Chapter 8
He loved libraries. The books, the knowledge, the towering shelves that cooed promises of all the magic he had yet to learn. You could get lost in there, and it was that particular fact that Harry was especially thankful for at that moment. It allowed him to… not hide, because he wasn't hiding, but just… disappear from sight while he searched for the book he had remembered he needed.
The fact that he had remembered he needed it thirty seconds after Daphne had gone to the bathroom was just a coincidence.
It wasn't like he had anything against those that were still at their table. Blaise and Tracey were nice enough he supposed, even if they sometimes looked at him funny, and once Astoria had burned through some of her energy she was quite tolerable, and none of them had mentioned any of those Skeeter articles that he didn't care enough to read, but they just… well, they weren't Daphne. Talking to them felt awkward and uncomfortable, and if there was one thing he hated it was feeling uncomfortable. Sirius would say that he couldn't stay uncomfortable around people forever and that he may as well get used to it now, and that would probably persuade him if he had any intention of interacting with people with any kind of frequency in the future.
Of course, it probably didn't help that most conversations he had with them sprouted from their homework assignments, and then he tended to go into a bit too much detail and they invariably ended up confused. In fact, had he spoken to them about anything other than magical theory even once in the few weeks since Daphne had convinced him to join their study sessions? He doubted it.
The benefit to that, though, was that it was more or less mindless. He could talk about fourth-year level magic with barely any effort at all, and it meant he didn't have to think about…things. Things, of course, meaning Daphne and her confusing yet quite pleasant change in behaviour.
Nothing huge had changed, mind you, and he hadn't really noticed it until he had eventually healed from the blood-boiling curse. It had taken six days of ever-increasing stress, with five and a half of those days showing very little progress and then the final four hours or so with rapid healing.
It was an extremely interesting result. It made Harry wonder if maybe he would be able to recover from that particular curse in the space of a few hours now that his magic knew what to do, or maybe whether he would get progressively quicker the more he was exposed, but the whole thing was rather overshadowed by the hug she had given him when the results finally showed he was recovered.
No, hug wasn't an adequate word. Assault would arguably be better. He hadn't been hugged her been compressed. She had thrown herself at him and then squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, giggling in his ear all the while, and he had been quite unsure what to do with himself in the endless millisecond before she let go.
He had put it down to relief at the time, but in the two weeks or so since he knew something had changed. Something had changed at the yule ball, actually. Some tiny yet oh so significant shift that he couldn't define but knew was there, but knowing it was there didn't mean he wasn't still at a loss as to what the change actually was. What change would make her like touching him more? The occasional expectant, almost confused looks she gave him only made things even more murky.
It almost made him regret not returning home on New Years Eve, because Sirius would surely have ambushed him and then explained all… all this. But he didn't regret it, because the lake was very pretty in the moonlight and became even more so when the fireworks reflected off its surface. Daphne seemed to have enjoyed it too – though that should be expected given it was her idea – even if her warming charms must have been abysmal given how close she sat to him.
Shuffling from his left drew his eyes and, annoyingly, Astoria appeared on his aisle. Damn, he had forgotten that she was doing a history assignment. If he had remembered he'd have decided another subject was more interesting, but as it was he had no choice but to return to their table.
Both Tracey and Blaise were blessedly engrossed in their work, allowing him to silently take his seat and start on his book about the history of the ancient kingdom of Aksum – one of the few ancient civilisations that had produced their own runic alphabet rather than simply a dialect of someone else's. This was one of Ben and Jasmine's very irritating joint assignments where he had to research the historical context of a runic alphabet so that he could then translate something Jasmine gave him, and it almost made him wish for the easy assignments Hogwarts gave out.
Faint footsteps approached from behind him, causing Blaise to glance up from his transfiguration assignment. He gave a quick almost-smile before he looked back down, and a second later Harry felt a featherlight touch ghost over his shoulder. He shivered despite himself as Daphne dropped silently into the chair next to his and immediately started flipping through a book as if nothing had happened.
That was exactly what he was talking about! Casual touching, closer proximity, more prolonged eye contact. It was driving both him and Tom mad. The difference was that his madness was quite a nice one.
'Will you stop obsessing?'
'I'm not obsessing.'
'You're always obsessing,' Tom insisted angrily. 'Everything is about her. We've barely progressed in our planning for the next task because you're too busy pining.'
Harry ignored the implication he was pining. He obviously wasn't.
'Are you suggesting we actually need all this time?' he retorted instead.
'No, but given that you've already wasted over a month of it I'd say we better get a move on so that you don't waste all of our time thinking about the way her fingers feel.'
