After Cedric pulled off his task with simple, clean elegance, not a burn to be found, Hermione found she could breathe again. She also found that she couldn't stop grinning like an idiot, but really, that wasn't anybody's business but hers.

"Fire eagles!" Colin was practically screaming, hopping up and down in his seat as the judges gave Cedric his score. Dumbledore and Crouch both awarded tens. Maxine and Bagman stuck to nines. And Igor Karkaroff, true to form, gave him a six. "Eagles! Of fire!" cried Colin, making Hermione smile wider still.

Even though she'd spent the last ninety-six hours doing nothing but help Cedric prepare for the task, even Hermione had to admit that the final product had been pretty goddamn impressive. Most of the crowd hadn't noticed the first few spells Cedric had cast, while he was still standing at the gate - a weak Frigidero to cool the air around him, and a series overpowered muffling charms to mask his footsteps, his scent, his presence. They only took note when he shot a small flock of fiery eagles into the morning sky, distracting the dragon - which immediately took wing, roaring at the eagles and straining at its chains - so when Cedric began to simply walk to the nest, utterly unprotected, utterly calm, they'd all collectively lost their bloody minds. He was in and out in under three minutes.

Fleur came next, and tried an overpowered Dormius against her Welsh Green that actually worked - which made Hermione wonder for a brief, terrifying moment about exactly how powerful the Frenchwoman was, to cast a spell that worked on a dragon - right up until the beast woke up, halfway through her exit, and set her skirt on fire.

Krum, true to Durmstrang's reputation for destructiveness, decided to leverage the dragon's weak point - its eyes - and hexed the monster with a Conjunctivitis Curse. The thing rampaged, exactly as Hermione had worried would happen, going berserk with fear and shock and pain, smashing its own eggs and- oh. It was horrifying.

In the end, it took seventeen dragonhandlers and Dumbledore's brief intervention to calm the animal down, and then Karkaroff still gave his champion ten points out of ten, while Colin - and most of Hogwarts - screamed increasingly colorful invectives at the oily, smarmy Continental.

But Hermione couldn't join in, couldn't tear her eyes away from the rocky enclosure, where the remains of the eggs were scattered across the field, shards of crimson-gold eggshell and tiny, furled bodies with thin, translucent wings lying crushed and murdered under their own mother's weight.

The pitch was cleaned of the corpses eventually, and the next dragon was brought in.

The Hungarian Horntail.

For Harry Potter.

Hermione's first thought about this Potter fellow was-

"Hey, he's kinda short, isn't he?" Colin mused, sounding a little surprised.

Hermione turned to him. "Isn't this the second time you're seeing him?"

Colin shrugged, his eyes glued on the Hungarian Horntail, monstrously spiked and armored and clawed, nature's finest machine of death. It had noticed the intruder on the pitch, and its dark, yellow eyes were slowly tracking Potter's movement. "Yeah, but that first time, I was scared out of my mind," Colin admitted without a trace of shame. "I wasn't really looking at his height."

"And now?"

"And now I've just seen three teenagers enter a pit with a bloody dragon and make it out alive," Colin replied, although Hermione could see he'd gone a little pale. "Helps put things in perspective."

Hermione looked down at her lap, where her fingers were all knotted together, white and bloodless, like a corpse. Her hands were shaking, she noted, very very distantly, as if she was looking at something through a window, through someone else's eyes.

"I mean," Colin was saying, a faint tremor to his voice, as Harry Potter advanced on the dragon, "how scary can one kid be, compared to four dragons?"

Her heart was pounding, erratic and hyperquick.

There was a sick, wild feeling in her chest, and Hermione realized she was scared.

Scratch that.

She was terrified.

And she had no idea why.

Ringwraith, Hermione thought, bizarrely, the word sibilant with fear and rich, bubbling hatred. Nazgul. Servitor of darkness, slave of Sauron's will.

Potter's wand arm was limp by his side, his cloak dark as pitch, the cowl throwing his face in deep shadow.

But Hermione was quite sure that it was more that just a trick of lighting - an Obfuscating charm, of some sort? Cast into the lining of the cloak? Maybe even second veil over his face, as a failsafe. It all depended on how highly Potter valued his anonymity.

