A/N: Apologies, there are formatting errors because it stripped out my page breaks for some reason. Will fix soon.
Chapter 12
Harry watched the dragon, the 15 meter 20 tonne locomotive of a dragon, descend from its hind legs faster than his firebolt could ever hope to match. The momentum and force behind the move shook the ground as the she-dragon caught herself on her forearms and lowered her head, stopping just over Harry. The instant she stopped moving without crushing him, he thought, "Hey, I might survive this."
The dragon matriarch opened her jaws and spewed forth pure golden light and flames. Harry had been staring directly into her jaws, and his heart gave an obscene lurch for the second time in as many moments. "Nope, I'm gonna die."
The fire covered him from head to toe. He had been burnt before. Some bad experiences as a very young child cooking, along with Dudley's discovery of matches and subsequently lighters had taught him a lot more about the sensation of burning than he had any wish to know. He expected the pain to overwhelm him, to feel his skin blister and be seared away, and he was bothered that he didn't even get the chance close his eyes to meet it. A full second of being covered in the holy fire pouring from the dragon above him was more than enough to tell him that this was an experience he had no parallel for.
The light from the fire seemed to go through his skin and directly into his core. He hadn't relinquished his death grip on his center from the very moment he saw the dragon he was to face until now, and as the light claimed him he noticed it pass through his shields like they weren't there and blanket his core in a magnificent golden holocaust of flame.
His eyes finally closed as he turned all of his attention inward. In the past he had noticed expansion in the size of this part of him that touched magic. It was the window or the door or something that magic entered his being through, and in the past when he poured all of his negative emotions into it, the window grew wider. When he had done battle with the foreign magic during the whole goblet of fire incident, he was being literal when he joked to himself that he should thank the Slytherins for delivering him from the force. Their constant jeering and the ridiculous behavior of professor Snape were responsible for almost doubling the size of his connection in the roughly two months he had to deal with them.
This fire though, this divine fire, it burned through him and ripped that connection open a mile wide. Harry felt it as every piece of magic he had activated or made in the world collapsed. He felt it as his center became one massive portal into the primal energy of magic.
Maybe ten seconds had passed in the outside world as Harry had sunk into himself and was overwhelmed by the boon this amazing creature above him had given him. In that time that audience had begun shouting and calling for the dragon caretakers (when they got drunk and thought themselves fancy they referred to each other as dragonologists ) to stop the beast. Every one of them though, was consumed by the sight before them. Only the oldest among them had ever seen the Flame of Life, as they called it.
It was a gift that could only be given by a very powerful and old dragon and then only by its own free will, usually to those that had rendered a great service to a dragon. It hadn't escaped any of them that Harry had silenced the area around the enclosure before apparently talking to the massive she-dragon. They all knew that this dragon was the dominant matriarch over all of the preserve they had in Romania. They knew that the only reason she had come was because she chose to, though they had no true idea of the real intelligence of their charges, they had each found some strong suspicions.
As the Flame of Life let up, Harry felt his connection to magic close considerably. Without the flame to sustain the growth, his connection shrank from filling the entirety of his center to being only a five or six fold increase over how large it had been ten minutes previously. The effect of the portal to raw magical energy opening in him so wide and for so long was not so quick to disappear, however.
Harry stood almost half a foot taller, and had put on more than a stone's worth of muscle. The magical potential that had coursed through him in the ten seconds he had been covered by the dragon-born fire had reversed the effects of more than a decade of starvation, malnutrition, and abuse. The work he had done at the Dursleys and here at Hogwarts would have made him one of the strongest and most muscled kids in his year, had the food at Hogwarts done anything but keep his body from self-destructing for want of nutrients. The fire had burned the impurities from his body and soul, making it so, though it would take some time before Harry would notice the soul part.
Harry faced the brood mother in front of him, the further gasps and shouts from the crowd now surrounding the pair. For some reason, he could barely make her out despite her being bigger than the proverbial barn. Harry took off his glasses only to find he could see everything with a clarity like he had never before known. He bowed deeply from the waist, she inclined her head generously, and Harry walked from the field, dropping his glasses to the ground behind him. If he knew Madam Pomfrey, and he felt he would have through raw volume of exposure even if they had they never even spoken a word to each other during his time in the hospital wing, she would be dying to perform a few dozen scans on him to be sure he was okay.
