And here's the seventy third chapter of "A Year Too Soon"! Enjoy!
* Review Response:
Asharzal, staying mostly quiet - especially when you aren't very talkative to begin with - can go a long way to make other think everything's fine. Crouch Sr. wasn't a very social man in the recent years, and always tried to make others follow the rules. So it is not unlikely that anyone would think something is amiss when he is quiet throughout the Feast and then says Harry has to compete in the Tournament when the Goblet spits out his name.
Luiz4200, I can never make Harry say a lie so cruel.
Brockster550, tumshie, 0DINS0N, magitech, Bearmauls, DarkRavie, BMS, nkh1, TuxedoMac (guest), thank you for your reviews, folks!
electronic mouse (guest), except Voldemort is already very much dead here. So the goal for the 'bad guys' is not to create a new body for him, but a full-scale resurrection.
* AN: This chapter has not been beta-read.
Disclaimer: I DO NOT own "Harry Potter" franchise. No profit is being made. Same goes for any books, video games, anime or manga I may or may not use for ideas.
"speaking"
"parseltongue"
'thinking'
written text
spells
A Year Too Soon
Chapter LXXIII: Getting Some Answers
Unfortunately, Harry was right on the spot and there indeed were people who still thought he had somehow cheated his way into the Triwizard Tournament.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of them were from Gryffindor - a House known for being headstrong and opinionated as much as it was for bravery and courage. Their rivalry with Slytherin likely was a factor as well.
And speaking of Slytherin, the House of Snakes also had a handful of people who were calling Harry a cheat, even going as far as to break the unofficial Slytherin rule of presenting the unified front when outside of the common room. These same people also had been vehemently opposed to the changes Harry had introduced to the House's code of conduct a couple of years ago. What a coincidence.
Meanwhile, the absolute majority of Hufflepuffs had been convinced by the questioning that Harry hadn't entered himself into the Triwizard Tournament and, instead, was a victim of whatever plot that was going on. A few of them even had approached him in the morning and offered him their help, even though that meant they would be helping someone competing against one of their own. Of course, there still were a couple of 'Puffs who would rather demonize Harry - but they never were the nicest people around to begin with, so…
Most of Ravenclaw students also believed in Harry's innocence. But unlike Hufflepuffs, they all chose to keep their distance and observe the unfolding events for afar.
As for the Beauxbaton and Durmstrang delegations, they definitely were quite unhappy that Hogwarts got to have a 'second' Champion, but most of their anger was directed towards Hogwarts itself rather than Harry. He still got some dirty looks from them, but that was about it.
The afternoon classes had just ended, when Harry received a note from Headmaster Dumbledore telling him that he was needed in the man's office in half an hour. According to this note, they will be investigating his claim that the slip of parchment used to enter him into the Triwizard Tournament had been torn off his stolen homework essay.
So, after dropping his things at his room in the dormitories and explaining that he has been summoned by the Headmaster to Flora and Hestia, Harry headed straight to Dumbledore's office. And despite arriving there a few minutes before the appointed time, he was still the last one to show up: Professor McGonagall, Professor Snape and the Headmasters of all three schools all were already there.
"Ah… Good afternoon." Harry greeted them. "I hope I'm not late?"
"You're right on time, Mr. Potter." Dumbledore reassured him, before addressing the room: "We are now going to examine Mr. Potter's memories in order to determine whether his claim that his name was entered into the Triwizard Tournament using a signed piece of parchment - Transfiguration essay - stolen from him is justified or not." Then, he turned his attention back to the green-eyed teen. "If memory serves me, you've already had a chance to use a Pensieve." He stated while gesturing towards a pretty large rune-covered stone basin sitting on his table. Harry nodded.
"No quite, Sir." He said. "I have given you some memories for reviewing a couple of years ago, but haven't actually watched any in the pensieve myself. " He paused for a moment, before asking: "Can a memory even show something I haven't actually seen?" It was a valid question as knowledge was something that just couldn't be Magic'ed into existence.
