Halloween night FitzSimmons slipped out of the Great Hall near the end of the Feast so that they could make it up to the Gryffindor common room and down their hidden staircase before the entirety of Gryffindor House made their way up there, and made it that much more difficult for them to slip away to their own private dorm undetected.
They had just turned the corner to the last corridor on the second floor when Simmons suddenly grabbed Fitz's arm, and pointing down the corridor exclaimed, "Look!"
For on the stone wall halfway down the corridor between two windows were the foot-tall words 'THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED; ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE' written in something dark red; a large puddle of water on the stone floor across from the words in front of a door that they had discovered was an out of order girls restroom during their exploration the year before, though they weren't paying enough attention to that at the moment to notice it; and Mrs Norris the cat hanging by her tail from the torch bracket on the far side of the ominous message.
FitzSimmons both immediately whipped out their wands and looked in every direction for any potential threats or dangers. Not seeing any, with her wand still firmly grasped in her hand should any unseen threat suddenly arise, Simmons rushed down the hallway and pressed two fingers to the cat's neck to check for a pulse. Upon not finding one, she carefully removed the stuffed-like feline from the torch bracket without singing its fur or her fingers in the flames above, and gently set it down on the stone floor. Not knowing any other spell to try before going to get a professor, she pointed her wand at it and said, "Rennervate."
A flash of bright red light shot out of her wand and hit the cat square on, but Mrs Norris remained as motionless as before.
She turned to her husband who was squatting down next to the puddle concluding that something in the bathroom beyond must be overflowing, and said to him, "We need to get her to the professors."
But before either of them could actually move, or Simmons could even move her wand from where it was still loosely pointed towards the cat as she talked to her husband, the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw herds came crashing around the corner into the hall on their own ways to Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Towers. Their noisy chatter died instantly as they saw the message and Simmons standing there with her wand pointed at a dead-looking cat with Fitz crouched next to the cat facing it (as he had turned to look up at his wife when she had spoken to him), and put two and two together and arrived at a rather reasonable five. And upon arriving at five, a Ravenclaw fifth year promptly screamed bloody murder.
FitzSimmons both covered their ears with their hands to prevent their eardrums from being shattered by the piercing screech, and by the time they felt safe enough to uncover their ears, caretaker Filch had pushed his way around the corner and through the crowds to them grumbling, "What's going on here? What's going on?", doubtlessly following after the largest group of students walking through the castle on their way to their common rooms in hopes of finding someone doing something that he could punish. But upon seeing his immobile cat, his most prized thing in the entire world, he let out a shriek of his own that made FitzSimmons wish that they hadn't uncovered their ears quite so quickly.
"My cat! My cat! What's happened to Mrs. Norris?!" Then seeing FitzSimmons crouched next to and standing above his cat respectively, and both of their wands in their hands, he screeched on, "You two! You two! You've murdered my cat! You've killed her! I'll kill you! I'll —"
But before he could finish exactly what he wanted to unsuccessfully try to do to them, Dumbledore cut him off with a loud, "Argus!"
Looking over from where they had been focused on Filch and making sure that he didn't actually attempt to execute any of his threats against them, FitzSimmons found the headmaster and several of the other professors standing there, the professors all staring in horror at the scene before them.
Striding forward, Dumbledore picked the cat up off of the floor and said to Filch, "Come with me, Argus," before adding to FitzSimmons, "You, too, Harry, Miss Granger."
Ever one to have to stick his nose in any business around, Lockhart jumped in with, "My office is nearest, Headmaster — just upstairs — please feel free —"
So five minutes later FitzSimmons found themselves walking into Lockhart's office for the very first time, barely holding in gags at the walls covered in magical portraits of the man, many of them even signed by himself. Sitting down at Lockhart's desk, Dumbledore studied the cat for a long time, occasionally casting a spell at it, as Lockhart unhelpfully rambled on nonstop about how if he had been there when the attack had happened he could have prevented it, and Snape lurked in the corner with a malicious look of joy like he thought that Harry 'Should-Have-Died-Instead-of-Lily' Potter and Potter's mudblood girlfriend who was somehow cheating her way to better grades than all of the clearly much smarter purebloods combined, were finally going to get expelled for this, despite there being nothing but very weak circumstantial evidence that they'd had anything to do with it, and certainly no evidence that was beyond reasonable doubt.
