OR DIE TRYING: THE STORY OF CHO CHANG
By monkeymouse
NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms. And one of the great things about JKR telling the story from Harry's point of view is that stuff could be happening all over Hogwarts that Harry isn't aware of.
Rated: PG
Spoilers: Everything
xxx
52. Three Schools, Four Champions
The following Friday, at precisely half past five, classes were dismissed. Students didn't simply go back to their dorms; they dashed back in a mad stampede. Cho wasn't particularly in a hurry, but let herself get swept along back to Ravenclaw House.
The tapestry and bookcase were already open, with students streaming in and out. She went up to her dormitory on the top floor of the girls' wing, pausing just long enough to watch the others toss down their bookbags and adjust their robes and, in some cases, their makeup. Cho didn't feel the need to do either; she simply went down to the Common Room. As soon as she came down from her dorm, she saw Roger Davies, who had just come down from his dorm.
xxx
The weeks after the first night of the new term, when Roger had blurted out his confession of love to Cho, was an awkward time for both. Cho hated the idea that she had caused Roger any pain; yet, it wasn't as if she had planned to hurt him. It was all his idea, after all, wasn't it; he apparently had been feeling something for some time now, and hadn't said a word about it. Serves him right, then.
No; no, it didn't. He didn't deserve to be hurt; he was too good a person, too good a friend. But why was he acting like the victim of a national disaster?
He spent all of September avoiding Cho, according to "Jinx" Jenkins, who was also Seventh-Year. "If he knows you're in the library, he studies in the Common Room," he told Cho one day. "And if he knows you're in the Common Room, he stays in the library or up in the dorm. He doesn't talk about it, not to me at any rate. But something's wrong, and it's got to be fixed."
Easy to say, thought Cho, but how am I supposed to stop this? I didn't even want to start it.
When Cho awoke, at sunrise on the first Saturday in October, she automatically started to go through the motions of getting ready for Quidditch practice. Roger had always called practice for Saturday morning. But then she remembered: Quidditch was off all this year. Well, thought Cho, so what if it is? It's been far too long since I've been on a broom. Besides, it won't hurt anything to take a look at the stadium-to see what they're going to do to it . . .
So, before most of the other students were getting ready for breakfast, she had already dressed, gone down to the broom shed and retrieved her precious Comet Two Sixty. She almost rode it to the stadium, she was so impatient to fly again; instead, she ran as fast as she could to the stadium.
When she got there, she saw that the goalposts had been taken down. So far, that was the only change in the stadium.
She also saw Roger Davies slowly circling the field.
She waited until he noticed her-which he did at once-and landed a few feet away from her. He didn't move toward her at first, didn't say anything.
Cho was finally overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. "Why are you doing this?!" she shouted at Roger. "You're trying to make me feel like a criminal, when all I did was tell the truth!"
"Yeh," Roger snapped back, "which is all I did, too!"
"But why can't you accept what I said? You act like it has to be all or nothing. Is my friendship worth so little to you?"
"No, but I was hoping that your love . . ."
"Is something I know next to nothing about! Roger, please, don't try to push me where you want me to go. I'll just end up trying to stand my ground, and neither one of us will be happy."
Roger stood for a minute, glancing first at Cho, then at his own feet. Finally, with a half-smile, he said, "You've always been stubborn, from the first day I knew you."
Cho also smiled a half-smile. "That's what comes of being born in a Year of the Horse, I'm afraid."
After another minute, he took a couple of steps toward her. "Truth is, I've missed you this past month. I was afraid I'd driven you off of me for good."
"And I've missed you. Can we go back to being friends?"
"Thought you'd never ask," he smiled-his first real smile in a month. "Guess you came out to fly, too."
"I was going mad without it."
"Well, I'll leave you to it, then." Roger started to walk out of the stadium.
"Roger!" He stopped at Cho's shout, and waited as she said, in a much softer voice, "Don't feel you have to rush off on my account."
So the two of them mounted their brooms and started flying over the pitch, abandoned for this year, neither one saying a word, because what was important had already been said.
xxx
Now, as Cho faced Roger in the Common Room, she smiled and nodded toward the door. "Ready to check out your competition?"
"Are they ready for Hogwarts, you mean?" he smiled back.
