At the conclusion of breakfast on the day of the Third Task, the families of the champions arrived to spend the day with them. Tsuna was conspicuous in being utterly alone. Samsara had to take exams, whereas Tsuna was exempt.
Rather than stick around to face pity he took himself off to a quiet spot and stepped over to the house, where Reborn was waiting, and kept a window open at the school in case anyone should go looking for him.
It gave him a chance to do some baking to keep his nerves steady. He would not normally be nervy, being generally too jaded about the possibility of death to get worked up, but with Reborn now amongst their number, the very idea of something going wrong and him departing for the next alternate early had him nearly biting his nails in worry.
Oh, he knew Reborn would make do and even thrive no matter where he ended up, but…
Tsuna churned out all sorts of baked goods over the course of the morning, which Reborn happily taste-tested, then returned to Hogwarts so he could be seen at lunch. After that he returned to the house and Samsara to their remaining exams, not to be seen again until dinner.
Before he left he said, "One of the Mists will be here to get you. Let me adjust the ring, please."
Reborn removed it and offered it up, so Tsuna set to work on it, ensuring that the only people who'd be capable of seeing the Sun were members of Samsara. He handed it back and watched as Reborn slid it back onto his finger.
"All right, I'm off, then."
Reborn took a step forward and placed his hands on Tsuna's shoulders, then leaned in to plant a lingering kiss on his cheek. "Knock 'em dead, Heul."
His eyes went wide in confusion. "Uh, right?"
Reborn smiled and let him go.
— — —
He slid into the spot waiting for him at the Gryffindor table and breathed a quiet sigh. Because having a massive feast with multiple courses right before four students were set to go into the maze was a brilliant idea. For everyone else, perhaps.
He helped himself to onion soup, salad, roast chicken, and mash with gravy. His family kept up conversation around him, slipping in the occasional reassurance that would be mistaken by anyone listening in for something else entirely.
His head went up when a series of bangs sounded—the result of Dumbledore sending up more purple fireworks with his wand—and the old goat said, "Ladies and gentlemen, in five minutes I will be asking you to make your way down to the quidditch field for the third and final task of the Triwizard Tournament. Will the champions please follow Mr Bagman down to the stadium now."
Daemon gave his arm a quick squeeze as Tsuna got up and headed off with the other three. His family at the table were there on turned time; they had already lived through the events to come, and their calm demeanor helped him to to remain calm himself.
"Feeling all right, Harry?" Bagman asked as they went down the stone steps onto the grounds. "Confident?"
"Placed a bet on me, have you?" he asked, then stepped away to the other side of the group. He knew he'd hit it when Bagman gasped, and wondered if his family had already come up with some nefarious scheme the man would shortly be suffering from, for he knew they were pacing him with at least one window. "Is that why you're always fluttering around trying to give me advice I don't want?"
A twenty-foot high hedge ran all the way around the edge of the quidditch pitch. There was a gap right in front of where they stopped, and the passage beyond it looked dark and forbidding.
Five minutes later the stands began to fill with students and visitors, and the sky had turned a deep, clear blue, the first stars starting to appear. Tsuna zoned out, wondering where Reborn would be stationed, for surely whichever Mist had brought him in knew precisely where the Sun would need to be for his part in things.
He snapped back to attention when he heard Bagman say, "So … on my whistle, Harry! Three—two—one—" He gave a short blast on his whistle.
Tsuna darted into the maze, already having memorized all the necessary turns, plus what obstacles he would have to face. He had planned a route to purposely avoid the boggart, because he still had no idea what his was, and the last thing he needed to deal with was finding out it would turn into a dead family member, or himself as a half-braindead Decimo. Or worse, a clone of his biological father.
Partway through his darting and dashing he heard a feminine scream. Either Delacour had run into trouble or one of the boys had been bashed in a tender spot.
The Blast-Ended Skrewt he ran into was taken care of by banishing a rock up the tube it used to propel itself and a piercing spell to its underside when the first one flipped it arse over teakettle. The golden mist that flipped his orientation upside down was nothing more than a blip on the radar for someone who regularly made gravity his bitch.
The sphinx, however, forced him to pause. If the riddle was too hard he would have to take an alternate route.
"I do not breathe, but I run and jump.
I do not eat, but I swim and stretch.
I do not drink, but I sleep and stand.
I do not think, but I grow and play.
I do not see, but you see me every day."
'What do those activities have in common?' he thought. 'Living things, not fish or sharks, so things with legs—oh.' He said, "A leg."
The sphinx smiled broadly. She got up, stretched her front legs, and then moved aside for him to pass.
He heard someone yell out, "Crucio," but kept going. For all he knew it was a recording meant to divert champions from their paths if they got too close to the center, and he knew he was very close.
He turned into what should be the final approach and, up ahead a hundred yards away, was the gleaming Triwizard Cup, resting on a plinth. He was nearly into the small clearing when something rose into view over a hedge to the left; it was moving quickly toward an opening on the other side.
'Fucking spiders,' he thought, absently tossing a barrier behind him to divert anyone coming from that direction, then shot piercing spells forward toward the opening, timing it just right to get the massive spider that was just coming around the corner.
The thing keeled over sideways, flattening the nearby hedge, and strewed the path with a tangle of hairy legs. Tsuna rolled his eyes and approached the cup. A glance at his watch showed him the time and he memorized it, then he reached out to grab the cup.
Instantly he felt a jerk somewhere behind his navel, and he responded by using his Mist Flames to cover himself with illusion.
On arrival he tossed the cup into storage and took note of the flaming letters on display: We're in position.
They quickly changed to: The rat is in front of you and to your left, approaching you.
His wand went into storage as a precaution. Pettigrew was wearing a hooded cloak and cradling the homunculus in one arm, and stopped beside a towering marble headstone, his posture quizzical.
A second later his twins stepped out of Between and each took one of the figures under their power. A third figure approached, Hayato, and with him was Mukuro, who with him brought the snake.
"We're clear," Mukuro said. "Nagini is the last of them."