But eventually Dumbledore pulled back and said, "She's not dead, Argus."
"Not dead?" Filch choked out in disbelief. "But why's she all — all stiff and frozen then?!"
"She has been Petrified," Dumbledore answered gravely. "But how, I cannot say —"
Filch, however, thought he could say very easily, and immediately did so.
"Ask them!" he shrieked, angrily pointing an accusing finger at Fitz and Simmons.
"No second year could have done this," Dumbledore replied firmly. "It would take Dark Magic of the most advanced—"
But Filch wasn't buying it, and interrupted the headmaster, shouting, "They did it, they did it! You saw what they wrote on the wall, and they were standing right over my cat, with their wands pointed right at her!"
Not to be left out in the Potter slandering, Snape spoke up from the shadows, a malicious sneer of doom for anyone whom it was directed at playing across his lips. "If I might speak, Headmaster. Potter and his friend may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But we do have a set of suspicious circumstances here. Why was he in the upstairs corridor at all? Why wasn't he at the Halloween feast?"
Everyone turned to look at FitzSimmons.
"We left early to beat the crowds," Simmons answered politely, but short and to the point.
"But why go down that corridor?" Snape sneered, his black eyes glittering in the candlelight like he was delusional enough to think that he had them pinned in a corner somehow, like no one ever went down that specific corridor unless they were petrifying cats.
"Oh, I don't know, how about you ask the hundred and fifty other students who also went down that exact same corridor on their way to their common rooms, you idiot?" Fitz retorted, not bothering to try to hide his disgust with the Snake in the least.
He and his wife may have been the first at the scene, but in under five minutes there were well over a hundred more students — literally half of the school, to be exact — passing through that exact same corridor, and Snape had seen with his own eyes all of those other students standing around in the exact same corridor that FitzSimmons were in. He noticeably wasn't accusing any of them of them of petrifying cats, just Harry Potter and Harry Potter's mudblood friend. Yes, it was true that they had been the ones physically closest to the cat when Snape had arrived (though many other students were quite close by by that point as well), but they could have merely been the most curious or least scared to get close and look, and certainly weren't at all acting unusual to be on that corridor as Snape had heavily implied.
"Harry, Miss Granger — please do explain why you were at the scene," Dumbledore said gravely. "I do not believe you could have done this, but I would like to know why you were there and what you saw before we arrived."
"As I said, we left the Great Hall right before it looked like everyone else would be leaving, in order to beat the crowds up to our common room," Simmons answered. "And like every other Gryffindor and Ravenclaw student in this castle going from the Great Hall to the staircase on the fourth floor where our paths diverge to the two different towers, we went down that second floor hallway to get to the stairs at the very end of it to continue on up to the third floor. Same exact path everyone always takes on this day of the week.
"But when we rounded the corner from the hallway before onto that hallway, we spotted the writing, the puddle of water across from it coming out from the out-of-order girls bathroom there, and a motionless Mrs Norris hanging from the torch bracket at the far end of the writing. Knowing animals, and specifically that they don't normally hang motionless when hung up by their tails, I rushed to try to rescue the animal if possible, or otherwise see what had happened to it, Harry running with me.
"Not feeling a pulse when I pressed my fingers against its neck, I carefully removed Mrs Norris from the torch bracket and set her on the floor, before pointing my wand at her to try and revive her — because while the writing seemed ominous and threatening, our first concern was the life form present. So I cast 'Rennervate' on her, which did nothing. At which point I looked at Harry, who was studying the water puddle, and said that we needed to get her to the professors. But before we could even move, all of the students of two entire Houses came rushing into that hallway on their own way back to their dorms, and first Filch and then you showed up mere minutes later, before we could try to take the cat to you ourselves. And you were there for the rest."
"Likely story," Snape sneered, despite it being at least as reasonable as two second-years successfully casting super-dark magic that even Dumbledore couldn't undo.
"All right then, arsehole — prove that we're guilty beyond reasonable doubt before a jury of our peers, or let us the fuck go," Fitz snapped right back at the slandering child abuser, leaping up from the seat that he had taken when they'd first walked in, long past fed up with the Snake's 'Potter is guilty of everything bad regardless of the existence of that pesky little thing called evidence or not' attitude.
