Just a solid adventure chapter as Group 1 finishes their side of the dungeon.
Content warning for Draco coughing up blood.
Harry eyed the challenge ahead of him with dread. Three hooks, three raised platforms, and six Beamoses revolving in niches along the walls. He would have maybe three seconds to plan each swing. Which sounded like enough time in theory, due to how easily the Vine Whip latched onto things, but theory didn't involve having to time his swings to occur when a set of laser-turrets wasn't looking. The three statues on the left turned opposite the three on the right and each pair of Beamoses looking at the platforms was staggered by a couple of seconds. Getting hit by a Beamos would mean being knocked into the foul water below and having to start the challenge over again with the added difficulty of nursing a second-degree burn. Harry had to assume there was some way to get past them without getting fried; he just wasn't seeing that golden window.
Behind him, Red was chasing Malfoy in circles to try and take off his scarf. The Slytherin had started coughing and wheezing soon after they'd left the temple's large central room. Harry had chalked it up to the effects of breathing humid, mossy air for a little too long. Then Malfoy had spat blood. And more blood had begun showing in patches through the thick wool of his scarf. He had kept insisting he was fine, though, even as he continued being wracked by alarmingly wet-sounding coughing fits.
What alarmed Harry more than the boy's mysterious injury was that Malfoy refused to complain about whatever was wrong with him. Malfoy lived to whinge. Most of what he said was either whining criticism or mean-spirited criticism. For him to attempt to draw attention away from a problem he was having made alarm bells sound in Harry's mind.
A heavy tail thumped against his hip. He looked down to see Dog standing there. The canine stared intently at the Beamoses and then looked up with a soft bark.
"Have you figured something out?" Harry asked. He was open to any suggestions, regardless of who they came from.
Dog nodded and returned to watching the Beamoses. He sat down, squinting intently. When the front set had just looked away from the first platform, he barked.
Harry watched the statues make another revolution, now watching how the entire group moved. The front set looked away, then the next, then the next…Huh, he hadn't noticed that. It had just seemed random before.
"Oh, that does work! Good boy." He petted Dog, who closed his eyes happily.
"Hands off of my dog, Potter! You're still filthy!" Malfoy shouted hoarsely. He planted his palm against Red's face and pried at the fingers the boy had hooked onto his scarf. "And you! Get your hands off of me, Potter!"
Red backed up a half-step, ducked under Malfoy's block, and caught the Slytherin in a one-armed headlock. "Nope! I let you do the stupid thing and you only started getting worse. I'm doing the smart thing now," he declared. "We're going to have a talk. See you in a minute, Green!" He dragged a loudly protesting Malfoy into the last room, a maze of blind stone corners and waiting blade traps. Soon, Malfoy's yelling turned to furious whispering.
Harry had to admit he was mystified. Though he wasn't generally too curious about people unless he thought they might be trying to kill him, Malfoy's odd fixation on his neck before the temple and subsequent bleeding presented some rather interesting questions. Such as: what was wrong with him, why was he being so stubbornly quiet about it, and why did Red seem to be the only one in the know? There was also the fact that Red had been asking weird questions "for a project" and consulting Hermione for information to help him on said project. Why would Red go out of his way to research something his teachers hadn't assigned him?
He glanced down at Dog. "Do you know what's going on with them?" he asked.
Dog barked and summoned the Lenses of Truth to his face. Curiously, their frame had stretched to accommodate his snout. He gave Harry a tongue-lolling grin.
"I should look at him with the magic glasses?" Harry asked for clarification. If Malfoy's secret had something to do with the Lenses of Truth, then Red knowing about it made sense. He hardly ever took those things off.
Dog nodded.
Harry rubbed his chin. "I guess I'll try doing that after this temple, then, since I still need my whip for now. Do you think he'll be okay, with his…whatever?"
The beast looked as thoughtful as a dog could for several long seconds. Then he raised his little eyebrow tufts and tilted his head to one side.