He faded into view and nodded.
"We'll just take care of that over behind a tombstone so it's not immediately obvious, and then we can get on with the rebirthing ceremony."
He nodded again.
A minute later there was an eruption of red flames, a gush of face-shaped, screaming smoke, and then nothing. Hayato was presumably hidden again (and possibly atop a tombstone or perched in one of the dead-looking trees), and Mukuro came into view again, this time with Harry Potter's twin.
"A rapist," Mukuro said with a malicious grin, "already programmed to act like a scared boy putting on a brave front." The duplicate was led over to the spot the portkey had arrived at and positioned, then Mukuro faded out of sight. An illusory Triwizard Cup appeared a moment later, near the decoy.
Daemon shot him a smile. "These two won't have a clue anything is wrong. As soon as the Dark Baby has been 'rebirthed' and we know if anyone else is coming to the party, we'll get them back under control so we can finish this off."
"I'll just disappear again for now," he said, then did just that.
The twins chuckled and faded away, as well.
Tsuna moved off to the side as the tableau unfroze. Pettigrew's hand snapped up and a spell was fired, neatly hitting the dazed stand-in. Pettigrew gently set down his burden and moved forward to grab the substitute, dragging him to the marble tombstone.
In what little light there was from the stars and moon overhead, Tsuna could see the incision.
TOM RIDDLE
Pettigrew slammed the decoy against the tombstone and used his wand to conjure tight cords, tying him to the stone from the neck down to the ankles. A length of black material was drawn from the rat's pocket, bunched up, and stuffed into the stand-in's mouth.
The rat huffed off and returned dragging a huge cauldron full of some kind of liquid, the sound of it slopping around inside loud against the soundscape of an otherwise quiet night. Pettigrew busied himself lighting a fire under the cauldron, and the liquid inside heated up quite fast, the surface bubbling and sending up fiery sparks.
"Hurry!" said a high, cold voice.
Tsuna eyed the bundle disdainfully, then looked back at the cauldron. The surface was alight with sparks, like crystallized starlight or the brilliant glitter of a snowcrust on a moonlit winter night.
"It is ready, Master."
"Now…" said the cold voice.
Tsuna rather thought, after Pettigrew opened the bundle of fabric covering the homunculus, that it was ugly. A bizarre human-snake hybrid of raw-looking, scaly flesh, with spindly arms and legs, a flat face, and gleaming red eyes.
The sort of thing he'd expect to see in a Silent Hill game, perhaps.
Pettigrew seemed to feel the same way given the look of revulsion on his face as he lifted the thing and carried it to the cauldron. He lowered it in to the sound of a hiss, and then there was a soft thud as the homunculus hit the bottom.
The rat raised his wand, closed his eyes, and intoned: "Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son!"
The surface of the grave the stand-in was bound to cracked. A fine trickle of dust arose from within and fell into the cauldron, the surface of which hissed and sparked and turned a vivid, poisonous-looking blue.
Pettigrew whimpered as he pulled a long, thin, shining silver dagger from his cloak, and sobbed before he said: "Flesh—of the servant—w-willingly given—you will—revive—your master."
Tsuna's brow went up as he realized what the rat was about to do and winced when Pettigrew sliced off his own right hand, which fell into the cauldron with a sickening splash. 'You don't see that shit every day,' he thought. 'Then again, this guy is so spinelessly terrified…'
The potion turned a burning red—maybe the added blood?
Pettigrew gasped and moaned in agony, but turned and moved to stand in front of the decoy.
"B-blood of the enemy … forcibly taken … you will … resurrect your foe."
That same shining, silver dagger pierced the stand-in's arm and drew plenty of blood. Pettigrew fumbled in his pocket for a glass vial with which to gather some of the freely dripping blood, then staggered back to the cauldron and emptied the vial into it.
The liquid within instantly turned a blinding white.
The rat dropped to his knees and slumped sideways, to lay on the ground, cradling the bleeding stump of his arm and sobbing.
Tsuna backed up a bit more, even though his intuition was not concerned. He wanted to make certain he remembered the details in case he ever again ended up as Harry Potter on his seemingly endless journey through the infinity of alternate universes. If he did end up in a similar situation, perhaps he could get everything accomplished early, because it was likely that many of the details would be similar.
The sparks the cauldron was sending out increased and multiplied and did their best to blind everyone. And then suddenly it all stopped. A surge of white steam billowed from the cauldron instead, smothering the area in a thick vapor.
Another surge happened, but it was due to a figure rising up, pushing the mist away. A tall, skeletally thin man emerged and said in that same high, cold voice, "Robe me."
Pettigrew, still sobbing, scrambled to pick up the earlier discarded black robes—
Tsuna again had to pause in thought and wonder if the Dark Lord would be upset that his clothing was not pristine.
—and stand up so he could pull them, one-handed, over his master's head.
'Thank kami there's enough mist still fuzzing the view that I do not know whether or not the Dark Stick is a Ken doll given that balls-lacking voice,' he thought, watching as the newly-made man stepped out of the cauldron. The figure's skin was bleached bone in colour, with wide, scarlet eyes, and a nose as flat as a snake's with slits for nostrils.
'At least he's not a furry?'
The Dark Lord drew a wand from the pocket of the robes and gestured for Pettigrew's arm, then scowled and indicated the other one when the rat offered up his bleeding stump.
Tsuna sketched flaming words of Mist in the air: He's going to try calling what others may be left?
Pettigrew's Dark Mark was a livid red. The Dark Stick pressed a too-long finger to it; it went jet black in response. When Voldemort began to monologue, Tsuna zoned out so he didn't lose any brain cells. The only people he knew off hand who were marked and free were Snape, Karkaroff, and Crouch Jr. Only after the Dark Lord had called his followers did he graciously grant the rat a new, silver hand to replace the one he'd sacrificed.
A glance at his watch showed that surprisingly little time had passed, so he would hopefully see the reactions of those three after he'd turned back and made it appear as if nothing had gone wrong. It was going to take some tricky timing and clever use of illusion to cover the fact that he'd been whisked away by portkey.