"Innocent until proven guilty, Severus," Dumbledore agreed firmly.
Snape looked furious.
Filch was as well — although he at least had the excuse of a crime having been committed against him — as he immediately voiced, shrieking, "My cat has been Petrified! I want to see some punishment!"
Completely ignoring this reasonable if unable to be implemented at the moment desire of Filch's, Dumbledore instead said, "We will be able to cure her, Argus. Fortuitously, Professor Sprout recently managed to procure some Mandrakes. As soon as they have reached their full size, I will have a potion made that will revive Mrs. Norris."
Always having to be the hero and center of attention, Lockhart boastfully proclaimed, "I'll make it — I must have done it a hundred times. I could whip up a Mandrake Restorative Draught in my sleep —"
"Excuse me," Snape interrupted icily. "But I believe I am the Potions master at this school."
In the ensuing deathly silence between Snape and Lockhart, Dumbledore quietly said to FitzSimmons, "You may go."
FitzSimmons didn't need to be told twice, and immediately scurried out of the room as quickly as they could possibly go, more than happy to get as far away from Snape as possible.
As they walked down the crime scene hallway again a minute later on their way up to Gryffindor tower, Fitz asked, "So what does 'The Chamber Of Secrets Has Been Opened; Enemies Of The Heir, Beware' mean, what can petrify a cat and why would it, and what does it have to do with the out-of-order bathroom across the hall that had something overflowing? Because we don't believe in coincidences."
Stopping in front of the writing, Simmons stepped up close to it.
"And what is this written in?" she added to their list of questions that they didn't have answers for yet. "It looks like blood, but even I can't tell what kind without any lab equipment, which I haveth not, the wizarding world having zero understanding of what science is, let alone a good gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer. But as for the message itself, a chamber is some kind of room or hideout. In this case a secret one, or one housing secrets, that the author of this message at least has named 'the Chamber of Secrets'. And it has been opened, implying that something was being stored inside, most likely whatever caused the petrification, since the petrified cat was hung under the message. And then 'Enemies of the heir, beware' implies that the same fate is going to befall the enemies of the heir of someone — little vague on the who, though, unless 'The Heir' is a well-known title in the wizarding world that we just haven't ran across yet. Another 'You-Know-Who' and 'He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named' kind of thing. Was Grindelwald know as 'The Heir'?"
"And is the chamber in the bathroom, and that's why it's out of order?" Fitz continued. "And opening it earlier tonight broke a pipe or faucet or something and that's why it's flooding? But who's stupid enough to leave the victim of their crime right outside their hiding spot?"
"Someone either extremely confident or extremely stupid," Simmons answered. "Which means we're either dealing with a highly intelligent serial killer who is toying with the castle, or a common loose-nut criminal who happened to discover a way to remove Mrs Norris from Filch's spy team." She paused for a second, before continuing on, "Care to take a look around the bathroom and see if we can find anything, since the adults sure as hell aren't doing any investigating?"
"Thought you'd never ask," Fitz smirked back, placing a hand on his wife's back and guiding them into the bathroom.
Inside they found the floor covered in an inch of water, though seemingly from no source. Nothing was running, and looking around at all of the faucets and commodes, none of them were filled to the brim even if they had stopped actually overflowing by that point. But they had just turned away from the last stall when they heard a splash from behind them, and turned around to find themselves staring at a young female ghost who had just popped up out of the toilet to see who was in her bathroom.
"Hi. We're Hermione and Harry. Who are you?" Simmons said politely, introducing themselves to the ghost.
The one time that they had quickly popped into that bathroom the year before while making the map, they hadn't seen any ghosts hanging around, and neither of them could ever remember seeing this particular ghost floating around the Great Hall or through the hallways of the castle.
"This is a girls' bathroom — he's not a girl," the ghost replied, looking at Fitz.
"And this is hardly a bathroom, it's just a wet, moldy, abandoned empty space," Fitz retorted.
The ghost looked at him in shock for a second, before exclaiming angrily, "This is my home!" and diving back into the toilet.
