Book Two ― A School Divided
Chapter Forty-Six ― Fire and Fury
Note: This chapter has been beta-ed by user Outliner.
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"This is disgraceful," Moody snapped angrily, the knuckles holding his staff painted white.
"It's an environment that works against them," Amelia reminded him calmly.
"They're fighting against children!"
"They're combating against some of the strongest students in Europe with several drawbacks weighing against them."
"They were humiliated by that Veela!"
"Veela are not endemic to Great Britain, and we barely get enough funding to train Aurors against the creatures which are on the island, let alone the Patrols," she side-eyed him in something of an admonishment. "Plus, the girl is not just a Veela, as you well know. Don't be crass, Alastor."
"Not enough!" He barked back, making the woman annoyed. His suspicions got stuck in his throat by means he couldn't unravel. He grumbled under his breath in a foul mood, mentally cursing Dumbledore and Voldemort.
"Train them yourself if you're so irritated," she demanded.
"I'm retired," he declared firmly.
"Then retire your damn mouth," she snapped before closing her eyes. "Look, Alastor, the situation is stressful enough as it is without your input. We instructed the Aurors to stand guard on their houses and not to gang up on the champions. In the field, we use the superiority of force, and you know that. This whole thing is a contrived challenge. If there were honest to goodness Dark wizards down there, they wouldn't last two minutes."
Moody didn't say anything about the subject. He had other comments to make, but this was not the time, not when Amelia was angry. Moody would talk to her at a later date. He scanned the field with his eye until he found Harry Potter waiting for his turn to meet the challenge.
"He doesn't have the dagger on him," he commented gruffly.
"It's a killing weapon," Amelia responded idly. "He wouldn't want to do that to another person."
"Maybe."
"You sound skeptical, even for you," she prodded, and he nodded, immersed in memories.
"Aye, the lad reminds me of his mum," he declared, and Amelia raised an eyebrow inquisitively.
"Temper?"
"Viciousness," he corrected her. "There was something off with him before the dragon that he's been adjusting since."
"And what would that be?" She prodded further. He turned silently to her, and she scoffed. "Please, as though you don't have several theories on the boy."
"I figure Occlumency," he eventually revealed, making Amelia blink a bit in surprise before recomposing herself. "Nothing too fancy or impressive, mind you, just early stages."
"Still, who's teaching him? Dumbledore?"
"Nah, the boy's got something against Albus," he scratched his chin. "It's obvious that Potter has a mentor of sorts, but who's to say who it is. I've seen talk to the Weasley boy who works at Gringotts during the Yule Ball."
"I'm not familiar with who he is in detail," she admitted with a light shrug. "Arthur made too many of them."
"Aye, but that one's clever. Curse-breaker. And the goblins have that secret of theirs."
"Ah, that would do it," Amelia said with a light pursing of her lips. "That damned book again. Don't let Potter get caught with it."
"The lad has a reasonably good head on him when he's not barging into things half-crazed because of stress, acting like a twit," Moody reassured her neutrally before smirking. "Say, you're close to Greengrass these days, aren't you?"
"I thought you didn't follow politics," she responded with a raised eyebrow.
"I don't," he snorted, a sound which fit the grimace on his face surprisingly well. "But I follow Death Eaters, and Malfoy's one of the bigger fish still swimming."
"Hm," Amelia hummed neutrally. "What's the point of your question?"
"Does he know his daughter and Potter are dating?" He asked with a sideways smirk that showed too much amusement.
"They are?" She asked, vaguely surprised. She knew that Harry had been friends with Daphne but wasn't aware of anything more. "I wonder if Susan knew. She went with him to the Ball but said they were only going as friends."
"And you didn't believe her," he guessed, and she shrugged.
"Would you?"
"Your niece is a hard one to read for her age," Moody suggested, "but she's honest. Combatively so, even."
"She's honest with you," Amelia shook her head. "Try to raise a teenager and see how long their honesty lasts."
"Well, you don't need to worry about Potter. He's trying to be discreet with the Greengrass girl, but they're both shit at it," he said gruffly, and the woman beside him grinned amusedly.
"Shit by your standards, or has anyone else noticed?"
"Filius knows more than he shows," Moody said after thinking about it for a few seconds. "Minerva may have noticed that something odd is happening, but she's looking at that Muggleborn from Gryffindor instead. Septima knows something is up as well. And I don't know anything about that Alchemist."
