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Chapter Text

May 2, 1998

The Great Hall was burning.

Smoke curled against the vaulted ceiling, blackening the stone where once hundreds of candles had floated serenely, dripping wax onto golden plates and polished goblets. The long tables were split and skewed like broken ribs; a Gryffindor banner, half-charred, sagged from its pole and smoldered on the flagstones. The air tasted of metal and ash. Somewhere beyond the doors, a giant bellowed, and the castle answered with a shudder that sifted grey dust from the ceiling like snow.

Elara Auclair pressed both palms against the chest of a boy no older than fifteen, a Hufflepuff who had been dragged half-dead into her reach by two trembling classmates. His tie was askew; his cheeks were freckled under the soot. Blood bubbled through her fingers, warm and slick, pooling along the creases of her knuckles. She could feel his heart fluttering faintly under the heel of her hand, a trapped bird’s wing beating itself thin.

“Tergeo,” she whispered, siphoning blood from the wound so she could see. “Episkey. Episkey—”

The skin tried to knit, then broke again with a soft wet sound. Elara gritted her teeth and pressed harder. Her breath came in ragged pulls; every inhalation scraped her throat raw with smoke. She had a single vial of dittany left—she had already halved and quartered its use across a dozen cuts that were never small enough. She uncorked it with her teeth, dripped three drops into the wound, and swallowed the useless urge to apologize when it stung and did too little.

“Anapneo,” she whispered to the girl on the boy’s other side, whose breath rattled and caught; phlegm cleared with a sickly click. “It’s going to be all right,” she lied, because people needed the shape of hope even when there was none.

Her magic stuttered, caught, frayed. It drained through her bones like sand through glass. She felt it as a physical weakening: a cold in the marrow, the tremor in her fingers that no will could steady. She had always been good at healing—her one talent, whispered about but never admired, because what glory was there in closing scratches in a world that praised Quidditch scores and dueling hexes? No one applauded the girl who carried plasters and dittany in her satchel; no one put her name on a House Cup plaque for memorizing the counter-curse to a curse that everyone else was busy learning to cast.

Even her professors had said it kindly, dismissively: Pomfrey might take you on as an assistant one day, Auclair. Not everyone is made for the field. Invisible. Ordinary. That was her place.

Her father, a third-generation Squib, had taught her the art of occupying corners. Better not to be seen, Elara, he used to say as he scrubbed his working hands with cheap soap that never cut the grease. The world can’t hurt what it doesn’t see. He fixed things—radiators, kettles, the kind of magic that muggles called electricity and wizards called a nuisance. He’d always been polite to witches and wizards and twice as polite to the ones who sneered. We’re the quiet ones, he’d murmur as they walked home through streets that didn’t belong to them. We keep the lights on. They never ask who did it.

Her mother, a muggle who worried too much, had only let her come to Hogwarts because the castle was safer than any school they could afford. “It’s a boarding school, isn’t it?” she had whispered on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, fussing with Elara’s second-hand robes—let down once, then again, the hem a faint line of needle-pricks. “At least you’ll be fed. At least you’ll be safe.” Her mother had kissed her brow and tried not to show relief at the gates closing behind her daughter and locking out the world.

Safe.

Elara pressed on the boy’s chest until his ribs creaked. “Stay with me,” she hissed between her teeth. “Stay.”

She’d learned the sound of bones when they were close to breaking in Madam Pomfrey’s infirmary—a detention that had turned into an apprenticeship of sorts, the nurse tossing her a roll of bandages with a brusque, “Hands like yours shouldn’t be idle.” She remembered rolling gauze tight around a Ravenclaw Chaser’s ankle and the way Pomfrey said, softer than she spoke to anyone else, There’s more to magic than force, Auclair. It’s how you hold it steady that counts.

She tried to hold steady now. Vulnera Sanentur was too big for her and she knew it, but she gave the smallest thread of it anyway, gentling the syllables, asking them to do less so they might do something. The torn flesh tightened a fraction.

A scream broke off to her right. A boy stumbled past—Slytherin green scorched brown along his sleeve—dragging someone by the armpits. “She can help!” he shouted to no one and everyone. “The wing’s gone, the wing’s gone—”

The world jolted again; dust plumed from a split pillar; a silver-helmeted knight toppled with a clang that vibrated the floor. Elara’s ears rang until the sound was a single, thin, unbearable note.

“Please,” someone sobbed. “Please, please—”

There was never enough of her to go around. She split again anyway, one hand still braced on the boy, the other skimming to the side to touch the wrist of a girl whose pulse thrummed too fast. “Rennervate,” she murmured, and the girl’s eyelids fluttered, then opened, raw with confusion. “You’re all right,” Elara lied again. “You’re all—”

A cough racked her; she choked and tasted copper. She realized dimly that some of the blood on her hands was hers—a shallow cut across her palm where glass had kissed her skin when a window blew.

Her father’s voice rose in her memory, harsh with protective love: Don’t wear yourself out for people who wouldn’t see you if you were standing right in front of them. He had meant the wizarding world, with all its disdain for a squib’s bloodline. He had meant that their family was better off unnoticed. Let the great and the good save the day. He had meant safety.

But Elara had never been good at letting anyone else bleed alone.

She saw flashes of the life that had taught her this: hiding beneath the kitchen table while her parents argued in low, tired voices about rent; the day her father came home with a split lip, smiling anyway; her mother teaching her to darn socks until the thread almost disappeared; the giddy, impossible green of her first Hogwarts spring seen from the Ravenclaw Tower, where the wind always smelled cleaner; the way Madam Pomfrey’s hands hovered over a patient as if respect were part of the spell.

The torches blurred. Shadows leapt and collapsed. One shape detached itself from the jumble and became a boy.

Draco Malfoy.

She’d seen him for years as one sees a constellation, points of light connected by assumption. The tilt of his head when he laughed like a knife drawn along glass. The impeccable knot of his tie. The classical profile that witches sighed over and that made boys harder on themselves. He’d moved through corridors on currents other students couldn’t catch—a glittering thing in a school where glitter mattered. She had practiced not looking at him the way one practiced not staring at the sun.

Now he stumbled from a collapsing archway, one arm raised to shield himself from stone dust. His robes hung scorched and torn, the hem blackened and curled by fire. His pale hair was streaked with soot; a smear of ash cut across his cheekbone. He looked smaller without the posture of privilege—just a boy who had been too close to a terrible heat.

His eyes were wide and rimmed red, not from tears but from smoke—or perhaps both. He moved like someone who had run until there was nowhere left to run. And when his gaze snagged on hers, it stopped as if he had hit a wall.

Elara didn’t mean to still. She didn’t mean to see him any more than she meant to see the gilded frame on a portrait while the person inside it screamed. But for a heartbeat the chaos around them emptied of sound. His stare—grey and stunned—shone with an identical understanding to her own: not just fear, but the nausea of realizing how ridiculous their schooling had been in the face of this. How their essays and house points and whispered gossip had nothing to say about a world ending.

He took half a step toward her. His mouth opened. She felt her lips part in answer—maybe to call his name, maybe only to pull in air.

She would never know.

The curse that struck her was quick, merciful in its way. A green blade of light she did not see until it was on her. The shock of it rang through her bones; the world skidded sideways. She collapsed beside the boy she hadn’t saved, cheek striking stone. The magic leaked out of her like water from a broken cup.

There was no time to be afraid. Only the faint, bitter thought that she had always been invisible, and would die the same.

Somewhere very far away, someone screamed her name—or perhaps it was another girl’s name altogether, and she borrowed it because it was kinder to die being called for. Her last sensation was of blood cooling tacky between her fingers, the way the Great Hall smelled when the candles were out and the feast was over—a mingling of wax and meat and iron—and, threaded through it, smoke like a memory burned to the wick.

Darkness folded in.

Chapter Text

Autumn 1994

A gasp ripped through her throat.

Elara sat upright. The blue curtains of the Ravenclaw dormitory hung heavy around her, embroidered with bronze thread that caught the pale seep of dawn like dull metal. Her lungs clawed for air; it felt as if water had been poured into them and she was coughing it out invisible. Her skin was damp with sweat as though she had been drowning. The echo of curses still thrummed in her bones, a phantom ache where no wound lay.

She pressed both hands to her chest. She expected blood. She expected the solid obstruction of a rib broken wrong or the sickly heat of a curse. Instead, her fingertips met the familiar weave of her nightgown, soft and worn, the hem mended by her mother’s careful backstitch. She watched her own hands tremble. They were clean. The crescent scar on her left palm—earned in second year when she ran a knife clumsily through nettles for a potion—showed pale against her skin.

Outside the curtains, voices floated—ordinary laughter, muffled through stone and tapestry. Someone yawned elaborately. A bedframe creaked. The wind scratched at the high windows like a polite guest.

Elara slid off the mattress and her feet found the cold wool of the rug. She stared at the run of her shoes set side by side—scuffed at the heels, polished poorly—and the neat stack of books on her trunk. Hogwarts: A History. Advanced Spells for the Discerning Mind. A slim pamphlet on healing charms she had begged Madam Pince to let her borrow the previous term, kept too long and hidden beneath a heavier volume so Filch wouldn’t see if he rifled.

She pushed back the curtains.

The fourth-year dormitory stretched around her, a circle of four-poster beds and trunks and draped scarves, all the colors subdued to a blue-washed hush by morning. Someone had pinned a Ravenclaw badge to the bed-hangings opposite, the eagle’s wing frayed. The frost along the nearest window traced ferns across the glass; beyond, the Black Lake lay dull as hammered pewter.

Her gaze snagged on the desk by her bed—the inkpot tipped over and dried to a dark stain, a quill bristling with ink that had glued its feathers stiff. She remembered that: she had fallen asleep over her Astronomy chart two nights before Michael Corner’s birthday, and in the morning there had been swearing and vinegar and sand. That had been… was going to be… would be… in a few days.

Her breath came short and quick. She counted in the way Madam Pomfrey had shown her—in—two—three, out—two—three——until the walls stopped heaving.

This was not a dream. Dreams did not smell so sharply of cold stone and parchment. Dreams did not return your own body to you with such awful precision. Her nightgown chafed the crease of her elbow exactly where the seam had always been wonky. The floorboard by her trunk squeaked on the second step and not the first. She could hear the riddle-knocker two levels below asking a too-early eagle what walks on four legs in the morning and two at noon and none at night, and a sleepy student muttering, “That’s not how the story goes,” and the knocker saying placidly, “It does today.”

