A Lesson In Nuance

“Incendio!” Harry growled as he threw a ball of flame at the side of a very green, very oppressive wall of magical shrubbery. 

His annoyance and impatience acted as an increasingly potent fuel for his flames, and they encased a section of the wall for many seconds, trying their damndest to find something worthy of feeding on until, disappointingly, they faded out of existence. Harry scowled at the plant for a moment before continuing onward. It wasn’t that he really expected it to work, but he never found much joy in failure. 

The same plant he attempted to incinerate loomed over him on both sides, blocking light from all but the most directly aligned stars. The plants were alive; he could feel their presence. It was more suffocating, even, than the water he swam through for the second task. At least his magic was unimpeded there. This conglomerate of magical flora was actively attempting to smother him with their own presence, and it was, to his frustration, actually working. 

He knew how they worked. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Neville knew how they worked, and he was only too happy to give Harry a lecture when he asked for assistance. The plant imprisoning him and acting as the guiding force of the third task was very literally a single entity. The hedges were all grown from the same system of roots, and they all shared the same magic. Reaching out with his own, Harry felt nothing but their aura, and that was exactly what it wanted.

The blasted thing was the ultimate trap. It was a single being, one mind, but it stretched as far as it could grow. It worked with itself to encapsulate whatever managed to walk into its clutches. It wanted him to exhaust himself, lose himself in its maze, and perish to feed it with his magic while he died. This was the fourth time it had rearranged itself to trick him into doubling back or doubting his current path. His wand acting as his guide toward the cup did little to help when nature itself was working against him. 

Speaking of which, he held his wand up in his open palm and used it as a focus to search for the signature of the triwizard cup. With his own magic, it was possible to reach out and feel things, but it was very much a difficult and time consuming task. With his wand acting as his center, he could use that to help him pinpoint the location of things, especially magical things, with much more surety. Finding the cup, he allowed his wand to direct him, and he opened his eyes to see his wand pointing very distinctly to his right. 

Fuck…

It was pointing him left a second ago, and he didn’t think he’d made a 180 at any point since then. This damn maze was pulling a fast one on him once again. For the sixteenth time that night, Harry lamented the fact that he couldn’t have his broom with him during the task. The judges wisened up after his first time summoning an outside object to help solve his problems. Fields of magic surrounded the hedges, preventing him from reaching beyond the maze with his spellwork, and he knew for certain that his beloved Firebolt would’ve burned to a crisp upon stepping through the warded entrance to the third task.

That was, at least, what happened to the beautiful beads of destruction provided to him by the Weasley twins. If anything could’ve busted straight through a hedge as magically resistant as these were, then it would’ve been something made by Fred and George. There was a reason he supported their endeavors both in a metaphorical and financial sense. Joke products, they may have been focused on, but better artificers of magical instruments weren’t likely to be found. 

Making sure to keep an eye on his wand, he made the turn it wanted him to, and he began heading in a direction that was supposedly the way he needed to go to get to the center of the maze. He personally thought that things were going rather swimmingly until the distinct chittering of something very large graced his ears. With his heart pounding in his chest, he pushed himself into the hedge on his right and tried his damndest to hold his breath.

An acromantula easily the size of Hagrid himself skittered around the corner of the maze and stopped at the four-way intersection, seemingly searching for something. Now, Harry knew very little about the specifics of acromantula senses, but he did know that spiders around the muggle world were known to detect things mostly based on vibrations. How well that translated to spiders the size of cart horses, Harry didn’t know. 

Soon enough, he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, and he began to take very quiet, shaky breaths of air. From the corner of his eye, he saw a small twig extend past his shoulder. He squashed his panic under the heel of his foot like a cockroach, but his wide eyes still stared at the branch as it slowly, smoothly wrapped around his left shoulder.

Holy shit… he just realized that he was hiding in a sentient plant.

The acromantula tapped its front "feet" against the ground in a seemingly contemplative manner before thrumming off to the left, following its previous direction. Once he could no longer hear the disgusting patter of a gigantic, scurrying spider, he yanked himself from the hedge. It held on much more firmly than he first suspected. Not only did that small, bendy branch have an iron grip on him, but it had also wrapped around his right ankle during his distracted state too. 

He yanked against the force once and then once more before he slashed his wand at the offending branches with a snarl.

“Diffindo!”

His spell sliced through the mass clinging to his ankle, and the stuff wrapped around his shoulder recoiled as if in physical pain. He backed up just a little bit more and blasted the fucking bush with an explosive curse in the hopes of teaching it a damn lesson about personal space before continuing on his way. A scream was what caught his attention next.

It was difficult for him to tell the exact point from which the noise came, and it echoed around the hedges in a way that made his vision sway and his head hurt. He knew that it could’ve well been a trap designed by the maze, be it through manipulating events into luring him in or straight up magic if they were capable of such a thing. Unfortunately, damn him, he’d never been good at minding his own business.

He was off in the vague direction of the noise in seconds. He rushed through the hedges, daring them to attack him as he made his way toward whoever may have been in danger. What he found was the twitching form of Fleur as her body was slowly dragged into the hedge by the greedy arms of the plant itself. His lips twisted into a disdainful sneer as he stared at the plant. It hadn’t been trying to trick him with the scream, but it did want him to get lost in the sickening, disorienting echo it created instead of interrupting its feast. 

