Chapter Text
The crowd roared somewhere behind them, but Harry could barely hear. All notions of before, of being clever and fast and snatching the golden egg from right under the dragon's feet, faded away under the overwhelming panic. The Hungarian Horntail, roaring twice as hard as the crowd and infinitely more ferocious, had broken away from the arena and was now chasing after him with all the rage of a nesting mother with her eggs in danger. All Harry could think of was getting away and trying, against all odds, to stay alive.
Four years of magic and countless dangerous situations did not make him all that confident that he could. A troll he could handle, a basilisk, yes, wraiths and spirits and a runaway prisoner – even a werewolf. But there was something very different about all that and about having a seventy foot dragon chasing after him, a behemoth among creatures, big enough to make the insidiously deadly basilisk seem minuscule in comparison.
It was rather like being chased by a mountain. A volcano on wings, roaring fire after him. And his flimsy broom, the expensive, top of the line Firebolt, so great and sturdy and fast before, seemed now weak and fragile and so very slow. The dragon was gaining on him with an ease any broom maker would've loved to manufacture, and with a horrible intent. It wasn't even trying to breathe fire on him anymore, no. It didn't want to burn him – it wanted to eat him.
He really should've paid Hogwarts School motto more attention. Not that he had been tickling this particular dragon, of course.
Looking wildly over his shoulder, Harry had barely enough time to duck to the side and avoid the enormous maw with teeth that, from this angle, seemed bigger than he was. His heart pounding, he ducked fast to the side, circled around in hopes of confusing the dragon, and darted towards the Forbidden Forest, hoping against all hope that he could make it into the tree cover and hide. Or at least lose the dragon for a while, so that he could get something of a head start when the chase resumed. Anything.
If there was ever a time Harry would start to hate the magical world, this would be it. He hadn't wanted to get into this stupid tournament. Sure, the idea had been fascinating – but money, eternal glory, death defying trials? No, he didn't need any more of those, he had more than his fair share already. And yet, he had been put into the tournament anyway, a fourteen year old competing against seventeen year olds, three years worth of magical studies in between making the entirety of the affair less than fair.
The dragon roared, low and high at the same time, spitting fire and beating the air with massive wings. The sounds of the crowd – or any other sound except the roaring and the wind – were gone. The sound of Harry's heart made him nearly deaf to the roar, though, and the forest seemed unforgiving, being still so far away. Maybe he ought to duck under the Viaduct? The gaps between the legs of the bridge would be too small for the dragon to pass through; it might stop the beast for a moment… but no. Most likely the dragon would crash right into them, and then Harry would have to pay for the repairs.
That was, if he came out of the ordeal alive at all. He had considered it before, but now he was sure. Whoever had arranged his name to pop out of the Goblet of Fire had indeed wanted him dead. And they would most likely get their wish – if the dragon didn't kill him, then the second or third tasks would. After all, if they started with dragons… he didn't even want to think what the other tasks would be. Wrestling Nundus and having staring matches with Dementors maybe.
Heat against the back of his robes was the first warning, and instinct of a Quidditch player as well as someone regularly in deathly situations made Harry drop like a stone, and out of the way of the barrage of flames. They still nearly licked the top of his head and as he, wide eyed and terrified, darted away again, he had to pat his hand over his hair to make sure it hadn't caught on fire. The dragon ducked right after him, now used to the quick turns Harry could take and unwilling to let him get away, and without any other means of escape, Harry continued to plummet towards the ground – to pull up would make him slow down, the dragon would catch him….
Bad idea. The dragon had some dozens of tons of weight on him, and body designed for this sort of thing. In contest of falling, it won wings down, and crown of horns rattling, and only luck and some divine intervention made Harry's broom wobble enough that the tail end hit the dragon's snout, sending him off course and over the dragon's head, rather than directly into its mouth. What followed was less lucky, as Harry's broom crashed against the dragon's horns, and shattered, bits flying away from Harry's hands under the force of the air rushing by, leaving him with only a broken handle to hold on to.
