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The many Deaths of Harry Potter by ShayneT

Books » Harry Potter Rated: T, English, Harry P., Hermione G., Words: 242k+, Favs: 6k+, Follows: 4k+, Published: Mar 2, 2017 Updated: Jun 15, 2017 3,851Chapter 45: Enraged

"Isn't it foolish to make threats?"

Harry laughed shortly. "What are they going to do, kill me?"

Rita Skeeter stared at him for a moment. "The rumors of a bounty on your head have never been conclusively proven."

"Just the rumor is enough, isn't it?" Harry asked.

If enough people believed there was a bounty, then idiots and poseurs would be coming out of the woodwork for him. The fact that it wasn't proven made it more difficult for the aurors to track it down.

"Rumors can be quite powerful," Rita Skeeter says. "Like the rumor that you are much more powerful than a boy your age should be...some people say the last boy as talented as you was you-know-who himself."

"Prophecies have a way of making themselves come true," Harry said. He smirked. "If I'm to fight Voldemort as an equal, then I have to become his equal."

"What will you do if you win?"

Harry stared at her. He hadn't thought too much about what would happen afterwards because it felt like he'd be jinxing himself.

"What is it the American sport stars say? I'll go to Disneyland?"

Rita Skeeter smirked.

"I might invent a new hair care product...compete with Lockhart when he gets out of Azkaban...maybe join a rock and roll band."

"Can you play?"

"No...but when did that ever stop anyone?" Harry grinned. "Maybe I'll start thinking about politics."

Rita Skeeter suddenly sat up, her former playfulness gone. "You'd have a leg up given that you are popular with your classmates."

"I was joking," Harry said. "I wouldn't go into politics unless there was something I wanted very badly to change."

"How do you feel about the current administrations policies?"

She was leaning forward and Harry realized he was in a dangerous position. As angry as he was at Scrimgeour, he was at least superficially on Dumbledore's side. With the seats on the Wizengamot open due to assassination, the Wizengamot would be the ones to appoint a successor to fill out his term until the next election.

With the open seats gone, the current balance of power fell in the direction of the purebloods, who would doubtlessly appoint someone Harry didn't care for at all. He'd had the politics carefully explained to him by his Slytherin contacts and for once he'd actually listened.

He had to be careful in what he said.

As he opened his mouth the door opened suddenly. A panicked looking Scrimgeour was standing outside with Dumbledore behind him.

Considering that Harry had toppled his predecessor after a visit to a reporter, Harry could understand his concern.

"It's time for the wand weighing," he said shortly. "The photographers are waiting."

Harry nodded, grateful for once to see the man.

Scrimgeour grabbed him and pulled him away. "What did you say to her?"

"Nothing that will hurt the elections, I hope," Harry said. "But you'd better keep me away from her if you want things to go smoothly."

The last thing he needed was for her to paint him as the next dark lord right before the elections.

She was following them, but didn't say anything as they entered the chamber with the other champions. They were seated together while the four judges were sitting at an elevated table.

"Here is our last champion now," Scrimgeour said. "If I may introduce our expert, Mr. Ollivander we can begin the weighing of the wands."

Harry watched as Ollivander tested Fleur's wand...which apparently contained a Veela hair from her grandmother.

Krum's wand contained hornbeam and dragon heartstring. None of it mattered really; wandlore was a highly specialized and esoteric art that Harry had no interest in. His wand was a tool and a weapon, and as long as it did what it was designed for, he had no problem with it.

Harry found himself reluctant to hand it over, however, although he schooled his face to look impassive.

He found himself looking at the wands of everyone in the room calculating the odds. Who's wand looked loose enough to accio wandlessly, who was most likely to attack him and where would he have to dodge.

By the time he'd finished calculating the possibilities, Ollivander's examination had ended.

Pictures were agonizing afterward; Harry had spend most of the last four years trying to avoid photographers. Even though the Death Eaters now knew what he looked like it was a hard habit to break.

Furthermore, Harry had never had to sit through the interminable family photos like Dudley had been forced to; his aunt and uncle had not cared to have pictures of him. Now he understood why Dudley had hated it so much.