"Not really, Mr. Potter." Dumbledore replied. "A memory will not contain anything you haven't actually seen, but as long as you had even the briefest glimpse of something, even if you didn't pay attention to it at the time, we will be able to see it in full clarity in a pensieve."
"I see." The green-eyed teen said. Perhaps, reviewing his memories might yield some results after all. "Alright, let's do it." He said then, before reaching for his wand to extract the memory for viewing. Having had no chance and no need to practice this particular skill, it took him a couple of attempts to properly pull the silvery strand out and place it safely into the pensieve but, thankfully for him, none of the adults in the room chose to comment on that.
After that was done, Dumbledore had everyone present in his office - Harry included - stand in a circle around the pensieve. Then, once everyone was ready, he had them touch the memory in order to enter it.
This was Harry's first time actually using a pensieve so the transition into the memory caught him by surprise and left him quite disoriented. And that was even before getting into all of the strangeness of watching yourself from a side, or the rule of perception that Professor Dumbledore had mentioned earlier: it was downright freaky to see memory-people appear out of void and disappear into it whenever his memory-self gained or lost awareness of them.
"Are you alright, Mr. Potter?" Dumbledore asked, having noticed his uneasiness.
"Yeah, I should be." Harry replied. "It's just… this might need a bit of time to get used to." The Hogwarts Headmaster nodded in response before rejoining the others in following the memory-Harry. And the real Harry hurried after them a few moments later.
It wasn't long before they arrived at the point where the incident they were reviewing actually happened.
And, surprisingly enough, they could actually see a cutting spell hit memory-Harry's bag before it burst open and spilled its contents all over the floor. Probably because he had seen its reflection on a suit of armor or something, even if it had never registered with consciousness. The memory didn't show the one who had actually cast that spell, though.
They then watched the memory-Harry fix his bag with a quick Reparo before he began hurriedly picking his things up from the floor. That was the moment when an Auror entered the 'scene'. And he appeared from exactly the same direction the cutting spell came from. And he was actually the only person to come from that direction, making it rather obvious that he had been the one to cast it.
The Auror - whom Dumbledore identified as someone named James Knutsworth - then proceeded to help the memory-Harry gather his things. Except there was a single piece of parchment he didn't return and instead pocketed it for his own 'use'.
At that point, Dumbledore used his wand to pause the memory playback and even rewound it back a bit to let everyone have a clear look at the piece of parchment that Auror decided to steal. Which happened to be a Transfiguration essay, with a very notable inkblot under Harry's signature - identical to the one that had been on a piece of parchment that had come out of the Goblet of Fire.
"It looks like you've been telling the truth about your homework getting lost in an accident back then, Mr. Potter." Professor McGonagall said.
"This is an outrage!" Headmaster Karkarov shouted a moment later. "It's not even Hogwarts that is trying to cheat in the Tournament, but the entire British Ministry for Magic instead! If Victor's Magic wasn't at stake here, Durmstrang would be leaving right now."
"That is certainly a possibility and, should it turn out to be true, you can certainly count on support from Beauxbaton and the French Ministry for Magic in your quest for justice, Headmaster Karkarov." Madame Maxime was a bit more restrained with her words, even if she was just as displeased by what she had just seen. "That said, I can't help but find the method the Auror used to obtain Mr. Potter's signature seems to be very strange for a government-sponsored operation. There might be something else going on here; we must question the Auror first."
"That is a sound suggestion." Dumbledore said. "I shall contact Amelia - I mean, Madam Bones of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement - immediately and have her bring Mr. Knutsworth in for questioning regarding this… incident."
"Do so." Madame Maxime commanded. The Hogwarts Headmaster merely nodded in response and with a quick wave of his wand brought everyone out of the memory and back to the real world.
"Before we proceed any further, there is something I must ask Mr. Potter." The old warlock spoke then.
"Yes, Sir?" Harry queried, not sure what Dumbledore wanted to ask him.