'Glory be,' he thought. 'No one came. And doesn't Voldemort look pissed.'
Another few minutes went by as the Dark Lord raged, and then it all just … stopped.
Daemon and Xeul stepped into view, each controlling a target. Eyes went blank, and mouths slack.
Daemon stared intently at Pettigrew for several minutes, silently imparting instructions, then tagged the man and stepped back. Pettigrew disapparated, presumably to go turn himself in and spill every relevant bit of knowledge he had.
Xeul nodded toward where Tsuna had last been visible and said, "He's all yours, darling."
Tsuna faded back into view and fetched his wand from storage, then sent a brace of piercing hexes at the Dark Snake, through the heart, the eyes, the throat, and lungs. A dark mist rose from the corpse and broke apart. There was no screaming face this time, and no wraith trying to swoop through someone's body so it could (presumably) steal a bit of life force or magic.
Daemon opened a window into the Department of Mysteries, in the Hall of Prophecy, in front of row ninety-seven. The prophecy given by Trelawney was dark, its cold blue light extinguished.
"Right," he said. "Hayato?"
Mukuro stepped out with Hayato in tow, and his Storm set to work disintegrating the body. A flick of his wand once it was done saw the particles that once made up the Dark Lord's short-lived new body whisked into an iron box, which was sealed tightly.
"We can dump it in the ocean," Hayato said.
Tsuna checked his watch again. "I have about ten minutes before I need to turn back. I plan to go back two hours so I can be in place on time at the center of the maze."
"That gives us time to dump this off, then, and we can turn back as well, to make sure we have a place for you at the table, for one."
"And to get Reborn in place," Xeul said. "We'll see you once you've won the task and the tournament, darling."
Tsuna nodded and stepped Between to the usual spot, got out his time turner and turned back two hours once the ten minutes were up, then stepped Between again to a room at the Hogsmeade house, one that Reborn knew not to go into until after the event. The time turner was tucked away until later; he would retrieve and stow it after the tournament was concluded, so that he did not somehow create a paradox inside his storage space and blow up the multi-verse or something equally silly.
He stepped again, this time to the center of the maze, but stayed on the edges of Between so he could observe without being caught at it. Sure enough, not even a half hour prior to the start of the task, the fake Moody stumped his way in to set up the cup and, before he stumped off, make it into a portkey with a tap of his wand.
Tsuna waited as patiently as he could, restlessly pacing a small area because he had yet to manage to Edge while standing still, until finally he could hear Bagman's voice echoing over the hedges to commence the third task. Ten minutes later his earlier self came into view and tossed up a barrier, then took down the gargantuan spider, reminding him he needed to remove that the moment his other self was gone.
Tsuna brought his Mist Flames into play and masked what was really happening on the off chance the officials were using some method to spy with, and pulled his copy of the Triwizard Cup out of storage, moving into position a short distance behind his other self.
It was more than a little strange using his flames to prevent his other self from realizing he was there. The moment his earlier self was portkeyed away he melded with the illusion copy of himself, which was just then grabbing onto the cup, and dispelled it at the same time.
Nothing happened.
He had almost expected the hedges to disappear, but remembered that had the points been spread around a bit differently, him reaching the cup first might not have gotten him the win. Did the thing have a flesh memory like a snitch did, so the officials could accurately tell in what order the champions touched it?
He absently dispelled the barrier his earlier self had thrown up and settled in to wait. No sense tipping the fake Moody off and ruining their plan.
'Why do I get the feeling I'll have to watch a pensieve memory in order to see of any of the exciting bits on this end?'
When nothing further had happened ten minutes on he pulled a deck of cards out of storage and started a game of clock solitaire on a blade of grass transfigured into a slab of wood. A window was aimed at each of the openings to the little clearing and positioned where he could easily keep watch, though he hoped his intuition would warn him of anyone (or anything) incoming.
He played several games before a sudden swell of noise came to his ears. He looked up, but could only see the sky from his position. Not even the tops of the stands were in view. He heaved a sigh and listened. There might have been the odd scream or two in the babble of voices, but he couldn't be sure.
Did that mean Crouch Jr had been exposed?
A message finally flamed up in front of him: Reborn's shot was true. Not sure how much longer before they finally buy a clue and come investigate the champions. These idiots don't even have any kind of visual tracking on you four.
Tsuna rolled his eyes and continued his game.
It took nearly an hour before anyone thought to enter the maze to see what had become of the champions. Tsuna first noticed something in his peripheral vision and looked over to see red sparks high in the sky. A short time later there was a second set of sparks, followed quickly by a third.
And then, McGonagall appeared and stopped dead on seeing him playing clock solitaire on his transfigured slab of wood, the Triwizard Cup still sitting there on its plinth.
"Mr Potter!"
"Hm?" he hummed, not bothering to look up as he shifted cards about.
"The third task is officially over. Come along now, and bring the cup with you."
He pushed all the cards back together into a deck and slipped them into their case, then into his pocket, then got up and grabbed the cup. McGonagall led him out in silence, using a non-verbal spell to make openings appear as necessary in the hedges for a direct route out.
Bagman noticed them emerge and coughed, then cast an Amplifying Charm on himself. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he called out. "It appears the only champion to make it to the cup is Mr Potter of Hogwarts, and is awarded full marks. That makes Mr Potter the Triwizard Champion!"
There was a lackluster amount of applause, either because they all still assumed he cheated, or because they were too caught up in prematurely downed champions and a fake Moody being exposed.
Minister Fudge waddled over and shoved a sack in his hand. "Here you go!" he said, his mind clearly elsewhere, and then waddled off again, his two auror guards in tow.
Tsuna blinked and shrugged, then shoved the pouch into his pocket. "May I go now, professor?"
"What?" she said, turning back to look at him. "Yes, Potter, you may go."
He smiled blandly and started walking. Tsuna hadn't taken more than a half dozen steps before he was joined by Hayato, Ken, and Chikusa. By the time he got halfway to the castle his Mists had joined him. Reborn had presumably been dropped back off at № 6.