Whatever survival instinct made Harry reach out wildly and grasp a hold of whatever he could reach ended up probably saving his life, as he grabbed a hold of the dragon's numerous horns and barely managed to keep himself from flying off right after the bits of the Firebolt. Not that it made his situation any better. His broom was gone, and he was hanging onto a feral, enraged dragon for dear life, and no, his situation was not good at all.
The dragon, noticing him there by some instinct or maybe by the feel of his weight, beat herself out of the dangerous plummet, and shook her head, roaring in anger. With nothing else to keep him from a deadly fall, Harry held on with all his might, letting out a grunt of pain as he was thrown to the side and right into one of the many horns, thanking his lucky stars that the horn in question was broken and dull and not razor sharp like most of them. So, instead of puncturing his lung, the impact only gave him bruises – and maybe a fractured rib or too, but he could live with that.
He couldn't live for long where he was. Already the dragon was ducking her head and lifted her foreleg, talons reaching for him to swat him off, probably mauling him in the process. Hurried and haphazard, Harry swung himself out of reach, sneakers slipping on the dragon's hide but still finding some purchase – the Horntail's hide was marked evenly with sharp and rough protrusions, making the hide seem almost scaled with what felt like rough stones, like badly made pavement. It was a very small blessing to find footing there, though, because soon the dragon was reaching with both front legs, talons scraping to get him, and it was only a matter of time until they would reach.
He needed to do something. But what?
Slipping into the crown of horns, hoping that they would shield him from the talons some, Harry pulled out the wand he had thrust into his pocket at the beginning of the chase. At least he still had that, he thought, though what good it did him, he had no idea. Dragons were immune to most magic – according to Charlie, the only magic that had any effect on a dragon was transfiguration, and that only because they could make chains and cages and whatnot appear and take form around the dragon. Spells cast directly at dragons were borderline useless – even something like the infamous Killing Curse would be nothing more to a dragon than what a bee-sting would be to a man.
Still, Harry had to try. Wild, he cast a stunning hex at one of the talons reaching for him, sending a blast of red from the tip of his wand. It made the talons falter a little, but nothing more. The blasting hex, which Harry had yet to fully master, did even less, hitting one of the horns instead and dying away without causing any damage. Cursing to himself, Harry tried again, any spell that came to mind – he even tried to levitate the reaching talons away, to no avail, until in his desperation he tried Lumos and then a hurried Nox as the light flashed, blinding, and made the dragon let out a startled sound.
For a moment, the dragon was still, wings beating on automatic as she confusedly shook her head. Then, as Harry wondered what he had done, the dragon let out an infuriated sound, shook her head harder, ands then gave up trying to claw Harry from her head. Instead, she set out in a violent flight, rolling from side to side, shaking herself hard and then, to Harry's amazement, going as far as turning upside down in midair in an attempt of shaking him off.
She was flying blind now, Harry realised. Whether it was the Lumos or the Nox that had caused it, he didn't know, but she was blinded. The pattern she flew in was haphazard and uncontrolled and as she twisted from side to side and let out small roars of anger, the wizard saw that they were not only getting closer to his goal – but flying right past it. Hogwarts, the Viaduct, the arena and everything else was left far behind as they flew, uncontrolled, over the Forbidden Forest.
Unbidden, a thought came to the frightened boy. He had wanted to hide in the trees, but the Firebolt was gone, broken. If he fell now – and survived somehow – how would he get back? Or worse what if they crashed and…. Well, the likelihood of him surviving a crash on board a behemoth of a dragon were pretty small. He could die. No, scratch that, he was going to die. And it would happen soon – not in some unforeseeable future, not in hour or in a day or a week, or during the second or third task, now, probably within minutes.
He didn't want to die. He wanted to see Sirius again, to live with him. He wanted to tell Hermione thanks for helping with the task; if she hadn't forced him to learn Accio to summon his broom, he would've probably died already. He wanted to tell Skeeter off and tell Ron he was being a prat, and then forgive him because despite everything Ron was still his best mate, and he wanted to… he wanted to do so much more. He wanted to see foreign lands, and learn more magic and graduate and he wanted, he wanted….
