twice for the son

“He just fainted,” Cedric says dizzily, handing a barely-conscious Harry over to Professor Moody with some effort. “I don’t know what happened, the Portkey took us to this- this empty field, and then back here? I didn’t even know Portkeys could hold more than one charge.”

The observers’ chatter had calmed somewhat with the arrival of the professors onto the field and a now-clearer view of the two Hogwarts contestants. Briefly, Cedric turns his head to look over at the Hufflepuff stands and nods his head at his friends, who’ve gathered near the barricade and let out an uproarious cheer at his acknowledgement.

Professor Moody, looking rather irate, shakes his head. “We’ll need to investigate this. In the meantime, get yourself to the Hospital Wing, boy, you’re shaking like a leaf.”

“I will, sir,” Cedric says, and wants to vomit at the taste of the word in his mouth. Moody gives him a strange look and departs; in his wake, Cedric sees his father approach, his arms already stretched out for an embrace. 

A deep-seated shame rises within him and settles comfortably in his chest. “Dad…”

“Oh, my boy!” Amos gathers him up in his arms and physically lifts him up and off of the ground, spinning him around in a way he hasn’t done since Cedric was a kid. “You did it! You beat him! You won the entire tournament! You have no idea-” He laughs loudly and places him back down on the ground. “You have no idea how proud I am of you.”

“Dad, your back,” Cedric says, but in all honesty he can’t help the grin spreading across his face.

Amos shakes his head as if to say forget my back! How can I care about the aches and pains of life when my only son has made me the proudest father across? When he’s triumphed beside the Boy-Who-Lived, and has cemented himself into modern British magical history as the best of all Diggorys, and still has enough respect for his father to accept the love he’s been showered in since before the day of his birth? When my son has made me prouder than I’ve ever been? “I saw you, Ceddy. If not for that dastardly spider, you’d have come out on top of the whole game. Over Harry Potter!”

Cedric hunches slightly at the name. “Dad, he’s the reason why I could even win in the first place. Don’t be mean.” 

“Ah, well. You’re right, I suppose.” Amos reaches a hand up and ruffles Cedric’s hair. “Where is the boy, anyway? I’d like to apologize for what I’d said earlier…

“Cedric, oh my god.”

From behind him, a voice like Christmas bells calls out, and his shoulders slump in relief as he turns. “Cho…”

Cho Chang’s raven hair looks as if it’s been distressed more than after any of her quidditch games. Her soft brows slope downwards with worry as she runs forward to throw herself into his arms; he catches her there and breathes in the scent of smoke and peppermint, holding his lips against the crown of her head for a long, long while. Amos sighs slightly but gives his son a genuine smile before walking back to where his wife is waiting.

“I love you,” Cedric murmurs finally, pulling away once he thinks she’s wiped away all her tears. “I missed you more than anything.”

“It’s only been a few hours, you know…” She’s hoarse and deflective keeping her face angled away from him, and Cedric smiles to himself and waits for her to turn. They’d gone over this time after time, after all. He knows how she hates to cry in front of others.

“A few hours without you by my side, you mean. Which, if you think about it, is more devastating than anything else in the world,” Cedric says under his breath, and Cho finally looks up to give him an indulgent roll of her eyes.

“You’re silly. Also you’re bleeding. Quite badly, in fact.”

He’d sort of forgotten, but it does explain a lot of the dizziness he’d been feeling. “Yeah, well. Couldn’t very well heal myself without a wand in my hand, could I?” 

Cho doesn’t say anything, only looks at him funny, and Cedric knows full well that yeah, it is sort of his own fault that he didn’t practice wandless magic like he promised he would. 

“Okay,” he relents, and Cho’s frown immediately shifts into a concentrated smile. 

