NEWT year and Fred, George and Lee have that."
Lee tapped out a rhythm on the floor. "I'm kind of wondering why the teacher got chosen so late. We barely had time to get our textbooks."
That reminded Harry that he hadn't actually gone through the Defence textbook himself, so he went to rummage around in his things and get it out for a read.
"Maybe they didn't get chosen late, they were just really indecisive," Dean suggested, snorting.
Checking for a moment to make sure he had the right book – a book about Defensive Magical Theory, by Wilbert Slinkhard – Harry opened it and started reading.
The first thing that he noticed (and it was hard to ignore) was that the book was a little bit dry. It wasn't unreadable, not for a dragon who'd read the Silmarillion and then started using it as reference notes for a dungeons and dragons campaign, but it was a lot less easy to read than other books they'd had.
The first chapter was kind of weird, as far as Harry was concerned, because it seemed to be taking a very long time indeed to explain in great detail some very basic concepts. There was a page and a half on what a shield spell was – not about how it worked, just what it was – and every time a spell was mentioned it was immediately followed by a long cautionary note about the possible collateral damage. (That included the shield spell, where it was carefully noted down that a spell cast with insufficient power to penetrate the shield but with more power than could be dissipated by the shield – a threshold gap that usually increased with how well cast 'most common' shield spells were – would be repulsed in a ricochet, and that these bounced spells could cause a significant amount of damage to bystanders or others in the vicinity.)
The book, or Slinkhard Harry supposed he should say, did say that there was a much superior shield spell that could be found in later chapters of the book which avoided these problems. Which sounded useful.
Another thing that Harry started to notice, as he worked through the book, was that some of the paragraphs or sentences had a number or letter label attached to them. So the bit about collateral damage from shield spells was labelled in neat brackets with the legend (1E), and then a page or so later Slinkhard referred back to 1E without further explanation as part of why all offensive or defensive spellcasting in a crowded area could be risky.
It was easy enough to understand the idea, at least in that case, but then Harry got curious and flipped through to about halfway through the book.
It should therefore be evident, in keeping with case 14D and 14E, that using 11A for the analysis produces the most useful result in this situation. The crowded environment means that missed (4B) or deflected (1E, 9B) spells all cause as much damage as they would if they had been deliberately targeted…
Harry decided that this wasn't one of those books where you could just go into any part of it and read it. You had to read it right from the start, and keep notes about things, or you'd be constantly flipping back and forth and wouldn't get anywhere.
He went back to the first chapter, and kept reading.
"So, what's it like?" Fred asked. "How's it looking for our new Defence teacher?"
Harry looked up, noticing that the sun was setting – they couldn't be all that far from Hogwarts – and thought about it for a moment before answering.
"It's kind of dense," he admitted. "A lot of it involves referring back to previous parts of the book, you know, like if there's a reference book but it has endnotes instead of footnotes."
"What, really?" Ron said, rummaging in his bags for his own book.
He opened it, glanced through, and groaned. "It does, as well."
"Oh, I know a solution for that," George said, drawing his wand. "Let's see one of them?"
Harry put down the book at the page he was on, tapping a couple of examples with his foretalon, and George examined the page before putting the tip of his wand on one that said 4C.
"Flipendnote!" he announced.
"You what?" Ron asked, then everyone jumped back in surprise as the book neatly flipped back through the pages to paragraph 4C.
"Wait, that actually worked?" George asked.
"You didn't know?" Harry blinked.
"It was a pun," George explained, a bit weakly. "You know. Like the knockback jinx, Flipendo."
"Do you get extra credit in Charms for inventing spells?" Tanisis checked. "You should mention it in your NEWTs."
"Oh, that's a good point," Harry realized, thinking about Xenographia.
You'd probably need to have a bilingual examiner, though.
"Wait, hold on a moment," Neville said. "How do we get back to the page we were reading?"
"There's this wonderful Muggle invention for that," Luna informed him, rummaging in her pocket, and brought out something that Harry found very familiar indeed.
"...Luna, that's a bookmark," Ginny felt herself bound to point out.
"Yes, they're very useful, aren't they?" Luna smiled.
About ten minutes later Harry had to stop anyway, because he had to help let people know that the train was arriving at Hogsmeade station before long and they should get changed.
That part of being a prefect was nice and easy, at least, and that started Harry thinking about how he could make sure all the first-years knew what was what.
Maybe he should fly over and keep a bit of an eye on the first-years in case any of them needed help during their trip over the lake? They wouldn't see him in the darkness, and he'd be able to see if there was a problem… though Harry also supposed that that would mean he'd be travelling separately from his friends.
It was a tricky problem, and Harry finally made up his mind to do the flying-over just in case only a moment before the Hogwarts Express shivered to a stop.
Hermione opened the door, and almost straight away saw two people trying to manhandle a big trunk out of a carriage. "You don't need to do that," she assured the first-year girls. "It'll be taken up to your room once you know what House you'll be in."
The girls both looked at Hermione with awe, then saw Harry and looked even more awestruck. Harry gave them a smile and a little wave, though this time he remembered to keep his muzzle closed to reduce the teeth quotient, and the general movement of students from compartments out onto the platform started to sort that problem out.
It was a bit chaotic, which was normal, and Harry made a point of telling Isaac not to fly to the castle because there was a tradition of going a different way in First Year. That was about when Hagrid started calling for the first years to follow him, which made things easier, and Harry caught sight of June giving her (cousin?) a pat on the side before sending him off towards Hagrid.
"I'll keep an eye on them until they're across the lake," Harry said, as the other six years moved towards the Thestral carriages, then spread his wings and took off in a rush of wind.
It was quite a warm evening, still, though there were plenty of clouds and it felt like it might rain before long. Harry powered into the sky, relying on main wing strength instead of anything with more finesse, then banked around to get a good look at Hogwarts and the Black Lake and the Forbidden Forest.
That let him catch sight of Conal, trotting briskly out of the Forest towards Hogwarts, and that gave Harry a smile – it was good that Conal had got his preference – before he slipped a bit lower, staying over the wooded area, so he could hear a little of what was going on where Hagrid was leading the first-years.
It sounded like they were mostly moving in silence, except for Hagrid telling them that there wasn't much further to go. Then they reached the little headland where the trees parted to give everyone their first view of Hogwarts, and the collective gasp reached Harry even flying overhead.
Then there was a sharp whistle from Hagrid, which didn't sound like anything that had happened the first time. The boats were already there waiting for them, but a moment later there was an answering roar that echoed across the water.
Big and black against the backdrop of the sky – and of Hogwarts – Nora burst out from behind Hogwarts before dropping towards the Lake. Three smaller shapes followed her, forming a slightly ragged diamond, and all four dragons skimmed low over the water towards the First Years before pulling up and shooting flame.
It was like an air display.
"Hi!" Nora said, wings thrumming as she pulled up and began to hover in front of Harry. "It's nice to see you again!"
She waved a paw at Ollie, Gary and Sally, who had all done flips before starting to circle. "We practiced that! Did it look good?"
"It was great from up here," Harry told her. "I bet the First-Years were really impressed."
"Woosh!" Gary announced proudly.
It seemed as though the introduction to Hogwarts was developing a few new features.