Author's Note
As always - thank you for your reviews and thank you for reading, and many thanks to Trowa no Miko for the beta work. Here is chapter ten. I feel like I've been writing this chapter forever.
Harry Potter: The Last Avatar
Book 1: Water
Chapter 10: Phoenix
"So, still not entering?"
"Hm?" Harry was assisting an antlered rabbit with its grooming, brushing its heavy spotted fur coat, and he was generally focused on keeping said rabbit's antlers from poking at his face and mouth as it shifted comfortably in his lap.
"First round's this weekend, isn't it?"
"Oh, right, the Duelling Championship... Yes, it is - and no, I'm not entering."
"Oh right, I forgot. You're scared."
"Terrified," Harry agreed dryly. "Quaking in my boots."
"Even though Malfoy won last year, and you practically beat him..."
He looked up at Parvati, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground across from him and had her attention on a painfully adorable long-eared bunny. They should not have been native this far north, but this one had somehow gotten misplaced here and joined the pack of antlered rabbits that the class was tending to today. The bunny did not seem completely content in her arms - it was whipping its head back and forth, its long floppy ears flying here and there, but she held it tighter still, patiently cleaning its remarkably dirty fur.
Harry had continued to partner up with Parvati Patil during Creatures Class, and he found her to be quite good company when removed from the poisonous element of Lavender Brown. She was witty and as they tended to whatever creatures Hagrid could entice into coming out of the forest and joining them, Harry found himself joking around with her in a way that had previously been reserved only for Hermione. The difference was that he and Hermione had developed their banter over years, and it was based on a deep understanding on one another's thoughts and feeling, while he and Parvati had all the banter with none of the understanding, which meant that occasionally she would make a joke that rubbed him the wrong way. In the same manner Harry quickly learned through her sudden silences that while Parvati might badmouth Lavender all day, it was not Harry's place to join in.
"But, could be interesting," Parvati said. "To watch, I mean. I'm certainly going, anyway."
"Well, I'm certainly also going," Harry countered. The thought of getting an undisturbed view of the elite upperclassmen duelling was enough to put a grin on his face.
"Perhaps we should make a combined effort to take in the new arena then," Parvati said, not looking up from her bunny, which was now trying ineffectually to escape her clutches.
"Isn't Lavender going?" Harry asked, slightly taken aback. No matter how well he and Parvati got along during class he didn't think that they'd held as much as half a conversation outside of Creatures.
"Yes, but she'll be busy cheering for her Won-Won," Harry snickered and stored this nickname away for future use, "and that can get a bit tiring."
"Certainly."
"Well? Should we?"
Harry hesitated for a second, because Hermione was going to "try to get some work done" and so he'd been planning on getting an undistracted view of the duels and to sit and scribble in his notebook. But he could sense Parvati sensing his hesitation and he didn't like that.
"Of course we should!" he said, as though it was obvious.
The new arena was another Unsolved Hogwarts Mystery as far as Harry was concerned. Almost this whole term, to McGonagall's hilariously suppressed irritation, their firebending exercises had been disturbed by the sound of diligent hammer-strokes and shrill drilling and the sounds of other great big machines that Harry did not pretend to understand. No expense had been spared and boats had streaked back and forth across the lake carrying workers and materials and machines, all bearing the Future Industries logo, and just as the Duelling Grounds themselves had been transformed by Moody, the aged wooden stands that surrounded the circles had been transformed into a proper arena.
Who paid for this?
As Harry flowed along with the crowd down from the school and towards the impressive new structure, he could not help but feel slightly depressed. Hogwarts had always been a sanctuary, a comforting, never-changing piece of the past, but now, even though he was surrounded by fellow students and even though they were all wearing their uniforms, he felt as if he was back in Diagon, trying to stop his head from spinning.
"Isn't it grand?" Parvati asked, looking up at the Hogwarts crest, embedded above the wide archway that was now the main entrance to the arena. At least it was the Hogwarts crest, and not the seal of the Republic, but Harry thought gloomily that it might as well have been. Because there were Aurors, in their impressive uniforms, standing at either side of the gate, and what with the newfangled concrete design of the arena it was as if a little piece of Republic City had emigrated to the Hogwarts grounds.
Invaded.
"Yes," Harry agreed. "Grand."
They had no problems finding a good spot in a section of the stands that was not too crowded, despite the fact that the whole school seemed to have showed up to have a look at the finally finished arena. The varied landscape that Moody had crafted looked strange when surrounded by these endless rows of uniform seats...
"Ow."
Parvati had jolted him from his brooding by punching his arm. "Look!" she said, pointing and sounding genuinely excited in a way that was quite rare. "Is that what I think it is?"
