The following morning, a bright and sunny Wednesday with clear blue skies outside and over the Great Hall, FitzSimmons finally got to see Tonks as a professor for the first time.
Being their first class of the morning they arrived thirty minutes early in order to be able to chat with their friend before class started, as with both of their busy schedules with their various classes teaching and taking, they hadn't been able to speak with her again since they had all gone up to the Head dorm after the Opening Feast, only being able to wave hi in the Great Hall at meals or when they passed in the hallways during the first two days of school. Tonks arrived at her classroom within five minutes of FitzSimmons' arrival, and spent the next twenty minutes telling them all about what she planned on teaching them that year, until the rest of the class started arriving and getting settled into their desks, at which point FitzSimmons took their own seats right in front of Tonks's teacher's desk, fully planning on being teacher's pets.
And as everyone piled in and class actually started, it was clear to FitzSimmons that everyone from sixth year had in fact entered seventh year as well, much to their relief. They did briefly wonder if the incoming sixth year class was much smaller than normal (like NEWT Potions had always been before Professor Slughorn took over the class again) from students being more terrified of Snape than of not being able to defend themselves against Riddle and his Death Eaters, or if the school had done its job and informed all of the rising sixth years that they wouldn't be abused by Snape if they continued on with their NEWT DADA like FitzSimmons had made sure was the case with Potions the previous year, but they had no easy way to find that out and it would be very difficult to change at this point anyway, so they put it out of their minds as Tonks began the lesson.
Which for all intents and purposes was year one of auror training, minus the field training that she couldn't give them being stuck inside a castle — a plan that FitzSimmons very much approved of. The field practice would have been nice of course, but they understood completely why it wouldn't happen, even if with a class of seventeen and eighteen year olds it really could be done if done right. Because while Fudge and Umbridge had been afraid of Dumbledore creating a student militia two years prior, Tonks was actually training a well-regulated (trained and ready to pick up arms and go at a moment's notice should any threat be detected, not controlled by the government) militia of adult wizards, who just happened to still be in school for another ten months, but after that would be going out into the world on their own where threats really did possibly lurk behind any corner or shadow, or wide out in the open in the form of a politician.
Tonks started out the lesson with a couple of personal stories from her own three years in the aurors where she used a particular spell, after which she taught them said spell and had them begin practicing it, a teaching method that she would use profusely throughout the upcoming year. In this particular case it was a spell that FitzSimmons had already learned on their own the year before while going through more advanced defensive spellbooks since they were so far ahead, but they could already tell that it was going to be a fun, exciting, learning-filled year of Defense Against the Dark Arts, taught by their best friend who would almost certainly be willing to give them extra and more advanced work when they asked her for it.
~FS~
That Saturday FitzSimmons decided to go investigate the prefects' bathroom that they now had access to should they ever want to use it.
Once on the fifth floor they walked up to the fourth door to the left of the statue of Boris the Bewildered (the lost-looking wizard with his gloves on the wrong hands) where Simmons gave the password. The door opened slightly with a creak, and Simmons pushed it the rest of the way open so that she and Fitz could walk inside. Closing the door back behind them so that no non-prefects (or non-quidditch captains, not that they were aware that these could also access this bathroom or would have cared if they were aware) could follow them into this reward for earning the individual position of prefect (well, in theory anyway — Ron and Malfoy had both been named prefects), they looked around at the room that they were standing in.
The floor, walls, and ceiling were all white marble, softly lit by a gold candle-filled chandelier floating in the middle of the room over an empty, rectangular swimming pool sunk in the middle of the marble floor of the room. Surrounding its edge it had what looked like a hundred gold taps each with a different jewel set in its handle making FitzSimmons assume that they did different things, and a three foot high diving board at the twelve foot deep end of the pool. Windows in the facing long wall overlooking the Forbidden Forest were framed with long white linen curtains, and on the short side wall behind the diving board was a gold-framed painting of a mermaid with long blonde hair, who started giggling and flashing her fins as soon as she saw FitzSimmons enter. Finally, a large pile of fluffy white towels sat stacked in one corner for drying off with after you finished swimming.