There was a pronounced sneer in his voice that made Harry's fingers clench. He did not spend all his time thinking about her fingers of all things. That would be pathetic. But that didn't mean he hadn't wondered why it felt so strange…
'Fine,' Harry hissed, 'we'll do it now. What's your suggestion Tom? If it's just me that's been wasting time then surely you have ideas.'
'Self-transfiguration,' Tom said immediately. 'Not partial transfiguration, of course. I'm not turning ourselves into a half fish monstrosity. No, no, no. Not only will we look ridiculous, it's also not as advanced as it looks.'
It was still quite advanced, Harry knew, but he chose not to point that out to an already frustrated Tom.
'What we'll do is give ourselves gills and webbed feet, maybe even something sensory. If we can feel vibrations in the water that will give us an advantage given it will be dark at the bottom of the lake, and maybe we can try something with our eyes too so we can see better. The gills will be tricky considering fish don't have lungs so we'll effectively be making ourselves an entirely new respiratory system, but that's the point.'
'Gills and webbed feet? You mean exactly what you get when you take gillyweed?'
'Gillyweed is the simpleton's way out,' Tom said as if speaking to a particularly dim child, 'and it webs the fingers too. That will make complex spell casting rather difficult, and what's the point if we're not doing any complex spell casting.'
Harry resisted the urge to sigh.
'Tom,' he said with very thin patience, 'you do realise we've never tried self-transfiguration before? Ever?'
'That's why you shouldn't be wasting so much time.'
A slight nudge brought him out of his annoyance, and he looked up at met Daphne's eyes.
"You okay?" she asked quietly.
He nodded and gestured at his book, and she nodded and returned to her own with a quick, soft smile.
He had gotten used to Daphne somehow knowing what he was feeling, so instead he focussed on Tom. Tom wasn't used to being told no, and to be fair dragging his feet really wasn't going to benefit either of them when they would have to share the same head. They had plenty of books referencing self-transfiguration in their room, but while he was here he might as well look at those the library had to offer. He didn't want to leave just yet.
~Scene Change~
It was almost February by the time Harry admitted to himself that he would need advice. He and Tom were already sure they knew what was going on, of course, but it would be best to check. The implications were significant to say the least.
"Harry," Dumbledore said in surprise as he entered the headmaster's office, "I wasn't expecting you – today isn't our usual session."
The happy look in his eyes faded to concern as he looked at him.
"What's wrong my boy?"
Harry paused under Dumbledore's gaze, wondering where to start.
"I've been trying to learn self-transfiguration," he began, "for the second task."
"Trying?" Dumbledore asked. "Self-transfiguration is difficult, but I have seen you perform more difficult feats of magic."
Harry nodded silently. Admitting he couldn't do something stung, but it wasn't really his fault. He just wasn't sure how to explain it.
"Can you transfigure me, professor?"
The concern in Dumbledore's eyes deepened. Nonetheless, he stood and waved his wand over Harry's arm. Crimson feathers sprouted from his skin, flickering gold in the light from the fire, and Fawkes gave a little squawk of approval from his perch.
Dumbledore spent several seconds staring at the arm before nodding to himself.
"I don't see the-"
The feathers had started to lighten, continuing to do so until they matched the pale colour of his skin. They looked like hideous, impossible folds of flesh, almost alive as they shuffled along his arm, becoming smaller and smaller until they disappeared like cloth stretched over a table. Frowning, Dumbledore waved his wand again, this movement seeming more complex. Harry felt shifting under his skin, the muscles seeming to twitch, before they seemed to slow back to stillness again.
Dumbledore's eyes flicked rapidly between Harry's arm and his face before he sighed, evidently having come to the same conclusion that Harry himself had.
"I had always thought that your ability simply healed damage," he said as he sat heavily behind his desk, "but it appears I was mistaken. It restores you to what it considers you should be. Not your most ideal self – that second spell altered the composition of your muscle fibres. It made you faster, and yet your body reversed it almost instantly."
He sighed again, looking every day of his long age.
"If we are correct then anything that changes you on the physical level may not work, not simply self-transfiguration. Polyjuice potion, gillyweed, any potions or rituals involving physical enhancement…"
He sighed heavily, glancing towards his bookshelves.
"I had hoped… but we may be wrong…"
"I already tried gillyweed, professor," Harry interrupted. "It didn't work."
Dumbledore sagged ever so slightly. Fawkes swooped over onto the back of Dumbledore's chair and started nuzzling into his beard. The headmaster still looked tired but he smiled nonetheless as he ruffled the bird's feathers, and Fawkes looked very pleased with himself as he hopped up onto Dumbledore's shoulder.
