A/N: Okay, so here's the long-promised, highly anticipated chapter of The Snow Queen; the Dragon Fight. That's right, it's here and slightly modified to reflect the new aspects of the story. I am exhausted, been writing this thing non-stop all day. Enjoy it, kiddies. And as always, stay tuned.
The grounds around Hogwarts were eerily silent for a warm November afternoon. The storms had let up somewhat, allowing a hint of blue to pierce through the white and grey clouds. You could see the Beauxbatons camp off in the distance, the majestic carriage surrounded by tents and banners looking like a palace lording it over the local slum. The ship from Durmstrang was moving across the lake, happily bobbing along as if there wasn't a curious giant squid feeling up the outer hull with its tentacles.
Most of the children were outside, enjoying the gap between the end of classes and dinnertime in their own ways. There was a chess match going on between Weasley and Goldstein, the Gryffindor Golden Boy and the Ravenclaw Overmind duking it out in an intense match-up that would determine the outcome for the October chess rankings.
The Slytherins and the Hufflepuffs were sitting together off to the side, attentions divided between the chess match to end all chess matches and the newly arrived exchange students. Durmstrang and Beauxbatons were lounging around and talking in different languages, their discussions about as easy to follow to the Hogwarts students as one of Babbling's treatises on the origins of Runic Sanskrit rituals.
But all of them were keeping a weary and slightly scandalised eye on the black-haired girl whirling around the grounds with a sword and the biggest grin anyone had yet seen on her.
Rose wasn't paying much attention to anything around her, losing herself in the combination of kicks, punches and sword thrusts she favoured during lone training sessions. She needed this. It had been a week since she'd had any kind of alone time, what with the incessant parties on offer to Capitol residents, that cute guy she'd picked up on leave and yesterday. Not that she would complain much about things. It had been a lot of fun for her. Hell, ever since she'd woken up this morning she'd been having tons of fun. Training drills from ten AM onwards, arranging to finally go shopping with the crazy cat lady (or was that Lion Lady?), doing some research on this tri-pussy tournament she'd been roped into and, finally, her little bit of alone time with a gladius she'd picked off one of the older armours whilst exploring the castle.
And what a castle it was. It had everything she'd expect from a frontier outpost with things to hide. Hard-to-navigate corridors, trick doors, trap doors, hidden floors... she'd almost forgotten her training regimen in her exploration. Hermione had given her a few quick pointers after breakfast before hopping off to classes, all of them incredibly unhelpful (What was a gryffin anyway? Winged creature with the head of an eagle and the body of a great cat. You'll know one when you see one.Thanks for that Blue. How incredibly unhelpful of you. I try.), but that was okay. The poor girl had no idea that she'd had no idea. Not to mention that she was incredibly nervous around Rose. So Snow decided to cut her some slack. The lack of directions was more than enticing anyway. But man, those stairways had been a surprise. Though not as big a surprise as when a group of kids no older than twelve had stumbled upon Rose hanging off a balustrade and shouting her love for stair-surfing out loud as the stairway whipped over to the other side of the room.
So she'd had her fun. Would do again later. But now it was sword practice time, so Rose had to shimmy. Doing sword drills by yourself quickly got boring though, so she'd focused and rushed through her two-hour drill for the day in one and a half hours and then gone to the lakeside to practice some more.
The gladius sung as it spun through the air, its ancient blade seemingly gleaming in the afternoon light. She'd trained with one throughout most of her time as a Tribute Trainee, its lighter blade and shorter reach forcing you to engage up close when you didn't have a shield handy. With a shield, disciplined drill manoeuvring gave you the advantage as you could easily get inside your opponent's guard if you did everything by the numbers. Without a shield, buckler or other form of deflective protection, you had to improvise. And Rose was nothing if not an inventive brawler when it came to wielding one of these short swords unshielded. She preferred to train with a target or sparring partner handy, but those were thin on the ground here unless she wanted to try outmanoeuvring that crazy war vet that handled defence against whatever (the dark arts. I know, thanks), which was not something she fancied doing until she'd worked out the kinks in her technique first.
So here she was, running through one of her former teacher's more inventive sword drills wearing nothing but boots, shorts and a tank top.
To the onlookers, she made quite a sight. This teenaged girl whirled the blade around as if she was born with one in her hand, ducking, kicking and punching unseen enemies just as if she was fighting off a demiguise hunting party. The male population appreciated the view greatly. It wasn't often that a witch, no matter her reputation, willingly bore that much skin in public. And she was pretty shapely for a girl. The muscles glistening with sweat were... appreciated. Even the Veela girl hadn't gotten such a reaction out of them when she'd first made her entrance.
The more observant portion of the crowd noticed something a bit more disturbing. Scars peeked out from under the tank top and ran down legs, arms and even came out from underneath the neck line. The face was fine, but the rest of her body had more in common with a terrain map than the body of a healthy human. What was even more disturbing were that one could recognise what had caused the scars. Her right hand, for example, bore the faint lines of deep wounds. Her left arm had a deep indentation on both sides, which some of the muggleborn recognised as an exit wound of some sort. Her legs were criss-crossed with faded white lines, some so deep they left a ridge in the muscle, others not. The back of her neck was the worst. It looked like an acid burn, but without the blemishing you expected to find there. It was simply a shallow pool of scar tissue masked under normal-looking skin.
A lot of the kids remembered the rumours about Rose fighting Inferi and cursed muggle devices and revised their opinions accordingly. Whatever she'd been fighting had left evidence up and down her body. You just had to look closely to see it.
The more medically inclined were horrified. How was the girl even walking? Some of those scars indicated wounds that could take out wizards and have them bed-ridden for months should they survive. And yet this girl, Girl-Who-Lived or not, was evidently able to recover from them as if nothing had happened. Just who was she? And how did she do it?
Many people puzzled over the enigma that was Rose Snow. Some over just how she would look like with even less clothes on, others about just what she'd done that had allowed her to live through such obvious trauma.
One of them set out to find some answers.
Rose's sixth sense started blaring at her. Someone had just snuck up into her training space. Going on instincts drilled into her both at the Academy and on the battlefields, she whirled around and prepared to thrust her blade into the dumbass's stomach. At least, that was the plan until a firm hand gripped her sword arm and pulled it aside. She kicked out with her foot, catching the potential enemy in the stomach.
Sword arm free once more, she brought the gladius back into thrusting postion and stopped as she noticed that the dumbass she'd almost run through was actually a student. From Durmstrang, if the uniform colours were right. Damn, but didn't it look half good on the guy too.
"Apologies for interrupting." The boy said gravely as he finished wheezing and picked himself back up. Wow. The guy was huge. And solemn. "My name is Viktor Krum. I vish to challenge you to a sparring match."
"What?" Rose asked. "That was a pretty stupid reason to get this close to a chick with a sword, you know."
"No, it vas ze best vay to get your attention. You vere distracted."
Rose snorted. "No shit." She looked closer at him. "A spar, huh? You don't exactly look like you're up to it yet. What with my foot getting comfy in your gut and all."
"Zat is not quite true. I vould be honored if you gave me zis opportunity to test my skills against you."
Snow nodded. "Rules?"
"No blades. No killing." Krum said, his expression not changing an iota as he sized her up.
"Aww, and I was starting to like you too." She mock-pouted at him. "Big man like yourself? Hate to break it to you, but that is not what they mean when they talk about hitting on girls."
Viktor looked puzzled. "Vat? Hitting on girls? Is zat slang for fighting?"
"No" she laughed, "most definitely not. It meanst asking a girl out."
"I still don't get it." He admitted sheepishly.
"Dating a girl." When in doubt, go for the deadpan.
"Ah! No, I don't vant to ask you out. I just vant to fight you for a round or two."
"Alright then. No blades. No killing." Rose shrugged as she tossed the gladius aside. "Guess you do something new every day."
"Vat? Fighting vizout blades?"
"No. Fighting without killing at the end." She said before kicking out.
Krum dodged under the haymaker before trying to grab her foot. She brought her foot down before he got into position, her heavy boot impacting his left wrist before planting into the soft grass. She then used the momentum to barge forward underneath his guard, her hand striking out into his unprotected groin.
"Oof!" He said before slamming both his fists into the middle of Rose's back, bringing her down with him.
