Chapter 7.1- Doom Days

“Enough Potter” Mcgonagall hissed harshly, and while that brought some clarity to me it did nothing to stop the laughter. I’d fucked up. I’d completely and utterly fucked up. Now I was going to pay for it. I could see all the hints I’d ignored now that I knew what was coming. I hadn’t found dragons in the forest because there had been none in the first place. When Firenze said the creature of fire was in the forest, I hadn’t asked any other questions- thinking he was talking about Dragons. I never even bothered questioning the use of the singular instead of the plural, foolishly taking it as a quirk of the centaur’s way of speaking. Foolish.

Confirmation bias. It was a textbook example. I had the answers I wanted and so I never bothered truly looking for the truth, only evidence in support of the truth I’d chosen. What a mess. I sobered up as the situation began to sink in. It was funny that I’d gotten things so terribly wrong, but the situation in front of me was nothing funny at all.

“Apologies everyone” I said when I finally managed to stop laughing and realised the entire tent was staring at me.

“I just felt Mr. Bagman’s joke was a really good one” I said, not able to just stop there and feeling the need to offer some explanation to avoid the news breaking on the Daily Prophet that the Boy-Who-Lived was batshit insane.

“Well, Mr. Potter, while Ludovic’s statement was ill-timed, it was not a joke. You, all for o you, will in fact be facing a hellhound today.” The black haired woman spoke, looking at me with pitying eyes. I realised then just how small I must have seemed to all of them. A healthy diet meant I was growing a fair bit but I was still in the body of a fourteen year old and Potter genes weren’t disposed for bulk by any means. I’d definitely have to fix that sooner or later. The entire room seemed to tower over me.

“Noted” I said simply, not allowing any of my apprehension show on my face. This could either be very good or very bad. A hellhound wasn’t as specific a term as one would think. There were many creatures that technically counted as hellhounds. The Cerberus that had kept the philosopher’s stone safe was one of those. So were a dozen other creatures. But very few of them had weaknesses that were as easily exploitable as Fluffy’s. There was even one of them, according to my monster hunting, that had no weaknesses at all. It was ridiculously rare so I had little expectations of it showing up here.

“Okay. Mr. Bagman might have jumped the gun a bit so let’s pretend we didn’t all just hear that as we go through the presentation as initially planned, ey? Mr. Crouch, if you would” She spoke again, gesturing to Crouch to take her position at the centre of the circle of bodies we’d formed.

A/N; Yes, Harry did just jinx himself. ç