Fitz let out a low whistle as he took it all in.
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too," Simmons replied. "Opulence to the extreme, but the first sign we've seen in this castle of individual achievement being rewarded, as opposed to social achievement that we successfully proved first year could be easily defeated by a mere two House members."
"And would have kept proving every year since then if we hadn't called their bluff that they can't expel us, and therefore can't give us detention either, which has led them to stop even bothering taking points away from us most of the time, giving Gryffindor a chance to win House Cup again," Fitz agreed. "But since they did give us head boy and girl for apparently academic reasons, because it certainly wasn't our blind obedience to the adults here, let's see what all these taps for the pool do."
And with that he walked over to the line of taps and began turning them on and off one by one to see what they did. Which as it turned out, was to stream different types of magical bubble bath-mixed water to fill the pool with: pink and blue bubbles the size of soccer balls, ice-white foam thicker than the icing on a good cake, heavily perfumed purple clouds that hovered over the surface of the water, jets of water that bounced off of the surface of the water in large arcs, as well as a hundred other different types of bubbles and foam and clouds and everything imaginable from bubble bath, plus two normal taps that had plain hot and cold water. By the time they were done testing out every single tap, even just for long enough to see what each one did, the pool was nearly full.
As Simmons waved her wand and vanished all of the water from the pool, she said, "We should come here in the middle of the night and skinny dip."
"Jemma!" Fitz exclaimed, scandalized at his wife.
"Fitz, it's technically not even actually skinny dipping, this is a bath not a swimming pool, you're supposed to be naked in it," Simmons said, rolling her eyes at her husband. "I just wouldn't want to use it as a bath when anyone else might come in — Daisy, sure, she'd just join us, but no one else. And there is a bolt on the door that I guess prefects use or something if they use this as a real bath and not just an indoor swimming pool, but I wouldn't want to risk someone knowing magic capable of unlocking a physical bolt. Coming during the day and using it as a swimming pool with a bikini could work, though — I'd have no problem with that. And only fifth years and above are allowed in here since that's when prefectship starts, so we wouldn't be scarring anyone too young. But as for using it to actually skinny dip in, we have Harry's invisibility cloak, it would be no problem to sneak over here and have some late night fun — it's not a long walk from our new flat."
"If we used it as a swimming pool in the middle of the night, I bet Tonks would come join us if we asked her," Fitz suggested. "Hell, for all we know, when she was a student here she learned the password and would sneak in here to skinny dip in the middle of the night when no prefects were awake to catch her using their swimming pool/bath."
"I'm sure she'd love to!" Simmons answered excitedly. "Yes, we are totally coming here to use this as a pool — on the weekends, maybe school evenings when we could use something to relax us, midnight skinny dipping trips, and midnight pool parties with Tonks."
After spending all summer looking for the last missing horcrux to no avail, Dumbledore finally admitted that he needed help.
So at the beginning of the third week of school he called FitzSimmons up to his office to see if they had any more suggestions, since they had been the ones to really find Ravenclaw's diadem the year before in the Room of Requirement that he never would have looked in, because he didn't know it even existed before they had shown it to him.
"I have searched everywhere I can in Voldemort's life, but I have found no hints of where he might have stored Hufflepuff's Cup," he said to them once they were all seated around his desk. "I wondered if you two could come up with any ideas, like you did Ravenclaw's Diadem being stored here in the school."
FitzSimmons were quiet for a minute, thinking hard, before Fitz began reciting the locations of the first five horcruxes. "The diary he gave to a Death Eater, the ring he put in his grandfather's house, the diadem he hid here, and the locket he hid where he terrorized the other kids when he was a kid himself."
"So places he visited and committed a crime — the house and lake; somewhere physically well-protected — here; and gave it to someone he trusted," Simmons mused.
"If we assume Dumbledore's found and looked in all the historical places of significance, then we're left with another Death Eater or another inherently safe location," Fitz continued. "Although — would he have put one in the home he murdered my parents in? Actually, wait, no, he didn't find out about that place until he had already made and hid all of them except for Nagini, so unless he moved one there since his return, he can't have put one there."