The soft grass made for a nicer cushion than the usual fare she had to deal with when her face ended up hitting dirt. Grass stains were easier to deal with than bruises from landing on concrete. Rose was impressed. It was not often that she fought a man that could still think when his balls were sharing space with his tongue. Still, she had a fight to finish. She pivoted her feet around, clamping down on Krum's windpipe. The panicked blows he rained down on her thighs hurt like hell, but left him completely unguarded when she kidney-punched him. Getting a last-minute burst of inspiration, Krum grabbed hold of one of her feet and twisted gently, causing her to howl and instinctively retract her foot, breaking the throatlock in the process. Enraged, she brought the offended foot back around and kicked him in the stomach before he could recover. Getting to her feet, she was about to drop-kick his chin when Krum's hand came up. "Yield!" He shouted. "I yield."
Wary of retaliation, Rose limped closer to the giant bulgarian and offered her hand to him.
"Zank you." He said as he grabbed her hand. "You spar viciously."
"It's what I do."
"For a living?"
She shrugged. "Something along those lines."
Viktor took a good look at her. Up close, the scars stood out as if they'd been painted on, the pale lines and furrows contrasting heavily with the flushed skin of his fighting partner. "You veren't kidding about vhat you said earlier."
Rose just shook her head. "No, I wasn't. But it's okay. This was a spar, after all. I wasn't going to kill you."
"Vhat did zis to you? And how can you still fight with such tissue damage?"
"It's all superficial. The damage was repaired a long time ago. About the only one that's caused me problems is this one." She said, pointing to the symbol by which she was known. "Crazy headaches, though it's not bothered me for a while now."
"And how did you get zem?"
"Not telling. Girl's gotta have some secrets, you know." She stopped, pondering something. "Although, if you really want to find out, I'll give you a hint."
"And zat hint vould be?"
"My squad has a saying. 'Who dares, wins'. They picked it out of a pre-Dark history book."
"And zat's it?"
"More than enough, big guy. More than enough. See ya."
That saying, she limped off to retrieve her sword and get changed for dinner, leaving a bemused Bulgarian and some very scared muggleborns in her wake. "Goodbye." Krum said before leaning over and vomiting his lunch onto the ground. Maybe eating Maria's muggle space cake had been a bad idea.
"She said what?"
"Who dares, wins. What does that mean?"
Hermione just stared at Ron. "How can you not- wait, stupid question."
"Hey!" Weasley said, clearly offended. "Just because you know it-"
"I wasn't referring to your blondeness, Ronald!" She huffed. "It's a reference to a muggle military thing."
"Uh, Hermione? What's military again? I forgot."
"Muggle term for Army-related, Ron. Though why they don't cover it in muggle studies is beyond me."
"So what's the reference for?"
"There's a group of soldiers, very good soldiers, who use that as their motto."
"Soldiers?"
"Muggle hit-wizards, Ron. The people who deal with situations nobody else wants to."
"Like what?"
"Wars, fighting, natural disasters, that kind of thing."
"Ah." Ron said, nodding. "Muggle Hit-wizards. What a world. So that's what Rose is?"
"No, she isn't. The soldiers that use that motto are not your normal kind of soldier."
"What kind are they?" He asked, looking confused as he ate his meal.
"They're the best at what they do." She said, still digesting the implications as much as she was trying to digest a house-elf's idea of what a BLT was. She'd tried explaining what a lettuce was to them, but the poor dears had used some kind of boiled root vegetable instead. Oh, how she missed mum's cooking. "They're the people you turn to when you need something done and done well."
"An whaffs vaft?"
"Don't talk with your mouth full Ron. It's unseemly." Hermione huffed. Weasley just looked at her, confused. "It means bad, Ron. Bad." She said, rolling her eyes at him. Why did this supposed school not have English classes? Just one more thing she would add to her list, right behind 'get rid of cooks-uh, liberate house elves'. English is not an instinctual language, no matter what anyone said. At least it helped explain the Daily Prophet's approach to journalism i.e. its non-existent capabilities at reporting the facts clearly and concisely. How in the world had the wizarding world survived this long? Oh wait, it hadn't. A banana republic in downtown London. That should have been her first clue to Stay Away.
Ron gulped down his food in a way that would have given his local GP a heart attack. "You still haven't answered the question, you know."
"Well, if I'd understood what you were trying to say, then I would have."
"And what's that?"
"What's what?"
"The quest- no wait, backtracking... What does that mean, if you want the job done, and done well? What kind of hit-wiz-soldiers are they, Hermione?"
"The good kind. That's all you're allowed to know." Damn, watching Ron get frustrated was so much fun. Almost as much as making him read a book with no pictures in it. It helped distract her when things were going bad.
As in, finding out that this year's threat (potential threat, Hermione. She may not be the actual threat this year.) may just be a special forces soldier that fought zombies and bandits for a living bad. Yes, she definitely needed this distraction right now.
Rose ate slowly, nursing the developing bruise on her back as she checked out the table she was sitting at. Back at the table she'd started at this morning. Had it only been one day? Still, she felt like she needed to check these guys out more thoroughly than this morning's cursory glance. It had been a while since she'd mucked about with Elites, after all. To be fair, killing as many of them as she could get her hands on had been the best survival strategy she could think of at the time, but damn if she didn't miss messing with their pretty little heads at times.
This bunch were definitely in the Elite category, though distinctly lacking in the mad skills department. A bow, a quiver of arrows and a knife would probably be enough to finish off this lot in under three minutes. Two, if she managed to drink more of that heavenly coffee before going berserker on them.
The kiddies were sizing her up now. It was kind of cute. "What?" She asked.
"What are you wearing?" A pug-nosed girl her age asked in a manner Rose considered condescending.
"My uniform. What does it look like I'm wearing? Your nose?" See bitch, that's what being rude gets you. If it came down to it, she'd die screaming.
"Please forgive Pansy. She's a dear, but ever so blunt when something confuses her." A brunette girl that reminded Snow of Mother said as she sat next to Rose. "Tracy Davis."
"Rose Snow." She said, nodding at Tracy. The rest of the table turned to stare at her face. More precisely, her scar. "Do I have something stuck to my face?" She asked the dark-skinned boy from yesterday sitting a few chairs away from her. "Only, I'd prefer if you told me, seeing as I'd need to clean it off before eating."
"No madam." The boy said grandly. "We are merely wondering about why you refer to yourself as Snow instead of your birth name."
"Huh? Oh you mean the whole 'Potter' thing." She exclaimed in realisation. "Yeah, they kinda died and I got adopted, so Snow it will be from now on." The table stared at her, dumbfounded. All but Tracy and the kid from this morning, who just looked smug.
"You gave up the name?" A small blonde boy asked, horrified. "But you're a Potter!"
Rose frowned. "Sorry kid, but I've not made anything out of clay since I left school." She sighed. "Anyway, let's start over without the rudeness. My name's Rose Snow. What about you?"
"Blaise Zabini."
"Yes, I know. You told me this morning. Weren't you the kid that pointed out Hermione to me?"
Blaise seemed to wither under the combined glares of the rest of the table. "Err-heheh, yes?"
A boy with a silver P stuck to his dress glared at Blaise. "That was you?" eliciting a whispered 'oh dear' from the girl sitting opposite him, a golden H affixed to her blazer. Blaise shuddered. Oh brother, he was in for it now.
"Thank you!" Rose said, smiling at Blaise. "You wouldn't believe how helpful she's been." Once again, she was the centre of attention. Messing with these guy's heads was fun. Maybe she wouldn't kill all of them after all. A few scared minions tended to work a treat. And, in the case of Blaise, scared and thankful minions would do great.
"Pansy Parkinson." The pug-nosed girl from earlier. "And I apologise for my abrupt tone." She ground out.
"Pleasure to meet you, Pansy!" Rose said in the fakest cheery voice any of them had ever heard. Okay, she apologised, but reluctantly. She would still die if she crossed Rose, but her death would be quick and only mildly painful.
"Tracy Davis, but you knew that."
"Sure do now." She smiled at the girl. "And thanks for helping break the ice here. Tough crowd."
"Daphne Greengrass." A blonde girl said in a fake-emotionless monotone. "And this is my irritating sister, Astoria."
"Hi!" A hyper little brunette shouted at her. "Pleased to meet you! You are my idol!"
"Uhh, thanks?" Rose said, confused. Just what the hell-oh, the Potter thing. Damn, that was getting annoying.
"Draco Malfoy." a blonde boy said, bowing low to her. "Lady Potter."
"Snow." She ground out in irritation. "Learn the words. S-N-O-W."
"My apologies." Malfoy said, recovering from the gaffe. "I was referring to your title."
"So wait, I'm a Lady?"
"Yes." Daphne said whilst looking at Draco a bit strangely. "You are."