“I swear to God,” he said to the plant as he leveled his wand at the base of the hedge. “If you don’t let her go, I’m spending the rest of this damn task figuring out how tough you really are.”

He watched it hesitate slightly, but it didn’t take long for it to start dragging her closer again. Thinking that, perhaps, he wasn’t speaking its language well enough, he buried himself in the anger he felt toward the maze and allowed it to leak from his skin and suffuse itself into the air around him. That made it pause. It seemed to think for a second and wonder whether or not the meal was worth the pain. Apparently, it decided it wasn’t because it withdrew its hold on the French champion without much need for further coaxing. 

His sneer slowly turned into a smirk as he sent red sparks into the air to signal the resignation of a champion. They’d find her soon. On the bright side, it seemed as though the maze was capable of being at least somewhat reasonable. With so much stuff wandering around its confines, food wasn’t a big problem for it. With that in mind, it must’ve decided that an angry wizard trying to blow sections of it to pieces wasn’t an optimal way to spend its time. 

That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be watching with a smile on his face when the Ministry eventually tore it down. 

Confident that the tournament administration would get to the champion before the plant could do any true damage to her if it decided to misbehave behind his back, he started walking again. The maze seemed to be just a bit more wary of him now. After having escaped its clutches the first time, fought past its trickery, and showed his resolve should it not cooperate, he seemed to have instilled within it the idea that he wasn’t going to be some sort of simple prey. 

That was both good and bad.

A wary opponent was preferable to the overtly violent one he had to deal with before. At the same time, a wary opponent was far harder to predict and much more difficult to properly combat. Harry was certain that it wasn’t going to give up on him, and he was also sure that its next attempt wasn’t going to be as simple for him to escape.

Nevertheless, he pushed onward, creeping through the narrow paths available to him and trying his best to swathe the area ahead of him with magic. Coming up to a turn, he pushed closer to the hedge and came to a careful stop right before the corner. He could feel something ahead of him, but it was odd, difficult to grasp. Deciding that waiting would only hurt him, he whipped around the corner, his wand literally glowing with power. 

A yelp was all he heard as the form in front of him fell onto its backside. He slightly lowered his wand, using its output of magical power as a sort of pseudo-torch. Angling it down even further, he saw what it was, and it made his face twist with nothing but the strongest, most potent disgust and loathing he could’ve possibly mustered. Sitting on the ground was a small, scrawny, weak boy staring up at him with fearful eyes and a trembling lip. The extremely underweight boy had messy, black hair and cracked, tilted glasses that skewed across his face in an unsightly manner. 

“D-D-Don’t hurt me… Please…” the boy begged him.

The person cowering at his feet physically repulsed him, but he knew what was going on the second he saw the scar. That was the problem with boggarts. They showed nothing more than the physical manifestation of its victim’s greatest fear. For some, that was a terrifying weapon capable of turning the boggart into something with power and impact. For others, like himself, all it did was make him angry. Seeing himself back as that useless, trapped boy wasn’t something capable of harming him; it was pitiful.

That was, of course, the entire reason it took that form.

“Riddikulus,” he snapped with a swipe of his wand.

The boy twisted and twirled until a colorful ball of foam sat in his hand. It wasn’t particularly funny, really, but that mattered little so long as the blasted thing cooperated. Once he was sure that his transfiguration wasn’t going to reverse on him, he put the ball into one of his robe’s pockets, and he kept walking with his new traveling companion in tow. As much as he hated them, he wasn’t sure when or if fear might be a useful tool. 

A light, gentle mist grew more prominent in the air as he made his way toward the center of the maze. It was warm and felt nice against his skin. It smelt vaguely of lavender, so vaguely that he didn’t notice it for the first five or so minutes until it got much thicker. It, at first, seemed to him as nothing more than midnight dew. Once his vision started to subtly swim around him and the sweet smell became strong enough to cause suspicion, he knew something was up. 

Feeling as though he'd ingested an extra shot or two of firewhisky than he probably should’ve, he stumbled into the side of the maze and lifted his wand to his face. Squinting his eyes shut to keep his head from twirling, he put a bubble head charm around his mouth and nose. Unfortunately, it didn’t help his senses much, but it did have the upside of taking away the smell that was starting to make him feel lethargic. 

Of course, the tournament overseers would put in some kind of airborne magic. Harry wasn’t even sure if it was some sort of spell or an inhibiting potion. If it was a spell, it was out of his hands unless he could figure out enough about it to counter it without killing himself from magical exhaustion, but having the option in his back pocket if it turned out to be more sinister than he thought sounded really nice at the moment.

Now more stumbling than walking, Harry went deeper into the slowly building fog. It was so thick at this point that he could hardly see more than a few meters in front of him. Berating himself for not being more vigilant, he mourned the fact that he couldn’t control his limbs quite as well as he would’ve liked. Through a slight haze, his brain slowly recognized the fact that he could hear fighting somewhere in the distance.