Behind him, a score of dragon handlers took the field to gently guide the horntail away. They needed to get her out of sight of the crowd. Wizards may live under a constantly suspended state of disbelief due to the persistent explanation of 'Magic', but the crowd wouldn't likely stay on the sidelines long if anyone began shouting that the dragon had hurt the boy-who-lived somehow.
After Poppy had run a solid half dozen scans on him (he only remembered after number five to resurrect his shield layers, so most of her scans actually returned results) he was let go from the medical tent for his scores. While she sat at a table shaking her head in confusion (Harry Potter, the only man on earth to get hit by dragon fire and be better than he was before, she thought), he was replacing his still smoking and crumbling robe. Ron and Hermione barged in to the medical tent.
"Harry, mate, bloody hell, I hardly recognize you! I wanted to say that I... I reckon that whoever put your name into that cup was trying to do you in!"
Hermione couldn't even say anything. She was white as a sheet, and her only response was to walk to Harry and give him a crushing hug.
Harry awkwardly stood still until she finally separated from him, his lack of response to her and Ron's statement hanging heavily in the air between the formerly inseparable trio. Harry finished throwing on new robes before turning to the other two. He almost made it past the pair before Hermione made a pained noise deep in her throat. Harry turned.
"What? Oh! I'm sorry, did you expect me to see you two come back to me and for me to just blindly forgive you both because you finally saw that I could die here? Ron, since I've known you, you've never once been able to look past my inheritance or my stupid ruddy fame to see that I would move heaven and earth to have a family and a life like you do. You're rude, you eat with less manners than the dragon I just faced, and you betrayed me utterly in Gryffindor tower.
And you, what excuse do you have, Hermione? I've tried to be there for you every day since that damned Halloween with the troll, I spent as much time as I could possibly spare with you in the hospital wing during second year, and you throw me away why? Because I started beating you in class? Bugger off, the pair of you. You deserve each other."
Harry left the tent, disgusted with them and himself. He had years of experience with those two. Ron and his brothers (mostly the brothers, he now suspected) had rescued him from literal starvation before second year. Ron and Hermione both had come with him to get the stone and Ron had come with him to the chamber. He still remembered the hours he had spent at Hermione's side when she was petrified. He paid more attention than he had ever before on his notes at the time, and read them to her unmoving forming in that antiseptic smelling room he hated.
He had so much emotion invested in that stupid, absolutely rubbish pair of people. And then they both get jealous of him, one he was sure for entering the tournament and spending time with other people, and the other for paying attention in school and finally living up to his potential. They were the first real friends he had ever made, Hagrid and Hedwig notwithstanding, and this is how it ends. It hurt.
He moved the curtain obscuring the outside world from the tent, and walked out to the adoring faces of his brothers, the amused face of his god-brother, and the incredibly worried face of the first girl to mean something to him as a girl and not just as a friend. His sadness almost disappeared.
The fallout from the events of the First Task was interesting, to say the least, Harry thought a few days later as he idly lay in bed beneath the workbench in his lab. He had decided to have himself a bit of a lie-in and categorize the events of the last few days.
First and foremost, the changes to himself. He still wasn't sure what exactly the fire had been. He was taller, he was stronger, he had eyes like an eagle, and as an accident that had almost incinerated Ollivander's notebook had proven (damn Freyr, always knocking over his potions!), he wasn't affected by flame anymore.
He had tracked down Charlie like the dragon had requested, and even for the somewhat surly man he had been unusually tight lipped about what happened. Charlie led him to a small group of the dragon handlers, and after they had erected a truly impressive number of privacy wards, they answered a few questions.
Their answers had, in a typically wizarding fashion, only led to more questions though.
They told him a little of the dragon they called Sigyn, the Horntail he had faced. She was an ancient dragon, born to the wilds that would later become the Romanian dragon preserve around the time that the Germanic wizard Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, and the city itself fell.