"Oh." That was a little ominous. Malfoy's current closest companion wasn't sure if the boy would be alright? Now Harry was becoming more concerned for the aristocrat's health. Malfoy had been becoming more tolerable lately, less wound up about "blood purity" this and "my father" that. It didn't seem fair for the boy to start turning his act around, only to be struck down by Mysterious Bleeding Neck Disease.
"Arrr," Dog said with a commiserating nod. Then he toward the door, his ears pricking up.
Red and Malfoy emerged from the last room. They wore similar strained, haunted expressions, as if Malfoy's unease had become infectious. Dog padded over to Malfoy and wound around him like a cat until the boy started petting him, while Harry peered worriedly at his brother.
Gripping Red by the shoulder, he pulled him in closer. It was unsettling to see his own face so uneasy and pale. "What happened?" he asked in concern. Red was a difficult boy to shake up. He was very much one to roll with the punches and accept whatever new weirdness came up. "Are you okay? Is he okay?"
"I…think so?" Red said. He grimaced, though Harry wasn't sure why. "Malfoy agreed to go to the Hospital Wing later. They, er…his neck…the thing going on isn't really hurting him, so he's fine for now."
"Red, he's bleeding."
His brother rubbed at the back of his neck. "It's from his throat…clearing. Some stuff is happening to him, and, erm…yeah. He'll be okay, just a little weirder."
Malfoy winced at the last word and put his hands to his neck. "Father is going to disown me," he moaned.
Stepping out in front of him, Dog growled and stamped his front paw on the floor.
"I'm not paranoid. I'm being realistic," Malfoy insisted. "I've told you what he's like. He'll either disown me or have me locked up in the manor like some…some bastard." He spat the last word.
Dog turned and faced an imaginary enemy. Snarling ferociously, he lunged forward with his jaws wide and ripped his unseen target apart.
"You are not allowed to maul my father, no matter how unreasonable he may be," Malfoy said sternly. "The same goes for Professor Snape, before you ask."
Dog made an offended noise and pawed the floor again.
Malfoy crossed his arms. "Getting back at them must be done with tact and subtlety. Until you prove to me you're capable of such things, I'm leaving you out of my plans."
"Arrumph," his pet growled, gently head-butting him in the chest.
Harry watched the interaction with fascination. Malfoy really was changing. He had always struck Harry as a kind of Evil Hermione: intelligent and respectful of authority figures, but also using that cunning and the favor of those adults to make everyone else's day worse. If he broke the rules, he generally did it by wielding his father's influence like a Beater's bat, kissing up to Snape, or sliding it under the notice of the Hogwarts staff. And he rarely did anything directly against a teacher, except for Hagrid; Malfoy seemed to view him much in the same way Hermione thought of Trelawney. To see him planning to outright defy two of the people he probably respected the most was astounding. Was it Dog's influence or the Harrys'? Maybe a combination of both?
"What are you looking at, Potter?" Malfoy snapped. His yellowish gray eyes darted to Red. "What is he looking at?" he hissed more quietly.
"You're fine, mate. Green's just having a moment, is all," Red assured him. He looked at Harry. "Do we have a plan to get to the next room, or what?"
Harry blinked. Oh, right. Temple. "Er, yes, we do. Dog figured out the timing." Once they'd all lined up against the edge of the first gap, he said, "Don't worry about how random it all looks. When the first pair of Beamoses looks away, start your jumps and go as fast as you can until you get to the other side. If you take more than a few seconds in between, you'll get zapped and knocked into the water." He slid his tongue across his teeth, still tasting moss and finding new sources of grit. "Trust me, you'd rather fall into the corpse-water in the last temple than the muck here. It's so thick that you can't see, so you have to figure out which way is up while totally blind."
Malfoy visibly shuddered at the mention of the nasty water below. Harry swore the boy was greener every time he looked at him. He wondered whether the prissy aristocrat might have a nervous breakdown if left to wander around this dirty temple full of questionable water and algae-stained stone for too long. While the idea would have been entertaining a few weeks ago, it gave him a slight pit in his stomach now.
"We'll go one at a time," Harry said. He took out his whip and dragged his eyes away from Malfoy to watch the first pair of Beamoses. "Follow me."