Samsara slipped into the castle and up to the tower, employing Mist Flames to keep them unremarkable to the occupants therein, and they made it to their dorm room without any hassle.
Tsuna shoved the cup into storage and flopped onto his bed with a sigh. "What a night."
"And yet somehow it was almost more boring than that one time for the Scramble Battles," Chikusa commented.
"At least the Varia have personality," Hayato said. "Half these people shop at the same persona store. Inbred pure-blood bigot modules on sale, half price off! Special discounts for an inflated sense of superiority!"
He snickered. "The Varia have also proven time and time again just how quickly they can fuck you up if you aren't careful, whereas too many of these old farts are riding the coattails of their ancestors and tossing gold around like confetti. Ugh. I can't believe it took them that long to even bother come find out what happened to us. And speaking of which, what did happen to the others?"
Mukuro smirked. "Crouch Jr happened. He was stalking around the maze with that eye of Moody's rather than outside patrolling. He ambushed Delacour and took her out of the running, then used the Imperius Curse on Krum to get Krum to use the Cruciatus on Diggory."
Tsuna huffed. "Oh. Then all that wasn't meant to divert people away from the goal."
Mukuro shook his head. "Soon as he had those three down he stumped back out as fast as he could and started to patrol. No one sent up red sparks, so none of the patrollers went in to pull them out. Delacour had half her silvery hair gnawed off by a frustrated niffler while she was lying there unconscious."
His eyes widened at the thought. After a quick shudder he sat back up. "Karkaroff?"
"Tagged him. He fled the moment his Dark Mark went fully active."
"Snape?"
"Got into a low-voiced argument with Dumbledore about his mark going active, but we meddled," Daemon said. "Neither of them remember that the mark went active—and Snape is compelled to ignore that it has since I doubt he bathes with his clothes on and will see it from time to time—and the people around them had their memories of the time during the conversation erased or altered."
"Crouch Jr?"
"Reborn did exactly what he promised, based on our signal. The flask was punctured and knocked far enough away that it was useless to him. He started to change back in front of everyone, and was promptly stunned. Several aurors not part of Fudge's guard were here to watch the task, and they hauled him off to the DMLE for interrogation. We might have done a bit more meddling with the old goat's mind to make it veer off on a tangent every time the subject of Karkaroff or the fake came up, so he should die before he can come to the realization that he's been duped. We can make sure of it over the next few days. We don't leave until the third of July, after all."
"Any idea how much longer he has?"
Xeul shrugged. "Soon-ish, but we could tinker some more with him and Snape to ensure those potions he's been delivering are nothing more than placebos. He should move on to his so-called 'next great adventure' in a day or so."
"I'm leaning toward placebos. I would like him dead as quickly as possible without directly pulling the trigger myself. It's all well and good to feel a bit of schadenfreude at his predicament given his thoughts on Harry Potter, but let's not tempt fate on this one."
Daemon stepped out a second later.
"Once the old goat is dead we can deal with Karkaroff—maybe he's just never found again and people are left in doubt—and then Snape can have a tragic accident of some kind. Karkaroff may be a spineless dweeb, but he's still a pure-blood bigot and must have done something to deserve that tattoo, just like Snape and Malfoy and all the others."
"A potions accident is tempting," Chikusa said, "but also a bit cliché. Trampled by a herd of nifflers? A sinkhole opens up in Hogsmeade and swallows him?"
Tsuna snorted in laughter. "With how greasy he is I don't think anyone would ever swallow him, so why would a sinkhole?"
Mukuro laughed creepily. "Such a pervert today, darling."
Chikusa gave him a mildly reproving look before continuing, "The one Rube Goldberg-style machine that actually functions correctly and kills him? ..No, that would go against the laws of the universe. Hm."
"I'm suddenly imagining a horde of lemmings, a fishing net, and a panicked scamper over a cliff."
"I'd say have Reborn shoot him, but any muggle-born would recognize the wound and it would cast doubt on anyone muggle-raised."
"So." Ken drew the word out so far it was ludicrous. "We pull a random card from the Heul's Bizarre Deaths File and reenact it?"
Tsuna grabbed a pillow and chucked it at his Sun.
"Accidentally asphyxiated by a roaming, amateur dominatrix?"
"Stripped of all his flesh by a locust swarm?"
Tsuna waved his hands around. "Let's all sleep on it. We have a week to think about it, and maybe Reborn will have some ideas we could use. I'm gonna go grab a shower."
— — —
It was funny how the school's collective attitude flipped after Tsuna won the tournament. There was suddenly no mention of his obvious cheating to get in, or how obviously he'd had adults like Bagman feeding him all the answers so he was better prepared than anyone to face the tasks.
He was a hero now.
Speaking of Bagman, he had won his bet, but instead of using the money to square his debts with the goblins, he had blown it on yet more gambling. He was presumably an addict to some degree. The last anyone heard of him was a panicked flight to get out of the reach of the goblins.
Karkaroff had fled to a shack in Siberia and been killed in a freak avalanche.
Thankfully, it was not until after they were on the train home that Dumbledore slipped into a coma and died, so they were not enjoined to attend the man's funeral in person. Once they were in their compartment they stepped out to № 6, though Tsuna did make a quick detour to pick up and stow his time turner before joining the others.
Reborn had decided to be more French than Italian and had greeted Tsuna with a kiss to each cheek. As he was not completely up to speed on everything French culture-wise, he was unsure if that was the done thing or not. So he blinked in mild confusion, smiled a serene smile, and offered to make croissants.
"I was considering breaking into the old goat's tomb and acquiring his wand," Hayato said after they sat down to enjoy some tea while Tsuna busied himself with baking.
"So that some fanboy doesn't steal it as a macabre souvenir?"
"Essentially."
Tsuna shrugged. "Go for it, then. And that leaves Snape. The only thing I've come up with since our last talk on this is some bullshit excuse about how an oath to Dumbledore ultimately led to his death after the old goat died. Somehow."