He started casting spells again, now haphazard and only barely aware of what he was trying. Tripping and tickling hexes, one useless charm after another, most of the spells he had learned in Defence Against the Dark Arts, all useless, and finally spells he had only heard of but never managed to cast – never even tried to cast. The dragon was now tilting dangerously downwards and the tree tops were getting closer – and they were going fast, so bloody fast, and Harry's grip on the horns was sweaty, barely holding on.
The dragon swung, and they were now heading head first towards an enormous ancient oak – if they hit it, the oak probably would give in before the dragon would but Harry would probably crash right into the tree or be thrown off, and the fall would, without any pain of doubt, kill him. A spell, any spell, magic had to be able to do something, he thought desperately, and tried and tried, with a need and urge and want he had never before pushed into a spell. Something had to work, something Lupin or Moody had taught him, something had to make the dragon duck the tree, avoid it; all she had to do was just swing to the side, like she had done before, like she would've if she only could've seen the bloody tree…!
Letting out a confused sounding noise, the dragon ducked to the side. Harry, having not expected it at all, only barely managed to keep himself on the dragon's head as it sidled around the enormous oak, the tree's branches brushing hard along her neck and back and nearly taking Harry's arm off, but avoiding the complete impact. The dragon roared, as one of the branches broke and then gauged a long wound along her back, but didn't stop, couldn't stop. Now too busy trying to hold on, Harry didn't notice that the quick move had been only a faint, momentary victory because now the dragon was heading downwards at a sharp, terrifying angle.
The sight of the ground, a strange clearing in the middle of the forest, coming right at them froze Harry completely and he only hung there, hugging an enormous white horn of the dragon, and handle of his Holly wand digging into his palm painfully. His mind went completely blank with the upcoming disaster, no spells popped into his head, no attempts to survive, nothing, he was completely unmoving and empty-headed for one crucial moment.
There were stones in the clearing, he could see. Enormous boulders, long and oddly shaped, in a circle of sorts. It reminded him a bit of the pictures he had once seen of Stonehenge. They were coming up fast.
That woke Harry only long enough for the panic to return with a vengeance, but he had only enough time to hold his wand, to open his mouth, no spell in mind only a terrified plea for something that would do anything. The magic was alive and wild with his terror and desperation and that of the dragon, who seemed to sense the danger but was as helpless as Harry was to stop it, and together they crashed down, with the dragon's blood trickling down its neck and onto Harry's robes and Harry's terrified magic whirling feebly around them both.
The impact was earth shattering, but only lasted for a split second before everything faded to blissful darkness.
She was beautiful sitting there, in nothing, red hair floating like fire, green eyes glowing. "This isn't right," she said, and the words nearly made Harry crumble – they were not the ones he had hoped to hear his mother say to him, when he finally got the chance to see her.
"Oh, Harry," she sighed, reaching and lifting him up, up from the bottom of nothing and to her lap, really like a mother would've. "Many things go wrong right here. It wasn't meant to happen," she explained, pressing her lips to his cheek. "So many things. When the time comes I will wring Albus's neck for allowing you to be entangled in that tournament, it wasn't meant to be. For that matter, I will wring his neck for ever allowing the tournament to be played out the way it was at all – it was buried for a reason. And you, oh, you were never meant to fight dragons."
"I'm sorry," he answered, though he wasn't entirely sure what he was apologising for. Everything, maybe. Her death, his father's death, for the tournament and for the dragon, for crashing down and dying. He hadn't wanted to die. He didn't want to die, but here he was – and it was strange. He though he might be happy, seeing her. Maybe his father was there, too? And yet, like she said, it wasn't right. It felt… wrong.
"It's alright, sweetheart," she murmured, her arms warm around him. "It's not your fault." She sighed heavily and looked down at him, eyes compassionate and alight with warmth and knowledge. "You're not dead, sweetheart. But soon it will be as good as," she said, stroking a hand up and down his back. She let out a sound, mix between a chuckle and a snort. "You inherited your father's affinity for trouble. I don't know how good or a bad a thing that is – maybe without it, this would've never happened. Or maybe, you would've simply died. I suppose it doesn't matter."