"I must confess, Harry, that the great many unknowns of your ability are rather frustrating," he said lightly. "But, it is nice to not know something for once."
"I'd rather know, professor."
"I'm sure you would," Dumbledore smiled, "and frankly, so would I. Unfortunately some magic is simply meant to remain unknown."
Harry had no plans of allowing his magic to remain unknown, but he certainly wasn't going to tell Dumbledore that.
"Now," Dumbledore said, grinning in a way that reminded Harry far too much of Sirius, "as headmaster it is my duty to check in on my students."
The grin deepened.
"How has Miss Greengrass been doing recently?"
Harry found himself blushing, and he rushed out with Dumbledore's chuckles echoing after him.
~Scene Change~
Coming up with a suitably impressive method of completing the task had been an irritating process when anything self-transfiguration related was off the table. Still, eventually he had come up with a method that would be both effective and soothing to Tom's ego, even if the item he would sorely miss remained a mystery. That bothered him, but at least locating whatever the organisers chose wouldn't be difficult seeing as he had put a tracking charm on every single item of importance he owned. It was blood magic but it wasn't technically illegal, just slightly frowned upon, and even though it was supposed to be used to find family members he could see no reason he couldn't use it to find items he had imbued with his blood.
He'd cast a few extra charms on each item too just in case. They probably wouldn't be able to remove the blood charm, but he didn't want to take chances with Dumbledore involved.
He had back-up ideas too, like locating either the wizard or the merperson that was surely guarding his item. That would be irritating if they had hidden each champion's item in different places, but he doubted it would be necessary anyway.
As he had little desire nor patience to put up with students and press and just people in general Harry remained in his rooms until it was time for the task. It was confusing, though – he couldn't find anything noteworthy that was missing. Not his invisibility cloak, his painting, nor any of his experimental notebooks. Everything was where it should be. What could they have taken that he cared about but hadn't noticed?
'They must have taken something of little importance just because they had to,' Tom said, 'maybe even something from Sirius's house. Dumbledore likely knew we wouldn't fall for it.'
Harry doubted it – there wasn't anything at home he would truly miss, and there was a heavy feeling in his gut that pushed a sense of urgency into his steps.
The corridors were more or less empty as he made his way through the castle and out onto the grounds, all but the stragglers having long ago taken their seats in the stands that now stood next to the lake. Four curtains of silver were hovering high above the water, unmoved by the winter wind that was howling past them. Three of them had the crests of the respective schools displayed proudly in their centre, and the fourth had a stylised P that Harry vaguely remembered Sirius showing him once. His family crest, he supposed.
That was one mystery solved; he had been wondering what exactly the crowd was going to be watching beyond the surface of a lake.
The three other champions were stood at the waters edge, each of them wearing swimsuits similar to the one that had appeared in his room that morning, and Harry was taken aback by how agitated each of them looked. Fear was splashed across their faces, almost drowning everything else. Even Krum was scared beneath the fury, and the heavy feeling in Harry's gut deepened as he wondered what could have been taken that each of them could value so much.
'Their own fault for not protecting their valuables,' Tom sneered.
Purple robes separated from the huddle of adults at the judges table and quickly began making their way towards him. There was a sense of caution to Dumbledore's gait which set Harry on edge, and one glance at Dumbledore's twinkleless eyes had Harry searching the stands as a horrid idea settled in his mind.
Sirius and Nikolay and everyone else were crowded into the families box but Harry's eyes slid off them quickly, the relief of seeing them eclipsed by the worry he felt when found Blaise, Tracey and Astoria in the sea of green and silver. He searched the seats around them, searched the whole stands, but he couldn't find her. Daphne wasn't there.
The looks on the other champions' faces suddenly made sense. They hadn't taken things, they'd taken people.
Worry gave way to fury, so intense it surprised him as it burned down his fingers. They'd kidnapped Daphne and put her at the bottom of a creature-infested lake in the middle of February, and he dearly, dearly wanted to kill them for it.
'Harry,' Tom's voice said quietly in his ear, 'try to calm down. We'll get her back."
He supposed he really must be angry if Tom was trying to calm him down. Actually, he didn't remember being this angry in… well, ever.
"She is quite safe Harry, I promise" Dumbledore said softly from where he stood a few steps away. Harry wondered when he had gotten so close.
That particular platitude meant precisely fuck all to him when she'd be much safer if she wasn't in the fucking lake, and Dumbledore seemed to know it.
"I apologise," he continued quickly, "but she was the only option. Sirius was ruled out by the fact the merfolk would not permit any fully trained witches or wizards inside their village."
