One afternoon over Easter holes FitzSimmons were studying in the library when they saw Hagrid walk in.
And he secretively shuffled to a row of books — though how he thought that no one would notice him FitzSimmons didn't have a clue — before shuffling back out again a few minutes later with a book not very well hidden behind his back. So Simmons immediately went to find Madam Pince, highly doubting that she would want even a staff member taking a book out of the library without signing it out first so that she could keep track of where all of her books were at all times.
"Excuse me, Madam Pince," she said when she found the librarian. "But Hagrid just snuck in, took a book off the shelf, and snuck back out without signing it out. Just thought you might like to know that one of your books is missing."
"Did you see what row?" Madam Pince asked.
"Yes, Ma'am, right this way," Simmons answered.
She led the librarian to the end of the row that she and her husband had seen the gamekeeper sneak down, before returning to Fitz to resume studying, trusting that Madam Pince could take care of the situation from there. To their great surprise a few minutes later they saw Madam Pince stalk out of the library, the first time that they could recall ever seeing her out of the library besides at occasional meal times. But as she returned twenty minutes later and they hadn't seen anyone else try to sneak a book out during that time, they simply continued on with their studying, figuring that it was really none of their business — the adults were clearly handling it as they should.
And they didn't think anything of it again until over a month later, when they were walking across the courtyard to Herbology and saw smoke rising from the direction of Hagrid's hut. Spending so much time outside exploring they had eventually discovered that the giant of a man lived in the small hut by the edge of the Forbidden Forest, and that was doubtlessly where he had wanted them to come the first Friday when he had invited them over for tea. They still hadn't actually gone to his hut, or even particularly near it, but they knew where it was on the grounds in reference to their walk to Herbology and the thick smoke certainly seemed to be coming from that direction, and nothing else except the forest lay in that direction.
"Hagrid's house catch on fire?" Fitz asked when they saw it.
"Sure looks like it," Simmons answered. "And it's made of wood, so it would burn pretty easily. That or part of the Forest itself caught on fire — lots of trees and shrubs in there to burn."
So after Herbology they walked down to see what was going on. It turned out that Fitz's guess had been correct, as Hagrid's hut was now a smoldering pile of ashes. They had only been walking around the ruin for a minute when Hagrid walked up.
"Hey, Harry!" he greeted far more cheerfully than someone whose house had just burnt down would normally be expected to. "Norbert burnt me house down, as yeh can see."
"Norbert?" Simmons asked in confusion.
"Me pet dragon," Hagrid answered. "I won 'em off a stranger in a game o' cards. Hatched the egg meself, and been raisin' 'em in me hut the past few weeks. But this mornin', he caught it on fire — m' house is made o' wood, yeh see, highly flammable."
No shit, Sherlock, Fitz thought to himself.
"So what happened to the dragon?" Simmons asked.
"Dumbledore sent 'im off to a dragon reserve in Romania," Hagrid answered sadly. "Turns out he knew this whole time I had th' egg an' dragon. Yeh see, I snuck into th' library right after I got th' egg to learn how ter raise it, and someone apparently saw me and told Pince, who went an' told 'im. But he's not gonna report me ter th' Department for th' Regulation an' Control o' Magical Creatures, just said he'd have ter send th' dragon away, and that he'd fix me hut like new by nightfall. Good man, Dumbledore."
"Shame — I would have liked to seen and studied a real dragon," Simmons sighed. "Make cuttlefish look practically boring in comparison — what's color-changing chromatophores next to breathing fire?"
Hagrid looked at her strangely, never having heard of cuttlefish or chromatophores, but at that moment the bell rang beckoning FitzSimmons onward to their next class, so they bid Hagrid adieu and ran off to Transfiguration, leaving everything dragon-related behind them.
~FS~
A week before end-of-term exams were to finally start, FitzSimmons were necking in an abandoned classroom along the most common route from the library to Gryffindor Tower, when the door suddenly opened and they quickly broke apart to find Professor Quirrell standing there staring at them.
But before they could even try to come up with a reasonable excuse for snogging in an abandoned classroom, Quirrell turned and hightailed it with a look of utter terror on his face, and by the time FitzSimmons reached the door and looked up and down the hallway, he was completely out of sight.
"That was strange," Fitz commented as they started walking towards Gryffindor Tower, not wanting some other professor to wander by who wouldn't flee from them looking more scared to see them than they were to see him.