"Well, it'll be fun to see Greengrass's face when I tell him about it," Amelia sighed contentedly. They stayed in silence for a few seconds before she asked. "How do you think Potter will perform?"
"I'm not sure, with him," Moody conceded before speculating. "He's a wildcard. If you consider his age, he's the most powerful of the bunch, and the First Task showed he is as ruthless as any of us," Amelia nodded in acceptance. "But I think he got spooked by it."
"Rightfully so, don't you think?"
"He's going to overcorrect," he predicted. "He'll be too hesitant to use his strength, particularly after seeing Delacour wipe the floor with three of the disappointments down there."
Amelia ignored the twinge of irritation that returned at the insult on her Auror trainees and sent a searching look towards the last champion.
"We're about to find out if you're correct, Alastor."
Harry felt as though he was on uneven footing as he went down the slope towards the ruined houses that held the keys he needed to collect. Despite the lengthy break required to repair the damage caused by Fleur to the entire arena, he hadn't been able to start to devise a strategy. Every part of his mind was screaming for him to be elusive, but Harry didn't know where to begin doing that. The only spell in which he felt the confidence to be able to retrieve a key without revealing him was the many variations of the Whip Charm he had grown so proficient with, but Fleur's performance had proved the guards were on the lookout for that. So, what to do?
He took slow, deliberate steps, both to center his growing anxiety and to give himself a few extra seconds of thought. Unease draped over him, of a different sort than the one that affected him during the First Task. He didn't feel mortal dread or a fleeting control on his mental stability, just a vague sense of trepidation with a slight aftertaste of resignation. He knew he wouldn't complete the task. After what Fleur had accomplished, he stood no chance of getting to completion. With luck, he would equal Cedric in keys.
Harry stopped in front of the first ruin.
"This is so bloody stupid," he muttered to himself, taking a deep breath.
Unlike the First Task, he didn't feel compelled to perform to perfection or convince everyone of his value. He had made that mistake with the dragon and had learned that notoriety doesn't come without its drawbacks. Part of him didn't want to be there, involved in these machinations. But the commanding portion took another step, and then another. He didn't feel the need to prove to those watching him in a tense silence that he was worthy of their respect. But he did feel the urge to not bend to the hardship that Voldemort had imposed on him by setting him up to fail during this Tournament.
The entrance to the first home was a mere two feet away. As the others had done, Harry angled himself to scout its insides without being exposed to attack. He scoured hidden corners, hoping to see the glitter of the key somewhere, but found nothing. There was the sound of the fluttering of robes, which Harry guessed came from the guard. The Auror seemed to be taking cover behind a wall that cut Harry's sight from a bit under half the inside of the place.
"The key has to be there," he murmured beneath his breath, resisting the urge to close his eyes despondently. If the guard wasn't moving, he knew where the key was and wouldn't change his position. Harry watched the wall for a few seconds, silencing the part of his mind that wanted to blast the thing down to bits before a stray thought entered his mind. "Might as well try."
To an untrained ear, Parseltongue was soft to the point of being beyond detection. Though his being a Parselmouth was public information, the use of the language as a means for casting spells was known to only a select few. If there was one thing Harry had taken from seeing Fleur transform into a Veela and obliterate the people within the houses, it was that breaking with expectations was the wisest way to overcome dizzying odds. He approached the wall, readied his wand, and very softly hissed at his feet. Though his voice didn't travel far, the spell's light and sound did, and he noticed the guard tense across the barrier between them.
"Shit," Harry whispered. Now, he needed a distraction, or the Auror would turn the corner, and he'd be overwhelmed immediately. No one was moving for now, but the tension was so high that some minor movement could trigger an immediate response. Harry took his wand and decided to create as much noise as possible to cover his plan. "Expulso!"
He aimed the explosion far away from the man on the other side, and though he hadn't leant all his weight into it, he had cast the spell in Parseltongue. It was still loud and disruptive, sending shockwaves across the building. Moving against the effort of his first spell, Harry put one foot on the wall and then the other, and then he walked up, using the sticking charm he had cast on his feet. When he had managed a few more steps to the top of the wall, he peeked over to see the Auror hugging the wall, preparing to turn a corner with a flurry of spells. Just as he made his move, Harry finished his slow ascent. Looking down on the bewildered and confused Auror, the champion languidly pointed his wand at the man's torso and hissed.
"Stupefy!"