At first nobody in Ravenclaw was sure whether Roger Davies would enter the Tournament, including Roger himself, but as the day grew closer he seemed more and more interested in trying for it. He certainly would have been on the short list of likely candidates from Hogwarts. As they had several times in the past month, Cho and Roger talked about that list as they made their way to the Great Hall.
"There's Diggory in Hufflepuff," Roger was saying as they passed a suit of armour which someone had cleaned a little too zealously; all of its bolts had been over-tightened, and the armour fidgeted as it tried to loosen everything up again. "Prefect, Seeker, and there are some that say he's good-looking."
"Well, if looks entered into it, there's Johnson of Gryffindor," Cho answered back. "Prefect and Chaser, although I don't know what either of them has done beyond that."
"Good thing it isn't about looks, then," Roger chuckled; "I might still have a chance."
"If it wasn't about looks, Crusty might have a chance, and we don't need that." Cho was talking about Crustaceous Warrington, a Seventh Year Slytherin Chaser who couldn't seem to break himself of the habit of pulling out his wand during a match and trying to hex the opposition. No matter how many times Madam Hooch fouled him out, he didn't seem to learn from it- or didn't seem to care.
The entire student body was assembling on the great stone steps overlooking the lake. As the hour of six approached, they all kept glancing about, not sure what would happen.
The first thing that happened was that a house seemed to fall out of the sky. Actually, it was a pale blue carriage as big as a house, drawn by golden horses twice the normal size. On the door of the carriage was the crossed wand insignia of Beauxbatons. But they didn't see the insignia for long; after the carriage landed-with a crash that made everyone think that a house had indeed fallen from the sky-the door flew open almost immediately. A young wizard, who couldn't have been older than Third Year, dressed in robes of some thin, shimmering material that was the same pale blue as the carriage, jumped out and fumbled with some steps.
He then stood aside as a woman just as large as the carriage stepped out. She seemed to be the same size as Hagrid. She was dressed all in black, including black jewelry, all of which highlighted her dark-coloured skin.
"Didn't think they grew 'em that big in France," Vincent Krixlow muttered as Hogwarts, led by Headmaster Dumbledore, applauded the Headmistress of Beauxbatons, Madame Olympe Maxime. She was followed out of the carriage by ten Seventh-Year students, all dressed in the same pale blue robes as the boy who put down the staircase. The girls, however, who were in the minority, kept their hoods up, as if they were used to warmer weather. Cho also noticed that one of the girls looked to be no more than a First Year, and was struggling to hide the fact that she seemed terrified. The boys, on the other hand, didn't seem athletic at all; they appeared to be on the sensitive side, and only a bit less nervous than the girls.
"Don't see a Champion in that lot," Roger whispered to Cho. "They look like a stiff breeze would take them away."
He stopped as the students headed for the castle; the Hogwarts students had to part to make way for them. No sooner were the Beauxbatons inside the castle when Lee Jordan gave a shout. Everyone's attention turned to the lake, where, barely visible in the gathering dusk, a large whirlpool had formed, and was growing larger and fiercer. Finally an old wooden sailing- ship rose up out of the whirlpool, casting its anchor into the lake.
"This should be interesting," Vincent whispered again; "from fairy coach to Flying Dutchman."
The ship let out a gangplank that reached to the shore, and the passengers (perhaps they also doubled as the crew) walked single file up to the steps. They were all bundled up in furs, but they weren't fur robes. These seemed to be pelts that had been stitched together any which way, giving them an appearance of being primitives, from a time before magic was discovered. The leader of this group approached Dumbledore. Cho recognized him from his picture in the Prophet last summer: he was Igor Karkaroff, who had come over to the World Cup with the Bulgarian team. A second later, Karkaroff was introducing one of the Durmstrang students to Dumbledore, and Cho wasn't the only one to recognize him:
"Merlin on crutches!" Roger choked, trying not to say it out loud. "That's Viktor Krum!!"
Cho could hardly believe it. Hadn't she heard that Krum was Seeker for the Vrasta Vultures when he was picked to play for Bulgaria? And he was still a student? Well, barely a student; he seemed a bit older than his peers. Maybe the academy waived the age limits for him.
