Chapter Text
Harry couldn’t, wouldn’t let go. The handle of the cup cut into his palm and his knuckles popped with the strain of holding so tightly to Cedric’s robes. The noise was deafening and there were people moving around him but, face pressed into the grass of the pitch, he could see none of it. Amos Diggory was moving closer, saying things with increasing worry and Harry's gut twisted. He didn't want to face this, couldn't face this.
Then it happened.
Cedric’s chest, which had been so still only a moment ago, lifted under his hand. Harry didn’t have even a split second to register this because, in a blinding flash, Harry’s scar burned as it never had before. He lost track of the world as his head was ripped in two, but the older boy too had gasped in a breath only to release it in a long, drawn out scream of agony. The twisted harmony of their suffering tore the night apart.
Harry woke, as he had so many times before, in the Hospital Wing. The curtains were drawn around his bed but late afternoon sunlight painted bright shapes into the material and burned his eyes. He grimaced and put a hand over them, giving himself one glorious moment of semidarkness.
Then a series of familiar sounds, far too loud, crashed through his ears as his friends noticed him.
Hermione jumped up from the squeaky chair beside him and parted the curtains to call, “He’s awake!”
Ron from his other side said, exasperated, “Give him a minute, Hermione, he’s not even said anything yet.”
Harry’s thoughts were still sluggish and slow, his tongue coated in the heavy bitterness of healing potions. He blinked his eyes open to find the world blurry and out of focus.
A smudge of red hair was leaning in, helpfully holding out something black and wiry that could only be Harry’s glasses. He levered himself up and pawed at the air. His depth perception was ruined by the tilting of the room and he found Ron’s elbow first.
“Take it easy, you’ve been out of it for three days, mate,” Ron said, taking Harry’s wrist and placing the glasses into his hand.
Harry jammed them on with a muttered thanks just as none other than Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather and the most wanted man in the country, shoved the curtain aside.
“Sirius, what are you doing,” Harry tried to shout, frantic. The words came as wheezing and then a hacking cough as air caught in his dry throat though.
Sirius dropped into Hermione’s vacated seat, looking far more concerned about Harry than himself. He snatched up the cup of water on the bedside table and pressed it into Harry’s hands. He drank gratefully, polishing off the glass in seconds.
Sirius took it from him and refilled it while Harry stared, bewildered, between him and everyone else in the room. Madam Pomfrey was hovering right over Sirius’s shoulder, for Merlin’s sake. None of them seemed at all bothered that an escaped convict was in their midst with absolutely no cloaking or disguise though.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Harry tried again, addressing his godfather in a low, hurried whisper.
Sirius let out a bark of a laugh that surprised Harry so much he jumped. Sirius clapped him on the shoulder with the widest grin Harry had ever seen on anyone. It took years off his face, bringing back some of that handsome youth Harry had glimpsed in pictures.
There was such a note of triumph in Sirius’s voice as he said, “As a free man, I have every right to see my godson.”
Harry’s head spun, both elated and horribly confused. “How,” he asked, stumbling over the word.
Sirius opened his mouth to speak, eyes bright, when two disapproving throats cleared behind him. He glanced over at Hermione and Madam Pomfrey, who were both giving him disapproving looks.
He shrunk slightly under their heated glares, but still asked, genuinely perplexed, “What?”
“Perhaps that is a tale for another time, he’s only just woken up.” Harry had rarely heard the nurse sound so stern but he had the strange desire now to lay back, complicit to any demand. She could rival Professor McGonagall if she really put her mind to it.
Sirius did not seem to agree. He straightened with a snort, shaking his head. “He deserves to know what he went through did some good.”
“No, she’s right,” Hermione said, matching Pomfrey’s stern demeanor to a T. “Harry should be recovering, he doesn’t need to think about all that right now.”
“All what? What happened,” Harry demanded. Being spoken about as though he were some china pot was grating on his nerves.
“Peter Pettigrew’s dead,” Ron supplied, pointedly ignoring the look Hermione shot him. “The Aurors found him in the graveyard where the portkey took you, strangled by some weird, cursed hand.”
