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Chapter Text

They all remembered the way the Quidditch World Cup had gone bad. It had been quite the traumatic experience for actual teenagers, seeing chaos and destruction wash over the campsite that had only hours before been peaceful and happy, filled with celebrating wizards and witches of all ages and nationalities.

That said, they weren’t going to miss the event.

It was Quidditch! Nothing could keep the twins, Harry, or Ginny from going to watch it and they would damn well enjoy themselves. Not even the fact that the two time travelers had already seen what would happen once could deter them, and Harry had even more motivation with Sirius already having walked around with face paint, showing his support for the Irish team, at the start of August.

How could they possibly deny the man on this occasion, after what they had put him through when collecting the cup of Helga Hufflepuff? That just wouldn’t be fair, now, would it?

So there they were, Sirius and Harry having joined the Weasleys in their tent on the camping grounds, and already high in spirits. Ron had managed to put his imagined enmity towards Harry to the side and was enthusing over the teams with the other boy. Ginny was sitting a bit further away from the two, talking with Hermione about something that Fred hadn’t been made privy to, and threw in her opinion on the matter from time to time.

All in all, it looked peaceful. Well, except for George, who was standing stock-still next to Fred and exuded nervousness. This would be the first time he would maybe fight against another wizard or witch without the rules and regulations of a duel. They had offered him to stay with the rest of their families, but he wanted to come along.

After all, who knows, they could incapacitate some of the death eaters that would be present, or maybe even stop Barty Jr. right there!

——

Sirius was fairly sure that his godson and his friends were mad. The frightening thing about it was, that he only now actually admitted to himself that he thought so.

Well, admittedly there was also the other thing, that was that Snape had been telling him this for the past two years, and Sirius had written it off as the other man still being bitter about their own time at Hogwarts.

Turns out that the git actually had a reason for his accusations! Who’d have thought?

The Quidditch World Cup had gone great! They had all seemed just as excited to see the match as Sirius himself was. They had joked around and generally had a good time. Fred and George had even bet with him on the outcome of the match being that Ireland would win but Krum would get the snitch.

He’d never lost thirty-seven Galleons, fifteen Sickles and three Knuts as happily as he had that day.

But then the commotion started and Death Eaters showed up, Dark Mark in the sky and everything, and all hell broke loose. And of course, because none of them could just be normal kids, the twins and Harry had gone off to fight the bad guys. 

Luckily — while Sirius had been running around like a headless chicken — Molly had found them before they had found someone else. He knew that the three were good at dueling and defense and all that kind of magic, but they were still just children. Sirius didn’t even want to imagine what could have happened if any of them would have confronted one of the Death Eaters.

He also didn’t want to imagine the telling off the twins had to have endured at the hands of their mother after they got home.

Sirius himself had looked back at the way he had parented Harry since he got custody of his godson and had asked himself if he could maybe have prevented such reckless behavior, but he hadn’t done more than sat down with the boy for  talk about why it was a really dumb thing to do and then sent him off to bed.

Hopefully Harry would grow out of it and it was just a puberty thing.

Sirius didn’t dare hold on to that hope too much. He himself hadn’t grown out of that sort of thing either.

——

“So, let me get this straight,” Ginny said. “There’s going to be a tournament with different tasks to complete, you will be entered by the defense professor, who is actually a Death Eater posing as Alastor Moody.” She paused looking at them questioningly and both Harry and Fred nodded in approval. 

“Great. Then in the third task, which is a race to get to the cup, it turns out that it’s actually a portkey that takes you to a graveyard where Voldemort will then be “revived” from the state he was in.” Again she looked around to see if she had gotten everything correct, then sighed. “I’ve only got one question. Why don’t you just shank him when he’s all evil-infant like?”

A few moments passed, heavy with their silence as the twins, Harry, and Sirius — who had walked by the room while the youngest Weasley was speaking — stared at Ginny with varying levels of judgment and horror.

“Now, Gin, we can’t jus-” Fred was the first to speak up, but was curtly interrupted when Harry all but yelled out, “How come we didn’t think of that? That would be so much easier!”

The focus of all eyes shifted from Ginny to Harry. Nobody had yet commented on the adult who was blatantly standing in the doorway.

“Do you really think you could off something that looks like a baby?” 

Harry raised an eyebrow at Fred’s question and scoffed. “Believe me,” he sneered. “That did not look anything like a baby.”

——

They were mad. Absolutely mad! And he hadn’t noticed! How had he not noticed this?

