"I'm sorry, but how is this not a big fucking problem?" Harry asked, his voice a half-strangled rasp as he tried to keep it from turning into a shout at the breakfast table.
Hermione sighed and Ron couldn't meet his eye. Pansy was late for breakfast.
"I'm not saying it's not a big problem, Harry." Hermione said testily, scribbling down the last line of the riddle, "What I'm saying is that it has to be possible, or else they wouldn't have set it. The goal of the competition is for someone to win – it's not like it used to be."
Ron nodded, making his chewing of a piece of toast pensive somehow.
"I'm sorry, sorry, sorry," pansy said, hustling over to them and kissing Harry on the cheek, "sorry I'm late – Daphne had some bad news by owl in the middle of the night and had to floo home, we hardly slept after that."
"It's okay." Harry said, sliding his fingers into hers.
"How did it go?" Pansy asked, seeing the tension in Harry's face. "Did you manage to work the egg out?"
Harry shrugged and Hermione slid her piece of parchment bearing the riddle across to Pansy.
She read it, frowning. "We cannot sing above the ground?"
"Merfolk." Ron said in answer.
"It's the 'hour long' bit that's freaking me out more than anything." Harry said, pushing his uneaten breakfast away.
Pansy read the riddle again and sighed. "Well let's look on the bright-side: one," she held up the index finger on her free hand, "you've got ages until this thing is due, so that's plenty of time to figure out what you're going to do; two," she added her middle finger, "you have all of us to help you out and three," she raised her thumb, "it's not like they'd have made an impossible task, is it?"
"That's what I said." Hermione said tartly. "He just won't listen."
Pansy stiffened. "Oh sorry Hermione, I forgot you're a machine that can't understand anxiety – it must be someone else who spends the run-up to exams every year buzzing around every teacher and crying every five minutes."
Hermione flushed and the two women glared at each other for a long moment.
Ron slapped the table. "Would you two leave it out for Christ's sake! This is the last thing he needs. Come on Harry mate, let's go for a quick fly, it's nice and clear this morning."
Hermione looked furious, Pansy abashed as Harry and Ron stood and stalked out of the hall together.
Harry had slept easily enough – the relaxing potion had made it so he'd struggled to get back to his dormitory – but his dreams had been full of drowning and grindylows and people laughing at him as he stood naked on a gang-plank while his Firebolt sank into pink water below him.
The sky was a hard, pristine blue with hardly a cloud to be seen as they stepped out into the morning air. The sun was still low in the sky, throwing hard shadows across the grounds.
Harry mounted his Firebolt and Ron his decrepit Shooting Star, both of them rising high into the cold air.
As was almost always the case with flying, Harry felt better as soon as he left the ground. The pair levelled off, skimming over the enormous ancient pines of the Forbidden Forest. Harry could feel Ron's eyes on him and his concern from fifty feet, and was incredibly grateful that he was letting Harry run his frustration out, waiting to talk when he was ready.
It only took a few minutes of shivering to get their muscles warm and after fifteen, they rose higher, coming to a stop ten feet above the highest tower of the castle.
Ron raised his face to the steadily climbing sun, feeling the rays soak into him and listening to Harry's breathing. He knew it was close now.
"I think I'm fucked with this one Ron." Harry said after less than a minute.
"Nah. You'll be fine. You've got me, Hermione, Pansy – everyone on your side."
Harry started to speak a couple of times, but his throat seemed too thick. Ron waited.
"It's like… I just want a normal…" Harry sighed, cleared his throat and tried again. "It's like I said, I don't want glory and honour. I just want you and Hermione and Pansy and Sirius. I just feel like I want to run away somewhere no one has ever seen my fucking scar or heard of Voldemort."
He was immensely grateful to Ron for not even flinching at the name.
"Okay, we'll do that then – come the summer, a bunch of us can go camping or something. Dad said Perkins doesn't want his tent back; we can take that and just… piss off somewhere for a bit. How about that?"
Harry smiled. "Sounds nice. Will you bring Luna?"
Ron's ears went red. "If she'll come. She's brilliant you know – I think Ginny might be right, how she said she might be as smart as Hermione."
"I'm not sure that's what Ginny said."
"Well I think it's true – I can hardly understand what she's on about half the time. She's already doing OWL Divination papers and smashing them. I wish she hadn't gone home for New Years." He said with pride.
They sat in companionable silence for a while.
Harry released a huge breath. "Thanks for getting me to do this."
Ron shrugged. "I know how you get. After all these years I see you getting all caught-up in your own head and know you just need to get out. Normally Fred and George would do something mental, throw a party or try to blow Filch up, but I know you just need to get on your broom and piss off."
Harry nodded. "I don't understand how people can go through life not doing this, you know?"
"Freaks mate, there's nothing like this. I mean, snogging's great, but…"
"If you say this is better than eating face, I might have to knock you off your broom." Harry said.
"No, dickhead," Ron laughed, "I mean… that's great, but it's all inside, shared. This is…" He trailed off, not finding the words.
"Freedom?" Harry asked, understanding what his best friend meant but thinking it lame.
"Kind of. Have you ever had a really crap day, then it starts to rain? The air changes and the light gets soft and there's that smell when the rain actually comes – smells like earth and change and… there's a name for it – Hermione told me ages ago. But it feels like the whole world is out there waiting for you to take it."
Harry did know, and he had a crystal-clear memory of his first full night at The Burrow after the Weasley brothers had stolen him away from the Dursley's in the old Ford Anglia. That first night there had been a massive thunderstorm after weeks of sun and he had just stood at Ron's bedroom window and watched the whole thing for hours.