Harry pushed his glasses further up his nose and squinted down at a whole bunch of unknown men - not teachers, and far too scruffy and eccentric-looking to be associated with the Aurors - clustered around some sort of large boxlike device standing on a tripod. The men were all talking over one another and moving the box back and forth in tiny increments, angrily pointing at the field and then at each other.
"I have no idea," Harry said. "But it seems terribly important."
"That's a film camera! And look, there's another one!"
There were indeed several of the contraptions standing spaced around the arena, and Harry peered down at them with new interest. They looked a little like regular cameras, but elongated and with round boxes attached - to hold rolls of film?
"Look at that lens!" Parvati said, and as far as Harry could tell she was referring to the long pipe sticking out of the front of one device. "It's almost like a binocular - it must be to help them shoot from a distance!"
"Shoot," Harry repeated dully. He had very little insight into these things except that he'd thought that film cameras would be bigger.
"Did you see 'Two Avatars, Two Dragons'? Did you like it?"
Harry grimaced but kept himself from groaning in the face of her obvious enthusiasm. "Do you even need to ask?" he said, avoiding the actual question. "I thought that everybody liked it."
"Except you!" Parvati gasped - because obviously Harry was not as subtle as he thought - and then added, gleefully: "There's something wrong with you!"
"Okay," Harry said, abandoning his feigned indifference and throwing a leg over the bench to sit facing her, "let me get this straight: you sat through the entirety of that eleven reel monstrosity and didn't walk away from it wanting to throw yourself off a building? How?"
"What's wrong with it?" she called out in affront, but she had mirrored him, and they were facing one another now.
They argued about the film for a good ten minutes, exaggerating with increasingly ridiculous superlatives (and Parvati surprised him by throwing in the occasional crass expletive). They were both trying and failing to hide how much they were enjoying the argument. In the end Parvati crossed her arms, turning back towards the stadium.
"You just don't get it."
That was true enough. By now Harry's mind had flown back to that summer day, when Lily Potter had dragged him out of his dark little refuge of a room and across town to then playfully but firmly inform him that she did not want to see him again until she was finished at the lab, which would be at seven. She'd given him money to buy food and instructed him not to leave the safety of Diagon under any circumstance. The idea had been to get him out of the house, he supposed, and so the decision to spend a large part of his time in a dark theatre hall was probably largely fuelled by teenage spite.
The film had started with Avatar Aang on his deathbed, surrounded by friends and family and managing to give a long incomprehensible speech before finally kicking the bucket. The film had then cut to Avatar Korra, as played by a regal looking middle aged woman with a pinched face, meditating on a frozen mountaintop built out of painted planks of wood. Some man had arrived and given her the news of terrible goings on in Republic City, and to plead with her to come and help. The gentleman delivering the news - Harry could not remember who it was supposed to be - had been given an inordinate amount of screen time and was depicted as some sort of assistant or companion to Korra as they travelled, hidden, to Republic City.
Korra had become incensed as she saw the condition that the Republic was in - with non-benders being rounded up and forced into menial manual labour or enlisted against their will in an army meant to invade the rest of the world. With her assistant's help she had managed to bypass the heavy security around the then 'President' of the Republic, and to stage a private confrontation with Grindelwald, played by a huge hulking man, in the inner sanctum of his palace.
Then the film got weird. It started cutting back and forth between Korra's battle with Grindelwald and Aang's battle with Firelord Ozai. (The younger Aang, who was, according to Harry's memory, supposed to be twelve years old, was played by a short man who was clearly somewhere in his twenties.) The two fights were obviously meant to parallel one another, but since both 'battles' consisted mostly of intellectual rhetoric, interspersed with short bouts of actual fighting, it got boring quickly. Even the fighting itself - for which the film had been praised, since they'd thought up all manner of tricks to make it look as if the actors were bending more than one element - had been as stale and lifeless as the dialogue, in Harry's humble opinion.
So Harry had patiently explained to Parvati how she must be some sort of robot if she didn't find the film entirely too melodramatic and supremely fake. Parvati had in turn explained that Harry's brain must be a little too small to realize that the film was supposed to be larger than life - that of course you were aware that it wasn't realistic but that once you accepted that (if you had the brain capacity to do so) then you would be immersed in a completely wondrous world! Harry had asked what was so wondrous about a story where everybody died at the end, and that was when Parvati proclaimed that he "just didn't get it".
"Look," Harry said, in a last-ditch effort to make his point, "there famously weren't any witnesses to the fight between Korra and Grindelwald, right?"
"So?" Parvati said, arms crossed and smirking out at the field.