He felt awkward and unsure and this wasn't something he was used to feeling. He didn't care for it at all.

Maybe he'd have loved it as a Gryffindor, loved all the glory and the acclaim, but Harry felt he more naturally belonged in the shadows. The limelight was dangerous.

The article Skeeter had written wasn't quite as bad as he'd feared, but it was almost. She'd described him as dark and dangerous and with possible political ambitions.

Worse was the fact that she seemed to intimate that he and Hermione were dating, and that he was making a political statement by dating a muggleborn instead of a pureblood. She claimed that as a Slytherin everything he did had a meaning.

He caught people looking at him and Hermione in a new light, one that made him feel uncomfortable. Hermione was his closest friend, with Neville as his second. Anything that made her uncomfortable was something he couldn't abide.

Hermione had had her teeth fixed to smaller than they had been before, and so now she was noticeably prettier than she had been in the past. Other boys were starting to notice, which irritated him more than he could admit.

He wondered if it was simply that they threatened his time with her. After all, he'd seen what happened with other couples. They spent so much time making eyes at each other and doing whatever it was that couples did alone that they lost time for their friends.

No one dared to tease him about it; Malfoy came close, but stopped when he saw Harry's expression. However, Hermione wasn't so lucky. She refused to tell him who was teasing her, but he saw her several times with flushed cheeks looking angry.

Neville tried to stand up for them, but the more he protested, the less anyone seemed to believe him.

Harry finally had to resort to sending a letter to Sirius, who agreed to meet him during the next Hogsmeade weekend.

"You're looking better," Harry said.

The shrieking shack hadn't changed much since the last time he'd been in it except for the addition of additional years' worth of dust.

Sirius was dressed better than he had been and he'd been filling out and gaining weight. He looked healthy and tanned, nothing like the disheveled shell of a man he'd been when Harry had first seen him.

"I'm doing important things for Dumbledore," Sirius said. "We're on the verge of something big...very big."

Harry stared at him inquiringly, but Sirius shook his head.

"It's all top secret. No offense, but someone could pluck it right out of your head if you weren't careful, so there's only so much I can tell you."

"What can you tell me?" Harry asked.

"The headmaster of Durmstrang is a former death eater," Sirius said. "He was captured by the Ministry but was released after naming a lot of names. Many Death Eaters went to Azkaban because of him, and its thought that he isn't particularly popular in those circles."

"I'm surprised he's still alive."

"It's probably because nobody knows where Durmstrang actually is, which may have been why he took the job. He has to want this TriWizard Championship pretty badly in order to come out of hiding like this."

"So I may not be the only one Voldemort is out to kill," Harry said. "Great."

Being accidentally killed was just as painful as being intentionally killed. Being caught in the middle of a war between two sides sounded a lot like his entire life.

"There's also the possibility that he's made a deal with the group in order to get them off his back. That may be why he's here, to throw a spanner in the works."

"We'll see how he judges me," Harry said. "I'm pretty sure Voldemort wants me to win this thing, so if he grades me high he's probably working with him. If he grades me low to give his own champion a better chance of winning, then he probably isn't."

"Either way, watch out," Sirius said. "He's not someone you want to cross. You don't get to be headmaster of any magical school by being weak."

Harry nodded.

"I was only able to find out the first task," Sirius said. "Security is pretty tight around the others because they don't want reporters ruining the spectacle."

"It's dragons, right?" Harry asked.

Sirius stared at him, then nodded. "How did you know?"

"I just thought of the worst thing I could imagine that spectators could actually watch, and I asked them." Harry said. "Dumbledore is good with a poker face but the others aren't."

Basilisks would make for a poor viewing experience to say the least, and cockatrices had attacked the judges at the last event. Dragons seemed like a close third.

"I can't believe that they want us to kill dragons in front of spectators," Harry said. "That seems a little bloodthirsty, even for the Ministry."

Sirius shrugged. "I don't know exactly what they plan, but I've got a few ideas about how to approach it."

"Ones that don't involve me blowing up half the stadium, I hope," Harry said.