She became the dominant brood mother of the preserve around two hundred fifty years ago when she killed the previous matriarch in a battle that lasted for near on a week and burned down most of the preserve's buildings (and consequently records). Since then, by all accounts, she had ruled over the preserve and all of the dragons moved there with and iron claw, killing many who stood up to her, but otherwise running a very orderly and peaceful flight of dragons.
They had asked him what she had said to him. Harry wasn't sure how to respond to that. He didn't like advertising the whole parselmouth thing. He may not really care what other people said, but the whole heir of Slytherin thing still hurt when it happened. They overrode his protests. It seemed that they didn't care about the 'evil' ability to talk to snakes if it let them get a little closer to their charges.
"She called me a nestling, and it kinda felt like she was calling me her nestling. It seemed like she was interested in the tournament. She seemed surprised when I told her I didn't want to be in it. Ummm... She negotiated me up to another cow, and she said that I was speaking the low language of the snakes. She said it was dirty, and beneath a dragon to speak, but she seemed kinda interested in me. At the end there, she demanded that I speak to her," Harry shot an apologetic look at Charlie, "Orange furred two-legs, and that I get permission from you all to visit in a couple years. Before that whole fire-thing she said she was going to give me a boon to help me weather the next few years to come back to her."
Harry didn't know what to make of it. Most of the dragon handlers crowded around each other and began whispering, Charlie walked over to him and said with a smile, "Did she really call me her orange furred two legs?"
"Yeah, mate. It was oddly possessive too. The snake language has a lot of shades of meaning, it's hard to describe, but yeah."
Charlie let out a few deep belly chuckles at that, "Thanks for talking to us. I'm sorry if this is strange, Harry, but we always knew they were smart. A lot of us could see their intelligence, it's in the eyes, you know? And there was no way in the nine hells we could have gotten them to come here if they didn't want to come, things like that."
Harry gave a nod. Beasts (beings? beasts didn't feel right any more) the size of Sigyn wouldn't be moved if they didn't want to. And there was a definite reason that dragon hide was valued as armor. You couldn't pierce some species hides with a killing curse if you hit them in the wrong place, the Ukrainian Ironbelly being only the easiest example. While they had been talking the others seemed to reach some sort of conclusion, they called Charlie over for a moment.
Charlie conferred with them and walked back over to Harry, "Alright mate, here it is. We don't know much more than you do about what happened to you. Truth be told, everyone it has happened to in the past has refused to talk about it, but we know it is usually a reward. If you don't mind, we would love to have you come visit us when you get out of Hogwarts. If she wanted to see you in a few years, we're guessing that's what she meant."
It made sense to Harry. He didn't really feel like telling them what the fire had done either. He wasn't the brightest, but he knew if word got out people from all over would be coming to the preserves and harassing dragons, and it wouldn't end well for anyone. He also knew that until he was an adult and out of school no one would let him go to Romania, especially not after the task.
"Also, unless you have a good reason, we would really appreciate it if you didn't let out that dragons are intelligent. The ministries may fund us, but we think a lot would change if they knew," Harry gave a nod of assent, "Okay then. Thank you for sharing all this with us, and we look forward to your visit. The guys here really want me to urge you to consider being a dragon handler. "
They pulled down their privacy wards, and Charlie took Harry aside one final time before heading back out to his scaled responsibilities, "Hey, I don't mean to pry, but I never heard back from you, did you get my message about the dragons?"
When Harry asked what message, Charlie had a few rather uncharitable things to say about his brother, then, "I gave Ron and Hermione a message to get to you. I was forbidden to contact any champion, but after seeing the pair at the Burrow this summer I figured if I let slip to them what was going to happen, you might have a fighting chance."
Because Harry really needed another reason to be angry at his former friends.
The second piece of fallout from the task came in the form of a truly ancient looking witch waiting for him with McGonagall before his next extra lesson with her.
Before the tournament they had all decided to keep his lessons somewhat secret. They weren't really hiding anything, after all, what students and professor did in their free time was up to them, but they did go out of their ways to do nothing that would bring attention to their activities. The reason Minerva had found out that Harry could handle extra lessons in the first place had been his efforts to avoid jealousy.
In their efforts towards avoidance, they often met in Minerva's private quarters. This day when Harry knocked on her door and entered after her call to do so, he was confronted by the sight of one of his two favorite teachers having tea with a witch that made the headmaster appear to be a sprightly young man.