A part of him took note of the implication that the hostages were in the merfolk's village and that Sirius was considered to be another person that he would sorely miss, but they were all but drowned out but anger and worry. That stupid egg was playing over and over in his mind, laughing.
Past an hour, the prospects black. Too late, it's gone, it won't come back.
"I would like to ask something of you, Harry," Dumbledore said, and when Harry glared at him his look became imploring. "I understand your anger with me and all those involved in Miss Greengrass's situation-"
'Abduction,' Harry hissed in his mind.
"-but if you will not do it for me, do it for the child."
He could hardly tell Dumbledore no now could he? Tom would, and Harry dearly wanted to purely out of spite, but he couldn't ignore Dumbledore's pleas when there was a kid involved. Even he knew that would be wrong. Manipulative old bastard. The look he gave him should have made the old man drop dead, but instead Dumbledore had the gall to actually look relieved.
"Miss Delacour's hostage is her younger sister," he said, "who is also of veela heritage. As I am sure you can imagine, a young girl with blood that burns with fire and flight should not be kept deep in a freezing lake. There are anecdotal records of veela being tortured in such a way."
"Why did you put her down there then?" Harry snapped. "It's your fault, you go get her."
"Although Madame Maxine and I fought against Gabrielle's use," Dumbledore continued as if Harry hadn't spoken, "the delegates from Durmstrang and the respective ministries refused to dull their tournament's excitement and it's stakes over some old wives' tales as they called them."
Harry scoffed internally. This sounded an awful like cleaning up their mess.
"So you want me to get her out too?"
Dumbledore nodded.
"Only if her health is deteriorating or if you deem her to be in danger. I have no doubt you will get there first, Harry, so I only ask you to check on her. Again, only attempt to retrieve her if absolutely necessary. The merfolk guarding the hostages are likely to enforce the rules quite…" Dumbledore cringed. "Stringently."
Harry glared first at Dumbledore and then the surface of the lake.
"Where is Daphne's wand?" he asked finally. "If the Delacour girl needs treatment down there then Daphne will need to do it."
Dumbledore smiled at him, relief and pride sweeping the frown from his face.
"That I cannot say. I am sure that if you summon the courage, however, that you shall find it."
"Why not just tell me to summon it?"
Dumbledore smiled to himself as he hurried back towards the judges table, gesturing at Bagman to start the task and ignoring Karkaroff's attempt at a threatening glare.
The man's excitable, dim-witted voice started echoing through a sonorous charm and Harry forced both it and the image of the idiot's head falling from his shoulders out of his mind. He had to figure out a way of finding Daphne. Finding the merfolk would be possible using the sound tracking charm he'd learnt as a back-up, but that really wasn't that accurate and only had a limited range, and that was assuming all the hostages were in the same place. It would be logical if they were – it would effectively be a race – but he had long ago stopped applying logic to idiots.
He needed to find Daphne herself, but he didn't have anything with enough of her in to use in a tracking charm. Her copy of their results would work because of the blood magic, but he didn't want to expose that if he could help it and he couldn't summon it even if he wanted to. There weren't many other things he could use without having to do a full ritual. All he had of hers really was her wand and anything else he could summon…
Her wand. That would work. Technically it was an auror spell and a restricted one at that, but he didn't really care at that moment.
"Begin!" Bagman's voice shouted.
The other champions raced forwards, throwing their robes off and casting spells as they went. Little gold balls whizzed after them, broadcasting to the screens, and Harry glared at his own as he waved his wand. The other champions were underwater before they could notice Daphne's wand zip out of Dumbledore's pocket and snap into Harry's palm. Quickly, he muttered a long string of spells over it, his own wand waving this way and that, until it jumped from his hand and hovered in the air in front of him. It hung there for a second before it spun to point out into the lake with its tip pointing slightly downwards.
He ran towards the lake and ignored the sounds of the crowd behind him when, instead of sinking into the water, his feet smacked into its surface. Water sloshed with each pounded footstep as Harry ran across the water, creating little waves as if rocks were being dropped from above. He and Tom had planned to simply walk across, to show how easy it was for them and to really exaggerate the biblical parallel that they had chosen this method for, but Harry was unwilling to waste a second. The lake seemed to go on and on, but he didn't stop running until Daphne's wand pointed straight downwards. His skidded stop sent a small wave rolling across the lake as he pulled a fabric mask from his pocket and pulled it over his nose and mouth.
It didn't look like much but it was actually quite a tricky bit of enchantment. The mask would function more or less like gills to pull oxygen from the water, while also exchanging the carbon dioxide he would be exhaling and keeping the water out as well. Some would argue he was overcomplicating things, but the various securing charms made it much more reliable than the flimsy, vision-blurring bubblehead charm, and unlike the charm this couldn't pop.