"About that," Sirius said. "Did you bring the map?"

Harry nodded and pulled it out, opening it up. He could see the headmasters together in Dumbledore's office. Moody was with Snape in the dungeons.

He looked carefully for any names he didn't know. He'd begun doing it on the night of the Goblet ceremony, and he had continued doing it on a sporadic basis. The last thing he needed was to have his throat cut by one of the porters who'd carried the cup then had never left.

"There's a special room that we never found until the last year of school," Sirius said. "Long after the Map was made. You've been having trouble finding a place to practice?"

Harry nodded.

"This room can be anything you wish for, if you know how to open it."

That could prove to be very useful. Harry had almost gotten caught on two occasions during his experiments on the Astronomy tower, once by a sixth year couple out to enjoy some romantic time together.

The fact that neither of the other champions looked surprised at the announcement that it was dragons suggested that someone was cheating.

On the other hand, only needing to get past the dragon to get the golden egg meant that half his strategies were suddenly useless. The last thing that anyone would want to see was him slaughtering a dragon in front of a crowd of thousands.

Harry reached his hand into the bag and grimaced. It fit his luck; he'd gotten the Hungarian Horntail, the most vicious of the three dragons featured.

Krum gave him a sympathetic look.

After that it was just waiting and listening to the roar of the crowd as Krum went out and did whatever he was doing to deal with the dragon.

It was reassuring that he didn't hear any screams of horror. Harry was certain that if things went horribly wrong he'd be able to hear it long before anyone came to inform them.

Fifteen minutes seemed like an eternity as the crowd roared and then gasped over and over. Harry kept waiting for the screams of horror that never came.

The enthusiastic clapping that finally ended it was an enormous relief.

Fleur had been sitting across from him the entire time, wincing every time the crowd gasped. She was pale and trembling, but when she was called she stood with her head held high and she stepped out into the light.

The fact that she took only ten minutes probably had something to do with the fact that her dragon was easier than Krum's. It might have also been because of whatever strategy she was using.

Finally the applause came, followed by the scoring.

Harry's turn finally came. As he stood, his legs felt like jelly. He knew what it felt like to die, but he didn't know what it felt like to burn alive or to be chewed up and swallowed. He wasn't particularly looking forward to learning either thing.

Stepping out into the arena, Harry saw hundreds of faces staring at him. The fact that any one of them could be planning to attack him while he was busy with the dragon occurred to him, but the fact was there wasn't anything he could do about it. Planning only took him so far, and after that you had to deal with the situation as it changed.

More important was the dragon, which was bigger than he'd thought. It looked angry; it was gouging the ground with it's claws and staring at him with its yellow eyes.

It thought it was protecting its eggs, which made it much more dangerous than it usually would have been. The fact that it usually would have been a wizard killer wasn't encouraging.

Harry squinted, hoping to get a good look at the egg. He couldn't see it because the dragon was crouched too low over the eggs with her wings outstretched.

He'd have to get the dragon to move if his primary plan was going to succeed.

Pulling out his wand, Harry took a deep breath. He'd been practicing the charm he was about to use almost constantly since Sirius had taught him to do it. It hadn't helped Adrian against a troll, but it was presumably going to do better for him.

"AVIS," Harry shouted.

The sound of a small explosion was followed by a stream of birds flying from his wand. It was an advanced transfiguration that was mostly useless in a real battle, but what Harry was facing wasn't a real battle. He was facing a beast that was chained down and he was out of range of its fire breath.

The birds began to flock around him.

"AVIS," Harry said again. Another explosion and another flock of birds.

Again and again he cast the spell, the flock around him growing and growing to become truly massive. Soon it filled the half of the arena that was out of the dragon's range.

The dragon looked as though it was growing more and more agitated.

Finally feeling that he had enough, Harry gestured, and the massive swarm flew at the dragon. It screamed and blew fire, but the swarm simply parted in the face of the stream of explosive death.

The birds flowed like a school of fish, subject to Harry's will. They flew at the dragon's eyes, and it screamed again as they pecked and pecked away at it.