Elara crossed to the window and pressed her forehead to the cold pane. Her breath fogged a circle; she wiped it away with the side of her hand. The grounds spread quiet and innocent below—green sloping to water, the Forbidden Forest darkly kind at its edge. Hagrid’s hut was a small square; smoke rose from its chimney in a friendly line. The castle’s shadow lay long and exactly where it should be.

She knew this morning. She knew this week. She knew the shape of the days that would come next: rumors thickening into gossip, gossip into certainty, certainty into awe as the Triwizard Tournament was announced. She knew the enormous carriage that would descend like a blue whale from the sky, and the ship that would shoulder up out of the lake, sheds of water shining on its decks like mirror scales. She knew the names Beauxbatons and Durmstrang whispered in a dozen accents. She knew Cho Chang’s laughter would ring brighter for a while and then go narrowly, horribly quiet.

Cho had not yet lost her boyfriend.

Elara slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her knees to her chest. She pressed her forehead to them and tried to breathe evenly. A laugh, from the common room, looped up the stairs—easily, ignorantly happy. She had loved that laugh once: the sound of other people’s lives happening in safe, ordinary rhythms while she studied. She heard it now as if from under water.

Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She lifted them because not looking at them made it worse. They were small and competent. The hangnail on her ring finger was almost healed. There was a faint crescent of yellow under her index nail where she’d been careless with turmeric for a salve—a memory of a memory, a detail before the war she could not possibly have carried after dying, and yet here it was, present as breath.

Her mind, that diligent Ravenclaw thing, tried to catalogue. I remember the seventh year that I did not live this time. I remember Carrows. I remember a friend who didn’t come back after Easter. I remember the smell of the Great Hall burning. I remember Draco Malfoy’s face, ash-smeared and startled, his eyes locking on mine.

Draco Malfoy.

The name pulsed, inexplicably, as if it belonged to the mechanism of her heart. Elara squeezed her eyes shut and saw him again—staggering, the immaculate mask broken, the hems of his robes singed into crooked black petals. She had the strangest conviction that he had taken a step toward her a moment before she died, as if her small corner of the catastrophe had tugged at him with a string neither of them had known was there.

It meant nothing. It had to. They had never spoken. At best he might have once taken the seat behind her in a Charms lesson when he’d come late and all the Slytherin side was full; he might have sneered at her second-hand copy of Standard Book of Spells, Grade Four—except she couldn’t remember if that had actually happened or if she’d only feared it so vividly it became memory. A boy like him did not notice a girl like her, except perhaps to step around her if she was cleaning up someone else’s accident.

And yet the image persisted, sharp as a cut: the way his gaze had fastened to hers like a hook. Not recognition. Something more like—agreement, terrible and brief—that this was all too much. That they had been children asked to hold back a tide with their hands.

She put her palm, the one with the old nettle-scar, flat to the floor to ground herself. The stone was cold and steady. She matched her breath to that steadiness until the panic slid its claws loose.

She stood, eventually, because the clock on the far wall—a stately old thing with an eagle whose wing swept the minutes—told her the hour was moving. It would be breakfast soon. Students would climb out of bed and pull on robes and argue about toast. If she stayed in the dormitory, someone would start asking questions, and she had no answers to give.

She washed her face in the basin, flinching at the ordinariness of the water’s chill and the thin white towel with her surname embroidered in a teacher’s careful hand. She pulled on her uniform as if she were dressing a stranger in her clothes. Her tie came out crooked twice before she managed the knot she had been making for years.

On the desk lay the pamphlet on healing. She touched it lightly, as one touches a headstone. The notion rose unbidden that perhaps she was meant to do something different now that she had been unwound and set down again earlier in the pattern. The thought felt too large to look at directly, like the sun. She shelved it behind the smaller, more manageable terror that if she changed one thing, she might change everything—might erase every future she had come from, even the people in it she had lost.

Her mother’s hands flickered through her mind, red from dishwater, guiding a needle through cloth. If something tears, she’d say, you fix what you can reach. Don’t go ripping the whole dress to save one seam. You’ll be left naked and cold. Elara couldn’t breathe for a moment at the memory of that voice; she shut the drawer on it gently, as if closing a music box before the last note could play.

She looked once more at the window. A gull arrowed past, white and simple against the pewter lake. Somewhere below, the riddle-knocker asked another ques­tion in a tone both patient and faintly amused. The castle’s heartbeat went on without noticing her small resurrection.

Elara opened the dormitory door.

The corridor beyond smelled of parchment and stone and the faint mink-oil tang of well-kept brooms. At the landing, she paused and put her hand lightly to the rail. The wood was polished by a thousand hands; it took her weight without complaint. A pair of first-years thundered past, giggling, their robes still slightly too long. One of them bumped Elara and said, “Sorry!” without looking at her face. She found that this ordinary invisibility, this longstanding talent for not being seen, slipped over her like a cloak—and that for the first time it felt like both shield and sentence.

At the top of the stairs, the door to the common room stood closed, the bronze knocker shaped like an eagle’s head gleaming even in weak light. It turned as she approached.

“Good morning,” it said pleasantly. “Before you leave, answer me this: What can you break, even if you never touch it?”

Elara stared at the beak. The answer rose, inevitable. “A promise,” she said, and heard, layered under the words, the quiet vow she had made in a burning hall to a boy she did not save, to a girl who coughed blood, to herself: I will try. I will try even when it is not enough. She wondered what it meant to say that again now that she had another chance.

“Correct,” said the knocker, and the door swung open to let her through.

The common room was exactly itself: round and high, blue and bright, carpeted with woven stars. The arched windows spilled early sun across stacks of books and the back of a sleeping cat. A cluster of fifth-years hunched over Arithmancy, their heads bowed as if praying. Someone had left a chessboard mid-game; one black knight kicked its heels idly and glared at her.

Ordinary, ordinary, ordinary.

Elara crossed the room, the image of Draco Malfoy’s ash-streaked face lodged between heartbeats like a stone. She did not know why that moment clung. She did not know what it asked of her, if anything. Perhaps only this: to remember that on the night she died, someone she’d never spoken to saw her. Perhaps that was the smallest seam she could reach with her mother’s thin needle, and perhaps it would hold.

She laid her hand on the exit latch. The metal was cold and sure.

The Triwizard Tournament year had just begun. And she was alive again.

Chapter Text

They came again.

The carriage fell from the sky like some pale leviathan, the gilded wheels flashing as it dipped lower, drawn by six winged horses the size of small elephants. The Beauxbatons banner snapped in the air, its silk almost blinding in the autumn sun. Students craned their necks, pointing, gasping, the same chorus Elara had heard once before.

She gripped the banister of the front steps hard enough that her knuckles ached. She remembered this moment, the weight of déjà vu like an ache beneath her ribs. The first time she had watched them arrive, she had been sixteen—half curious, half resentful that her classmates saw only glamour in the spectacle. Now she felt only dread.

Then the lake erupted.

The Durmstrang ship surged up from its depths, water cascading down its sides in sheets, lanterns flickering as if they’d burned steadily beneath the waves all this time. The air thickened with shouts and laughter. Boys in thick furs clambered onto the deck, stamping their boots, calling to one another in accents Hogwarts students mimicked cruelly behind their backs. Krum walked among them, already a legend.

Nostalgia and terror tangled in Elara’s throat. She had seen this before. She knew exactly how it would end. The day glittered with spectacle, but beneath its surface ran a dark current, tugging inexorably toward the moment Cedric Diggory would walk into a graveyard and never return.

She forced herself to breathe evenly, to keep her expression calm as the other students chattered. “Incredible, isn’t it?” one of the Ravenclaws beside her whispered, eyes wide as the ship settled into place. Elara nodded mutely. She wanted to say, Yes, incredible, and terrible, and none of you know where this parade is leading. But she swallowed it back.

By the time the carriages rolled them up to the castle for the welcoming feast, her hands were still trembling against her lap.

The talk of the Goblet consumed the castle. The enchanted cup had been placed in the Entrance Hall under Dumbledore’s watchful eye, blue-white flames licking its rim. Sixth- and seventh-years strutted in small groups, debating the “best chance” with the casual arrogance of those who believed their futures belonged to them.

In Ravenclaw Tower, the energy churned around Cho Chang.

It always did. Cho had been beautiful long before she became popular. She had the kind of beauty that drew eyes without effort, wide dark eyes and hair that gleamed in torchlight, a smile that seemed to promise she understood you. Now, with the Tournament arriving, that attention doubled, tripled. Everyone wanted to know what it felt like to date the boy whose name was on every betting whisper.

“Cedric’s practically a shoo-in,” Marietta Edgecombe gushed, sprawled across the sofa. “Sixth year, Seeker, prefect—it’s practically written.”

“They’re saying Krum will be chosen,” another girl countered, though without much conviction. “But if Hogwarts has any sense, it’ll be Diggory.”

“Oh, can you imagine?” Marietta’s laugh rang. “The golden couple. Champion and his Ravenclaw queen.”

The others giggled, a bright ripple of sound that filled the common room.

Elara sat tucked near the window, a book open on her knees though her eyes blurred over the words. She had never belonged in Cho’s circle—Cho’s friends spoke easily, confidently, while Elara had always hovered at the edges, a listener instead of a participant. Now the distance between them felt like a chasm.

She thought of Cedric: tall, easy-smiled, a boy who remembered people’s names, who carried himself like the world was a place worth meeting with kindness. She had never spoken to him. Why would he notice her?

Her mind flickered, unbidden, back to the Great Hall, smoke stinging her lungs, her magic spilling out into dying bodies. She saw Draco Malfoy through the haze, his stare locking with hers for one terrible instant before the curse took her. That memory burned sharper than Cedric’s smile ever had.

And yet—it was Cedric who mattered now. Cedric who would walk away and not return.

Elara closed the book on her lap, pressing her palms against the cover as though to ground herself. She could not speak. She could not shout across the room that Cedric’s life was a thread already cut. No one would believe her. She didn’t even believe herself, not fully. She only had the echo of death in her bones, the sick certainty of a pattern she had already lived.

So she began small.

Late that night, when the common room had emptied, she crept down the spiral stair with a slip of parchment in her pocket. Her quill had scrawled only a single line, her hand shaking so badly she’d had to rewrite it three times.

Don’t put your name in the Goblet.

No explanation. No signature. Just the warning.

And yet, getting that folded scrap of parchment to Cedric Diggory without him noticing her was an ordeal that consumed three entire days.

