Work Text:
"But I didn’t put my name in the goblet of fire," Jack found himself saying incredulously. He wan’t usually incredulous, but the situation called for it a little. "I didn’t ask for it to spit out my name when I never went anywhere near it."
Pitch peered at him suspiciously.
"I'm telling the truth."
After another moment’s pause, Pitch sighed. "So it seems. Pity, I had been hoping you’d finally recognised your ambitious drive and managed to use your wit to trick the sacred goblet."
Jack gave him an unimpressed look.
"An uncle can hope can he not," Pitch gave him an elegant half-shrug at the words. "But if you didn’t put your name into the goblet, yet your name was chosen, then we have a dire problem indeed."
Jack watched as his uncle stalked around the cave pensively, hand stroking his chin as if he had a beard there and not perfectly clean shaven. He shifted uncomfortably in the shadowy cave, huddling against his cane slightly. Not for the first time wondering exactly why his uncle had such a penchant for darkness and shadows and underground constructions.
"Does any of the teachers have a grudge against you?" Pitch finally asked.
"Don’t you mean the older students?"
Pitch scoffed. "Please, if there was a student at Hogwarts powerful enough to manipulate the sacred goblet, I would know about it."
Jack wanted to make some sarcastic remark to Pitch's ability to judge magical strength in people he'd never met, but right at that moment, a boy popped out of the shadows right by his feet.
"Gyah!" Jack instinctively jumped back, cane pointed in front of him.
The boy blinked, gave his cane the smallest of glances, before casually saying, "Hi."
Off to the side, Pitch gave an annoyed groan. Jack wasn't surprised, almost all wizards loathed having to deal with the 'olympian gods' as they called themselves. They weren’t really gods, at least, they never created the world. They were immortals though, or at least had very long lives, along with extremely powerful gifts. They may have had even been given a species name, if the entire species didn't have some weird rule about not interacting with mortals directly. This would have been fine, Jack was a big supporter of minding-your-own-business, if they didn't have a habit of sending their 'demi-god' children to fulfil ridiculosuly dangerous 'quests' that often involved them getting killed.
It also involved them getting in everyone else's way.
Jack distinctly remember his godmother, Aunty Tooth, threatening to enforce health and safety rules on the demi-gods after one kid got all his teeth knocked out and swallowed by a monster before her fairies could collect them.
"What do you want, son of Hades," Pitch snapped at the boy. It was his boogey man face, the one that usually had children running away screaming.
The boy, Nico di Angelo if Jack recalled correctly, just glared back.
"If I had what I wanted, I wouldn’t be here."
Pitch actually rolled his eyes, "Then why are you here?"
Nico scowled. "Dad says to stop giving dying children nightmares."
"They're dying, of course they'd have nightmares."
"Well refrain from providing them."
The two glared at each other some more. Pitch was adjusted his grip on his wand and Nico had a hand on the hilt of his sword. Jack sincerely hope they don’t actually come to blows, getting in the crossfire of that would not be fun.
"Tell your father to 'refrain' from getting in the way of my job," Pitch all but sneered.
Even if Nico wasn't a demi-god, Pitch never liked interacting with people. Actually, Jack thinks his uncle just didn't like people.
Nico didn't seem all that affected by the sneering, as if he faced worse every day. The boy simply sent his own icy stare back.
Jack rarely saw Nico, especially if his uncle was not present, but he always got the impression that Nico didn't like people much either. He wondered if it was a shared trait amongst people who like shadows and darkness and caves.