They couldn't do any damage unless they impacted the eye directly, but the flock was doing an excellent job of agitating the dragon, which looked more and more upset.

It rose up on its hind legs to claw at it's face.

Harry could see the crowd staring at him. He hadn't moved a single inch from his original position. He had no intention of getting any closer to the thing than he had to.

Finally he saw his chance; a glimmer of gold in her nest as she shifted away from it.

"ACCIO EGG!" he shouted.

A moment later the golden orb flew through the air to smack into his hand.

The crowd was silent for a long moment, as though stunned at what had seemed perfectly obvious to Harry. There was no need to actually get past the dragon. All that was needed was to acquire the egg.

He dispelled the birds with a wave of his hands and they flew up into the sky, dispersing into all directions.

The crowd began to clap politely as they realized that he had actually completed the task he had been assigned. A lot of them looked disappointed. It probably hadn't been the spectacle they had hoped for, but it had been effective.

Winning the Tournament didn't really matter to Harry as much as simply getting through it. He wouldn't have minded winning except that he suspected that was exactly what Voldemort wanted. The fact that he'd had a dream like that once simply meant that his subconscious mind was telling him what he already knew.

Harry could see Scrimgeour scowling. He'd obviously hoped for something more flashy from the Boy-Who-Lived. After all, the primary purpose of the Tournament was to entertain and distract from the failures of the Ministry.

On an impulse, Harry held the egg up for the crowd to see, and he heard people cheering.

Unfortunately that wasn't the only thing he heard. The Horntail was staring at him and at the dragon in his hand. It screamed its anger and defiance; as far as it was concerned he'd stolen the egg from it.

The birds had already enraged it; now it lunged forward, the chains holding it creaking as it struggled to break free, to attack him.

Harry heard the screams from the audience and he realized that now was probably a good time to leave.

He turned to head back into the tents, but he heard the sound of metal breaking behind him and he whirled to see the dragon roar in triumph.

It was free and it was charging toward him, looking suddenly much bigger than it had from all the way across the stadium.

It suddenly occurred to Harry that a following plan that required enraging a dragon probably wasn't the brightest thing he'd ever tried.

Damn.

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The many Deaths of Harry Potter by ShayneT

Books » Harry Potter Rated: T, English, Harry P., Hermione G., Words: 242k+, Favs: 6k+, Follows: 4k+, Published: Mar 2, 2017 Updated: Jun 15, 2017 3,851Chapter 46: Dragon

It was already too late.

The dragon was charging toward him, and although Harry could see the dragon handlers chasing behind it, there wasn't enough time for them to do anything.

Running into the tent wouldn't do anything but endanger the staff inside. If he could get to the stands there were protections that were designed to keep the audience safe. No one wanted a repeat of the disaster from the last Tournament.

However, the same protections that would keep the dragon away from him would also keep him from getting into the stands without leaving the stadium and coming in from behind. That would run the risk of the dragon escaping and attacking any stragglers who weren't actually in the stadium.

No matter what happened, he had to gain some mobility. If he didn't the dragon would push him into a corner and then either burn him to death or eat him.

Hoping that it would distract the dragon, Harry threw the golden egg. This didn't stop the dragon at all; if anything it only seemed to enrage it more.

"ACCIO BROOM!" Harry shouted.

It didn't matter whose broom or where it came from as long as it reached him.

Unfortunately, it would take time for the broom to reach him; time he didn't have. Harry stared up at the dragon as it approached him, and then he waved his wand.

"ACENDIO!"

The spell sent him hurtling straight up into the air even as the dragon pounced on the place where he had been. Harry pointed his wand downward and yelled, "ARRESTO MOMENTUM!"

He began floating instead of falling, although as he was floating down toward the jaws of an angry dragon that was leaping up to eat him, it wasn't much of a comfort.

"BOMBARDA!" he screamed, pointing his wand down at the gaped open mouth of the dragon below.

It had a sudden strange expression on its face as the beam of light went down its throat. A moment later there was a muffled explosion.

The dragon fell back, coughing convulsively as Harry continued to float downward.