"I'm not dead?" Harry asked, surprised.
"No. You are… lost, but not dead. Not yet," she agreed and sighed again, lifting her hand and stroking his cheek with her fingers. "I am not here," she said suddenly, making his stomach drop. "I'm a memory, sweetheart. Albus told you some, didn't he? In your first year. I am here," she placed her hand over his chest. "An imprint of myself in you. Accidental magic on my part, but powerful. I've been trying to look out after you. But I'll be gone soon, completely. It's all I can do to keep you alive, and it will wear me out completely. I imagine it will wear you out too."
"Mum," Harry whispered, not quite understanding, but feeling the truth in her worlds. He could feel it in there, her emotions. And something else too, something in the back of his head. Something strange and foreign and yet growing more familiar. A change. "What will happen to me?"
She smiled, sad and solemn, and kissed his forehead. "The dragon and you crashed into an old magical site. It was made long before Hogwarts, long, long ago. I've only seen it once, during my seventh year as part of my Charms studies. Ancient Celts did magic there, or so people think nowadays. It is part of the reason why Hogwarts was build where it is – both the school and the site sit on magical hot spots of sorts," she said. "Magic like that never fades – the site is still what it was when it was built, it's just that for eons now no one has had any idea what it was for, exactly."
Harry said nothing, just closed his eyes and leaned his cheek on her shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was strange, but he wasn't scared. He was actually oddly reassured by the whole thing, but then, sitting in your mother's lap probably had that effect on everyone. Like there was nothing that could break through the secure protection of her arms, not yet, not for a while.
"Your magic, the dragon's blood, all that chaotic energy activated the site," she said then, her voice rumbling beneath his ear. "Not like it was supposed to, of course not, but something was opened and you… you fell into it, with the dragon." She shook her head and pulled back, to look at him. "I am drawing all the power I can to make sure you survive, to take you somewhere where you can live, where you will fit. It will drain me, it will probably drain your magic and the dragon too no doubt. But I don't know what's on the other side. I am trying, it might be something the same or different… or it might be nothing. I don't know."
Harry frowned and then nodded, looking down. "It's okay. Thank you for trying," he said quietly, looking at her hand on his chest. Her fingernails were pale, a little long. Pretty.
"Oh, sweetheart," she whispered and pulled him to her chest again. "I love you very much. Your father did too; you were the greatest source of pride in his life. Whatever happens, remember that, alright? Remember that and be strong. Live, however you can. For us."
He nodded, not quite sniffing but not far from it. His eyes were getting blurry. "I love you too, mum," he whispered brokenly into her chest, hugging her tight.
Then she was gone, and he was falling again.
Harry woke up to the smell of forest – moss and trees, leaves and pine needles and water. The dream of his mother was fading from his head, and for a split second his heart thumped wildly with the memory of falling to the circle of ancient stones, before he realised that he wasn't falling anymore – that he was still, lying on his side, and feeling heavy and clumsy. Alive, all in all.
He sighed heavily with relief, and then froze as the sigh brought forth the smell of ash and a small mist of smoke, that under his wide eyes slithered into the green foliage. His mind sat still for a long moment just staring, confused and uncomprehending, before he dared to carefully lift his head a little. It was a heavy, clumsy move, and nearly sent him falling to his side again as what should've been a simple, small shift, brought his head several feet up, and to the level of the lowest tree branches.
Harry didn't get the time to try and figure out what that meant, exactly, when he felt something on his neck dislodge and slither down. Reflex made him lift his hand – or what he thought was his hand anyway – and stop the fall of the strange, loose object. As it halted by the crook of his arm, he looked down, and stared.
There, on the forearm of a dark, scaly arm, lay his own lifeless body, looking impossibly small and fragile and half broken, loose limbed and lax in his unconsciousness. And yet, the arm, the foreleg, cradling the body felt like it was his, while the body lying there, in his champion's robes with half bent glasses loosely hanging on his nose, felt like a foreign object.