"So most of the film was, by definition, made up! Everyone watched that film, and everyone loved it - for some strange reason - so now everyone goes around thinking that's exactly what happened, because they saw it happen. But it isn't true - it's just the product of some writer's tepid imagination!"
"So what?" Parvati said, rolling her eyes at him. "Who cares if it's true if it's a good story?"
Lee Jordan's voice had then exploded out of a nearby speaker to welcome them all to "A Fabulous day of Fighting Fun!", and Parvati had, regrettably, gotten the last word.
Harry sighed. Parvati Patil could say what she liked - as could the film critics of Republic City, who had given 'Two Avatars, Two Dragons' all the awards they had, and invented a few new ones for the sole purpose of giving them to the film - but Harry still preferred his history books, where the lies were, at least, less blatant.
The first years came on first and did their tiny little duels, and Harry noted that they were all doing quite well for first years. True, their attacks did not have much power behind them but their form was generally not terrible and they were certainly taking it very seriously - no one gave up without being incapacitated or pushed from their circle. Moody was obviously drilling them harder and better than Lockhart ever had.
"Were we really ever that small?" Parvati asked, squinting down at the duel currently in progress, where a first year Ravenclaw named Stewart Ackerley was running circles around Gryffindor Jimmy Peakes.
"Yes," Harry said, his attention focused on Ackerley. Peakes tossed flame after flame but the thin Ravenclaw boy deflected all of them with gusts of wind or, more often, sidestepped the attacks smartly.
"Well, maybe you were - you still are, almost - but I don't think I've ever been that small."
Harry suppressed some irritation and made an effort to keep the conversation going. "We were that small, but we weren't in a huge stadium like this, and we weren't fighting on a landscape like that…" He thought back to the simple circles painted on the grass, in which they had done what passed for 'duelling' back then, and was struck by a sudden thought. "Didn't you compete, first year?"
"I did. You beat me, remember?"
"Oh." He didn't. "Right."
Parvati huffed in mock annoyance and Harry's attention shifted from the fight on the field to the girl sitting right next to him, a stray thought drifting through his mind. He watched how she sat on the bench, how she held herself, and he wondered what difference it would have made if she had been an airbender rather than a firebender...
"What?"
He'd noticed, too late, that he was staring.
"Um - I was thinking about your sister..."
"You were?" Parvati raised a single eyebrow.
"No, I meant... I've been watching the way she walks."
"You've been watching the way she walks?"
"Well, no, I mean - I've been watching you too!"
"Here, keep digging, I'm sure you'll strike gold." She mimed handing him a shovel and laughed when he sputtered.
"What I meant was - the two of you walk differently. She has this flow in her movements, this lightness when she walks, while your posture is more straight and confident."
"Yes," Parvati agreed solemnly, "this is not a creepy and strange conversation at all."
Parvati was joking, but not really, and so Harry did not say: 'But your confident stride is forced - a shield to hide uncertainty and a habit beaten into you by McGonagall.'
"Do you and your sister ever fight?" Harry asked instead, unable to release this train of thought.
"You have a sick mind, Harry."
"Yes, yes, that's been established. But do you fight?"
"We're sisters - what do you think?"
Harry shrugged. "Don't know. Only child."
"Hah! Must be nice to get all the attention."
Harry laughed, a little too harshly.
"Well, anyway," Parvati said, peering at him suspiciously as if he might be making fun of her, "trust me, all siblings fight."
"And who wins? Between you and Padma, I mean."
"Hm..." Parvati considered for a moment - or she was simply unwilling to give a straight answer. "Did you ever play 'water, fire, earth'?"
"Uh, sort of. Sure."
"Well, water beats fire, fire beats earth, and earth beats water..." Parvati did the appropriate hand gestures as she talked - a flat hand for water, an open hand, fingers wiggling, for fire, and a closed fist for earth. "But air isn't even part of the game. Why?"
"Because with four legal moves there'd be too many variables for a children's game?"
Parvati shook her head. "Try again."
"Okay... Well, I guess it's based on reality. Earth might taint water, turn it into mud, and water can put out fire and fire can burn the earth. I guess air is sort of... different?"
Parvati nodded. "You can't beat air. Try to strike it and you'll just wear yourself out. So yeah, as much as I hate to admit it, Padma would usually win."
Can't beat air...
He noticed Parvati looking at him strangely and realized that he'd murmured the phrase out loud.
"You're a weird one, Harry Potter."
"It's part of my charm."
"You wish."
Harry turned his attention back to the field, where the Ravenclaw boy, Ackerly, was doing a good job of keeping himself out of harm's way and of exhausting Peakes, but he did not seem to have any real strategy for actually finishing the duel. It was, Harry supposed, a characteristic of airbending - constantly being on the move, escaping rather than confronting.
