Rowena Ravenclaw was one of the few humans whom even the Fae respected.

-Sayern nar-Hazozh, (The History of the Treaty), translated c. 1952

Of all the tasks in the Tournament of Houses, Mark had only dreaded one, this one to be specific. He had every confidence in his out-of-book-smarts and team skills and absolutely no doubts about his courage, but he was the first to admit (if only to himself, in a very, very tiny voice at the back of his mind) that his book smarts could use some improvement. He knew this, but he had more important things occupying his mind and time and only began seriously preparing for the Ravenclaw Task a week before.

His efforts were hampered by Harry, so badly hampered that he was tempted to go to Professor Dumbledore or McGonagall and ask them to make his brother back off. Perhaps challenging a Slytherin to a prank war was not the best of ideas, but Mark was far too stubborn to admit defeat even when he was clearly outclassed. How could he defeat Voldemort the next time the tosser came for him if he couldn't even outsmart a boy only a few minutes older than himself?

Five days ago, though, he had realized that their prank was wasn't so much a war as a chess match: he would make one move, then Harry would follow it up with his retaliation. If he stopped pranking Harry for a while (or, as he phrased it to his friends, if they put off attacking until they could do something really grand once this task was over), then Harry would stop hiding their laundry where even the house-elves couldn't find it and jinxing their shoes and whatnot so he could focus. That way, Mark assured the three other Gryffindors currently in the dorm (Neville was the notable exception. Mark couldn't trust him—he was probably a plant), the three of them could concoct something spectacular and he could turn his attention to the task at hand. Perhaps if their finale were grand enough, then Harry would quit harassing them.

So for four days, following a particularly embarrassing incident wherein the boys' pants had been enchanted to emit flatulence all day long (fortunately Professor Flitwick managed to remove the spell before dinner. "Quite an impressive bit of Charms work," he had commented, ignoring Mark's scowl), the Gryffindor third-year champion had been able to cram to his heart's content. Admittedly, this was not much cramming relative to everyone else, as Ron kept distracting him with chess and Gobstones, but Mark learned a fair bit spell trivia.

The problem was that there was so much to learn. Even though he limited himself to spell trivia, which the seventh years thought was the most likely topic of the task, Mark found himself overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information with which he had to deal. For the first time, he found himself glad he was on a team.

So here he was in the Great Hall, going through 1001 Strange Spells for the second time and trying to remember who had made the Ribbit Charm, which forced the victim to croak like a frog. It was… ah, there. Wendolyn the Weird… no surprise there. Perhaps once the task was done he could use some of these on Harry? He doubted that any third year knew the counterspell for the Ribbit Charm.

Dumbledore and the four Heads of House entered in a V formation, the headmaster at its point. Fawkes the phoenix perched upon the shoulder of his flamboyant flame-colored robes, blending in so well that Mark almost mistook him for an epaulet. The other teachers were more conservatively dressed, though Professor Flitwick, with an enormous stuffed eagle on his head and blue-trimmed bronze robes, was only barely so. It was his House's task, after all, and the little man was almost quivering with excitement. Clearly he expected his students to excel, catapulting them firmly into the lead.

Mark smirked. Not going to happen.

As pretty much everyone in the school had suspected, the Ravenclaw Task was to take the form of a quiz bowl. That much was obvious within the first few words out of Dumbledore's mouth.

The headmaster waited a few moments for the whispering to die down, his eyes twinkling merrily. "Yes, quite clever of you to have realized that," he agreed. "Now, does anyone know what subject we will be using? Any champion who can guess wins full points for his team."

Naturally, every champion just had to guess, but no one got it right. Dumbledore's eyes twinkled even more brightly as the guesses went on: no, not magical creatures or astronomy or famous Muggles or Ministers of Magic. Herbology was a good suggestion, but no, that wasn't it either. Nor was entomology or candlemaking or wandlore or centaur culture or Native American spells. Mark suggested alchemy, a subject in which Dumbledore was particularly accomplished. Hermione Granger wondered if it was phoenixes, as Dumbledore had brought in Fawkes. But it was neither phoenixes nor alchemy nor anything else anyone guessed. It was….

