The Son of Mystery - Harry Potter Male Insert

Familiar Faces at Christmas

Harry's cries of distress were immediately alerted to Professor McGonagall, who arrived very quickly with an extremely concerned look on her face.

When she had finally managed to get Harry to coherently convey what he had seen, she paled and ordered both Ron and Y/N to follow her to Dumbledore's office.

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.

Y/N's stomach had dropped from the moment he had heard the guttural screams of distress from Harry; He wanted to know how Harry had seen something like this, and if it wasn't a dream... was Mr. Weasley dead?

Mr. Weasley had tried for the last year and a half to mend their relationship, to welcome him into the family as one of their own, clearly against his own wife's wishes. He wanted to run, he wanted to scream at Dumbledore to actually give him more than a brief glance.

They passed Mrs. Norris, who turned her lamp-like 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 en- trance to Dumbledore's office.

"Fizzing Whizbee," 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 continuously upward like a spiral escalator. The four of them stepped onto the moving stairs; the wall closed behind them with a thud, and they were moving upward 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, Y/N, and Ron inside.

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 around at Harry, frowning slightly. "Very well, then, Potter, you tell the headmaster about it."

"I...well, I was asleep..." said Harry, sweat beading on his forehead. Y/N listened intently to every word Harry uttered, but he could see that Harry was becoming ever more irritated that Dumbledore wasn't even looking at him, instead, the headmaster was staring at 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."