A flick of his wand transfigured his shoes from leather to stone, and a few more removed the runes that he had delicately carved into the soles of his shoes to allow him to stand on the water. Heavy cold rushed into his pores as he sank rapidly downwards towards the clustered lights he knew to be the merfolk village, spinning slowly as he did so to keep an eye out for any creatures that were hiding in the gloom. None came, and as he sank the village came into better focus.
Houses of roughly carved, algae-stained rock were clustered around a wide courtyard. Stone hewn benches and plantbeds of coral and kelp were dotted around what looked like playground equipment, but all of that paled next to the towering statue at the centre. The great merman glared up at him with his trident and net of knotted seaweed raised, and Harry was almost sure he could feel the thing's eyes watching him.
Crystal jars of captive creatures lit the village with murky light, so dim that Harry struggled to make out the scores of merfolk peering at him from the gloom even as he reached the bottom and removed the transfigurations on his shoes. Only the ones guarding the statue were clear, with mollusc-covered armour and tridents of gleaming bronze, and Harry felt Dumbledore's warning echo in his head as he swam towards the girl that was tied to the statue's base.
It was the girl Diggory had taken to the ball – Chang, he remembered – and next to her was the bushy haired girl Krum had taken. They looked healthy but still somehow lifeless as they swayed in the current, but Harry ignored them as he swam around to the other side of the statue. Relief flooded his system when he saw Daphne. She looked just like the others had – like she was in an eerie sort of sleep, deeper than should be possible but yet still as if she would wake from it just as easily as she woke each morning.
The same could not be said for the little girl next to her. Dark veins stood out against her too pale skin, dripping down her arms until they bled into now blue fingers, and the rises of her chest were far too quick and far, far too shallow. Harry didn't need to cast any charms over her to know that she was in trouble, but he also knew that he couldn't help her.
With a flick of his wand a bubblehead charm appeared over Daphne's head. She woke instantly, instinctively struggling against her bonds until she noticed Harry hovering in front of her. Her expression became relieved, and even though Harry's face was obscured by his mask she seemed to know something was wrong. She followed Harry's eyes to the little girl next to her and took one look before she quickly looked back to Harry, who cast a cutting curse to free her from her ropes and passed her her wand.
Immediately Daphne's wand began to dance over the youngest Delacour, her movements urgent and barely slowed by the water. Harry just watched on, not understanding even half of the spells she was casting. Diagnostics, heart rate stabilising charms, warming charms, spells for brain oxygenation and countless more blurring together as they settled into the girl's skin. Harry was slightly in awe.
Metal thwacked against his side, and Harry spun to see an armoured merman with trident in hand. He was burly and wide with muscles that bulged against his chest plate, but even with his limited knowledge of merpeople Harry could tell he was young. It was written all over his face – he didn't look nearly as commanding as he was trying to be, just distressed. Scared. Desperate, even, though there was something about him that made Harry hold his wand slightly tighter.
The merman gestured at the Delacour girl with a webbed hand and shook his head, and then held up one finger before pointing to Daphne and then up at the surface. Only one hostage. Harry glanced back at Daphne, and she slowed just enough in her spellcasting to shake her head before she returned to trying to stabilise the girl. If anything she looked even worse now, her skin grey and her limbs limp.
Harry shook his head at the merman as he turned to cast a cutting curse to release Delacour from her ropes. They needed to get her out of the water as soon as possible. The trident smacked into his side again, and he cast a banishing charm blindly behind him to push the merman back. Hopefully that would get the message across.
Daphne cast a few last charms before she nodded slightly, now content that she had stabilised the girl as much as she could down here. Her expression was grave but relieved when she looked up from her charge, but it turned to one of horror a split second before Harry felt himself being shoved forwards as three quickly widening points push into his back.
He looked down to see three clawed points of bronze sprouting from his abdomen as blood wafted from the wounds. Quickly the water around him was stained red, so quickly that he barely noticed the flash of crimson that raced past him nor the horrid screech that pierced his ears. He was far too focussed on the fucking trident that he was impaled on.
It was an odd sensation. He supposed for most people pain would overwhelm any other feeling, but for him it felt… well almost normal. Emphasis on almost. His insides felt like they had been pushed around, but that wasn't painful per se, just uncomfortable, not unlike waking up with a knot in his back after falling asleep over a book. Still, the sensation of water flowing into places it definitely shouldn't be felt really odd, as did the pressure from the trident inside him as its long handle swayed gently in the current.