He finally saw the broom. Just as the dragon was recovering, Harry caught onto the broom flying toward him.

The dragon had recovered faster than Harry found comfortable, and it was already spreading its wings ready to come for him.

Harry cast a Conjunctivitis spell, hitting one of its eyes, but that only angered it more. It flew toward him, and as he tried to hit its other eye it kept moving its head, making it harder to hit.

Forcing his broom down as a gout of fire flew over him, Harry found himself wishing he'd spent more time practicing flying. It was all he could do now to avoid the dragon and even as he cast the flame freezing charm on himself and his broomstick.

Just in time; fire washed over him and he felt his skin tingle. The fire tickled and he felt an uncharacteristic urge to laugh.

Seeing that the fire was having no effect on him, the dragon redoubled its efforts, flying faster now. Although Harry was more agile, the dragon was faster than the old school broom and he knew he didn't have much time.

Below, he could see Dumbledore struggling to get out of the crowd, which had inexplicably begun to panic. He was being crushed in the crowd, which probably made undoing the anti-apparation wards more difficult than it should have been.

It was getting closer, and the wizards below were struggling to maintain order. Harry didn't have any choice.

He pulled out a small amount of peanut butter that he'd stolen from breakfast and slipped into a candy tin that Neville had lent him. Pulling it out, he cast the flame freezing spell on it before he threw it behind him, flicking his wand at the same time.

It would have been terrifying, riding his wand without using either hand, but the specter of death rapidly coming behind him with an open maw made it a trivial consideration.

The peanut butter flew straight and true, led by Harry's spell. It landed in the dragon's gullet. The dragon didn't look as though it had even noticed.

"GEMINIO!" he screamed.

The geminio curse was a spell designed to cause objects to multiply exponentially. It was used in the vaults of some wizards to cause thieves to be crushed under the replicated weight of the very things they were trying to steal.

As long as whatever it was continued to be touched by a living thing it continued to replicate, within the limits of the caster's power.

The thick peanut butter, stuck to the dragon's mouth began to replicate, doubling in size and then doubling again.

Harry dodged the dragon, dropping straight down toward the ground in a dive. He'd be able to pull up more easily than the dragon would.

It was diving after him, apparently banking on its own ability to catch up to him and pull up before it smashed into the ground. Dragons were decent fliers and this one was better than most.

Harry grimaced as it snapped at him, it's fangs only three feet from the back of his broom. It was already dead but just didn't know it, but even a dead snake could still kill.

He dodged to the right, but it didn't make much of a difference. The dragon had his measure now, and as they approached the ground Harry knew he had to pull up.

"BOMBARDA!" he screamed, pointing the wand in the dragon's face.

The explosion didn't seem to do much damage, but the smoke it created was enough for Harry to slip under it and behind.

The dragon had to come around for another pass, buying Harry some breathing room. The dragon's demise was taking longer than Harry had thought it would, and his only option was to continue to buy time until it was over with.

A few moment's breathing room was all he would have.

"FUMOS!" Harry cast, and an explosion of smoke emerged from his wand.

"FUMOS, FUMOS, FUMOS!"

A massive cloud of smoke suddenly surrounded him, obscuring his view of the ground below. It was a dangerous spell to use, because while it made it more difficult for the dragon to see him, it would be harder for him to see it.

He took a moment to cast the supersensory charm on himself. He could hear the sound of the dragon wings from below him and the sounds of its breathing, which was beginning to sound a little labored. The dragon was making a hacking, phegmatic sound deep in its throat.

It wouldn't be long, but Harry had to survive until then.

He dove to the very back edge of the cloud, and as the dragon flew up into it he dropped out of the crowd, diving for the ground.

The screams of the crowd made him gasp and want to hold his head. Instead he dismissed the charm. But it was too late. The dragon had heard the crowd and it was coming for him.

It dove, but as suddenly as it did it began hacking harder. It's entire body began to be engulfed by spasms, and it slammed into the ground rather than pulling up in time.

Hitting the ground shouldn't have been enough to do more than stun it slightly; dragons really were heavily armored.

However, it didn't get up.