"Good to know." She filed that away for later consideration. "And the others?"
"Outside our year group or sitting elsewhere. I hear that Theo- Theodore Nott, sorry Rose – is sitting over at the Hufflepuff table while Crabbe & Goyle have yet to find their way here." Blaise said. " Honestly, five years and they still have trouble when it comes to finding their way to anything more important than the toilet."
"I don't know. Toilets are pretty up there on the importance scale." Tracy pondered. "Maybe that's all they want to find out about the castle."
"Doubtful." Malfoy drawled. "I had to correct their initial assumption that the cauldron storage room held the boy's toilet during my first week here. How in the world Severus didn't notice the stench is beyond me."
Pansy snorted. "Please. He spends all day in a potions lab when he doesn't have Gryffindors to torture."
"Severus?" Rose asked. Severus was a fairly common name back home. Could it be another Panem refugee? "Who is he?"
"Oh, he's our head of house and resident potions master. See that man over there? That's him." Astoria said, eagerly pointing at a 30-odd year old man wearing a dress covered in stains and blemishes. The man was glaring at her. Oookay, whoever he is, he looks like one of those guys that had, uh, issues where she'd been concerned in the militia. Still, he knew her name if he was faculty. Maybe- no, if he had been from Panem, then he'd have known the name Snow. You just don't look at a Snow that way. At least, not for long.
"Look at them."
"Huh? What is it, Severus?" Pomona Sprout asked as she looked at the grouchy head of house Slytherin.
"My Snakes." He ground out, clearly upset. "I taught them better than this."
"What?" Sprout asked before looking at the table Severus was glaring at. "Oh Severus." She chuckled. "They're just getting to know their hero. Leave them be."
Snape just kept on glaring at the table. "Whatever she is Pomona, that girl is no hero. And yet, there they are, practically eating out of her hand after a couple of seconds. Idiots."
Sprout just snorted. "Severus, they're children. Leave them to do their thing and get to eating."
"I wish I could. But it seems my appetite has deserted me."
"You know what Poppy told you, Sev. Now eat your food before I sic Minnie on you."
That attracted his attention. "You wouldn't." He stated with absolute confidence.
"Watch me. Oh Minnie!"
"Alright, alright you devil woman. Devilled eggs with bacon bits." Pop. "See?" He said, gingerly lifting a fork and putting it in his mouth. "I am eating."
"Very funny Sev. Now do that again, but with food on your fork this time."
Severus grumbled as he started eating his eggs. Cursed women.
Rose stepped into the Hogwarts' VIP guest room and gasped. "Whoa!" The room was easily the size of her old barracks back home. It was decorated in a style she'd never seen before too; tapestries, old furniture, an open fireplace... Just wow. There was nothing like this she could relate to back home. Doing a quick tour of the room, she discovered that there was an upper floor that held a bed capable of fitting her and about a dozen others quite comfortably. It was ostentatious. Beautiful. A statement of power. Whose? She had no idea. Hopefully hers.
She settled in a leather couch that was sitting in front of the fire, happy to just think about the days ahead in comfort.
The tournament had said nothing about killing the other contestants. Nobody was allowed to interfere with how she prepared for the tasks ahead. She was only allowed to bring her wand into the arena. But then, she was sure she could find a way around that. Maybe she would ask Blue about it.
She never even noticed when she dozed off.
Nothing much happened in the days afterward. She slept, dreamt of how she could use her wand, sorted through the memories she was allowed to access and made a list of things she'd need to buy. She trained, researched and shanghaied Hermione into helping her. She ordered books for herself, some of which would have made a few of her former crew salivate with envy and most of which made Hermione look at her in fright.
This was truly a strange time. None of the history books had really ever mentioned the late 20th century at all, focusing on the 300-year span of the Great Imperial Bloc Era that followed afterwards. And even then it had been old history, described as the golden age preceding the final fall of civilisation resulting in the Dark Times where everything just... stopped.
But to have missed this... The sheer scale of destruction and genesis boggled Rose's mind. This was the age where digital computing started. The age of wars and genocide that had resulted in the development of nuclear weapons, chemical and biological agents and all the fun things in-between. Within less than a hundred years, humanity had gone from balloons to spaceflight. From machine guns to ICBMs. From paper files to digital databases. The internet had started less than thirty years ago. An age of enlightenment that gave birth to the civilisation that would give birth to the civilisation whose ruins were combed over by Panem's rise. Her hands shook as she contemplated what she was reading. She was at the very beginning of recorded history as known to the historians in Panem. As far as they were concerned, this was the forgotten time in-between humans crawling in the mud and the Bloc's survivors heading for the stars.
Not to mention the three thousand-plus years of additional history whose existence would disappear in the nuclear fires heralding the start of the Dark Times, the In-Between and the Dark Days of the First Rebellion. Three nuclear wars. A thousand years each? Most likely. She knew at least a dozen people in Panem that would have burned a settlement to the ground with a smile on their face if it meant having access to just one of the books that was freely available to her in the here and now.
And then she received her first gun books via Owl Post. How strange, to open a book on weaponry so familiar to her in the middle of a castle untold aeons in her country's past. To see pictures of assault rifles on glossy paper, picking out the ones she wanted to get ahold of as kids flung food around the place and hexed each other with magical bits of wood. To grin as she read the specs of an F-16 fighter jet as boys & girls practiced quidditch on brooms overhead. To stare in grief at the profile of a tank ("so this it, huh?" Liz asked, blood coming out of her eyes and ears. "Is this how I die?"), shivering as she remembered how a future version of this machine would come for her and her squad one last time, only a select few noticing how she just stared at the page with pain in her eyes while the party was in full swing.
It was weird. But not as weird as modern magical history. Civil war, civil war, interspecies rebellion, civil war, terrorist uprising, progroms, religious persecution, genocide... One century. This century. Fifteen separate civil uprisings spread across the world, with no apparent connection to each other, often running in parralel with conflicts fought by the 'muggles'. The Potters had literally been the last casualties of the last one, laughingly termed the 'Blood War'. She looked at a moving picture of her birth parents and felt... nothing. They were strangers. She wore their faces, but hey, they were dead. Her actual parents were lost in time. Would she find a way back? Probably not, but they'd done as much as they could to prepare her for life and the militia had handled the rest. They had been good parents as far as Capitol Families went. She would try, but only after she'd won the tournament here.
Memories... Blue gave her more and more of them. Memories from people that had wielded the wand in her hand. Memories from the victorious. The fallen. The foolish. She could feel the wand's memories filling her head, of places that no longer existed, languages that were long dead, emotions for families and loved ones that were a thousand years gone. She now knew why they were being doled out sparingly. No sense getting lost in the mausoleum that the wand guided her through.
But the nightmares! Oh man, the nightmares. The people that had been after the wand had almost unanimously been very, very bad people. The scale of the slaughter the struggle for the slim piece of wood had produced was beyond anything she could have imagined. She was almost scared of finding out just how bad it had gotten. But, after Blue left and she drifted back into her own mind, she found the nightmares intermingling with her own battlefield memories. Mostly featuring monsters and tanks, but now with creatures in them whose sheer alienness just served to drive her dreams to new heights of horror. Her workouts afterwards were far angrier than any she'd done before.
She was changing and she knew it. It did not scare her. She'd been thrown in the deep end before. All she had to do now was adapt to this new situtaion.
But magic... magic made it all worthwhile. The power to bend time, space and the very fabric of reality itself to your will. It was intoxicating. She remembered how to perform spells, but the specifics still eluded her. Blue told her that her magic was just starting up again, the part of her mind that had lain dormant now starting to awake. It had run wild inside her for a decade and it would take a while to reclaim control of it. As in, several years. Until then, she could rely on nothing more than what she was capable of performing herself unless necessity dictated otherwise.
In all, despite the memories, the nightmares and the realisation that she was at the very start of her home's eventual genesis, she had a good, relaxing time. Say what you will, but a castle in Scotland was a far cry from the slums of District 11.
Then came the weighing of the wands. More precisely, the need to get her a normal wand.
"Ah, do come in my dears!" The elderly shopkeeper exclaimed as he appeared directly behind them. Minerva and Rose jumped but, while Minerva just tutted, Rose had gone to her concealed holster. Damn it! If he'd been an enemy, Rose would be dead by now. She had to work more on awareness training during her drills.
"Honestly Garrick." Minerva huffed at him. "I wish you would cease playing such games on paying customers."
"Ah, Minerva." Ollivander replied sadly. "You tried before, remember? Back when I was a teacher and you a snot-nosed eleven-year-old. Allow an old man his vagaries, if you please."