On the first morning, she thought she could simply leave it on his plate at breakfast. Easy. Quick. Anonymous. Except Cedric never sat alone. He was a magnet—surrounded by a constant halo of Hufflepuffs, hands clapping his shoulder, voices calling his name. Elara hovered at the edge of the Great Hall, her note damp from the sweat of her palm, waiting for an opening that never came. Each time she approached, another friend plopped down beside him. By the time she finally tried to dart close, Cedric turned his head at exactly the wrong moment and caught her eye. She panicked, wheeled around, and retreated so fast she crashed into a passing Ravenclaw prefect.

Day two, the library. She trailed Cedric between the stacks, clutching the parchment like it might combust. He settled at a table with his books, and she made it as far as the next aisle over before realizing two giggling Hufflepuff girls had already joined him. From the shadows, Elara tried to slide the note onto the table with a well-aimed flick. Instead, it fluttered sideways, landing squarely in Madam Pince’s line of sight. The librarian swooped down like a hawk, seized the parchment, and tucked it away for “inspection.” Elara spent the rest of the day rewriting the message by candlelight, cursing her own terrible aim.

Day three was worse. She followed him toward the greenhouses, intending to tuck the paper into his bag when he wasn’t looking. Halfway there, he paused to chat with Professor Sprout, and Elara—too close behind—had to dive behind a barrel of dragon dung to avoid being seen. The stench clung to her robes all afternoon, and she swore half of Ravenclaw Tower gave her strange looks at supper.

By the evening of the fourth day, desperation sharpened into recklessness. Cedric had gone up to the Owlery alone, a letter in hand. Elara crept after him, her slippers whispering against the spiral stair. Her heart thundered so loudly she feared he would hear it and turn. She crouched low behind a stone pillar, waiting for her moment.

When his back was turned, she darted forward. Her hands shook so badly the note almost slipped from her grasp. She jammed it into the side pocket of his schoolbag, the fold of leather gaping just enough to take it. For a split second, she froze, convinced he must feel the air shift, must know she was there.

But Cedric only straightened, whistling for his owl. He never looked back.

Elara bolted down the stairs before her knees could give out.

The warning was in his bag now. Whether he found it that night or the next, whether he laughed at it or ignored it completely, it was done. Anonymous. Untraceable.

And yet her stomach twisted as though she had just set fire to the floor beneath her own feet.

For the next few days, Elara’s fingers would not stop wrinkling against each other, twisting the hem of her sleeve or the corner of her quill. Every time Cedric walked by, laughing with his friends, her stomach dropped to her shoes. Had he found the note? Had he read it? Was he thinking about it? Or had it slipped into a forgotten pocket and been washed with the laundry, ink bleeding uselessly away?

She told herself she wouldn’t watch him, and then watched him anyway. Every glance felt dangerous, every heartbeat too loud. Once, she swore Cho’s dark eyes flicked her way with a sharpness that made her neck prickle. Perhaps Cho had noticed her odd lingering, her starts and stops around Cedric like some clumsy shadow. The thought made Elara want to vanish into the stonework.

By Saturday evening, her nerves were so raw she could barely sit still as the whole school gathered in the Great Hall. The Goblet stood alight, blue flames licking the rim, parchments already rustling within. Students milled forward in clusters, laughter and whispers tangling with the buzz of excitement. Names fluttered into the fire one after another, each consumed in a flare of sparks.

It was happening all over again.

Cedric rose from the Hufflepuff table, tall and easy-smiled, his friends slapping his back, whistling, shouting encouragement. Elara’s nails dug into her palms. She tried to tell herself he might hesitate. He might remember. He might—

He didn’t.

He stepped cleanly over the age line, parchment in hand, and with that same calm confidence he slipped it into the fire. The flames flared, blue turned white for a breath, then settled back as if the Goblet had simply swallowed destiny whole.

Elara gasped.

The sound tore out of her before she could stop it. Several Ravenclaws turned, frowning, and she shrank under their glares. The Hufflepuffs were too busy cheering to notice, but Cho wasn’t. Cho’s gaze slid over, sharp and assessing, lingering long enough to send heat rushing to Elara’s face.

She ducked her head, cheeks burning, wishing the floorboards might split and drop her through. Her heart thudded so loudly it drowned the cheers.

The ceremony dragged on—thirty minutes of names fed to fire, laughter and chatter echoing against the high ceiling. The Weasley twins made their infamous attempt, aging potion sloshing in their veins, striding across the line with identical grins. For a glorious, ridiculous instant, the hall held its breath, and then the age line flung them back with a spectacular crack. They sprawled across the flagstones, beards blooming wildly, curses and laughter mingling as half the hall doubled over. Dumbledore clapped his hands once, smiling with infuriating calm, and the Goblet burned steadily on.

Exactly as before.

And Harry Potter never moved. He sat at the Gryffindor table, thin shoulders hunched, eyes shadowed as though already weary of the weight he hadn’t yet been asked to bear. He didn’t rise. He didn’t put his name in.

And yet—

Elara sat rigid at the Ravenclaw table, waiting in agony. Every rustle of parchment into the fire felt like a hammer striking closer and closer to the moment she dreaded most. She pressed her fingers white against her knees, willing the air to stay in her lungs, willing the pattern to break.

Her gaze drifted, traitorously, helplessly, to the Slytherin side.

To him.

Draco Malfoy sat among his housemates, head tilted as though the spectacle amused him more than it concerned him. His pale hair gleamed in the firelight, his expression sharp, untouched. He leaned back with that easy arrogance she remembered, lips curling faintly as the twins’ disaster replayed in whispers around the room.

And for the hundredth time since she had woken in her fourth-year bed, Elara felt the unbearable weight of two futures colliding—the one she remembered ending in fire and blood, and the one unfolding now, identical step for step.

She lowered her gaze quickly, afraid someone—Cho, Draco, fate itself—might see too much in her eyes.

But still, in her chest, the ache burned on.

The Goblet burned steadily through the week, blue-white flame licking upward as if it was savoring the secrets dropped into its core.

On Halloween night, the Great Hall glowed with jack-o’-lantern light and feasting shadows. The air was thick with roasted pumpkin, cinnamon, and nervous anticipation. Elara barely touched her food. Her eyes kept dragging toward the Goblet, which pulsed faintly every so often, like a beast exhaling.

And then, at last, Dumbledore rose. His voice carried with that peculiar gentleness that demanded silence. “The champions will be chosen.”

The flames shifted, flaring red, then gold. Sparks spat into the air, bright as meteors. A scrap of parchment soared upward, twisting lazily before Dumbledore’s long fingers plucked it from the air. He read the name aloud:

“Viktor Krum!”

The Durmstrang table erupted. Cheers thundered, boots stamping against stone. Krum rose with the ponderous grace of someone long accustomed to admiration. He looked half-bored by it, as if competing in the Tournament were just another weekend chore. The rest of the hall roared anyway.

Elara’s palms were damp where they pressed against her knees. Her heartbeat felt like it was lodged in her throat. Here it comes, she thought. Don’t gasp this time. Don’t you dare.

The Goblet flared again. Sparks, smoke, a second scrap of parchment.

“Fleur Delacour!”

The Beauxbatons table nearly tipped from the force of their applause. Fleur stood, hair like spun light, chin lifted with an elegance that made half the boys in the hall gape as if they’d never seen a girl before. The Hogwarts girls muttered, half-scandalized, half-envious.

Elara barely noticed. Her eyes were fixed on the Goblet, waiting for the third name. Please, not again. Please, please, please—

The fire flared. The third slip shot up. Dumbledore caught it, read it, and spoke.

“Cedric Diggory!”

The Hufflepuff table exploded in noise. Cheers, shrill whistles, stamping feet. They rose in a wave, clapping him on the back as he stood—tall, shining, his smile quick but modest, like he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

Elara bit down on her lip so hard she tasted iron. She did not gasp this time. She did not scream. But inside, she was shrieking. She wanted to rise, grab him by the sleeve, and shake him until he swore never to set foot in the maze, never to touch the Goblet, never to take one more heroic step forward.

Instead, she sat frozen.

She didn’t cheer. Her housemates did, of course, all except her. The silence of her stillness burned hotter than if she had shouted. Cho was already on her feet, eyes shining, clapping furiously. Her hair swung over her shoulders as she turned to watch Cedric cross the hall.

And Elara sat, tasting blood, her hands clenched in her lap.

Maybe… maybe this time would be different. Maybe fate would blink, just once. Maybe—

The Goblet flared again.

No.

The flames shot high, scarlet streaking into white. Gasps rose. A fourth scrap of parchment soared, twisting in the air.

Dumbledore caught it, his face tightening, then smoothing into neutrality. “Harry Potter.”

The hall broke. Gasps, murmurs, disbelief so loud it shook the banners.

“He’s not of age!”

“He put his name in!”

“He couldn’t have—”

“He must have—”

The professors leapt to their feet. Madam Maxime’s voice rang sharp, Karkaroff’s louder still, fury cutting through the din. Dumbledore’s calm snapped into steel as he demanded silence.

But for Elara, the noise might as well not exist.

Harry Potter’s name had been called again.

And that meant one thing.

Fate hadn’t budged. Fate hadn’t listened to her feeble, frantic attempt to change anything. It had simply steamrolled on, crushing her small, trembling warning into the dirt.

Inside, she laughed. The brittle, cracked echo of laughter, because what else could she do? Of course. Of course the universe didn’t take notes from Elara Auclair, invisible Ravenclaw with a talent for healing scratches. Why would it? She was a speck, a background smudge. Fate wouldn’t pause for people like her. It never had.

She pressed her lips together, forcing the sound back, while her chest ached with horror. Her housemates whispered furiously, eyes darting between Dumbledore and Harry and the Goblet. Cho had gone pale, staring at Cedric, at Harry, at the madness of it all.

But Elara… Elara only felt the weight of what she already knew: this was the first nail hammered into the coffin for a third of the people in this room. A coffin she herself had already lain in once.

And all she could do was sit, silent, and watch the story replay.

Chapter Text

Elara liked lists. She had always liked lists. They were neat and predictable in a way the world, pre-war and post-war and now-rewound, cruelly refused to be. Lists made chaos into a problem that could be scheduled, prioritized, cross-checked.

If she could not stop fate outright, perhaps she could desk-manage it into something less lethal.

So she made a list. She did what Ravenclaws did when faced with something unsolvable: she reduced it to components and applied unreasonable amounts of footnotes.

1. Notes already written: a tally of the scraps shoved into a champion’s belongings that never quite reached the one life that mattered. Each one worse than the last in handwriting and tone—the first a neat, cautious Don’t put your name in the Goblet, the last a jagged, ink-blotted you will die if you don’t drop out of the games that read like it had been written with fingernails. Purpose: Warn. Result: Ignored. Moral: Paper is not persuasive.
   