Harry stared, and then, hardly daring to move, lowered the forearm and the body on it, carefully easing the limp form to the mossy ground. He had no way of knowing if the body was alive or unconscious and what it all meant – because, as slowly as his mind was turning, he did understand this. It was strange, impossible, incredible, but he was somehow….
Or maybe he wasn't. He had no way of knowing – he couldn't see himself. Looking down to the foreleg, Harry gazed up and down it. Talons, those he knew, they had tried to kill him. And the rough scaling, like shapely but sharp rocks in a neat pattern, he had scampered over it what felt like a little while ago. And the forearm gave way to an elbow and upper arm and shoulder, and as Harry watched, horrified and fascinated and still curiously quiet-minded, his head turning in an odd angle that felt strange and natural all at once, he saw them. The wings, one lying a little loose on his other side, other sitting tucked almost neatly to his side and between them a long bloody gouge, no longer bleeding but immensely more painful now that he was aware of it.
But he couldn't look away from the wings, which shuddered as he stared at them, and what felt like a lightning bold ran through Harry. In an awkward move he was suddenly on his feet, wings shaking, tail curling out from where it had dug in, halfway buried in moss. There were branches and dirt stuck in the spikes of his tail, the longest end spike that gave Hungarian Horntails their name having skewered what looked like a small tree trunk.
A Hungarian Horntail, Harry thought, standing there on what felt like on his feet and palms and yet not because in a dragon's body it was a natural way to stand. He was the Hungarian Horntail. The beast that had been chasing him, trying and nearly succeeding at killing him… he was the dragon! And his own body was, was….
Harry turned to look down again, to the loose form lying on the forest floor, so tiny, smaller than a mouse from this perspective. He swallowed, a cold feeling uncurling in his stomach, and lowered his head for a closer look. Was he dead? Had his mind somehow jumped from one body to another? What had his mother said in the dream – he couldn't remember, something about the dragon fading, and yet… that was his body, plain and simple, lying there. Glasses and scar and all. The wand was gone, though, as were all the fragments of his Firebolt, and yet it was him.
And yet he was the dragon?
Feeling dizzy with the sheer strangeness of his own thoughts, Harry lay back down, letting out an inhuman grunt as he did. He couldn't think; all his thoughts could do were hopelessly flitter around what he was seeing and not quite believe it. He felt so strange, big and clumsy and heavy and just foreign. He could feel the wings, the tail, he could almost move them, and it felt so odd. His neck felt unnaturally long, his face strange. And as he moved his tongue, it was a strange feeling, made only stranger by the enclosure of fangs around it.
Was he dead? Was he alive? He wasn't sure. He felt alive, but his body was… not his, and his own was on the ground – and he didn't dare to touch it, not to even check if it was even alive because he was so big now, he had talons and horns, and what if he accidentally killed himself with one wrong stroke of his hand – his foreleg? Forepaw? Whatever it was.
Confused and suddenly feeling very alone, Harry lowered his head beside the body lying on the moss, and whined. It was a low, rough sound, and it released another cloud of dark smoke into the air, washing over the pale face of the small human form on the ground – and only in hindsight, Harry remembered how bad dragon breath had smelled, like sulphur and fire and burning, and hurriedly he lifted his head, not wanting to breath on the body again because what if the body breathed in, and choked on the dragon breath?
The moment of panic was sharp and strong – and ended abruptly, as his vision split apart and he started to cough. Harry flailed, confused, because he was coughing and there was the smell of sulphur he had feared, and yet he wasn't at the same time. And suddenly, he could feel the moistness of the ground seeping through his robes, that he had a bruise on his side, and how was that possible, because dragons couldn't wear robes, and he hadn't been bruised – except there was the gauge on his back, and he felt that too, that and the bruise and the fact that he had lost a shoe somewhere and –
Harry opened his eyes – even while his eyes were already open. His vision was perfect and yet it was also blurry, his glasses were askew, crooked. He straightened them, confused and grateful that, though the metal was bent from the middle, at least the glasses hadn't cracked. Then looked up and down at himself.
