They'd barely been levitated into the pavilion tent, which Madam Pomfrey had set up with infirmary cots, and begun receiving treatment for their wounds and the decompression sickness before Fleur's father was storming in. His illusory seeming was flickering with his worry, and only stabilized as he saw both his daughters alive and basically unharmed. Harry caught a look of relief before the elf steeled his features back to a stern political mask.
"Papa!" Gabby cried in happiness at seeing him. Her bed was next to Fleur's and the two hadn't stopped holding hands since they came out of the water.
Maréchal strode over to the beds, walking right past Pomfrey's frown of annoyance at him invading the infirmary. He began a torrent of conversation with the girls in French. Even if Harry's translation implant was functioning, he wasn't sure he'd totally be able to follow it with the speed of the discussion, and their attempt to keep it fairly low just in case. With the cheering of the crowd outside as the judges deliberated, Harry was lucky to pick up tone of voice and cadence.
Not surprisingly, Maréchal seemed angry, only barely hanging onto his temper in front of his younger daughter. Fleur was contrite and yet didn't seem to be giving ground entirely, occasionally glancing past her father over to Harry as if either mentioning him or just looking to him for the strength to stand up for herself. The vibe Harry was getting was pretty similar to the times he'd had it out with his aunt: it was a lot harder for a parental figure to fully punish your bad decisions if you'd managed to make them work out with no real harm done.
Gabby, living up to her nickname, kept interjecting in an excited stream, gesturing at Harry, Viktor, and her co-hostages. Maybe she didn't yet have her empathy developed to understand the tension between her sister and father. Even through the language barrier, it was clear she'd just had the first adventure in her life and thought it was great, actually.
Finally, showing that despite his overbearing political outlook there was still a dad in there that had been scared because he loved his daughters, the argument wound down, he gave them both a fatherly pat on their shoulders, and he turned to Harry. Moving closer to the bed he said, in English, "Thank you for helping to make sure my daughters didn't come to harm." He moved his eyes over all the assembled, as everyone had played a part, but it was clear he was mostly talking to Harry.
"It was my pleasure, sir," he responded, getting the impression that he was being given tacit permission to at least hang out with Fleur. Though he doubted the man's long-term plans had changed.
As he left, the judges began to announce the scores. While Dumbledore had given Fleur his first pick, he was the only judge to realize what a disadvantage she'd been at in the frostbitten world of the Jotuns. Harry wasn't even sure she'd been able to manifest her battle form and flame while there, relying entirely on glamour magic. Conversely, Viktor had gotten the highest ratings from Percy and the Ancient One. Overall, the total scores weren't that different from the first round, with Harry pulling solid first or second rankings from most of the judges for his leadership and fighting skill.
The scores after two tasks were Harry at 26, Fleur at 23, Cedric at 21, and Viktor at 18.
"And I suppose you're curious what those scores mean," Bagman suggested as he and Percy entered the tent to observe the challengers and hostages, still letting the potions work through their systems. "They will represent the order of entry into the final challenge, which we envision as a race to completion. No more teamwork for this one, I'm afraid! We're putting you in separately, and only the first one to the cup will be the champion of the tournament. Make sense?"
"Do ve know vhat the terrain is yet?" Viktor asked.
"I'll be sure to clue you in once the auguries are clearer," Bagman shrugged. "Right now all we can say for sure is that it should be in the spring. Keep up your fitness and casting, and I'm sure you'll be ready for anything!"
After he left, Harry gave his best Rowan Atkinson impression to the rest of the tent. "It's a race!" Nobody seemed to get it. Maybe they hadn't had Rat Race lovingly shown to them by someone like Rhodey when he was trying to make a point about the ludicrous rich-people shenanigans Tony got up to in Las Vegas. "I'm winning." More blank looks. Dean would have gotten it.
"If things are fair," Hermione ignored him (she'd gotten very good at ignoring him and Dean when they were obviously doing a bit from some obscure movie), "the race will be on Niflheim, Nidavellir, or Asgard. That way the most realms will be represented and nobody will have the home realm advantage."
"'ow often 'ave zese been zat fair?" Fleur asked, having come to respect Hermione's research acumen.
"Never," she admitted. "It's honestly a little unusual that none of your home realms have come up in the first two tasks. Simple statistics says it's likely to be a duplicate. The only one we know it won't be is Vanaheim, since I'm pretty sure you can't have a convergence to a different place in the same realm."
"There's never been one on Asgard, either," Cedric volunteered from his cot. "It will be the final realm connected in the Grand Convergence."
"So we've narrowed it down to… anywhere that might be interesting for a footrace across half a dozen planets?" Harry checked and neither of them disagreed. "In that case, I'm hoping we just pop into the middle of American Ninja Warrior."