"Quidditch?" Hermione squawked in absolute horror.

A huge grin nearly split Mark's face in half as Dumbledore replied, "Yes, Quidditch indeed, Miss Granger."

The poor Ravenclaw looked ready to faint. Hers was a rather common reaction, at least among her Housemates. How ironic that one of the most un-Ravenclaw subjects in the wizarding world was so essential to the Ravenclaw Task.

The Gryffindors, though, had a rather different reaction. Theirs was the House that cared most for the sport, and Mark especially was absolutely thrilled. He knew Quidditch inside and out. Even better, this subject neutralized the biggest threat to their victory, the Ravenclaws themselves. He was a bit concerned about Diggory, who was a half-decent Seeker himself, but one person couldn't save the Hufflepuffs.

There were to be forty questions. The first team to think of the answer was to shoot green sparks into the air, at which point everyone would stop to listen to the team's answer. If they were wrong, they forfeited their opportunity to answer again. Each correct answer was worth one point, which would be added to the total score from the other tasks.

"Now that I've explained the rules," Dumbledore concluded, "I had best surrender the floor to our true expert on Quidditch, Madame Hooch." He gestured to the huge doors, which swung open of their own accord. Madame Hooch stood there, a tall, hawklike figure with sharp gray eyes and uncharacteristic eagerness in her step. She strode forward to the podium which Dumbledore had conjured for her.

"Question one," she announced in the carrying voice that allowed her to control dozens of first years on broomsticks, "Who founded the Holyhead Harpies?"

Mark's brow furrowed in thought. Holyhead Harpies. They hired only women. Seeker Glynnis Griffiths, captain something-or-other Jones. It was founded centuries ago, but by whom?

"Bridget the baker's daughter!" shouted one of the Slytherins, shooting sparks into the air.

"Correct! One point to Slytherin. Question two: Which team did the inventor of the Hawkshead Attacking Formation play for?"

Mark knew this one! He shot sparks, nearly singeing Collin Creevey in his enthusiasm. "Kenmare Kestrals!"

"Correct! One point to Gryffindor. Question three: Which team is famous for their rivalry with Thundelarra?"

One of Mark's fellow Gryffindors literally leapt at the opportunity to answer that. "It's the Moutohora Macaws."

"Incorrect. Gryffindor forfeits its right to answer this question. The other Houses may guess."

A Hufflepuff hesitantly raised her wand. "Is it the Toyohashi Tengu?"

"Incorrect. Hufflepuff forfeits its right to answer this question. The other Houses may guess."

The same Slytherin who had gotten the first question right tried again. "I think it's the Woolongong Warriors."

"Correct. One point to Slytherin. Question four: Why were the Moose Jaw Meteorites nearly disbanded in the nineteen seventies?"

And so on it went through all forty questions. In the end, Gryffindor and Slytherin (namely the one Slytherin who seemed just as Quidditch-crazy as Ron) were almost tied, twelve and thirteen, respectively. Hufflepuff managed a decent ten points, four of which were acquired by Diggory, and the Ravenclaws came in last at four points. One question ("Why do the Quiberon Quafflepunchers wear shocking pink robes?") could not be answered at all. Even now that the questions were over, Madame Hooch still refused to explain why.

Mark strongly suspected it had something to do with them being French.

"I knew all that, though," Ron wailed as they walked back to their dorm.

"Even about the Quafflepunchers?"

"Well, no. But I knew everything else. I really did! Wish she'd asked something about the Cannons, though." Ron sighed. "Mark, mate, you should have called in sick. I could've beaten that snake girl soundly. I knew two of the answers before she did!" He scowled.

"Sorry," Mark replied, "but I didn't know it'd be about Quidditch. If I had, I'd have figured out some way for you to communicate the answers to me."