The distinct sound of wands firing spells and the subsequent splashing of said spells against the environment was proof enough that the two remaining champions were probably duking it out. If he could get there with enough time to spare, he could potentially wait it out and take down the victor while he was at his weakest. With no one else to compete against him, he could take all the time in the world to drag his inebriated ass to the Triwizard cup. His pride was almost too strong for him to accept such a cowardly plan, but looking down at his shaking hands, he realized that there probably wasn’t any other way for him to win at this point. 

Being quiet while trying not to fall flat on his face turned out to be something of a challenge. Nevertheless, he managed to make his way over to where the combat was at its loudest. What he saw looked about as pretty as he expected.

The maze walls were so compact that movement was extremely difficult. There wasn’t much space at all to maneuver, even less than what would’ve been afforded on a traditional dueling platform. Cedric was the one closest to him, and his back was turned as he dueled viciously against what could only be Krum. Harry immediately knew that Cedric held the disadvantage, but he was impressed that the boy was putting up such a good fight. 

Cedric was the nimble type. All throughout the tournament, he’d been probably the most agile of everyone in the competition, even Fleur. He relied a ton on speed and maneuverability, and that was probably because his power was absolutely shite compared to the rest of them. With nowhere to go and almost nothing to help him come up with a clever move in their duel, Cedric was forced to deal with the brunt of Krum’s magical force. 

When a gigantic swathe of flame came pouring down their little section of the maze, Harry knew it was practically over. Cedric had no recourse but to put up some kind of barrier. Unfortunately, he was so drained that doing some transfiguration on the ground wasn’t going to be possible. A spell shield was all he had. Cedric hunkered down behind the most powerful protego he could muster, and Harry could feel the desperation in the boy’s stance. As the last of the flames whipped against Cedric’s shield, a shimmer passed through the barrier like wind through a screen door. 

Cedric probably didn’t even notice it at all. It was only Harry’s magic still saturating the air around them that allowed him to sense the attack. His face twisted into a disgusted scowl as soon as he felt the spike of power because he knew what it was; he’d felt it before in the chamber, and he’d felt it again in Moody’s class. Krum just used the torture curse to bypass Cedric’s shield.

Oh, how he wished that aurors were mere seconds away from apparating in and apprehending the fucker for daring to use such a spell in what was supposed to be a competition centered around honor, bravery, and valor. Unfortunately, while those three damnable curses were unforgivable both morally and legally, they were still magic. This was a competition that ascended laws and cared little for the petty philosophies of man. It was why the tournament was disbanded a couple centuries ago and why the Goblet of Fire didn’t give a single shit that the judges banned participation for students under the age of seventeen. 

Krum wasn’t going to get punished for his shitty spellcasting at all. In fact, if he won because of it, he’d be praised beyond even what his quidditch career could’ve given him.

Harry watched as the boy collapsed on the ground, screaming and writhing in nothing but the greatest amount of agony. He cringed as he watched the scene unfold, and, damn him, Harry knew exactly what he was going to do no matter how much he loathed the thought of doing it. Waiting things out was the most solid plan he could’ve possibly come up with. Watching someone go through the cruciatus when he was in a position to stop it, however, wasn’t an option for him. 

Spinning around the corner of the hedge to fully reveal himself, Harry went with the quickest spell he knew. “Pello!”

The spell streaked from his wand almost faster than he’d entered the battle as he flung it across the clearing, over Cedric’s prone form, and straight into Krum’s personal space. It was two syllables, lightning fast, and simple in effect, but it was such a good starter that he couldn’t have justified using anything else. All the spell did was push. It was like a banishing charm, but it was much more primal in nature, more akin to an impact, a thrust, or a really brutal shove than the clean, succinct displacement of a general banishment. 

He scowled when the spell crashed violently against an immaterial shield and shattered. Still, the force was enough to make Krum’s protego groan under the pressure, and the shove was present enough to force him back a few frantic steps until he could properly get his feet beneath him. At least Harry had the comfort of knowing that the cruciatus was halted, but the element of surprise was just as absent now as Krum’s curse was. If he’d waited through the boy’s pain, he could’ve caught Krum when he was almost magically depleted from the power it took to torture someone so excessively.

Still, he had pressure, and it was his turn until Krum could find an opening.

Harry’s typical approach of shock and awe was put to startling effect in the coming seconds. He was younger and less educated, but his experience and power wasn’t matched by some wannabe warrior whose only true battles were done on a quidditch pitch. He battered Krum’s shield, pushing the boy further back and stepping in closer with each successive spell. If Cedric was the most agile of their group, then Krum was the most immobile. Ironically enough, the fastest seeker in the world was one of the slowest and clumsiest people he’d ever met on the ground.

Becoming pretty sick of the game already, Harry ended his onslaught with a shield breaker. It wasn’t a particularly complicated spell, but it was risky. It was nothing more than a reductor curse. The only difference was that it had to be performed with the intent to break magic instead of something within the physical realm. Its only purpose was to destroy constructs that were entirely magical in nature. Most of the time, it was something like a magical shield. Its intent was so specific that it was near impossible to hold up a shield through the reductor without a truly horrifying gap in magical power. The main drawback, however, was that it only worked against magic. 