But they could hear the ghost sobbing in the u-bend, so after rolling her eyes at both of them, Simmons said, "Will you please come back out and tell us your name? We have some questions we want to ask you about something that occurred in the hallway outside your home earlier this evening."
"And how would I know anything?" the ghost replied sulkily, before slowly floating up out of the water again a few seconds later.
"Can we start with names first, please?" Simmons asked.
"Myrtle, but everyone calls me Moaning Myrtle," Myrtle answered.
"Nice to meet you, Myrtle," Simmons replied. "Now did you see anyone in this bathroom, or hear anything going on outside it earlier tonight? A cat was hung up right outside, petrified."
"I wasn't paying attention," Myrtle answered dramatically. "Peeves upset me so much I came in here and tried to kill myself. Then, of course, I remembered that I'm — that I'm—"
And with that she burst into tears and dove back into the toilet, splashing more water onto the already flooded floor.
"Lovely girl," Fitz muttered as he turned back to look at the room again.
"Indeed," Simmons agreed. "But if the mystery outside has anything to do with this bathroom, she's not going to be of any help. Sounds like there could have been a Chamber of Secrets rave in here tonight and she wouldn't have noticed. Hell, we might even be standing in the Chamber of Secrets right now, and she wouldn't know about it."
"Investigate on our own then?"
They looked over the entire bathroom, pressing against all of the walls looking for any secret doors or hidden passageways, but found nothing. Other than years of abandonment, the only thing out of place that they could find was a tiny snake scratched onto the side of one of the copper taps. They tried turning the tap in both directions, pressing it, pulling it, but it did nothing, neither turning on the water nor opening any secret chambers.
By this point Myrtle had finished sulking and reappeared, and said, "That tap's never worked."
"And how long have you been here for, if I may ask?" Simmons asked.
"Been a ghost for fifty years, and was a third year when I died," Myrtle answered cheerfully. "This bathroom was regularly used before I became a ghost, but that faucet never worked the entire time I was a student, and rumor had it that it had never worked, at least not in living memory."
"So did someone mark it with a snake because it doesn't work, or does it not work because it's marked with a snake?" Fitz asked rhetorically. "And by that I don't mean the snake symbol is causing it not to work, simply that it never working and the snake symbol are because of the same thing."
"Certainly suspicious, but I don't know any snake-related magic to try on it to make it open something," Simmons answered. "We can show it to a professor in the morning, though, and see if they can make anything of it, and hopefully not just write it off as some odd coincidence that 'this is how things have always been'."
"Likely as not," Fitz muttered, before asking his wife, "See anything else in here we should show them as well?"
"Other than a lot of mold and grime and fifty years of disuse that could probably be magically cleaned in a few seconds if the professors wanted to, and then doing something about how much it holds water to begin with to enable this much mold growth, and maybe turning the water off in here entirely if they're never going to fix it and reopen it so that it can't accidentally flood anymore — no. I don't see anything else," Simmons answered.
~FS~
News of the attack spread like wildfire or bad news the following morning at breakfast, and soon Slytherin and Hufflepuff joined Gryffindor and Ravenclaw in knowing that Mrs Norris had been attacked and the Chamber of Secrets was open, and more importantly, that Harry Potter and his brainy girl were the ones doing it.
But FitzSimmons expected no less and payed no attention to it, instead more interested in passing on to Professor McGonagall the information that they had discovered the night before in the out-of-order bathroom across from the crime scene. So once they had finished eating, they walked up to where Professor McGonagall was eating her own breakfast at the staff table.
"Excuse me, Professor McGonagall, but we would like to show you something that we found in the bathroom across from the crime scene that we think might be relevant," Simmons said to the deputy headmistress.
"Moaning Myrtle's bathroom!" McGonagall exclaimed, completely missing the point. "That bathroom is off limits! You're not supposed to be in there! And he's certainly not supposed to be in there, it's a girls bathroom!"
"Kind of missing the point," Fitz muttered, rolling his eyes. "We found something that may help solve the crime of the petrification of Mrs Norris, and catch the guilty party."
McGonagall stared at him in shock, before finally saying weakly, "But it's a weekday, the day's classes will be starting soon…."
"Your precious classes, or a crime of most dark magic according to Dumbledore that could very well be a student next time?" Simmons replied sarcastically, not in the mood for McGonagall's bullshit that morning.