Planning to kill a baby — no, Voldemort who looked like an evil non-baby — what even was going on in his life at this point? How had he never noticed the scheming the five teenagers had apparently done under his own roof for probably the past years?

Sirius would need to tell someone. Preferably an adult. He himself wasn’t very good at adulting, but there was bound to be someone that was, wasn’t there?

The first person that came to mind as a competent and well balanced adult was Minerva.

She would know what to do. She always did.

She would need to, too, because Sirius had no idea how to interact normally with his godson and his friends after having overheard them casually discussing their plans to murder — would it be murder? — the Dark Lord in Harry’s bedroom.

How was someone supposed to react in such a situation? The parenting books he had been reading over the school years hadn’t prepared him for this!

Chapter Text

Fred had never liked Barty Crouch Jr’s rendition of Professor Moody and he thought it was only fair to show his opinion openly and for everyone to see; Nobody liked those people who only played nice until one’s back was turned, after all. Harry had agreed with this sentiment vehemently and wanted in. He hadn’t yet forgiven the impostor for the way his fourth year went the first time.

So when the dramatic bastard stepped into the Great Hall at the same time that lightning and thunder struck, and walked up to Dumbledore — still soaked to the bone — they executed their plan.

A silent tripping jinx made the disguised Death Eater stumble and a muttered switching spell transformed the flask Harry had transfigured as close to the one he had seen Moody drink out for as long as he had known him, into the one fake-Moody had on his belt.

And then the two Slytherins sat back and watched.

A few students around them looked at the two like they were mad, but they expertly ignored them, grinning from ear to ear as fake-Moody grasped for the fake-flask, took a swig, and froze.

Fred hadn’t known how regularly Crouch Jr had taken the potion, so he had filled the flask with a counter potion of his own design. He couldn’t find one in any books, but there was a spell, so he had made it his personal quest to create a potion variant over the summer.

And create it he did.

The taste was designed to be similar to that of polyjuice, but it had turned out to be a bit too difficult for them to completely replicate the taste. Honestly, they hadn’t wanted to examine the components that mixed into the vomit-inducing flavor of polyjuice too closely — with potions you never knew what you would find, and they still had potential plans involving polyjuice. 

Now if that were the real “Mad-Eye” Moody the counter potion would do absolutely nothing, if he wasn’t…

“What are you grinning for?” A girl a year older than him hissed, eyes narrowed suspiciously. When it came to any of the terror trio grinning, nothing good would follow. They all had learned that.

“Oh, nothing really. I’ve seen this already-“ The teenagers around him groaned collectively. “-so I’m just watching the show go down.”

As if on cue, fake-Moody began to seize and transform back into Barty Crouch Jr.

Dumbledore had him down in barely a second.

Fred couldn’t help it, he broke down in hysterical snickers.

——

Professor Snape had been examining the contents of the flask the Moody impersonator had drunken out of shortly before he had transformed —and rather forcefully at that — back into himself.

He didn’t know how he should react to the revelations he had gotten during those last few hours. He had never seen anything like it, it was the perfect combination of spite and efficiency.

It was a counter for polyjuice. A potion to counter polyjuice.

The last time he had checked, there had been no such thing as a counter potion for polyjuice. But this concoction was designed to do exactly that. Someone who wasn’t disguised under polyjuice wouldn’t notice anything, except the disgusting taste, but anyone who drank this potion while under the effects of polyjuice would transform back into their own form, painfully and a lot faster than was strictly safe, but they would.

The potions master in him wanted to bounce around the room in happiness at this new subject to study.

The teacher in him wanted to strangle Fred Weasley.

That dumb, dumb, brilliant child had brewed a, possibly original, without a doubt very difficult and highly dangerous potion to brew. 

And it had worked.

Oh, there was no question of who was responsible for the spectacle at the welcome feast, while Weasley and Potter both had practically buzzed with anticipation right before it had happened, Fred Weasley was the best student he currently had in his class, no matter what year one looked at.

Of course, when Snape had asked the students that had sat around Weasley, they had informed him that he had, once again, claimed to have foreseen the evening’s happenings. Snape would never put faith in such claims, but the menace had been a bit too accurate with his ‘seer abilities’ over the years to just write them off completely.

No matter what, though, he would make sure that Fred Weasley would at least get the chance at a potions mastery after he completed his NEWTs. 

Even if he had to take the boy on himself for it to happen.

Merlin, sometimes he really hated being a teacher.

——

Harry, much like Fred had still not recovered from the fiasco at the welcoming feast.