The spell came not a moment too soon. Just as the red light hit the Auror's chest, his wand was already making a wide arc to meet the champion. Harry watched as the man was thrown back by the impact of the spell and did not move. He was breathing and had no serious injury, but the attack had done its job in one go. Before Harry had even gotten the key from where he could see it glittering away, Bagman was already announcing his success.
"Harry Potter, with a clever bit of trickery, manages to get the first key untouched and unaffected!"
As Harry countered the sticking spell and leaped down to the ground level to reach for the key, he idly mused that Bagman was wrong. While he may have left the first house untouched, he didn't leave it unaffected. As ever when he used an offensive spell in Parseltongue, Harry could feel his aggressiveness increasing and had to consciously slow down his breathing to think straight, with the way that his magic reacted to it all. He wished that Serena was there. His snake always managed to either relax him or fill him with so much energy that he didn't care about being calm.
Now that he had the first key, his steps were surer and less hesitant, though he still did not know how to crack the second house. He considered going to another ruin but figured everyone would be on high alert after what happened in Krum's performance.
"Fleur was right," he grumbled. "Being last is the worst possible position in this one."
The approach to the second house was much harder. Instead of patrolling the ruin as a whole, the guard was again standing over the key, making a direct confrontation all but impossible. Unfortunately for Harry, he chose the wrong entrance and was faced with an alert opponent immediately. He only had time to pivot once and then had to throw himself out of view, taking two cutting spells to the arm in the process.
"Are they all going to stand over the key?" He asked with a pained hiss as he did a quick Episkey to deal with the wounds, which luckily were only superficial.
Harry looked around. Trying to repeat his trick wouldn't work, as the ascent would be too slow to catch the Auror by surprise. He could go for a straight fight, but he didn't think he could withstand even a fifth of what Krum had gone through before taking a stunning spell he couldn't dodge. His shield was solid, particularly the one he cast in Parseltongue, but there was no advantage to staying on the defensive without any possibility of counteracting. He contemplated leaving the ruin when he glanced at a pile of rubble near him. It was one of many scattered around the houses, but something clicked in his head. He spent a few moments wondering if this had any possibility of working before figuring he might as well try.
He couldn't use the illusion spell that Fleur had used, but he could create that actual chaos around both Auror and himself and bet on his reflexes to catch the key before the woman inside could hit him.
"It's just Madeleine's exercise intensified," he whispered to himself nervously, trying to convince himself that he was being clever. When he cast a Flagrante on the stones for good measure, making a mistake was significantly more costly. As he sent more and more objects around himself into orbits which went faster and faster, pebbles and even large cinder blocks would collide against his body, both injuring him and burning his skin painfully. But he kept up collecting more objects until he had a substantial amount of protection against a first strike. From there, it was a matter of acting fast and not allowing the chaos to swallow him.
A low murmur of befuddlement from the crowd had warned the woman inside that something was about to happen. When Harry stepped into view, she didn't take into account any of the odd objects surrounding him and merely sent a blasting curse his way. It worked as intended for Harry, hitting one of the stones in front of him and sending debris everywhere. Some of it hit him, the pain of the burns made his sight teary, and the grasp of his wand wobbled, but the surprised hiss coming from the woman at the touch of the cursed flames gave him a second to envelop them both in a looping pattern with the objects orbiting him.
Neither could see the other, as they were both lost to the whirlwind of debris surrounding them at high speeds. Harry didn't want to hit the woman with it, as she would retaliate much more explosively and could harm her severely. Most of the things that crashed into them both were small and insignificant on their own, but the powerful burning curse made even the smallest of pebbles hitting your thigh noticeably painful. With as many things floating at velocity there, neither wanted to make a move that would inflict copious amounts of pain on themselves. And if the Auror preferred to cast a shield and ride it out, it was fine by Harry. It would make his path clear.
The finesse required to maintain that whirlwind was enormous. It was more natural for Harry to blast a training dummy in half and be done with it, but he would be hopelessly outmatched on power against an actual Auror, trainee or not. He needed a more elegant solution.
Not that his choice had been elegant. He was thoroughly regretting it already. To walk as he commanded that large a collection of individual pieces of rubble as precisely as necessary took all of his concentration. He gritted his teeth as another rock hit his arm, and the objects' orbits all wavered as burns threatened to force him to drop the spell. The stones almost fell to the floor, allowing for a brief gap in his protection through which the Auror pounced. Her attack was fast and not particularly powerful, with even the stunning charm taking longer than a second to conjure in an unexpected window of time. Her stinging hex almost hit him straight in the wand arm, which would end the struggle right there and then, regardless of its power. If it landed, he would almost certainly drop his wand, which he couldn't afford. He awkwardly twisted away from its path, sending another wave of rocks in wayward directions. What saved him was that the following collisions disrupted her as much as they disrupted him. He recomposed himself barely in time to avoid a wave of spells as the Auror recovered from the sudden bursts of agony.