Praying he didn't screw up immediately after declaring he'd set an example, he bent his knees and prepared to swing. His heart pounded in his chest; getting hit by a laser and then taking an unpleasant swim wasn't exactly lethal, but he really, really didn't want to experience that water again. His robes were so heavy with rotted, reeking plant sludge that he was mildly tempted to burn them.
Right as the blue centers of the Beamoses' eyes moved away from the platform between them, he focused on the golden hook overhead and swung his whip at it. He didn't pause to check its grip after it connected, throwing his body across the gap. His feet hit the next platform a little awkwardly, but he was already aiming for the next hook as he stumbled. It didn't need to be perfect; it just needed to be good enough to get him across. He flung out his whip and swung again. In his impatience, he mistimed his dismount and almost missed the edge of the next platform. For a seeming eternity he wind-milled his arms desperately to catch his balance.
"No more swimming!" he blurted out, thrusting his hips forward. It was just enough to shift his center of balance. He locked his eyes on the next hook as soon as he was stable. There was no time to consider how many seconds he'd wasted on recovering from a bad jump. 'Don't think about the Beamoses. Don't think about the Beamoses!' he chanted in his head. The whip wrapped around his target and he sprang off of the platform like it had turned to hot coals. He heard the shrill buzz of Beamos blasts and felt a burst of hot air brush against the back of his neck immediately after. It startled him so badly that he missed his landing and hit the painted wood of the last platform in a tumble of banged knees and elbows.
'I made it,' he thought dizzily. Then, with some guilt, 'Oops, did the others feel that?'
"Ouch, Green! You suck at landings!" Red's voice echoed from across the room.
"Sorry!" he called back.
Dog was the next one to make it over. One running start and three impressive leaps was all it took. Harry suddenly understood why people throughout history had been so enchanted by the grace of various four-legged things. Dog could spring across five meters with ease and land on a dime!
The shaggy beast landed neatly in front of Harry and looked over his shoulder. "Boo-woof!" he bellowed encouragingly at the rest of their group.
"Easy enough for you to say!" Malfoy shouted. "You'd better save me if I drown!"
The Slytherin went next, after some nudging from Red. Despite his skill with a whip, he was even worse at landings than Harry. The first was a stumble, the next an awkward roll that definitely left bruises and almost dropped him off of the platform. Like Harry, he hardly made the last jump before the Beamoses came back around. As it was, they managed to graze one of his feet before he pulled it out of range. Malfoy yelped in pain, but he managed not to let go of his whip. He was coming in at entirely the wrong angle though, thanks to him curling up in the air.
Harry, foreseeing disaster, whipped out his wand. "Wingardium Leviosa!" he cried, aiming for Malfoy's torso. While he didn't have the same skill at guiding floating objects as Hermione, he could at least stop something in the air.
To his complete surprise, Malfoy continued falling. In fact, if Dog hadn't run to cushion him with his body, the boy would have likely fractured his elbow. It was as if Harry hadn't cast any spell at all!
'Have I forgotten how to do a Levitation Charm?' he wondered. It wasn't something he used often, so he might have gotten some part of it wrong. "Sorry about that, Malfoy," he said. "I guess I'll have to practice that spell again before the next temple."
Malfoy pushed his hair out of his face. Some strands had come loose from whatever he used to slick them back. "I'm sure your spellwork is still passable, Potter," he said tiredly. "Magic just doesn't work on me anymore." Hissing through his teeth, he disentangled his injured foot from his robes to scrutinize it.
"Magic doesn't work on you?" Harry parroted dumbly. His brain tried and failed to find a line connecting the dots between Malfoy's mysterious illness and new immunity to magic. "But why?"
The aristocrat looked away, one hand picking at the charred leather of his shoe. "If it's still pertinent after this temple, I may decide to tell you."
"But it's kind of pertinent right now, isn't—"
"Incoming!" Red's shout made Harry reflexively jump back. It was a good thing, too, because otherwise his brother would have clobbered him. Red landed, rolled, and popped back to his feet. "That was fun! I really like this thing." He waggled his whip. "I hope some of these hooks show up around the castle so we can swing around the halls. Wouldn't that be brilliant?"