She snorted. "Please. Yer not that old and yah know it. Still got a good century to go, I reckon."
"Merlin forbid! Only a century? And who have we here? Who-dear me, is that who I think it is?"
"Yes." Rose replied. "It is I, your customer. Bow before my wallet, why don'tcha?"
"Ha! So the Prophet spoke the truth, for once. The Girl-Who-Lived actually lives."
"As if there ever was any question about that." McGonnagall said a bit colder than before. "You know, you're not too old for me to put you over my knee and spank you, old man."
"And deprive Madame Du Vall of her hard earned galleons. Why Minerva..." He said as he grinned at her, causing Rose to giggle.
"Damn old man! I think I like you." Rose said as she tried to stifle the laugh she felt bubbling up after looking at Minerva's expression.
"Be that as it may, we have business to dispense. Seeing as you are here for the first time, I am assuming that you're here to collect your wand, young lady?"
"Yep! Well spotted." Ollivander just chuckled as he snapped his fingers, causing a number of tape measures to fly off the shelves and start measuring snow in strange places. "Whoa-hahah! Is this really necessary? I think one of them is trying to get into my pants."
"Swat it for me, will you?" Slap "Thank you. Just a few more seconds, young lady, then we can get to the important part of the procedure."
The tape measures went back to their spots on the dusty shelves and Ollivander bent an ear over each one in turn. "Wild magic? At her age? Oh my!" He started to grin. "A challenge! I so love challenges."
Five minutes into the whole 'wand chooses the wizard' spiel, Rose grabbed hold of a slim holly wand and felt something explode inside her head. Magic rushed out wildly, filling the room with a rainbow of yellows, greens, reds and blacks. A song trilled through her head as she looked out at a constellation of dust motes caught in the moment. She pointed her wand straight ahead and gave the magic that she could now feel free reign to do as it will.
A brilliant seam of light came into being and slowly widened until she saw-she was not quite sure. It was like a tunnel of ethereal impressions, pulsing to her heartbeat. She stared at the entrance, enthralled at the display until, suddenly, her magic shut itself down and the whole thing closed with a whoosh of displaced air. "Wha-what was that?" She panted out. "What was that thing?"
"Magic, my dear." Ollivander said with a goofy grin on his face. "Pure, unbridled potential. In all my years... you have a rare gift, girl. And a rare wand now, too. Holly and Phoenix feather, if I don't miss my guess. Yes, indeed. Almost as if fated, really."
"What do you mean, fated?" Rose asked, always wary about people talking fate and destiny. It never ended well for the fated ones.
"You see, this wand has a brother. I gave it away almost, oh, sixty years ago now. Bright young man, he was. I told him that the wand he wielded was destined for great things. And it was. It did terrible things, terrible but great. And the young man, well..."
"Well what?"
"You see, the young man, he grew up and, on october 31st, 1981, he went to a little cottage in Wales where he gave you that scar."
There was dead silence in the room for three seconds. Then Rose lost it and broke out laughing. "Damn old man, I think I really do like you! The whole drama thing? You shoulda gone into the entertainment business, you know."
Ollivander just shook his head. "Well, in the interest of fairness, I'll warn you too; the wand you hold is powerful. It's destined for great things. Treat it well and it will treat you well."
Rose nodded, turning to leave. "Thank you sir. Warning received, don't do anything too stupid with it. Minerva? Can you pay the nice man, please?" Minerva just kept staring at her like she'd grown a second head. "You old people. One little life changing experience and you go all to pieces. Hellooo, wakey wakey! Money to give to shopkeepers. Shopping to do. Or do I need to call the nice people with straight jackets now too?"
Minerva McGonnagall, deputy headmistress and privately referred to as one of the few women that could make Margaret Thatcher quail in her boots, shook herself and glared at her before handing the money over to Ollivander.
"Bye Ollie!" The strange 16-year-old shouted as she left the shop alongside her suddenly functional chaperone.
"Ollie. Heh." Garrick Ollivander smiled to himself. The next few years were going to be... interesting to say the least. After all, chaos and phoenixes go so well together. Not. Yet there she went, a chaotic girl with a wand of purest order. Hmm, maybe he should check to see if he still had those front row tickets after all...
The officials were stuffy, overbearing, self-important and so full of hot air it was a miracle they didn't just drift in from London. In other words, they acted pretty much just how you'd expect sports officials to act. Welcome to the wizarding world, where time and space is bent out of shape just so the fantastic can be made boring enough for everyone. There was Crouch with a familiar looking redhead in tow, acting like a hardass. There was that quidditch dude, probably wishing he'd brought a bigger hip flask along. There was Ollivander, looking just as cheerful and laid back as he'd looked when Rose tore a hole into the fabric of reality. Rose wondered if anything ever flustered the man.
Facing them were four figures. The first was a blonde girl, dressed in her school outfit with a little bonnet sitting on her head at an angle. The second was a boy in standard Hogwarts uniform, smiling at the officials like they were his best friends. The third was Viktor Krum, dressed in a fur coat from a bear, a red shirt with a dragon symbol on the left hand side pocket, leather pants and riding boots. Finally, the last member of the foursome was Rose Snow, also known as Lady Potter, dressed in her olive green dress uniform complete with pistol holster on her left side with the bulky semi-automatic on full display.
Crouch eyed the pistol nervously. During the first blood war, he'd seen what had happened when Aurors and Death Eaters had come face-to-barrel with firelegs that small. It wasn't pretty. And there was no way that he could ask her to take it off, considering that it seemed to be an integral part of her school's uniform. The way she stared right past them also unnerved him somewhat. It was practically impossible for a witch or wizard to stand that still for that long without hitting them with an immobilius. And Ludo, that drunken prick, hadn't even blinked when he clearly recognised just what the Girl-Who-Lived had attached to her belt. Oh wait, no, he'd gone and downed the flask of firewhiskey in one gulp and now was grinning like he'd won the lotto.
Finally, Garrick cleared his throat, distracting him and the more observant members of the peanut gallery from the Kedavra in a box that foolish girl was flaunting like a muggle nipple ring.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to test the contestant's wands. So let's get to it, I have it on good authority that there will be a buffet after the ceremony is complete and I forewent breakfast in order to get here on time. First up, Fleur Delacour, please come up to the podium."
And so it went for Fleur, Cedric and Viktor. Then Rose took one step forward and remained at attention.
"Rose Snow, please come up to the podium."
"Sir, yes Sir!" Rose barked out, eliciting a couple of smiles as she marched up to the podium. Crouch grit his teeth at Garrick's goofy grin. Of course the old fart would be delighted at the girl making a scene.
"Present wand Miss Snow!" he shouted at her as she unsheathed a wand from a boot holster that Crouch distinctly remembered banning from sale back when he'd been head of the DMLE.
"Sir, wand ready for inspection Sir!" she barked as she handed her wand over.
"Ah yes, this is the wand I sold to you, is it not Lady Potter?"
"Sir, Holly and Phoenix Feather, eleven inches Sir! This is the wand you sold me Sir!"
"Looks a bit grotty there Snow." He grinned at her while following the twitch she'd developed in her left eye. "Use more wand lubricant next time Rose. There'll be a surprise inspection later."
"Sir, yes Sir! I shall polish my wand more thoroughly from now on Sir!" She barked out, her face not changing expression when the rest of the room started laughing.
"Good, good. Here's your wand back Miss Snow. Dismissed."
"Sir, affirmative Sir!" She barked before marching back into position. Fleur just looked at her as if Snow was one of those Snorkack things that Luna girl talked about. Cedric grinned. Krum just lifted an eyebrow at her. Rose nodded at them. Ah, the local yokels were confused. Life was good.
"Er, Miss Snow!"
"Yes?"
"Rita Skeeter, Daily Prophet. We're interviewing all the tournament participants. Could you follow me please?" She grabbed the girl and pulled her into a corner of the room that was shielded from view.
Rose just smiled at the woman. "With all due respect Ma'am, but I don't do interviews. I have, however, prepared a press release that I would be glad to give you now."
"Press release?"
"A prepared statement that you can use to do your job faster instead of having to spend hours asking stupid questions and getting stupid answers ma'am." Rose said, inwardly seething at how backwards these people were. She'd seen the difference between Diagon Alley and Picadilly Circus just last week. It was like comparing night and day to her. Why, oh why hadn't she landed somewhere sensible like, say, that Montpellier place Hermione kept raving on about? Girl had issues, but she definitely knew where to go to have a good time.