"I can at least look up how race tasks have played out in the past," Hermione pouted.
By the time they were all cleared by Pomfrey to return to their dorms, the party in Gryffindor was in full swing. The abruptness of the tournament and kidnapping of multiple students had gotten them to cancel the rest of Wednesday's classes. (There was also the rumor that the real reason for classes being canceled was because the staff wanted to spend the afternoon raiding the underwater collection themselves before the convergence closed.) Hermione got rare spotlight time at the party, since she actually had the most secret knowledge: everyone had seen all the stuff that Harry had done on the big screen.
Even though her answers were mostly, "We sat in those jars looking at frog people for a few hours and then figured the rescue was happening when they started rushing off in a hurry," she still had to tell the story over and over.
And then things settled back in. Spring-Month was, confusingly, the last month of winter, covering the end of February and March through the equinox. That gave them several weeks before they had to worry about getting dumped through another convergence. The various school teams competed for lower-stakes trophies. The study group did their best to remember that they still needed to pass their classes. Dean spent more effort on running in their practice sessions, especially as it got nicer outside, and Fleur, Viktor, and Cedric joined in fairly often.
Seeing the older kids in running gear out in the warming air turned out to be better for teen libidos than in the freezing cold of the lake. Fleur was obviously supernaturally attractive, but Viktor and Cedric weren't at all bad to look at either. The girls (and Seamus) insisted it was true.
"Should I ask you to go to Hogsmeade?" Harry questioned Fleur after one of their runs, right after the spring field trip had been announced. He mostly held her eyes while he asked, though the shimmer of her sweat getting wicked into the edges of whatever blue-gray fantasy material her sports bra was made of was distracting to his peripheral vision.
"I would like zat, but…" she looked at the rest of the group, who'd spread out to grab their towels and water bottles. Viktor was playfully helping Hermione with her towel while she mock-insisted she could dry her own hair without actually moving out of range. Dean and Padma were heavily flirting about what a slave-driver he was making her run so far. The group members that weren't that obviously flirting were still paired off with their significant others. "...per'aps we could all go as a group?"
"Because it can't be a date?"
"If it got back to my fazzer, it is just easier if I went wiz friends."
She must have realized he was still not understanding her careful language, and walked close enough to him to "accidentally" brush her leg against his. He'd basically stopped shielding around her, so he got a quick empathic hit. It was enough to understand that she wanted to spend time with him, and was just trying to prevent her father from feeling the need to step in again to stop it.
"Okay, got it," he smiled, worries dismissed. "Hey, guys," he asked everyone. "Can we do a group hangout at Hogsmeade this time? And maybe have it work out better than last time?"
The third Hogsmeade trip of the year was less packed than the previous two had been. Despite it warming up outside and getting well into Spring, the auguries evidently still placed the final task well out. Presumably most of the die-hard fans had used up all their vacation time hanging around in the dead of winter waiting for the second task, and couldn't spend weeks more to be in place for the third.
That suited Harry fine. The study group entourage needed a lot of space as it wended through the village like a small society of its own. In addition to their usual suspects, they'd wound up with a few of the Durmstrang kids, so the Creeveys and their friends had tagged on as Oona's crew. Fleur didn't really have any elves she actually wanted to spend much time with, but she'd become friendly with enough Ravenclaws that a few had joined in between her, Padma, Luna, and Cho. And then there was the long tail of Cedric's Hufflepuff friends, where he served as a strange hinge between their group and his.
He honestly seemed as baffled by it as anyone, having meant to just tag along with Cho.
Harry was surprised to notice they'd even picked up a Slytherin. "It's cool, right?" Theodore Nott asked. "This is a big friends day and if anyone asks it's because I need Viktor to teach me something?" Despite his assertions, Harry couldn't help but notice that the lanky pureblood was standing very close to Seamus, who hadn't sneaked off on his own.
"Yeah, man, it's cool," Harry smiled and went back to talking to Fleur.
"A snake, though?" Ron couldn't help but whisper, for all that he was also glad to see their roommate find someone with the limited options he had at the school.
Their crowd was two-dozen strong at least, maybe more at certain points of the day, and they didn't browse the stalls so much as engulf them. It honestly screwed up foot traffic around the rest of the town, when they'd cluster around a shop all at once, blocking the aisles. They bought candy and other treats. They browsed quidditch supplies. They stocked up on dwindling school supplies.
That was all surface.
They showed off their tastes and knowledge. They probed interests. They casually brushed against one another. They invited each other to try a bite of the food they'd purchased.
Somehow, even for the couples that had been together for nearly a year, flirting in a group while out in the world was a new experience.