Harry and Malfoy both gave him looks that questioned his sanity.
"Did you switch out with Yellow while I wasn't looking?" Harry asked, flicking the colored strand in his brother's hair. "I don't get how you're like this."
Red shrugged. "What can I say? Adventure is my calling." He noticed Malfoy and raised an eyebrow. "You alright there, mate? Or are we carrying you through the rest of this place?"
The aristocrat's face screwed up. He looked torn between insulting Red and honestly considering the offer. He tentatively pressed his injured foot against the floor. Then he stood up, wincing and using Dog as leverage. "I'll manage," he said tersely.
"To the next room, then!" Red led the way through the next door, full of enthusiasm.
Then he and Harry stopped, knocked to their knees by a flash of pain arcing through their backs. Harry doubled over and ground his forehead into the cold tiles, breathing out a silent scream. It felt like a troll had stabbed him with a giant sharpened fork! What the hell were his brothers getting up to?
He counted in his head in measured seconds. At eleven (he may have counted a tad fast), the pain lifted away. He pushed himself up and grimaced at the pinch in his abdomen. He'd been clenching so hard he'd given himself a stitch in his side.
Malfoy was staring at him with wide eyes. "You were dead quiet," he said. "But it looked like it hurt so much…?" The boy floundered, visibly conflicted over his small admission of concern. Then he squared his shoulders and lifted his nose. "You're fine to keep going, aren't you?" he said haughtily. "I know that shared-pain curse doesn't linger."
Red lurched to his feet and brushed off his knees. "We're fine, Malfoy. Just glad to know you care."
With a condescending sneer, Malfoy drawled, "Of course I care. I can't have my pawns breaking while they're still useful." He winced when Dog smacked him in the leg with his heavy tail.
For some reason, the snooty comment made Harry suppress a smile. Did Malfoy mean to sound so absurd, or was it by accident? Either way, he was starting to see why Red put up with him. He was entertaining to watch, if nothing else.
He laid a hand on his upper back, a frown on his face. What had that been, though? Not a Skulltula's fangs—there had been too many points of pain. Definitely not a Peahat, because those could only slice, not stab. Whatever it was, the injury had felt severe. Was his brother okay?
Malfoy snapped his fingers in front of Harry's face. "Sitting here worrying isn't going to help anyone, Potter. The best thing you can do is get through whatever nonsense is ahead and try not to get injured while you're at it."
Harry supposed he had a point. They were in a relatively calm spot right now, but they had no idea where they were in the temple and they could potentially be wandering around lost for hours until they found his injured brother. It was best to push that worry to the back of his mind so he didn't add to his group's collective pain due to making stupid, distracted mistakes. He stood up and brushed the dirt from the temple floor off of his forehead. "I'm alright," he told Malfoy.
"Good." The blond strutted off toward the next doorway. Red and Dog followed behind him.
When Malfoy reached the entrance to the next challenge he stopped with a look of horror. Backpedaling, he tucked himself behind Dog.
Red held onto the edge of the doorway and leaned in. He whistled. "Damn, that's a lot of green. Hey, Green, lookit!"
Harry jogged forward, then froze when he took in the sight of the room. His feet rooted themselves in place as he was suddenly overcome by his cleaning instincts. The place was positively plastered in algae and moss. He could only guess that it had been sealed up and ignored longer than any of the other areas they'd seen so far, allowing it to grow a thicker carpet of glistening wet plant life. In the greenish tinge of the temple's lighting every inch of the room looked like a potential health hazard. The urge to gag welled up in Harry's throat. He swallowed hard. Maybe Aunt Petunia's lessons in scrubbing had drilled their way deeper into his personality than he'd thought.
They all forced themselves to go in. It only took a few breaths of the warm, unbearably moist air to send Malfoy into a renewed fit of coughing. Harry groaned internally. The boy had only just stopped hacking up blood and now this awful room had made him relapse. Even worse, this was the only way to continue through moving through the temple unless they were to turn back and face that collection of Beamoses again.
"Why…is this happening…to me?" Malfoy whined between coughs. It was the most in-character thing he'd had to say about his throat problems all day. He loosened his scarf a tad to rearrange it around his neck, then pulled it tight. Closing his eyes, he pressed his hands tightly against the layers of wool.