Wait, current? All of a sudden he remembered that the trident hadn't just appeared and that he had, in fact, been stabbed. He spun to face his attacker only to see the merman floating in the water several feet away, dead. His skin was brown and wrinkled and shrunken, squeezing tight around the gills that bulged from the sides of his neck, and thin streams of milky red were drifting around the eyes that had burst in their sockets.
He looked at Daphne as she stared at his abdomen with horror on her face, seemingly uncaring of the dead merman that was drifting a few feet behind him. It was a pretty grisly sight he had to admit, and it definitely looked bad. He was sure he'd be fine though; there was no magic in a merman's trident. To try to reassure her he calmly reached behind him and yanked it out, pointing down at the flesh that he could now feel writhing back into its correct position as proof that he was okay.
By the look on Daphne's face it didn't work, and even his attempt at a reassuring thumbs up didn't seem to do much good either.
Dark shapes emerged from the shadows in their dozens as merfolk swam from their homes to group behind the remaining guards, and Harry gulped instinctively at the feral looks on their faces. Understandably they seemed to want him and Daphne dead, and he had a feeling that the fact the merman had attacked him first wouldn't matter.
Before they could charge he cast two more cutting curses to release the remaining hostages from their bonds and then flicked his wand to send them, Daphne and the Delacour girl shooting up towards the surface. Their ears would probably give a nasty pop from the pressure, but he thought that was probably preferable to being killed. The rapidly approaching merfolk didn't look inclined to take prisoners.
A simple but overpowered augamenti charm acted like a wand-mounted rocket that pushed him towards the surface while simultaneously pushing the merfolk away. Water rushed past as he blindly rose until he cleared the surface of the lake like a breaching whale, and the sudden weightlessness and instinctual fear barely had time to grab him before a swarm of bandages did. They coiled around his torso and yanked out of the air before they deposited him in front of a horrified looking Dumbledore.
"It wasn't my fault!" Harry protested.
Instead of scolding him like Harry had expected, or even casting a load of pointless medical charms over him, Dumbledore swept him into a hug, seemingly uncaring that his purple robes would be stained red by the blood that was already seeping through the bandages. Harry froze and felt that warm feeling in his stomach again, but at least this time he had the excuse of it being because he'd been impaled. It only took a split second for him to be released and the expected medical charms to be cast, and Harry didn't have any time to think before even more were cast when a tearful Daphne appeared in front of him.
"I'm fine," he said as she continued to cast charms. "I promise I'm fine."
"You were just stabbed by a trident!" she said shrilly. "Half your liver is gone! And you've still got the fucking thing!"
Harry was surprised to find that the trident was indeed still gripped in his left hand, gleaming now that the blood had been washed away.
"The liver grows back a bit even in normal people," Harry pointed out. "Mine will be back in about five minutes. As for the trident, I like it. Unless you want it?"
It was only fair, he supposed. She had killed the merman it belonged to. He had spent more than enough time teaching her the blood boiling curse to recognise it.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?"
That seemed like a very odd thing to shout before you hugged someone, but Harry put it down to the shock as he wrapped his free arm around her, though not nearly as tightly as hers were around him.
"You'll find it in your room, Harry," Dumbledore said with a faint sigh as he gently pulled the trident away.
As if by its own accord, his now free arm immediately wrapped itself around Daphne's torso, and Harry looked up to see a smile worm its way onto Dumbledore's face as he waved off a pale Madam Pomfrey.
Harry's eyes followed her path towards the medical tent, past the silently arguing judges table and the dripping wet, bewildered Krum as he was squeezed by his frizzy-haired hostage. A trio of wizards emerged from the water with a bloodied Diggory between them, and shortly after five more dragged a resisting Delacour out of the water while firing spells behind them. She was screaming and straining to get back to the lake until a shout finally managed to get through the panic, and then she was sprinting towards the medical tent. Several of her escorts limped after her, and Harry caught sight of several grey skinned corpses floating face down in the water before fog swept in and hid the lake from sight.
"All students are to return to their housing areas," Dumbledore's voice boomed tiredly across the grounds as he lowered his wand. "Points will be announced at dinner this evening. Professors, please escort your students."
Movement only appeared in the stands once the professors started to shepherd their students towards the exits, and even then Harry could feel hundreds of eyes on him. It wasn't hard to work out what had unfolded under the lake; enraged at the killing of one of their own, the merfolk had sought revenge on the other champions. It was logical that each champion would have been being shadowed by the merfolk to keep them safe, even if they had ended up doing the opposite. That horrible screech had probably echoed through entire lake.
It was fortunate he had freed all the hostages, else they would probably be dead.
'It wasn't really our fault, though,' Tom said.