"And what on earth was he entering that classroom for if he hadn't heard us snogging inside?" Simmons asked. "Not that I know how he could have heard us, I was managing to keep pretty quiet despite your best attempts to make me do the opposite, and these are stone walls and thick wooden doors that the castle is made of. But he certainly wasn't trying to catch us, because he definitely did, and I'm 95% confident he isn't running to find some other professor to give us detention — assuming there even is a rule against first years snogging out of sight bothering no one. Because kissing itself isn't against the rules, as we've seen older students give each other small kisses and pecks in the vicinity of professors."
"Did he get cursed really badly or something the last time he walked in on two students going at it?" Fitz offered. "Maybe half of his head is missing from said curse, or it gave him a really ugly afro that he can't get rid of because it's magical, and that's why he wears a turban all the time to cover it up. Doesn't explain why he wanted in that room in the first place, though, as it was clearly an abandoned room that hasn't been used in years, or possibly even decades given the thickness of the dust covering all the desks."
"Yeah, I don't know — like you said, that was really strange," Simmons replied, unable to come up with any potential ideas of her own for the very odd encounter.
FitzSimmons continued to pay close attention to Professor Quirrell every time they saw him after that, but he never showed any signs of being afraid of them again, nor did he make any indication that he had even seen them in that classroom snogging on that odd afternoon. In fact, other than nervously adjusting his turban perhaps slightly more frequently than normal, which was already a lot that seemed to have slowly increased over the course of the year, nothing seemed different about the already rather odd, and always very nervous-acting professor. But just to be on the safe side, FitzSimmons didn't frequent any more abandoned classrooms for him or any of the other professors to possibly walk in on them in, and so they arrived at exams still as bumfuzzled as ever at his odd behavior that one afternoon in late May.
Exams that were an absolute breeze, and practically boring even for FitzSimmons. For they had easily memorized and mastered everything that they had covered in class or been assigned as homework essays throughout the year, and then spent most of their free time reading about and practicing even more advanced spells. Everyone else was of course panicking because they hadn't spent the entire year learning all of the spells as they went along like they should have, but FitzSimmons didn't have that problem in the least. Every spell that the professors could throw at them they performed flawlessly, and every question that the professors could ask them about magic they answered with perfection and usually excess, acing every exam like it was just another homework assignment during the year, without any of the stress that the rest of the students were putting themselves through by trying to cram a year's worth of studying into just a couple of weeks.
Final exams were over for another year, and Dumbledore and Voldemort were each preparing for the final steps of the dance that they had been swaying to all year.
Dumbledore was to that pretend that he had received an urgent missive from the Minister of Magic, who they both knew was actually very jealous and therefore afraid of Albus, and only called him any more in truly desperate emergencies, of which there were none at the moment. And as soon as the Headmaster flew off for London on a very time-consuming broom instead of portkeying or Flooing instantaneously directly to the Minister's office like he would have if there actually was an emergency, Voldemort was going to make Quirrell go through the first year level traps to where what was almost certainly a fake stone was hidden in the mirror in such a way that Quirrellemort could never get it, only Harry could get it for Quirrellemort. Dumbledore had considered calling the whole thing off — after all, Harry had not received a single one of the necessary hints to assure that he would go after the stone like the good little sacrifice that he was — but decided in the end that there was no risk in letting it still play out, on the very slim off-chance that Harry saw Professor Quirrell sneaking into the right-hand side of the third floor corridor and decided to follow to see what the professor was up to.
Of course, such chance was very, very off, as had FitzSimmons seen Professor Quirrell entering the off-limits third floor corridor, they would have assumed that he had reason to be there being a professor and all, and so they wouldn't have thought twice about it. After all, they had only been told that it was off-limits for students, not for professors, and in their vast experience, an area that was off-limits for one set of people was almost always in-limits for a different set of people, or else the entire area would have just been blocked off completely, or either torn down and something different put up in its place, or remodeled and replaced with somewhere that at least some people were allowed to go into — unused space was an expensive waste of money in most places, after all, though admittedly this castle seemed like ninety percent unused space at the moment.
But as it was, as Dumbledore was flying off on his broom for a nice tour of the Scottish countryside until it was time to return, and Voldemort was ordering Quirrell into the obstacle course, FitzSimmons were swimming in the Black Lake enjoying the beautiful evening that they were blessed with. So that night when Dumbledore returned and moseyed on down to the final stage of the obstacle course containing the Mirror of Erised, he found Quirrell boredly sitting on the stone floor in front of it, just as expected.
When he heard Dumbledore enter the room behind him, Quirrell turned his head to make sure that it wasn't Harry, and upon seeing that it was the Headmaster instead, said, "Your boy never came to get the stone out of here for me, Albus."
"I know," Dumbledore sighed. "He strayed from the path as soon as he got to school, and there was pretty much no chance he was going to come down here tonight. I didn't tell you just in case I completely underestimated the boy, or sheer luck made you two meet up, but it clearly didn't happen."
