Protection From Nargles

I - Mistletoe

DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the Harry Potter Film or book products.

December, 1995.

Fifth-year Hogwarts student Harry Potter watched as the Room of Requirement quickly emptied. The last training session of Dumbledore's Army before the Christmas holidays had just ended, and the students wanted to get to the Great Hall of Hogwarts in time for supper.

Harry wasn't really in the mood to eat and socialize, though. It had been a hard year for him so far. The usual harassment by Draco Malfoy and his goons was irritating enough, but had been so much of a constant for the last four years that it largely amounted to background noise in Harry's life unless Malfoy was being exceptionally irritating.

Headmaster Dumbledore's increasing distancing from Harry was more worrying. Harry had always thought that the old wizard was in his corner. Lately he wasn't so sure about that. Whether it was due to a concern for his job due to scrutiny from Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor (and Hogwarts High Inquisitor) Dolores Umbridge, the Ministry of Magic's overseer of the school, or due to a lack of concern for Harry's welfare, the effect was much the same - Dumbeldore was not the presence in Harry's life that he had been in the past. Harry felt he was losing a valuable ally, and a good friend.

As for Umbridge herself, the woman was a sadist. Harry looked at his scarred left hand, where Umbridge's detention methods had caused "I must not tell lies" to be carved into his skin by her magical quill. Repeatedly. She had banned student organizations, was intercepting the owl post, and making school dramatically more unpleasant than it had been on even the worst days. He never thought he would hate a teacher more than he hated Potions Master Severus Snape, or that a teacher would hate him more than Snape did, but Umbridge was proof that things could always get worse.

Umbridge was also instrumental in the campaign of slander and lies against Harry by the Ministry of Magic and the Daily Prophet, it's semi-official mouthpiece. Voldemort had returned! Harry saw it with his own eyes, and saw poor Cedric Diggory murdered to bring it about. But the Ministry was telling everyone that Harry was lying, the Prophet was libelling him, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. With Wizarding Britain's government and newspaper of record telling people Harry was at best deranged, and more likely a foul liar and threat to magical society, public opinion had swung against him. He spent much of the last half-year fending off accusations that he was off his rocker, and it had taken it's toll on him.

There were only three things that had really kept him going through the year. The first was the support, hesitant though it may be at times, of his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Even if they silently thought he was becoming more unbalanced, they still backed him up. They had helped him survive four years of danger and madness at Hogwarts, and he had no doubt they would help him get through this one as well.

The second was Dumbledore's Army. What had started as an attempt to give students some practical Defence Against the Dark Arts training, as opposed to the pollyannaish drivel taught in Umbridge's farce of a class, had slowly changed into something more. It gave Harry a platform from which convinced some students, at least, that Voldemort had returned, and was a real threat to the lives of all of them. It gave Harry some practical leadership training, as he was the acknowledged head of the D.A.. All this served to boost confidence in him by his friends, his schoolmates, and most of all, himself. He could see himself becoming not just the lone boy who had faced Voldemort three times, and miraculously survived them all, but potentially a leader of men and women in the fight against the Dark Lord and his minions. This was an unexpected revelation - to Harry, at least.