"Oh, really? Can I have one then?"
"Sure." Rose said, reaching into her uniform jacket and taking out a small stack of papers she'd pre-written. She noticed Crouch tense at the buffet table when she did that. Hmm, the old man was more observant than she'd expected. Odd.
Rita read through the document quickly. "And you're saying that I can publish this under my name?"
"That's the general idea."
"Alright. Thank you miss Potter!"
"That's alright Miss Skeeter. Oh, and by the way?"
"Yes?" Skeeter asked, turning to face the girl fully only to find a surprisingly hard fist going the other way.
Thwack! Rose glared down at the flabbergasted and slightly scared witch before crouching down and slipping a knife under her neck. "Now you listen to me very carefully. I'd advise that you blink at me to show that you understand, as nodding may be a bad idea. As would be talking or screaming. Got that? Blink if you have."
Rita blinked, desperately trying not to do anything that would end with her blood on the floor. Rose's eyes bore deeply into Rita's, causing the prone reporter to shiver all over. Those weren't eyes she expected to see on a child. She'd seen eyes like those before, but only when interviewing Azkaban inmates. Rose's eyes were animalistic and filled with a lust that meant very bad things for anyone who saw them. There was no soul there anymore, just a machine staring back at her. She quailed inwardly.
"Good. Now let me get one thing straight for you. If you ever, ever speculate about my private life again, I will skin you. Blink if you got that." Rita blinked. "Now, if you report anything about me or mine without asking me for permission first, I will skin you, your pet crup, your three closest relatives and whoever you happen to have sex with on a regular basis. Blink if you got that." Rita blinked. "One last thing. If you ever talk about our little chat to anyone at all, know that, one day, I will find out. And when I do..."
She leaned closer, putting more pressure on the kife as she did so. Rita went red trying not to breathe. Rose looked her directly in the eye and smiled. "Good. Do you understand everything I told you? Blink if you have." Rita blinked. "Nice. I hate having to repeat myself. Control issues, don'tcherknow. Now that we've had this delightful little chat, let's go grab a drink at the bar together, shall we?" Rose stated as she pulled Rita up and dusted her off, knife still in hand. "Oh, and before you go wondering, I meant every word. Now then, drinks on me!" The suddenly cheerful girl announced, causing Rita to flinch at the abrupt change in tone.
"Wow, Rose!" Neville Longbottom exclaimed as he examined the Daily Prophet the following morning. "Rita seems to like you!"
"Thanks. Guess I just know how to handle journalists."
"Oh? And how do you know how to do that?" Hermione asked as she sat at the table.
"I learned from the best." Rose said, winking at her. Hermione suddenly had the uncomfortable feeling that she knew exactly what it was that Rose had done. You could only listen to so many stories about how her grand-dad handled nosy people before you started connecting the dots. Neville had that faux-goofy look on his face that told her that he'd worked it out too. He looked at her. She shrugged. It was Skeeter.
So that whole Spew campaign wasn't exactly well planned on Hermione's part. That did not justify Rita splashing it all over the front page of the Prophet with bad vomiting puns to boot. And that whole support Umbridge thing... Bitch deserved whatever she got, as far as Hermione was concerned.
Hermione shrugged again and kept on eating. Longbottom just looked at Rose and Hermione a bit longer before getting up and leaving.
"Heya Rose."
Rose turned around and looked up. And up. And up. "Hello." She said, deciding to be polite to the guy that was as tall as a bus. "Do I know you?"
"Ah yeh. I used ter come around and visit yer parents when you were still a wee lass."
Rose stared at him. "You knew my parents?"
"Yep!"
"Were they good friends to you?" She asked, hoping that the giant man would get to the point soon.
"Ah yeah." He said, drawing out a hankerchief and poking at his watering eyes. "They would be so proud to see ya now, Rose."
Maybe not, Rose thought. Everyone says they were so nice, so kind. Wonder what they'd think if they ever got a hold of her file and saw that most of her medals came from wiping out illegal settlements down to the last child. "I hope so." She smiled at him. He didn't know. Didn't need to. Not yet. "So what's up, Hagrid?"
"Ah yeah. I've got a secret to show yer."
"Oh-kay. And what's this secret about."
The giant glanced left, glanced right, bent over to head height and tried to whisper "The first task." Key word being tried, since every head at the table whipped around to stare at the huge man. Rose just blinked. Had her ear gone deaf again?
"Alright." She said. "Hermione, care to join us?"
"M-me? But, but..."
"Ah c'mon girl." Rose overrode her sputtering with a confident grin that didn't reach her eyes. "I could use the company."
The bushy-haired girl sighed. "Alright. Just let me go grab my coat."
"Cool." Rose said, giving her a genuine smile before turning around to the Slytherin table. "Hey Theo!" She shouted. "Get your ass in gear boy! We're going for a walk."
A brown-haired, brown-eyed boy with a completely forgettable face walked over to her. Dear god, but the kid would make a great assassin once Rose was finished with him. "What is it Snow?" The boy sneered at her. "Another round of spot-the-acromantula? Or are we out baiting Bane again?"
"Neither. I need you come along to this super-secret thing Hagrid's taking me to. Has to do with the first task. That way, you can go relay the message to Diggory while I can truthfully say that I never told you anything."
"And what do you get out of it?"
"Apart from keeping the game fair? Not telling." She smirked.
Nott smirked back. "You know, I cannot wait for you to get Sorted. You'll make a fine addition to Slytherin."
"Come on, Theo." Rose smirked. "I'm not stupid enough to join the evil house."
Nott shrugged. "Sometimes you have to sacrifice something to make yourself look like an easier target. Joining Slytherin is the best way to do that. They think we're all gullible inbreds, which makes fleecing the bastards easier."
"Hmm, I'll think about it. I bet that it'd be easier for me to go elsewhere though."
Nott just snorted. "You would be great. Plus, I doubt you can avoid it. Your twisty little brain won't fit anywhere else"
"Sod off!" She shouted at him, smiling as she heard him laugh all the way down to his dorms. She went to fetch Hermione. They had a deadline to meet, after all.
"Why did you bring the mudblood along again?"
"Can it with the rhetoric Theo." Rose said. "I know you don't believe in that stuff."
"Oh, and how do you know that?"
"Because you make sure all those muggleborn Hufflepuff firsties are well looked after, perhaps?" Hermione asked. Nott just stared at her in surprise. "What? I have eyes, you know. Plus, I saw your face when you learned how and why the Basilisk was targeting muggleborns in second year."
"See why I brought her along now?" Rose snarked.
"You may have a point there." Nott said, frowning at Granger. "You know, it seems that we have greatly underestimated you, Granger.
"Oh please Theodore, tell me what your first clue was. I'd love to know." She said, smirking at him.
Theo smirked back. "I'll be keeping an eye on you Miss Granger."
"Back atcha."
"Gesundheit?"
"Gesund-what?" Rose asked before accessing her new memories to check. "Oh, well done Nott. Nice repartee. Not."
"Thank you?" He asked, confused at the pause between repartee and his name.
"Eyah kids, this way!" Hagrid shouted quietly. Rose motioned to the others to follow her lead.
They moved down a small trail through the Forbidden Forest until they reached a clearing.
Rose stared at the large spot of grass in front of her. There were people everywhere here! She saw fences, ward-gates and heavy tents littering the ground. But the most impressive of all was the large cages set up in the middle of the enclosure which contained-
"Dragons." Nott stated as an animalistic howl tore through the night.
"Dragons?" Rose asked, a bit baffled at coming face to face with one of her favourite fairytale animals.
"Dragons!" Hermione whispered in fear as a twenty-metre long jet of yellow plasma illuminated the surrounding tree line.
Hagrid just looked at the three kids behind him. Hermione was shivering like a leaf despite everything he'd done to help her understand the cute creatures, Nott's face was blank as usual and Rose had an unholy look of glee on her face.
"Dragons." She stated again, her eyes lighting up in animalistic expectation. She got to kill a dragon. This was going to be great.
"Dragons." Nott stated.
"Dragons?" Cedric exclaimed, puzzled. He had no clue as to what Nott was going on about.
Nott just nodded. "Your first task has something to do with dragons.
"Oh great. What about the others? Do they know?"
"Rose for sure. Not sure about the others."
"Can-can you tell them too? I'd like to keep this as fair as possible."
Nott just shrugged. "Sure. And by the way? You owe Rose one."
Cedric nodded. "I know. Any idea about what she wants?"
"Beats me. You figure it out."
"Something tells me I'll find out sooner or later anyway."