"Except for the part where there's no evidence he made one," Ken said. "Though, most people were clueless as to why the old goat trusted Snape so much, and might have come to the erroneous conclusion that an oath was involved."
"He's just a pathetic, bitter man," Tsuna said. "He fancied himself in love with Lily Evans when it was truthfully more like a stalker obsession. What rational person would believe joining the Death Eaters, the very people who want to snuff out girls like her, would make an intelligent muggle-born be so impressed that they'd want to be with him?"
"Why don't we just seal him?" Reborn said. "You told me the seals you placed on the Death Eaters in Azkaban saw them dead after a few weeks. As amusing as it is to come up with increasingly improbable ways to off the defect, simplicity is probably better in the end."
Everyone exchanged looks and slumped.
"Yeah, you're right," Hayato said. "We should do it quick, then, so whoever takes over as headmaster or headmistress has time to find a replacement. Tonight, then? We can sneak onto the grounds and take care of the wand and Snape."
The Mists nodded, and that was that.
"I take it you've not had any trouble with the zoo next door?" he asked Reborn.
Reborn shook his head. "Their eyes gloss right over me. Just as well, as I expect the giraffe would try to flirt with me otherwise, and no sane man should have to deal with that."
Tsuna laughed merrily. "Shall I craft you a disguise of a plain man, Ki-san~?"
Reborn scowled at him. "As much as the very idea irritates me, I do wonder what will happen from here on. Once you're all free of the magical world…"
Tsuna laughed again. "It will be interesting indeed to see the look on the local Reborn's face when he sees you. We will have to lure him in and gain his trust, after all, in order to have his backing for when we spring the cure on everyone else. Shall I recreate Samsara and seduce him with my cooking?"
Reborn's scowl intensified. "Your cooking would definitely capture his attention, Heul."
"Ki-san is flirting with me again~!" he teased. "Don't worry. You will always come first when it comes to dealing with any version of Renato Sinclair or Reborn. Which reminds me…" He frowned in thought.
"What name I should be using," Reborn stated.
"We could just go with Ren again," Mukuro said, "but ultimately it's up to you. The local version always has first claim to the name 'Reborn'. Or we could call you Sin."
Tsuna chortled. "I kinda like that, actually."
"I can live with being called Sin. I would also accept Clair, though it would draw attention to my French half, with an upside of it meaning 'famous' by some interpretations. Sinclair is given to mean pure, renowned, or illustrious, which is interesting if you consider Saint Clair of Assisi, an Italian saint and one of the…"
Reborn actually got through his lecture on history without anyone objecting or looking bored, and by the end of it they were aware of how some names with "saint" in them were slurred in a way, such as how St John could become Sinjin and St Clair could become Sinclair.
Anyone who could make history and etymology interesting and compelling was a teacher of great skill in Tsuna's opinion.
Tsuna presented a fresh batch of croissants and sat down to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
That evening his Mists went off with Hayato to take care of a few loose ends and returned two hours later. Hayato presented him with Dumbledore's wand, which he tossed into storage as a slightly more exalted stick than usual, but still just a stick.
"I wonder who will end up in charge of the school," he said as he slid plates onto the table. A quick trip via Between to Japan had provided all the ingredients he needed to make homemade ramen for his family, with dango for after.
By the time it was late enough to seek sleep, Tsuna became aware that Reborn—Sin—had been using his bedroom the whole time he'd been living there. He had been the only one with a bedroom to himself, as their leader, so it was only logical that Sin would be housed there.
It made him blush for some reason.
Maybe it was because there was only one bed in there? The room had changed from simply lived in to warm and inviting in a way that only a Sun could produce. Well, a Sun not bent on burning the life force out of you.
Sin acted like it was nothing out of the ordinary when he slipped into the bed, taking the right side, so Tsuna shrugged and got ready, and took the left side. Sin turned out to be an upgraded version of a cat, portable space heaters that they were, which made it a bit warmer than he'd like given it was July, but he fell asleep despite that, certain of his safety.
— — —
The next morning, after a bit of awkwardness on his part on waking up to another person in his bed, Tsuna set about slicing fruit to go with the croissants from the day before as breakfast. He noticed Sin had acquired an espresso maker at some point and installed it in the kitchen.
The Sun made himself some caffè latte which, as he learned from his time in Italy, was only drunk in the mornings, along with other milky versions.
Tsuna didn't care; he still didn't like the taste of coffee in general, and neither did the others.
He did care, however, for making things his family liked, and that included Sin. He pulled some books out of storage and started browsing, and finally found something he thought he could try, even if he would inevitably tinker with the proportions. The books got packed away again for the time being.
Lunch was cheeseburgers, chips, and a Thai salad.
"So, any news on the brothers three?" he asked.
Daemon shrugged. "The usual. Enrico is still playing the field, Massimo is starting to, and Federico is still the baby. This latest check has revealed that Enrico has a thing for blondes, so we can focus our efforts there better."
Tsuna looked up. "There's a part of me that wants to ask you to compel the idiot to keep it in his pants until he's married, and to then always be faithful. If some poor woman is going to be a brood mare for the Vongola name, she should at least have the comfort of a faithful husband. Same for the others, once they're old enough. I do trust you're making sure he's not…"
"Fathering bastards?" Mukuro said bluntly.
"Yeah. Vongola seems to think they're above the mores of society for some reason. That much was proved when Teo-jiji brought in an alleged bastard son of his. If you can't keep it in your pants, at least keep it covered. Or, you know, go for your own gender. Even the mafia hasn't come up with a way for one man to impregnate another man."
His Mists seemed particularly amused by that for some reason.
"What about Estraneo?"
Ken perked up and looked at Mukuro.
"They've just recently decided to start their experimentation ward," Mukuro reported. "That being so, we can't very well haunt them with the ghosts of their victims as with did with Lockhart."
"They weren't actually dead, though," Chikusa pointed out.
"Details! The point is they are just gearing up and have yet to do anything worse than the average wrong-side-of-the-tracks famiglia."