   
2. Direct intervention at the Goblet: The fantasy version of this involved a dramatic midnight incantation, a stealthy swig of Polyjuice, and the Goblet vomiting up a list of alternative champions—preferably sheep, perhaps a goat. Probability of success: 0.05 (if you believed in miracles). Probability of detention and/or expulsion: 0.95. Side effects: Possible burning to ash, accidental summoning of house elves. Verdict: Admirably theatrical; not recommended.
   
   
3. Convince Cho directly: Walk up to the prettiest, most adored girl in the room and tell her bluntly, Don’t let Cedric go. Hand him a signed petition, organize a charm-based intervention, or—Elara shuddered—a public speech. Pros: Emotional leverage. Cons: Cho had gone from being privately inaccessible to publicly encircled. Approaching looked like intruding on a garden party where everyone else had been given hors d’oeuvres. Verdict: Socially impossible without a louder voice, better shoes, and, ideally, a cloak of invisibility.
   
   
4. Be useful in the only way I know how: Become indispensable at the infirmary. If she could make herself needed by the champions—mend a sprain, soothe a bruise—she might be permitted, even asked, into their circle. Pros: Plausible. Aligns with existing skills. Cons: The champions (and Cho’s entourages) were surrounded by the school’s tapped-out network of attentions: Pomfrey, visiting healers, parents, adoring friends. And the sort of wound that got you close enough to whisper strategy was rarely the kind that could be manufactured ethically. Verdict: Slow, boring, morally fine, and likely to be politely ignored.
   
   
5. Gather allies: Recruit someone with proximity: a distracted prefect, a friend of a friend, a Weasley with a penchant for mischief but also for decency. Pros: Shared risk. More hands. Cons: People were notoriously bad at carrying other people’s catastrophes; they prefer the weight of their own. Also, how do you recruit help for a prophecy you can’t prove without sounding either insane or melodramatic? Verdict: Necessary long-term, unworkable short-term.
   
   
6. Bribe a house-elf to slip a charm into Cedric’s robe: Not remotely legal. Involves slavery ethics and, if discovered, severity beyond detention. Verdict: Do not.
   
   
7. Ask Draco Malfoy for help: The thought arrived unbidden and absurd, like a moth circling a bulb. Pros: He’d seen her in the smoke once; he’d looked at her, which meant—what, exactly? That he was a conduit for fate? That a Slytherin heir might lend a hand? Cons: He was Draco Malfoy. He and his court were busy turning cruelty into sport. Asking him felt like asking a storm to wear a hat. Verdict: Highly unlikely unless one had a death wish or a particularly compelling bribe (glittering snake jewelry, perhaps).

She wrote these plans down on a page torn from one of her notebooks, then rewrote them, then folded the paper into neat squares and tucked them into the inner pocket of her robes. Lists were calming until they weren’t; the more she tried to rationalize the irrational, the more the irrational pushed back.

Her second list was subtler: Moments of Opportunity.

— The practice fields at dusk when champions were exhausted and less guarded.

— The infirmary between lessons when Pomfrey needed an extra set of hands.

— The Owlery (late evening), where messages delayed meant people were briefly aimless.

— The prefect patrol routes, which assumed kids moved predictably and could be caught in the margins.

Each item was annotated with timelines, patrol schedules, and the probability of being pushed into dragon dung. She was thorough to the point of absurdity. The humiliation of her earlier failures made her exhaustive.

Days folded into one another with this anxious rhythm. She lingered near Cho’s circle despite a principled, rational acknowledgement that it accomplished nothing—because doing nothing felt worse than the embarrassment of being shunned. She followed Cedric like a satellite tracked a planet, staying exactly out of orbital range: a courteous distance, recycling the same breath, performing the same optical illusions of attention that said, I am here, and I am not.

Her heroics had become tiny—helping a first-year patch a torn sleeve, carrying an overlarge basket of herb samples into the greenhouses, staying longest after Potions to sharpen more than just her own pencils. Each small kindness was a seed planted into a soil she did not trust would sprout in time.

Meanwhile, life’s other tragicomedy played on. The Gryffindor trio, always a problem in three parts, were splintering in public with the kind of indecent honesty that made the castle walls blush. Ron sulked in a way that smelled of stale treacle and wounded pride; Hermione lectured like a headmistress in training; Harry looked like he carried an ocean in his ribcage. It was heartbreak with homework.

And Draco—bless Draco—continued to practice cruelty with an Olympian dedication. He and his court made Potter the subject of their private carnivals, smirking and prodding for a reaction that rarely came. There was a cadence to their teasing that matched the cadence of her memory: mean jokes a beat late, a little less clever each time, a performative cruelty meant to stop the thought of war from getting too close to their parqueted shoes.

Elara watched them, catalogued them, annotated them with the kind of merciless footnotes only a Ravenclaw could generate. Draco’s smirk means—footnote: Check for signs of injury or malnutrition; sometimes cruelty masks other vulnerabilities. She felt a faint, stupid tether every time she looked at him, the ember of that single locked gaze in the burning hall. She could, admittedly, braid that ember into superstition: maybe the fact that he had looked at her meant they shared some common line through the catastrophe, some unspoken obligation. Reason, however, immediately unbraided the superstition.

He is Draco Malfoy, not destiny.

“What are you doing?” asked a voice on the stair, startling her from a half-page of schematics for intercepting a champion’s sock (because socks, if lost, might lead to errands, and errands might lead to vulnerability).

It was Penelope Clearwater, blinking at her like one of those small, bright birds that had no idea what it meant to be ominous. She peered at Elara’s notebook. “Planning heists?”

Elara—never graceful with human contact—cheated a smile that probably read like a grimace.

“Strategizing,” she said. “It’s all very official.”

Penelope peered more. “You look like you could use a break,” she offered. “Or a divination consultation.” She meant well. Elara wanted to say I have been to the end of the world and returned three weeks ago, but she folded it into a joke because jokes were warmer than apocalypse.

She kept the lists. She kept the plans. She kept trying one ridiculous idea after another because momentum, however small, felt better than fatalism. Sometimes those ideas were comical—sneak in during Quidditch practice and throw a perfectly harmless charm on Cedric’s gloves to make them slightly too slippery; send an anonymous confession to Cho with a signed promise to be her gardener for life if she’d keep Cedric inside. Sometimes they were practical: a schedule of where she might plausibly be useful that didn’t involve breaching ethics or summoning goats.

Mostly she catalogued failures in meticulous handwriting, and sometimes she laughed, hollow and quick, at the absurdity of a girl who had died and returned trying to rewrite a world with Post-it notes.

“What would you do if you could change one thing?” Penelope asked once, when they sat in the library and the light cut the dust into golden lanes.

Elara stared at the margin of her page where #1: Prevent Cedric entering Goblet had been crossed out with three angry strokes.

She had a dozen answers and none of them were brave. “I’d move the world an inch to the left,” she said at last, and it sounded like a joke because saying anything else aloud might make it real.

Penelope laughed, the sound small and clean. “If anyone can, it’s you,” she said. She meant it to be kind. Elara accepted it as kindness because kindness was oxygen.

That night she bent over her list again, sharpening the pencil so the plans looked more exact than they were. She added footnotes—Observe, Test, Fail forward, Ask for help when it becomes not possible alone. She underlined Fail forward twice.

Because failing without trying was a different kind of death. She had already died once, and the world had been indifferently faithful to that fact.

If this time she could nudge the world the smallest fraction of a degree and watch it wobble, she would.

If all she could do was make one boy pause long enough to think, to reconsider, then perhaps she had earned the breath she’d been given.

Besides, even if fate never listened—especially if fate never listened—she was, at least, going to be clever about it. Sarcasm was no defense against doom, but it was an excellent map.

So she planned. She watched. She practiced the small kindness that might anchor her to people who could be persuaded to act. She wrote notes she would never sign and tucked them into the safest of places, where the world’s grand machinery might never notice them.

And every night she slept with the ridiculous, stubborn hope that someone—maybe fate, maybe a friend, maybe an unfashionable strategy born of observation and patience—would surprise her.

She had died. She had come back. She had a list. She was not, by temperament, a girl who surrendered without footnotes.

Chapter Text

Days condensed the way they always did when something terrible was approaching: in a blur of practice, unusable plans, and the small, mechanical motions of life pretending not to care.

Elara kept busy—too busy, she told herself—mending bandages, folding fresh linens, mixing poultices that smelled vaguely of rosemary and regret. Most of her schemes never graduated from the page. They sat in neat columns in her notebook like polite corpses: Polish Cedric’s boots so he can’t go out at night (ridiculous); Enchant Cho’s scarf to cling to Cedric with passive-aggressive warmth (immoral); Charm the Goblet so it chooses a goat (illegal, theatrical, and would almost certainly summon trouble). She’d folded each away with a sigh and a coin of sarcasm.

The Tournament kept moving. Time had no interest in exceptions.

Pomfrey, bless her little paranoid soul, had volunteered Elara as a warm body near the champions’ tent. “You’ll be close enough to fetch ointments and not much else,” the nurse had said, waving a hand full of bandage pins like a witchy fan. “Half a dozen mediwitches will be here, but I want someone I trust, who knows what to do if a jaw slips or a tendon threatens mutiny.” The flattery was thin and practical, and Elara accepted it like a hand offered to help across a puddle: useful, potentially saving, and slightly humiliating to need.

If Pomfrey meant watch, she watched. If Pomfrey meant stand ready, she stood ready. If Pomfrey meant be close enough to do something in an instant, Elara counted this as the sliver of possibility she’d been chewing on since the note in Cedric’s satchel. Maybe, hopefully, those seconds would exist.

The champions’ tent smelled like hay that had been pressed into corners of memory and dragon-sweat, the heat under the canvas making the air taste like metal and smoke. The mediwitches clustered like shorebirds at high tide: efficient, busy, hands never idle. A small satchel of dragon-choosing tokens sat on a stump table in the center, each scroll sealed and humming with a kind of impatient magic. The champions approached in turn like actors stepping onto a stage they couldn’t see from inside.

Elara watched them pick. Cedric reached with the casual grace of someone who expected good things, slipped his hand into the satchel, and drew a slip. His mouth set into that modest smile, bright and steady as an honest coin. He looked up when the name was announced, a quick flick of his glance, and something in Elara’s chest constricted with a memory she could not spend without cost.

Harry and Hermione shared a quiet, public hug near the Gryffindor side. It might have gone unnoticed if not for the sudden, sugary voice that cut across the canvas:

“Well, well, well. Isn’t that touching?”