Dumbledore, after having taken down the impostor had barely even acknowledged the Death Eater that was then already being levitated out of the Great Hall by Professor McGonagall accompanied by Snape, before continuing his welcome speech.

George and Ginny, while visibly holding back their own amusement at the memory, were a bit cross with them. While they had been told about the fake-Moody aspect of this years happenings, neither one of the two time travelers had told them that they had a plan to take the impostor down.

Harry and Fred had discussed telling them about the whole thing, but in the end they had decided that it would be funnier to watch their reactions during the feast.

“You told me that the guy who put your name in the Goblet of Fire last time was fake-Moody?” Ginny was, judging by her tone of voice, doing a very good job at holding back frustrated, intelligible screaming.

Harry nodded, completely oblivious to the emotional turmoil Fred saw bubbling like a badly contained potion underneath his sister’s skin. “Yes, and then he made a whole spectacle of helping me through the tasks just so that I would be the one to be portkeyed to the graveyard at the end of it all.”

Ginny seemed to contemplate that. “So,” she began. “If he’s out of the picture now, there’s no way that you’ll be taking part in the tournament?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

The youngest Weasley was silent for a few seconds, staring at Harry who was still grinning widely at the other two members of their group, and then the older of the twins. Fred himself didn’t quite dare to be so bold in the face of Ginny’s wrath. Then she sighed. “You really don’t see the problem here, do you?”

They looked at each other in confusion and shook their heads. Although something began to tug at the back of Fred’s mind.

“You are still aware that our plan consisted of Harry being part of the tournament, so that Voldemort would be brought back and he could defeat him?”

Well. Fuck.

They had forgotten about that.

——

“I despise this,” George muttered for probably the twentieth time that afternoon. Fred and Harry could only agree.

The day the other schools would arrive was hectic. Everyone was just soo excited and running around worse than any flock of chicken — they would know, they had experience in that matter — and it was impossible to go anywhere without someone already being there.

This, Fred decided, was worse than all the Gryffindors following Harry around. That at least had died down after a few days to weeks, depending on the person, and they had been able to just leave Harry somewhere and be at peace. This wasn’t like that. The hallways were filled no matter where they went and they couldn’t do anything to stop it.

Or could they? Fred perked up, eyes glinting and turned towards his twin. “Do you remember that portable swamp we made?”

They had made it a policy for themselves to not repeat pranks, but desperate times called for desperate measures and honestly, nobody would be able to judge them for repeating something that hadn’t even happened yet anyway.

——

Harry’s name had come out of the Goblet of Fire.

It was the first time that Fred had seen the boy actually be shocked since they had met in this time, and in all honesty, it scared him. Not too much, of course. To assume nothing bad would happen on Halloween especially would be a dangerous mistake to make. And stupid. Just because that specific streak of luck hadn’t shown yet this time around, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t ultimately start up again.

And Fred liked to be prepared for every possibility, so an optimistic mindset was out of the question.

Harry had been sent with the other champions — no differences there, either — and been questioned just like he had been the first time around, and all of his newfound confidence had failed him.

It had been jarring to witness, and just a little bit of a reminder, that this wasn’t all just for shits and giggles, but they were actually still trying to stop the most powerful Dark Lord of the last generations.

 Somehow another Death Eater must have managed to sneak in and bypass the wards around the Goblet. His bets were on Pettigrew, that damn rat.

The only good thing about it this time was, that everyone was still way too mad about the randomly appearing swamps to be mad that the fourteen-year-old was elected as the fourth champion in a three-wizard tournament.

So Fred sat at the Slytherin table and thought. Snape would probably not kill him outright if he had sat with the lions, but at least poison him with some slow acting and very painful concoction of his own design if Fred didn’t play his part in the whole house-unity thing in front of the other schools. And Fred suspected that the potions teacher actually did know how to tell him and George apart.

They hadn’t taken him serious when he had told them the year before, but after Snape had correctly addressed them ever since, they began to wonder. In the end they had agreed that it would be safer to just believe the git. It wasn’t like there were others that could reliably tell them apart.

Speaking of. He looked towards his twin and found him… grinning?

Ah. So they had finally broken George.

Maybe they really should bring Cedric into the team. As a replacement. Just to be safe.

——

Sirius didn’t know how to react to this. That, he had begun to notice, was becoming a regular occurrence in his life and he couldn’t say that he particularly liked it. Who would?

Harry was going to compete in the Triwizard tournament.