Cho was about to ask Roger about this when the crowd shifted, going back into the Great Hall for the welcoming dinner. She got swept along again. When she made her way to the Ravenclaw table, she found that the Beauxbaton team was already there, seated at one end. It was almost with a sense of relief that she saw the Durmstrang team sitting at the Slytherin table.
This should make for a fascinating year, she thought.
But even though Cho tried to catch the eye of the nearest Beauxbaton to her (the little girl) to try to start a conversation, none of them said a word to the Ravenclaws or even acknowledged their presence. They sat, waiting, looking rather distressed.
"Wot's up wi' them, then?" Jan asked Cho, as if the Beauxbatons couldn't even hear her. "Do they expect the ghosts teh come an' take a bite out of 'em?"
"Who knows what they expect?" answered Letitia Groondy. "Beauxbatons must have filled their heads with some incredible rubbish about us."
The Beauxbatons suddenly jumped to their feet as their Headmistress entered the Great Hall; they didn't sit back down until she was seated. It reminded Cho of stories her parents had told about the Emperors of China in bygone centuries, and their lives of absolute power and terrible loneliness in the Forbidden City . . .
Cho's thoughts were interrupted when one of the French girls, seated next to the youngest one, laughed insultingly at some remark from Dumbledore. Quite a few Hogwarts students who heard her, not just at the Ravenclaw table, looked at her with amazement, even hostility.
"Well, now we know what the incredible rubbish is," Linda Fairweather whispered. "They must think they're the center of the wizarding world!"
"They're in for a rude awakening," Roger replied. "From what I can see of this lot, they don't have a hope for the . . ." He stopped suddenly, as if his voice had been stolen.
Cho immediately saw why. With Dumbledore's remarks finished and food on the table, the rude Beauxbatons girl had taken off her hood and muffler. Her hair was platinum-blonde, the same color as Draco Malfoy's, which was just one more reason for Cho to dislike her. But her hair was longer, fuller and straighter than Cho's, hanging to her waist. Cho'd seen that kind of hair recently, and the flawless skin and the deep blue eyes-
Yes; at the World Cup! The girl got up, went to the Gryffindor table to get a tureen of soup, and some of the boys there froze, staring at her.
She was a veela! A part-veela, anyway! How could a French witch have the blood of a Bulgarian creature? "Roger," she turned, "don't you think . . ."
Roger was staring at the French girl, oblivious to Cho or anyone else.
Part of Cho wanted to laugh, even though it wasn't funny at all. Indeed, this would be a fascinating year.
xxx
As soon as dinner was over, Dumbledore spoke again, officially starting the Tournament by pulling the Goblet of Fire out of an old chest. The goblet was made of wood, which was nevertheless not consumed by the fire burning within it. He stated that anyone age seventeen or older who wished to enter the Tournament should drop a paper with their name into the Goblet, which would name the Champions for each of the three academies the following night.
Before Dumbledore's remarks were over, Roger was writing his name on a scrap of parchment. He made sure that his name was the first one into the Goblet of Fire.
"Maybe I'll get points for eagerness," he said as he came back to the Ravenclaw table. "Anyway, that's over with. Just have to wait until tomorrow."
xxx
The waiting seemed harder for some than the Tournament would have been. It was a Saturday, so there weren't any classes to take up the time. It was Halloween, but not a Hogsmeade visiting day, so there was little to do but wait for the banquet that night when the Champions would be announced.
Some students tried to cheat the Goblet, and it was amusing to watch them pay for it. The Sixth-Year Weasley twins, who were always up for practical jokes, had the tables turned as they sprouted beards-fully as long and white as Dumbledore's-when they tried to enter their names. But so did Archie Summers, a Hufflepuff Sixth-Year, and so did Fourth-Year Ravenclaw Sally Fawcett. She'd probably tried it to impress some boy or other; she was rapidly becoming notorious throughout Hogwarts. Both Vince Krixlow and Giulio Grimaldi hinted that she'd "shown them what it was all about," but never said anything more.
"Pay them no mind," Libby Foggly said at the banquet that night. "They've been playing at being sex maniacs since their First Year. You can't take them seriously."