"Harry! This is Griselda Marchbanks, she is the governor of the Wizarding Examination Authority, that is the board responsible for making the OWL and NEWT examinations, as well as certifying Masteries and formal apprenticeships."
Harry thought that the woman seemed like a no nonsense type. He moved to sit in a chair opposite the two witches, and firmly shook her hand (he laughed a bit to himself that before the episode with the dragon's fire, for him firmly had a much lower definition).
The aged witch addressed him, "Mr. Potter, I attended the first task of this triwizard tournament. The last one held, as I recall, was something like seventy years before my own birth. I had hoped to see some interesting magic, among the last few generations I have seen some interesting applications of some of the spells of my youth. Your own headmaster, as I recall, during his own NEWT exams did some things with the regular set of transfiguration spells that I have never before seen! That's all beside the point however, your performance during the task I found to be of especial interest. I haven't seen such magnificent conjuration in some time, and your use of a power circle to focus your work into permanence!"
Harry's face colored slightly and he couldn't meet their eyes, "Well, I saw the dragon, and I was just terrified. I mean I'm fourteen. I'm a kid, and that was a dragon, a full grown mother dragon with a clutch of eggs! All I could think to do was appear to not be a threat. I thought if I offered the best food I could, the dragon might just let me be."
Minerva and Madam Marchbanks both nodded.
"Mr. Potter, I couldn't help but notice though, your cows weren't afraid to be in the presence of the dragon, did you get them there through a compulsion?"
Harry still couldn't meet their eyes, but he puffed up a bit at that, "I've had a little experience before with animals around predators (the week he had spent at his 'aunt' Marge's farm would be forever etched into his memory), so in my circle I specified that the cows not have any sense of smell and be a bit deaf so they wouldn't be spooked, and I also made their eyesight very bad. If they were blind they'd likely stampede or something, but if they could make out the ground in front of them they would be calmer."
Madam Marchbanks nearly lost her tea cup from unfeeling hands. Her surprise couldn't be more evident, but since Harry refused to meet any of their eyes, he marched on, "I also have a lot of experience cooking, so I'm pretty familiar with beef. I was mostly done with the circle at about five minutes in, so I decided to get a little fancier and I specified that the bones of the cows be laced with a hint of lemon pepper. I couldn't exactly get feedback from the dragon, but if I know my steak in the slightest, they should have been pretty well seasoned for it."
Harry finally dared a look up at her, only to get a full view of a witch who predated Dumbledore drop a teacup. Her mouth had fallen open, and her wire rimmed half glasses that had been perched on her nose fell from her face, to be caught by the silver chain that secured them around her neck.
She recovered after a moment, Minerva's muttered repairo! and another moment saw her hand filed once again by a cup of tea. Minerva managed to look insufferably pleased with herself through the whole ordeal.
"Mr. Potter, I had come here today to satisfy some personal curiosity about what you had done and to catch up with my dear friend Minnie (Harry looked to Minerva who appeared only a little embarrassed), but instead, I would like to offer you something. If you would be willing to repeat your feat from the task, I will grant you here and today your certification as a Master of Transfiguration."
Harry took his turn as the one to drop his jaw. He had the fortune to not break a cup by virtue of not having one, but with another insufferably pleased look, Minerva place a cup in his hands.
It took most of the day, but Harry agreed to do it, and the group found a place near Hagrid's house where he could conjure them another animal. The half-giant was drafted into joining them so that they could have an official expert presence look at the animal.
It was decided for the test that Harry should attempt a new animal, and from his cabin's confines, Hagrid appeared with a baby niffler. Harry looked the animal over so get himself familiar with it, despite its squirming and constant attempts at Harry's wristwatch.
It was a very cute creature, he decided, and it reminded him of a badger. It had short but thick black fur, and wide spade like hands that seemed ideal for digging. It had an elongated snout and very keen brown eyes that seemed to be bright and alive with what harry could only call mirth. This, Harry thought, was a very happy, very cuddly creature. He thought he might like one as a pet, if only it didn't try constantly to gnaw off his hand so it could get to his shiny watch.