In a moment of strange double vision, the wizard and the dragon stared at each other and, somehow, Harry was both of them all at once.
He gasped and growled through two different mouths, and suddenly the aches and pains made themselves felt. His side hurt just below his arm, his back hurt just between his wings, his head hurt, his stomach hurt, his joints and his bones ached as two bodies worth of pains assaulted him. Groaning through two mouths, one soft and another rough and inhuman, Harry curled in on himself. He had hit his head on something and the feel of blood in his hair was the last thing the human body felt, before it fell into unconsciousness again, hurting too much to manage.
Suddenly, Harry was one again, the dragon only. Swallowing and faltering, Harry lifted his Horntail's head from where he had tucked it in pain, under his wing, and looked down at the human body, now lying on its side, curled up.
He still didn't quite know what was going on, or how it had happened – or how in Merlin's name it was possible – but one thing was sure. He was in trouble. Lots and lots of trouble. Not just as a dragon and as a human, but as him, because he was two and one and all the while his human body probably had a concussion and while he didn't know much about medicine, he could guess how bad that was. He had no idea what he could do to help himself, but at least he was still, somehow, conscious enough to try.
Now a little less afraid of touching his own human body, Harry gently pried it off the ground with as careful a move as he could manage, and lifted the body – and quite a bit of moss and dirt with it – back to his front leg. The forest floor was cold and moist, and probably not good for a concussed human, he reasoned, and awkwardly supported the limp body into the crook of his elbow, where it would stay warm. He even went as far as to try and unfold his wing to work as a shelter from the cool air. It wasn't much, but maybe… maybe it would keep him from dying of cold, or getting one, or something, anything.
He did it just in time – just a moment later the heavy clouds above, which he hadn't even noticed so far, broke open and it started to rain.
When Harry woke up, it was as a human. Blinking through the darkness and the pain twisting through his head, he stared at the murky brown enclosure where he lay, only belatedly realising that he was staring at the chest of the Hungarian Horntail, then at the wing which lay over him like a lopsided, living tent. Looking down he could see some of the ground – and there, the snout of the dragon, with heavy puffs of heated air rushing out of large nostrils at steady intervals. The dragon, he realised and remembered, had laid there, immobile in the rain, for hours before tucking his head down beneath his wing, and going to sleep as well, too pained and exhausted to stay awake.
The dragon, who was him, just as he was him.
Groaning softly, Harry lifted his hand and ran it over his hair, over the wound. He had probably hit his head on one of the dragon's horns while falling – that was at least what it felt like. His hair was crusted with dried blood but it didn't seem wet anymore – the bleeding had stopped. The pain was still sticking around, both on his head and on his side, making his bones ache all over and draining him of his energy, but at least he didn't feel nauseous – or like he was about to die. He tentatively took that as a good sign and closed his eyes, willing the pain to leave him be for long enough for him to think.
For a moment he thought of the fight, the first task, the tournament – the circle of stones and the odd dream where his mother had told him that she'd drain out herself to save him. He wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but something was… different. Beyond the obvious, he added to himself and looked down at the dragon – which now didn't seem any more dangerous than a statue would've, even less though. The dragon felt, actually, comfortable. Familiar. Right.
But how? He had no idea. His mind flittered over the things he had read about magic, about werewolves and animagi and none of it explained this. Something about Voldemort nagged at him, and he thought of Quirrell and Voldemort in the back of his head and, no, that wasn't right either. Voldemort the ghost and the man and the diary, something like that maybe, because Tom Riddle the teenager had been in the diary and a living wizard at the same time, so was that it? Was the dragon now like Harry's Diary?
No. No, that wasn't it, because the diary had been just that, and even less, immovable and helpless and even after draining Ginny dry the best the diary had been able to do was produce a wraith of a man. The dragon – and Harry himself – was solid, secure, and alive. Very, very much alive, he thought, listening to the heavy drum of the dragon's heart, pounding a steady beat just beside him, deep in the dragon's chest. His chest.