Rita Skeeter had swept into the tent like she owned it, lime-green robes shimmering, Quick-Quotes Quill already scribbling furiously on its floating parchment. Her jeweled spectacles glinted as she leaned toward the pair, eyes gleaming with predatory delight. “Young love blooms under fire! Oh, this will make a headline for the ages.”

Hermione pulled back instantly, face scarlet, mortified. Harry mumbled something inaudible, already shrinking under the weight of speculation. Skeeter only beamed, turning her head just enough for the mediwitches to hiss in disapproval but not enough to actually leave.

Elara grimaced. She knew exactly what would happen in a few days’ time: Skeeter’s article, the poisonous speculation about Harry and Hermione’s “relationship,” the way it would twist knives into both Gryffindors when they had far larger dragons to face. Skeeter’s interruption wasn’t just notorious; it was inevitable.

Elara felt, absurdly, the tug of envy alongside her disgust. Wouldn’t it be something? To be important enough for someone like Skeeter to barge into a room, quill poised, just to record the curve of your frown or the angle of your elbow? Surely Harry carried a weight nobody else could see, but at least he was seen. At least when he stumbled, the world noticed.

To be known, she thought. To be marked with a name that echoed. To be remembered for something other than being useful.

It was an ugly thought, and she hated herself a little for it. She had died invisible. She had been buried as someone who stitched, soothed, and vanished from the ledger of stories. Fame would not save him—she knew that—but fame meant memory. Wouldn’t being remembered, however cruelly, be better than vanishing as nothing?

Cedric moved with that easy brightness that had always made him sunlight incarnate, and Elara felt the urge to step in, to whisper, to warn. But her chance was gone. Skeeter had sucked all the air from the tent, and the mediwitches were already circling closer to their charges, glaring daggers at the journalist.

And so Elara swallowed the ache, gripped her list of failed plans tighter in her pocket, and reminded herself: she was here to mend, not to matter.

The first task was minutes away.

Elara had the best seat in the world and the worst: ground floor, three rows back, where the dust came up in small puffs and the heat from the arena washed her face like a hand. She was not on the spectator tiers where the students hooted and waved; she was below, among the working people—the mediwitches with their belts of salves, the broom-and-cage handlers, the keepers who smelled of leather and hay. The canvas of the tent shivered with the roar of the crowd, and somewhere above a hundred throats made a single animal sound when the dragon was unveiled.

It was as awful and magnificent as she remembered. Scales like hammered bronze, steam wreathing from its nostrils, eyes black as the inside of a night with teeth like jagged ivory. The dragon’s wings beat once and the air seemed to go viscous; the first shimmered gust tore at ponchos and turned skirts into flags.

Elara kept her hands tight on the tin of salve Pomfrey had pressed into them like a talisman and marvelled, for the thousandth time, at the particular brand of human stupidity that applauded voluntary death.

Who would volunteer to be eaten for sport? she thought, sarcastic and private. Also, who thought dragons were a good idea? The answer came with the old, familiar ache: glory, prize money, legacy—reasons that looked luminous from the top of a mountain and monstrous at its base. For a second she saw it as a theatre of ritual sacrifice and wanted to set it on fire.

The champions moved like actors called onto a stage, each walked out under a hail of cheers. Viktor was first. He was methodical and enormous, like a boulder waking up. Fleur shimmered and made the crowd forget to breathe. Then Cedric: the hush that rolled across the Hufflepuff end of the stands could have been a physical thing, a soft curtain descending. He carried himself the way someone carries kindness, as if it were as ordinary as breath. He strode in with his chin not too high and not too low, the sort of posture that made you trust him before you even knew why.

Elara watched every move, counting the seconds with the kind of clinical attention Pomfrey liked: watch the approach, note the slack in the stance, check the heat bleed from the dragon’s flank. The first task was brutal in the way spectacles can be, loud, hot, and impatient. The dragon roared and launched its first breath like the mouth of an oven. Cedric dove, sidestepped, and then, impossibly, hooked the dragon’s flank with the device the champions were given, a precise little thing honed for purpose. For a moment she saw him the way the crowd saw him: bright, daring, exactly where the story said he should be.

He finished the task. Not untouched—his forearm bore three new scratches, soot layered like war paint across his face, and his hair was matted with sweat. Mostly unharmed, though; he walked out of that breath of fire and into the world again, and half the hall took that for proof of invincibility.

Elara let out a breath that felt like breaking a small, private bone. She ought to be relieved. Instead she felt brittle and wired, like the nerve at the back of her jaw had been exposed. A mediwitch brushed past, scolding an undergrad for holding the wrong salve. A handler muttered a curse about a scorched rope. Above, the crowd was rewriting its narrative in a hundred voices: Brave! Lucky! Heart of gold! The chorus made her teeth ache.

Then, because the universe liked cruel symmetry, the entourage formed with the predictable orbit: Pomfrey with a nurse’s rigid calm, Hufflepuffs clustered bright and frantic, Cho and her glittering circle, parents with blinking eyes and damp handkerchiefs. For a heartbeat Elara felt the walls of access narrowing around Cedric like a ring of reeds.

She didn’t wait for permission. Her feet moved before her brain could argue. She stepped past the mediwitches, feeling a dozen micro-glares, and gave Pomfrey a quick, efficient nod—part apology, part briefing: I’ll be fast. I’ll be useful. Pomfrey’s mouth thinned, but she only raised a hand to indicate the kit, and in that small hand-signal Elara saw both trust and a thin rope of worry.

Elara went straight at him.

She had the salve tin cupped like a relic and a roll of gauze tucked under her elbow. The air around Cedric smelled of smoke and turf and the metallic tang of fear. For a breath she rehearsed the words she’d written until they tasted old: You will die if you don’t drop out. They had sounded monstrous on a page; she didn’t know how they would land face to face. They were the sentence she had written and rewrote and shoved into his bag, and they felt too blunt in the open.

He was surrounded by people, but there was that instant—the thin, knife-edge moment before attention settled—when proximity becomes permission. She moved into it.

“Cedric,” she said, voice low. The tent hummed, but the world narrowed to the line from her mouth to his ears.

He turned, blinking in the salt-stung light. 

“You will die if you don’t drop out,” Elara whispered, the words scraping raw from her throat.

For a second she thought he might not hear. Either the dragon’s echo or her own fear muffled her. Then his gaze snapped to hers and something like recognition smoothed into his features—astonishment, then a quick ripple of understanding.

“So it was you,” he said.

His voice was low, even, measured the way only someone raised on patience could manage. He looked at her not unkindly, but as though weighing her, testing her motives, trying to decide whether this was sabotage or something else entirely.

Relief slammed into her like a train and then became ash on her tongue: he knew, and knowing did not mean he would act. She had the half-second she had begged the world for.

“Drop out,” she repeated, the warning landing like a stone in a glass of milk. “You will die if you don’t. If you don’t leave, you will…” She stopped because speech flapped against the life-thing that made speech: faces moving in the periphery, the approach of taller steps, the soft, stunned tread of parents. Cedric’s mother was already moving fast, hand to her chest; his father’s face had the rigid, white sheen people wore when they were about to sprint. Cho’s gasp rose and broke into gasps of others.

He didn’t scoff. He didn’t shout. He did the thing people who are kind and grounded do: he considered how the words landed instead of the source.

“I saw your parchments,” he confirmed softly, and there was a terrifying steadiness in it. 

“Then please, listen to me,” she pressed, clutching the gauze tight against her chest.

His brows drew together. “It wouldn’t be that simple.” 

The moment thinned; Elara felt the window closing, seconds slipping like sand. She forced the last words out before the world swallowed them both:

“Then…” she started. “Then if you have to stay in the game—if you have no choice—stay away from Harry Potter.” She found the words a strange, stubborn finality on her tongue. It was a selfish, clumsy sort of rescue: not a way out but a direction that might change the shape of what came next.

Cedric’s eyes flicked, then narrowed, and for a beat she saw calculation: he measured her, the salve, the gauze, the fury in a throat that had learned to be quiet. He put a hand on his mother’s shoulder as though to anchor himself, and then he gave her a look that was not unkind.

“Thank you,” he said, soft as an afterthought. “I’ll… I’ll think about it.” There was no promise in it, only the consideration she had begged like a prayer.

The seconds that followed were merciless: hands reached, voices rose, Cho’s circle swelled in a river of concern and curiosity. Someone—one of Cedric’s mates—clapped him on the back. Pomfrey’s mediwitches closed in with professional efficiency. The moment was over.

Elara watched him go, small and human in the press of bodies, and felt the old, familiar drag of inevitability pull at the hem of her mind. She had spoken; she had not altered the universe. She had, perhaps, put a seed of a different choice in a place where a different seed might grow.

And she had said Harry’s name into a charged silence, and already she could feel the small eddies it would make. Whether they swirled safe or sick, she could not know.

For a second she let herself be bitter and triumphant both. Fate, vast and deaf as ever, had not paused. But she had spoken. That, in some ledger she kept private and ragged, was at least not nothing.

Chapter Text

The tent swallowed Elara back into anonymity. Cedric was swept up in a tide of parents, mediwitches, and Cho’s circle, and Elara let herself be pushed to the edges until she was no more than another robe in the blur. 

By the time the first task was over, Hogwarts was a frenzy. Students filled the corridors like floodwater, voices overlapping with speculation, cheers, gossip. Cedric was a hero. Harry was a cheat. Fleur was divine. Krum was unstoppable. The Tournament had delivered its spectacle, and the castle hummed with the intoxication of it.

And, inevitably, people were already talking about the Yule Ball.

Elara kept her head down, weaving through knots of students who debated dress colors and dance steps with the sort of urgency usually reserved for exams or Quidditch finals. To them, the Ball was glitter and glory. To her, it was memory—one of the most humiliating nights of her first life.

Last time, Michael Corner had asked her. Or rather, she had found out later, he’d asked half the girls in Ravenclaw, queueing them up like a list of broom models he might test fly. She hadn’t even been in his top three choices. She had said yes anyway, flattered, and then scraped together what little allowance she had saved to buy a second-hand dress. It had looked acceptable in the shop. Under the Great Hall’s enchanted starlight, surrounded by gowns that shimmered like spellwork, it might as well have been rags. She had smiled until her jaw ached, danced once, and left early with blisters in her shoes and a stone in her stomach.

Never again.

This time, she decided, she would spare herself the misery. If nobody asked her, excellent. If Michael asked again, she would decline—politely, firmly, without apology. And when the night came, she would vanish into the library, tuck herself behind a pile of Arithmancy texts, and wait for it to be over. No sideways glances. No whispered questions. No empty “See you at midnight?” from someone who hadn’t cared whether she was there or not.