It was struggling to breathe as the peanut butter in its mouth continued to double in size over and over again. The peanut butter was filling it's air passages, and Harry could see some coming from its nose.

Harry continued to float above it on his broom as the creature asphyxiated.

It took longer to die than he'd thought it would.

By the time Dumbledore and the dragon tamers reached the dragon, it was dead. Harry allowed his broom to drop to the ground.

"What did you do, my boy?" Dumbledore asked.

The crowd had finally stopped and people were standing in the stands. They were staring at the scene in stunned silence.

Harry decided that he would always have an exit from crowds; after the last time he knew they were a good way to get killed.

"I kept feeding it until it choked," Harry said. "I didn't have a choice."

There wasn't much to say after that, other than wait on the judges to confer. Killing the dragon had explicitly not been part of the challenge. However, Harry had accomplished the task as asked.

Harry could hear Karkarov arguing that the task hadn't officially been over until Harry had left the field. Once the dragon attacked him in the air, the task had continued.

The judges were arguing, and it suddenly occurred to Harry that it was unfair for the headmasters to be judging their own students.

Finally the deliberations were done. Madam Maxine raised her wand, and the number six emerged floating through the air.

Karkarov gave him a two, which probably meant he was not in Voldemort's camp currently, although Harry still couldn't be sure.

Bagman gave him an eight.

All in all, Harry had come in second, which was a decent showing given the disaster that had happened.

Part of him felt a little resentful that they had blamed him for killing the dragon. It was their responsibility for not having good enough chains.

He would have argued if he'd really cared about winning. It simply irritated him to be punished for something he couldn't help.

Sirius ran up to him; Harry hadn't seen him in the stands although he'd known he would be there. He was pale and there was blood running down his face. Apparently he'd tried to get out of the crowd to help Harry and had a hard time of it.

"I've never wished my animagus form was a bird instead of a dog until today," he said. "Are you all right?"

Harry grinned weakly. "Looks like I came out of it better than you did."

"There's got to be some way to get you out of this," Sirius said. "If this was the first task, what will the second one be like?"

Harry shuddered.

He wasn't sure whether the broken chain was due to sabotage or incompetence, but he hoped someone got sacked. Considering that he saw Rita Skeeter in the audience looking like she'd won the lottery, he suspected that it would be sooner rather than later.

After all, a well run Tournament was in the interest of the Ministry while a fiasco was not. Harry had a fleeting thought, wondering whether Voldemort's plan was to make the Ministry look incompetent as a way of swaying the vote on the new candidates.

Bagman called out to all the champions to gather around.

"That was a little more excitement than we all expected," he said, chuckling uneasily.

The other two champions were pale; apparently they'd gotten to watch his contest after finishing their own. Fleur was looking at him differently as well; she had always looked down on him as a child and she'd been open about it. Now both she and Krum were looking at him with more respect.

"The next task won't be until February 24th. We won't leave you as clueless as we did this time, but we won't make it easy either. If you'll look at the eggs we've given you you'll see that they have a hinge on them. Open them and interpret the message inside and it'll give you a clue to the next task."

He had three months before he had to bother with the second task. He felt a sense of relief. He'd have time to prepare, to get faster and better. The body of the dragon behind him proved that he was getting stronger and better, but Voldmort was more dangerous than any dragon.

Figuring out the screaming egg was harder than he would have thought. Harry had tried every spell he could think of, and other spells suggested by the other Slytherins. Nothing had seemed to work.

He wasn't allowed to get help from professors, not that this would have stopped him, but no one seemed interested in helping him.

Sirius had suggested that some animals sensed things differently from humans. Things that seemed high pitched to a human sounded low pitched to some animals. This was why Harry was sitting with a modified version of the supersensory goggles while the Weasleys, Hermione and Neville were sitting with the earmuffs used in Herbology to handle the mandrake roots.

These were adjustable; the twins were hoping to market them as ways to experience what it was like to be an animagus without having to go through all the trouble. See life as a dog! Experience the senses of an earthworm! They hoped to get actual animagi to calibrate the senses for their respective animal types.