Nott just left, passing a pensive-looking Neville in the corridor with Ron happily yapping on about the arithmantic properties underpinning wizarding chess. Weasley wasn't nearly as stupid as Hermione believed after all. He was just ridiculously focused on topics he was interested in. Neville knew this because, of all the Weasleys, Ron was the one who took after his father the most. And, while Arthur Weasley was basically inept at anything magic-related, he was also the only wizard on the planet that could run a computer network.
The next day, Rose received a special delivery from Gringotts. "Finally!" Rose exclaimed as she eyed the massive chest that the Goblins had had portkeyed into the Great Hall.
"Rose?" Hermione asked warily. "What is that?"
"Oh, there were a few things I couldn't find during my shopping trip that I asked the Goblins to find for me. Looks like they did, too."
Feeling an icy shiver crawl up her spine at the look in Rose's eye, Hermione calmed herself down and asked the question whose answer she suspected she already knew. "And what is in there?"
Rose just grinned like a lunatic as she opened the chest and retrieved an FN Mini-Mi with one hand. Hermione fainted. Rose cackled as she pulled out a block of Semtex with the other. Oh, this was going to be so much fun!
The Gryffindors crawled away as they heard the Girl-Who-Lived start laughing evilly to herself. Just what was going on?
The First Task
The morning of the first task dawned bright and early over Hogwarts. The Scottish landscape bathed in the golden light of morning sunshine, with only a few clouds showing themselves in the clear blue sky and a more enthusiastic than was healthy population waking up early and heading down to breakfast. All in all, a rather strange late November morn to be had in Northern Scotland, what with the lack of rain and all that jazz.
Not that it bothered Rose overly much. She was far too fixated on the coming battle for mundane things such as the weather to have penetrated her awareness just yet. She was going to get to kill a dragon today. She ran the plan through her head again, trying to iron out the kinks she'd identified and only coming up with more potential complications when the Wand chimed in.
Also, today the Wand had decided to help her. She'd mastered three spells that would be critical to her success; apparition, accio and depulso. In other words, teleportation, tractor beam and kinetic repeller spells. She smiled as she thought about those three for a while. She was looking forward to what was about to happen.
She'd found out something important about herself. Turns out that living without the ever-present threat of violence was dreadfully boring. How did other people even live like this? The thrill of the hunt, the adrenaline rush of fighting, the satisfaction of dominating your enemy and turning their relatives into fodder for the system... none of it was there! How dreadfully boring this was. Okay, so it had been a relatively relaxing month, but years of this? For her? Not likely. She was starting to become as jumpy as Hermione at her worst, which was saying something. It wasn't paranoia to her, but survival instinct. She'd had to stop herself from gutting over half the people she came into contact with simply because they were getting too close for comfort. She needed this. It was either the dragon or whichever poor bastard ended up approaching her at the wrong time.
"A Hungarian Horntail. Huh." Rose said, looking at the little figurine in her hand with a thoughtful expression while reviewing what Hermione had dug up on the creature a few days ago; twenty metres long from tip to tail, covered in bony, blunt spikes that grew out of their plated hide. Tough enough to weather a shotgun blast at close range and armed with a vicious set of razor-sharp, well, everything.
Case in point: the Horntail's favourite hunting method consists of picking out a squishy-looking herbivore and to just land on the poor thing. The Horntail's feet, which are covered in retractable, serrated spikes, would contract just before contact, allowing those fishhooks to dig into the flesh of the animal and hold the victim in place during the flight back to the nest. If the cow, horse, centaur or whatever was lucky, they'd bleed out before being baked alive by the Horntail's fiery breath, a process that slowly cooked the fresh meat to perfection for the Horntail. Though sometimes, when eating humans, Horntails were known to skin them alive first. Huh, maybe hominid skin is just too stringy for an animal whose jaws can crack open ten-centimetre-thick metal armour with a single bite? Who cared. Well, her but hey, professional courtesy and all that tripe.
And these idiots expect her to take that monstrosity down without killing it. Using a fancy fucking stick. She smiled at the idea. They had no idea what Rose, Hermione and the Slytherins had cooked up.
To say that the goggling masses were intrigued was an understatement. The first time the Prophet had published a photo of Rose Potter, the wizarding world came face to face with a metre eighty-odd sixteen-year-old wearing an olive drab dress uniform with red shoulder patches. The left and right side of her torso were studded with medals nobody could recognise while the epaulettes indicated that she held the rank of Sergeant in some unit somewhere.
Most of the muggleborn took one look at her and wondered just what part of Eastern Europe she'd grown up in. The purebloods kept pestering their half-blood friends (how daring of them to talk to impures!) about information as diverse as just what that little fireleg was good for and if that was an accurate depiction of a muggle dress uniform.
One thing was for sure, the way she held herself, the way she stared at the camera whilst remaining completely stock still unnerved the Daily Prophet readers. Her intimidating look was further enhanced thanks to short black hair and fiercely intense green eyes daring the viewer to find fault in her appearance. The fact that this was supposedly her school uniform had sparked fierce debates about what, exactly, muggles were teaching their children these days. Overall, Rose had shaken wizarding society purely by striking an imposing figure. She cackled quietly when she heard that one.
There were odd rumours mentioned about her in the papers; how she was and wasn't a Hogwarts student, how she was seen training in the forbidden forest at night, how she would sometimes appear at breakfast, covered in her own blood and claiming that she'd skinned an acromantula with a pocket knife ("I just did it once!" She'd exclaimed at Luna. "It was coming after me, I swear!")...
Quite honestly, most of the wizarding world didn't know whether the girl should be worshipped or interned for her odd behaviour. So seeing such an attractive, high-spirited and seemingly dangerous girl being pitched against a Horntail was the star attraction here. This lifted Rose's spirits even more.
All the spectators had gathered when the Horntail had been dragged in and the starting gong sounded... only to wait and wait for the girl to appear. The Horntail, on the other hand, was slowly going berserk. Though why that was wasn't noticed until fifteen minutes after the starting bell tolled...
An invisibility cloak was all well and good, but it kinda sucked when you were facing an angry mother dragon. Said angry dragon could, after all, smell you, hear you, see you in infra-red and, barring all else, sense your magical presence from a long way away. It was a flying, fire-breathing tank with an AWACS sensor suite... and it was pissed at her. So she ditched the magical jacket Dumbledore had gifted her with. It wouldn't do much good for having the Horntail pinpoint her thanks to the very thing that was supposed to keep her hidden. Instead, she opted for a dark brown khaki uniform with a magically expanded backpack thrown in. She slipped out of the tent and performed the only spell she'd need at this stage. "Accio swag bag." The elder wand responded eagerly to the request, sending a small backpack hurtling at Rose at top speed. She caught it without dislocating her shoulder, pulled the backpack on and dropped to the ground.
To the dragon and the spectators, nothing moved in the arena. Everyone kept peering at the tent expecting the challenger to emerge forthwith while the dragon sniffed the air in puzzlement. Something just wasn't right here. Meanwhile, Rose crawled along the ground, the backpack, uniform and slow movements hiding her from sight while she set off scent bomb after scent bomb. The dragon's nostrils twitched in irritation as its sense of smell shut down.
She finally reached the far end of the stadium. There was an outcropping starting there that ran all the way across the upper half of the stadium. She just had to get up to the escarpment without being seen by the dragon.
Rose carefully, silently took off her bag and unzipped the top pocked. She took the gloves that had been enchanted for her by Greengrass and Finch-Fletchley and put them on, feeling the magic wash over her. She could now stick to walls for five minutes. Yippee.
She got up into a crouch and thumbed a small detonator she'd hidden in her trouser pocket. A muffled pop came from the entrance of the grounds, attracting everyone's attention to the blast while she got the wall and started climbing. She needed to get close to that thing.
The climb wasn't hard for her thanks to her extensive fitness training and magical gloves. The uniform served better than a ghillie suit for hiding her amongst the brown rock. She came up to the narrow path winding across the arena she'd been aiming for and stopped the climb there, her position offering a clear view of the arena floor and the Dragon warily eyeing the boulder-strewn path for any sign of movement. Rose frowned, observing the Horntail for a while. Why was it focusing on the narrow, boulder-strewn pathway on the arena floor anyway? Was it the lingering thermal image of the other contestants? And, if so, why hadn't the dragon tried to fry her yet? Nevermind, she had work to do.
Moving along the narrow path, she found a new vantage point for herself. She silently prayed that she wouldn't make enough noise to attract mommy dragon's attention. Taking off her backpack, she zipped open the pouch and started rummaging through the obscured contents, looking for a specific-aha!