Finally, when the banquet was almost over, Dumbledore extinguished most of the candles that lit the Great Hall, so that the Goblet of Fire cast its light over half of the room. Any time now, it would spit out the names of the Champions.
"Good luck, Rog," Cho whispered.
Roger just smiled and shook his head, as if he knew he wouldn't be chosen.
The first name out of the Goblet was the Durmstrang's Viktor Krum. All the tables applauded his choice. Cho applauded politely; she still didn't like his performance as Seeker in the World Cup.
While she was recalling his aggressive attempts to demolish the Irish Seeker, the goblet spit out another name: Fleur Delacourt of Beauxbatons.
It was the veela. She sat at the Ravenclaw table for a minute, seeming to milk the applause for all it was worth, preening herself. Two of the Beauxbatons girls-who weren't veela-broke down in tears. Fleur acted as if she were Headmistress; as if she had every right to be Champion.
"A veela and a ruthless Seeker," muttered Vincent. "Bet if you turn that Goblet over you'll see a winkle underneath."
Cho couldn't help but giggle. The choices so far weren't that interesting.
Whether by design or by accident, the Hogwarts Champion was chosen last; the suspense was almost unbearable. But when the third name appeared, the words "Cedric Diggory" was barely past Dumbledore's lips when the Hufflepuff table exploded in cheers and shouting. Cedric was being pummeled by everyone within reach. Madam Sprout, who was Head of Hufflepuff House, looked as if she'd burst from pride.
Cho was glad. She liked Cedric well enough. They had a bond, both being Seekers and both paying midnight visits to the hospital wing to look in on friends attacked by the basilisk two years earlier. Well, she thought, better him than Crusty. Would have been nice to cheer for Angelina, but it wasn't to be. She glanced over at Roger, who had an odd smile on his face, and shook his head as if at some unbelievable piece of news.
So that's two Seekers, Cho thought. They can have it; this Tournament doesn't sound like anything I'd wish on anyone. Not on Roger, even though he seemed to want it. Not on myself, certainly. Not even on-
"Harry Potter!"
What?!
xxx
to be continued in part 53, wherein the competition starts in Hogwarts before the Tournament even begins
By monkeymouse
NB: JKRowling built the Potterverse; I'm just redecorating one of the rooms. And one of the great things about JKR telling the story from Harry's point of view is that stuff could be happening all over Hogwarts that Harry isn't aware of.
Rated: PG
Spoilers: Everything
xxx
52. Three Schools, Four Champions
The following Friday, at precisely half past five, classes were dismissed. Students didn't simply go back to their dorms; they dashed back in a mad stampede. Cho wasn't particularly in a hurry, but let herself get swept along back to Ravenclaw House.
The tapestry and bookcase were already open, with students streaming in and out. She went up to her dormitory on the top floor of the girls' wing, pausing just long enough to watch the others toss down their bookbags and adjust their robes and, in some cases, their makeup. Cho didn't feel the need to do either; she simply went down to the Common Room. As soon as she came down from her dorm, she saw Roger Davies, who had just come down from his dorm.
xxx
The weeks after the first night of the new term, when Roger had blurted out his confession of love to Cho, was an awkward time for both. Cho hated the idea that she had caused Roger any pain; yet, it wasn't as if she had planned to hurt him. It was all his idea, after all, wasn't it; he apparently had been feeling something for some time now, and hadn't said a word about it. Serves him right, then.
No; no, it didn't. He didn't deserve to be hurt; he was too good a person, too good a friend. But why was he acting like the victim of a national disaster?
He spent all of September avoiding Cho, according to "Jinx" Jenkins, who was also Seventh-Year. "If he knows you're in the library, he studies in the Common Room," he told Cho one day. "And if he knows you're in the Common Room, he stays in the library or up in the dorm. He doesn't talk about it, not to me at any rate. But something's wrong, and it's got to be fixed."
Easy to say, thought Cho, but how am I supposed to stop this? I didn't even want to start it.
When Cho awoke, at sunrise on the first Saturday in October, she automatically started to go through the motions of getting ready for Quidditch practice. Roger had always called practice for Saturday morning. But then she remembered: Quidditch was off all this year. Well, thought Cho, so what if it is? It's been far too long since I've been on a broom. Besides, it won't hurt anything to take a look at the stadium-to see what they're going to do to it . . .