After a time, Harry handed the baby back to Hagrid, who in turn gave it back to an anxiously waiting niffler on the ground next to his cabin. Harry walked to an open area in the half-giant's pumpkin patch, and again transfigured a wide area into a smooth blackboard. He conjured himself another piece of chalk and went to work under the critical eyes of his friend and the two witches.
Harry made a series of five concentric circles for this summoning. He thought he would need the stability of five on this one because he had a lot of changes to make and he couldn't bear to summon a living thing with a defect because he hadn't been cautious. He began covering the inner-most circle with runes. Harry didn't know much of runes still, he hadn't had time to study them, despite their usefulness. The runes he used were very general, mind, body, heart, and bone were most of what he scribbled. In truth he likely could have simply doodled and it would have been enough. Magic was about intent, and these runes just crystallized his intent surrounding a specific aspect of the conjuration. Their form didn't matter, they were just snapshots of what he wanted to do.
Harry decided to strengthen the skin, bones, and muscles of his niffler. He had some basic knowledge of the critters, and knew that they were rather hearty as it was, but Harry's creation would be near indestructible. His changes would make the baby creature weigh almost a stone with its increased muscle and bone density. Harry strengthened its internal organs as well, it was an underground animal after-all, and it wouldn't do to have it succumb to just any old snake bite. His physical changes took the inner three circles.
As he moved out to the fourth circle, he had a few changes he wanted to make to the mind of the niffler. His intent was to have it be as smart as or smarter than Hedwig. He wanted it to be smart enough to be able to enjoy its life and understand it happiness, but without another niffler of equal intelligence he didn't want to burden it with self-awareness. The final change he made was a modification to the desire to find and eat shiny things, he lessened the compulsion from mind-consuming to fun-pastime. Harry thought he might like this one as a pet, if it would have him.
He finished his circle and walked to the outside. The appearance he imagined was an incredibly dark blue, so dark that in most light it would look black. He also gave it a tiny white lightning bolt on its right front paw. He reached into himself for the emerald magic of transformation, it was the magic that encircled his core, and he thought that it was the reason transfiguration came so easily to him. Harry channeled it up from his center to his shoulders, then down through his arms to his hands. When they glowed from the inside with the same emerald hue he saw at his center, he placed them at the edge of the circle (having forgone his wand for everything but the initial transfiguration of the ground) and pushed his will and his power into the designs he had drawn.
The process he was using here was orders of magnitude less rushed than what he had done before the she-dragon. This time he brought his magic slowly through each circle, paying attention as each level of intent flooded his awareness, brought in by the chalk inscribed runes he had drawn. Harry closed his eyes for this final step, but the other three had not. They watched as the glow from his hands raced like wildfire across the chalk lines for the fifth circle, then slowly it made contact with each of the others, the power bleeding in and concentrating as it crawled down through the levels of the concentric circles Harry had drawn.
When Harry's magic reached its most intense concentration at the center of the circle, the observers could feel the air heavy with magic and possibility. Minerva hadn't felt magic this strong since her research work with Albus decades before. Hagrid had never known magic of this strength, the magic of his mother's people, the giants, the jötunn, in all of its waste and brutality wasn't even this strong. Madam Marchbanks lost her glasses once again as she stared at the boy in front of her.
With a much smaller pop than before, in the center of the circle there was a baby niffler. It matched the mental image Harry had constructed of it, from its beautiful black-blue hair to the small white lightning bolt on its paw. It opened its eyes somewhat lazily, and gave an extremely wide yawn as its elongated snout opened to reveal its many wide molars. It stood and shook itself a bit, then identified Harry, and scrambled over in joy and jumped into his arms.
Harry grunted like he'd been hit with a furry bludger, which in many ways he had been, and was knocked back onto his butt as he cradled the cooing animal in his arms. Harry gave it a tickle which is responded to with a surprisingly high toned giggle. Nifflers were sopranos, who knew?
Hagrid managed to separate Harry from his new pet only with great difficulty. It definitely did not want to be moved from the arms of its adopted mother. When the gentle giant declared the young wee beastie more fit than any fiddle had any right to be, Harry described the changes he had made.
