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Author: Bronte Story: The Last Month Before Hogwarts Rating: Everyone Setting: Pre-OotP Status: Completed Reviews: 3 Words: 12,266
Harry watched out the window as Aunt Petunia walked down the path to the corner store. He had heard her call out to Dudley that she was 'just leaving for a few minutes' sweetums' and that she wouldn't be long. He had also heard Dudley beg her not to leave him alone with 'that freak' before she left. Harry had been waiting for this moment. He had been thinking about what Dudley would do when they were alone, especially since he saw how scared he was of Hedwig last week. Harry picked up his wand as he walked out of his room to begin his search for his cousin. If Dudley didn't run away at the sight of Harry, Harry wanted to see how he would react to something so blatantly magical. Not that he was actually going to harm him in any way, but a little payback for the past ten years wouldn't go amiss. He jumped down the stairs, avoiding the squeaky one over his old cupboard. Not that anyone was in there anymore; Harry just had a feeling he should avoid it from now on. Following the sound, Harry traced Dudley to the main television in the living room, there were two other telly's in the house, not counting the broken one in Harry's new room. Harry grasped his wand and shined it on his T-shirt, blinking when some gold and red sparks shot out the end. He wished he know how to make it do that on command. That would scare Dudley a treat. Dudley was watching one of his television shows. Harry didn't know which. He didn't watch much television; any time he had tried to get near Dudley would bully him for getting to close, even if he was on the other side of the room from the box. Harry snuck closer and settled on the couch next to Dudley. He was so absorbed in his show that he didn't even notice Harry for once. Harry rubbed his wand hoping for some red and gold sparks. Nothing happened but Dudley must have noticed the movement. "Get that thing away from me," Dudley jumped up in alarm and scurried into the corner, unwittingly putting Harry between himself and the door. "Aw, come on Duddy, you're not scared of a little stick are you," Harry taunted. Grabbing his wand in both hands and trying to make it spark again. "I'm not stupid…" Dudley started 'Could have fooled me,' Harry thought. "… you don't have to be near me to do freaky stuff. I've seen 'The Sword in the Stone' I don't want anything to go with this pig's tail." Harry tried one last time and wrapping his hand in his T-shirt, he rubbed his wand again. Eureka! Sparks flew out of the end and Dudley squealed as he ran for the kitchen. Harry didn't think he'd ever tire of that sound. He turned after him grinning. He probably wouldn't be seeing anymore of Dudley before he went to school. He had to make the most of his chance. Harry followed Dudley into the kitchen and stuffed his wand into his back pocket as he went. As much fun as this was he didn't want Dudley to tell on him to Aunt Petunia. He still wanted to ask her about his Mum and he hadn't got any name tags for his robes yet. He didn't want to upset her too much. "Dudley? I'm not going to do anything to you. See I've put my wand away," Harry held up his empty hands to illustrate the point as Dudley peeked over the kitchen peninsula. "I just want to make sure that nothing of this gets said to Aunt Petunia. I've been reading my new school books for a couple of weeks now, I think I could pull off some wicked hexes if someone's tongue was to slip." Dudley dropped back out of sight. Harry didn't think he could really do much at all; he could barely make sparks fly out of his wand let alone do any real magic, but Dudley didn't need to know that. "I don't know if I could reverse any spells I do though. Hagrid probably could. I'd have to send Hedwig to find him, and that might take a few days, but he's sure to come if I asked. He did say I should send Hedwig to him if I needed anything though. I suppose I could send him a letter anyway, maybe I should ask him to come back and magic off that tail. Does that sound like a good idea, Duddy?" Harry heard a slight squeak from the far side of the kitchen peninsula and paused, pretending to be thinking. "In fact I think I'll do that, I'm going to go write him a letter now." Harry started retreating back into the hallway. Dudley's head peeked out over the breakfast bar, and Harry could see the desperation in his eye's "Harry, NO!" "What's that, Dud?" "Don't get him to come back. I won't tell Mum anything, I promise, just keep that big freak away from me." "Are you sure? You don't want to go to school with a tail after all." Harry had heard Uncle Vernon rumbling under his breath about 'that tail' while he was supposedly watching the telly. Harry had shrunk further back against the couch cushions every time he heard something. So far nothing had further had been said openly about it, at least not while Harry was around. They didn't seem to notice Harry anymore anyway; it had made a nice change from being yelled at. "Harry, I promise. Just don't let him come back again. Pleeeaase!" Harry didn't think he had ever heard Dudley say please before, especially not to him. He guessed he should leavc it there. Anyway anything else and he would probably have to do some magic, and he couldn't let Dudley find