"Maybe Morse code," Dean suggested.

"Yeah, like Morse code. It's a Muggle thing," he added at Ron's perplexed stare. "It was used in telegraphs."

Ron frowned. "I thought they were called tellyphones?"

"Those are different. You can talk through them. Telegraphs were older and you had to use Morse code to speak through them. No one uses them anymore, though, and the only Morse code I know is SOS."

"Floo calling is much easier," Ron commented.

"In the beginning, but now phones are better." They were, in fact, one of the few things Mark missed about the Muggle world. "You don't have to sit on your knees in a dusty old fireplace to talk with phones."

"…I thought they were called tellyphones?"

"Telephones," Mark replied, "and people call them phones for short. You should have taken Muggle Studies."

"Why? If I ever want to know about Muggles, all I have to do is ask you or Dad." Ron grinned. "You're like my own Muggle library."

"Ha ha." But Mark was smiling.

"Don't look now," muttered Seamus, "but we've got company."

"Who is it?" Mark queried, tensing up.

"He was born just a few minutes before you, has dark hair and glasses, and was Sorted into Slytherin House."

Mark groaned.

"He's not going to prank us, is he?" asked the nervous Ron.

"No, I'm not," said Harry, who had by then caught up with them. "I wanted to ask if the lack of attempted pranks these past few days means that we aren't going to do this anymore, or were you just too busy focusing on the task?"

"Not going to do it anymore," Ron lied. Ever since Harry's guard had gone up, he had been almost impossible to catch. If they could trick him into letting it down, they could do something truly spectacular.

"Nope," Dean agreed.

"You win," Seamus added.

Harry said nothing, just gazed unblinkingly at Mark. Mark, who had never been able to lie to his older brother.

Not that he didn't try. "Nope. Not going to do any more pranks." It came out a bit too fast, a bit too high-pitched. His smile too was plainly forced.

Harry's eyes grew sad. "I see." A sigh. Despite their falling-out, that sigh still made Mark's insides squirm with guilt. The child in him wanted to confess, to beg forgiveness, anything to banish the disappointment from his big brother's face and voice. The Boy-Who-Lived in him quashed that urge.

"Don't believe me?" he snapped.

Harry raised a slender black eyebrow. "Should I?"

"Yes." Ron, Seamus, and Dean answered almost simultaneously.

"I wish I could," Harry replied, so sad and old and hopeless. "I don't enjoy humiliating you, Mark, but I can hardly stand down and let you use me as your target. A prank for a prank, when you stop, I will too. Until then, I must apologize in advance for your upcoming mortification." He bowed slightly before turning to join the other Slytherins, who were gloating over their victory on their way to the Common Room.

Mark hated himself for wanting to follow, to say that he really wouldn't prank Harry—his brother, his twin—again. Once again, though, he forced the impulse down. And he did not look back.

Instead, he continued on. "Come on. Let's go to the Common Room."

Except he regretted that decision almost immediately, his friends wanted nothing more than to talk about Harry, Harry, Harry: about their encounter with him, about their plans for the Granddaddy of All Pranks (which mostly involved Seamus and Dean arguing about their ideas, Ron's and Mark's plans having been discarded early on), about whether Harry would ever see sense and ask for Mark's forgiveness. The younger Potter's nerves were still strained and tight. He couldn't stand to listen to it anymore. Harry this, Harry that. But he could hardly change the conversation to something more palatable—say, Gryffindor's performance in the task and his own role in answering several questions—without looking like he was trying to change the subject.

So he made a strategic retreat: "I have to go to the Library. Want me to pick anything up?"

"Maybe if there's a good book on pranking," Seamus suggested.

"There should be," Dean agreed. "The Library's enormous."

"I have a book for you to drop off," Ron said. "Let me go grab it."