Madam Marchbanks conjured a certificate from the air, immediately signing in her capacity as governor of the Wizarding Examinations Authority. Minerva and Hagrid both countersigned it as expert witnesses, and Harry was handed his first Mastery on the spot. Of course he had to juggle the paper with the squirming bundle of joy in his arms. The niffler who he decided to name Freyr eventually decided he like riding on Harry's head, and flattened out there allowing Harry full use of his arms.
How do I get myself into these things, Harry silently bemoaned, as the laughing witches left him to the tender mercies of a group of confused mother nifflers that had come out to see the baby none of them had given birth to.
Fallout number three had followed the task directly, but didn't truly hit until a few days later, and it took the form of an impressively unattractive witch named Rita Skeeter.
Evidently Skeeter had been waiting for him during the weighing of the wands, but lost patience when he couldn't be immediately produced. She had run an article about all of the other champions in the Daily Prophet, and Harry had been pleased to see that he was barely a side note with a tiny picture of him and his quote residing after the detailing of the quidditch battles of Krum, somewhere near page 10. It was like she thought he'd be hurt by the lack of attention, Harry laughed.
With his evident summoning of demonic cattle from the outer darkness, Skeeter's interest was piqued though and she made an attempt to drag him off after the scores were given for the task. Harry had never been more thankful for his brothers then after that conversation.
She began after being not so politely rebuffed from grabbing at him, Neville and the Twins knew of her it seemed, "Harry! Dear! Word for the Daily Prophet!?"
Harry didn't like her from the start. Her desperation to get him alone, her rudeness in doing so, and just the general feeling he got from her all screamed at him to leave and leave now. Even Lady Hogwarts sent him a note of warning regarding the platinum blonde witch.
"I'm overjoyed to still be alive, dragons are surprisingly nice if you give them a chance, and I would love to be left alone, thank you."
With his brothers as escorts he made it away safely, but the newspaper had made up for the lack of interview. Skeeter had a soiled but effective quill, and she proceeded to speculate on his surliness, his going dark, his choice of companions, and oddly enough, his new 'hunk-y' (Harry shuddered at the thought of Skeeter checking him out) appearance. He never put stock of any kind in the paper, but Malfoy had thought it funny to quote it at him at every chance. The articles were vague and ignored by all but the most crazy, more annoying than anything else.
Harry began debating the virtues of going dark in truth and whether anyone would really notice if Malfoy and Snape just went missing one day. Her articles were truly inflammatory. Harry was honestly a little nervous about what kind of damage she could manage if she had actual information. It had only been a few days, but already his little Freyr had help him find a number of unpleasant things in the mail sent to both him and Luna.
The final piece of fallout came from the other three champions. When he yelled at the three of them for having cheated in a competition against a kid three years their junior, they evidently took his anger to heart.
Harry had been cornered with Freyr between classes in the library. Viktor, Cedric and Fleur all took places next to him at a table where he had spread out several reagent reaction tables. He had been trying to get work started on. He was working on balancing the influences of re'em blood, his own blood, the raw transformation magic of metamorphmagus hair, bowtruckle silk, and finally a little blood from Hagrid.
The re'em blood would increase the strength of any magic passed through the focus, but it was incredibly difficult to get a hold of. That one ingredient was what he was burning his entire tournament budget on. His blood would bind the focus to himself, and Hagrid's blood would significantly boost his power using charms based magic. By its very nature, the magic of the jötunn was charms magic. They put massive power behind single intents, smash, burn, grow, things like that, if he could get Hagrid to willingly donate just a little, it would be of enormous help. Metamorphmagi were beings of pure transformation energy. They could only be injured with great difficulty, because even most mortal wounds could be taken care of entirely through transforming themselves. The hair of a witch or wizard with the ability was the most easily changed feature on their bodies, therefore the most packed with their transformation energy. Willingly given, it would increase even his ability with transfiguration. The bowtruckle silk was very magically powerful, it fairly resonated out loud when Harry touched it, and it would give Harry's channeled magic a strong tie into natural magic.
Harry had most of the restricted section's potions references in front of him while he idly tickled Freyr in his lap as the three other champions took chairs at his table. Each of them had their golden eggs with them, Harry was refused one by virtue of not even attempting to get it. He felt it was fair and simply didn't care.