That was why Harry was almost as annoyed as he could’ve possibly been when Krum let his shield drop. His modified reductor washed over Krum with absolutely zero ramifications, and Harry felt the shimmer of the cruciatus curse flow toward him exactly like it had with Cedric. The main difference was that Harry saw it coming and had no current intentions of feeling the wrath of an unforgivable. 

Diving to the side, he managed to get out of the way of the colorless spell without making contact. He fell roughly against the ground, trying to disperse the force with a sloppy roll but ruining it due to his damaged coordination. Looking up at his opponent from where he was laying on the ground, he saw the earth tearing a path toward him, and he desperately reached out to touch the dirt beneath his prone form.

He knew that spell, and he was certain that raising a magical shield was only going to get him destroyed. With the threat of a very bloody death filling his head should that shockwave actually hit him, he closed his fist around a small clump of dirt, feeling the grainy texture of the soil-like ground beneath his hand. He’d never attempted to cast a spell like this before, not in the way he currently needed. It was one thing to use his wand and direct his transfiguration with proper movements and a solid stance. In this position, he was vulnerable, and it was impossible for him to go through the steps methodically like he could’ve if he was standing on his own two feet and had the space and time necessary to do everything like he was taught.

This was instinctual, his last ditch attempt to not get torn to shreds by Krum’s magic. He growled the spell beneath his breath, and he focused on the change he needed with such intensity that it almost completely dominated his chaotically panicking brain. An intense burst of magic flew through his body, down his arm, and into the dirt. It drained him to the point that he was almost scared it would knock him out, but he grit his teeth until his jaw ached and held on by a fucking thread as the dirt transformed into a dome that completely encased his body. That weak barrier of dirt was then transfigured into solid steel, turning what was a useless defence into something that was shockingly sturdy. 

The spell he used was meant to be performed with the intent to entirely encompass the user. If he had more time to experiment with it, he felt as though he could’ve modified it enough to create the half-dome he really needed. All he had to fall on, though, was the training he had with the spell, and every bit of that was with transfiguring a complete, massively draining dome of carbon-infused iron. In the moment, following what he instinctively knew was all he could’ve asked for. As it was, the spell took a lot out of him, even more because he did it without proper wand movements and while directing it out of his hand instead of his focus. 

But it was enough… 

The spell tore into his dome, but steel was a bit different than dirt or even his own magic. The metal took the impact, and his dome did its job by deflecting as much force as it could away from the center. During those few seconds, he was reintroduced to the familiar feeling of helplessness he normally got when he was in situations far above his head. It was depressing that, even during events he felt decently prepared for, he was apparently still doomed to have moments like this. His defence was what he made it, and he could do nothing more than curl under his protection and hope it held. Once the world finally stopped shuddering, he lifted his wand behind his head, pressed it against the roof of his dome, and pulled it down to his side. 

The entire dome creaked and snapped as his magic forced it into doing his bidding. Transformation was very different from transfiguration, and he was much more gifted in the former than the latter. Changing matter itself was referred to as transfiguration, and it was a notoriously difficult and power-consuming field of magic. A subsection of it, though, dealt with changing nothing but the shape of matter. Manipulating what was already there required much less energy than creating something new or even changing the properties of what already was, and Harry found himself fascinated by the subject.

He sprung to his feet while what was previously a dome of metal was crushed and twisted into a bastardized spike of violently contorted steel. Pieces of the spike were torn and ripped, and its morphed surface came to a multitude of creased, broken points. He reared his arm back, relishing in the look on Krum’s face as he blasted his transformed weapon with the hardest throw he could manage. Following through with his toss, he found himself tumbling to the ground, but he knew his aim was true.

Krum attempted to raise the earth in a similar manner to Harry, knowing that a spell shield wasn’t going to stop something like a gigantic metal spike, but he wasn’t anywhere near fast enough to transfigure it into something that could take the impact. The spike ripped straight through the wall of dirt and jammed itself into his gut until the tip of it popped through the back of his body. Krum looked down at his stomach, and he saw the way his jagged, busted skin parted around the piece of horribly disfigured metal. A slightly hysterical huff of laughter left his mouth at the sight of it as he fell to the ground, passing out from the pain. 

Harry couldn’t see Krum behind the wall of dirt, but he could see the hole his spike punched through it, and he was confident that the fight was over. He was much more focused on not suffocating while he puked his guts out in his keeled over position. He wasn’t puking because of what he knew he must’ve done to Krum but because he felt as though he’d just been attached to a spinning top until he could barely comprehend his own existence. 

This was much worse than a few extra shots of firewhiskey.

Bringing his hand up to his face, Harry confirmed that his bubble head charm was still working properly. This wasn’t the result of further inhalation. More than likely, it was because of his exertion and the way that catalyzed the progression of what he’d already put in his bloodstream. He won the fight, but participating in it in the first place only truly succeeded in worsening his condition. 

Hermione was going to have a field day with this…

Pulling himself onto his feet and away from his vomit, he forced his weak legs to move over to Cedric. The boy was still shaking from the aftermath of the curse. Harry wasn’t shocked. It had nothing to do with willpower or discipline. The shaking was a physical response to the extreme stress put onto his muscles from the curse. It was bound to continue for quite a while, especially if Pomfrey didn’t get to him soon. 