'No, it wasn't,' Harry replied. 'Fault would imply we did something wrong. That doesn't mean it wasn't us that kicked it off though.'
Tom gave his equivalent of a shrug.
'They shouldn't have attacked. You were lax in your defensive awareness, but we were hardly expecting to be attacked by a guard. I suppose we should almost be thanking the fish; this is our most serious injury yet. It is a shame we don't have the monitoring charms on, but it will nonetheless be interesting to observe.'
Harry doubted Daphne would agree given how hard she was squeezing him, still unwilling to let go. The warm fuzzy feeling was rapidly becoming concern, especially when he felt wetness against his neck.
"Daphne?"
"I'm sorry," she muttered into his neck, over and over and over. "I should have stopped him from s-… him from doing it. I wasn't quick enough."
"Daphne I'm fine," he said. "You of all people know that it won't even leave a mark."
She just shook her head into his neck without saying a word. Harry just stared down at the top of her head, but try as he might he couldn't think of any way to help. He understood that it can't have been pleasant to see, but she knew that he would be okay so he couldn't see the problem. Without knowing the problem he couldn't think of a solution, and he certainly wasn't going to pay any attention to Tom's mutters of 'its not our job to comfort her sensitivities'.
"Can I help?" he asked softly.
She shook her head and squeezed harder. Harry didn't know what to do.
"Let me through Brooks or I'll make sixth year look like a kindness!" a familiar voice shouted, and Harry looked up to see a scowling auror step aside to allow Sirius to push past, seemingly ignorant to the glare the auror was levelling at him. Dumbledore let out a faint huff of amusement that seemed to lift a little weight from his slumping shoulders before he turned away and finally gave in to the rabble of professors, aurors and politicians behind him.
Reluctantly Daphne let go, and Harry caught a glimpse of red rimming her eyes before a charm and an empty smile wiped it away. He wanted to comfort her – he didn't know how, but he just wanted to try – but before he could he was yanked around by the shoulder to face a frantic Sirius.
The faint self-loathing that had been swilling around in Harry's stomach grew by a few more drops when he looked at his godfather. The look in the man's eyes was reminiscent of when Harry had first met him years ago, haunted by Azkaban and filled with fear and pain and worry. This fear was very different, of course, but it still reminded Harry just how much Sirius had suffered, and even though he knew it wasn't really his fault he couldn't help but feel horrible to have added to it.
"Sorry," Harry tried to say, but Sirius was having none of it. Immediately he yanked him into a hug just as Daphne had and, once he had ascertained that Harry wasn't dead, proceeded to rant about all manner of people Harry had only vaguely heard of. He wasn't quite sure how the chair of the Ministry budget committee was involved in this task, but Sirius seemed to think they deserved death.
The rest of the day was a bit of a drag if he was honest. There was just so much concern – about his health, about the legal consequences of what had happened, about people wanting to experiment on him – and while it made his chest warm happily at first it quickly began to get old. He lost count of how many times he was asked how he felt, and also of how many times they didn't believe his answer and cast diagnostic spells. At one point he must have had six different people casting charms over him, and that wasn't including the dozen that Daphne had had on him since he came out of the water.
The fact that she had refused to let him out of her sight didn't drag nearly as much as he would have thought it would, but what he didn't like was the guilt that squirmed on her face when she thought he wasn't looking. She blamed herself and she was heartbroken about it, and stuck in his room with Dumbledore, Sirius and every one of his tutors there he couldn't try to help her. He was just thankful that the trident was hidden away in his bedroom.
Ben and Nikolay disappeared for an hour or so, but other than that Harry was under the constant gaze of every single adult in his life that entire afternoon regardless of how much he insisted he was fine. It was only dinner that eventually forced everyone out, and even then it was only because the points were to be announced. There weren't any points awarded anyway – it was announced that given that three of the four champions were yanked from the lake halfway through they would all be given zero. Harry could see their point, although Tom thought it was 'totally fucking unfair'.
Obviously, he didn't stay to eat anything. Not only was he not hungry and not keen to be stared at, he also had a good portion of his abdomen ripped out. He rather doubted his stomach was in much of a state to have anything put in it.
"I'm going to go to bed," Harry said when, predictably, he was followed out of the hall by a swarm of concerned tutors, teachers and whoever else had decided to try to follow him. He could even see that Skeeter woman skulking at the back, or at least she was until Tracey shot her a body-bind alongside her venomous glare. Dumbledore smiled ever so slightly at the thump of the reporter's body against the floor, and Harry noticed a few extra emeralds drop into the Slytherin hourglass.