She casts a winding Episkey that glows as it settles into his wound and warms him far deeper than the open flesh, working quickly and leaving pinked skin in its wake. Healed, Cedric lifts his arm up and eyes the wound; the scar doesn’t look great, but there’s always a salve for that.
He’s touched. Her healing spells hadn’t looked nearly this good when the year began. “Thanks, Cho. You’re the best.” 

“Any time. I’m just- I’m so proud of you!” She lets out a laugh, airy and bright, and hugs him tight around the middle again. ”What a dream this is, Ced! You won!!”

“I…” Cedric thinks of a boy of fourteen, dead on the ground. “Yeah. We did.”

They stay like that for a while, watching as Fleur and her fluttering entourage speak unhappily amongst themselves and make their way towards the Beauxbatons carriages. Too soon, Cho disentangles herself from Cedric’s arms to push a lock of hair out of his eyes, looking into them like she can see more of him than measly flecks of green and gold. 

He’s transfixed by her endless gaze, temporarily pushing that image of Harry out of his mind as if trying to shelter her from it. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing groundbreaking,” she says, blinking once. “Just- I’m glad Harry did what he did. Sharing the win like that. Merlin knows if it were me in those shoes, I’d have taken the trophy as soon as I got ahead.” She laughs to herself quietly. “I love you though.”

“Yeah.”

Cho notes the ugly notes in his voice before Cedric himself does. “Babe? Is something wrong?”

Trying to force the expression on his face into something a bit more palatable, Cedric shakes his head quickly and grabs her hand. “Just a bit shaken up, is all.”

“Bet that portkey took a lot out of you. I swear I heard the thud of your fall from the stands.” Cho presses his knuckles to her smiling mouth. Something in Cedric melts like late snow.

“Yeah… because I fell for you,” he says immediately, because he cannot help himself from drawing out the grumble that says his sweetheart is secretly pleased but would never admit it. “Don’t laugh! That was good!"

“Sure, mate. Let’s get you to bed.” And she walks him to an empty cot in the hospital wing and settles on the armchair beside, and he knows she knows that something’s wrong, and he thanks Merlin for her everlasting patience as she lets the matter lie and dozes off with his hand in hers.

//

He dreams of cold fog and wet dirt and a forearm wound that bleeds like a faucet. Oh, of course he tries to stifle the flow, stuffing the hole with his Hufflepuff tie before burning the whole lot in some attempt to cauterize the wound, but that just leaves him with a blackened limb that smells of burnt caramel. 

“Ow,” Cedric says. 

As if in response, his arm falls off at the elbow, then regrows into a fresh, untouched version with a faded scar where his wound was. 

“That’s better,” sighs the voice of Harry Potter into his left ear, but when Cedric turns his head he sees nothing except a dense, dense, green smoke. 

//

He awakens to a crash of voices and the half-expired chill of a dementor and finds out that Professor Moody is dead. 

“-but it wasn’t Moody!” Marietta Edgecomb rattles off her gossip like gravel shooting off the blades of a brushcutter. ”It was the Crouch kid! You know, the Death Eater in Azkaban? He’d gotten out somehow and Polyjuiced into the man on the daily! We probably saw him take the potions with every meal. Merlin. He taught us the Unforgiveables. Genuinely unbelievable. Oh, good morning!”

“Hey,” Cedric says, trying to calm his racing heart. “Give me a mo’ to wake up.”

Cho leans over and gives him a loud kiss on the cheek, bringing a small smile to his face. "You slept through all of yesterday," she murmurs. "Pomfrey said you were magically exhausted. Your dad said to tell you hello when you woke up."

"Ah." Cedric grimaces and itches his nose. "Thanks. You both carry on."

From how animated they are and the bright light streaming in from the window, it’s clear they’ve been up for a while. “Where’d you hear this one from, then?” She asks Marietta, uprighting herself. “Not the Weasley twins, surely, Polyjuice is far too easy a hook for one of their tales-”

“That’s the thing, though!!” Marietta says, turning back to her with a wild look in her eyes. “It started with the Weasley twins, but it was confirmed by- wait, hold on. Guess.”