Quirrell just nodded slightly as Dumbledore sat down next to the professor, and they were both silent for several minutes, looking into the Mirror of Erised.
But eventually Dumbledore asked, "So what are you going to do now, Voldemort?"
"Go back to my spirit form," the back of Quirrell's head answered, muffled some by the turban. "I could live in the back of Quirrell's head for a while longer, as we both try playing games with each other, but I just can't keep doing it. It's a terrible home, and quite frankly I'd rather be back in the Albanian forests flitting in and out of snakes since there's nothing here for me any more, assuming you're not going to give me the real stone as a consolation prize for doing everything you wanted me to, if it's even actually existed for the past couple centuries, considering the fact that no one has actually seen Nick or Perri since the seventeen hundreds, only heard your claim that you worked with the man in secret in Devon on alchemy."
"Sorry, no can do," Dumbledore replied. "But if I could ask one more thing from you, can you leave Quirrell's body down here so that I can just seal up this entire underground wing and not have to deal with disposing of his body? I can just put out the story that he disappeared in the middle of the night, another casualty to your curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position."
~FS~
As the day of the Hogwarts Express train back to Kings Cross Station, London drew closer and closer over the two weeks between the end of exams and the end of term, FitzSimmons began figuring out what they were going to do for the summer.
The last thing they could do was go back to the relatives whom Harry Potter had been living with according to Professor McGonagall, or Hermione's parents that she of course lived with, as FitzSimmons weren't the people who everyone thought they were, and they still knew very little about the lives that they had usurped, certainly not enough to fool anyone who actually knew them. So they had to figure out what to do instead. They knew that it was 1992 based on a copy of the wizarding newspaper that Simmons had discreetly glanced at during their first week in the castle, which meant that they had time traveled as well as universe travelled, and also made things awkward if this was an altered copy of their own universe, as they would only be four, nearly five years old, and a bit over a decade before they joined Shield.
However, they did still know a lot about the Shield of before they started the Academy, so while Shield 1992 wasn't their speciality by any means (they weren't Coulson after all, pre- or post-becoming a robot), they probably knew enough that they could convince certain people who mattered that they really were Shield agents from the future, and secure a living and working place for the summer — assuming, of course, that their belief that only wizards thought they were first years was true. But they still thought it a reasonable assumption, as the 0-8-4 had sent them straight into the wizarding world, not the normal world before it, and very easily could have used everyone's magic to reinforce the beliefs that they all already had that Harry Potter was only eleven and just starting Hogwarts. Whereas any normal people who saw them wouldn't have this preconceived notion of whom they must be, and could therefore see who they actually were, a couple of thirty-five year old geniuses who could convince Fury or Coulson that they were the two smartest scientists ever from the future.
But that was a problem for later — first they needed a way to even get to Shield before operation 'convince the best spies in the world that time travel was possible' could commence. Fortunately, however, Simmons found a solution to that problem pretty quickly once she started researching magical travel. It was called the Knight Bus, and according to the book on means of magical transportation that she found in the library, it could take them anywhere on land. Of course, whether that included land on other sides of bodies of water she wasn't sure, as wizarding Britain did seem to often behave and think like they were the only land mass in existence, or at least once in Wizarding Britain, always in Wizarding Britain. But the bus's motto was 'Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, step on board, and we can take you anywhere you want to go', so they hoped really hard that there was actually truth in advertising. The chapter did say that the bus couldn't do anything underwater, which would make one logically conclude that they could do land overseas, since it didn't say that they couldn't do it like it said that they couldn't do underwater. Though what was underwater for them not be able to transport one to, FitzSimmons didn't know — perhaps Atlantis was alive and thriving somewhere in the magical Mariana Trench, and they just hadn't read about it yet.
And so by the time train day eve arrived, FitzSimmons had a carefully constructed plan. The following morning they would take whatever transportation was expected of them from the castle to the Hogsmeade train station, before disappearing into the shadows as everyone else was too preoccupied pushing and shoving their way onto the train to care what two other students were doing. Then they would hide until the train had left, before walking back out onto the street and calling the Knight Bus, which they would ask to take them across the pond to somewhere nearby the Shield building — and then the fun began. But if it turned out that 'everywhere' was actually only Great Britain, then they would have the bus take them to Shield's British field office, where they would have a much harder time getting the audience with Fury or Coulson that they really needed in order to land their summer vacation home. But that was a problem to worry about only if it occurred.