That continued for another minute, with Harry slowly making his way to the key, with the Auror's attacks turning more frantic and less conservative as he approached it. Every time she attacked, there were fewer objects around them, and he had to make them faster to create cover and concealment. And the smaller and more numerous the debris, the harder their path was to control collectively, and the more hits they would both take. By the time he finally reached the key, those collisions were happening so frequently that Harry was operating on fumes, the pain of a thousand phantom burns so intense he couldn't think properly. He only continued to advance until he grasped the key. The relief of its cold metal contrasted heavily with the burning sensations crowding all of his limbs, and he allowed a brief moment of respite before the pain sent a rude and unmistakable reminder to move quickly.
He couldn't see adequately through the debris, the hazy cloud bearing down in his mind, and the tears blurring his already faulty vision. But he could see a point that seemed brighter than its surroundings and trusted that it was an opening. Unwilling to suffer through any more unnecessary pain now that he had the key, and in far too much pain to allow his sense of fairness to outshine his practicality, he weakly banished the objects towards the woman. Hearing her startled gasp turn into a cry of pain, and then into the clung of rock meeting magical shield, he threw himself at the patch of light, feeling relief when he did, in fact, land on the grass outside the ruins. He crawled towards cover, waited for a few seconds for a stunning spell to hit him while he was vulnerable.
But it didn't, and he distantly heard Bagman's voice saying something he couldn't understand. His entire body was shaking, and he was silently crying in pain. He frantically patted his limbs, trying to extinguish flames that didn't burn flesh but did consume his spirit, creating an inescapable sort of mental anguish that he had to wait out while barely resisting the urge to go into the fetal position and staying there, inert. He had used that spell in combat more than once, and it was a favorite of his with small things to create disruption, but after being exposed to it for such a long time without being able to protect himself, he couldn't fathom using it on a large scale ever without it being a life or death scenario.
He tried to derisively whisper, "brilliant idea, Potter," but opening his mouth made him throw up suddenly from the pain. Black spots filled his vision, and his brain swam uncomfortably inside his skull. For a second, he thought he was about to pass out, but before Harry could hit the floor, he regained control over his arms and broke the fall. It took him a few minutes of panting and dry-heaving before he could minimally recover, and he could hear the speculation from the audience about a curse hitting him. They didn't know it had been extended exposure to his Flagrante that had almost broken him in a wave of pain unlike any he had felt since the basilisk bit him in the Chamber of Secrets.
Concernedly, the audience watched as he slowly rose. Some were expecting him to give up. A portion of the school, the one who had hated him ever since the First Task, was cheering as he suffered, even as the rest of the audience silently — or not so silently, a distant part of his brain thought for him, as he registered the angry yelling voices of Hermione, Ron, Neville, and Tracey, among others — judged them.
The cheers turned into silence, and the silence turned into cheers when he obstinately extended his fist and showed he had the key firmly in his grasp.
"Next time, when I'm trying for finesse, I need to go for actual finesse," he spoke to himself in a broken, hoarse whisper. Every few words, he would cough violently to the point that his vocal cords strained harshly, but he needed the reassurance of hearing himself at the moment to deal with his still twitching limbs. "Not just pain tolerance, and whatever else happened there."
He wasn't exhausted, despite the enormous effort of the past minutes. Harry had a truly abnormal constitution when it came to energy to spend ever since he began training more intensively. But the way his body jerked and cycled between feeling numb and burning pain, it was hard to keep even his wand placement consistent.
Harry limped to the third house and spent half a minute thinking about what he was going to do. He tried to counter the effect he was going through by casting a Patronus, but the pain distracted him, making it harder to conjure the feeling required to do it. Harry could deal with swarms of Dementors trying to suck his soul, but the pain was more insidious, harder to counter. Snarling quietly, he gave up that strategy and started scouting the house. As he had expected, the Patrol inside was guarding the key, not watching over the entrances.
"They did agree to use the same strategy," he murmured. "Bastards."