Maybe you have some airbender in you.
An earth- or a waterbender could end duels by constructing traps from rock or ice, but fire- and airbenders were in the same corner in that they had no such option. Out of the two, fire was much more aggressive but there were airbending techniques - giant winds and spirals of air - that Ackerly could have used to end the fight if he hadn't been a first year and lacked the raw power.
There was something tickling at the back of Harry's mind.
'You can't beat air.'
He grasped at the thought because somehow he knew that it was important, but he got sidetracked by the loud electric BUZZZ that signalled that the time limit had been reached, ending the duel as a draw between Peakes and Ackerly.
Between fire and air.
You can't beat what you can't hit, but you can't win if you don't fight back. Harry looked down at himself. He was, just as Parvati had pointed out, still very small. His exercise regime had done little to change that - he had slightly better stamina and conditioning now, but it seemed that he was doomed to be forever lean and slim, never becoming a particularly impressive example of male physique.
Neither was Aang.
When he'd tried to emulate the walk of an airbender for a day he'd been much more comfortable than when he'd tried the strong earthbender walk, although he'd felt a tiny bit silly, stepping so lightly. What with their penchant for avoiding and deflecting, and their often small packaging - Flitwick was the only Hogwarts Professor that Harry was taller than, for goodness' sake - Harry had to admit that the airbender way of moving and fighting did resonate with some part of him.
But there were other parts as well... Moody had said that half of Harry wanted to run away and that half of him wanted to burn the world down. Neither extreme was great, but what if if those two parts could be moulded together? Harry's head was spinning slightly, and he glanced at Parvati, who was watching the next duel with interest, before surreptitiously pulling out his notebook, trying to quell his excitement.
"Wow, those are good!"
"Thank you."
No, they're not.
"I mean... They might not be completely correct, but there's absolutely an energy there... Why don't you take Arts Class?"
Harry shrugged.
"It's probably a good thing... We had this drawing master, because Padma wanted to draw, so I know all the rules and proper perspective and everything, and everything I ever make comes out completely and totally lifeless." She laughed. "It's like I can see this great lively picture in my head, and when I try to put it down on paper it comes out dull and strict and not at all what I had in mind."
"That's dangerous," Harry agreed.
He knew that he should be paying more attention, talking more, but Cho Chang was duelling, and Harry could not look away. His pencil moved across the paper almost of its own accord as he stared and tried to capture her spinning and twirling, but it was all happening too fast and he was getting it all wrong and becoming irritable.
Duel after duel had been fought in the arena and the afternoon was getting on but Harry, who had kept a particularly close eye on the Ravenclaw contestants, had not found or captured what he was looking for. The airbenders, like everyone else, mostly won their duels through raw power - like Ron Weasley, blasting through the walls created by of some fifth year Hufflepuff boy - or trickery - like Draco Malfoy, distracting and confusing Katie Bell, who was still formidable but less coordinated now that she was on her own and not working as a team with Angelina and Alicia. "A win is a win," was the thinking that Moody had instilled in them, but Harry was searching for more than tricks.
Chang was duelling now, however, and it was remarkably different. She had a sort of minimalist approach, meaning that Harry was finally getting a display of airbending boiled down to its very essence. She was duelling Seamus Finnigan, of all people, and outmanoeuvring the hotheaded Gryffindor every step of the way.
The competition was divided into four leagues - the first years had their own thing, but above that the second and third years were combined, as were the fourth and fifth years and the sixth and seventh. That meant that last year Malfoy had defeated all the competitors from their year as well as the year below, but this time he and Weasley and the others - like poor Seamus - were up against the fifth years as well as their fellow fourth years.
As Harry knew, Seamus had quite a lot of power but very little precision, and the wide area attacks he tried to overpower Cho Chang with had him running out of energy quite quickly. Cho, on the other hand, didn't seem to be bending at all - she just twirled and spun and managed to not be wherever Seamus' fire was. Eventually, when Seamus was almost running on fumes, Cho danced closer, in and around his defences, and blasted him from the circle with a great gust of air.
Harry's pencil broke against the paper.
"Hm," Parvati said, "we'd better get moving."
Everyone was standing up. The clever people had already started moving halfway through the last duel because it was going to be much more difficult to get out of this arena than it had been to jump from the old wooden stands. Harry sighed and got up, and they stepped into a crowded aisle, making their slow way down the stands. When they reached the bottom row, which was a sort of pathway leading around the whole arena, raised five feet or so above the actual field, the flow of people wasn't as thick and Harry sighed in relief, reclaiming some of his personal space.
"Hey, Harry! Harry Potter!"