Cho wrinkles her nose in thought. “That one Slytherin? Goyle? The blonde in our year?”

Marietta laughs, derisive and sharp. “Her brain’s too dye-fried for conscious thought. I’d never spread any shit she says, we’d all get secondhand fume poisoning.” 

“That’s mean,” says Cho, lips quirked downwards, but Cedric knows from around Hufflepuff that the aforementioned Giselle Goyle (despite how stellar of a Care of Magical Creatures partner she can be) is a bitchy wannabe Greengrass that looks down on basic intellectualism if it doesn’t come from her boyfriend, so he sympathizes with his girl’s suppressed laughter.

“So what.” Marietta waves it away, and just like that, it’s behind them. “Anyway, Cedric, guess already, would you?”

Cedric does not hear her, thinking now of Giselle's boyfriend Merritt Montague, who- along with his twin brother Graham- would probably be quite excited to hear about Cedric’s involvement with his most recent extracurricular.

“Uh, Cedric?”

A shame their father was so high up the Minister’s arse. A shame their mother was so good at lying about the Imperius. Eventually, he thinks bitterly, they would do the Dark Lord a lot of good, and with his luck he'd be swept along in their wake.

“Ced? Love?”

He shakes himself. “Sorry. Erm. One of the Smiths?” There are what seems like a few dozen Smiths at Hogwarts. It’s the best option, statistically speaking.

Cho and Marietta share a look. “No,” Marietta says as if she wants to follow it up with ‘are you thick or something?’. “It was- if you can believe it, Cho- It was Roger.” 

Cho’s jaw drops. “No way. There’s- you’re lying. No way.” 

Cedric blinks quickly, quite surprised at the revelation himself. “Really? As in, Roger Davies?” He and Roger were friendly enough, if one counted ‘nodding at each other mid-game’ friendly. 

Sure, Cedric wasn’t the greatest fan of how the guy looked at Cho when she really gunned for the snitch (though historically, she’s been distracting enough to throw entire teams off their game, so he wasn’t really special in that regard). Yeah, he could be a bit of an arse when it came to drafting scrimmage rules. Absolutely, he loved to gush about how wonderful he found each and every DADA class, even counting their revolving door of professors as a perk. What kind of person did that?

“He wouldn’t…” Maybe they actually weren’t friendly, now that Cedric thought about it. “I thought he loved Defense,” he continues dumbly, and the two girls cheer their agreements. 

///

Pomfrey discharges him around four that evening with a pat on the shoulder. Cho and Marietta had gone ahead, vowing to find him something nice to wear amongst his heaps of middling-quality robes, leaving him behind to complete the final review spells.

“Do look out for poor Harry, will you?” Pomfrey asks Cedric as she finishes sanitizing his cot, worry crossing her weathered face for a moment. “He… well. I’m not sure if the Edgecomb girl knows yet, but he’d sustained some significant spell damage. Memory-altering, specifically.”

Something in Cedric’s stomach drops, and he hopes she doesn’t see his hand gripping the hem of his robes. “That’s… terrible.”

“Truly. We were not able to trace the spell to the Crouch boy’s wand, nor to the wands of any of you Tournament Champions, so it’s been a rather uphill climb. And the damage… well. I thought you deserved to know, after what you two had gone through together.”

“I’ll take care of him,” says Cedric solemnly, silently wondering how the fuck Marietta hadn’t heard of this.

Pomfrey smiles with relief and thanks him in earnest. "And do return if you feel any symptoms. Emotional suppression, memory misplacement... none of it is good for a boy your age."

///

All the hospice food he’d eaten in the past few hours comes rushing back out of his mouth as soon as he reaches the sink in his room. The stomach acid mingles with the stale dorm air and turns it pungent and sharp, and he bemoans his lack of a wand as he gazes down into the mess he’s made for himself.