Now if this had happened to him when he had been a forth year, he would have been ecstatic! But to be perfectly clear, he would not have been the best of role models back then, he still wasn’t even though he tried to be better. And Harry had not looked like it had been planned, at least by him. Sirius couldn’t be sure about his godson’s friends anymore. He still trusted them in the sense that he still at least kind of trusted Harry’s judgment, but that was all.

So now here he was, and he didn’t know what to do… again.

One couldn’t simply not take part in the tournament after the goblet of fire had chosen the champions. It wasn’t possible, at least without breaking the contract and that would have consequences no wizard or witch would be willing to accept. 

Harry had no choice but to compete and Sirius was both excited for him and absolutely horrified at the thought.

Minerva would hex him if he went to her for therapy again. But first she’d laugh a bit, just to rub it in how much of a reckless and obnoxiously irritating teenager he himself had been.

And worst of all was that he could admit that he deserved it.

Chapter Text

“We should get Cedric into this team!”

Fred… hadn’t expected that, of all things, to be the first words out of George’s mouth when they met after the feast. But even so, he had to agree, so he nodded along sagely. It wouldn’t do for any of the others to see his faith in the probably most stable member of their group falter.

“What I don’t understand, though,” Harry began, tapping his fingers against his lips, “is how this happened. I mean, I didn’t put my name in, and Crouch Jr isn’t in the picture anymore, so how did this happen?”

Ginny fixed the two time travelers with a hard stare. “Well, someone forgot that we need Harry in the tournament, so we-” she pointed to George and then herself- “had to take matters in our own hands.”

Oh. That explained the grinning. It was kind of anticlimactic though, and Fred had to admit that he was at least a bit disappointed at the lack of people out to kill them. Life was so boring without murder plots and Ginny had forbidden them to start any of their own.

“Wait a minute! You managed to get around the age line? How in Merlin’s name did you manage that?”

Ginny’s eyes sparkled dangerously. 

Fred decided that he didn’t want to know. His little sister was only getting more and more terrifying the older she got. Which was really starting to worry him; He didn’t think the wizarding world would be able handle her in a few years.

“Anyway!” He continued hurriedly. “Bringing Cedric into the team, yes, I agree!”

“We should also try and get the sword of Gryffindor. I don’t want to have to wrestle that snake with a basilisk fang,” Harry added.

George had been silent for a while now, and when Fred looked over to him he seemed deep in contemplation. “How about…” He broke off, frowned a bit and then started up again. “How about we steal the sword, give it to Cedric and have him wrestle the snake while Harry takes care of Voldemort?”

That actually made sense. 

Harry didn’t seem to like the idea much, though. “He was killed the moment we arrived at the graveyard, last time,” he supplied, browns furrowed.

“Then let’s make him invisible!”

What would they ever do without Ginny. Honestly, Fred didn’t know anymore.

“That still leaves the problem that he doesn’t know how to fight with a sword,” Harry just had to say. Honestly, the answer was so apparent!

“We’ll teach him, of course!”

The boy’s eyebrows rose on his forehead. “You know how to fight with a sword?”

George and Fred looked at him like he had grown another head. “What would we know that for?”

——

The plan to introduce Cedric Diggory into their little group was brilliant. Absolutely foolproof. There was only one small problem with it: Cedric didn’t want to join them and avoided every single member of their quintet at all cost.

Now, Fred supposed that that may be just a little bit more than a minor problem, but at least they had a plan, right? They could always jump him and force the Hufflepuff to listen. They had gotten quite good at jumping other students in the hallways. Anyone who doubted that could just ask Ginny; If they were brave enough, that was.

Well, maybe it was two problems, if Fred was being honest with himself. They also needed to get the sword. It would be possible to kill the snake with one of the basilisk’s fangs, they had enough of those, after all, having pulled quite a few out of the huge serpent’s maw, but they weren’t that big. Fred would be a bit skeptical if somebody came up to him and told him to fight a snake with a small bit of other-snake-tooth.

So they really would need the sword. If only to convince Cedric that they were in fact competent. But somehow Fred had the suspicion that Dumbledore wouldn’t just give it to him. Especially because he was a Slytherin. And so was Harry. Even at his worst, Dumbledore wouldn’t be able to justify giving the sword of Gryffindor to the boy-who-was-decidedly-not-a-Gryffindor.

Damn that Hat.

——

Fred wasn’t sure what Harry was going to do to deal with the dragon this time around, but he expected the other time-traveler to not just rely on his knowledge of the last time and out-fly the dragon again.

So of course when the task started the first thing Harry did, was summon his broom. The uncreative idiot.