"You lot aren't scheduled to be born for another four years," he said. "But I remember you telling me about those Estraneo scientists, how their own faces were stitched up like they'd been experimented on. It reminds me of that one vault in Fallout 4."
"The school?" Daemon said.
"Yeah. I don't want to be the cause of the local yous not being born, but…"
"And neither do you want to engineer exactly who the local Tsuna harmonizes with."
"Also yeah. It gets confusing at times, you know that. I so rarely show up early that this isn't normally an issue. I don't want you three locally to have to suffer that torture. Maybe investigate and see exactly which members of Estraneo are pushing for the experimentation, and off them? Leave more moderate people in charge? Or if one of the defects happens to be one of your parents…"
Mukuro laid a hand on his and said, "I will do some investigating this summer. Once we have a better picture of what's happening, their plans, and so forth, then we can sit down again and hash out a plan of action. Part of the problem is that we don't know who our parents are. Anything we do could prevent our births, and we need to be able to accept that before we make a move. Or we wait until the locals are a few years old and rescue them as per usual."
Tsuna sighed. "All right. I'll leave it with you three to start with."
An owl flew in and dumped a Daily Prophet on the table, then winged out.
Tsuna pulled the paper over—and why was it a paper using muggle-ish materials instead of the parchment used for everything else?—and noted that there was nothing much of interest for stories, just more idiocy regarding his victory in the Triwizard Tournament.
"Don't they have better things to report on? Like, I don't know, Lockhart finally going insane and offing himself because of the ghosts we anchored to him?" He sighed and pushed the paper away. "I need to go shopping. Who's coming with?"
— — —
Sin was giving him a look he couldn't interpret. It was intense, bordering on warm, but there was a quality to it he simply did not recognize.
"You know," he said, "I never did ask before."
As quick on the uptake as always, Sin said, "My experience with my local Tsuna?"
He hummed. "What went through your head when you first saw him?"
Sin smirked. "It was a good thing I was in hiding at the time, because I'm afraid to say I gawked like a newbie on first seeing flames in action."
Tsuna smiled softly. "I was a messed up kid."
"Yes, but you know damn well that's not why I gawked. Why didn't you use a disguise when you set up Samsara? You were in the heart of Italy. Any one of those idiots could have seen you, seen the startling resemblance to Giotto, and flipped out, thinking you were a child from some unknown bastard offspring."
Tsuna shrugged. "Daemon was perfectly willing to fuck with people's heads if need be. I have the Heul disguise, but I always feel more comfortable with my original appearance. How did you treat him? He seemed very—well, almost gutted. When you said good-bye."
Sin pursed his lips. "He looked too much like you, Heul. I couldn't bear to be my usual trollish asshole self, not looking at those big brown eyes, that ridiculously fluffy hair, and all that innocence. I won't say I was nice, but I did go easier on him than I ever did on Dino. I sometimes think I might have taken out my anger on the kid, after what Don Timoteo told me about the seal, if I hadn't already met you. It would have felt like a betrayal of you to do so."
"We know how to place them now, but removing them…"
"Yeah, the only thing so far are the bullets," Sin said, frowning. "Can you reverse engineer the seal? Find a bunch of defects, seal them, paying especial attention when you do so, and then trying to reverse it? Unfortunately I have not been able to figure out the bullets."
Tsuna frowned. "You know? In all this time I have yet to learn anything about those bullets. And I distinctly recall at least one famiglia got their hands on some and tinkered with them, or figured out how to make something similar. Huh. Maybe I'll do a bit of digging. I'll have to ask one of my Mists to poke around in Teo-jiji's brains, though."
"It would be unfortunate if his brains liquified," Sin said, smiling innocently.
He wrinkled his nose. "Probably. But on the other hand… No, that wouldn't work, not without one of them rewiring Enrico's mind so that he's no longer a strutting peacock with more arrogance than brains. Besides, I only went psycho that one time and wiped out family members. Maybe haunt Teo-jiji with the ghost of his mother?"
"What, have Daniella harangue him at every opportunity, every time he does yet another monumentally stupid thing?" Sin suggested.
Tsuna brightened with malicious glee. "Yes! Maybe we can save one Teo-jiji from his own stupidity, even only if it's because he's terrified of his mama. Yeah, let's do it! I have three Mists who are sadistic assholes when they want to be—"
"Which is frequently," Sin interjected quietly.
"—and I think they'd be thrilled with the assignment!" he finished, pretending he hadn't heard that. He resolved to bring it up at dinner, then changed the subject. "We've been to Disney World, but I found out there are parks here, too, just not as big. What do you think of us all going to Thorpe Park and having fun on all the roller coasters?"
Sin smiled toothily. "Only if I get to sit next to you each time."
He blinked, unaware that he was blushing. A tiny, quiet, nearly inaudible voice in the back of his mind was chanting, "Ki-san is flirting with me~!" over and over. "Sure!"
"Let's go watch a movie," Sin suggested, and somehow, it just wasn't a surprise to Tsuna when Sin insisted on sitting right next to him the entire time, brushing his hand every time the man went to get more popcorn from the bucket Tsuna had ended up being the one to hold.
That evening he worked on dinner, letting Sin be the one to bring up the haunting idea, and his family exploded in mirth. His Mists promptly set to squabbling over who got to be the one to haunt the aging don and settled it with a game of jan-ken, with Xeul coming out as the victor.
Tsuna slid plates onto the table with Ken's help. "There is one other issue," he said as he took a seat. "Sin and I were talking and the subject of the seal Teo-jiji uses came up, as well as those Dying Will Bullets. I don't see why you guys can't get information on those. I mean, who knows, that might help us in the future."
"There might come a time when we arrive after the local Tsuna turns five," Chikusa said, "in which case, definitely. I have to wonder if those bullets could be tweaked and used to show what latent flames a person has, though I'm not seeing a situation offhand where that would be useful."