Harry did not know how to feel about that. He stared down at his arms, one of them still bandaged, and felt again a silver knife slicing him. Then the dark cemetery and a crowd of hooded figures flashed before Harry’s eyes, a high, cold laugh echoing in his ears.
“Did they find him, did they find Voldemort,” he asked, his heart in his throat.
There were flinches and a scandalized noise from Madam Pomfrey, but Harry ignored all of it, intent. Hermione and Ron exchanged a coded look before Ron said, with a hint of bitterness, “The Minster says the investigation’s still ongoing so we’ve not been getting much information about what they found besides Pettigrew’s body. There’s a lot of crazy rumors going around though. Did you,” Ron paused to swallow and glanced around like the man himself might be standing behind him before he asked, leaning in to almost whisper, “did you really see him?”
“We have to tell Dumbledore right away,” Harry was saying, kicking his blankets off. “He has his body back. He called his Death Eaters and he’s–”
“Mr. Potter, do NOT leave that bed,” Madam Pomfrey ordered. Her wand was out and the sheets were tucking themselves back in, holding down his legs. Harry struggled against them but they were stubbornly immovable.
“Calm down, Harry,” Sirius said, his hand a steady weight on Harry’s shoulder. “You’ve just been through hell, let the adults take care of it for once. I’ll bring Dumbledore, you try to relax.”
Harry was torn. He needed to speak with the Headmaster, but he did not want Sirius to leave his side now that he had him here; this man had been snatched from him too often already. Sirius looked so assured though, exuding that confidence he was in control of things, that he would really be back. Harry finally gave up his fruitless battle with the bedclothes and fell back against the pillows in defeat. Sirius chuckled warmly at him as he stood and pushed past the curtains.
His even footsteps echoed away out of the Hospital Wing and each seemed to reverberate in Harry’s head at ten times the volume. He hadn’t realized how badly his head was aching. Then, Madam Pomfrey was holding out something, instructing him to drink. He swallowed it mechanically and the pain instantly left.
“That’s loads better, thanks,” he said, giving her a weak smile.
“Of course, dear,” she said, patting his wrist gently.
“Cedric will be so glad to hear you’re alright. He’s been asking for you since he woke up,” Hermione said.
Harry frowned at her. Surely, he’d heard wrong. “Cedric who?”
“Diggory,” Ron said, as though it were obvious. “Blimey, Harry, you should know, you dragged him back.”
“That's not possible,” Harry said with a shake of his head, the words sticking a bit in his throat. “Cedric Diggory is dead.”
His friends exchanged bewildered looks.
“He’s having some memory problems, but I assure you, he is alive and well,” the nurse said with her best soothing bedside manner.
“That’s not possible,” Harry repeated, more angrily this time. “Wormtail used the killing curse on him, I saw it.”
“If it will bring you peace of mind, I’ll fetch him,” Madam Pomfrey said, departing through the gap Sirius had left in the curtain.
As soon as she was out of sight, Ron leaned in and demanded, “What do you mean ‘he’s dead’? I mean, yeah, he’s a little off, but he’s not–”
Hermione’s voice cut over Ron’s as she said, “You must have heard wrong. I mean, that isn’t the only green spell in the world.”
“I don’t know, that spell’s pretty unmistakable, Hermione,” Ron pointed out.
“It was a highly stressful situation. And what’s the other alternative? He’s a zombie?”
“I wouldn’t put it past old snake face to know how to do it.”
Harry had stopped listening ages ago as a silhouette darkened the curtain. A familiar boy appeared in the gap, grey eyes watching him from under dark hair.
“There’s not a spell like that. Reanimating the dead just keeps the body moving, it can’t simulate–” But the new arrival stopped Hermione in her tracks as he said, “Harry Potter, awake at last.”
Though it was certainly Cedric’s body acting, everything, from the way he carried himself to the cadence of his voice belonged to someone else, someone Harry had met years ago in the pages of a diary.
“Tom,” he asked, his lips numb.