And then the wind caught the bottom of his cloak, fluttering the hem for a second, and Hermione caught sight of his shoes - white trainers, and a rather distinctive logo down the side.

Her eyes widened, and beside her, she held Colin choke out an abrupt, hysterical laugh. They turned to each other at exactly the same time.

"Did you-" he gasped, just as she said, "Were those-"

Hermione nodded, to the unasked question, and Colin jaw dropped, eyes flickering between Harry and Hermione, shocked into silence.

The year after the incident with the troll, Hermione had done a lot of reading - even more than usual - under the covers and into the wee hours, staving off sleep and the nightmares that came with it. It had been a strange, terrifying time for her, after the calm, sluggish pace of her Muggle life - a life filled with three-headed monsters that guarded trapdoors, and mirrors that taunted her with impossible dreams, and trolls that invaded washrooms; Hermione had never seen so much blood. She hadn't known her body held so much blood, not until it was splashed across the second floor girls' loo like a Jackson Pollock gone terribly wrong, until she'd seen her own leg, ripped and tossed like a ragdoll's, halfway across the room, the horror of trying to stand and toppling over, the certainty that, this was it, this was how she would die-

Reading about trolls had made her twitchy and nauseous, so she read about the Cerberus instead. The three-headed dog of Hell. She read the old myths, the Greek legends, Plato and Hesiod and Euripides, devouring the stories about Hades, the Lord of the Underworld and the Master of Death.

They tried to paint him in bad light, those ancient writers, but Hermione had liked Hades anyway. Except for the bit with Persephone, he was perfectly sensible. Zeus and Poseidon seemed content to putter around, raping lovely young maidens left and right, ignoring their responsibilities and picking fights, generally making great arses of themselves.

Not Hades.

Hades did his job. He was a fair judge, and an exacting master, and if he was not a good man, precisely, then he was, at least, a rational one. Hermione found herself liking that a lot more.

And he had a dog.

Cerberus.

A great, slavering monster of a dog, perhaps, but a dog all the same. A good dog, for the job it had. Hermione could only imagine that guarding the gates to hell got messy, on account of how close she herself had been to entering them.

Cerberus, she read, came from the old word kerberos, meaning 'spotted'.

Spotted.

Colin turned back to the pitch, to Harry Potter. There was an expression of fierce, savage hope writ large on Colin's face, and Hermione knew in an instant, that he wanted Potter to survive this. To win.

"Accio!" they heard Potter call, his voice clear and loud, and in seconds, a plain, black broomstick slapped against his open palm and he was up, up, in the air, taunting the Horntail, slipping past gouts of fire with only inches to spare, a skill so refined it seemed utterly impossible.

Nazgul, she thought again, and now the word was filled with bemusement, made soft by a crooked smile.

Hades did his job, stayed faithful to his wife, and had a dog he called Spot.
And Harry Potter, the boy even Hell spat back out, limned in darkness, returned from the almost dead, was short, skinny and apparently wore Reeboks while battling dragons.

It was hard to be scared of him after that.

The school practically descended on top of the tent, once Potter had been given his scores (nines from Dumbledore and Crouch, an eight from Maxine, a ten from Bagman, bizarrely enough, and Karkaroff spared a five with an expression like a toothache, putting him three points behind Cedric) and quite literally vanished into thin air.

To their left, in the far distance, a tiny figure hoppped off their broomstick, and slung it over their shoulder. Hermione could just barely make out the thatch of rumpled blonde hair, the broad shoulders, the long, hurried stride. Colin jumped up and down, waving his arms wildly in the air, hollering, "Riiiiiiick! RIIIIICK! OVER HERE!" while Hermione shrank away and pretended she didn't know them.

Rick caught up, red-cheeked and looking a little worse for wear, but his eyes were bright as he babbled about the view, and how cool everything looked from up there, and all the photos he'd gotten. Hermione slipped away, with an awkward smile and a hasty excuse, but the two third-years had their heads together, seriously discussing when they could start developing the photos, - 'immediately' - who they were going to sell them to - 'everyone' - and how they were going to advertise - 'really loud' - and they barely noticed her go.

By the time Hermione managed to catch up to Cedric, they were already in the Great Hall, but there were still crowds swarming around him, and she didn't look too odd when she walked up to offer her congratulations.