"Mr. Potter, do you want to stay for the questioning of Mr. Knutsworth?"
"I…" The teen breathed out. "I would like to know why he decided to set me up as the fourth Champion in the Tournament." Dumbledore nodded.
"Very well." He said before walking up to the fireplace in the corner of his office and making a call to the office of the Director of the DMLE. The two of them talked briefly before Madam Bones promised to arrive at the castle once she collected the Auror in question, who was off duty today, apparently.
Some fifteen minutes later, the fireplace roared back to life and Madam Bones stepped in through the emerald flames, all but dragging one James Knutsworth - still in his civilian clothes - after herself. The man seemed to be… resigned to whatever was about to happen to him.
But before he could be questioned by his boss and the headmasters of the three schools, Madam Bones herself had to swear an oath that she wasn't a part of whatever conspiracy that decided to enter Mr. Potter into the Triwizard Tournament, nor that she knew anything about its existence - at least until the events of the yesternight.
Once Madame Maxime and Headmaster Karkarov were assured of the integrity and lawfulness of Madam Bones, the questioning of Mr. Knutsworth finally began. Of course, the first few questions were all about making sure that the Veritaserum given to the Auror was working properly. Once that was established as the fact, though, the question everyone wanted to know the answer to was finally asked:
"Why did you put Mr. Harry Potter's name in the Goblet of Fire and how did you manage to fool it into selecting him as the fourth Champion?"
"Ah, well…" James began, clearly rather ashamed of what he was about to say. "Ugh… Someone… Someone told me to do that. I… I'm not sure when exactly that happened, but… They even explained how to make sure the Goblet chooses Mr. Potter. And… I… I don't know why I agreed to do it."
"Imperius Curse?" Dumbledore wondered out loud.
"Likely. Probably with an extra helping of other Mind Magics." Madam Bones agreed with a nod. "I'll deal with that later. But right now there are other things that need to be done." She added after a moment.
"Indeed." The Hogwarts Headmaster said to her. Then he shifted his attention back to Mr. Knutsworth. "And what exactly did you do to make the Goblet of Fire select more than three Champions? It's an ancient and quite powerful Magical artifact. Breaking its enchantments like you did shouldn't be possible - at least, not without anyone noticing anything until it chose Mr. Potter here as the fourth Champion."
"I… I didn't need to break any enchantments." James replied. "That man - I think it was a wizard - he gave me instructions on how to work around them and warp them to serve… his purposes. All I needed to do was make the Goblet forget there are only three schools in the Tournament. And make sure Mr. Potter was entered under a school that isn't Hogwarts, Durmstrang or Beauxbaton."
"I see…" Dumbledore said. "Thank you for confirming my theory."
"So, you already knew how the Goblet of Fire was fooled?" Madame Maxime asked then.
"No, I didn't know that for sure, but since the parchment with Mr. Potter's name on it didn't bear a name of a school that he would be representing, I strongly suspected that whoever had entered him into the Tournament used some Magic to make the Goblet believe there were four schools in the competition instead. And since Mr. Potter would be the only one from this literally-no-name school, he of course would be selected as its Champion." The old warlock explained.
"That… makes sense." The Beauxbaton Headmistress admitted. "Still…" She continued. "The fact that there is a third party that has such an intimate knowledge of the Goblet of Fire inner workings is worrying. It actually makes it even more likely that someone from the British Ministry is behind all this. But, as Madam Bones told under her oath, she has no information about such a conspiracy. And since she is the head of Law Enforcement, I want to think she knows a lot about what goes on within the British Ministry. So, for the time being, I will trust her."
"This is still an outrage!" Her colleague from Durmstrang, meanwhile, wasn't exactly satisfied with the answers he got so far.
"Anyway." He was cut off by Dumbledore. "Now that we've established how Mr. Potter's name has gotten into the Goblet of Fire, as well as that he really isn't a second Champion representing Hogwarts, even if he's still a student there, we must decide on what we do next about this situation." He paused for a moment before turning his attention to Madam Bones. "Thank you Amelia. I'll leave Mr. Knutsworth's fate in your capable hands."