The chain holding the dragon snapped and both the flying champion and the beast vanished from sight shortly after.

Wasn’t this tournament supposed to be interesting to watch? Just who had designed these tasks and thought “What a brilliant contest, both to compete in and to watch” ? Admittedly, the first one was alright, at least if one only judged by ability to actually see the competitors, but the other two tasks were really just created for the sake of having a task.

Fred huffed, crossed his arms and leaned against the back of the bench. All around the arena others did the same. Even Malfoy seemed upset, but Fred assumed that that was caused more by the fact that he wouldn’t be able to see the dragon kill or at least horribly disfigure Harry.

Not that that would happen. Dumbledore would probably jump out of the stands to come to Harry’s rescue if he thought it was needed. That would have been funny to watch, but no. They just couldn’t have nice things, could they?

——

The day after the first task started the same way it had the first time around, if Fred’s memory served him right. Slow to start with but heating up with immense speed. And so the elder of the Weasley twins had the great pleasure to observe Hermione approach Harry as soon as the two Slytherins entered the Great hall for breakfast.

“Harry, can I just say—“

“Nope!”

“But this article—“

“Nope!”

From the way Harry had been pacing and swearing the evening before in the common room Fred had expected that his plan to manipulate Rita Skeeter into writing something in his favor hadn’t quite worked out as Harry had wanted.

Unless Fred had missed something and Harry’s plan had actually been to be portrayed as the mentally unstable teenager that he — to be fair — had presented himself as ever since he had started Hogwarts.

Somehow he doubted it, though. 

Ginny, in contrast to everyone else, was smiling. It wasn’t a very pleasant smile, or at least it wasn’t if one could look past her general malice and theatrical talent. “I for one think it’s fitting,” she said and took another slice of toast. “Maybe if your actions begin to draw consequences you will actually start thinking for once.”

A few minutes later — Hermione was still glaring at Harry, who did an admirable job at pretending that she wasn’t — George entered the Great Hall. Perceptive as he was, he immediately felt the tension surrounding them. One look at the Daily Prophet cleared the confusion.

“Well.. That’s not ideal.”

——

The dungeons were quiet. So was the Slytherin common room.

Nobody dared to come near Harry and Fred anymore after the younger of the two had used the golden egg as a people repellent. It was very effective in that regard; It only took him opening it two times when a horde of Slytherins tried to mob him for them to leave him alone entirely.

Fred had only been just outside of the common room for the first time it had happened, but still he had heard the screeching of the opened egg. He had to admit that he had forgotten how horrible it actually was after all these years. Nobody should ever be subjected to that kind of torture. Nobody that they liked, at least. Maybe he should ask Harry what had happened to the eggs after the second task was over, it could prove a good weapon against Voldemort.

The situation in general was way different than it had been the last time around; The fact that he was one of the Slytherins made the Snakes quite a bit more willing to accept Harry Potter as the odd fourth champion. That and the fact that house-unity forbid them from making fun of him publicly.

Not even Malfoy was likely to turn against them. He could still sell the stickers and badges and whatever else he had sold the last time around to ridicule Harry, but the likelihood of Snape finding out and giving him detentions until the end of the year would probably deter him.

All in all, Harry was having a great time.

——

As if on cue a huge flock of a variety of owls entered the Great Hall. A few of the professors looked up at them confused for a second before they went back to eating. The only person who didn’t ignore them was Snape, who had over the years developed a sixth sense to detect any and all misdoings the terror trio got up to.

Maybe they would some day have to do something about that, it was a quite troublesome gift to have, but as long as nobody took the potions professor seriously when he tried to warn others it was more fun to watch him grow more and more frustrated. 

For now they could stay concentrated on the important things in life.

Speaking of, the owls had started to land, evenly placed along the tables. Or, well, as evenly as one could plan ahead based on where people normally sat during breakfast. Which had been a lot more difficult considering this was probably the first time in decades that every single student was present in the Great Hall on the morning of the 25th of December. 

That specific date had also been a part of their plan, this way the packages — obviously designed to be varying in size, they weren’t that stupid — that the owls delivered would be seen as nothing more than some late gifts.

A loud and piercing shriek filled the Great Hall as the first person took their package from the owl delivering it.

Moments later there was an ever growing cloud of glitter hanging in the air all over the tables.