So, before most of the other students were getting ready for breakfast, she had already dressed, gone down to the broom shed and retrieved her precious Comet Two Sixty. She almost rode it to the stadium, she was so impatient to fly again; instead, she ran as fast as she could to the stadium.
When she got there, she saw that the goalposts had been taken down. So far, that was the only change in the stadium.
She also saw Roger Davies slowly circling the field.
She waited until he noticed her-which he did at once-and landed a few feet away from her. He didn't move toward her at first, didn't say anything.
Cho was finally overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. "Why are you doing this?!" she shouted at Roger. "You're trying to make me feel like a criminal, when all I did was tell the truth!"
"Yeh," Roger snapped back, "which is all I did, too!"
"But why can't you accept what I said? You act like it has to be all or nothing. Is my friendship worth so little to you?"
"No, but I was hoping that your love . . ."
"Is something I know next to nothing about! Roger, please, don't try to push me where you want me to go. I'll just end up trying to stand my ground, and neither one of us will be happy."
Roger stood for a minute, glancing first at Cho, then at his own feet. Finally, with a half-smile, he said, "You've always been stubborn, from the first day I knew you."
Cho also smiled a half-smile. "That's what comes of being born in a Year of the Horse, I'm afraid."
After another minute, he took a couple of steps toward her. "Truth is, I've missed you this past month. I was afraid I'd driven you off of me for good."
"And I've missed you. Can we go back to being friends?"
"Thought you'd never ask," he smiled-his first real smile in a month. "Guess you came out to fly, too."
"I was going mad without it."
"Well, I'll leave you to it, then." Roger started to walk out of the stadium.
"Roger!" He stopped at Cho's shout, and waited as she said, in a much softer voice, "Don't feel you have to rush off on my account."
So the two of them mounted their brooms and started flying over the pitch, abandoned for this year, neither one saying a word, because what was important had already been said.
xxx
Now, as Cho faced Roger in the Common Room, she smiled and nodded toward the door. "Ready to check out your competition?"
"Are they ready for Hogwarts, you mean?" he smiled back.
At first nobody in Ravenclaw was sure whether Roger Davies would enter the Tournament, including Roger himself, but as the day grew closer he seemed more and more interested in trying for it. He certainly would have been on the short list of likely candidates from Hogwarts. As they had several times in the past month, Cho and Roger talked about that list as they made their way to the Great Hall.
"There's Diggory in Hufflepuff," Roger was saying as they passed a suit of armour which someone had cleaned a little too zealously; all of its bolts had been over-tightened, and the armour fidgeted as it tried to loosen everything up again. "Prefect, Seeker, and there are some that say he's good-looking."
"Well, if looks entered into it, there's Johnson of Gryffindor," Cho answered back. "Prefect and Chaser, although I don't know what either of them has done beyond that."
"Good thing it isn't about looks, then," Roger chuckled; "I might still have a chance."
"If it wasn't about looks, Crusty might have a chance, and we don't need that." Cho was talking about Crustaceous Warrington, a Seventh Year Slytherin Chaser who couldn't seem to break himself of the habit of pulling out his wand during a match and trying to hex the opposition. No matter how many times Madam Hooch fouled him out, he didn't seem to learn from it- or didn't seem to care.
The entire student body was assembling on the great stone steps overlooking the lake. As the hour of six approached, they all kept glancing about, not sure what would happen.
The first thing that happened was that a house seemed to fall out of the sky. Actually, it was a pale blue carriage as big as a house, drawn by golden horses twice the normal size. On the door of the carriage was the crossed wand insignia of Beauxbatons. But they didn't see the insignia for long; after the carriage landed-with a crash that made everyone think that a house had indeed fallen from the sky-the door flew open almost immediately. A young wizard, who couldn't have been older than Third Year, dressed in robes of some thin, shimmering material that was the same pale blue as the carriage, jumped out and fumbled with some steps.
He then stood aside as a woman just as large as the carriage stepped out. She seemed to be the same size as Hagrid. She was dressed all in black, including black jewelry, all of which highlighted her dark-coloured skin.