"Well, most people store their valuables in a bank if not a vault or bunker at home," Simmons said. "Does Riddle have a vault at Gringotts or some other wizarding bank that he could have stored it in? Like we said last year, if he stored it in a muggle bank we'll never find it, but if he was as hung up on the wizarding world as it always seems, and especially the British wizarding world, then we've got a chance — because there's only one wizarding bank in all of Britain. And it's always claimed to be the most secure place other than Hogwarts, right?"
"If he ever did, which I have never heard of, I'm sure the Ministry would have seized it during the first war," Dumbledore replied. "The Ministry and Gringotts have never got along, but I'm sure they would have forced a way when it came to Lord Voldemort. But his Death Eaters do have vaults there, and very secure ones. And whether Voldemort specifically asked them to keep an artifact for him in their vault, or he simply asked them to keep something safe like with his diary and they then put it in their vault themselves, there is certainly a possibility that Hufflepuff's Cup is somewhere in Gringotts. And the goblins have never actively been into dark magic themselves, so while they frequently allow wizards to store whatever they like in the vaults, something so dark as a horcrux just might be too much for them, in which case they would probably help find it if it is in fact there. Thank you, Harry, Hermione — once again, you may have just found another horcrux."
"Our pleasure, Sir," Simmons answered, before she and Fitz bid the headmaster goodnight and left his office to head back to their dorm.
Dumbledore, meanwhile, as soon as they left flooed his friendliest contact at Gringotts. It took him a lot of negotiating and finagling over the following week as he worked his way up the goblin chain of command, but he finally had the chief convinced that Riddle may have had one of his followers store a portion of his soul in one of the goblins' vaults, and that it was far too dark and evil magic to just ignore like they did all of the other dark objects that wizards routinely stored in Gringotts in the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy of the bank that was the only way that goblins could stand to do business with wizards.
The only thing left was to figure out which vault it could be in — Riddle had no shortage of powerful, ancient families bending their every knee to him who had vaults of the highest security. But through a process of trial and error, combining goblin magic with a few horcrux hunting-specific wizarding spells that Dumbledore agreed to teach them since the goblins absolutely refused to allow any but their own to look inside vaults that did not belong to the person wishing to look inside (Dumbledore, in this case), and starting with the most secure vaults first, two days later the goblins discovered Hufflepuff's Cup inside the Lestrange's vault in the high security section protected by the dragon.
Presenting it to Dumbledore in a meeting room up on the Diagon Alley-level floor of the bank, the chief goblin said to the headmaster, "I believe this is what you are looking for."
"Indeed," Dumbledore answered gravely. "And thank you once again for your help. This is one of the last pieces necessary to be able to defeat Lord Voldemort forever."
"Thank you for bringing this horror to our attention," the goblin replied. "You know that we do not take sides in wizarding wars, nor to we take sides in 'light' versus 'dark' magic as wizards like to label their spells, but truly evil magic we will not stand idly by and allow to be stored in our hallowed halls."
After thanking the goblin one last time and saying goodbye, Dumbledore flooed back to his office with the horcrux, quickly pulled out the sword of Gryffindor from its glass display case, and used it to destroy the third and final of the other three founders' surviving artifacts. Then he placed both artifacts back in the glass display case with Ravenclaw's diadem and Slytherin's locket, confident that the only horcrux still standing between Harry and killing Voldemort forever was the snake that was always by its master's side. And so the following evening, ten days after they had made the ingenious suggestion of looking in Gringotts, he called FitzSimmons back to his office to show them their success.
"Hufflepuff's Cup, horcrux-free all thanks to you," he said to them, motioning towards where it sat in the glass case with the rest of the Founder's objects.
"We just thought of where it might be — you and the goblins actually found and destroyed it," Fitz replied, trying once again to reiterate the point that people other than the 'Prophesied One' were doing work to kill Riddle. That anyone could kill Riddle if they just tried and had the right opportunity. "This is you."