Nobody, not even the trio that had designed this sparkling and probably everlasting hell, was spared. That might be the only design flaw still present in their invention, but they weren’t going to complain now. This was probably the first ever successful use of this particular toy of theirs, and nothing could ruin this for them. Not even the fact that they would still be glittering when they would graduate would be able to dampen the delight Fred felt when he saw the way Dumbledore was failing to hold back his elation at the sight of a glittery pink Severus Snape, scowling the deepest scowl Fred had ever seen on the man’s face.

This was a sacrifice well worth the outcome.

——

Yule of 1994 was no a memory Harry liked to remember. The whole night had just been sad, but he would do his best to not have that repeat itself.

This time he had planned for who he would take with him to the dance in advance, he had anonymously sent Ron a set of acceptable dress robes, and he had put at least a bit of effort into learning the dances, since, while he didn’t want to dance much, he did not wish to have people laugh about him for being uncoordinated.

They had had a short conversation about the ball in the room of requirement, and Hermione had quite vehemently refused to go with him, if that would mean that she would be dragged to the bottom of the lake. He had told her about his suspicion on how the “prizes” for the second task had at least partially been selected. Obviously Fleur hadn’t gone to the dance with her sister and Harry hadn’t been there with Ron— … 

Well. That was probably up for debate. Anyway, Hermione was not keen on seeing the Black Lake from its bottom and rejected him. He hadn’t had any problems with that, his goal hadn’t really been to go with her, after all. He only wanted her not to go with Krum. Harry never had any real problems with the guy, but the relationship between Viktor, who was already off-age and Hermione, who was barely fifteen, had started to bug him more and more the longer he had had time to think about it. Not that there had been too much of a relationship between the two, but from what Ginny had told them the last time around, it had definitely been more than just going to the ball together.

So, when Hermione had asked him who she should go with then, he hadn’t even hesitated to suggest Ron. The two might not know each other well yet, but just because Harry wasn’t friends with both of them this time around, that didn’t mean they couldn’t grow to like each other again. Maybe.

That hadn’t solved his own partner-problem. 

He was going to think of something.

Maybe he would ask Malfoy as a joke?

—

Harry bowed to his date, and the red head took his hand graciously and bowed back, a wide grin on his face. 

When Harry had come to Fred with the question as to what he should do, since he wasn’t really inclined to go to a dance with someone so much younger than himself, especially since such things often left the pairs in a position to potentially date, the other had immediately started laughing. 

Following that it hadn’t taken them long to agree to just go together.

Although Fred had demanded that Harry ask Malfoy to the dance. The blond had not reacted well to that. Harry supposed that falling to his knees and offering a bouquet while Fred had stood on the sidelined conjuring flower petals had been a bit much.

Well, it was too late to change it now.

When Harry and Fred stepped onto the dance floor with the other champions and their dates, they did get a few weird looks, which they expertly ignored.

This was their night, after all. Maybe they’d even pretend to date for a few months, before faking a dramatic breakup during breakfast, or something like that. Just to get the rumor mill spinning at full speed. Rita Skeeter was still out there and Harry still carried a deep dislike for the woman after what she had singlehandedly put him through the last time and again worked towards this time around.

While they danced and actually had quite a good time, joking around, Harry couldn’t help but notice Sirius’ expression though. It took all of his inner strength not to burst out laughing. His godfather looked like he wasn’t sure if it was one of their pranks, or if they actually maybe end up dating and he should be happy about it.

Sirius himself had asked both professor McGonagall and Snape, if what Harry had heard was correct.

Well, at least he wouldn’t be judged by his godfather then, for however long Fred and he would keep up this charade. As far as he knew, Sirius had no problems showing attraction towards anyone. Not that that was something Harry cared about much. He had better things to do right now, and like he had already established, he wouldn’t go around his so called “age group” and date somebody.

That would just be weird.

They probably wouldn’t even appreciate his numerous problems as the charming traits that they were!

—— 

George was bored. The task had been going on for about fifteen minutes now and just like in the first task when Harry had flown away with the dragon nobody could see anything! What kind of tournament was this?

And Fred, of course, was the price Harry had to collect from the bottom of the lake, so here he was, with Ginny and Hermione, who were both rather studying than even trying to look like they were paying attention.

Well, at least George could console himself with the knowledge that no one else seemed to enjoy themselves, either. Snape hadn’t even shown up, but that might just be because Sirius had been trying harder to annoy the other man lately. Nobody was really sure what was going on between the two. There was a rumor that they were secretly in love, but from what George knew of their shared past, those two were about as likely to happen as Harry and Malfoy.