Knowing that this was the case, he was about to raise his wand and shoot off some sparks to notify the examiners, but he stopped before he did. Harry was practically dead on his feet. If he was alone in this maze, he was almost certainly going to lose or possibly even bite it. He didn’t trust those fucking hedges, and they were probably more than aware that his prospects were worsening by the second. If Cedric wanted to stop, then he could, but there was still a prize waiting for them at the end. Perhaps an accord was better than simply forfeiting the match for the boy.

“Cedric!” Harry called in a crackly voice, still trying to keep his eyes looking straight ahead of him. “Cedric! Are you good?”

Cedric groaned as he opened his eyes, but he gave a weak grin despite his obvious pain. “Yeah, I’m just peachy, Potter. Did you get him?”

Harry spared but a glance over to the still-standing pile of dirt. "He's not getting up anytime soon… if at all.”

 “Good,” Cedric ground out. “He deserved it. If I knew we were going to be throwing around unforgivables, I’d’ve started in on him a lot sooner, the bastard.”

“Are you going to be able to continue?” Harry asked. “I don’t think either of us could make it ourselves, but we could do it together. We’ll split it down the middle. 500 Galleons each no matter who touches the cup.”

Only one person could be the champion, and the Goblet wasn't about to just let people break its rule of individually competing. Still, working together on a temporary basis had precedence. It was similar to how he rescued Fleur’s hostage in her place or when Cedric helped him with the clue for the second task. So long as only one of them won and they split the cash prize later, away from prying eyes, it wasn’t a big deal that the only two remaining competitors worked together to make it to the end when neither of them would’ve made it if they hadn’t combined forces. 

Well, he hoped it wasn't anyway.

Cedric smirked for just a second before grimacing when a spasm hit his left leg. “That’s a lot of money.”

“About 50,000 pounds, give or take.” Harry added on with a nod, still not really used to thinking in terms of wizarding money despite the simple conversion rates. 

“And eternal glory sounds pretty good,” Cedric joked with a chuckle. “I imagine second place’ll look nice on my resume.”

“So you’re in?” Harry asked, inwardly feeling as though Cedric conceding the first place trophy to him was rather deserved considering Harry could’ve forced him out of the competition at that very moment and instead simply tried his luck with completing the game alone. He probably would’ve won due to point distribution anyway, even if he didn’t make it all the way.

“Yea,” Cedric extended his hand to grab his own. “I’m in.”

Harry took it and pulled the boy up, conscious to support his weight as much as possible while keeping contact to a minimum. The cruciatus made it physically painful to touch practically anything. Every single one of Cedric’s nerve endings were probably scorched to hell right about now. Harry imagined that it felt as though he’d been burned by the sun until it cooked him down to the bone. 

Cedric hissed as he leaned against Harry’s side and wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulder. The sight of 50,000 pounds was driving him onward, but he needed the support if he wanted to walk. His muscles felt like they barely worked at all. 

Presumably, no wizards were left in the maze but them. That didn't mean danger was absent though, and it also didn't mean that they could continue without being careful. Holding Cedric up was a task and a half, possibly more considering he was barely able to properly see what was sitting right in front of him. To make matters worse, the hedges were getting rather handsy again. They knew Harry wasn't up to the task of hurting them like he would've before, and that made them bolder in their attempts to wrap him up. 

Like two drunks after a long night at the bar, the two students limped to a stop when they saw a large lion blocking part of an intersection. Well, the lion part was concerning, but what made them halt their progress was the very human face sitting where a lion's should've. The thing that most definitely wasn't human, no matter what its face looked like, was gazing at them with a tilted head. 

Shivers went up and back down Harry's spine as it looked into his soul through his eyes. It was then that a gentle, feminine voice reverberated within his skull.

"If you say nothing, I will allow you to leave unscathed. If you answer my question correctly, I will let you pass, but if your answer is incorrect, I will kill you where you stand."

What followed was the most convoluted mess of tripe that Harry had ever heard in his life. Walking was a chore at this point. Trying to listen to whatever weird ass riddle a sphinx came up with in her spare time was asking far too much of him. With squinted eyes, he glared at the lion before glancing over at Cedric. The boy was obviously just as lost as himself. 

He contemplated blasting the thing away with the biggest explosion he could muster, but he wasn't too confident it'd do much in his condition. The sphinx was the same size as a regular lion, but he felt that a creature wouldn't warrant a class 4 rating if it was nothing but a lion without the gigantic teeth. Turning right instead of going toward the sphinx, Harry threw up a middle finger and kept on limping. He smirked at the indignation he felt from the creature. The bitch said he couldn't say anything if he wanted to leave unscathed. She didn't mention any sort of punishment for using a hand gesture. 

He regretted that decision soon enough. 

Hagrid was really getting on his last fucking nerve. First, it was his grand idea to hunt down a unicorn killer with a bunch of untrained kids. Then, he gave Harry the awesome advice to follow some spiders into a den of acromantula. Now, the gigantic bastard was breeding exotic monsters for the express purpose of killing him in the tournament's final task. If he didn't love the man so much, they'd be having words over this. 

