Tom couldn't fathom what the hell was wrong with this dragon. Was it because Jerry hadn't managed to get the upper hand on him lately, so this scaly lizard was stepping up to take the mouse's place? That was ridiculous!
This was the Hogwarts set, not Tom and Jerry! This was Warner Bros, not MGM! Why was his cartoon luck still so terrible over here?!
Squeak—
Perched on his shoulder, the little dragon lowered its head dejectedly, looking genuinely remorseful for what it had just done.
"Hagrid, you absolutely cannot keep it here!" Hermione, having witnessed the whole ordeal, finally spoke up. "It's far too dangerous. If anyone other than Tom had taken that hit, do you honestly think we'd still be alive right now?"
"But—" Hagrid bit his lip, tears blurring his vision. "I know I can't keep him forever, but... he's just a baby right now!"
"A baby that could kill us at any given second?" Hermione looked dead serious. Sure, the hatching had been... magical. But seeing Tom reduced to literal ashes had abruptly snapped her back to the harsh reality of how lethal dragons were. "And Draco! If you knew it was this dangerous, why didn't you warn us earlier?!"
"Why didn't I warn you?" Draco froze.
While he had been getting along decently with Harry's group lately (Weasley excluded), that didn't mean he had abandoned his pureblood pride. A Muggle-born witch daring to interrogate him like that? Draco instantly felt deeply offended.
He sneered. "Hmph. Yeah, I deliberately didn't tell you. Got a problem with that? I wanted the dragon to burn you all to a crisp! Happy now?!"
"You—!" Hermione was furious and about to retort, but Ron cut her off.
"Drop it, Hermione. Draco probably didn't know Norbert would be this dangerous either. I doubt even Charlie has ever heard of a dragon acting like this."
Despite his disdain for Malfoy, Ron had to admit Draco wasn't at fault here. Forget Draco—nobody could have predicted a newborn dragon would be this... chaotic!
"Exactly. Even magical creatures are incredibly fragile right after birth," Ariana chimed in. "Take a phoenix, for example. Right after a burning day, a newborn baby phoenix looks no different from a plucked, helpless turkey. Hermione, I know you're worried, but Draco truly didn't do anything wrong here. You shouldn't speak to him in that tone."
Looking at the solemn faces of her friends, and then at a visibly fuming Draco, Hermione opened and closed her mouth. Finally, she lowered her proud head. "I'm sorry... I just didn't know..."
"Hmph. Whatever. I won't lower myself to argue with a mere Muggle-born," Draco scoffed, waving a hand magnanimously. "But you are right about one thing. This little beast is dangerous. If it's this aggressively destructive right out of the shell, I dread to think what it'll be like later—"
Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!
Roughly understanding that the humans were trying to separate it from its "Mama," Norbert frantically chirped, desperately trying to prove it was harmless. But unlike Tom, Harry and the others didn't speak Dragon.
[It says it totally agrees with leaving. Hagrid's place is way too cramped and freezing anyway.] Even though Tom perfectly understood what it was actually saying, he had zero intention of letting this "lethal hazard" stick around. It had been hatched for barely five minutes and he had already been immolated three times! If it stayed longer, dying a dozen times a day would become his new normal.
Sure, he could respawn, and it didn't really hurt, but who the hell wanted to die on repeat? And death wasn't even the end of the annoyance.
Squeak!
It's often said that people are capable of anything when pushed to their absolute limits (except math). Little Norbert was currently pushed to its absolute limit.
Realizing "Mama" was trying to throw it away, the baby dragon panicked. It squeaked twice, opened its jaws, and blasted a concentrated gout of fire into the air.
Then, under everyone's alarmed and utterly baffled gazes, the flames shifted and morphed in mid-air, spelling out a glowing, fiery sentence:
[Mama, don't make me leave! I won't hurt any of you! (>—<)]
"?"
Everyone stared at the flaming text hovering in the air, exchanging stunned glances.
Tom wasn't too surprised. In the Tom and Jerry universe, even a duckling he literally cracked out of a frying pan could speak perfect English. A dragon doing it was par for the course. While the dragons in this world were essentially just oversized magical beasts, this specific dragon had been incubated by him. It was bound to be a little... special.
Seeing their shocked expressions, Norbert seemingly thought they still didn't believe it, so it decided to kick things up a notch.
Under the baby dragon's control, the fiery text in the air broke apart. The individual letters morphed into tiny, glowing stick-figures made of fire. They began tap-dancing in mid-air, slowly floating down until they landed perfectly on Hagrid's wooden table.
The most absurd part? Even though they were literally just clumps of fire, they opened their "mouths" and started singing!
Yes, singing and tap-dancing across the table. Forget the young wizards; even Tom was dumbfounded.
Wait, how is this fair?! I, the legendary Tom, still can't talk properly—aside from that brief chat with the stupid mouse inside the mirror—and yet a bunch of literal, non-sentient fireballs can sing?! This world is completely rigged!
Tom didn't pay too much attention to the actual lyrics. The general gist was: Yes, we are fire, but we promise not to burn anything important, and even if we do catch something on fire, we can control the spread! In short: incredibly cartoonish, zero percent magical. The witches and wizards in the room were completely spellbound, their brains short-circuiting.
"Well, since Norbert put it like that... maybe we could give him a chance?"
Harry stared at the dancing flames on the table, a sudden, brilliant idea forming in his head. If these sentient flames could be kept as pets, could he take a cluster back home with him?! Next summer, the second the Dursleys even thought about bullying him, he could just deploy the fireballs to do a little tap-dance on their heads!
"Well..." Hermione was equally paralyzed. Her highly logical brain had completely crashed. She had read plenty about magical beasts, but elemental lifeforms? Those flat-out didn't exist in this world! Yet, here these fireballs were...
"Whoa, that's amazing!" Ariana's eyes sparkled.
She had seen her brother's pet, Fawkes, plenty of times. But even a majestic phoenix didn't do cool stuff like this outside of its burning days!
In that instant, she completely forgot her earlier stance on sending Norbert away. She even forgot that her family's trademark pet was traditionally a phoenix. Her mind was utterly consumed by a single thought: That is so cool. I want one!