Especially not with the Cedric situation still spiraling in the background. She had warned him—brutally, directly—and he had listened, but not promised. Elara doubted he would drop out, doubted he would stay away from Harry when the Tournament itself would keep throwing them together. Her warning hung in the air like smoke, dissipating too fast to matter.

She sighed into her sleeve as laughter rang down the hall, some sixth-year girls chattering about who Krum might ask, whether he’d go for a Hogwarts student or one of his own.

Life had been hard enough the first time around.

The second time? Marginally better—she had learned how to dodge embarrassment, at least. But infinitely worse knowing what doom waited at the end, a train wreck already screeching down the tracks with Cedric tied to it, and herself, powerless, watching.

Just as Elara had expected, the Yule Ball turned Hogwarts into a beehive. Everyone buzzed with speculation, dress fittings, hair charms, whispered lists of who-was-asking-who. Elara did her best to keep her head down, to walk through the chatter like a ghost among the living, but even ghosts couldn’t escape the noise.

Ravenclaw Tower had its own way of preparing. Not for them the squeals of Gryffindor girls throwing themselves across beds, or the practical efficiency of Hufflepuffs swapping sewing kits. No, Ravenclaws made lists. Pages upon pages, charmed to shuffle names and rearrange ranks at the flick of a quill.

Unsurprisingly, Cedric Diggory was ranked first.

No one even debated it—he was sunlight incarnate, Quidditch captain, Hogwarts champion. He was the safe bet, the handsome face on half the girls’ dream ballots. Elara winced every time his name came up, though she didn’t know if it was because she already knew his fate, or because the constant chatter wrapped him in inevitability like a shroud.

After Cedric, however, the rankings slanted green.

Draco Malfoy sat neatly near the top, of course. His name drew comments about tailored robes, family vaults, and the sort of sharp jawline that could double as a dueling weapon. Blaise Zabini was close behind, murmured about in a different register—less adored, more admired, his mystery an asset in itself.

And then, surprisingly often, Theodore Nott.

Elara tilted her head whenever she saw his name scrawled into the upper ranks. Not because she disagreed—objectively, his cheekbones could slice parchment—but because he was not often seen in the loud court of Slytherins. Unlike Draco, unlike Blaise, he slipped past attention. Nott had the same pedigree, the same resources, but carried them with a quieter, sharper air. Elara had noticed that, even if she wasn’t in Slytherin. Especially because she wasn’t.

Lists gave her permission to notice things.

Too bad she wouldn’t be seeing any of them on the night itself. Not Draco in whatever immaculate tailoring his vaults would provide. Not Blaise with his cool, unruffled charm. Not Theodore, whoever he would choose to stand beside. And certainly not Cedric, even though the entire school would be watching him and Cho glide across the floor like a storybook illustration.

She closed the page of names and rankings before anyone noticed her staring. It wasn’t her list anyway.

Hogwarts had officially dissolved into chaos disguised as celebration days before the Yule Ball. Invitations flew like enchanted paper airplanes; rumors multiplied faster than nifflers in a coin vault. Even the professors looked vaguely harried, as though the sound of collective adolescent squealing had finally worn through their patience.

The champions were the center of it all. Cedric, naturally, was a foregone conclusion—Cho Chang’s name had been floating alongside his since the Tournament began. Elara heard it repeated in hallways, in classrooms, in the library whispers that traveled faster than ink. Fleur was less obvious; would she take a Hogwarts boy? A Durmstrang admirer? Or no one at all? Viktor Krum, moody and silent, had people speculating with a fervor usually reserved for quidditch transfers. Harry Potter was the oddest rumor of all—too young, too infamous, too lonely-looking—and yet the gossip churned: maybe he would ask a Gryffindor, maybe he wouldn’t dare to ask anybody.

For Elara, gossip had always been something she orbited but never touched. She walked through the frenzy like a shadow sliding across the wall. It didn’t stop people from trying.

Michael Corner cornered her on the landing outside Charms, the same nervous grin as last time, voice cracking as he began: “Elara, I was wondering if…”

“No,” she said, before he even finished the question.

His face fell, and then he shrugged, already glancing past her as though she were just another line in a queue. Which, of course, she had been last time. Elara walked away with her chin higher than she felt, heart hammering, relief sharper than guilt.

Later, Penelope Clearwater, who meant well in the way prefects often did, smiled at her in the common room. “So… what color’s your dress?”

Elara dodged clumsily, pretending to be absorbed in her parchment. “Oh, I… haven’t decided.” Which was true, in the sense that you can’t decide between apples if you’ve got no orchard to pick from. Penelope, to her credit, didn’t press.

Elara folded into herself, pretending the question had never been asked.

Her gaze strayed—traitorously—to the Slytherin table, where the “list toppers” sat like gods idling on marble thrones. Draco Malfoy with his silver polish and knife-edge smirk. Blaise Zabini, mysterious as ever, people guessing what he might wear with the same fervor they guessed at Fleur’s gown. And Theodore Nott, quiet, sharp, separate, never fully part of Draco’s orbit though he had every right to be. The Ravenclaw girls whispered about cheekbones and vaults; Elara noticed absences, gaps, the silence of someone who did not court attention.

But lists were distractions. She had her own.

Her notebook brimmed with increasingly unhinged ideas about saving Cedric Diggory from doom:

• Slip him a potion that caused a mild stomach bug the night before each task. (Indignified. Illegal. Would probably land her in Pomfrey’s bad books forever.)
  
  
• Hex his shoelaces to knot themselves, forcing him to trip and miss the call to the arena. (Clumsy sabotage, highly suspicious.)
  
  
• Bribe a house-elf to misplace his wand. (Ethically atrocious. Also, he’d probably find it within five minutes anyway.)
  
  
• Write another note, this time in blood, so he had to take it seriously. (Dramatic. Disturbing. Would likely result in a visit from Dumbledore, or worse.)
  
  
• Pretend to sprain her ankle directly in front of him before each task, forcing him to detour and maybe miss his cue. (Ridiculous. Painful. Unsustainable.)

She sighed, staring down at her own tidy handwriting as though the neat ink could disguise the chaos of thought. A healer-in-training, even unofficially, plotting stomach curses and self-sabotage. What a legacy.

Around her, Ravenclaw girls continued to squeal over invitations, or gasped in mock-scandal at the more surprising couples. Elara folded herself smaller at the edge of the room, the sound washing over her like waves against a breakwater.

Then the night arrived.

Elara told herself she wasn’t going.

And she didn’t. At least, not properly.

Her secondhand robes were still folded at the foot of her bed. She hadn’t wasted a Knut this time, hadn’t scraped her allowance into rags pretending to be finery. But when the music drifted up through the stairwells and laughter rang like silver bells across the stone, curiosity dug its teeth into her.

So she wandered. Accidentally. Purposefully. A Ravenclaw in plain school robes when the rest of the castle shimmered like a ballroom dream. Nobody stopped her. Nobody even noticed her. She moved through the crowd like a house-elf clearing crumbs from under tables—unremarkable, expected, invisible.

The Great Hall had been transformed. Frosted garlands twined along the rafters; crystal stars shone from enchanted skies. The air smelled of pine and spice, of anticipation. It was beautiful, achingly so. Too beautiful. She tried not to overlap this dreamscape with the other memory: the same flagstones slick with blood, candles guttering in smoke, faces grey and ashen as they fell. The contrast made her stomach twist.

And yet she lingered.

The Slytherins looked like they had stepped from glossy portraits. The girls glittered, every hemline cut to perfection, hair charmed into impossible shapes of elegance. Pansy Parkinson was radiant, her hand looped possessively through Draco Malfoy’s arm. Draco himself wore robes tailored to a razor’s edge, silver trim catching the light, smirk sharpened by satisfaction.

Near them, Blaise Zabini radiated a quieter magnetism, his date laughing too loudly at something he had not actually said.

And then, Theodore Nott. Alone.

He stood a little apart, posture deliberate, eyes half-shadowed. And already Elara saw two girls veering dangerously close to abandoning their own dates, emboldened by his solitude. As if the very fact he had not chosen anyone yet was invitation enough.

Why wouldn’t they? He looked untouchable, the kind of boy who didn’t need a partner to draw eyes. Who had he asked, if anyone? Had he turned someone down? Why was she even wondering, as if it were remotely her business?

Elara folded her arms, gaze skittering back to the ceiling’s starry frost before her thoughts wandered further into places they had no right to be.

She told herself she’d only stay a moment, just to see, to fix this second chance into memory. One more look. One more note on her invisible list of observations.

The music swelled. Cedric and Cho took the floor, graceful as every rumor promised. The crowd clapped, the chandeliers threw diamonds across the polished stone.

For a heartbeat, it almost felt safe. Almost.

And then she saw it: the overlay of memory. The same hall torn open, not glittering but burning, not starlit but smoke-choked. The blood, the shouts, the endless falling. She bit the inside of her cheek until it stung, anchoring herself to the present.

Enough.

She turned, slipping into the shadowed corridor that led toward the library. The music softened behind her, muffled by stone. The further she walked, the easier it became to breathe.

She never noticed Theo’s eyes following her retreat. Just a brief flicker, a tilt of his head, as though he had marked her presence at the edge of the dream and filed it away.

Elara only knew she had escaped before memory drowned her.

And she wondered—again, always—why she had been given this second chance if she had no power at all.

Why be sent back, if all she could do was scribble ridiculous lists and watch fate hurtle forward unchecked?

Chapter Text

The library was deserted.

Not just quiet—the kind of quiet broken by the shuffle of pages or the cough of a hidden Ravenclaw—but empty. Even Madam Pince’s desk stood abandoned, her usual pile of confiscated Zonko’s products conspicuously absent.

For the first time, Elara had the entire place to herself.

It felt… strange.

Spacious. The rows of shelves stretched wider than she remembered, cavernous in their silence. The smell of ink and parchment, usually comforting, seemed heavier, like it was pressing against her lungs. And without the soft buzz of other students, the emptiness tasted a little like loneliness.

Still… better here than anywhere else.

She slid into her usual table by the high arched window. The satchel thunked softly against the chair leg. A few textbooks came out first—her camouflage in case anyone walked in. But it was the folded parchment she smoothed onto the center of the desk that mattered. The list.

Her unhinged, ridiculous, desperate list.

The inkpot clinked as she set it down. She uncapped her quill. Then she pressed her forehead into her palm, staring down at the newly scrawled lines like they might rearrange themselves into something useful if she glared hard enough.