But Cho, sitting next to Cedric, noticed her first.

"Hermione," she saw Cho murmur, although her voice was swallowed up in the din.

There was a blazing look in her eyes, and if Hermione hadn't been a Gryffindor, she would've taken a step back. As it was, she stood her ground, gulping, as the older girl walked up to her.

"Did you know?" Cho asked, and silence rippled outward from where the two of them stood, as if everyone was straining to hear their conversation.

"What?" Hermione asked blankly.

"About the dragons," Cho repeated. "Did you know?"

Hermione looked to Cedric, and he inclined his head in a single, sharp nod.

Were they both insane? Hermione wanted to scream. They wanted her to cop to it? In front of an audience?!

"No," Hermione replied, careful to keep her voice flat. Hollow. "Of course not. That would be cheating."

And Cho tackled her-

-in a hug.

Huh?

Dumbfounded, Hermione slowly forced herself to pat a clearly overwhelmed Cho on the back. Cho pulled back, still fierce and beautiful, and took both of Hermione's hands in her own. "Thank you," she whispered, with a vehemence that stunned Hermione. "Thank you for helping him. I don't know what I would've done if anything-" She choked, and blinked twice, before she soldiered on, "if anything happened to-"

"Nothing is going to happen to him," Hermione interrupted. "Nothing."

Cho nodded, eyes fiery and dark with determination, and Hermione clasped her hands together. It felt, in that moment, like a bloodpact had been sealed between the two of them. Nothing would happen to Cedric. Not on their watch.

Hermione Granger woke up to the Daily Prophet hitting her in the face.

It was the morning after the First Task, an impossibly bright morning in the middle of November, and someone tossed the newspaper at her. It smacked her in the face, and within seconds, Hermione had snapped her wand into her right hand, a wicked, silver dagger in her left, slipping off the bed in a single, fluid movement, and standing alert at the side. Her knees were slightly bent, her feet apart and firmly placed, pushing her center of gravity low and flexible.

Her wandtip glowed a dangerous, throbbing red, the wood creaking under the pressure of her inhumanly strong hand.

"What the motherfuck," someone swore, and it seemed to wipe the heat from Hermione's eyes. She sighed.

"Parvati," she acknowledged, her voice hoarse and papery. Merlin, her head was going to kill her. "Don't startle me like that again."

"What the hell was that?!" Parvati whisper-screamed, backing away from Hermione like she was a feral hippogryff. "Is that a knife? Do you sleep with a knife under your pillow?!"

"Mm-hm," she mumbled, stowing the knife in her bedside table, and twisting her unruly hair up into a bun.

"Why?!"

"The Sirius Black incident. He got all the way from Azkaban to Gryffindor Tower. I-" She saw the Daily Prophet lying sadly at her feet. "What's this, then?"

"No!" Parvati cried, suddenly panicked, "Don't- " but Hermione had already picked up the newspaper. "Oh crap. Look, I'm gonna- I'm gonna- Um. Bye!"

With that, Parvati was scuttling out of the dorms like her robe was on fire, but Hermione hardly noticed her leave. Her eyes moved over the headline blankly, over and over and over again, uncomprehending.

There were photos on the front page of the tabloid - a panel of three. The one to the left had Cedric chatting with Fleur. He said something and she laughed, tossing back her blindingly perfect mane of platinum hair, and Cedric grinned, seeming rather pleased with himself. The one in the middle featured Cedric on the edge of the dragon enclosure, a golden egg tucked under his arm, the Swedish Short Snout roaring in the background. Cho ran up to him, and he swept her off her feet, kissing her like his life depended on it.

And the one to the right was of Hermione and Cedric, in the tent.

He grinned at her. She jumped into his arms. He turned his face into her neck. Ran his hands down her spine, stopping just short of too friendly. The picture turned oddly grey for a second, and then looped over.

He smiles. She hugs. They stay that way too long.

Again.
Again.

'CEDRIC DIGGORY:,' the headline read, 'CHAMPION, OR CHEATER?'

The byline belonged to Rita Skeeter.

Hermione's knees wobbled for a second, before she sat down hard on the edge of her bed. This could not end well.