Something behind the eyes that had once been Cedric’s became shuttered and his voice was more neutral as he said, “I’ll admit, I don’t remember much, but I’m pretty sure that’s not my name.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Harry spat, barely aware of what he was saying, anger burning like a fire through his veins as he felt for his wand at the bedside table. “So then, do you prefer Voldemort, the Dark Lord, or have you picked a new name to start your reign of terror?”
His friends were confused, a touch alarmed even, but the boy in Hufflepuff robes did not react, fingers wrapped subtly around his own wand as he watched Harry, careful.
“You seem a bit confused as I couldn’t possibly be. After all, I watched you blow that man’s body to pieces. For the second time,” Tom said, that cool, easy charm enough to fool most, but Harry could swear he heard bitterness and fury under those last words, like he couldn’t help reminding Harry of how much he had ruined his carefully laid plans yet again.
Harry’s hand finally found his wand and he whipped it forward, pointing it at Cedric’s chest. The false Hufflepuff’s wand was up and ready though, lightning quick. They stared each other down, Harry glaring while Tom kept up a maddening neutrality.
Ron and Hermione were speaking, unnerved by the hostility, but their words fell on deaf ears.
“You don’t want to cross wands with me,” Tom said, coolly, his words barely a whisper under theirs.
A smirk crossed Harry’s lips at that despite the cold sweat running down his spine. “Always seems to work out better for me than you.”
Hatred glowed in the depths of Cedric’s eyes, but none of the emotion showed on his handsome face. He took a careful, deliberate step back.
“There’s a lot I want to talk with you about, but perhaps we should continue this another time,” Tom said, then he was gone, his steps retreating into the castle.
His friends still looked skeptical, but they weren’t denouncing him on the spot as a loony. Though it likely helped that Ron had recently sworn off ever accusing him of lying and attention seeking.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, but,” Hermione said and Harry tensed like he was waiting for an attack, “we do have to acknowledge the possibility that the both of you were hit with some kind of memory altering magic.”
"Having an evil dark wizard in your head would cause some 'memory problems,'" Ron said, using Madam Pomfrey's words with a dark chuckle.
“It really happened,” Harry insisted. “I don’t know how, but Voldemort is inside Cedric’s body.”
“Honestly, I just don’t like thinking about You-Know-Who possessing corpses whenever he feels like it,” Ron admitted with a shudder, nose wrinkled in disgust. “Just when you think that guy couldn’t get any creepier…”
Sirius appeared then, grim. “I’m sorry, Harry. Dumbledore says he’s too busy to come see you at the moment, but he says there's ‘nothing to be concerned about’.” His scowl painted his disagreement clear for all the world.
Harry’s skin was buzzing with indignity. “Voldemort is walking around in Cedric Diggory’s body, he can’t just ignore this!”
After his initial shock, a frown formed on Sirius’s brow and he scrutinized Harry for a moment. His words were cautious as he said, “As far as anyone can tell, the Diggory boy is suffering from memory loss.”
“I just talked to him, he good as admitted it!”
Sirius glanced at the other two. Hermione did not meet his eyes, still clearly undecided. Ron gave a shrug that could mean anything then caught Harry’s eye and added quickly, “He did seem a bit shifty.”
“He pulled a wand on me,” Harry waved his own for emphasis.
“You started that,” Hermione pointed out coolly. Harry shot her a glare, but she was unphased.
A dark look crossed Sirius’s face as he glanced toward the gap in the curtains. Harry got the distinct impression that his godfather, at least, was taking him seriously. When he turned back there was something almost dangerous about him. Still, he said, “I’m sure Dumbledore has it under control.”
“And if he doesn’t,” Harry demanded. It wouldn’t be the first time Dumbledore had missed Voldemort in the castle.
“You still have the map, don’t you?” Harry nodded to Sirius’s question, but before he could say anything, Sirius continued, “Good. Use it to keep yourselves as far away from him as possible until we get to the bottom of this. There’s a lot of strange things going on lately and, if what you’re saying is true, we have a new problem to worry about.”