Trip jinx on Quidditch broom to keep him from training? (suspicious, cruel)

Beg? (pathetic)

Hex? (unthinkable)

Her breath fogged faintly against the parchment. The yawning space of the library swallowed the sound. For a moment, she almost wished someone else would be there, even just Madam Pince muttering about spine damage.

And then—

“Busy night?”

The voice slid from the shadows like a blade being drawn. Elara nearly leapt out of her chair, quill clattering across the desk.

Her jaw dropped when she saw who it was.

Theodore Nott moved into the candlelight as though he had been part of the shadows themselves a second ago. His footsteps had made no sound at all. The formal dark robes he wore shimmered faintly with silver embroidery when the flames touched them, perfectly cut, perfectly tailored. 

Against the library’s dimness, he looked almost otherworldly, like he belonged in a painting that had stepped off the wall and decided to walk around.

Elara could only gape, her mind flatlining into white noise.

“What… what are you doing here?” she stammered, clutching her quill like it might double as a wand.

Nott only shrugged. As if that were explanation enough. As if his presence in the deserted library at midnight, while the rest of the castle waltzed and glittered, required no justification at all. He took another step closer, his robes whispering faintly against the flagstones.

Elara’s pulse jumped. In a panic, she snatched her parchment off the desk, crumpling it in her fist.

Theo tilted his head, a brow arching up in silent amusement.

She froze, eyes widening like an owl caught mid-blink.

And then, unbelievably, he laughed. A quiet, low sound, warm at the edges. Elara had never seen his face break into anything resembling humor before, and the sight was unfair. Criminal, even. Her cardiovascular system had officially decided to file for early retirement.

“You look like a deer in torchlight,” he drawled, eyes flicking to her fist clenched tight around the parchment. “And you’re hiding something.”

He wasn’t wrong, but that wasn’t the point.

Elara’s mouth moved before her brain could stop it. Words spilled out, ridiculous, unedited, pretending this was normal. Pretending she had ever spoken to him. Pretending they weren’t the only two souls in the castle who had chosen shadows over starlight.

“As if I’d… be cataloguing… I mean, er… herbal remedies. For… you know. Digestive issues.”

She said it as if he knew her name.

As if he knew what she’d been through.

As if he knew what she wanted to change but couldn’t.

Don’t overthink. Don’t go off tangent. Don’t—

Her mind screamed. Her cheeks burned. And Theodore Nott’s faint, knowing smile suggested he’d heard all of it anyway.

For one excruciating minute, her excuse about digestive issues still hung between them like a banner she would happily set herself on fire to destroy.

Theodore Nott did not, mercifully, look disgusted. He looked entertained. His faint smile widened the smallest fraction, and for someone whose expression usually resembled carved marble, that fraction was devastating.

“Herbal remedies,” he repeated, tone velvet-dry. “Fascinating. Truly riveting Saturday night reading.” His eyes flicked to her crumpled parchment, then back to her face. “Cataloguing, was it? Or is that code?”

Elara’s brain screamed. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t talk to people like me. He definitely doesn’t smile. He looks like he was built to brood in corners, not banter in candlelight.

And yet he was talking. To her. Almost… friendly. Which meant one of two things: either he had some hidden streak of human decency, or this was a Slytherin’s idea of entertainment—watching her combust from sheer embarrassment.

“It’s…definitely not code,” she replied, too fast. Her ears burned. “I mean…it could be, but it isn’t, not that you’d… why are you even here?!”

He raised a brow. “Do I need permission to read in the library?”

“You don’t have a book,” she blurted.

That earned her a sharper smile. “Maybe I was waiting to see what you’d recommend. You seem… full of ideas.”

Her stomach plummeted. He knows. He knows. He read the words right off her parchment with those impossible cheekbones.

“You’re—” she began, then stopped herself before she said unfairly distracting. “—not supposed to sneak up on people.”

“And yet,” Theo said lightly, stepping closer, “I’m very good at it.”

Elara gripped the edge of the desk until her knuckles whitened. Why is he here? Why me? Why now? The thought curled tighter in her ribs. 

Did he know? Could he?

Where had he been during the final battle? She couldn’t remember. Too much smoke, too much screaming, faces running grey. Some details in her first life had bled out of her like water through cracked stone. But here he stood—intact, smirking, inscrutable—and it twisted her stomach into knots.

“Theodore Nott,” she muttered before she could catch herself, as if saying his name out loud might pin him to reality.

He tilted his head. “Ah. So you do know who I am.”

Her mind shrieked. Of course I know, I know too much, I shouldn’t know anything at all.

Out loud she said, “Everyone knows who you are.”

“Do they?” he asked, soft and sly, like it was a private joke.

And Elara, gaping again, had the awful suspicion she was the punchline.

Their words danced in circles from there—his easy prodding, her frantic deflections. Every time she thought she’d caught her balance, he tilted the floor.

“You’re twitchier than a first-year sneaking firewhiskey,” he continued, amused.

“I’m not twitchy,” she snapped.

“You’re practically vibrating.”

“I’m perfectly calm.”

“You’re crushing that parchment like it owes you money.”

Her face burned. She loosened her grip on the parchment, then clutched it tighter. Combustion imminent, her mind screamed.

And just before she actually did combust, Nott tilted his head, eyes hooded in the candlelight, and said something that froze her spine.

“Funny thing about time,” he murmured, like it wasn’t meant for her at all, “it doesn’t… always go forward.”

Elara stared at him. The library’s silence roared in her ears. Every reckless thought in her body surged forward at once: Grab him. Shake him. Ask him how to drag Cedric Diggory out of the Tournament before fate steamrolls him again.

Before she could open her mouth, he spoke again. Soft. Certain.

“Elara Auclair.”

Her jaw went slack.

He knew her name.

Why?

WHY?

HOW?!

Half the Ravenclaws in her own year barely knew her first name. The other half muddled it with “Ella” or “Lara.” Even professors sometimes paused over the roll call. And yet—of all people—he knew it?!

Her heart thudded so loud she thought he must hear it. He definitely knows something. He’s definitely up to something.

What? Was he a spy?

She scoffed at herself internally. Of what, exactly? Of fate? Why would anyone waste time sabotaging… her?

But she didn’t get her answer.

Just as suddenly as he’d arrived, Nott turned, robes whispering against the stone, and slipped back into the shadows. Once again, his steps made no sound at all.

When the last ripple of candlelight swallowed him, she was left gripping her parchment like a lifeline, wondering if she had imagined the whole exchange.

Or worse, if she hadn’t.

They came back from the winter break as if nothing had happened.

Snow still freckled the grounds, and the castle smelled of wet cloaks and cinnamon. Students returned with cheeks pink from winter and a hundred new confidences about how they’d spent their holidays—overripe gossip that spread faster than the steam from the boilers. Elara moved through it like a careful animal, ears flicking for a scrap of the one thing she wanted to hear: Did he tell anyone? Did he say anything?

He did not, apparently, care.

Theodore Nott walked the corridors with his usual soft certainty, hair perfectly in place, robes falling just so. He held conversations with the same economy of words he always had, and every time Elara was close enough to hear, his tone was neutral, businesslike. If there had been fireworks in the library that night, Theo carried none of the singe marks. He behaved as if they had never traded a single sentence.

It was infuriating.

She tried not to let it have her. She told herself she was a Ravenclaw. Ravenclaws could compute, could plan, could take cold facts and make them practical. Instead, she found herself looping the same three things in her head until they wore grooves across her sanity:

1. He said, “Funny thing about time, it doesn’t always go forward.”
2. He knew her name. Elara Auclair.
3. He acted like none of it mattered.

If this were a reasonable person’s list, the next step would be to approach him and ask. Rationally. Calmly. With an elegant square of parchment and a list of questions in tidy columns. But rational is not what her heart did when it faced Nott. Rational was what her mind pretended to be when she wasn’t staring at the empty seat beside his in Arithmancy.

She had noticed that seat from the first day of term. It was peculiar the way students regarded it, like a public secret. No one sat there. Girls from Slytherin glanced at it, then away. Even Ravenclaws who liked to test the edges of decorum passed it by. It was the sort of empty place that gathered superstition: the space a person leaves when they are, by reputation or temperament, too dangerous to sit near.

On the second week back she almost took it.

Arithmancy, mid-morning. Professor Vector’s voice threaded through sums and symbols. Parchments slid, quills scratched. Elara hovered at the doorway long enough that an irritated prefect shot her a look. She could have moved in, could have placed her satchel with an air of casual rightness, could have sat, opened her book, and asked—asked—as if conversation were a transaction.

She did not.

Instead she took a seat two rows over and watched him. Nott arrived five minutes late, calm as an unruffled tide, and took his place at the infamous empty desk. He set down his book, aligned his quill, and did not perform the slightest ritual of hiding the fact that his chair held space no one would occupy. He looked as if the emptiness belonged to him by right.

She rehearsed a thousand prefaces in the scrap of silence between Professor Vector’s lecture and the tapping of chalk: Hi, do you remember me? About the library? Please tell me you weren’t playing with me… are you a time wizard? None of them sounded the sort of thing you said in a classroom.

So instead she wrote. She wrote everything she could think of and then crossed most of it out. 

Since then, she began to watch him in study halls, or from the end of the herbaceous beds. She found reasons to be near enough to intercept a glance and became, by habit and irritation, expert at spotting the micro-movements of his face: the almost-invisible curl at the corner of his mouth when he registered a thought he liked, the way his hands folded when he considered something before speaking, the small tilt of head he used when listening. 

He looked like someone who had been taught to be small in speech and vast in thought, who would be telling himself a private joke that simply would not include people like her.

Several times she almost stopped him in the corridor after class. He walked with a small group—Slytherin courtiers who flanked him like punctuation—a small circle that somehow miraculously had zero overlap with Draco’s larger court. She timed her steps to match his, swallowed the feeling in her throat that wanted to call his name, and then let herself be swallowed instead by the tide of students spilling into the sunlit yard.

Only once, maybe twice, he did look back, and there would be a flicker. The smallest acknowledgement. An eyebrow lifted the width of a hair. She read entire conversations into that sliver of attention, then berated herself for confirmation bias. She told herself that if he had anything to say, he’d say it plainly. 

Maybe he was testing her. Maybe he was waiting. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed the thing he’d said at all, and she was the only person reading ghosts into his syllables.

Her mind entertained every hypothesis with the kind of frantic generosity that made her spiral.

• He knows about her resurrection. He has secrets the rest of them do not.
• He’s a spy for someone—perhaps the Ministry, perhaps a private collector of oddities—who measures anomalies like she is one.
• He knows because he is part of whatever force is tugging strings behind the scenes—cosmic chess, as she’d once joked to herself—and she is a pawn.
• He was only being theatrical in the library. A line. An affectation. Nothing at all.