The man wasn't giving his back to any of the entrances and was standing beneath a ledge, a good place to counter any attacks from above. Harry tried to think of ways that would allow him to get unnoticed to the key but couldn't figure out any.
He looked down at this right hand, holding his wand. It was still shaking, and the spasms made him change how he had to grip it to make sure it didn't leave his grasp. As it stood, he couldn't work with any spells that required an awful lot of precision. The man inside was a Patrol trainee and not an Auror.
"This is a stupid idea," he repeated to himself over and over again, grinning a bit as he finished the thought and realized another thing, "but it's better than the one for the second house."
Despite the sense of doom surrounding the situation, he couldn't help but feel excited. That part of him which had reveled at attacking the Auror in the first house was spry and bright in his mind, and the cautious portion had already conceded that elaborate solutions were beyond him at the moment. And, for all the knowledge he had accrued over the past months, he still dealt best in situations where he was allowed to pack a punch.
Harry began his offensive by peeking his wand through a crack in the wall and casting as powerful an Aquamenti as he could in the direction of the Patrol. Barely a second before the man inside realized that there was a half-inch of water all around him, Harry turned a corner and cast a Glacius, making the Patrol stuck. The man was still faster than Harry, forcing the boy to run alongside the wall, intermittently using shields as he dodged the majority of the attacks. But for all that speed, the Patrol was stuck in one place, making it easy for Harry to cast spells without even aiming.
"Expulso," Harry hissed, watching as the concussive force of the explosion hit the Patrol's shield, forcing him out of the icy trap he had laid for him. Now that the Patrol could move again, he could cast spells on the run, making this a sprinting battle.
Running and weaving through hexes and curses made Harry's perception of pain increasingly less noticeable. Adrenaline had taken over, and things were slowing down around him, his focus set straight on his opponent. For every spell he could cast, the Patrol would cast four or five, but with the aid of the Parseltongue, every one of Harry's spells was abnormally strong, and the atmosphere around the third house began to smell faintly of ozone.
The ground beneath Harry shook as the Patrol hit a Bombarda between his feet. Losing his balance, the champion tried his best to twist and shield his body from the flurry of attacks that followed, though some of them landed. A weak Disarming Spell burst through and forced Harry to grip his wand tightly, his resistance to its effects surprising the Patrol. But that surprise manifested in yet more aggressive spellcasting until Harry saw something he couldn't believe at first.
A dark orange spell was headed directly at his left leg, and he instinctively knew what it was by its description in Rookwood's book. That was a bone-breaking curse, and though he knew it wasn't fatal, it was far more violent than he expected from any of the guards in the Second Task. Harry knew that the curse would end his performance, so he did something Flitwick had instructed him early on to never do. He jumped to the ground as far away as possible.
Just as the half-goblin explained, the time it took for Harry to recover was longer than the time it took for the Patrol to redirect his aim. Harry rolled out of the way of the spells as best he could. Still, Harry kept getting pelted by stinging hexes, piercing jinxes, and other concussive curses. His body was covered in bruises and shallow bleeding cuts, and as it stood, it was a matter of time before the next spell he couldn't avoid was a Stupefy strong enough to knock him out. He had to force the Patrol to the defensive for long enough for him to stand and set a stance.
More or less blindly, Harry raised his wand in the general direction of the man and cast his first non-Parseltongue spell of the day.
"Lacero!"
The aggressive curse surprised the Patrol, and even though it passed to the left of him, he stopped his attacks to make sure that it didn't hit him. In that second, Harry managed to stand and cast another curse, and this time he didn't hold back, his anger taking over for just that one spell.
"Lacero!"
The difference in power between a hesitant, aimless curse and one cast in Parseltongue with conviction and viciousness behind it was almost comical. As it left his wand, the impact was so strong that his arm recoiled, his body temporarily reveling in the discharge before he regained his composure. While the first spell resembled a curse mostly on nomenclature, the second was unmistakably malicious. Its edges seemed to cut the air like knives, making a low whistling noise. The smell that dominated the room alone was enough to make Harry's hairs stand on edge, and the Patrol could only cast a haphazard shield to stop the spell from hitting him head-on. Upon contact, the Protego folded, only fractionally slowing down and deflecting the curse, which hit his side, creating a large gushing wound.
Weakened, the Patrol could only cast a quick medical spell which did very little to stop the bleeding before he had to dodge a fire whip from Harry. As they had agreed to do before Fleur's performance, he side-stepped and cast a whip of his own, intending to use it as leverage to push Harry to the ground. But Harry had been using wandless cutting charms to those whips for months now, and it was the Patrol who lost his balance as he pushed with all his strength and hit nothing. In that second, Harry rolled two spells in quick succession.