At that McGonagall finally stood up and let them lead her up to Myrtle's bathroom. Taking her inside, they showed her the copper tap that didn't work that had the snake scratched on it.
"The attack occurred right outside this room, or was at least staged right outside this room, and that one tap is completely different from every other one in this bathroom, or any bathroom in the entire castle that I've ever noticed anyway, and it hasn't worked in over fifty years, since long before Myrtle died if the rumors she heard as a student are to be believed," Simmons said. "In all that time, why hasn't it ever been able to be fixed to work like a normal tap, or why hasn't anyone tried to fix it? Also, for God's sake, please use a little magic to clean this room even if you're not going to reopen it as a bathroom, and if you're not going to reopen it, turn off the water to it so that it can't flood again like it did last night."
"I don't believe the piping works that way, and this bathroom stopped being used after Moaning Myrtle died in here," Professor McGonagall muttered more to herself than to them, "but that is definitely a snake, and this is the bathroom Moaning Myrtle died in."
But before FitzSimmons could ask what exactly those two things meant, Professor McGonagall turned to the last stall and said loudly, "Moaning Myrtle!"
"Yes, Professor?" Myrtle asked sweetly, popping up from the toilet, splashing water on the stone floor that had dried up since the night before.
"Where exactly did you die?" Professor McGonagall asked her.
"Right in this very stall," Myrtle answered proudly, suddenly looking substantially more cheerful than before. "I'd hidden in here because Olive Hornby was teasing me about my glasses. The door was locked, and I was crying, and then I heard somebody come in. They said something funny. A different language, I think it must have been. Anyway, what really got me was that it was a boy speaking. So I unlocked the door, to tell him to go and use his own toilet, and then — I died."
"Is there anything else you can tell me about your death?" Professor McGonagall asked. "Did you get a look at the boy, did you see what killed you, or perhaps where they were?"
"All I remember seeing was a pair of great, big, yellow eyes, and my whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away. I never saw the boy, but the eyes were somewhere right about were all of you are standing."
As Professor McGonagall stood there staring at the sink and tap again, lost in her own thoughts, Simmons asked, "If I may, Professor, what is the Chamber of Secrets that the message outside referenced? I've never heard of it before."
"There is both a legend, and an actual series of attacks," Professor McGonagall answered, still seemingly lost in her thoughts and not paying attention to the fact that she was talking to two students. "The short version of the legend is that Salazar Slytherin built a secret chamber that only his heirs could open, unleashing the horror within to rid the school of all the non-pureblood students. The actual attacks attributed to the opening of the Chamber of Secrets culminated in the death of Moaning Myrtle in this very bathroom that nearly shut down the school exactly fifty years ago."
"Slytherin — so that's why the snake is relevant, and it isn't a lion, eagle, or badger scratched on there," Fitz said.
"If it was opened before, what stopped it then, and how did they know it was safe not to shut down the school?" Simmons asked. "And if the person doing it was caught, who's opening it now? Or even if they weren't caught, it seems unlikely that they could be doing it again this time fifty years later, unless it's a professor who was either a student or much younger professor back then, because y'all are the only adults in this castle who could have been doing it back then as well."
"Or it could be a family that had one member open it back then, and another member a generation or two later who's a student here now opening it this time," Fitz supplied.
"A suspect was caught and expelled last time, and the attacks stopped after that, but Dumbledore never believed said person was actually the one opening the Chamber," Professor McGonagall answered. "Dumbledore did have a suspect at the time, but that's completely impossible that he could be doing it again! Completely impossible!"
"Dead?" Fitz asked.
"In a manner of speaking," Professor McGonagall answered, still not paying attention to what she was answering or to whom she was answering it.
There was silence in the abandoned bathroom for several seconds, each of them deep in their own thoughts, before FitzSimmons exclaimed in perfect sync, "Voldemort!"
Professor McGonagall looked up at them startled, before very tellingly not answering, and returning to looking at the sink.
So Simmons asked, "And Slytherin's monster? Any ideas on what that could be, and how it could be traversing the castle without being detected?"
"It was never seen by any of the students attacked, or by Moaning Myrtle before she died other than the pair of great, big, yellow eyes that I had never heard before a minute ago, and it was obviously never caught, since it attacked again last night," Professor McGonagall answered. "And if Dumbledore has some idea, he never shared it with me."