"Well, while Xeul is hashing out his game plan for the haunting, Daemon and Mukuro can duke it out for the other information, or tag-team and poke around for anything else of interest while you're there. Also," he said, "I would like to go have some fun at Thorpe Park, so we need to fit that in somewhere. And I promise to do my best not to get spooked and use Earth Flames to fuck up the whole park."
No one talked about that incident at Universal Studios. No one.
"Great!" he enthused when not one of them foolishly tempted fate. Or his generally squashed-in-a-dark-place temper.
— — —
The first time Sin called him "tesoro" was when he presented the Sun with a cup of coffee based on a little something called caffè d'un parrinu, an Arabic-inspired coffee flavored with cloves, cinnamon, and cocoa.
Tsuna wasn't quite sure how he felt about being called, essentially, "treasure", but he was pleased that Sin appreciated his efforts. Sin was sunshine personified after a sip of that cup of coffee and his mood was infectious. He also developed a habit of slinging an arm around Tsuna's shoulders and pulling him close.
Tsuna was starting to get the idea that his offering of flavored coffee had been taken as a declaration of love. Of the romantic kind, rather than platonic.
Was he reading into things too weirdly? Seeing stuff that wasn't there? Curse his fifteen-year-old-going-through-puberty body!
Every cup of that special coffee he made would be a ticking time bomb. What the results of the explosion would be… Tsuna perked up. Might he finally get rid of that awkward virgin status? If a veela chick, who had almost the entirety of the male population at Hogwarts panting like puppies after a picosecond in her vicinity, hadn't made a dent in his own libido, was it not entirely possible that he was gay? Or at least Reborn-sexual?
'I just know I can get a pun out of this somehow,' he thought, eyeing Sin as he stared at his now empty cup with a weird tangle of wistfulness and bliss. 'Sin-sational? Sin-sexual?' He shook his head lightly. The first one was closer to a pun.
He shrank back slightly when Sin fixed hungry eyes on him and displayed a smile full of glinting, sharp teeth.
"So," he said loudly, suddenly feeling like prey, "let's talk about that trip to Thorpe Park!"
— — —
Sin danced attendance on him the entire trip, making sure he always had a drink when he was thirsty, something to nibble on, and always sat at his side. It made the roller coaster rides even more exciting than advertised, being close to an apex predator who gave every indication of wanting to consume him.
He knew he was in for it eventually when, as they were about to plunge down the initial, nearly vertical slope of the most hair-raising roller coaster the place had to offer, Sin whispered in his ear, "Not to worry, tesoro. I won't even consider making you mine properly until after your body has turned sixteen."
And then they were headed straight down.
— — —
"How goes Operation Scare the Stupidity Out of Teo-Jiji?"
"You are never being allowed to make up mission names again," Daemon said with a scowl. "That was pathetic."
Xeul rolled his eyes and went to speak, but was distracted when an owl swooped in, dumped off a copy of the Daily Prophet, and winged back out. "Oh. Pettigrew is finally going to be on trial."
"About damn time," he said. "Full Wizengamot, too, public trial. Awesome, except for the part where Black may decide to move back to England and become a thorn in my side. Shall we all file in as witnesses to this event or just open a few windows?"
Ken grimaced. "I'd rather view it remotely. The stench of idiocy is bad enough all year at the school, and those are just kids. To be at a trial with who knows how many adults…?"
The rest of his family agreed, his Mists chiming in to say, "We can always do a bit of remote mind-fuckery if necessary. Fudge might try to skew the results, and that can't be allowed."
"Awesome," he said. "Tomorrow we will witness our government actually doing things correctly, even if we have to force them into it. Keep an eye out for anyone on the Wizengamot being dicks, so we can visit their brains later and find out what other sort of bullshit they've been shoveling."
"Don't you mean hippogriff shit?"
"No, I refuse to be drawn into using Merlin and hippogriff shit and kami knows what other magical-slanted terms when we already have plenty of useful ones to choose from."
"Getting back to Teo-jiji," Xeul said firmly. "After rummaging around in the man's head for a while to get a good feel for how Daniella impressed herself upon his memory, I have a good idea of how to proceed with the haunting. It may take a while for the message to sink in, however, as he seems to be particularly stubborn in the idea that his plans are flawless, and therefore need not heed any counsel but his own."
Tsuna rolled his eyes. "He's starting to remind me of the old goat."
Xeul nodded. "There are distinct similarities. As I said, he's stubborn, so I might seem a bit distant at times, possibly throughout this coming school year or longer. Obviously, I could just rewire him, but that would fail to offer lasting amusement of the 'let's have a pensieve night' variety."
Sin smirked. "Blackmail is always a lovely thing to have. Can you take photographs inside one of those things?"
"Eh… No. Not unless there's a type of pensieve that allows your whole body to go in. When you watched that memory of the Yule Ball, your mind was inside, but the rest of you just sat there unmoving. Hm. Something to look into. Maybe that's why pensieve memories aren't allowed as evidence in court?"
"Maybe since we have continued to fail when it comes to getting those damn laptops to work," Hayato said, "we could switch focus for a while and fuck with pensieves instead? We could always try requiring something on how to craft them once we're back at Hogwarts. It's not like we're actually learning anything at that school."
Considering that after several months of utter boredom his Mists had taken it upon themselves to break into every professors offices and make copies of all planned homework assignments, simply so they could just get them done ahead of time and move on to more interesting things…
"Add it to the list."
The next morning after breakfast they assembled in the sitting room to watch the big-screen version of a window. Smaller ones were opened along either side, to be used to focus on individuals.
Madame Amelia Bones, head of the DMLE, had Pettigrew in the chair and chained in place in no time flat. She asked for and won the right to use veritaserum on the rat on the grounds of "dead men have no rights". It took hours (lunch was served right there in the courtroom) for them to decide it was time to call for a vote (the only reason Tsuna could figure that was because some of them—the ones now occupying the side windows—were trying their best to delay things in the hopes they could indulge in some old-fashioned back-room dealings involving bribery, threats, blackmail, or extortion), and in the end Pettigrew was sentenced to the Veil.