out he was bluffing. "All right, Dud, I won't ask Hagrid to come down. I can't promise he'll stay away though. We got on quite well so he might visit just to see how I'm getting on. He's a decent bloke maybe he'll come and fix your tail without me saying anything." Dudley blanched at this and slumped back down behind the cabinets. "He'll probably let me know first so I'll keep you posted, See ya later," Harry chirped as he left the kitchen. ***** When Harry woke up the first thing he saw was his wand. It was lying on top of the reduced pile of school books where he had left it yesterday after 'playing' with Dudley. After checking his chart (August the 19th, 11 more days!) and having a shower. Harry picked up his wand, noticing as he did so the book underneath on the top of the pile Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Harry looked at it and then decided to take a look, he might find out something about Phoenix feathers which might tell him more about his wand. Harry rifled through his book. Malaclaw, Murtlap, Phoenix! 'swan-sized, scarlet…regenerates bursting into flames…gentle…eats only herbs…can vanish and reappear at will' It can vanish at will! So maybe I wasn't just seeing things when Hagrid disappeared, maybe humans can do it too! Harry read further, 'Phoenix song is magical…tears have healing properties' Nothing about Phoenix feathers having any particular special powers. He guessed he would just have to figure out his wand the normal way. If only he knew what the normal way was. Sighing Harry turned to the front of the alphabetical listing. At the top of each entry was written M.O.M. Classification followed by a number of crosses from one to five. Harry wanted to find out what that meant. Bingo! At the start of the listing, after the introduction (He would get to that later) there was a table of Ministry of Magic Classifications. One X meant 'boring' and XXXXX meant 'impossible to train or domesticate'. The Phoenix had had XXXX meaning a skilled wizard may handle it. But that didn't make sense. The entry had said that they were gentle. Keeping one finger on the page of classifications Harry returned to the entry for the Phoenix for another look. Ahh that made more sense, there was a footnote number attached to the classification X's. 'The Phoenix gains its XXXX rating not because it is aggressive but because very few wizards have ever succeeded in domesticating it' Harry wondered why it was so hard to domesticate if it was so gentle. It seemed to him that violent animals would be hardest to tame. Remembering that other wands had Unicorn hair as the magical core, Harry flicked to the entry on Unicorns. UNICORN: The unicorn is a beautiful beast found throughout the forests of northern Europe. It is a pure white horned horse when fully grown, though the foals are initially golden and turn silver before achieving maturity. The unicorn's horn, blood and hair all have highly magical properties. It generally avoids human contact, is more likely to allow a witch to approach it than a wizard, and is so fleet of foot that it is very difficult to capture. It was cool that the foals were gold; He'd love to see that, but it sounded like he probably wasn't likely to. Harry wondered why unicorns liked witches better; he supposed it must have something to do with men being more likely to hurt it. In his history lessons at school, it always seemed to be the men going out hunting and the women staying home with pet dogs, but maybe it wasn't like that in the magical world. It had a footnote attached to the M.O.M. classification too, saying to check the footnote on centaurs. Flicking back to the C's Harry found a footnote saying '… given a XXXX classification not because it is unduly aggressive, but because it should be treated with respect.' Harry wondered what they would do if they weren't respected, would the unicorn bow its head and charge? The Muggle ideas he had of unicorns made them seem all shy and… well magical, And always tinged with purple and pink. Centaurs were half man and half horse. Like Mr Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, no wait, he was half goat. They sounded like they would be interesting to talk to as they were 'intelligent and capable of speech' and had chosen to be classified as a beast and not a being. That seemed only slightly more probable than seeing a unicorn foal as 'They are…mistrusting of wizards as they are of Muggles' and good at astronomy to boot. Maybe he should look for them at night then, if they liked astronomy. Centaurs were followed by the Chimera, the Chizpurzle (Harry had to practise that one, he kept saying kizfurzle), the Clabbert, the Crup which looked like a Jack Russell, and hated Muggles, the Demiguise which could make itself invisible. Harry read the description of the Diricawl with fascination; it was the same thing that he knew as the Dodo. He had heard about them, they had been hunted to extinction, being too dumb to run away from men with clubs who just hit them over the head. The Ministry of Magic had decided to keep the non-extinction of the Dodo secret after that. The next entry was something called the Doxy but he jumped straight over that to the next entry; the Dragon. Harry had always liked dragons; at least the Muggle ideas he had of them anyway. Hagrid seemed to think they were cool too; he had told him he wanted one on the