So far they had only concentrated on modifying the sense of hearing. They'd added four knobs on the side of the visor and it had taken them more than a week of work to do so.

Harry grimaced at the wailing shriek of the egg. They were on the astronomy tower with permission, but he knew the sound was reaching everywhere.

"No...no...no...wait," Harry said. "It's getting a little closer. Closer...that's it!"

Instead of hearing things more intensely he'd had to actually muffle and deepen it, finally he heard the message.

He repeated the poem, which had been recited in mermaid's voices. He knew those voices intimately because he'd seen them outside the windows of the Slytherin dungeons. He'd heard their voices sometimes.

"It's a challenge under the lake," Harry said. "Probably has something to do with the mermen."

The possibilities for cheating were enormous. The first thing he needed to do was scout out the lake and its dangers. There was no guarantee that they wouldn't add more later, but the chances were that knowing his way around under the lake would only help him.

Besides, as he'd seen from recent events he really needed to work on his cardio. The next time he had to run from a dragon, there might not be a convenient broom around.

"Anybody up for a swim?" he asked.

The others looked alarmed.

"It sounds a little risky," Hermione said.

"If you can find a map of the lake I'll let you off, but I'm going to need to see what I'm getting into. It would be better to go as a group because then we'll be better protected."

The last thing he wanted to do was jump into a lake without knowing the possible risks.

"Didn't you already look up the creatures that are in the lake?"

"I didn't look up where they are," Harry said. He hesitated. "If you really don't want to go, that's fine. I don't want to endanger anybody for something that's really my problem anyway."

The Weasley twins were grinning. "Miss out on an undersea exploration mission? We've always wanted to have something to hold over our brother who likes to brag about exploring tombs and fighting strange mummies."

Harry grinned.

Harry's body ached.

He hadn't realized how out of shape he was until he'd begun exploring the lake. Fighting Grindylows hadn't been particularly hard, and finding the exact location of the Mermish village had been a matter of time and effort.

The swimming had been the most difficult part. Hermione had found a spell to keep them warm, saying they'd catch their death of cold jumping into a lake in Scotland in the middle of winter.

Harry wondered if he should see if the Room of Requirement could summon up a swimming pool. That would be a safer way to get the exercise he needed without having to be seen going out into the lake and risk being followed.

Their being there had upset the Mermish anyway.

"The Yule ball is approaching," McGonegall was saying. "A traditional part of the Triwizard tournament. It is an opportunity for us to socialize with the other schools."

"The ball will be from eight o'clock to Midnight on Christmas day," she continued. "It is only open to those of fourth year and above, although they may invite younger partners."

The Slytherins were all looking at each other.

"Unlike my own House, I have no reason to suspect that you will become too...spirited. I expect that everyone will represent this school to the best of their ability."

She dismissed the class, then said, "Mr. Potter, a word."

Harry stopped and waited for the other members of the class to file out of the room. Despite the fact that Slytherins were more composed and reserved than their counterparts in the other houses, he could sense excitement in the air. The girls were whispering together in ways he usually only saw in Gryffindors.

"Traditionally the Champions and their partners open the ball," McGonagall said.

Harry looked at her blankly. "Partners?"

Was there some part to the contest that he hadn't understood? He thought the entire point was for them to go it alone.

"Dance partners," McGonagall said.

If this was a joke, he didn't appreciate it. Putting him up in front of the entire school to be humiliated sounded like something from his first year, not now.

"I don't dance," Harry said flatly.

"I've seen you duel," she said primly. "And I'd beg to disagree."

It was a compliment from her; from what Harry knew about her she was a formidable opponent on the battlefield and a master of transfiguration.

"I don't know how to dance with girls," Harry corrected himself.

"There will be a chance to learn," McGonagall said. "But first you have to find a partner."

"What...ask someone out?" Harry asked blankly.

"Indubitably...and it needs to be soon."

Harry wondered why he was suddenly dreading this as much as he was. He had faced down death many times, fighting Death Eaters and Basilisks and dragons. None of those however had produced exactly the same kind of anxiety as being forced to ask a teenage girl out to dance.