The Lost One: Harry Potter x Fem!reader

12

Harry was so relieved she was taking him seriously that he did not hesitate, but jumped out of bed at once, pulled on his dressing gown and pushed his glasses back on to his nose.

‘Weasley, you ought to come too,’ said Professor McGonagall. They followed Professor McGonagall past the silent figures of Neville, Dean and Seamus, out of the dormitory, down the spiral stairs into the common room, through the portrait hole and off along the Fat Lady’s moonlit corridor.

Harry felt as though the panic inside him might spill over at any moment; he wanted to run, to yell for Dumbledore; Mr Weasley was bleeding as they walked along so sedately, and what if those fangs (Harry tried hard not to think ‘my fangs’) had been poisonous? They passed Mrs Norris, who turned her lamplike eyes upon them and hissed faintly, but Professor McGonagall said, ‘Shoo!’

Mrs Norris slunk away into the
shadows, and in a few minutes they had reached the stone gargoyle
guarding the entrance to Dumbledore’s office.

‘Fizzing Whizzbee,’ said Professor McGonagall.

The gargoyle sprang to life and leapt aside; the wall behind it split in two to reveal a stone staircase that was moving continually upwards like a spiral escalator. The three of them stepped on to the moving stairs; the wall closed behind them with a thud and they were moving upwards in tight circles until they reached the highly polished oak door with the brass knocker shaped like a griffin.

Though it was now well past midnight there were voices coming from inside the room, a positive babble of them. It sounded as though Dumbledore was entertaining at least a dozen people.

Professor McGonagall rapped three times with the griffin knocker and the
voices ceased abruptly as though someone had switched them all off. The door opened of its own accord and Professor McGonagall led Harry and Roninside.

The room was in half-darkness; the strange silver instruments standing on tables were silent and still rather than whirring and emitting puffs of smoke as they usually did; the portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses covering the walls were all snoozing in their frames. Behind the door, a magnificent red and gold bird the size of a swan dozed on its perch with its head under its wing.

‘Oh, it’s you, Professor McGonagall … and … ah.’

Dumbledore was sitting in a high-backed chair behind his desk; he
leaned forward into the pool of candlelight illuminating the papers laid out before him.

He was wearing a magnificently embroidered purple and gold
dressing gown over a snowy white nightshirt, but seemed wide-awake, his penetrating light blue eyes fixed intently upon Professor McGonagall.

‘Professor Dumbledore, Potter has had a … well, a nightmare,’ said
Professor McGonagall. ‘He says …’

‘It wasn’t a nightmare,’ said Harry quickly.

Professor McGonagall looked round at Harry, frowning slightly.

‘Very well, then, Potter, you tell the Headmaster about it.’

‘I … well, I was asleep …’ said Harry and, even in his terror and his
desperation to make Dumbledore understand, he felt slightly irritated
that the Headmaster was not looking at him, but examining his own
interlocked fingers. ‘But it wasn’t an ordinary dream … it was real … I saw it happen …’ He took a deep breath, ‘Ron’s dad – Mr Weasley – has been attacked by a giant snake.’

The words seemed to reverberate in the air after he had said them,
sounding slightly ridiculous, even comic. There was a pause in which
Dumbledore leaned back and stared meditatively at the ceiling. Ron looked from Harry to Dumbledore, white-faced and shocked.