"Didn't think they grew 'em that big in France," Vincent Krixlow muttered as Hogwarts, led by Headmaster Dumbledore, applauded the Headmistress of Beauxbatons, Madame Olympe Maxime. She was followed out of the carriage by ten Seventh-Year students, all dressed in the same pale blue robes as the boy who put down the staircase. The girls, however, who were in the minority, kept their hoods up, as if they were used to warmer weather. Cho also noticed that one of the girls looked to be no more than a First Year, and was struggling to hide the fact that she seemed terrified. The boys, on the other hand, didn't seem athletic at all; they appeared to be on the sensitive side, and only a bit less nervous than the girls.
"Don't see a Champion in that lot," Roger whispered to Cho. "They look like a stiff breeze would take them away."
He stopped as the students headed for the castle; the Hogwarts students had to part to make way for them. No sooner were the Beauxbatons inside the castle when Lee Jordan gave a shout. Everyone's attention turned to the lake, where, barely visible in the gathering dusk, a large whirlpool had formed, and was growing larger and fiercer. Finally an old wooden sailing- ship rose up out of the whirlpool, casting its anchor into the lake.
"This should be interesting," Vincent whispered again; "from fairy coach to Flying Dutchman."
The ship let out a gangplank that reached to the shore, and the passengers (perhaps they also doubled as the crew) walked single file up to the steps. They were all bundled up in furs, but they weren't fur robes. These seemed to be pelts that had been stitched together any which way, giving them an appearance of being primitives, from a time before magic was discovered. The leader of this group approached Dumbledore. Cho recognized him from his picture in the Prophet last summer: he was Igor Karkaroff, who had come over to the World Cup with the Bulgarian team. A second later, Karkaroff was introducing one of the Durmstrang students to Dumbledore, and Cho wasn't the only one to recognize him:
"Merlin on crutches!" Roger choked, trying not to say it out loud. "That's Viktor Krum!!"
Cho could hardly believe it. Hadn't she heard that Krum was Seeker for the Vrasta Vultures when he was picked to play for Bulgaria? And he was still a student? Well, barely a student; he seemed a bit older than his peers. Maybe the academy waived the age limits for him.
Cho was about to ask Roger about this when the crowd shifted, going back into the Great Hall for the welcoming dinner. She got swept along again. When she made her way to the Ravenclaw table, she found that the Beauxbaton team was already there, seated at one end. It was almost with a sense of relief that she saw the Durmstrang team sitting at the Slytherin table.
This should make for a fascinating year, she thought.
But even though Cho tried to catch the eye of the nearest Beauxbaton to her (the little girl) to try to start a conversation, none of them said a word to the Ravenclaws or even acknowledged their presence. They sat, waiting, looking rather distressed.
"Wot's up wi' them, then?" Jan asked Cho, as if the Beauxbatons couldn't even hear her. "Do they expect the ghosts teh come an' take a bite out of 'em?"
"Who knows what they expect?" answered Letitia Groondy. "Beauxbatons must have filled their heads with some incredible rubbish about us."
The Beauxbatons suddenly jumped to their feet as their Headmistress entered the Great Hall; they didn't sit back down until she was seated. It reminded Cho of stories her parents had told about the Emperors of China in bygone centuries, and their lives of absolute power and terrible loneliness in the Forbidden City . . .
Cho's thoughts were interrupted when one of the French girls, seated next to the youngest one, laughed insultingly at some remark from Dumbledore. Quite a few Hogwarts students who heard her, not just at the Ravenclaw table, looked at her with amazement, even hostility.
"Well, now we know what the incredible rubbish is," Linda Fairweather whispered. "They must think they're the center of the wizarding world!"
"They're in for a rude awakening," Roger replied. "From what I can see of this lot, they don't have a hope for the . . ." He stopped suddenly, as if his voice had been stolen.
Cho immediately saw why. With Dumbledore's remarks finished and food on the table, the rude Beauxbatons girl had taken off her hood and muffler. Her hair was platinum-blonde, the same color as Draco Malfoy's, which was just one more reason for Cho to dislike her. But her hair was longer, fuller and straighter than Cho's, hanging to her waist. Cho'd seen that kind of hair recently, and the flawless skin and the deep blue eyes-
Yes; at the World Cup! The girl got up, went to the Gryffindor table to get a tureen of soup, and some of the boys there froze, staring at her.