A slight grin stole its way onto his face as he remembered how Harry and Fred had come crashing into the room of requirement, tears of laughter streaming down their cheeks and flower petals all over them after the younger Slytherin had apparently asked Draco Malfoy to the yule ball. Harry’s robes had shown signs of obvious abuse where Malfoy had thrown jinxes at him.

The only time the crowd stirred a bit was when Fleur came up to the surface and admitted defeat. How the girl hadn’t managed to defend herself against the grindylows when even a fourteen-year-old had managed it would forever remain a mystery.

After the excitement about that had died down, George went back to waiting in silence.

The lake stayed flat and undisturbed for a long while and George sighed. He didn’t remember either of the two time travelers — well, mostly Fred on this — to have told him that this had been as boring as it seemed now. And Harry had argued that he didn’t want to change things up too much, so they couldn’t even find fun ways around the written rules.

The first sign that things weren’t going to go exactly like the last time appeared when Harry broke the clear surface of the lake and landed securely with both feet on the platform, Fred carried bridal style in his arms, and with more than half an hour to spare. There was no sign of him having rescued Fleur’s sister this time.

None of the judges could justify giving him less that at least nine points. They had to at least pretend to not play favorites. Well, except for Karkaroff, who still only awarded Harry with eight.

——

They were sneaking around the corridors, Ginny scouting out the way to the room of requirement. They couldn’t have anyone catching them, in this instance even more than normally.

Nobody had crossed their path yet, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen, it was barely after lunch yet, after all. Most of the students were walking around with their friends or studying in the library like one did on a Saturday afternoon.

Needless to say, they weren’t doing that. The quintet weren’t just like everybody else, as many of their peers had realized by now, much to their suffering. Hermione herself was admittedly probably the most stable, forming one end of the spectrum, with Harry on the other end, described only with the word “unhinged”. Nothing else would fit the boy at this point, and even Dumbledore had started to notice that something was truly and horribly wrong with his mind.

When Hermione would become Minister of Magic she would look into establishing actual therapy for the wizarding world. The fact that that hadn’t happened yet explained a lot.

Although, she had to admit, even if Tom Riddle would have gone to a therapist, it would probably not done him that much good, what with how prevalent Freud had been back then compared to now. If anything, it would have made things worse for the poor boy. Hermione didn’t want to imagine what the Death Eaters would be up to if their leader would have taken to the psychological theories of that man.

But that was a thing a different dimension would have to deal with, so the girl shoved the thought to the back of her mind and concentrated on what was important right now.

They had arrived at the room with nobody intercepting them and quickly stepped inside, careful not to hit the head of the body floating behind them on the door frame.

“What’s this then?” There was an obvious and badly suppressed undertone of amusement to Fred’s voice when he asked the question. His eyes took in every aspect of the situation at hand as the unconscious boy that the two girls had brought with them was positioned on a couch.

Hermione shrugged. “Doing your job for you, as always.”

There was an offended “Hey!” from the twins and Harry, but she didn’t care. It was true, they just didn’t think things through.

A weak stinging hex woke the teenager up and barely a second after wide, bright gray eyes settled on all of them. There was a moment of silence in which he just stared at them and they stared back, none of them knowing what to expect from the other, then Cedric Diggory whispered a silent, yet very emphatic “What the fuck?”

——

Fred and George sat in the stands, waiting for anything to happen. This again was one of the tasks that obviously had only been designed for the competitors and not with the crowd in mind. Then a loud crack sounded and two bodies and the cup rolled onto the grass below. The twins were down next to the two in seconds.

“It was still there!” Harry was far too giddy for the kind of news he brought. “Snakeface hit me with the killing curse but I got better again!”

Cedric, who had thankfully survived this time, was lying to the right of the boy-who-had-done-it-again, still half covered by the invisibility cloak. His face was white and his whole body was trembling and he seemed to be stuck muttering “What the hell?” over and over again. But, hey, what’s a little trauma between friends?

“You got him, then?” George asked and Harry nodded, still grinning wildly. 

“Got who, if I might ask?” That voice was definitely Dumbledore. Fred opted to ignore him.

“And the snake?”

Harry pointed to where Cedric was still clutching the basilisk fang they had given him. It was covered in red, so he had at least gotten someone with it. Was snake blood red? Fred didn’t know, but he thought it might be. It wasn’t like he had seen a bleeding snake before, and he wouldn’t hurt one on purpose just to find out, so he settled on being optimistic and thinking that it had been Nagini.

Dumbledore, who had watched their interaction with sharp, icy blue eyes, opened his mouth to without a doubt invite Harry up to his office to talk to him. Fred however had had years to learn about the old man’s ways and seen it coming. He raised a hand to silence the headmaster. To everyone’s surprise, Dumbledore froze and didn’t say anything, simply furrowing his brow.