"I think it's just one of those things, you know? Snogging is great because it's now and there's nothing else. Flying - really getting away - is like there's no now at all. And that's why I know you haven't got anything to worry about. We're going to figure out how to get you to breathe underwater for an hour, you're going to save that broom you're sitting on. If I have to figure out how to transfigure you into a dolphin, I will."
Harry didn't reply. He just sat on his broom for a few minutes in the silence.
"Harry?" Ron eventually asked.
"Hmm?"
"Can we go down now? I think my fingers are about to break off."
Pansy and Hermione were both waiting for them when they had dropped off their brooms and thawed out. They were both loaded down with a selection of spell and notebooks and ready to work.
"I'm sorry, Harry." Pansy said, hugging him hard.
"Me too." Mumbled Hermione. "We've agreed to put the past behind us."
Pansy nodded.
"What matters right now is you getting through the tasks ahead and that's what we're all going to do." Hermione finished, looking like she was reading from a script someone else had prepared for her.
"Thank you," Harry said, kissing Pansy on the forehead. "I've been thinking about what I need, and there are a few specific things I need from each of you, as it happens."
"Whatever you need, mate." Ron said, slapping him on the shoulder.
The girls nodded.
"Cheers. I need you to make me go flying and duel with me a couple of times a day. Hermione – make me study. Pansy – keep me sane."
Pansy smiled and took his hand. "Of course."
Hermione nodded.
"And something I'd really like all of your help with is: help me learn to swim properly and figure out how I can stay alive underwater while I look for something unknown that has been stolen by merpeople."
New Year celebrations at Hogwarts were usually – officially – a quiet affair, with just a big meal and a few speeches from a couple of teachers about what they were grateful and hoping for from the year past and the one to come, followed by another raucous – but less chaotic and damaging – party.
This time, due to how low the population of the castle was, everyone was invited to the Hufflepuff common room.
It turned out that the Hufflepuffs lived deep in the heart of the castle, roughly at ground level near the kitchens. It was superficially very much like the Gryffindor space, Harry found, sinking into an enormous squashy sofa with Pansy. There were the fireplaces, the cushions, sofas and tables; but where Gyffindor Tower was huge and airy, with tapestries and trophies, the Hufflepuff space was enormously comfortable, softly lit and well equipped with games and books of history and genealogy.
The only real upset of the night was when Hermione showed up for half an hour with Viktor Krum, which caused much gossiping and chatter for several days afterward. The elder Hufflepuffs carted out another substantial bag of cannabis around ten o'clock which saw to the evening going much more smoothly than the previous apocalyptic Christmas Eve party and – whether they had partaken or not – everyone was back in their beds before three am.
Harry and Pansy were becoming more comfortable not being glued together every second they were together. This, combined with their desire to avoid people seeing the light show that would appear when they kissed or started to get carried away with each other, was for the best. That night, a final-year Ravenclaw very smugly declared that he had figured out a way to make a muggle boombox work inside the castle – for a maximum of thirty-minutes at a time after which it would start to smoke – so they were treated a wide-array of music played on cassettes bought by him and his girlfriend from home.
Harry and Pansy were dancing to something slow and saccharine sweet called I Swear when Hermione re-entered the common room red-faced and her hair even more chaotic than ever.
"Oh, I love this song!" she said, skipping into the improvised dancefloor and taking a bottle offered by one Jonathan Stand, the male six-year Gryffindor prefect.
Ron emerged from a heavy cloud of bluish-green smoke grinning like an idiot.
"Nice, isn't it, down here?" He said, stealing a sip of Hermione's drink as the song came to an end and the boombox owner scambled to change the tape. "And this muggle music is brilliant."
"Always the note of surprise." Hermione scolded with a smile.
"Well, you don't expect it do you?" He said hazily, "They have to work so hard at everything, don't they?"
"Well to be fair, there's a lot of really crap music out there – you should hear to the shite my cousin listens to." Harry said, twirling Pansy around, "Any idea how they managed to get that boombox to work here, Hermione?"
"The what?" Hermione turned, saw the blaster and ran over to harangue the couple of Ravenclaws while Jimmy Cliff started singing about being able to see clearly after the rain had gone.
"That was easy." Ron said, straightening up and grinning, suddenly significantly less stoned. "Thought I'd get rid of her for you." He winked, hugged them both together and sighed. "God, I miss Luna." Then he turned and wandered back off into the smoke.
Harry and Pansy stared at his retreating back then back to each other.
"That was unusually considerate of him." She said, grinning.
Harry nodded, "Hey, love is in the air, I guess."
"Not just for him." She said, kissing him quickly – just quick enough to avoid the stars and lights appearing, but slow enough flick her tongue against his which caused him to shiver.
They still hadn't said that yet, but they'd settled into a kind of deliriously happy normal in which they spent as much time together as they could without ignoring and abandoning their friends.
Wrapping his arms around her waist, he hoisted her into the air, swinging her around as Take That faded into Baby-D. "Let me be your fantasy, yeah yeah-yeah." He sang, hideously out of tune. "Oh, I meant to say, thanks for earlier. I'm down to about fifty-percent panic now."
She rolled her eyes, "No problem, told you it wouldn't be difficult, we've got almost two months."
They'd spent three hours that afternoon throwing around ideas for how to tackle the Second Task and had come up with a substantial list of things to research and look into which, when done, really helped put his mind at ease.
At some point over the next two cassettes, nineteen ninety-four became nineteen ninety-five without anyone noticing.