"Stupefy!" He cast. As he expected, the Patrol did as the Auror had done against Krum and remained barely conscious. "Depulso."
Harry approached the bleeding form of the Patrol cautiously, kicking the fallen wand out of reach just for good measure. The man was unconscious from the strength of his collision against the wall from the Banishing Charm. As the instructors and Ministry workers watched, troubled, Harry carefully levitated him, ignoring the protests of his even more pained-stricken body. The act took less than twenty seconds, and he carefully put the unconscious Patrol in a place where a medical team could easily reach him. The judges and Ministry workers all nodded approvingly, and Harry could tell he had earned the goodwill of many in the crowd by going out of his way to ensure his defeated opponent was safe.
"I really am an idiot," he mumbled to himself as he limped back to the house to collect the third key, distantly noticing the applause from the crowd. "All that nonsense about trying to impress everyone when all it took was to be me."
Approaching the fourth house was more difficult than the previous three, not because it was well-guarded, but because the pain under which he was already straining was now combined with exhaustion. He still had some spells on the tank, but that second Lacero had taken an awful lot of energy, and he had to lean against the wall of the building to recover his stamina for a moment.
His breaths were labored, now. The series of attacks he had endured from the Patrol were beyond his notice at the time, but now that he wasn't in combat, everything ached, and he could feel his legs wanting to give out. He was certainly far less mobile than just a few minutes before when he managed to power through his injuries to run and weave through spells with great agility.
Without running and only a few strong spells in reserve after spending so much energy, he had to find a way to move quickly without using his legs. He thought about summoning his broom but dismissed the thought. Even for him, the houses were too small to fly at speed with the broom, and as he needed both hands to make sharp turns, he wouldn't be able to protect himself or attack the guard inside.
Harry replayed the previous confrontations in his mind and decided to see if he couldn't combine strategies. Knowing he wouldn't be able to act in silence, he decided to be as fast and as violent as possible in a short burst. Again, Harry scouted the ruin, took note of where both Auror and key stood, and picked a good position. Then, he brandished his wand to the floor and cast a banishing spell, as strong as he could.
His rise wasn't gracious or controlled, but he just needed to vault over the wall, and that he managed comfortably. Then, he half-twisted his body and cast another spell.
"Ventus!"
A gust of wind sent him towards the center of the house in a descending curve. It was still not a controlled fall, but it was smooth enough for him to worry about the Auror and not the approaching ground. Deciding to emulate the strategy the guards had set upon him, Harry hastily cast another fire whip, trying to wrap it around the Auror's legs and pull. That way, he could control his landing better and knock the man to the ground, from where a couple of stunning charms would finish him. It was a matter of speed, and he had quick reflexes.
But he underestimated the reflexes of the Auror inside. Though he didn't counter Harry's magic, he managed to jump over the conjured fire whip. With no weight to balance his movement, Harry continued to flounder towards the ground. He tried to break the fall with a weak Ventus aimed at the floor but had to get his shield up to defend against the flurry of attacks. Harry landed unevenly and couldn't find a comfortable footing. He didn't sprawl in a heap of limbs, but it was enough to settle the confrontation. The Auror was far quicker than the Patrol, who himself was already faster than Harry. The moment the champion's wand wavered and the shield broke, three spells hit him in almost impossibly quick succession. A blasting curse hit him directly in the chest, breaking several ribs and making the air inside his lungs leave in a muted gasp. A disarming charm hit him in the shoulder, sending his wand flying upwards. And another curse he didn't recognize hit his right leg, which gave under him as though all its bones disappeared, much like that day Lockhart had screwed up that spell in his second year.
Refusing to go out, even as the broken ribs made even the slightest bit of movement agonizingly painful, Harry reached for his wand with a spell already on his tongue.
"Incendio!"
Green flames engulfed the air between champion and Auror, making the ruin so hot that it became unbearable. Harry's entire body shook and sweated, and he began to feel light-headed. The brightness of the flames was so intense that it was nearly blinding. But after a few seconds, another spell cut through the fire as though a knife cutting through butter, and before Harry could react, a red light hit his chest, and he gasped in pain as his ribs protested. A moment later, another one landed, and he passed out before he hit the floor.