The trip to the Library wasn't anywhere near as much an escape as Mark had hoped. For one thing, he had to hunt down a book on pranking, which kept his mind firmly on Harry until he abandoned his two selections at Madame Pince's desk and headed for the comparatively meager fiction section. He browsed the two shelves, searching for something silly and stupid and wishing that wizards wrote more stories. He didn't read for pleasure much because he had to complete his books in one or two sittings or his brain wouldn't retain everything, and he didn't often have time to do that now that he was a teenager. He'd read more as a very young boy when he and Harry had hidden in the elementary school library and looked through picture books.

Memory again. Mark scowled. What was it that made him so sad about today? Normally he was the one disappointed in Harry, angry at his brother. Today the opposite was true. It must be the sigh, he decided, shoving a book into place with rather more force than was necessary. Stupid Harry, manipulating him like that….

He made his way to Madame Pince's desk, checked out the pranking books, and started stalking back to Gryffindor Tower. His thoughts were dark, his brow thunderous. He was completely absorbed in his own inner world, oblivious to everything around him, in a word, vulnerable.

Pain on the back of his head; he staggered, groping for his wand. The books went falling, falling. He tried to turn, but something struck him again, and he fell.

His head still ached when he awoke, but it had been joined by pain on the rest of his body. He felt like on big bruise. His nose especially hurt: it had apparently made contact with the stone floor, as the cartilage seemed a bit out of place and dried blood was crusted beneath both nostrils. His left palm was scraped as well, some of the skin torn away where he'd tried to catch himself. And of course there was his aching, miserable head.

Mark rubbed the base of his skull. One hand felt at his nose. Good. It had stopped bleeding. His palm had scabbed over as well.

Was this worth a visit to Madame Pomfrey? If not for the head injury, he would have gone back to Gryffindor Tower. But he was fairly certain that head injuries could be deadly if left unchecked, and he really didn't want to die anytime soon, so he'd best be off.

Grumbling, Mark gathered up his fallen books (the pages had bent something awful. Madame Pince would have a fit when he returned them) and began his trek to the Hospital Wing.

Had Harry done this? Mark considered for approximately half a second. No. Brute force was Dudley's style, not Harry's. They had argued earlier, yes, but he didn't believe that his brother had changed so dramatically as to attack him while his back was turned. No, Harry would have wanted him to know. Perhaps one of Harry's friends? Again, no. The princess was too much of a snob to actually hit someone upside the head. The other Slytherin preferred pranks. Neville was too much of a wimp, and the Ravenclaw girl too much of a bookworm. No, this attack had nothing at all to do with his and his brother's spat.

But, Mark wondered, if Harry hadn't arranged this, then who had?

And why?

Harry was almost disappointed by Mark's next prank. Oh, it was decently executed, but he noticed it a moment before they struck. He ducked instinctively; the curses hit Gregory Goyle, who was quite coincidentally heading to the Great Hall at the same time as him (they were both apparently hungry early that night), instead.

"Nice tentacles," Harry observed dryly. "He looks rather like Cthulu now, don't you think?"

But Mark (or at least one of his friends) was cleverer than that; the four Gryffindors fired another round of curses. Harry ducked, dropping to the floor and automatically raising a Shield Charm. Two of the curses bounced back; Dean was presumably hit by one, if his foul curse was any indication. That, or he'd injured himself trying to dodge.

Harry rolled, propped himself up onto an elbow. Keen green eyes surveyed his surroundings. He was surrounded and alone save for the betentacled Goyle, whose clothing was beginning to melt off. Harry grimaced; that was a sight he'd never wished to see. Best not to look in that to focus on the four third years (including Dean, whose heavily made-up face indicated that he had indeed been hit by his own hex) whom were approaching at a run, firing spells all the while.

An ordinary third year wouldn't have stood a chance. Had Harry been such a being, Goyle's unfortunate fate would have befallen him, leaving him betentacled, his chest sprouting salt-and-pepper fur, his face covered in whorish makeup, his clothing melting away. But he was the Lightning Speaker, unwilling vessel of Voldemort's memories, and he was by no means ordinary.