He really wished someone could've explained it all to him, because no matter how he turned it in his head, it made no sense to him. Well, some sense, but still, how? Magic, obviously, maybe his mother if that had even been real, and maybe the circle of stones?
The circle. Opening his eyes, Harry blinked and then glanced around. The circle, he remembered that, and what his mother had said about it in his dream. Something about Celts and magic and that something had been opened. Harry had gotten the impression of a hole, of falling through nothingness – and hadn't his mother said that she didn't know what was on the other side?
Harry knew now. There was a forest, moss, rain, normal things. And yet, somewhere in the back of his head or maybe in the back of his spine, somewhere where people felt things without being able to explain, he felt it wasn't normal. It was different, very very different. Something was missing – and yet not, not missing. Something had never been there.
Swallowing back a whimper of pain, Harry turned where he lay and then slowly slid down from the enormous forearm of a dragon, which had served as his rough bed. As he did the dragon stirred, and Harry was no longer one but two again, and yet he was only spread farther, rather than split in two. One consciousness in two bodies. As he opened his closed eyes, the double vision struck again, and yet his thoughts didn't change, there was no other mind.
He wasn't sure if he had even feared that there might be – that somehow he was split in two, still somehow in bond with each other, but different. It wasn't like that. Before he had been in too much pain to realise, but even while looking through two sets of eyes, one human and blurry, the other dragon and so very sharp, he was still just him. Him, as he had always been, and yet also more.
It was difficult, though – it was like someone had knocked him over the head and now his eyes were looking in two different directions, and he couldn't decide which one to give more attention to. It was dizzying, to have two sets of things he saw, even if they were so similar, confusing. For a moment he tried to make sense of it, tried to look at the two things all at once, but his head started to hurt until he saved himself the trouble, and closed his human eyes.
His dragon eyes, he was quickly realising, were much better. His dragon awareness was better too, but that was mostly because of the size – he had more to feel with. The rain was over, but the air was cool now, it was getting late, and dark. As he carefully unwound his wings from where he had unfolded them, into a shelter over both of himself, the air rushed forward into what had been pleasantly heated private space, and made his human body shiver. The dragon was better equipped to handle it – with fire burning away in its chest, warming it.
Except, it wasn't an it, was it? No. The dragon was a she. A mother of a clutch of eggs, even, except the eggs weren't there.
That was bit too much oddity for him to handle, and Harry was quick to push the thought away. Instead he concentrated on himself. His human body curled back into the dragon one, seeking warmth against what felt like a late November night in Scotland and, maybe, even might've been.
Ignoring the human body, because it was too distracting to keep track of them both at once, Harry looked up through dragon eyes, taking a closer look at the forest. The trees around him were mostly oaks, birches, ashes and whatnot. Familiar trees – the sort of trees the Forbidden Forest was full of. Maybe, he thought with a sudden burst of anxious hope, he was in the Forbidden Forest after all. Hogwarts was just a little further away, all he would have to do was to go there, and they would be able to sort everything out. He'd be him again, and the dragon would… what? Die?
In his draconic form, Harry shifted a little. He had only been in it for a little while, but it felt… comfortable. Not quite natural, but not bad either – nothing like taking polyjuice or being transfigured into something, no. The body felt like it was his. He didn't know it, not at all, but he could feel it. The weight of his tail, the bone of the sharp horn – the horns on top of his head too – and his wings, they all felt like him. A very strange him, but him nonetheless. The idea of it being killed, him being….
Except, it wasn't him. He was Harry James Potter, a wizard, a human. He needed to hold onto that. He didn't want to be a dragon. Right. Except of course he had thought about it when he had learned about Animagi, how cool it would've been, to be able to transform into a dragon or griffin or something, but… not like this. This was too confusing. He couldn't… work properly, like this.
Besides he was hurting, tired, his bones ached and he was hungry – in both bodies, human more than the dragon. He wanted out of the forest and into a bed, he wanted Madam Pomfrey's healing potions and he wanted to go to sleep and rest until everything made sense again. Yeah, that sounded about right.
