"Damn it!" Andromeda snapped, throwing out a wind charm to condense a miasma slowly creeping through the stands — carrying one of those plague-mimicking curses which had to be inhaled — into a ball of sickly yellow fluid. She followed up with an Unmaking Curse, invisible flames burning the cursed liquid into nothingness before she added, "Why aren't the judges doing anything?"

"Dumbledore, Slytherin, and Lovegood keep trying to get up from their table," Emma reported, kneeling to peer over the next row of seats Cissy hadn't vanished, "but it looks like they can't, for some reason?"

"Emma, if you get yourself cursed, Little Bella will never let me live it down," Sirius warned her, glancing away from the fight to glare at her — and coincidentally steal a peek at the screen behind her, where Harry and two others were making their way back to Fort Hogwarts on foot. Damn it! Sirius had missed something important! Last he'd seen his godson (probably ten or fifteen minutes ago), Harry had stopped running from Krum like a pigeon fleeing Reggie's stupid hawk and started throwing some half-decent curses of his own at the bugger (finally), but he'd gotten distracted by a conjured monkey making a break for the muggle delegations — the leaders had been evacuated quickly, but Sirius was pretty sure the Irish had used up their emergency port-keys this morning, it had taken a few minutes to get all the muggles out, one at a time with some elemental transport spell — and lost track of Harry entirely.

"Emma, if you get yourself cursed, Maïa will never let any of us live it down," Tienne added, tugging her sister-in-law's head back down below the level of the seats.

"I'm not going to get myself cursed," Emma snapped, waving her off, but she did stay down — Sirius saw that much, at least, before he had to pay attention to redirecting an explosive freezing curse and conjuring a football in its path to trigger it, because that was the sort of thing it would be a really bad idea to let fall on some poor student lower down in the stands.

"I think they might be compelled to judge like the competitors are compelled to compete," Schmidt suggested. "If you three have the defence here under control, I'm going to help evacuate the younger children."

"Eh?"

"Some of your fellow Wizengamot lords have fled via conjured ladders and slides," she explained, drawing Sirius's attention to Lord Peakes and his wife making a break for a slide running from the top of the stands to the ground. More of a human-sized ice luge, really — he was going to have to remember that next time he and Bella were bored in the middle of the night, because wrapping something like that around the outside of the Southside Tower at Ancient House would be fucking awesome. "A few of the Hogwarts prefects are attempting to do the same, but they seem to be having difficulties maintaining their conjurations."

Following her nod, he realised that probably had something to do with the fact that they were trying to fight off a horde of children desperate to get the fuck out of here — without hurting them, of course — and conjure an escape route simultaneously. Well, that and the three trying to figure out the escape slide clearly weren't used to cooperative casting, at least with something as complex as conjuration, and apparently none of them had the channelling capacity to reach the ground alone.

"Yeah, go, we've got this." Their section — filled with nobles, every one of whom was hated for one reason or another — was probably drawing more fire than any other (though Schmidt was right, it had started slowing down a bit), but unlike at the World Cup people weren't drunk and stupid, and there wasn't unlimited room to maneuver — they were sending conjurations and shite like that miasma, and lobbing mostly physical, long-distance charms into the crowd over the intervening (panicking) spectators, rather than get closer to attack specific targets and risk being spotted and kerb-stomped.

Sirius hadn't even seen the idiot who thought he'd throw another firebomb at Mike, for example, though Síomha definitely had, fighting her way through the crowd to apprehend (or murder) him. Most of her people had cleared out with their muggle delegation, as had Langley and his people — not surprising, putting down riots was so incredibly not their job (the hit wizards, whose job it was, had buggered off after the Order of Merlin ceremony, went with Ainsley when Scrimgeour told him to take his fucking pride and piss off, no one cared about the Order of Merlin being gravely offended when someone was throwing deadly curses at foreign diplomats on their watch), and if they'd stayed they'd just be making targets of themselves. Siomha had stuck around to get that would-be assassin, and she was drawing all sorts of fire from (Sirius assumed) British nationalists who were just a wee bit vexed over her fiery fuck you to the British establishment earlier. The fact that they kept getting in her way was probably the only reason she hadn't already caught up with the attempted murderer. Well, that and he doubted she wanted to kill too many innocent bystanders just for not getting out of the way fast enough.

Those few idiots who were fighting their way closer seemed to be focused mostly on Siomha — not surprising, maybe — rather than the Blacks and the various other members of their party who might normally be expected to become targets in something like this — class-traitors; race-traitors; leaders of political parties who were hated for helping Death Eaters escape justice and/or for betraying the cause of pureblood supremacy and/or just being a snooty little bitch; ferrety little twats; muggles whose daughters revealed the flagrant ethical violations of beloved Leaders of the Light; and so on.