She retrieved a container with a pin holding the top cover closed, the blank grey of brushed steel feeling at odds with the warmth the container gave off. She pulled the pin, drew her arm back and let the now smoking canister fly into the arena, with the small cylinder landing behind a rocky outcrop. Moving quickly, Rose zipped the backpack up by touch and put it on her back again, trusting the charm to keep her hidden for the scant few seconds it would take her to reach the back of the cliff overlooking the Horntail's nest.
She started running just as the jam can exploded, flooding every magical being's thaumic senses with the magical equivalent of chaff. Neither Dumbledore, the attending half-humans or even the Goblins laying in ambush for Bagman's hide could make out the slightest detail of what magic was happening inside the boulder maze. The dragon, of course, went crazy, sitting up on its hind legs and torching the stadium floor like a garden hose full of Napalm.
Just what Rose wanted. As the angry, angry Mother started straining against the chain holding her to the arena floor, Rose abandoned all pretense at stealth. She braced herself against the wall and jumped. It was go time.
The angry Horntail was a terrifying spectacle to bear witness to. The sight of the angry mother Dragon rearing up on her hind legs and breathing fire seemingly everywhere at once reminded Hermione of some Godzilla films she'd seen last summer. She really, really hoped that Rose had been on the floor just then. Hermione smiled.
Rose was a threat. Not to Hermione, really, but more like a threat in general. Hermione had spent four years holding back the forces that wanted to either kill or eat her and her fellow students. Rose gave off that exact same vibe. But Hermione couldn't, wouldn't be the one to fire the first shot. She'd simply sit back and observe until Rose revealed her true intentions. Then it'd be time to strike. Hard. Fast. Deadly. Just like she was supposed to have done with the Troll. With Quirrell. With Umbridge, even. But Rose was different. She would have one shot and one shot only. If she missed, well, Rose had a tendency to tell more than she thought she did when she relaxed in front of a fire. Hermione only hoped she'd have enough time to kill herself before Snow came for her.
But hey, death by Dragon? That was fine too. One less problem to overcome in her search for the threat of the year. Because, whoever summoned Rose, had done so intentionally. Hermione was sure of it. Indeed, she remembered Dumbledore's surprise as the name came out of the goblet, so she knew that the faculty wasn't in on it. That left external vectors. Still, summoning a girl who had all the hallmarks of a great serial killer on the make? That was never good.
The other reason she wanted the dragon to kill her was because it was becoming increasingly more difficult for Hermione to justify or even contemplate herself delivering the killing blow.
Hating her or not, Hermione saw that Rose, the cheerful, cheeky and crazy monster she was, was also the loneliest creature on the planet. Rose was, by design almost, constitutionally incapable of tolerating treating others as equals. They were either better than her or less than she was, both situations that warranted wildly different ways of behaving. But there never was an equal to Rose. You had to know her to see it, the subtle jabs and familiar phrasing, the soft manipulations and harsh threats she delivered, but it was there to see once you did. Rose did not tolerate anyone having any power over her other than the power she was willing to give them. And, even then, that power came with strings attached. She didn't trust anyone. She was all alone in a world of strangers and, as far as Hermione knew, she was all Rose really had in terms of a confidante.
Not that it gave her any illusions; Holding Rose Potter's secrets just meant that the girl was more, not less, likely to kill you if you betrayed her in some way. She was the kind of person that found it easier to trust and confess into people she held absolute power over rather than any friend or, in Rose's case, psychiatrist. Hermione knew that Rose knew that Granger was terrified of her, a state of mind Rose used ruthlessly in order to get Hermione to do what Rose wanted. She didn't use threats or anything. A smile here, a grin there and Hermione's mind did the rest. Rose somehow pushed all her buttons without even thinking it.
As a result, Hermione was one of the few people who knew just how much of a monster Rose was. If Snow had been a member of any army that existed on Earth, she would have been tried for a list of war crimes that looked like something that would have been tried at Nuremberg. The only thing missing was managing concentration camps for fun & profit and even there the bushy-haired witch wasn't entirely sure if Rose was keeping that one in reserve for when she got drunk.
So here Hermione was, best friend to a monster that shouldn't be allowed to live. And yet... and yet... she didn't know any better. She was born and raised to act like this. Hermione couldn't honestly blame her without acknowledging that. She was a perfect killing machine with a perfect record for obeying orders. And Hermione was the only one who knew. It was both frightening and incredibly euphoric, to be trusted so completely with this. Rose had found a friend in her and her world had gotten more complicated.
Come on, Dragon. It's just one girl with no magical training. Just fry the bitch so that Hermione didn't have to.
Rose screamed her anger and agony out at the sky. She'd forgotten how abrasive a Horntail's outer skin was and was now feeling her hands pay the price with thousands upon thousands of microscopic cuts being inflicted on her palms. Quickly summoning her gloves, donning them and quickly swallowing a bunch of painkillers once she was stuck to the horntail's back, she fished her gun out of the backpack whilst holding the Elder wand in the other hand.
Nothing had moved for the second or two it had taken to do this. She then looked to her left. Straight into the eyes of a surprised Horntail staring back at her. Oh fuck. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The spectators gaped as they finally noticed the camouflaged girl drop straight onto the back of a mother dragon, scream in pain before somehow sticking on the dragon's back with magic gloves.
Which was when the dragon decided to go berserk.
Rose held on for dear life, the furious mother dragon alternatively trying to hit her with its tail, throwing herself against the cliff-face and furiously tugging away at the chain stopping it from taking even more drastic action. She felt the thing's shoulderblades move as it tried to dislodge her through musclepower alone. She eeped as a shower of debris landed on her, probably giving her bruises in places that should never ever be bruised as a result.
Then the chain snapped. That hadn't been part of the plan. She was supposed to ride the dragon until it tired itself out and, in that moment of weakness, Rose was supposed to fire a three-round burst at the Horntail's eyes. But now the damn chain was broken. Which meant that the Dragon was airborne. Horntails can survive at altitudes higher than the maximum altitude a glider jet could achieve, meaning that it could now suffocate her and let her drop off its back before chowing down in a Rose sushi.
Okay, new plan.
She was still right above the heads of the screaming masses of spectators but climbing fast. She felt the air around her get thinner and colder as time went on, the Horntail's massive armoured wings beating out a steady booming rhythm even as the Dragon gained altitude. Even with the thick uniform and gloves, Rose felt her extremities start to go numb. She decided to climb the back a bit.
As they reached the clouds, Rose felt comfortable enough with her position on the Horntail's back to grab a hold of one of its scales, vertigo and thinning air warring with her adrenaline rush over who would cause the first of what felt like many strokes. The Dragon broke through the sparse cloud cover, allowing a hyper-ventilating Rose an unobstructed view of the mid-morning sun... for the second and a half before the Horntail started going in the other direction.
Okay Rose, no more planning for you.
Rose screamed herself into unconsciousness at the force of both the wind and acceleration hitting her full-on.
"Wake up Rose! WAKE UP!"
Rose woke, blinked as she felt... strange. Where was her bed? Why was she clothed in-oh. She was in freefall. And she could see the Dragon racing just slightly ahead of her. Ah, right. Third task. How could she have forgotten that?
She assessed the damage. Her gloves were gone. The skin on her hands was shredded. The backpack and her clothes were still relatively intact. She could get out of this alive, but her hands hurt like hell now that the pain killers were starting to wear off. Oh, and of course there was crazy dragon bitch to consider.
And where was her pistol? Ah, floating several metres above her. Of course. She sighed, shifting herself into a standard parachutist's pose. She slowed down enough to edge closer to the gun hanging up above, but not enough to get a hold of it.
Suddenly, her wand arm twiched, sending a blast of magic at her other hand before the other hand took the want and repeated the procedure. Surprised, she tried thinking at the want.
"Blue? Was that you?"
Yes.
"Why are you helping me?"
Because I need you alive for now.
"Okay, well, thanks for that."
Enjoy it, because I am not doing something like that again. Now get to work.
Suddenly, inspiration struck her. She was in mid-air and falling at close to terminal velocity. Time to change the game.
"Accio Pistol!" She tried to say, but the garbled gasping worked as the weapon streaked straight for her. Grabbing the gun with her left hand, she twirled her wand hand around and pointed it at the pissed-off horntail. "Accio Dragon!"