"Are you trying to strangle yourself again?" Harry asked tentatively. He looked to Red. "Should we stop him?"
"He's probably trying to, er…focus his breathing," Red said. "I think all the water in the air is messing with him."
The question of "why?" itched at Harry's skin. He desperately wanted to ask what he was missing—because he was clearly missing something obvious—but he knew that asking "why" would only get him more frustrating responses. Red didn't want to say, Malfoy didn't want to say, and Harry wouldn't be able to put Dog's advice into action until after they found the spell scroll for the Vine Whip. Though he knew some members of the large expedition team in the last temple had abandoned one artifact to use another while fighting the monster at the end, he hadn't thought to ask what happened when one did that. Would summoning the Lenses of Truth banish his whip and leave him stranded? Would he be able to drop the weapon to call up something else and pick it up again later? He didn't know and he didn't want to take the risk, no matter how much he wanted to solve the mystery.
Rather than voice any of the impatient curiosity burning within him, he scoped out the room. It was, as its smell and color implied, very full of water. Moving platforms stuck a few inches out of the water and slid through it along circular paths made visible by the relative lack of surface debris. Their sides were coated in a thick enough carpet of slime that he shuddered. Somehow, this temple unsettled him more than the last. There was something about living contamination that hit him harder in the urge to disinfect than any of the long-dead things in that crypt. Anyway, there were moving platforms, lots of water, no visible enemies, a handful of golden hooks, and something shiny at the other end of the room. Harry squinted. It was gold, he could see that much. And maybe…four?
"Oi, Malfoy." He nudged the Slytherin in the shoulder. "You have better eyes than I do. What's that at the end of the room?"
Malfoy scowled at him, but obediently looked. "There are four sideways hooks," he paused to wheeze, "like the ones on the ceiling. I can only assume…" Now a five-second coughing fit, "…they're meant to be interacted with in the same way."
Harry nodded. "Alright, we've got a pretty straightforward room, then." He cracked his knuckles and watched the platforms swirl through the green-blanketed water. The water seriously just got worse with every room they traveled through. He wondered if the worst pool of it would even be recognizable as water, or if it would just be primordial soup at that point.
'Stop thinking about it,' he thought, shaking his head. If he got too deep into considering things like that, he'd only wind up making himself feel ill. Aiming for the first hook, he swung to the first moving platform. The fact that it was moving in a different direction than the force of his momentum made him wobble dangerously upon landing. He dropped into a crouch and tried desperately not to think about what had almost happened. The horrible green water was something he could have nightmares about later; he needed to have his head on straight right now. He stood, gritting his teeth at the feeling of instability, and waited for the next platform to come around. When it did, he snapped his whip up at the hook, swung, touched down, and kneeled before he could tip over. For the next platform, he did the same. Efficient, cautious, and safe. No more swimming for him today. Just one more jump and he'd be across—
There was a splash behind him. Then another.
With his heart sinking, Harry turned around. Malfoy was floundering in the green soup, clutching his throat with one hand and slapping the water with the other in an uncoordinated attempt to swim. His mouth was wide open for reasons Harry didn't understand, issuing raspy noises that didn't sound healthy. Dog, who had caused the second splash, was paddling over to him as quickly as he could. He clamped his teeth on the back of Malfoy's collar, scarf and all, and towed him back toward the starting platform. As he dragged the boy onto land, the scarf came loose.
Harry held his breath as it fell away. What had Malfoy been hiding since the hedge maze? What secret had he and Red been teaming up to keep?
The accessory dipped enough to reveal the blond's neck, and Harry saw…a thin layer of smeared blood and nothing else of note. He squinted, wondering whether there was really nothing or his eyes were just that bad. "What have you been freaking out for?" he called across the room. "I don't know where you're bleeding from, but your neck looks fine."
Malfoy was too busy coughing to react, but Red seemed to jolt in surprise. He peered closely at the Slytherin and proclaimed, "You do look fine! See, if you'd just shown me instead of being stupid, you could have saved yourself a lot of worry." He clapped the boy on the back.