The reaction to the end of Harry's performance was varied. Most people in the crowd applauded enthusiastically, screaming his name and cheering him on. Others were concernedly watching his unconscious body as it was carried away for medical attention. Some were silently impressed he managed to fell a Patrol, and others were loudly impressed he had accomplished the same thing. However, the obstinate few who came into the arena hating his guts laughed at his defeat and imitated his gasps of pain, heavy limping, and fainting at the end. Others were distressed at the violence with which he had cut his third opponent, even if he did ease his recovery later on.
Amelia and Alastor watched in silence, with pensive and somewhat grim expressions.
"You were wrong," she declared. "Potter didn't hold back."
"He did not," he conceded, narrowing his gaze. "But he didn't seem out of control, like the First Task."
"You think he won't lose control in the long run?" Amelia inquired in the same tone she used when asking for a report.
"I don't think he will," Moody said after thinking for a bit. Then he moved his jaw a bit. "But something's bothering me. Those two lacerating curses. They were too different."
"The first one was about as powerful as I expected from a student with his age and his ability," Amelia mused. "But the second..."
"Was way too powerful," he griped moodily. "It broke that shield like it was paper, and it wasn't a bad shield. It wasn't a great one, but it shouldn't have folded. But it was the same spell, I'm sure of it."
"Is the difference not intent?"
"I don't think intent can make up that much difference," Moody replied. "There's something more about the lad."
"Any guesses?" She demanded, and he shook his head.
"None that I like."
Elsewhere, in the arena, Tracey and Blaise were booing the people around Malfoy who were jeering and mocking Harry's performance. Things in the Slytherin section in the students were not as pro-Harry as in the Hufflepuff or Gryffindor portions, but many found the mocking disrespectful in light of what they considered a good performance. Still, a fair amount of Slytherin House joined in insulting Harry.
Tracey was furious, and even Blaise was angry. They weren't the only ones. Many people who weren't associated with Daphne's core group of allies and friends were similarly outraged, and some Professors thought it wise to intervene, ordering everyone to be silent.
"Unbelievable," Tracey hissed, with her fists clenched. "They are scum, mocking Harry's pain like that."
"It's just not right, no matter who it is," Blaise complained, sending a disapproving glare towards Malfoy. "For Potter to be like that, it must be an enormous amount of pain."
"They're bastards, all of them," Bole scoffed, doing the same as Blaise.
Tracey was about to agree when a stray thought crossed her mind. Daphne had been silent, even as the people around her were loud and brash in their disapproval of Malfoy's behavior. She frowned and turned to her best friend, and what she found there made her freeze.
Tracey had seen many of Daphne's moods over the years. Though her reputation as unapproachable and aloof wasn't factual, something that most Slytherins would admit by now, she was much more composed than other people their age. As her best friend for years, Tracey had seen Daphne be joyous, enthusiastic, sad, lazy, interested, arrogant, and dismissive. In those two first years at the school, she had seen Daphne isolated, defeated, and even depressed. Rarest of all her moods was anger, as Daphne always had excellent emotional control, unless the subject was her family, Tracey herself, and now, Harry.
Tracey expected to see anger in Daphne. If she was furious, she couldn't begin to imagine how her friend must have felt, seeing her boyfriend in so much pain during his fights and then having to endure the mocking of people like Malfoy and Montague. But Tracey didn't expect to see that much seething, cold fury. That was something she had only seen once when a child mocked Astoria's condition in St. Mungo's to her face before they entered Hogwarts. It wasn't a look that fit Daphne as a child, and it made Tracey deeply uncomfortable even then. But now, that intense calculating wrath in her expression was far fiercer, far darker, and far scarier. Tracey felt very small when Daphne looked at her and was hit with a sense of dread and terror when her ire didn't abate for even a fraction as their gazes met. Daphne wasn't angry. She wasn't even furious. She was murderous.
The mass of people was making noises as the champions' points were awarded below masked Daphne's mood well. But Tracey couldn't hear a single thing, no matter how loudly Bagman spoke. Witnessing Daphne's emotions had paralyzed her, both for fear of what her friend would do if left alone and in fear of Daphne herself. Those years ago, in St. Mungo's, Tracey had thought that such anger didn't fit any child. But that look in Daphne's eyes wouldn't match with anyone, ever. It was too intense, too violent, and too cold. It was like getting caught in the middle of a blizzard so stormy that you could do nothing but kneel and accept death.