The more unhinged the thought, the more she loved it; the more practical the thought, the more it terrified her. She told herself not to be melodramatic, but her memory was a jagged thing now—some pages torn clean away, others smudged with old smoke. She still could not recall where Nott had been during the final battle, only the impression of a face that had belonged to someone who moved in shadows. That gap in memory had become a cavity she filled with suspicion to keep out the cold.

One afternoon, Elara found herself standing at the foot of the Slytherin table simply to watch him move his hand across a line of quills as if choosing which one to pick up. She had no right to be there. A prefect with a surly jaw gave her a small, disapproving nod. She smiled humbly and left, pockets full of unanswered questions.

Days folded in patterns of watching, testing, and erasing. She tried everything and nothing at all.

At night she lay awake, asking the same questions, and the same stinging, stupid hope returned like a tide: What if he knows, and wants to help? Then the cynical knot tightened: Or what if he knows and plans to use her?

Either way, she had to find out.

Because even if fate steamrolled her, she still had paper, a quill and the appetite for meticulous inquiry. 

And perhaps—if the world was kind for once—Theo Nott would fold his silence into something that told her whether she was alone in the room or utterly, terrifyingly, not.

Chapter Text

The second task arrived without warning—like the answer to a question she’d asked the universe too many times in the wrong language. One minute she was still cataloguing every silence Theodore Nott had ever offered her; the next, she was standing among mediwitches at the edge of the Black Lake, the air raw with cold and anticipation.

The water’s surface shivered under the roar of the crowd. Students stamped their feet on the stands, cheering as Cedric Diggory burst through the foam with Cho Chang clinging to him, both pale and shuddering but alive. Relief broke across the field like light through glass.

Elara didn’t clap.

She adjusted the strap of Madam Pomfrey’s satchel, fingers worrying the buckle the way her mind still worried Nott’s every unfinished sentence. Around her, charms flared and towels flew; she stayed still, half a beat out of time with everyone else. To the casual eye she was simply another helper awaiting orders. Inside, she was braced for something no one else seemed to expect.

Because she knew this wasn’t safety. This was illusion. The Tournament gave its champions back only to take them later. The crowd’s relief was a lie, and she couldn’t join in.

“You stand like someone waiting for a disaster you already saw.”

The voice was low, dry. Too close.

Elara jerked, nearly dropping the satchel. She turned, and of course it was him. Nott, silent-footed as ever, hands tucked in his dark sleeves like he was attending a funeral instead of a spectacle.

“I… what?!” she stammered.

His eyes traced her face, unhurried. “You don’t look relieved. You look… braced.” A pause. Then, softer: “Out of joint. Wrong place, wrong hour. Like you’ve slipped.”

Her heart stuttered. The air thinned. He couldn’t—he couldn’t possibly—

“If you know something, say it,” she blurted, voice sharp with desperation. “Please.”

The words tore from her throat before she could smother them. For a second, the world seemed to tilt: the roaring lake, the cheers, the mediwitches fussing, all muted. There was only him, pale in the winter light, watching her with a calm that bordered on cruelty.

He tilted his head. Testing. Measuring. And then, with a flicker of a smile, he said:

“My family has… affinities. Cantankerus Nott is remembered for his little registry of bloodlines. But less remembered are his other obsessions. Time. Loops. The places where hours fray. He left notes. Warnings.” His gaze sharpened. “Enough that I can tell when something doesn’t belong.”

Her throat went dry. “And you think… I don’t belong.”

“I know you don’t.”

She wanted to laugh, or scream, or both. Instead she said, “Then help me.”

One dark brow arched. “Help you do what, exactly?”

“Stop it. Change it. Cheat fate… whatever you want to call it.” The words tumbled too fast. She pressed them into shape with force. “You can feel it too, can’t you? That this—this Tournament—it’s going to end wrong. It already has.”

Theo studied her with unnerving patience, as if weighing whether she was delusional or dangerous. At last he said, “That’s a perilous game, Ravenclaw. Even for a Nott.”

Her hands clenched at her sides. “So you’ll just… what? Watch?”

“I’ll observe,” he said simply. “It’s what I do best.”

Something in her nearly broke. She almost told him everything—Cedric, her death, the blood-soaked stones of the Great Hall. The words crowded her throat. But before she could give them shape, he stepped back, gaze cool, unreadable.

“If you want me involved,” Theo said, voice low enough that only she could hear, “you’ll have to be honest. And you don’t look ready for that yet.”

Then he turned, robes whispering, slipping into the crowd as smoothly as if he’d been part of it all along.

Elara stood frozen by the lake, cheers echoing like thunder. Her satchel dug into her shoulder, suddenly heavy.

She hated him. She needed him. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

By now, Cho’s circle was watching her like hawks.

Elara had learned to time her warnings when Cedric was alone—slipping words between breaths, vanishing into shadows before the giggles and pointed looks could tighten around her like snares. But no matter how careful she was, the whispers followed. Ravenclaws didn’t miss much, and Cho’s friends missed least of all.

She told herself it didn’t matter. She told herself that even if Cedric thought her a lunatic, even if Cho’s friends branded her a jealous hanger-on, she had done her part. She had whispered the warning. She had handed him the notes. She had said the words that would one day be carved into his gravestone: Don’t touch the cup.

Cedric never asked how she knew. Never pressed for details. He simply accepted the scraps with that frustrating, gentle steadiness, like someone too kind to dismiss her, too polite to question, too determined to go forward anyway.

Maybe he thought she was mad. Maybe he thought she was some odd Ravenclaw with a flair for melodrama. Or maybe he believed her and chose not to show it.

Either way, she knew the truth.

The Third Task had been revealed. The hedge maze. The glittering prize at the center. And two weeks stood between her and the end she had already lived.

She had no plan. None. Every list she made ended in scribbled-out dead ends. Steal the Cup? Too heavily warded. Stop Cedric from entering? Impossible. Warn Dumbledore? Laughable.

Her head throbbed with helplessness.

Which was why she was sitting in the library now, parchment spread neatly before her, quill in hand, eyes fixed on equations she wasn’t solving. Pretending to do homework while her pulse thudded against her ribs.

Nott was three rows away. She knew because she had checked three times already, under the guise of reaching for ink or adjusting her bag. He sat as always, impossibly composed, legs crossed, quill gliding with unhurried grace. The air seemed to thin around him, like silence bent to his convenience.

Elara pressed her forehead into her palm, praying he would not leave when the others drifted out. She needed him to stay. She needed him to notice her. She needed—Merlin, she hated that she needed anything from him at all.

But two weeks wasn’t long enough for pride.

Cedric wouldn’t listen.

Her notes weren’t enough.

Her plans were nothing.

Theo might be her last straw, and she was grasping.

So she sat, pretending to calculate, waiting for the library to empty, waiting for the moment when she could stand and bridge the space between them without an audience. Her fingers tapped against the quill, her stomach coiled tight, her mind already drafting and redrafting the words.

If you can feel time, if you know I don’t belong here, then tell me how to change it. Tell me how to save him. Tell me I’m not mad for trying.

The candlelight flickered. Students drifted out in twos and threes. Madam Pince closed a ledger with a decisive snap.

And still Theo wrote, steady as the tick of a clock.

Elara swallowed, gathering the last of her nerve. Two weeks until the maze. Two weeks until the end.

If not him, then who?

If not now, then when?

The library had thinned to near silence. Candles guttered in their sconces, dripping wax that no one would clear until morning. Madam Pince had already snapped her ledger shut and shuffled off, her steps echoing into the stone.

Elara’s hand cramped around her quill, though she hadn’t written a single thing in half an hour. Every few minutes she risked a glance. Theo was still there, still poised, still unhurried. His presence held the kind of composure that made her stomach twist tighter: he would leave when he decided, not a moment sooner.

And time was running out.

Her heart hammered as she packed her satchel, fingers shaking. She told herself she would catch him at the door, intercept him, corner him if she had to. She rehearsed nothing. Every attempt at words had dissolved into static.

Then he shifted, closing his book with a measured snap. His chair scraped back.

Now. Now or never.

She rose too quickly, nearly spilling ink across her parchment. He turned, and to her shock, he crossed the space first. Steps soft, deliberate, his shadow long in the candlelight. For one breath she thought her heart had simply stopped.

“Ravenclaw,” he said softly, inclining his head, like he’d been waiting for this moment all along.

Her throat closed. The neat Ravenclaw thing to do would have been to prepare an argument, a rational chain of logic that would lead him to her conclusion. The Slytherin thing would have been to play her hand obliquely, bait him, wait for him to commit.

But Elara was neither brilliant nor cunning just then. She was desperate.

“I know what’s coming,” she blurted. Her voice cracked, raw as scraped bone. “The Tournament—it doesn’t end with glory, it ends with Cedric’s death, and nobody listens until it’s too late. Please.” Her satchel slipped from her shoulder, thudding against the floor. “I don’t care if you use me. I don’t care if you laugh. But if there’s even a chance you know something… help me stop it.”

Her breath hitched. The words scorched her throat. She hated herself for the tears that stung her eyes, but she couldn’t stop them. “I can’t watch it happen again. Not again.”

Theo watched her in silence, his expression unreadable, a study in stillness. His gaze flicked across her face like he was parsing text only he could see.

Finally, he spoke, voice low, precise. “So that’s what you’ve been hiding.”

She laughed—a broken, bitter sound. “Yes. That’s what I’ve been hiding. Congratulations. You’ve caught the mad Ravenclaw.”

“Not mad,” he said, almost absently. He stepped closer, and in the dimness his presence pressed against her like gravity. “Out of joint.” His eyes narrowed. “You weren’t lying.”

Her knees nearly gave out. “Then… you believe me?”

“I told you,” he said slowly, “that I can feel the dissonance when you speak. You don’t sit in this time cleanly. Which makes you… useful.”

Her heart twisted. Useful. She should have flinched. But if it saved one life, even that word was enough.

“I don’t care what you call me,” she whispered. “Just… don’t let him die.”

Theo studied her another beat, then tilted his head, the faintest edge of something like curiosity curving his mouth. “You’re reckless, Ravenclaw. Cards on the table, no strategy at all.”

Her fists clenched. “Because there isn’t time for strategy.”

Silence stretched, sharp as a blade’s edge.

And then, finally, he nodded once, deliberate as a vow. “Very well. Let’s see if fate can be cheated.”

Elara’s breath shuddered out of her. Relief flooded her so fast she almost sobbed.

Because for the first time since she woke up in this cursed second life, she wasn’t alone with it anymore.