Malfoy stopped hacking and spluttering just long enough to swear at him.
Since the rest of his team seemed relatively alright for the time being, Harry made the last jump. For the fun of it, he stuck the landing like he'd seen a gymnast do on TV. It was the little things that made life more enjoyable.
While waiting for the other three to make their way over, he perused the hooks on the wall. Like Malfoy had said, they were exactly like the ones hanging from the ceiling, only on shorter poles that recessed into metal slots. They were probably designed to all be pulled on at once. What would happen when they flipped the switches? Anticipation made his heartbeat pick up speed.
He was in for a long wait, though. Red made it across more easily than Harry had, and Dog made clearing the room look like a breeze, but Malfoy just couldn't seem to get the hang of swinging onto moving platforms. He'd land, tumble sideways as the moving tiles pulled his feet in another direction than the one he'd been going in, and hit the water.
Red kept shouting encouragements at him, though Malfoy only shouted insults in reply. Harry wasn't sure whether his brother was doing it as an honest effort or just to wind the Slytherin up.
After the fourth time of falling in, Malfoy spat a final curse and just started swimming. And he was fast. Harry watched, stunned, as the Slytherin sliced through the water despite the waterlogged robes weighing him down. He'd assumed, from seeing the first time the boy had fallen in, that Malfoy couldn't swim at all.
"You're like a fish!" Harry exclaimed once Malfoy had dragged himself onto the ground next to him. "Why have I never seen you by the Black Lake if you're that good? You'd have to practice a lot to get so fast."
The boy wiped the slime off his face with his equally slimy sleeve and sent Harry an unamused scowl. "Firstly: never compare me to a fish. Ever." His voice was flat and cutting. "Secondly, the Black Lake is freezing and infested with Grindylows and merpeople. I'd rather wait until the summer to go to my family's private beach." He paused. "Wait, how did I say all of that?" He coughed experimentally and then slapped his hands to his neck. "I can breathe?" he said in disbelief. "How did that awful sludge help?"
"Maybe getting dunked a few times un-confused your breathing," Red suggested. "Because…water, y'know?"
Malfoy got a nasty look on his face. "Well, aren't you the eloquent one? You should write poetry."
Red just beamed at him. "Hey, you sound like you again! Now let's get this temple over with, shall we?"
They all faced the hooks, three with whips at the ready and one with his jaws clamped sideways over the metal switch. They all latched on and pulled in their different ways, until the hooks slid farther out from the wall. When they couldn't pull them out any more, the four of them let go and the hooks snapped back with a heavy clunk. There was a moment of silent anticipation.
The temple rumbled under Harry's feet. Something had shifted, just like how corridors at the castle kept changing.
A door to the left of them that Harry hadn't noticed now slid open. Through the opening he could see the colored light produced by the glass ceiling of the temple's central hub. Had they really just gone in a big circle? His sense of direction was so thrown off by the multitude of doors and the lack of any constant landmarks that he couldn't keep track of where his group was in the temple. He doubted he could have found his way back to the temple's center if it hadn't given him an obvious invitation.
Walking through the open doorway, he immediately set to finding what had changed. It wasn't difficult; he'd already had a suspicion of what needed to be done to reach the final room. A new platform, dripping green and wreathed in plant matter, now stood in front of the big metal door. It perfectly filled in the big gap he'd noticed before.
"Well, the path to get to the big monster is open now," he said. "Now we just need the key to open the door."
"Must we find it ourselves?" Malfoy whined. Now that he was healthier than he'd been throughout the temple, his bratty disposition had clicked back on. "If there are two groups of us in here, I think it's only fair the other four pull their own weight." He dropped on his rump right where he stood. "We've done our part without the benefit of a map or a compass, which means they must have found both. I think we've earned a moment of respite. Besides, my foot hurts and none of the meager healing spells either of you may have learned will make it feel any better."
Harry rolled his eyes, but Malfoy had a decent point. He sat down next to the Slytherin and the rest of his team followed suit. He figured it wouldn't hurt to take a moment to relax in this beautiful, ruined room.