With that thought, Harry decided to try and see if he could find his way to Hogwarts. Or maybe Hogsmeade. Or if he could find a centaur or something, that would work, too. He was getting nowhere, sitting there, doing nothing, he needed to get going. With that decided, he concentrated on his human body long enough to crawl his way up to his dragon body's neck, where he sat, shivering with cold and pain but somewhat secure. Then, concentrating onto his dragon body, he carefully stood up. Flying would've been wicked, but he didn't dare to try it, not with his own body being too weak to hold on, not without getting some safe practice first.
He probably never would, if he found Hogwarts, though. Everything would be sorted out and he'd be human and only human once more.
Maybe, anyway. He'd cross that bridge when he came to it.
He walked for hours and hours, thanking every step of the way that his draconic eyesight was so much better than the human one, and he could still see fairly well in the faint light – especially when the clouds broke open enough to reveal the stars beyond. That was about all he had to be thankful for, though. His draconic body was big and clumsy even after he figured the trick of holding his tail a little up to balance his head and keep it from dragging in the foliage – he kept walking into trees, making a couple of them nearly fall, and getting branch splinters all over his hide.
In the end, though, he had to give up. His human body got tired fast and could barely stay awake until it became too much – he got too scared that his human body would just fall asleep and then fall off and damage itself. So he stopped, settled down so that he could get some rest, and time to think.
He was getting worried, though. He had been walking what felt like all night, and he hadn't seen any sign of anything familiar. No centaurs, no unicorns, no gigantic spiders, nothing. Not even any tracks in the forest. And the forest itself, once he got used to the new perspective of a dragon, seemed wrong - too small, too young, too wild. The Forbidden Forest was ancient, lofty, and dark, the trees so tall that they shed shadows on everything below them. In the Forbidden Forest, there was no undergrowth because the light barely got through the treetops. Here it was nothing like that, and even the oldest trees seemed young in comparison to what he had learned to expect from the forests around Hogwarts.
He was also hopelessly lost and suspected that he had been walking around in circles. That itself wasn't too bad – at least it had given him the chance to get used to walking around as a dragon. There was still a chance he could find out more other ways. For one, he could try flying – it shouldn't be that hard. All he needed to do was leave the human body on the ground, that way there was no danger of him falling. Then there were the mountains around him – he could climb them, and get a better look from the top. As a dragon, it didn't seem such a long way to climb too. And finally, there was the BlackLake. If he could find that, he could find Hogwarts.
But for now he needed rest. Not his dragon body, that one could've kept on, but his human body was still not well and probably wouldn't be for a while. It was a strange feeling, to be held back by himself like that, though no less strange than it was to be stronger than himself all the while. The whole thing was just bizarre, and what his own confusion had made easy to accept was now becoming just too strange, and all the more strange with each moment he spent considering it.
But that was starting to be a lesser concern, as was the fact that he did not know the forest where he was lost. The biggest concern was that no one had come for him. There he was, walking around as a great big beast, and he had yet to see anyone. Not to mention about the tournament – he had been fighting with a dragon in front of an audience of hundreds, and yet, after he and the dragon had run off, no one had come to find him, not even the staff? It was worrying.
Especially so, since he was starting to have a small, nagging suspicion about why that was – and he didn't much like it. The forest was different, and everything felt odd – like something he was used to being there wasn't. It was like some flavour of air or sensation of gravity was gone – and the more he thought about it, the more he feared that that something was simply magic. He had never felt magic, not as a constant presence, but he could feel its absence. Of course, it could be that his own magic was drained – his mother had said, after all. Or it could be that being split between two bodies had just messed up whatever sixth sense he had… but he couldn't encourage himself by telling himself that that was it. No. He couldn't feel the echoing feel, unspeakable and indefinable but usually so present, anywhere – not the ground, not the air, not the plants. Nowhere.
Too mentally worn to worry, he sighed, wrapped his wings around both of himself, and laid his head down. He wasn't tired, but he could sleep while his other body recovered. Maybe afterwards things would make more sense.