Harry turned and looked down at the field where he saw Cho Chang approaching, her light blue duelling robes looking impeccable, as if she hadn't wiped the floor with several other contestants over the past few hours.
"Miss Chang!" Harry nodded at her. He was stuck looking down at her over the waist high barrier that separated the pathway from the field, so they were in a rather awkward position for conducting any kind of conversation, even before Parvati appeared at Harry's elbow.
"Parvati?" Cho said, raising her eyebrows at the younger girl.
"Cho," Parvati said, somewhat cordially.
"Um -" Harry started.
"Harry, I was wondering if I could have a word," Cho cut him off, and it sounded more like a challenge than a request. He could see something hard in her eyes and the same tenseness in her body that was in her stance just before a duel would start.
"Uh, sure?"
"In private, I mean." Cho gave Parvati a look that was not unfriendly, though it was rather pointed. It was the type of look that carried more than just one meaning, and Harry realized suddenly that through Parvati's sister the two girls might actually know each other better than Harry knew either of them.
"Actually," Parvati said, crossing her arms, "we were -"
"It's about Luna," Cho cut in, turning back to Harry.
Luna.
Harry swung over the railing, touching down on the field just beside Cho.
"What's the matter? Is something wrong?"
"Well," Cho said, and then trailed off, looking up towards the railing where Parvati now stood alone.
"I'll see you later, yeah?" Harry said, and Parvati stared back at him for a few seconds before quickly nodding and leaving, flowing away into the crowd.
"You're insatiable..." Cho muttered.
"What's going on with Luna?"
"I was hoping you could tell me." The coldness in Cho's voice was even more apparent now that they had no audience.
"Why are you upset?" He didn't think he would've dared to say those words to Cho Chang, but he did, puzzlement overruling his manners and embarrassment alike.
"Well here's the thing," Cho said, taking a step towards him, "I'm not an idiot."
Harry took a step back, murmuring some half-response along the lines of "never said so," and watching Cho carefully. She was taking heavy steps towards him, moving more like an earthbender than her usual self, and it was a bit unnerving.
"So when someone tells me that they're going into the Forbidden Forest with a younger girl, I'm hardly going to leave it at that. Am I?"
"No," Harry muttered, "of course not." He was only half paying attention, distracted by her body, though not for the usual reasons. It was as if she was forcing a different gait and attitude in order to intimidate him, not realizing that her usual airbender movements would have worked better since they showed she meant business.
"Maybe I'm half an idiot, because I didn't tell Professor Flitwick immediately - which is what I should have done, considering what happened next. A forest fire! A firebender goes into the forest after a young girl, and then there's a forest fire, and when she finally comes back she is sopping wet - spends the next week in bed with a fever, by the way - and her robes are covered in mud as well as singed."
Some of the guilt Harry felt must have shown on his face, because Cho narrowed her eyes and when she approached this time she dropped the earthbender act and went back to her usual graceful and dangerous self. Harry's hand flew up, but she spun and somehow he was caught, held lightly against the wall.
Damn - how does she do that?
"What exactly did you do to her?" Cho asked, not pushing him but gently holding him against the wall. A light touch only, but with the promise of pain hidden behind it.
"I didn't do anything to her," Harry muttered, though he was barely aware of what he was saying now that she was leaning in to pierce him with her dark eyes. Not quite able to bear the intensity he looked just above her eyes instead - her pitch black hair was tied back, braided and knotted around her head to keep it out of the way, but it still shone, reflecting the late afternoon light right back at him.
"Is that why she doesn't eat? Why you can't find her in the tower - can't find her in class?"
"You said she skips class all the time..."
"It's never been like this, Harry Potter." Her hand tightened on his chest, gripping the front of his robes now. "What did you do?"
An image flashed before him of little Luna, her hair streaming up towards the dark sky that was reaching down to pluck Harry up, and finding Luna instead... At first he hadn't thought about the forest because he hadn't wanted to think about it, and then Moody had set him on a path where everything else faded into the background, and he hadn't thought about Luna Lovegood in weeks and weeks... But he was thinking about her now, and he was fairly certain that she had, quite literally, saved his life, and that's not the sort of thing one is allowed to forget.
She's also one of the - what, three people? - who you've let see you cry.
"Look," Harry said, meeting her eye now, and while he made no move to extricate himself he no longer cowered under Cho Chang's mere presence. "I would never do anything to harm Luna. And I don't know what's up with her, but if I can help then I will."
Cho held his gaze for a long moment and Harry hoped she could see some of the certainty that he felt inside. Finally, she retracted her hand and took a step back, letting out a long breath. She looked very tired, much more tired than she ever looked after a duel.
"I'm not going to apologize," she said firmly.