By the time they took over a whole wall of the Three Broomsticks for a late lunch, an onlooker could almost smell the cloud of teen hormones floating along with the group. Madame Rosmerta, the inn's owner, certainly could, bustling out and pushing the buttermead and cheese plates. She was curious whether she could get them to buy through her stock.
It was interesting how a dense enough, loud enough group could almost become privacy the other way around. While there was cross-chatter, it was easy to focus on the person adjacent, to have to almost shout to be overheard. Harry and Fleur were just one of several sets of kids trying to bridge the public to get into the private.
"Is Alfheim big on cheeses?" Harry asked, gesturing with a strip of one of the interesting cheddars that came from Vanir cattle.
"Oui," she agreed, spreading a soft cheese on a cracker. "Zough we import much from France. We don't keep livestock in ze same way, not enough to 'ave a large production."
"So does that mean your father would or wouldn't be impressed with a herd of cows?" Vanir dowry traditions had actually come up a fair amount, and, though he was joking, Harry was pretty sure Tony would help him buy out some kind of fancy herd if it would help him date an elven princess. Or maybe Sirius could get some of the massive Vanir cattle…
Wait, Sirius. Why was Sirius in the inn?
"Sorry to interrupt. Can I borrow my godson for a few minutes?" he asked, having shown up at the edge of the packed study group table.
Harry glanced at Fleur and brushed her hand with his own, trying to convey that he didn't expect the interruption. She smiled and he caught her own feelings that it was fine, with an undercurrent of curiosity about what Sirius wanted. As he was standing up and extricating himself from the booth, he mused that he enjoyed dating the hottest girl on the planet, but that empathic communication was really going to be hard to beat with anyone else.
"I was asking about dowries, man," Harry hissed at his godfather, as Sirius led him toward the private rooms upstairs.
"Hah!" he barked, ushering Harry into what was probably the same room he'd ambushed the minister in the previous year. "Sorry, pup. I'm sure it was top shelf material."
"Yeah," Harry agreed, slumping into a chair as Sirius shut the door and placed a package on the table. "I don't even know what I'm doing. Her dad is barely letting me hang out with her, and only because I saved her little sister. She still has to marry an elf king or something. I'm just wasting my time."
Sirius ruffled his hair and smirked, "That girl was not looking at you like you were wasting your time." He took the chair across the table from Harry and waited to see if more teen angst was about to pour out. Seeing that his statement had neatly punctured the pity balloon, he said, "Sorry I missed you rescuing the little sister. And the previous task. I've been busy."
"With this?" Harry asked, poking at the package, which was obviously some kind of flat-packed cloth bundle wrapped in brown paper.
"And working with Dora to track down rumors. But, yeah, it took me a little while to work out the enchantments on that undershirt and copy them. You weren't wrong: it wouldn't have held up for too much longer." Harry had left Sirius the "bulletproof" undershirt he'd gotten at the Goblin Market after the winter holidays. "Hopefully this one will. You can open it."
Harry grinned and ripped open the package, which revealed a dark red suit of glove leather, closely embroidered with runes in golden thread. "Wow. You didn't have to!"
"I kind of did," his godfather shook his head, face falling slightly even after seeing how thrilled Harry was. "Dora's been digging. Mentioning the theory about aliens. She's gotten a little bit of purchase, and I've been helping as much as I can with the other members of the Althing. But the Death Eaters are still moving, too. And there's still too much chance that you're about to get dropped into whatever they're plotting."
"What's it do?" Harry asked, trying to figure out what he could understand of the runes while he unfolded the outfit. It seemed like it would fit him closely enough that it could either serve as outerwear or be concealed under baggy clothing. "Also, Tony's going to be so pissed if he finds out you got me armor before he could."
That did turn Sirius' frown upside-down, and he explained, "Mostly armoring runes throughout. I'm not encouraging you to not try to dodge, but it should be a lot better than clothes against pretty much anything I could figure out how to protect against. I also added a couple of expanded pouches," he demonstrated that there were pockets concealed in seams, as deep as Harry's bag. "I worry that people will go for your bag. If you keep everything in here, maybe they'll waste time trying to grab the wrong thing."
"Makes sense," he agreed. "By 'people' you mean Death Eaters, right?"
"Don't tell the other challengers either," Sirius said, and then immediately bulled on with, "I know you like them, and you're probably right that you've won them over and they're good kids. But they do still want to win. And they might think they can safely make you lose by taking your stuff, and then the Death Eaters show up. It's better that nobody knows you've got an advantage until you need it."
"I guess so," Harry grudgingly agreed. "Only Fleur knows about my cloak, so I guess it's just one more secret." It wasn't like he wasn't used to keeping them, even from his close friends. "Are you sticking around to the task?"
