Natsu Dragneel and the Goblet of Fire

Beauxbatons and Durmstrang

Early next morning, Natsu woke with a plan fully formed in his mind, as though his sleeping brain had been working on it all night. He got up, dressed in the pale dawn light, left the dormitory without waking Gray, and went back down to the deserted common room. Here he took a piece of parchment from the table upon which his Divination homework still lay and wrote the following letter:

Dear Weiss,

I reckon I just imagined my scar hurting,

I was half asleep when I wrote to you last time. There's no point coming back, everything's fine here. Don't worry about me, my head feels completely normal.

Natsu

He then climbed out of the portrait hole, up through the silent castle (held up only briefly by Peeves, who tried to overturn a large vase on him halfway along the fourth-floor corridor), finally arriving at the Owlery, which was situated at the top of West Tower.

The Owlery was a circular stone room, rather cold and drafty, because none of the windows had glass in them. The floor was entirely covered in straw, owl droppings, and the regurgitated skeletons of mice and voles. Hundreds upon hundreds of owls of every breed imaginable were nestled here on perches that rose right up to the top of the tower, nearly all of them asleep, though here and there a round amber eye glared at Natsu. He spotted Happy nestled between a barn owl and a tawny, and hurried over to him, sliding a little on the dropping-strewn floor.

It took him a while to persuade him to wake up and then to look at him, as he kept shuffling around on his perch, showing him his tail. He was evidently still furious about his lack of gratitude the previous night.

In the end, it was Natsu suggesting he might be too tired, and that perhaps he would ask Gray to borrow Pigwidgeon, that made him stick out his head and allow him to tie the letter to it.

"Just find him, all right?" Natsu said, stroking his back as he carried him on his arm to one of the holes in the wall. "Before the Dementors do."

He licked his finger, perhaps rather harder than he would ordinarily have done, but hooted softly in a reassuring sort of way all the same. Then he spread his wings and took off into the sunrise. Natsu watched him fly out of sight with the familiar feeling of unease back in his stomach. He had been so sure that Weiss' reply would alleviate his worries rather than increasing them.

"That was a lie, Natsu," said Lucy sharply over breakfast, when he told her and Gray what he had done. "You didn't imagine your scar hurting and you know it."

"So what?" said Natsu. "He's not going back to Azkaban because of me."

"Drop it," said Gray sharply to Lucy as she opened her mouth to argue some more, and for once, Lucy heeded him, and fell silent.

Natsu did his best not to worry about Weiss over the next couple of weeks. True, he could not stop himself from looking anxiously around every morning when the post owls arrived, nor, late at night before he went to sleep, prevent himself from seeing horrible visions of Weiss, cornered by Dementors down some dark London street, but between times he tried to keep his mind off his godfather. He wished he still had Quidditch to distract him; nothing worked so well on a troubled mind as a good, hard training session. On the other hand, their lessons were becoming more difficult and demanding than ever before, particularly Bull's Defense Against the Dark Arts.

To their surprise, Professor Bull had announced that he would be putting the Imperius Curse on each of them in turn, to demonstrate its power and to see whether they could resist its effects.

"But - but you said it's illegal, Professor," said Lucy uncertainly as Bull cleared away the desks with a sweep of his wand, leaving a large clear space in the middle of the room. "You said - to use it against another human was -"