Now more dragging themselves to the finish line than limping, they walked away from a heavily stunned skrewt. Both of them were sporting multiple nasty burns, and Harry's cloak actually caught fire during the confrontation. He was lucky that he couldn't feel a thing through his woozy haze. When they finally saw the blue shimmer of the Triwizard cup, Harry couldn't believe it. 

He believed it slightly more when the hedges chose that exact moment to try their hand. Harry noticed it when the walls seemed to be slightly closer to him than he thought they should've been. His eyes shot wide when he looked to his left and right only to realize the entire pathway was closing in around them. 

Very roughly, he yanked Cedric into action, and the two of them carried each other through the closing pathway, both of them swatting and forcing their way through the reaching vines and branches. They were so close, so close, when Cedric was violently torn from his grip. Stumbling forward, he turned around only to see him fighting for his life against a bunch of roots that'd wrapped around his entire prone body.

"Shit!" He cursed, training his wand at the exposed plant matter. His wand, however, was swaying madly in front of him, and his bleary eyes couldn't get a solid lock on Cedric. He didn't want to shoot anything only to hit his friend. His glare moved then to the hedges themselves. "I warned you what would happen if you pissed me off!" 

Forgetting all about the cup, just like he promised, Harry spent as much magic as he had left in his body to hack away at the maze walls. Despite how little it affected the conglomerate as a whole, he could tell he was hurting the plant. If the entire thing was a single entity, then the whole maze felt the pain of each individual section as if it were getting personally mutilated.

As his cutting curses dug into the base of the plant, Harry's eyes only grew more determined and vicious. He was practically running on empty, and he’d pay for it tomorrow, but he meant the words with every ounce of his being when he promised to make that thing regret messing with him. That was, at least, until he hurt the hedge enough for it to slacken its grip on Cedric.

Yanking the roots away from his face with what had to have been the last of his energy, he gave Harry a command. "Get to the cup, Potter!"

"You want me to leave you with it!?"

"If you touch the cup, it's over!" He yelled through the roots as they began wrapping around him once more. "Get to the end! I'll be fine!"

Mastering his own emotions, he slowly backed away from the fruitlessly struggling Cedric, nodding a few times as he convinced himself of the validity of the boy's request. Turning on his heel, Harry decided that, if he was going to obey Cedric's command, he might as well do it quickly. With the plant focused on his suffocating friend, Harry was free to rush to the cup. 

He almost hit the podium during his inebriated rush but thankfully stopped himself by planting his hands on either side of the concrete slab holding up the cup. He looked into the shimmering blue light before glancing back at Cedric. The cup felt weird to his magic, almost exactly like the portkey he'd taken earlier that year. He took a moment to wonder if it was really okay for him to take the portkey to safety and let his ally sit there until the officials got to him. It only took a second before he made the final decision to follow Cedric's wish.

Wrapping his hand around the edge of the cup, he felt a hook pull him by the nape of his neck, and the world vanished around him. The very literal spinning caused by the portkey was not good for the metaphorical spinning caused by the mist he'd inhaled earlier. He valiantly held in his vomit, not totally sure exactly what would happen if he puked in this situation. 

Suddenly, much too suddenly, his feet smacked against the hard ground, and his weight made him crumble to his hands and knees. No longer able to hold back, he lost whatever the hell was left in his stomach before hauling himself to his feet. He swayed left then overcorrected right before finally finding his center. 

This wasn't where he was supposed to end up.

Around him was an ominous, droll graveyard. For some reason, he felt as though the winner of the tournament wasn't meant to come out in a place like this for the celebration that was undoubtedly awaiting him. With squinted eyes, he began to see what this might mean for him in the near future and let out a curse underneath his breath.

"Quite," a shrill, raspy voice said somewhere behind him in response to his whispered vulgarity. "Stun him."

Whipping around, the violent feeling of nausea almost knocked him to his knees again, but he held on and got a good look at some chubby, very blurry man leveling a glowing wand in his direction. Getting the memo, he fell more than jumped out of the way. It was great that he managed to remain unstunned, but it was slightly less great that his head smacked against a concrete headstone and knocked him out anyway. A glare worthy of killing a dragon was what stayed burned into his eyes until the second his vision cut to black and his body slackened against the ground.

When he came to, it was to the scorching pain of a knife digging into his arm at the crook of his elbow and slicing it open down to his wrist. If he felt woozy before, he wasn't exactly sure how to describe what he felt like now. Instead of pondering such things, he spent his time venting his pain through his eyes at whoever decided to cut him up.

The man didn't seem to care in the slightest. He was much more preoccupied with staring at his own hand while he walked away to stand before a very large cauldron. Harry soon discovered why that was when the man used the same knife he cut Harry with to slice off his own hand. Words were being said, not that Harry could hear anything properly in his condition. 

That was when a tiara was slipped into the cauldron.

The cauldron boiled over due to the reaction going on within it, and that overflowing liquid soon began to float in the air and coalesce into a conglomerate of slimy liquid. It pulsed and quaked in the air, constricting and folding into itself as it shrank into the compact form of a vague human. The slime golem slowly pulled its extra material into a more cohesive form, and its vague, definitionless surface became more detailed with every twist and contortion of its matter. The color of the slime was almost pale by the time it stopped changing, and what seemed to be its equivalent of hair began sprouting from its head not too long after. 