Also that night, they had a Leaving Feast to attend. In a most shocking turn of events Gryffindor hadn't won the House Cup, which was of course no surprise to anyone after FitzSimmons had lost the House two hundred points in the first two weeks, something that the rest of the House had never stood a chance of coming back from. Everyone at the Gryffindor table turned to glare at FitzSimmons when Dumbledore announced their number of points and last place finish, but FitzSimmons completely ignored them. After all, it perfectly proved one of the biggest problems with a socialized award like the House Cup — a single student (or two become one, in this case) could end their entire House's chance of winning it if they wanted to, to the point where nothing everyone else in the House did for the entire rest of the year mattered at all. But Dumbledore was continuing on with the other three Houses' points, and everyone soon directed their attention to the food that appeared in front of them, and FitzSimmons were left alone for the rest of the feast, completely meaningless House Cup finishing place completely forgotten already as everyone enjoyed the mass of food and talking with their friends about what they were planning on doing over the summer.
After that it was back up to the dorm rooms for most students to cram all of their belongings into their trunks in a hurry since they suddenly realized that they needed everything packed away before the following morning, and then into bed to sleep. Several hours of that and everyone was back in the Great Hall again for one last time before summer to eat breakfast and wait to head to the train. During which Professor McGonagall walked around telling all of the first years that they would be going with Hagrid in the boats again to get to Hogsmeade train station, same as they had come in the fall, and handing everyone notes that told them not to use magic over the holidays.
Once they were sure that Professor McGonagall was plenty far away not to overhear them, Fitz whispered to Simmons, "What's up with the order not to perform magic? Aren't we all wizards now?"
"I'm sure it's just to cover their arses in case a student does something bad with magic over the summer, so that Hogwarts can't be sued since they told everyone that magic isn't allowed," Simmons answered. "You know how companies have to be these days, even if 'these days' is 1992 here, so frivolous lawsuits probably haven't become quite as big of a problem yet."
Content that their plans to attempt to combine magical and muggle technology over the summer while they hid out at Shield wasn't going to be complicated by this unexpected order not to perform — which also meant not to practice — magic over the summer, FitzSimmons patiently waited for the time to come when they could sail the boats across the lake and get started with the next chapter of their life in this universe of magic. But right before they were all supposed to head out onto the grounds, Ron hurried over to them.
"You must come and stay this summer, both of you — I'll send you an owl," he said.
"We'll see," Simmons replied politely, having no intentions of visiting the redhead that summer, or any other summer, and wondering if his owl was even going to be able to reach them inside Shield on the other side of the pond. But Ron seemed to think this a satisfactory answer and not a clear dismissal, as he hurried away to talk to Dean and Seamus after saying that he would see them on the train, a misconception that FitzSimmons didn't try to correct.
A few minutes later the giant bell in the clocktower rang out loud and clear, and they followed Hagrid and the rest of the first years across the lawn, down into a cave, and out across the lake to the train platform where they found their trunks waiting for them since they couldn't very well carry them across the lake with them without risking someone's trunk getting dumped in the lake at some point. But unlike on the way there when their trunks were taken straight from the train to their dorm rooms, their trunks couldn't be taken all the way to their compartments on the train as no one had compartments picked out yet. Which was great for FitzSimmons, as they had no plan of finding a compartment on the train, as they weren't taking the train back to London and families who would instantly be able to tell that they weren't whom they were supposed to be.
So once they found their two trunks on the platform FitzSimmons nonchalantly carried them off into the surrounding woods, no one asking them what they were doing as everyone was too busy trying to get onto the train to pay attention to two students heading away from the train, just as FitzSimmons had expected. Also as expected, there were no adults around to make sure that everyone was getting onto the train like they were supposed to, same as there hadn't been anyone there when the train had arrived in the fall to make sure that everyone got off and went where they were supposed to go in order to get up to the castle safely. And while normally FitzSimmons would have found this very disturbing, had found it disturbing when they had observed it on the trip to Hogwarts, at the moment this negligence by the adults was very appreciated, as it meant less chance of them getting caught skipping out on the train.
Once in the woods and out of easy sight of the train platform they found themselves a little pine thicket in a dip in the land that was hidden from the platform by a short ridge, in which to hide until they heard the train roll away and they knew that it was safe to come out again in order to call the Knight Bus. It took a long time for almost three hundred students to board with their trunks, during which FitzSimmons wiled away the time rereading their Defense Against the Dark Arts book, because one could never know too much self-defense. But eventually they heard the train horn blast several times and the sound of the train starting to move on down the tracks without them. Giving it an extra five minutes to make sure that it was well away, they quietly snuck back to the train platform, keeping a sharp eye out for any adults who might have appeared since they'd disappeared. But they saw no one and were soon standing at the edge of the road leading away from the train platform, and Simmons raised her wand hand.