"You shouldn't," Harry said, easing himself away from the wall and taking a step or two, trying to shake off the tenseness. "That was a strange day. I can see why you'd... Well, I'm glad she has someone to watch her back."
We should have been watching her back.
"I'll talk to her," Harry said, staring off into space and wondering where Luna would be at this very second. "We'll figure it out..."
Cho watched him for a moment longer and then sighed. "I'm sorry," she said, despite her earlier proclamation.
Harry shrugged and they stood in awkward silence.
"Congratulations," Harry said, nodding towards the field, where a few people were now walking around, rebuilding parts of the circles that had been wrecked during the day. "You did great."
Cho made a non-committal hum. "It can't have been too interesting - you spent the whole time reading your book."
"Ah," Harry said, rather surprised that she'd noticed. "Actually, I was -" but he cut himself off, stopping his hand which was halfway inside his book-bag already.
Do not show her that book. There are way too many sketches of her in it.
Harry stood frozen, looking at Cho and thinking of the many failed sketches, and a question sprung to mind. She was watching him right back, eyebrows raised, and he didn't think he'd dare to say it, but this was too good an opportunity to let slip away.
"Actually, I was wondering... Well, this might seem a bit strange, but I want to ask you a favour."
"What?" Cho asked, the scepticism clear in her tone.
"I need you to show me something."
Slowly, so slowly, her fist sailed towards him through the air. There was no avoiding it, not in the position he was in; not without breaking the flow - not without speeding up.
"So if I come at you like this," Harry had started, simply punching towards her in slow motion.
"Then I might do this," Cho had said, sidestepping neatly, keeping the same slow pace.
"But what if that was a feint?" Harry had said, altering his advance.
Cho had adjusted her spin accordingly, and they were off. Words melted away as they read and re-read each other's intentions, with Harry attempting to advance and Cho neatly avoiding all his attacks; all of it in slow motion, allowing Harry to take in the movements. They probably looked absurd, especially since she wore her duelling robes while he had removed his black robe to conduct this mock duel in the standard shirt and tie of his uniform, but Harry was too focused to notice. He'd been wrong in what he said to Hermione - it was less like a riddle and more like a puzzle, and he could practically feel the pieces clicking into place.
He had watched Cho Chang as she shifted and spiralled to slink behind his back, disappearing from view and frustratingly matching all his movements, keeping her back pressed to his. He had watched her switch direction constantly, wherever she met resistance. He watched her bare feet on the rocky ground as she spun, almost soundless, just barely disturbing the dust into light puffs.
In theory he was leading the battle and she was following, reacting to his attacks, but in practice he saw that she was not only avoiding. In some strange subtle way she was both following the flow of the battle and changing it at the same time, as became apparent when now suddenly her fist was coming towards him and he realized that there was nothing he could do. He braced for impact, but instead of finishing her attack she gently flicked his nose with her finger.
"You're not doing very well," she said, straightening up and looking a bit smug. "If you're trying to figure out how to beat an airbender, I should tell you that it's very nearly impossible."
"I think," Harry said, looking down at his own bare feet, feeling the coarse rocky ground underneath as he shifted into an airbending stance, "that you might be right."
"Have you realized the superior ways of airbending and decided to convert?"
"Something like that."
"Sorry to inform you, but it's sort of impossible."
"Oh well. Do you think we could reverse - you attack me?"
The sun was still bright above their heads, quickening the fire and blood to flow free and fast inside Harry, and he was dying to try this out. But Cho was not looking at him - she was squinting over his shoulder.
"Hey, Harry!"
Harry turned around.
"What are you two doing?"
Harry looked down at his feet. They had already taken a step back.
"We were just -" Harry heard Cho Chang's voice from somewhere behind him.
"Ah, Miss Chang, isn't it? That was some pretty impressive duelling you displayed today - good show, I must say!"
Sluggishly, his head swimming with the movement, Harry turned and looked at Cho Chang, who was blushing and looking at the ground.
"Thank you, sir..."
A companionable arm was draped over Harry's shoulder, and he stiffened, looking up at Barty Crouch. The Captain's short brown hair fluttered in the wind, his smile as dazzling and charming and crooked as always.
"I hope you're not a slow learner, Harry - although maybe with a teacher like her I can understand you wanting to take your time..." Crouch laughed. He had a charming and infectious laugh, of course. "When are we going to find time for our little lesson, by the way? How to deal with waterbenders, and all that?"
Harry was a radio tuned only to static. He did not hear it - he felt it, reverberating through him. It was starting to make him nauseous, as if he was sinking, and then...
The world tilted.
Harry blinked - the channel on his inner radio shifted - and in that moment Crouch turned from some demonic creature into a man. Looking up at him, at such close range, Harry saw a mark on Crouch's face where he must have cut himself while shaving that morning.