At that moment the bell rang, and she quickly said, "Thank you for showing this to me, but you two need to be getting to class now. I will take this information to Dumbledore, and let him do with it as he sees fit. Good day."
Knowing that they were going to get nothing more out of her, and there seemingly really being nothing more to get out of her or the crime scene that they were standing in, FitzSimmons nodded and headed off to their first class of the morning, minds abuzz with everything that they had learned so far.
~FS~
That evening in the library Ron came up to where FitzSimmons were studying as usual.
"Can you believe that attack last night?" he said as he plopped down in the seat across from them. "Though the 'Chamber of Secrets' rings a sort of bell. I think someone told me a story about a secret chamber at Hogwarts once...might've been Bill…."
"It's the same thing as fifty years ago when Myrtle was murdered," Fitz replied without thinking, never looking up from his book.
Ron stared at them in shock for several seconds, though FitzSimmons never saw it as they were both still reading, before exclaiming, "What?! How do you know that?!"
Simmons finally looked up. "Talked to Professor McGonagall this morning. Myrtle was murdered in the bathroom across from where we found Mrs Norris, fifty years ago after a series of attacks on the school. That's probably what your brother was talking about."
"He definitely never said anything about anyone being murdered," Ron replied. "Just that it's some castle legend."
"Oh — then he was probably referring to the story that Slytherin built a secret chamber only his heir could open, with an apparently immortal if it's still supposed to be alive a thousand years later monster kept inside to rid the school of non-purebloods. If any of that is true, or if Voldemort just named his own monster after the legend since he wanted to do the same thing as the legend, who knows."
After visibly flinching at Simmons' brazen use of the just-as-forbidden-as-'mudblood' word — 'Voldemort' — Ron exclaimed in a hushed whisper, like he didn't want anyone in the library near them to hear, "You-Know-Who?! What does he have to do with any of this?!"
"Dumbledore thought he was behind the attacks back then, which means most likely he's behind the attack last night, though whether he's currently here in whatever form he currently posses, or has someone here doing his bidding for him, we couldn't say," Fitz answered. "That, or it's one of the professors who was here back then doing it again, or a family that's passed the task through the generations."
"That's it! It's Malfoy! He's been going around all day telling everyone, 'You'll be next, Mudbloods!', and you've only got to look at his foul rat face to know it's him. I bet his family's had the key to the Chamber of Secrets for centuries, handing it down father to son — his father opened it fifty years ago when he was here, and now he's passed it on to Malfoy. It makes perfect sense!"
"But it's a famous family, wouldn't someone have traced their family tree back to Slytherin if that were the case?" Simmons asked, personally believing it much more likely that the impossible to kill tyrant was a better suspect. "And was Malfoy's dad even here fifty years ago? That would have made him about fifty when he had Malfoy, and while wizards do live longer than normal people, that's still unusually old to have a child based on everything I've read about wizarding families."
"Come on, they could easily be Slytherin's descendants!" Ron exclaimed, like she was being unreasonable by questioning the narrative that he wanted to be true. "The whole lot of them have been in Slytherin as long as anyone can remember, he's always boasting about it. And his father's definitely evil enough."
"You've met him?" Fitz asked.
"At Flourish and Blotts this summer," Ron growled darkly. "He started a fight with dad, that me and the twins picked up against Malfoy, until eventually Lockhart drug all four of us kids up to where he was signing his autobiography to get a picture with us — it was front page of the Daily Prophet the next morning."
By the end he looked rather proud of himself. But Fitz was thinking of something different. "So that's what Lockhart was talking about at the Opening Feast, when he was talking about being responsible and giving you a taste for publicity and the front page of the paper with you four after that giant fight was broke up. Okay, that makes a lot more sense now — it was the second fight he saw you four in."
Ron, however, seemed to think that they were missing all of the important points, and so said, "Mark my words. Whenever they catch whoever's doing this, it's going to be Malfoy."
"Maybe," Simmons shrugged. "But that's not our responsibility. It's the professors, and if such a thing even exists, the wizarding police."