"Of course." The DMLE Director said. "I'll also be launching an investigation into our mysterious perpetrator. It looks like they are pretty good at covering their tracks, so I can't promise quick results, but rest assured I will do everything in my power to put them behind the bars." Casting the Imperious Curse - an Unforgivable - already was an automatic one-way trip to Azkaban. But that certainly wasn't the only crime they had committed. "I will also look for the source of a leak on the enchantments the Goblet of Fire has." The witch continued. "There are only so many people who have access to that information, so finding the one who let it out should be doable."
As Madam Bones and Auror Knutsworth were about to step into the fireplace and floo away, the latter stopped for a moment and addressed Harry:
"Mr. Potter… I know you probably won't forgive me, and I likely don't even deserve forgiveness for this in the first place, but… For all that it is worth, I'm sorry." This caught Harry completely by surprise and he couldn't actually form a quick response. The man, though, wasn't really expecting any regardless and so, once he got this off his chest, he quickly followed his boss and flooed away.
A lengthy period of silence followed, eventually broken when Dumbledore spoke up:
"I believe we have concrete proof of a third party interfering with the Tournament with malicious intent towards at least one of the Champions." He said. "Whoever is behind all this, they have chosen Mr. Potter as their target and they are almost certainly doing this with intent to bring him harm. And we can't rule out that there will be further attempts to interfere with the Tournament, which may put all of the Champions under additional risks. As such, I propose that additional security is put in place to ensure no outside interference that can hamper the Champions."
"And who would be that extra security? As we've just seen, British Aurors can be subverted with but a single Imperius Curse." Karkarov asked somewhat mockingly.
"Indeed, your Aurors didn't present themselves in the best light today." Madame Maxime agreed. "But I'm willing to give them as a whole a small benefit of doubt as this one was obviously young and inexperienced. Surely, they aren't the best the DMLE has? That said, I'm sure we all would feel safer if this additional security Headmaster Dumbledore proposes is handled by professionals from other nations as well."
"I don't really have objections to that." The Hogwarts Headmaster said. "Though it should probably be discussed with more than just the three of us."
"Uh… Sir?" Harry spoke up.
"What is it, Mr. Potter?" Dumbledore asked then.
"Am I still needed here?"
"Uh, no." Dumbledore said. "You are free to leave if you wish, Mr. Potter." He paused for a moment. They were about to start discussing the security improvements - which might include some details about the upcoming Tasks that a Champion shouldn't be aware of. Yes, it would be for the better if Harry were to leave right now. And, thankfully for him, the said teen was quick to catch up on that.
"In that case I'll take my leave. I wish you a good evening, Sirs, Ma'am." He said as he gave the three Headmasters a bow before walking out of Dumbledore's office and heading for the Slytherin common room.
"How did it go?" Hestia asked as Harry bonelessly dropped onto the sofa next to her and her sister.
"Apparently, I had been entered into the Tournament by an Impeioused Auror." The green-eyed teen replied with a tired sigh. "No one has any idea who they really are or what their actual goal is, but they certainly don't have my best interests in mind."
"I see…" His girlfriend said. "And is Dumbledore doing anything about it?" Harry gave her a nod.
"They are going to up the security for now. Not much else they can really do at the moment." He replied. "And the Headmasters are looking into the ways to remove me from the Tournament - which I shouldn't be participating in in the first place - so, with any luck, I will be free from all this before too long."
"Let's hope they succeed." Flora said. There was a pause, before she added: "But I'm sure you'll be fine even if you're forced to compete, Harry. You're a great wizard. Our boyfriend can't be anything but." Harry didn't look especially convinced by her words, so she decided to 'prove' her point with actions instead. By leaning in and giving him a quick kiss on his lips.
"My sister's right, you know, Harry?" Hestia said. Then she gave him a kiss as well.
This finally made Harry smile. How could he not when he has such great ladies by his side?
That's all, folks!
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