way to the train station. Harry didn't think he would be able to though the dragon had a XXXXX rating. Harry hadn't realised that there were so many types of dragon, there were 10 different breeds in his book. Harry heard Aunt Petunia calling him down for lunch and suddenly realised that he was hungry. He had slept late and missed breakfast. At least he wasn't woken up to cook it anymore. Placing his wand on the page to mark his spot he lay the book down on his bed and pounded down the stairs, automatically skipping over the squeaky one on the way. ***** Harry sat on the couch watching television after dinner. Dudley had squirreled himself away upstairs watching television in his bedroom. He wanted to watch something different to Uncle Vernon, not to mention the fact that he could hide from Harry there. Uncle Vernon had ignored Harry when he came into the room. Aunt Petunia was still in the kitchen making sure it was spick-and-span and that Harry had put all the groceries away in the right place. Harry had spent the afternoon wandering after Aunt Petunia as she shopped and being laden with bags. He didn't really mind, it didn't require any thought so he had tried to remember as much as he could about the beasts in his book. He had tried to remember what was so magical about each animal but had ended up getting them all confused. He'd given the clabbert's Muggle warning system to the diricawl. but the diricawl was the dodo, which walked right up to Muggles. So that couldn't be right, and there was some sort of dog. Did that mean there would be a wizarding cat too? He hadn't finished reading about the dragons so he wasn't even trying to remember anything about them, other than that they flew and ate people, which Muggles knew anyway. He'd then gone on to wondering which of the Fantastic Beasts he would see at school. He didn't think it would be many, how could they have them all there. They didn't look like they could be caged and how else could they keep them all to show the students. He'd probably get to see the dog one and have to learn about the rest from books. Unless they had field trips! Harry wasn't really interested in what was on the telly, but there was going to be a new ad for Grunnings shown and he would get brownie points for pretending to be interested and that it was the best ad ever. That along with all the bag-carrying this afternoon should bode well for Project: Keep Aunt Petunia Happy, or as he had taken to calling it Project: Butter Aunt Petunia Up. Harry waited for the advertisement concealing his boredom. The program was a home-improvement makeover type show; Uncle Vernon had been mumbling something about target markets throughout the show. Finally the advertisement came on, it was one of those longer ones, the "look how well this drill can go through metal!' types. Harry made the appropriate noises of appreciation, and got a glare from Uncle Vernon for his trouble. Enough was enough, Harry got out of there before Uncle Vernon could complain about anything and disappeared up the stairs. He heard the door to Dudley's room open and out of the corner of his eye he saw an eyeball peeking out of the room and heard rather than saw the door slam shut. Right, Dragons. The Antipodean (Ant-i-pod-e-an? An-ti-po-de-an. Harry sounded out the word) The Antipodean Opaleye lived in New Zealand, then there was the Chinese Fireball in East Asia, The Welsh Green and Hebridean Black in the UK, then another in Peru, and Harry supposed other place in South America too. There were lots in Europe; the Hungarian Horntail which was meant to be the most dangerous, Harry thought they all sounded scary; the Norwegian Ridgeback, The Romanian Longhorn, the Swedish Short-Snout and the Ukranian Ironbelly. The Ironbelly had carried off a sailing boat in 1799, It can't have been very tasty though and the book said it was empty so there were no people on it for the dragon to eat. Harry thought the Welsh Green and the Opaleye would be the best to see up close, they seemed the least likely to eat him. He supposed there was at least an outside chance of him seeing a Welsh Dragon, since he didn't live too far from Wales. He agreed with Hagrid that they were great but he didn't quite understand why he wanted one as a pet. They seemed a bit dangerous for that, with the carrying people off and eating them thing. When he started yawning Harry put the book down and climbed into bed. It had been tiring shopping with Aunt Petunia. He wondered if he would dream of dragons, flying across the sky, maybe he would be riding them. Could you ride a dragon? It was probably too dangerous to get so close to them. As he turned over, he wondered when he would get the chance to ride a broom. He hoped he didn't fall off. Maybe he'd get the chance when he got to school. School! Something pricked at his half asleep brain, 'must remember to ask Aunt Petunia about the name tags'.
A/N :The Sword in the Stone belongs to E.H.White, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to C.S.Lewis, and both also to Walt Disney Pictures A/N2: Stuff in Italics thatmay look familiar is taken from 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' by Newt Scamander, one of the books J.K.R. wrote for Comic Relief A/N3: the Wizarding dog is the crup, and the cat is a kneazle, like half of Crookshanks.
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