"Why don't we just prove it ourselves?" Ron exclaimed excitedly. "We could become famous — catching the person opening the Chamber of Secrets, saving the school, and proving what a git Malfoy is! Well, you could become both the Boy-Who-Lived and the Boy-Who-Saved-Hogwarts-From-the-Malfoys, while I finally become famous for the first time."
"Didn't you say you were on the front cover of the Daily Prophet this summer?" Fitz asked pointedly. "Isn't that fame?"
"Well…yeah…but apparently no one saw it," Ron replied. "Not a single person has mentioned it to me since we got back to school."
"Or you just discovered the principle of 'fifteen minutes of fame'," Simmons answered. "Most fame is very short lived, and people move on to the next flashy thing that catches their attention. And in your case, that meant moving on before you were around anyone for them to comment on your temporary fame."
"But Harry's still famous a decade later!" Ron whined petulantly.
"Because he took down a tyrant that the entire wizarding population combined hadn't been able to or was too scared to for over a decade," Simmons explained patiently. "And to be perfectly honest, he shouldn't be famous like he is for that. It was honestly just a case of right time, right place, right luck, that if anyone actually understands what the hell happened that night, they haven't told us or written it anywhere. It's not something that Harry actually did to earn the fame that has been thrust upon him at far too young of an age. Also, both of his parents were murdered in cold blood to give him that fame. So ask yourself — would you rather have fame and no family, or a family that loves you but you are only known by people who actually know you and care about you?"
Ron looked like he really wanted to answer that he still wanted the fame, but he didn't reply either answer out loud and simply slouched down in his chair, so FitzSimmons resumed their reading. And after about ten minutes Ron finally stood up and left, having no interest in joining the pair in studying, and afraid that he would overstay his welcome if he stayed any longer without starting to study.
~FS~
Over the course of the next week, since the professors said absolutely nothing to the school about not believing that FitzSimmons were the ones to have done whatever horrid thing it was that had been done to Mrs Norris — which they also never told everyone was actually still alive and would be revived later in the year — and so as all the school had to go on was the headmaster demanding that the pair go with him from the crime scene, everyone reasonably continued to believe that FitzSimmons were guilty of — well, whatever it was that had actually happened, that was clearly bad.
Numerous times FitzSimmons would be walking to somewhere such as the library, when a student approaching from the opposite direction would catch sight of them and quickly turn around and hurry away in the opposite direction. But as the overall result of this was that no one was bothering them, and they were allowed to get on with their schooling without distractions instead of everyone wanting to know the story of what had happened and what FitzSimmons had seen (and done), the Shield couple was rather happy about the situation that they had found themselves in, compared to what it could have been.
But no amount of believing that FitzSimmons were trying to take over the school and kill everyone by opening the Chamber of Secrets could bring down the increasing excitement for the upcoming opening quidditch match, Gryffindor vs Slytherin. Another late morning match, long after sexy times, FitzSimmons decided that they had nothing better to do that morning than go, so at 1100 as Madam Hooch's whistle blew to start the match, they walked into the quidditch pitch stands, finding a couple of seats alone in one of the topmost sections, a few rows away from the nearest people who happened to be Ravenclaws, so that they could snog if the match got too boring. But no sooner had they sat down and looked up to see what was going on in the match, than one of the bludgers came pelting straight towards Fitz's head. As Fitz instinctively ducked, Simmons, who had been casting a warming bubble around them with her wand when she saw the heavy object coming straight for her husband, whipped her wand towards the ball and shouted, "Protego!"
A silvery-invisible wall exploded into existence in front of where Fitz's head had just been, and a split second later the quidditch ball ricocheted off of it, shooting up into the sky. A player each from Gryffindor and Slytherin sped towards it, but before either of them could reach the ball, it looped in a tight one-eighty and headed straight towards Fitz again. This time FitzSimmons were watching, and they both threw up Shield Charms above their heads, the bludger deflecting off of Fitz's and back into the main field of play.
This time a Slytherin was flying by near enough to whack it towards the Gryffindor chasers, but the Bludger changed direction in midair and shot straight for Fitz yet again.
"This seems out of the ordinary," Fitz commented dryly as he threw up another shield to deflect it yet again.
Simmons quickly glanced around — other than a beater from each team, no one seemed to have noticed that the bludger seemed to be focused on a fan instead of the game.