She was a veela! A part-veela, anyway! How could a French witch have the blood of a Bulgarian creature? "Roger," she turned, "don't you think . . ."
Roger was staring at the French girl, oblivious to Cho or anyone else.
Part of Cho wanted to laugh, even though it wasn't funny at all. Indeed, this would be a fascinating year.
xxx
As soon as dinner was over, Dumbledore spoke again, officially starting the Tournament by pulling the Goblet of Fire out of an old chest. The goblet was made of wood, which was nevertheless not consumed by the fire burning within it. He stated that anyone age seventeen or older who wished to enter the Tournament should drop a paper with their name into the Goblet, which would name the Champions for each of the three academies the following night.
Before Dumbledore's remarks were over, Roger was writing his name on a scrap of parchment. He made sure that his name was the first one into the Goblet of Fire.
"Maybe I'll get points for eagerness," he said as he came back to the Ravenclaw table. "Anyway, that's over with. Just have to wait until tomorrow."
xxx
The waiting seemed harder for some than the Tournament would have been. It was a Saturday, so there weren't any classes to take up the time. It was Halloween, but not a Hogsmeade visiting day, so there was little to do but wait for the banquet that night when the Champions would be announced.
Some students tried to cheat the Goblet, and it was amusing to watch them pay for it. The Sixth-Year Weasley twins, who were always up for practical jokes, had the tables turned as they sprouted beards-fully as long and white as Dumbledore's-when they tried to enter their names. But so did Archie Summers, a Hufflepuff Sixth-Year, and so did Fourth-Year Ravenclaw Sally Fawcett. She'd probably tried it to impress some boy or other; she was rapidly becoming notorious throughout Hogwarts. Both Vince Krixlow and Giulio Grimaldi hinted that she'd "shown them what it was all about," but never said anything more.
"Pay them no mind," Libby Foggly said at the banquet that night. "They've been playing at being sex maniacs since their First Year. You can't take them seriously."
Finally, when the banquet was almost over, Dumbledore extinguished most of the candles that lit the Great Hall, so that the Goblet of Fire cast its light over half of the room. Any time now, it would spit out the names of the Champions.
"Good luck, Rog," Cho whispered.
Roger just smiled and shook his head, as if he knew he wouldn't be chosen.
The first name out of the Goblet was the Durmstrang's Viktor Krum. All the tables applauded his choice. Cho applauded politely; she still didn't like his performance as Seeker in the World Cup.
While she was recalling his aggressive attempts to demolish the Irish Seeker, the goblet spit out another name: Fleur Delacourt of Beauxbatons.
It was the veela. She sat at the Ravenclaw table for a minute, seeming to milk the applause for all it was worth, preening herself. Two of the Beauxbatons girls-who weren't veela-broke down in tears. Fleur acted as if she were Headmistress; as if she had every right to be Champion.
"A veela and a ruthless Seeker," muttered Vincent. "Bet if you turn that Goblet over you'll see a winkle underneath."
Cho couldn't help but giggle. The choices so far weren't that interesting.
Whether by design or by accident, the Hogwarts Champion was chosen last; the suspense was almost unbearable. But when the third name appeared, the words "Cedric Diggory" was barely past Dumbledore's lips when the Hufflepuff table exploded in cheers and shouting. Cedric was being pummeled by everyone within reach. Madam Sprout, who was Head of Hufflepuff House, looked as if she'd burst from pride.
Cho was glad. She liked Cedric well enough. They had a bond, both being Seekers and both paying midnight visits to the hospital wing to look in on friends attacked by the basilisk two years earlier. Well, she thought, better him than Crusty. Would have been nice to cheer for Angelina, but it wasn't to be. She glanced over at Roger, who had an odd smile on his face, and shook his head as if at some unbelievable piece of news.
So that's two Seekers, Cho thought. They can have it; this Tournament doesn't sound like anything I'd wish on anyone. Not on Roger, even though he seemed to want it. Not on myself, certainly. Not even on-
"Harry Potter!"
What?!
xxx
to be continued in part 53, wherein the competition starts in Hogwarts before the Tournament even begins