The Gryffindors didn't stand a chance.

By the time Professor McGonagall pushed her way through the gagging crowd that had gathered, the four lions had been Petrified, Goyle was hiding behind a tapestry (which was starting to decompose due to whatever curse he had been hit with. Apparently it made all fabric with which he came in contact turn to dust), and Harry was enchanting his own outer robe so that it wouldn't be destroyed. The Deputy Headmistress's lips thinned. "What, pray tell, is going on here?"

Harry considered lying, discarded the idea. No. If Mark was going to continue harassing him, why should he cover his twin's butt? "They tried to ambush me," he replied simply, nodding at the frozen fourth years. "Hit Goyle instead. I'm decent with petrificus totalis, so I hit them before they could hit me too." He waved his wand with a murmured incantation. "There. Goyle, here you go." He passed his outer robe, which had been Engorged right after he knocked down the last threat, to Goyle's feet. The shoes covering them were faring better than the rest of his clothing (and indeed better than the rapidly fraying tapestry), but they were still about to fall off.

McGonagall glanced at her students, who were trying very hard and failing not to look guilty. She looked at Harry, who met her gaze without blinking. She looked at Goyle, who had thankfully managed to cover himself with Harry's Engorged robe. Her penetrating gaze took in the Slytherin's undulating tentacles, eye shadow, mascara, garish lipstick, and the tuft of unnatural five-inch-long chest hair peeking out from the neckline of his borrowed garment. Her mouth thinned further. "Twenty points from Gryffindor each. Mr. Potter, please escort Mr. Goyle to the Hospital Wing."

Harry nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

Goyle seemed unnaturally small as he followed Harry. Perhaps it was the way he hunched in on himself, one hand trying to tame the fur on his torso. Perhaps it was the way he hung his head. Whatever the reason, he seemed even tinier than Harry.

For a while they journeyed in silence, Goyle out of humiliation and Harry because he couldn't change the other Slytherin back without revealing things he wasn't supposed to know and felt a wee bit guilty about it. Just a little, though—he and Goyle weren't exactly on the friendliest of terms. But when they were three or so minutes from the Hospital Wing, Goyle spoke.

"Why'd you do that?"

"Pardon?"

"Help me." Goyle's voice was thick and slow. It reminded Harry uncharitably of mud creeping down a hillside.

Harry shrugged. "It seemed the decent thing to do. It's not like you've done anything to them lately. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mark has been bothering me since we got back from break, and it's not fair that you got caught in the crossfire." Even if he had used Goyle as a human shield, it was only due to reflexes. When people started firing spells at him, he ducked.

"Oh." Goyle nodded slowly, oh so slowly. "But—never mind." He shook his head, tentacles waving gently. "Never mind."

"Here we are." Harry pushed open the door. Hoping that Goyle would say no (he was very hungry still), he asked, "You want me to explain what happened to Madame Pomfrey?"

Goyle thought for several long moments. "No. You're nice."

"Er—thank you?" Compliments from Goyle were never expected.

Neither was the huge, craggy smile that broke out on the bigger boy's face. "I'm glad you're not the Boy-Who-Lived." And with that, he ambled off to find Madame Pomfrey.

Harry blinked several times at the other Slytherin's retreating back. What in Merlin's name was that about? Then again, it was Goyle. Who knew what went on in his head?

Shrugging his shoulders, Harry turned around, made his way to the Great Hall. By the time he arrived, he had put Goyle's strange words completely out of his mind.

All Quidditch facts except the bit about who founded the Harpies were taken from the Harry Potter Lexicon.

Any last-minute ideas for the Gryffindor task? I still haven't written it yet.

Next update: should be June 21 and will possibly contain aforementioned Gryffindor task and/or spring break and/or something else. Really not sure yet. Hopefully it'll be decent, at least. See you then!

-Antares