Also unlike at the World Cup, he doubted there was any organisation behind the scenes here. It was really much more likely that everyone was just taking the opportunity to throw a few curses at everyone else they had a problem with. Nathan Wilkins, for example, had been one of the few people stupid enough to try to get close enough to attack Sirius more directly. He was currently cocooned in conjured spider-silk, hanging upside-down after being dropped through a hole Sirius had burned in the stands for that express purpose. Someone would probably fetch him down before the conjuration failed, but Sirius couldn't bring himself to care if they just happened not to notice him until he broke his neck falling on his head from a hundred and fifty feet.

He got that Wilkins was cut up over Sirius offing his brother, he really did. If someone had killed James, even if it was in combat and he was doing something inarguably asinine, Sirius would probably be just as irrational over it as the older lord. He had, in fact, attempted to murder the Traitor in broad daylight over actually killing James — and if he'd had to blow up a muggle street and kill a dozen innocent bystanders to do it, he definitely would have (fucking Traitor just got there first). If Wilkins wanted to demand an honour duel and try to kill Sirius face-to-face, he'd go and put the poor bastard out of his misery just like his brother. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to take exception to the desperate idiot trying to collapse the stands under their party. And, you know, everyone else in the general vicinity. (Moron.)

(He'd considered telling Lise after the Seismic Rift Curse struck that if the stands were really under serious attack, she probably wouldn't notice until it was too late — anyone with half a brain (or less, in Wilkins's case) would attack the support piers under the actual risers — but he'd decided that she didn't need to know, it would only make her consider retreat more urgent.)

Some of the nobles at their backs (Cissy's side of the circle, she and Meda had switched at some point) had taken a few pot-shots at them, and a few others had attempted to retaliate against the crowd on the Blacks' other side with their own cutting curses and explosive hexes and shite, many of which had fallen short enough or been so poorly aimed that Cissy had had to fend them off. All in all, though, this riot was turning out to be much more chill than Sirius had expected. Between that and the fact that Meda was more than capable of holding up her side of their perimeter, Schmidt would be much more useful working on escape routes for the kids.

"What about Selwyn?" he complained to no one in particular as their new Miskatonite friend began making her way out into the crowd, which was starting to thin a bit as more of the useless political twats realised there was a way out. "She's technically not a judge..."

"Oh, yes, let's just ask the terrifyingly powerful mind-mage to use mass compulsions to make an entire stadium full of impressionable young children and political players who would take any excuse to cry foul against the University sit down and shut up. Great idea, Siri. We can distract everyone from our impending civil war with an intercontinental war!"

(Everyone ignored Mini-Malfoy's shocked "Civil war?!" — apparently he hadn't been paying attention when Sirius had mentioned it earlier.)

Er. Point taken. But, just on principle, he couldn't admit Narcissa was right about anything, ever. "I didn't say she should just compel everyone, Cissy," he snapped, trying not to sound too defensive.

("Mother! What do you mean, civil war?!")

"Oh, did you have some other strategy in mind for a single witch to quell a crowd of five-thousand panicking idiots? Pray tell..." she invited him, casually transforming a rain of glass to a rain of feathers.

"Children!" Andromeda did her Dru impression again, saving Sirius from having to come up with an alternative theoretical strategy for Selwyn to single-handedly stop a riot.

("Mother!")

("I heard you, Draco. I didn't answer because this is neither the time nor the place to discuss the issue in question with sufficient detail to do so comprehensively!")

"If you really want to sound like Auntie Dru, you need to insult our intelligence in Finnish or suggest that being a sitting Lady of the Wizengamot is a fine occupation for the average Society dilettante, but Cissy's disappointed her by not becoming the Chief Warlock before the age of thirty." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his cousin flush, which was just too funny. "Wait, she didn't actually say something like that, did she?" He laughed, overriding the animating charms on a conjured knife someone had sent to try to cut the throat of one of their civilians (probably Emma or Lise) sending it back at whoever conjured it in the first place and deflecting a bludgeoning curse into their grounding rod in a single motion.

Cissy was saved from having to attempt to deny that she was still holding out hope that she would one day manage to impress her mother (which was literally impossible) by a reverberating bong, identical to the one which had signaled the start of the task and loud enough to be heard even over the commotion.

Damn it! Okay, there was no one throwing anything directly at him — Sirius spun on his heel, eyes raking the screens, trying to see—

"They did it!" he cheered, spotting Harry's familiar face, sporting an unfamiliar grin, tired but clearly ecstatic, gilded laurel leaves tangling with messy curls, laughing as he spun the little Greengrass girl around— "They fucking did it!"

Most of the screens went dark then, but a flash of motion caught his eye — Little Bella and the Cæciné girl, still fighting, both obviously tired, both oblivious to the world outside their fight. Looked like the elves were confused about whether they were supposed to keep recording—

Then another flash of motion caught his eye — fireball, incoming—

Right, focus, Sirius!

Following in my long tradition of making up ridiculous background details for the Blacks' childhoods as we go along, Reggie now had a hawk as a kid, because hawking is cool. Like cravats. —Leigha