Harry didn't even look up from the parchment he was working on, and there was a moment of awkward silence before Cedric spoke up, "Harry, we... umm... we've been talking a bit, and we realized how unfair it is for you, especially with us having the bit of foreknowledge."
He couldn't know it, but this only increased Harry's ire. In his conversations with Charlie and later Hagrid (he had taken to going to care of magical creatures for advice on his new niffler friend) he found that both of them had tried to warn him, but both had tried to go through Ron with the information because they couldn't give it to him directly. He could have been warned.
Krum took up the thread of the conversation, "Ve vanted to give you hint for next task. You haff no egg, vud only be fair."
Beside him, Fleur was nodding her head emphatically. Harry felt a ghost of the veela influence slide around his shields. He finally looked up at that.
"No."
Harry looked back down his work, he was getting near unity between most of the ingredients, and it was the bowtruckle silk that was getting him. But maybe under the additional influence of those phoenix tears Fawkes had given him...
Fleur was the first to get over the mild shock of being refused, Cedric looked shocked still and Krum had grunted with a look of respect on his face, "What do you mean, no?"
Harry didn't bother to look up again, "You all want to make yourselves feel less guilty for cheating in this ridiculous international competition, so now you're offering to help me cheat? Listen, I may be fourteen, but I have self-respect guys. I'll start whatever the next task is with less info than you all, but that's par for course now isn't it. You want to help me? Do something dumb to keep Skeeter off my back, otherwise, please leave me alone."
Cedric just stood and left. Harry could only guess it was because of shame. The boy was a Hufflepuff after all. Their thing was loyalty, hard work, and fair play, Harry would be willing to bet that good old Diggory was having trouble looking himself in the mirror. Krum sensed that the outing was coming to a close, and gave Harry another grunt of respect and slap on the back. Viktor was an international quidditch hero, it took a lot to impress him and even more to earn his respect, this newly muscled fourteen year old had done both. He left in peace for his boat.
Fleur was less than amused. Here was some little boy showing her up, then trying to take some kind of high ground when she deigned to try to help him? Fleur Delacour was not familiar with being refused, and if the three of them couldn't get this boy to accept their help, she would just have to do it alone now, wouldn't she?
Fleur gave her surroundings a quick look, it seemed Harry had intentionally picked a table that was isolated from the rest, she couldn't know that the boy was kicking himself for not using the one he had warded. She focused back onto the boy-who-lived (despite Voldy being a British problem, he had been known and watched from across the channel, his apparent slayer as well) and ratcheted her aura up a number of levels.
The boy had the audacity to act like he didn't even notice! She removed all the blocks she had put on her aura, with it this high she had changed the sexual orientation of a number of men in the past, she had once snuck herself and a group of her friends into the Élysée Palace on a lark using her aura to charm the guards into giving them all an impromptu tour. She focused all her attention on the boy, who with a quick "Aha!" seized the book he was looking at and began flipping through the pages towards a section with vigor.
Fleur focused on him more, and more, to the exclusion of all else, and after about fifteen minutes he casually said, "You may as well stop, you know. Your sister veela at the world cup had stronger auras than you, and they were probably about a mile away. They didn't affect me either. Now Cedric deserved his shame, and Viktor deserved his indifference, but you? You may have just gotten Skeeter off of me. 'French veela witch tries to charm boy-who-lived!' I can see the headline now. I'm sure the local purebloods would love a quarter veela trying to charm the last scion of a noble and ancient house. Why don't you run along, hmm? Save us both some trouble."
Fleur's face ran through a number of iterations. Anger, embarrassment, shame, anger again, and finally pure concern for her own wellbeing. She fled, and Freyr climbed Harry like a tree, flattening out on his head.
"But you, you cute little devil, you're the one charming me!" Harry said at the single eye he could see of the creature perched on his head. The niffler gave a content high-pitched sigh and snuggled in for the long haul.
Yes, as Harry lay in his bed enjoying his personal day, the fallout had been interesting. Freyr gave a light snore and cuddled further into his chest. Harry knew it was a foolish thing, but he couldn't help but hope that things might slow down a little.