High above them, the Gryffindor seeker gave the Bludger a powerful whack in the direction of the Slytherin chaser currently in possession of the quaffle, but yet again, the Bludger swerved like a boomerang and shot at Fitz's head. This pattern continued on for several minutes, until finally the two beaters gave up and head back onto the field to chase the bludger that wasn't behaving strangely, and use their bodies to block the opposing team's chasers since they didn't have a second bludger to whack around.
Meanwhile, the crowd and the professors still seemed to notice nothing with as high up in the stands as FitzSimmons were sitting, and no one really paying much attention to what a bludger was off galavanting about doing, focused entirely on the quaffle with occasional glances around to see if the snitch had appeared. So when it started to rain fifteen minutes into the match, FitzSimmons decided that they were done with the match, and were going to head back inside the castle, where hopefully they could sneak in through the doors without the bludger being able to follow them, and it not break through a window to get back after Fitz.
But as they walked down through the stands to get out, and the bludger pelted back down towards Fitz and glanced off of his shield, people suddenly noticed the bludger whizzing through the air within feet of their heads, and turned to look at the black ball. Such that by the time FitzSimmons had made it to the bottom of the stands and were walking across the bottom walkway to the stairs exiting the stands, the bludger continually looping back towards Fitz and glancing off his shield again and again, everyone was staring at them and the rogue bludger, the game that was still going on out on the pitch completely forgotten by all of the fans.
It had also finally attracted the attention of the professors and staff, who hurried down from their seats in the stands when the safety of a sizable portion of the crowd became threatened by FitzSimmons' walking down in front of all of them deflecting a bludger over and over. As the bludger wizzed back down towards Fitz for the umpteenth time since they had arrived fifteen minutes earlier, and Fitz prepared to throw up an umpteenth minus one Shield Charm, Professor McGonagall raised her own wand.
But never one to let a good spotlight go to waste, Lockhart beat her to it shouting, "Finite Incantatem!"
Which immediately set the rogue ball on fire, but did nothing to deter its path, now making it a flaming bludger heading straight for Fitz's head.
Once the ball had bounced off of Fitz's conjured shield, Professor McGonagall was finally able to cast her own spell at it, "Impedimenta", freezing it in it's tracks long enough for her to levitate it over to Hagrid, who grabbed it in his arms, struggling to keep it contained when the Impediment Jinx quickly wore off and it started trying to chase Fitz down again.
Finally safe, FitzSimmons nodded a polite thanks to Professor McGonagall, before resuming their journey out of the stands and back up to the dry, warm castle with its private dorm perfect for having 'I'm glad a bludger didn't take your head off' sex in, as the rain was only growing heavier. But as they exited the stadium they heard a cheer and groan that could only mean that the snitch had been caught and the game was over, meaning that they weren't going to be the only ones soon heading back up to the castle. For unbeknownst to them, the out-of-control bludger had not only attracted the attention of most of the crowd once it had started threatening them, but it had also attracted the attention of one Slytherin seeker Draco Malfoy where he sat boredly in the sky watching for the snitch, realizing how much less exciting being a seeker was than he had thought when he'd forced his father to bribe his way onto the team. And as he sat there laughing his head off at Harry Potter for having to be rescued from a bludger when he hadn't even made it onto his House's quidditch team, Gryffindor's seeker had spotted the glittering, golden snitch and flew after it unopposed, lazily catching it on the opposite side of the pitch from where Malfoy was watching FitzSimmons leave the stadium, believing Harry to be such a scaredy-cat that he wouldn't stick around to watch the rest of the match even after being rescued from the simple quidditch ball. A mistake that made the rest of his team and Slytherin House at large very, very upset, as what was the point of having the nicest brooms money could buy if the seeker that came with said brooms was going to just sit around in the sky, instead of using his broom's speed to catch the snitch first and win the game for them?
Needless to say, Malfoy stopped laughing very quickly when Lee Jordan announced that the game was over with Gryffindor winning by a sizable amount, and was nowhere near as happy for the rest of the day as FitzSimmons were, holed up in their dorm room making sweet, sweet love, instead of being scorned by his own House and thanked profusely by the other three Houses that hated Slytherin.