"Well, regardless, the only horcrux left before Lord Voldemort can be killed is his snake, Nagini," Dumbledore said, either completely missing or intentionally ignoring Fitz's point. "And as he always keeps his snake with him, it will have to be destroyed just before you kill Voldemort, Harry. Of course, the problem is creating an opportunity for you to face Lord Voldemort. He will not be easy to lure out into the open."
"You know — Snape knows where Riddle has his base of operations," Fitz suggested, knowing from what Tonks had told them the first night that Snape worked for Riddle. "Can't you just coordinate with the aurors office, any other appropriate groups in the Ministry, and of course your own Order of the Phoenix, to launch a full assault on wherever he is? Make sure you know that Riddle's going to be there, surround the entire place with every man and spell you've got to make sure that none of them can escape, and attack with the full might of every combined resource that you can pull together. Riddle's got a lot of people, but it can't come close to the numbers of the Ministry. And you'll have the element of surprise and someone on the inside to take down wards and spells, and kill Death Eaters from the inside as you kill Death Eaters from the outside. There will likely be casualties on our side, but that's the cost of war, and being a surprise attack with a spy inside, you have the upper hand to keep them as minimal as possible. Maybe pick a night where most of the Death Eaters are out on the prowl doing missions for Riddle, so it's only the base guard actually at the headquarters. And then once you've killed Riddle and arrested or killed all of the Death Eaters there, just hide in the place and arrest the rest of the Death Eaters as they return in their small groups. Sure, word will eventually leak out somehow and some will be able to run and hide, and the aurors will have to hunt them down later, but you should be able to sweep up most of Riddle's organization, and most importantly, kill the terrorist himself. The war will be over, just a few stragglers to find who won't be trying to reform Riddle's empire on their own any time soon."
Dumbledore just stared at Fitz in shock, having no clue what to say. That idea was just — preposterous — but he had no clue how to explain that to Harry, because in reality it was the greatest idea ever proposed even though he honestly didn't see that. But what he could see was that he had no ready defense against it, so he just stared in dumbfoundment.
When it became clear that Dumbledore couldn't contradict Fitz's brilliant plan, but couldn't accept it for the brilliance that it was either, Simmons went on the offensive, attacking Dumbledore where it hurt him the most.
"Oh, what, your poor, precious Sevy is too valuable to put his life on the line?" she sneered mockingly. "He's too big of a pussy to risk his life to help kill Riddle? Going undercover is fine since he used to work for Riddle, but actually doing anything real to stop his old master is too much, or he never actually turned to the good side at all? It's a damn good plan, the best you've ever heard, you just don't want to admit that it would work without Harry having to be involved at all. Because you're just as obsessed with this stupid prophecy as Riddle is. You just try to hide it under a guise of 'I'm only interested because Riddle is'. And yes, it is important to know the prophecy because it does dictate how the enemy is going to behave, which enables you to predict his moves better and set traps for him because he does become predictable, but you shouldn't fall prey to placing all your own hopes on the prophecy as well. Believing the prophecy led to Riddle's first ruin — if you're not careful, it could lead to yours this time around."
As Dumbledore turned to stare at the better half of FitzSimmons now, Fitz said, "You know what, we'll make it easy for you. We'll leave, and give you time to think our idea over on your own. Talk to aurors you know, and other wizards who specialize in tactical assaults and SWAT no-knock warrants like this, and discuss it amongst yourselves. Then you can carry it out without ever telling Hermione and I beforehand, and we'll just read about it in the Daily Prophet the next morning when they report how a combined Ministry attack squad raided Riddle's residence and killed the terrorist and arrested most of his followers. And that's all the thanks we'll ever need from anyone, seeing that our plan successfully saved wizarding Britain. I mean, hell — take a more abstract understanding of the prophecy and I am still fulfilling it, since I created the plan that will vanquish him, and he will die at my hand in the sense that it was my hand working in the background moving all the chess pieces into place for a trained killer to do the actual physical killing instead of a seventeen year old kid."
And with that he stood up and headed towards the door, Simmons following right after him, leaving a dumbfounded, shellshocked, and highly flummoxed and flabbergasted headmaster behind them.
~FS~
To celebrate giving Dumbledore the perfect plan to rid the world of Riddle forever, FitzSimmons decided to try skinny dipping in the prefects' pool for the first time that night.