Now, it should be noted that Horntails weigh from a weight equivalent to a small delivery van for young males to that of a large, fully loaded 18-wheeler for old females. In other words, Rose was trying to summon close to five tons worth of crazed mother dragon directly to her, but not because she expected that to be the outcome. Rose effectively created a gravity bridge between herself and the object she's summoning. She doesn't have enough mass to pull the Horntail towards her, which means that the reverse happens and she's being sucked straight back to where she started. Which is exactly what she hoped would happen.
The awareness that she was gaining on the Horntail was a distant thing. That is, until the Horntail spread its wings and slowed, causing Rose to miss its back and overtake it.
"Motherfucker!" The now desperate girl shouted, clearly recognising that having a Horntail being able to see you while you couldn't see her was to be filed under Things To Avoid. Turning around, she saw the Dragon's jaws open wide as the scaly bitch started to gain on the falling girl...
"Depulso!" Rose cried out in desperation, her lucky aim targeting the Horntail's head. This was bad. Rose needed room to move around if she wanted to keep the dragon on the back foot, but the bitch smells blood and wants it. Which is why the Horntail was coming about again.
BRAAT! BRAAT! Rose fired two bursts of pistol fire at the dragon. Amazingly, it was close enough for one of the rounds to hit an ear. Which just pissed the dragon off even more. "Depulso!"
The silence back in the stands was one of stunned incredulity. Everyone was focused on the intricate aerial battle taking place above the crowd's head, the girl using every trick she could think of to shift her position before the Horntail could get close enough to munch her.
When the girl came up with a way to slow her fall, so did the Horntail. When she accelerated, so did the Horntail. When she ducked, the dragon followed, clearly angry at not being able to snack on the ape that had dared screw with her.
And then they saw Rose do something impossible.
Rose was tired. She knew intellectually that she'd spent less than a minute in conscious free-fall. But to her battered body, she felt like she'd spent hours dodging the insane beast in front of her.
"I need a plan." She sub-vocalised.
No you don't.
"I do"
Don't.
"Do."
Blue sighed. First off, no you don't. You already have a plan-wear her down as much as you can before shooting her. Stick to it.
"Okay, good advice."
No problem. Oh, and Rose? Look to your left.
She sawa massive jaw full of teeth go over her head. She felt the heated breath start to wash over her. She sensed the jaws unhinging, starting to close-
CRACK.
A battered-looking teen appeared a few metres above the arena floor, the loud detonation preceding the almost instinctual casting of a cushioning charm by the task's referee. She didn't look like much anymore, being pierced by what looked like dozens upon dozens of teeth. In fact, it looked like the girl had taken the majority of the Dragon's upper jaw with her following her apparition. Including the chemical regulation vents that allowed a Dragon to spew fire.
Rose stirred, half expecting to wake up in hell... or her father's office, depending on Death's sense of humour. Instead, she recognised the slag left on the arena floor after the dragon had had its way with it less than five minutes ago. Rose groaned. It certainly hadn't felt like five minutes at the time. She pushed herself up using both arms, or at least she tried to. She feel flat on her face again, surprised at having failed at something that simple. She ignored the pain coming from what felt like a kitchen's worth of knives digging into her back and lifted her right hand to her face. She tried the left... and screamed. Her left arm was gone. One of her arms was gone!
Looking around frantically, she finally caught sight of a hand sticking out of the ground a few metres away, still gripping the pistol tightly.
"AND IT LOOKS LIKE OUR CHAMPION SPLINCHED HERSELF! AFTER APPARATING HERSELF TO SAFETY OUTSIDE OF THE DRAGON'S MOUTH CLOSING ON HER AT THE TIME! INCREDIBLE!" the shocked voice of the announcer reached her ears as she went to retrieve the missing limb. She picked it up, barely noticing the blood leaking out of the open wound left behind by her splinching. Gazing around the arena in a daze, she finally located her objective. The Egg...
She could just run up and take it now. Walk away. Let the handlers deal with the irate mother. She'd taken her pound of flesh, literally. She could go home. But no. She came here to kill the thing. She would kill it if it was the last thing she ever did.
She foraged through her tattered backpack and came up with the grenade launcher. It only took one hand to operate and fired 40mm AP rounds. Just what she needed to kill that bitch.
She loaded the grenade launcher, wary of the far-too quiet stadium, when she noticed the area getting progressively darker...
She looked up and ground her teeth together in rage. The fucking bitch was going to just pluck her off the ground, eh? She wanted to hook her up and skin her alive, did she? Well, she sure had something to say about that. She pointed the M79 straight up at the descending Dragon, waited until she could see the individual scales on her belly and pulled the trigger.
THUMP!
With a shotgun, such a stunt would have ended with the Dragon enjoying Rose Pancakes for dinner. Unfortunately for the Horntail, instead of being hit by a hail of pellets meant to kill soft targets, the Dragon had to deal with the impact of something closer to a shaped charge. Put simply, she couldn't.
The AP round tore through her soft underbelly before becoming lodged in one of the beast's chemical storage compartments. The explosion threw the Dragon off her intended trajectory, causing the massive beast to impact with the arena cliff wall head-first. The detonation also gouged a deep hole into the Horntail's stomach, forcing Rose to wildly dodge the burning chemicals the beast's gut was gushing out onto the arena floor. Not that the Dragon was aware of that, or much else anymore.
She'd seen her sisters being deceived by egg-thieves before her turn came, all of them falling to the strange abilities the ape-things possessed. She told herself that, unlike the other Den Mothers, she would die before allowing herself to feel the shame of losing one of her eggs to the light-weavers.
Twenty minutes later, she lay on the ground, suffering a massive concussion and feeling a deep hole in her gut slowly getting wider as her stomach acids dissolved everything around them. That did not even consider the fact that she was missing most of her upper jawline, taken by the egg-stealing ape as she Moved herself out of the Dragon's maw. She was right, in the end. She would likely die before ever finding out what had happened to her egg.
The world went blurry before resolving itself into the form of the ape-thing, her egg at the thing's feet, one of the ape-thing's arms attached to her belt rather than her body, the tattered bits of second skin barely covering the thing's body. The ape thing raised a strange looking stick straight at her eye and talked in the Serpent's tongue.
"You know," Rose's breathing hitched before she got it back under control, steadfastly ignoring the greying-out world and painful throbbing of her remaining arm's broken wrist. "you are, by far, the toughest bitch I've ever had to deal with. I guess I should respect you for that, but I don't. You are a stupid bitch for getting yourself killed over an omelette ingredient, and seeing you go the way Darwin intended the stupid to go makes me all warm and fuzzy inside." Then the devil ape smiled as the wand moved ever closer to the Horntail's eye. " Just so you know, the egg you were protecting from little old me? It was a fake." The ape-thing grinned insanely as the Dragon's eyes widened in both rage and indignation. Tricked! She had been tricked into bearing another's young! "Ah, so you do understand after all. Well, congratulations you stupid slut. You died defending a fake egg. And with this, I wish you a painful trip to hell." She pulled the trigger on her pistol.
The three bullets entered the Dragon's brain stem via the eye, killing the giant monster in seconds as the shrapnel tore more and more brain tissue apart. Rose just looked at the Dragon fighting her end with all the pain, rage and fear such a primal force of nature could bring to bear... and lose . After the convulsions stopped, Rose bent over to pick up the egg (fuck, since when did bending over hurt that much?), stashed it securely into the nook of her right arm and limped back towards the exit.
At the sight of the heavily injured fourth champion making a determined break for the medical tent and, for all intents and purposes, looking like she'd die before making it halfway, Ludo Bagman got off his ass and screamed the end of the task for all to hear.
"POTTER-SNOW HAS THE EGG! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FIRST TASK IS NOW OVER!"
Pandemonium erupted in the stands as Rose's body gave in, causing the girl to finally pass out..
"Albus."
"Yes, Barty?"
"I just received a notification from our friends in the lake."
"Yes, and what did they want?"
"They say that they're pulling out of their role in the tournament."
"WHAT? Why?"
"Something about not wanting to have angry dragon slayers traipsing around their fragile eco-system was mentioned somewhere."
"... Bloody buggering bollocks!"
"My thoughts exactly, Supreme Mugwump Sir." Take that, you slimy fuck. "Not suited for the positon of Minister" eh?
Oh look, Rose was back in la-la land and covered in blood. And the bluenette looked like she was hopped up on caffeine pills. Yippee.
"Again!" The insane avatar of Knowledge shouted. "Let's go find another Dragon huh? Kill it, destroy it! Just like the one whose brain we just pulped! Ahahah!"
"Right." Rose said. "I'll get right onto that... once I get my arm back."