Everyone left the arena. Daphne was silent throughout the exit as people talked vivaciously all around her. By this point, Tracey had signaled to Blaise that something was very wrong. Everyone followed Daphne as they entered the castle and then towards the Slytherin Dungeons. As her steps echoed loudly in the silent corridor, Tracey's nervousness increased. They found an empty classroom in an abandoned corridor. Everyone noticed that Daphne was indescribably angry, and they were silently waiting for her to do something.
Several moments passed in which Daphne was so still that it didn't seem like she was alive. She was statuesque, a teenager petrified by her rage, and Tracey's fear increased with every passing second.
Finally, Daphne spoke in a whisper.
"Tomorrow."
Everyone looked at one another in confusion. No one wanted to speak in that atmosphere. The only one who felt close enough to Daphne to interfere was so paralyzed in fear for her friend that she couldn't even move. Finally, Bole asked.
"What's tomorrow?"
Daphne laughed harshly, without taking her eyes from the floor, a sound that resembled metal scratching stone. It made the blood of everyone in the room run cold. "The ambush."
"Daphne, don't you think it's better if we wait?" Blaise questioned as politely as he could, but his voice shook when Daphne's eyes met his. Tracey suppressed a whimper at the emptiness there.
"No. We do it tomorrow."
"Greengrass," Aileen tried to object, but her argument was cut the moment Daphne turned to the older girl, who couldn't meet her gaze and looked down to the floor, meekly.
Feeling rising desperation that no one was able to object to Daphne's decision, Tracey managed to overcome her fright. "Daphne, please," she begged, trembling with tension all the while. When her friend met her gaze, the fury there only made her feel more desperate and determined to stop her. "You need to think this through. If you do something rash, you're going to regret it."
"Regret?" Daphne drawled slowly with such open derision that it hurt Tracey, who managed to keep herself from flinching. "What would I regret?"
"You're going to murder someone if you're this angry!" She hissed, tearing up. The fact that no one around Tracey seemed to disagree made her desperation spike, and when all she received from Daphne was a dark grin, her stomach sank.
"Murder? No, I won't murder anyone," Daphne chuckled in a sinister fashion. "I want them to suffer. I want to ensure that the Malfoy family is so isolated and weak that they can't do anything but fade away. I want to make sure that no one gets to isolate another Slytherin for two years for no reason other than her surname ever again," by this point, Daphne's cold fury had cracked slightly, and she was showing more visible signs of anger, which both alarmed and relieved Tracey. Daphne's eyes were tearful, her fists clenched, and she gritted her teeth so tightly that they seemed liable to fall off her mouth. "I want them to be so battered and so broken that no one ever thinks it's wise to use sick children to force women to marry against their will ever again!"
She screamed those two last words with such intense ferocity that the echo it produced around the castle was enough to frighten off anyone. Tracey knew that Daphne had felt the impact of her initial isolation in school far more than she let on, and she also recognized that Daphne had merely suppressed the terror of being so nearly betrothed to Malfoy against her desires to try to save Astoria. The delayed reaction was strange at first glance.
But it had all burst forth at once as Daphne watched them mock an injured and pained Harry. Despite her words, Tracey's fear that Daphne would do something she was bound to regret only increased. She knew that her friend would severely harm someone to fight against any one of those three incidents, but all of them combined spelled disaster.
"Daphne, reconsider, please," she insisted.
"Tomorrow," Daphne barked.
"I-is it even wise to ambush them tomorrow, so soon after the Task?" Bole tried a different approach. Blaise nodded, catching on to the idea.
"Maybe it's better to wait for a few days," he declared.
"No," Daphne denied. "Tomorrow."
"Daphne, think about it," Tracey supplicated.
"I have!" Daphne snapped. "If we wait, they'll forget why they're ambushing me. We need everyone to have my declaration in their mind and not the Second Task. We move tomorrow."
"That's just a rationalization!" Tracey protested.
"Yes, it is!" Daphne screamed back, making her friend take a step back in reflection. She spoke more quietly next, but equally as harshly. "Weren't you all desperate to say that authority here was mine, and not ours? Then, that's my first order. Tomorrow."
Daphne walked out, and the people she left behind looked at one another nervously, not knowing what to expect. Tracey knew that with Harry injured there was no one that could stop Daphne, but she wasn't going to let her friend be harmed or harm someone in a way that she would come to regret once she calmed down. She left the room with a purpose firmly in mind, vowing that Daphne wouldn't lose it the same way Harry had done.