Sirius nodded, "Not that you'll really be able to visit, but, yeah. There's an old Black property in town I'm using. I don't know if I'll be able to help if something happens on another world, but I'll be as close as I can."
"Maybe I can sneak out. I'm pretty sure the twins know some secret passages. Oh, hey, we could meet in the Roaring Rampart if that tunnel is still there."
"Not that I mind seeing you, pup, but what do you need to meet up with me for?" Sirius asked, amused by the barrage of potential rules breaking.
"Learning to be an animagus?" Harry suggested. "I realized that would be another useful trick."
Sirius sighed, "Takes years, unfortunately. I don't think you're going to pull it off in the next month or two. And, honestly, with Loki no longer in Asgard, I'm not sure it's even possible to learn…"
"Wait, what?"
He nodded and explained, "It's basically following his path as far as Vanir are able. We can only get one alternate form, but it's said he can turn into several animals, and even flawlessly shift to look like other people."
"I thought that was just Aesir illusion magic?" Harry said, remembering Hermione going on about the potion she wanted to brew in second-year.
"For simple stuff, maybe. The Aesir royals are basically gods, though, and so are plenty of folks they went up against. You think he tricked the most powerful entities in the nine realms for centuries with only illusions? But, anyway, the last part of the animagus ritual involves praying to Loki. And it really felt like he heard us and shared his power in some minor way. I'm just glad my powers didn't stop working when he died."
"Huh. Almost sounds like a witchcraft investment, just with someone the Ministry has to be nice about," Harry figured.
Sirius admitted, "You're not wrong. That's another reason not many people become animagi. Or talk about it."
"Can I get investments from the other Aesir royals?" Harry wondered.
"I don't know. Loki left behind some notes that got passed around Hogwarts. And Peeves was a big help sorting out the process. Created his own little mystery cult as a prank. I doubt Thor would even know where to tell you to start, even if he was willing."
"Wait! Does that mean McGonagall is a Loki-worshipper?"
Sirius smirked, "We worked that out too. I don't know what got her laced up so tight, but I'm pretty sure Minnie was a wildcat when she was young." He changed the subject back to the original topic, remembering, "What nobody seems to be able to figure out is how you got into the tournament in the first place. It may have been someone good enough to tamper with the Goblet and then hide from the Norns themselves. And if someone like that was in Hogwarts, I can't tell why they wouldn't just take you out whenever they wanted."
"They need me in the tournament for some reason," Harry reached the obvious conclusion.
"Yeah. Either because they expected you to die in a way that's easier to explain as an accident than cursing you in the hallways… or because they want you to do well for some reason."
Harry checked, "Could it just be someone's a fan and isn't actually out to get me?"
"That would be nice, right? But I figure at this point, either they underestimated how well you'd do against monsters from other worlds… or whatever's going to happen will happen when you win."
"Make sure someone else wins, got it," Harry agreed. "I really kind of want Fleur to win, anyway. She needs it the most."
"Let me tell you, pup… never let the girl think you let her win. That won't count as a dowry."
By the time Harry made it back down to the main room, the flirty mood had diminished somewhat by the room filling up with other students, including Malfoy being shitty to Nott about hanging out with them. At least Draco apparently hadn't reached the conclusion about why he was hanging out (or maybe he had and just only cared about fraternizing with Gryffindors, not that Harry was willing to give Draco points for being progressive). Thus, he got to join the exodus from the inn and to do one more loop around town before heading back to school for dinner. Fleur at least seemed to think his armor looked cool.
A few days later, at the end of Eoster-Month (basically late April), the challengers got called out of class to meet with Bagman, who led the four of them on a walk-and-talk around the Hogwarts grounds as he explained, "I told you we'd tell you as soon as we knew, and we finally got a solid prediction. It should be sometime in the next few weeks. There's going to be a maze. Creatures. The race is to get the trophy at the center."
"What realm is it?" Harry checked.
"Too soon to be sure," Bagman shrugged. "How are all of you with tracking magic, though? Our plan is to give each of you a metal plate you can put your tracking spell on as close to before the challenge as possible. Then we'll put those near the cup when we place it. Don't want to leave you completely lost."
Harry felt fairly confident with that setup, glancing at the others to see if anyone looked like they might need practice. Nobody said they couldn't, but Viktor asked, "Ve don't know the realm. So 'creatures' doesn't give us anything to go on."
"That's what makes it a challenge," Bagman grinned. "You're supposed to evade them anyway. Get to the center of the maze. Get the cup. Win the tournament. Easy."
"At least we already fought dragons?" Harry took a step back so nobody would hit him as he sarcastically added, "So it's not like they could be worse, right?"
Fleur still managed to hit him.