Fred wasn’t going to let his friend, who had just survived dying, go through one of the headmaster’s therapy sessions. He just couldn’t do that to Harry.

——

Cedric was done. He was done, he would leave Hogwarts gladly after this year and probably move somewhere where the absolutely insane quintet wouldn’t find him. Never again! He would rather never have contact to any human ever again!

They had made him wrestle a snake with another bigger snake’s tooth while he was trying not to be noticed under a glorified invisibility blanket that had threatened to fall off him constantly. It was by pure stupid luck that it had even stayed on him after the portkey had brought them to the graveyard!

And then the boy-whose-mind-probably-didn’t-live had decided to first hold a public therapy session for the Dark Lord, then taunt the guy, duel him, be killed, and then Harry casually woke back up? What the actual bloody hell?

This was the exact reason he had avoided the terror trio to begin with! But he hadn’t anticipated that the youngest Weasley and Granger were just as bad. They had literally knocked him out in one of the hallways and trapped him in some strange room he had never seen before and forced him to go along, threatening that he would die if he didn’t. And the thought to go to a professor with that didn’t even cross Cedric’s mind until he already was in the maze!

It was a miracle that he hadn’t accidentally killed himself with the fang, that had after short examination by professor Snape tuned out to be a basilisk tooth from the monster they had slain years back. They were masterminds, having had this planned for years in advance! And nobody Cedric spoke to believed him!

The only one of the professors that had actually not brushed him off when he had mentioned that detail was professor Delphis. But then she had fallen into deep thought and soon started mumbling about suspicions and seers and what not and Cedric had fled the room when her eyes had begun to glow.

That woman was still as creepy as she had been the day she had appeared after Lockhart’s rather conveniently timed death. He was now more than ever convinced that she had been the one to get rid of him.

Again. Cedric wouldn’t tell anyone, about that either. They wouldn’t believe him anyway.

Instead he would go back to planning his emigration to Iceland. There weren’t a lot of people there, he had heard.

Chapter Text

One day they would find a way to get professor Delphis with one of their pranks. She couldn’t keep winning their little altercations; Everyone fails sometimes, and Fred was determined to see the day their History of Magic professor did, now that they had gotten rid of their only real goal next to general chaos.

For now, though, they were sneaking around the corridors on their way to the third floor, more specifically the charms corridor. There was no real reason behind their nightly wanderings. George had suggested they could do with a bit of rule breaking, now that they had collected the maximum amount of good-teen points — the name “good-boy” points had been vetoed rather vehemently by Ginny and Hermione and saying “good-boy and good-girl points” or any variation of that just took too long.

So they were sneaking past the History of Magic classroom, their most powerful silencing charms cast on each of them, towards the stairs, when they heard a quiet voice from the slightly ajar standing door.

Professor Delphis’ quarters were in a side room of her classroom.

Harry immediately rushed towards the gap and started eavesdropping. The twins shared a look and followed. They weren’t about to miss out on potential information on this woman that they still barely knew anything about.

“-Can’t! It’s too important to find out the truth,” a voice that was decidedly male and not their History of Magic professor’s protested. Fred instantly took a dislike towards the speaker. He didn’t like people telling him what to do, and if he knew anything about professor Delphis, it was that she didn’t take too kindly to it, either.

And in true Theodosia Delphis fashion, he instantly heard her shift her posture, probably taking on her stern teacher expression. “I will do what I want!” she snapped. “And you know what? I quit.”

Oh. Wait, what?

 “I’ve had enough of this; It’s going nowhere, and even if the boy is a seer, just let him be, would you?”

Oh.

So that’s why she was here. That explained quite a bit.

“Wha- You can’t! You’d have nowhere to go, no identity to come back to-“

Professor Delphis, who was unknowing to her being silently cheered on by all three of them, didn’t let herself be intimidated. “Oh no, I don’t think so! I quite enjoy being Theodosia Delphis, you know. But honestly, I don’t think you need to know any more of my life from now on.”

The fire, through which the other wizard had without a doubt spoken with their professor hissed when she extinguished it rather vehemently with a well aimed aguamenti.

Delphis sighed audibly, took a few steps across the room and swung her door open, leaving them to tumble to the ground and gape up at her. 

“It is quite disheartening to see you three still underestimating me,” she stated, looking down at them and shaking her head. “I believe detentions are in order, don’t you?”