No one took his announcement very well. Half a dozen voices tried to speak over each other, and Harry managed to catch the phrases "absolutely not" and "like hell" before they quietened. Sirius looked ready to speak – probably to insist either that he stayed or that Harry spent the night in the hospital wing – but thankfully thought better of it.
"Okay Harry," he said eventually, "but I want a patronus message as soon as you wake up. And I'll be checking in personally tomorrow evening."
He looked at Dumbledore as if daring him to object, but the headmaster nodded without hesitation.
That was about as good as he was going to get – although he had no doubt there would be a house elf watching him all night courtesy of Dumbledore – so Harry nodded before he turned and made his way up the stairs as Sirius and his tutors walked reluctantly out of the entrance hall.
The corridors were empty as he walked, finally giving him a chance to think properly about the task. He had done well at first – all his preparations had worked perfectly, and he had been able to devise a way to find Daphne under pressure. His anger had not burned through his mind like Tom's had a like to do, even if it had been close. In fact, everything up to what would otherwise have been the end of the task went as well as he could have hoped.
After that had been… less successful. The merman should never have had a chance to injure him, even if said injury was rather fascinating, and he certainly shouldn't have frozen once it happened. If it wasn't for Daphne the merman could have just kept attacking. It was a lesson learned: never dismiss an enemy, and don't allow an injury to halt him. He had done both and could have very easily paid the price for it had Daphne not acted so quickly.
Instead of stopping at the entrance to his room Harry walked straight past, past the defence classroom and then past the library, and finally stopped at the room he and Daphne met in. He had seen her slip from the hall as soon as Bagman finished his announcement about the points, and he knew that she wouldn't have gone down to her room in the dungeons. She would have gone to theirs.
The silencing charm around the room fell away when he opened the door, and Harry heard a hitched breath and whispered spell before Daphne turned to look at him with the same empty smile she had worn earlier. The expression became ever more brittle as he approached where she was huddled into the corner of their long since transfigured sofa, her knees pulled up to her chest and her eyes locked on the white bandages that peeked out from the bottom of his shirt.
"I'm sorry," she said without looking from that little patch of white.
There was so much depth in those two words that Harry didn't know where to start. All he could do was blink in confusion. What did she have to be sorry for?
"It was all my fault!" she cried when he didn't respond. "I was the one that agreed to be your hostage, and if I was a better healer I'd have been able to help the Delacour girl quicker and then we wouldn't have been down there and I should have stopped him from attacking you and-"
She was fast becoming frantic, and the only thing Harry could think to do to bring her out of it was squeeze her hand. Hard. The slight spark of anger in her face seemed like a good thing.
He couldn't bring himself let go of it afterwards.
"How was any of that your fault?"
She spluttered.
"I just-"
"No you didn't, you said things were your fault when there's no evidence for any of it. Explain it to me logically."
"Daphne," he said once her mouth had opened and closed without an answer, "the merman attacked because I tried to take the kid too, not because you were my hostage. I'd have had to do that whoever my hostage was. And you heard Dumbledore earlier!" he continued, almost wanting to smack her over the head with it, "it took the healers from St Mungo's nearly an hour to fully stabilise her, and you think you should have been able to do it in five minutes? With her in the environment that is actively making her worse?"
"I still should have stopped you from being attacked," she said stubbornly. "I wasn't paying enough attention."
"You were paying attention to your rapidly worsening patient. I think we can safely say that one is on me, Daphne, so stop being so stupid. You didn't do anything wrong."
He didn't know where any of that had come from, but it worked. The anger and the stubborn guilt drained out of her in a second, leaving her looking tired and scared and like the fourteen year old girl she really was.
"You could have died, Harry," she said quietly.
'No we couldn't,' Tom insisted, and the same response was very nearly past Harry's lips before he stilled it.
"And if that had happened," he said instead, "that wouldn't have been your fault either."
Blink. Blink. The smile she gave him was unlike one he had ever seen, gentle and soft and so radiant it burned the tear tracks from her cheeks. Something in her gaze made his heart thud happily in his chest and he felt himself smile back. He didn't know who moved first, but he ended up with one arm wrapped around her as she leant into his side, golden hair tickling his neck and his remaining hand clasped tightly in hers. He wasn't sure why he had taken hold of it, just that he was happy that he did.
He wasn't sure he needed Sirius's help now.
'How pathetic,' Tom said with disdain.
Harry couldn't bring himself to care as he felt Daphne shift next to him. Tom may not like it, but he did. He liked it a lot.
They were both fast asleep by the time a soft pop echoed around the room as a grinning house elf disappeared to tell the headmaster that Harry Potter was safe and sleeping just fine.