It’s cold for June. Despite having some remarkable breathability and temperature regulation, the Hufflepuff dorms were usually far warmer than this, especially this late in the school year. After all, how could the sun’s light find its way into the common room every morning without its heat following suit by the mid-day?

It’s an oddity that stays with him as he turns the tap on and rinses away as much of the vomit as he can, though an unfortunate amount remains. He misses the warmth, in that moment. Misses the heating spells his father wove into his tournament uniform before he entered the maze. Misses the drying charms his friends blasted him and Cho with when they emerged from the inky lake. Misses the prefect’s bath on its hottest setting and his girl laughing as she tries to pull him into the nigh-boiling the water.

Then he’s reminded of dragon fire and lying charred in the hospital wing and his most recent dream, and he considers that maybe the cold didn’t bother him much, anyway.

“Got your wand,” says Cho, and Cedric looks into the sink mirror to see her leaning against the doorframe and spinning the wooden stick in her right hand. “Sprout gave it to me, told me to pass it on.”

“Thanks.” Cedric’s elbows rest uncomfortably against the edges of the porcelain sink. He brings his eyes back down on the spiraling pattern of the water leaving the tap. 

“So, erm. Your big dinner’s coming up. Have you got any plans for it? Other than wasting the school’s water.”

“It all goes back into the lake,” he says morosely, then pauses. “Love?”

“Yeah?”

Praying she knows something, he asks, “What happened to Harry Potter?”

His wand clatters to the ground. “Sorry. I... I was waiting for you to bring it up.”

At this Cedric turns around, seeing her uncrouch from where she’d bent to pick it up. “What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” She asks, furrowing her brows in disbelief. “You’ve been acting strange, Ced, this whole time. And I understand yesterday, but you woke up yesterday morning crying his name. And I do mean full tears. And then you just went back to bed like nothing happened.” 

“Oh,” Cedric says, because he’s not really sure what to say. 

She sighs and slides down the door frame, sitting on the ground to look up at him. “I didn’t know what to make of it. But this morning, I left the hospital wing and got mobbed by his yearmates. Apparently, no one’s seen him since last night,” she confesses, “not even the Weasley twins and their network. But you know what? His two friends have gone missing, too. And Dumbledore, and McGonagall. And I was just turning it over and over in my head but it’s going nowhere.”

Cedric kneels down in front of her, moving to grab her hands, which she acquiesces to after a short pause. “I… Cho-”

“But there’s been something bothering me, did you know?” She says suddenly, untangling her fingers to close the door behind them. “When he was walking back inside the castle with Moody, before we knew the man was Polyjuiced, Harry looked at me… we made full eye contact… but it was wrong somehow.”

“How… was it wrong?”

Cho shakes her head, as if disbelieving her own theory, but something in Cedric’s eyes makes her stiffen. “He… he looked at me with no embarrassment. No embarrassment at all. As if our Yule debacle hadn’t ever happened. Honestly, the vacancy in his look felt as if we hardly knew each other at all.”

Cedric pushes any vestiges of jealousy deep, deep down where it enters a state of near nonexistence. In its place rises fear, at how strong could my Obliviate have been really, Merlin I didn’t even have a WAND-

He blinks hard, trying to clear his head, but succeeds only at bringing to mind the grotesque, snakelike visage of the Dark Lord overlaid atop the face of the love of his life. 

“Cho,” Cedric says, feeling panic seizing his limbs for the first time since the previous night, “Cho, I’m sorry, something happened, and I have no bloody clue how to even begin to tell you about it-”

BANG BANG BANG

“Fuck,” hisses Cho, who’d jumped nearly a meter high. “Who-”

BANG BANG BANG

“Diggory!” The distinctive voice of Professor Snape rings from the other side of the bathroom door, and Cedric looks at his girl with wide, wide, eyes. “I know full well you’re in there,” he continues, frantic in a way they have never heard him, “and we need to have a word now.”