The whole morbid event was time-consuming and rightfully horrifying. As the last of its definition finally came into place, the smoke that rose from the cauldron during the reaction swirled around its body, clothing it in long, black, tattered robes. Well, it wasn’t the best description for the thing anymore. Anyone who saw what made the person standing in front of the cauldron probably would’ve called her an it, but what remained was most definitely a her now. 

Harry was more than halfway sure that he was going delirious as he watched the scene unfold. Surely, this was one of the most fucked trips he’d ever experienced under the influence of magic, but that had to be what this was. The woman lifted her hands to her face, staring at them for a moment before looking down at her robes and pulling a face at the state of her attire. 

“Honestly, does every spell I find nowadays have to be so melodramatic?” she mumbled to herself.

But Harry heard, and it was the voice that got him.

He couldn’t see well enough to tell from her looks, but that voice was very distinctive. It was, perhaps, matured a bit from what he remembered, but it was hard to forget a voice like that. He’d almost died after having a decently long conversation with it, so he thought it would’ve been more odd had he not recognized the sound. Once he realized who just arrived, he became aware that this was, in fact, not a trip, and he wasn’t happy about that in the slightest. 

He was going to say something sarcastic about how he thought the melodramaticism was probably a problem with her instead of with the magic she happened to perform, but he found it very hard to formulate words when his head was spinning from poison inhalation, a nasty strike to the head, and acute blood loss. Instead, he merely sat there as his arm drained more of his life while she finally directed her attention to the unconscious, equally bleeding man lying at her feet. Her eyes rolled, even as she summoned her wand from the man’s pocket, not that Harry could see well enough at the moment to notice.

“For someone who wanted to prove he was more than the butt of a joke, you do an amazing job of screwing everything up, don’t you?” she condescendingly asked the unconscious man. “You almost killed yourself making a potion. The ritual asked for your flesh, not a whole bloody hand, bone and all. Congratulations, your extra ‘sacrifice’ turned me into a blushing-fucking-girl. Bella will never let me hear the end of it.”

Waving her wand over herself, the robes were succinctly transfigured into something much more fashionable and, surprisingly, rather muggle too. It was a simple dress that was easy to maneuver in while still looking like she gave a damn. With that done, she flicked her wand at the man as almost an afterthought, giving him a disappointed glare the entire way. The man woke up screaming as the very end of his arm shriveled into nothing before falling off, leaving an unfortunately not bleeding wound behind.

Seeing the look of fear and desperation cross his face, the woman grinned malevolently. “Maybe you’ll get the rest of your arm back when you learn to listen.” 

The man squeaked and prostrated himself into a kneeling position, seemingly getting ready to grovel. “M-m-my lor-”

“Leave, Peter,” the woman demanded in a low, vicious tone. 

Scrabbling backward and fumbling for his wand, the man that Harry now knew to be a rat disapparated with a loud, unwieldy snap. With him gone, that left only the woman and himself in the clearing, and Harry took a deep, resigned breath as he prepared himself for the end. It was tragic that he was going so soon, but to be completely honest, he could die happily. He'd managed to kill the bitch three times, and this was going to be her first win. Unfortunately, death never seemed to stick for her, and it was probably, most likely, going to be more final for him, but he could at least go knowing that the brilliant Lord Voldemort got a pity victory after technically losing 3 to 1 against a schoolboy. 

Apparently detecting his smugness, the woman looked at him from across the graveyard and began a relaxed, casual, but dignified approach. The closer she got, the more sure Harry was of his own demise and the more amused Harry allowed himself to feel. He was dying, yes, but he was going to make damn sure that she got zero satisfaction out of it. Once she was close enough to him that he could probably spit on her newly resurrected face, she came to a stop.

They both stared at each other for a few seconds.

“You look like shit,” was what she decided to say.

The words were so shocking, so queer coming from her mouth that he couldn’t help but release a bark of laughter. He wholeheartedly expected a six syllable word that sounded a bit too much like that stupid muggle phrase used by cheap magicians, and hearing such vulgarity from the revered Dark Lord for the purpose of humor was something he couldn’t properly deal with, especially not in his current state.

What he could do, however, was throw something back.

“Yeah, so do you,” he managed to scathingly retort, knowing perfectly well that there wasn’t a single blemish on her face or a strand of hair out of its proper position.

She smirked at his insult, apparently capable of finding amusement in being berated, before responding in kind. “Yes, well, a decade and a half of not having the proper amount of beauty sleep can do that to a lady, Potter.”

Possibly even more floored that Voldemort was capable of banter than he was by her ability to take an insulting joke, Harry found himself unable to properly return fire. In his silence, she glanced down at his arm and saw the massive amount of blood leaking from it. Reaching out with the hand not holding her wand, she went to grab it. He instinctively pulled it away from her. 

He might’ve been pinned to a grave, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her touch him.

The deadpan, disappointed glare she gave him was actually rather impressive. “You’re going to die if you don’t let me heal it. Are you going to be a baby, or are you going to be smart?”