I'm not afraid of you.
"How about right now?"
"Right now?"
"Yes." Harry said, stepping out of Crouch's grasp and placing himself between Cho and the Captain. "Say there was a highly annoying waterbender, who just wouldn't leave me alone. Right here and now. What should I do?"
"Well," Crouch said gamely, taking a few steps back and clicking a capsule on the back of his uniform, withdrawing a stream of water as he entered a duelling stance that Harry recognized well. "You might -"
"How about something like this?" Harry asked, and a second later there was steam everywhere.
Crouch had very quickly pulled out enough water to shield himself from the ball of fire - a ball larger than Harry himself - but that was fine, because the look on Crouch's face was priceless, and Harry had what he wanted. His attention.
Harry thought that he understood now why Moody had blocked his chi. It took away the distraction and allowed him to search out who he was underneath the fire. Because now the power fed into him rather than taking over. The fire was his ally, not his enemy, and now that he had refined them - adjusted them - found them - his instincts did not betray him either, just as he did not betray them by trying to run away.
Harry pounced, speeding towards Crouch, who only let his surprise distract him for the shortest moment before backing away and drawing more water to send flying towards Harry, freezing it into sharp icicles in the air, meaning to bar the way rather than to cause actual harm. It was meant to make Harry stop his assault; to dissuade him from trying to force them into hand to hand combat, probably in order to give Crouch a second to think, or to be pedagogic and condescending...
Harry did not stop his assault.
Air.
He was spinning; spiralling and twisting through the air, around and between the ice as they passed each other going in opposite directions - the ice speeding away to where it could do no harm, Harry speeding towards Crouch, where he could. Crouch's body was flowing into a defensive stance, getting ready to receive Harry's attack. Harry had intended to go into hand to hand but - shit - his glasses had flown off! He had no space for precision. This was the point where Ackerly had failed; where the ways of airbending did not resonate with who Harry was, and so this was the point where Harry switched.
Fire.
When Harry had attacked Hermione he had seen his hands move of their own accord, flames pouring out - even though he had not summoned them - to do unimaginable things that he had not asked for. It had been the same with Malfoy. But now it was he who moved the hand and he who called upon the fire - and if it responded with enthusiasm then, well, he could hardly blame it. Crouch's new shield, a wall crafted from a large amount of water hastily pulled from a nearby pond, should have been more than enough to block anything a fourth year Hogwarts student could throw at it.
Thud.
That was the sound of Crouch hitting the ground.
Harry walked through the steam, towards the blurry figure on the ground, and just as it groaned and shifted to get up, he lightly placed a foot on its chest. He was not exactly holding Crouch down, because he didn't think that he could, but he did gently nudge Crouch back onto the ground.
"I think I got it," Harry said. "Thank you so much. I won't be needing any more lessons." He looked down at the man on the ground. He could just make out that the man's hair was slightly singed, because he had not bothered to wear his helmet. Harry leaned down closer and could see that Crouch still wore only surprise on his features - not the furious rage or ice cold calculation that Harry had expected to see on Crouch's face when he'd imagined this happening, which he had done many times.
"Oh, and stop calling me 'Harry'. We are not friends."
Turning his back on Crouch was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. But even if Crouch was not playing along with how this scene had played out in Harry's imagination, Harry wasn't about to abandon the script so quickly, and turning his back on Crouch was part of the story. It showed that Crouch was not considered a threat.
Fire and air. Air and fire.
Harry stepped through the steam, which was dissipating now, focusing on the blurry image of Cho just to have something to walk towards. He heard, behind him, the sounds of Crouch getting up and after a terrifying moment of silence he heard the sound of Crouch walking away rather quickly. He stopped a few feet in front of Cho and let out a shaky breath.
"I probably shouldn't have done that." He was amazed at how light and conversational his voice sounded. It had been a bad idea in almost every sense of the world, but it had not felt bad. He had closed some sort of door, but he couldn't bring himself to mind. It was a door that he wanted closed.
"No, you probably shouldn't," Cho agreed, and as far as he could tell her face was distorted into some sort of grimace. "Harry, that was… Um - why am I suddenly glad that I didn't have to beat you up?"
"Took him by surprise," Harry said, mostly to himself. He tried to make his face stop smiling but it would not accommodate him. "That's probably the only reason it worked."
"Hm."
Cho disappeared for a moment and then her hand appeared, holding his glasses close to his face. He plucked them out of the air and put them on, and the world became sharp again. He might be imagining things, but it seemed that everything looked sharper now than before they'd fallen off. The breeze on his face was sharper too, and colours all around him were clearer. Cho Chang looked even prettier than she ever had and he could have written a song about how the rough texture of the ground felt on his bare feet.