On a side note, Sirius Black was declared exonerated of all charges (Bones had been kind enough to sweep all archives looking for trial transcripts, as she had not been in charge during the war, and came up with a big fat zero) and a press release would go out to the media post haste.
"Yeah, we'll be waiting for the Daily Prophet to report this before we bother writing to Black," he murmured. "Technically he is this body's magical guardian due to that whole godfather thing, but kami knows I don't want him mucking around thinking he has the maturity to handle it."
Mukuro smiled creepily.
"Speaking of maturity, I wonder how Enrico would react if Daniella's ghost were to pop up every time he wanted some action?"
Xeul cackled in delight. "That'd teach him to keep it in his pants until after he's married!"
"Still, it would mean tying up a Mist for who knows how long," he said. "Can we anchor the haunt into his psyche, rather like how Lockhart was handled? We're talking about a fairly simple condition, not like what would be necessary for Teo-jiji."
"Let me get the whole thing down with Teo-jiji, then I'll use that to implant something like a living nightmare in Enrico's head, triggered by that specific impulse or action."
Tsuna nodded and hoped that their plan actually bore fruit that didn't end up being rotten inside.
— — —
A copy of the Daily Prophet had been sent along to Black with a note stating simply that he'd been exonerated. The spy sent along with the owl doing the delivery had only lasted perhaps half the journey, so they were not in a position to use remote mind-fuckery to ensure Black stayed in his little tropical paradise, and hoped the note would not bring the man running back to Britain.
The calendar flipped over from July to August and with it, during the evening of the second, brought calamity—or it would have been if not for experienced and tricksy bastards and a leader who possessed Hyper Intuition.
Tsuna felt a faint sense of unease as the sun went down and said, "Something is coming. Soon. Within the hour."
"Deadly?" Ken asked.
"I'm thinking so," he said absently, straining to understand what his intuition was telling him. "I am reminded of … third year. Dementors?" He glanced out the window and saw that it was getting a bit foggy out there, which was odd considering they were experiencing a heat wave. "For that to be happening the temperature has to have gone down rapidly, and that makes little sense."
"Someone in the Ministry has it out for you?" Sin asked in an oddly hesitant manner. "Your street cred has gone back up after the tournament concluded, after a year of disdain, or worse."
"And prior that that you've been almost a non-entity," Daemon said. "Winning the tournament has made liking you fashionable again. Perhaps it's an official who is now worried it will make you more popular than the minister?"
"I hate politics," he muttered. "We aren't under the Trace and we have foreign wands we can use, or go wandless, but I expect that the Ministry is watching this area closely for any signs of magic, so I'll get blamed no matter what if any is detected."
"So we either sit tight behind our protections and wait for the fallout, or we act and possibly get hauled into court, because this is starting to feel like a clever plan to discredit you," Mukuro said. "Dementors move at the direction of the ministry. They already have a sweet deal at Azkaban. Someone promising them additional souls…"
"Against people who have no way to defend themselves," Chikusa stated.
"The Bounding Box will keep them away from us. I could make a larger one to push them out of the area, but that won't save other people in other areas. Even using the Patronus Charm would only see them driven away from here. In all likelihood, people are going to get their souls sucked out, assuming they'll even go after non-magicals. If not, we're the only ones in danger, and we're protected."
"A box that large would strain you greatly," Hayato objected with a scowl. "A test, then? We step over to the Hogsmeade house. If they were sent to this location, they won't follow. If they were sent after you specifically, you'll be in a magical area and we're free to defend, with a plus of a whole lot of people becoming aware there are dementors on the loose."
"And possibly get Kissed," Xeul said, "since most people are incapable of casting a Patronus Charm. Step into the Ministry itself and stay hidden? We're not that far from London, so…"
"The people on duty at night are mostly aurors, obliviators, the bunch in charge of handling accidental magic reversal…" Tsuna nodded. "Right, let's step over to the Ministry, then."
After a bit of shuffling (Tsuna was not surprised he was the one to drag Sin through Between) they were situated in the atrium on level eight, protected by a temporary Bounding Box. A sleepy-looking fellow was manning the security desk at the far end of the cavernous room, going through a cycle of slowly falling asleep, then jerking back upright after a short snore and looking around blearily.
Within an hour two dementors arrived (did they get in through the owl windows, Tsuna wondered), which caused the fellow on duty to shriek, piss himself, and slam his hand down on a button on his desk. Alarms went off as the man fled through a door, slamming it closed behind him.
It took a few minutes, but on-duty aurors raced into the atrium, paused on seeing the dementors, then hastened to contain them (though one unfortunate soul fainted dead away and was of no use whatsoever).
"Let's go," Tsuna said quietly.
Unsurprisingly, there was nothing in the paper the next day, or any other day.
"Clearly someone high up," Sin opined, "someone with the power to gag the press, or ensure it never made it out of the Ministry to begin with. While I do wonder how they fared against those horrors, I must also believe that anyone who went into auror training should not have been cleared for active duty if they weren't capable of casting the Patronus Charm."
"We did our best to protect the civilians," he said. "If any of those aurors were Kissed, that should be a blazing neon sign that the department needs a good shake up and retraining."
— — —
Letters arrived on the eleventh and, strangely, did not contain anything by way of a book for Defense. The cover letter was signed by Headmistress McGonagall, so at least one question had been answered. Tsuna wondered if she would be handling both that and teaching Transfiguration, and also wondered who would take on the role of Deputy.
Also of interest were the books for Potions, ones that detailed reactions and other information that should be considered basic knowledge for the art, but had never before been required. Then again, Snape had been abysmal at passing on his own, acknowledged expertise. The last person to hold the position, Horace Slughorn, had been a jovial fat spider and quite decent at teaching. He was also very skilled at his craft.
Hopefully the additional books on the list meant a competent instructor would be handling that class.
The article about Snape's fate had been tiny and tucked in between advertisements for various beauty potions, which was a backhanded slam at an already dead man. Also, amusing.
Supplies for the year were obtained and all that was left was the train ride.