Glaring right back, he nonetheless held his arm still when she reached for it a second time, and he allowed her to bring it up to eye level before running her thumb over the long, deep slice from its ending point at his wrist all the way up to the crook of his elbow. It sealed beneath her touch, stitching together as she went until it completely closed with barely a mark left in its wake. Surprisingly, he felt no pain from the contact, much unlike what happened during his first year. She seemed to have noticed the same thing, but she wasn’t surprised so much as casually satisfied. 

“I can touch you now,” she said, sounding just a smidge too proud of herself.

“I noticed,” was his snappy response.

Still apparently not experiencing unyielding rage over his attitude, she allowed herself a small grin before adopting something a bit more serious. “I see two options here.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked, practically dying of curiosity. “And what are those?”

“Option one,” she said, staring straight into his eyes. “Is that I kill you right now.”

Harry snorted at the response, finally finding something she'd said that he would've actually expected to hear from her. In a way, that sentence was less disturbing than the words they’d been exchanging thus far. 

“After healing me and everything?” he asked with as much sarcasm as he could muster, to which he earned nothing but a casual shrug.

“Option two,” she continued, now not quite so okay with him being the snarky git he’d been for the last few minutes. “Is you come with me and stop being so incessantly determined to get in the middle of my plans.”

Harry laughed at the offer, not caring for even a second that she just stood there, the epitome of unflappable, through his bout of amusement. When he finally finished, he glared into her very soul as he prayed to whatever deity might’ve been listening that he could suddenly develop the powers of the basilisk he'd slayed earlier in his school career. 

“What about option three, where I kick your arse again and wake up a few days later with a very cross Madam Pomfrey trying to jam her awful potions down my throat?”

She didn’t look impressed. “You have a concussion, you don’t have much blood, and you’ve inhaled enough Dreamer’s Lament to kill a muggle. You can't hope to beat me as you are, and that’s without being incapable of walking in a straight line.”

“Yeah… you’re probably right,” Harry said with nothing but the utmost regret on his face. That was, at least, until a shit-eating grin took the place of his frown. “Good thing I know how to improvise.”

It wasn’t much. In fact, Voldemort looked even more unimpressed with him than he thought she’d ever been in anything before when a foam ball was tossed out of his pocket. It turned out to be enough, however, when it caught onto a new presence and began to twist and morph into a…

A normal-looking priest who seemed to be on the brink of a midlife crisis?

For a moment, all Harry could do was stare. The clearing couldn’t have been more silent as his eyes latched onto Voldemort’s blank, unreadable face. So shocked was he by the sight of what was supposedly the Dark Lord’s deepest, darkest fear that he, at first, didn’t even realize when she lost control of her binding spell. Harry fell from the headstone, his legs almost buckling when they hit the ground. In an instant, he flooded the graveyard with as much of his magic as he could, trying desperately to get a grip on his surroundings and find a way out.

With his magic so thoroughly saturating the air, he could feel the turmoil within the only other human in the graveyard. There was so much going on in her head that he couldn’t even begin to decipher it all. His heart thumped wildly while an eternity of frozen time passed in a second. 

One emotion won out above the rest: rage. The priest combusted in an instant, and Voldemort’s wand was leveled at him. He had no recourse, no escape. His wand wasn’t on him; it was probably with the fucking rat. When her wand shimmered an ethereal green, he knew what was coming, and his mind went to only one spot, and that was, not so shockingly, to the very first time he was old enough to truly remember someone trying to cast the same curse on him.

His savior at that time was the same one who dominated his mind now.

“Dobby!” He yelled, invoked, begged to the skies. 

The green lightning bolt left her wand at the same time as a gentle pop came from somewhere off to his left. 

A pair of fingers snapped…

The lightning bolt was almost close enough to brush the peach fuzz on his fucking lip when a small, red, colorful hat, which he'd handknitted for the elf himself after the second task, intercepted the green curse, swallowed the bolt whole, and then turned to ash against the ground. Harry almost cried tears of joy when he looked to the source and saw Dobby standing with his snapped fingers extended toward the place where his hat took the curse for him. Voldemort looked to be so royally pissed that the only thing she could do was glare between the two with enough magical power behind her stare to give it a physical presence.

Before Harry could so much as say a word, Dobby extended his other hand toward Lord-Fucking-Voldemort without sparing her a glance. 

“You wouldn’t dare…” Voldemort growled, even as the elf snapped his little fingers.

A shockwave, not unlike the one Krum used against himself, tore across the graveyard dirt and bashed against the shield Voldemort erected in response with all its might. The clang was like that of a gigantic bell, deep and with enough vibration to make Harry’s teeth painfully shudder against each other. Of course, though, Voldemort’s shield didn’t budge in the slightest. The woman gave a vicious exclamation of anger as she dropped the shield and whipped her wand across her body with an indecipherable level of speed, one that was, coincidentally, just a modicum slower than the apparition speed of an elf who had been consistently using that particular bit of magic for his entire life without reprieve. 

The ground exploded with the force of a missile milliseconds after Dobby disappeared, and the elf snapped back into existence with his hands clutching Harry’s demolished cloak. Now looking perhaps a hair's breadth from destroying every single thing in her immediate vicinity, she lashed out at them with the hopes of killing them before they could escape her fury. Whatever she was going to cast, however, was lost when Dobby dragged the both of them away with his magic.