He felt good. Fantastic. Better than he could remember feeling ever in his life, in fact. It was like the glorious crackling stretching one's back after sitting hunched over for far, far too long. He was very light headed and should probably be finding somewhere quiet to lie down, but he felt more like bouncing on his feet or running a marathon.
"I wonder if they got that," Cho said, and Harry followed her gaze to the men with the film cameras, who were still bustling about and arguing. "I would like to watch it again, I think."
The stadium was not completely deserted yet, but with mostly empty stands around them it seemed that the affair with Crouch had gone largely unnoticed, which suited Harry just fine. "Do you think they'll show today's duels in Hogsmeade or something?" he asked, gesturing to the men with the cameras. "Watching you on film would certainly be more exciting than those fight scenes in 'Two Avatars'!"
What did I just say?
"Never saw it..." Cho said, and Harry felt his grin widen. "And anyway, Hooch said they were going to film a little, but they're just preparing, deciding where to put the cameras, that sort of thing."
"Wait," Harry said, "but why are they here then, if they're not filming the championships?"
"They're here for the tournament, silly."
"Right," Harry said, and then: "Uh. What tournament?"
"Um. Are you joking?" Seeing from his wide blank smile that he was not, she looked rather incredulous. "It's all anyone's been talking about! Professor Dumbledore told us all about it on the first day back!"
Harry shrugged. He hadn't been in his right mind on those first days back, and then after that... Well, whatever 'everyone talked about' wasn't really that important when you barely talked to anyone, was it?
"It's the Tournament of Elements!" Cho exclaimed. "It's the biggest thing since... I don't even know!"
"Oh yes?" Harry asked, mostly to be polite.
"It's a competition between us and the Fire Nation and the Water Tribe!"
"Between Durmstrang and Beauxbaton and Hogwarts, you mean?"
Cho waved her hand in impatient agreement. "Yes, yes! How have you not heard about this? It's going to be held right here and the whole world will be watching!"
"I don't..." Harry started. "What, so it's not just duelling; it's like sports and things? Does everyone have to play?"
"Play?" Cho parroted, sounding a bit annoyed. "No, you won't have to play. There's only one competitor for every school."
"Oh," Harry said, feeling a bit relieved. "Who's ours?"
Cho rolled her eyes. "It hasn't been decided yet."
The way she said it made Harry ask: "Are you entering?"
"Well," Cho said, blushing slightly, "as a matter of fact, I am. Or trying to, I mean. There's no way I'll get it..."
"Sure you will," Harry said, grinning like an idiot, "and then I'll be rooting for you!"
"Not entering yourself, then?" Cho looked him over speculatively, sizing him up.
"No, I'm more of a cheerleader," Harry said, moving his hands in a little dance, making them spell out 'CHO'.
Cho gave him a stern look. "You should be more excited," she announced. "There's going to be bloody royalty visiting!"
"No, really, I'm very excited," Harry said, but he apparently didn't look excited enough for Cho who made a sound somewhere between exasperation and amusement. "I've never heard you swear before," Harry added thoughtfully.
"Well, that's certainly strange, because you seem to bring it out in me!"
Cho laughed and Harry noted with immense pleasure that he'd made her blush spread.
He threw his gaze over to the men moving the nearest camera back and forth, and got a bit of a shock in that the long tube at the front, at that precise moment, happened to be pointing in his exact direction. For some reason it made him think of his first lesson with Moody, when the old Auror had pointed an enormous weapon at him, and all Harry himself had held in his hands was a small knife that he couldn't even wield properly. He suppressed a shudder and thought instead, with glee, of this week's 'detention', and how he was actually looking forward to it... Unlike this tournament thing - he had obviously lied to Cho when he said that he was "very excited". But still...
Could be interesting.
Author's Note
I found parts of that highly satisfying to write. The next chapter will probably be called 'The Goblet of Fire', so suck on that. What do you think will happen? (You must have wondered if there was going to be a tournament, right? It is Harry's fourth year after all.) Either way, we are coming up on a lot of the things I had in mind when I first started writing this, so that feels good.
A brief note on the Duelling Championship: in terms of the power levels exhibited by normal Hogwarts students I should say that I consider the main (bending) characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender to be prodigies. Aang, Katara, and especially Toph all demonstrated great power and despite their ages they all managed to master or invent new techniques in practically no time at all. I don't think your average bender would be able to do the things they did, and so the average Hogwarts student is not, because they're simply not as special. Harry, on the other hand, might be.
Thank you for reading. Reviews are appreciated.
- The Sorting Cat