Setting their alarms for 0200 they went to bed earlier than normal that night, before getting back up when the time came. Donning Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, they quietly started sneaking through the dark down to the bewildered statue of Bumbling Boris.
But no sooner had they reached the first corner of their short journey than they spotted Mrs Norris (the apparently widowed cat, as they still had yet to meet Mr Norris) prowling along the far end of the hallway that they needed to walk down next, the moonlight streaming in through the windows illuminating her dust-colored fur. Pulling their heads back around the corner, Fitz used the moonlight softly lighting up the hallway that they were on to silently point towards a tapestry that hid a certain secret passageway. It would take them way out of their way but would eventually lead to the fifth floor corridor that they were looking for, and while it was one thing for a cat to be out on the prowl at 0200, it seemed pretty unlikely that any adult would be out and about for them to run into. There was always the possibility that Mrs Norris was heading in the direction of the prefects bathroom as well and they would run across her again, but they would just have to keep a careful eye out for her and deal with that if it came.
But it never did, and fifteen minutes later Simmons whispered the password to let them into the prefects' bathroom. Quietly closing the door behind them, Simmons slid the bolt closed before throwing up all of the locking and silencing charms that she knew to make sure that they weren't caught. Fitz meanwhile walked over to the pool and threw on the hot and cold plain taps as well as a few of the specialty bubble bath taps that they had agreed beforehand that they both liked best, so that they would have a mostly normal pool with a few fancy bubbles on the top to spice things up — and they could always vanish the bubbles away mid skinny dip if they got tired of them, or wanted to change to different bubbles.
Walking over to where her husband was still messing with the taps, Simmons quickly dropped the robe, cami, and knickers that were all that she was wearing since it was the middle of the night and they were just coming here, and stood there waiting for him to look up at her. Which after a few seconds he did, just for his jaw to drop. Sure, he'd only seen her naked a few thousand times and mapped out every inch of her skin a hundred times over, but it still made him stare every time that she surprised him with it like this.
"Like what you see?" Simmons smirked, before diving headfirst into the filled pool before he could reply.
So Fitz quickly stripped off his own clothes and dove in after her, soon catching up to her on the far end of the pool and splashing her. Simmons laughed and splashed him back as they began to play in the warm water, enjoying the indoor private swimming pool that they now had access to. But eventually they played as much as they could and for as long as they could without being too tired the following morning for classes if they didn't get back to bed sooner rather than later, and so they climbed out the steps and grabbed soft, fluffy towels off of the pile in the corner.
"Now wasn't that fun?" Simmons said as they dried off.
"I never said it wouldn't be fun, I just thought it was scandalous for you to suggest," Fitz answered. "And I still do, even if I have no problem coming back."
"Yeah, but like I said it's not even actually scandalous, though," Simmons replied. "This is a bathroom, and that a bath, and you're technically supposed to use it for being naked in. The only rules we've broken tonight are being out past curfew — which one can argue that we're actually just up really early this morning, since no one ever thinks to make a morning curfew time, not that any professor would actually buy that if we weren't already expel-proof — and then possibly some rule about students not being allowed to bathe together, but there are no signs posted anywhere saying that that's a rule. So we're actually completely fine."
"It was the fact that you called it 'skinny dipping' that was the scandalous part," Fitz grumbled back as he pulled on his clothes. "And the fact that it's a semi-public place. Taking a shower isn't scandalous either, but if you call it skinny dipping it's going to sound weird, Jemma."
Simmons laughed at this. "Okay, okay, you've got a point. And I did intentionally call it skinny dipping because of the scandalous implications, and to try to make you blush. And of course to plant the picture in your mind of me stripping naked and jumping into this, like you said, semi-public pool, even if we'd obviously never do it when anyone else could see us."
"Well, mission accomplished," Fitz replied as they walked to the door to leave.
They quickly threw Harry's invisibility cloak back over them, before slipping out the door and sneaking back up to their dorm. Thankfully they saw no living creatures on this trip and soon tumbled into bed to get another four hours of sleep before breakfast, and then classes.