AN: It's been a while. I'd forgotten about this, but then I got a certain anonymous review. Those do sometimes make a difference. My writing's changed over the past few years and I'm not ecstatic about how this story was and is going, so it might be a bit different, but I had writer's block for my other project, so why not?

Also, anonymous: you should think about registering an account. There are features for bookmarking and following stories. Also (cough) if you favourite a story, then it's a good indication to an author which stories he should continue, and it bumps it for other readers if they sort by favourites. It's like a positive review, except you don't have to write a review.

… … …

In the library are private rooms one may book for group study sessions, since students with team projects need space with access to the books where Pince won't blow her top when we talk. Ravenclaws use them quite a lot before finals, because the rule about banding together against external threats extends to exams, and because one of the template Bets is 'I Bet you can't tutor Lisa to get over eighty-five on our Arith test'. Flitwick tends to encourage these; he's tried a variety of tactics like that over the years, some of which even work.

Around me are some of my friends, all poring through books on a cornucopia of topics. It's interesting to compare with last time, when I had about three: Pad, who's friends with everyone because she's gorgeous, and who spent as much time with the other girls as with me anyway; Kevin, whom I dated last year because I wanted to try someone as different as possible from my previous boyfriend, and whom I broke up with on good terms; and Tracey, of Slytherin, who warmed considerably after I stopped poaching her boyfriend. Now, Pad's focusing on me almost exclusively, rather than spending much of her time with Lisa. Lisa, Terry and Anthony are being helpful, and have completely swept the events of the summer under the carpet. These four are extroverted enough to drown Kevin out some; he's off with Tracey somewhere, probably snogging and planning to say they were whining about the other Houses again. Even Michael's here, although he's still offended about summer so I don't expect him to contribute anything. On top of that, a handful of Cho's friends like me now, or are pretending to. They aren't here right now, though.

"I think we have enough examples of the past tasks to shortlist the likeliest general events," Lisa says. She's been leafing through A Breef Historie of ye Triwizard Tournamente since dinner, listing the historic tasks and making the odd note next to them. The boys are reading up on some of the more exotic solutions used; Pad's got sidetracked and is reading about the palace of Beauxbatons. "The most common idea seems to be variants on the theme of getting to an object or location protected by some sort of obstacles, and you're graded on how fast and elegant you are."

"That's pretty vague," Anthony says.

"Here's an example from the last time Hogwarts hosted, 1782. The task was to capture a black unicorn loose in the Forbidden Forest. The object is the unicorn; the obstacles are the nasties in the Forest, plus the unicorn's own powers, plus even finding it." Lisa scans down her list. "Or this one from Durmstrang in '62, where they had to steal an enchanted sceptre from a giant chieftain." She wrinkles her nose. I skimmed the same book the first time round, and the Hogwarts champion died in that one, if I recall correctly. "And here's another from Beauxbatons, where three magical gems were hidden around a roc's nest."

"Those all also involve magical beasts," Terry observes. "Are those all five-X?"

I shake my head. "No, they're four. Unicorns are normally three, but black ones are nastier, and some of the other things that live in the Forest are four. Those spiders …"

black shapes swarming the defenders

"You mean acromantulas?" Pad prompts.

I snap out of it. "Um, yeah. I've heard there are acromantulas, magical giant spiders, living in the Forbidden Forest –"

"Why wouldn't they tell us that sort of thing?" asks Michael, who's wandered into the Forest more than once. "We might actually listen to them when they tell us to stay out of the Forest then."

"– but I also heard they're a recent addition, that they've only been there for the past fifty years or so, so they obviously wouldn't have been used in the last Tournament."

"The cockatrice from the last Tournament was five-X," Pad adds, "of course, but I think Kevin's right, we can rule that out if they're trying to keep the death toll down." She pauses. "No pressure, Su."

"None taken," I say absently, still trying to shake the memory away.

"Are you alright?" Terry asks. He always was the empathic one.

"Hm? No, I'm fine," I lie. "I agree with Kevin, too. They must have already been planning safe – well, nonlethal tasks, and they would have dialled the danger down even more when Potter and I were chosen."

That's actually a possibility. Maybe with two underage competitors, they'll lighten the tasks up a bit, or at least add extra safeguards? They didn't last time (I assume), so probably not. Old people hate nothing more than having to change their minds about anything that benefits young people.

"If that's true," Anthony says, "maybe they won't be using that template of task at all. What other patterns did you find, Lisa?"

"There are quite a few charmbreaker tasks," Lisa says. "In 1767, they enchanted three … somethings which this doesn't really describe but which sound like some sort of giant weird shapeshifting slime … things … and the champions each had to subdue one. This overlaps a lot with the treasure hunt tasks, when the MacGuffin is behind some sort of enchantment. Another is from 17–"

"You're only quoting tasks from the eighteenth century," Anthony points out. "Why?"

"The book's language changes over the years," Lisa explains. "1690 was the first Tournament recorded in semi-modern English; anything before that is barely readable without a dictionary. There are explanatory notes in the margins, but it loses a lot in translation, and honestly this book is a bit patchy at the best of times. Still, that's, what, twenty-one Tournaments, sixty-three tasks less any that were cancelled … that has to be enough for us to pick up the patterns."

"What sort of confidence interval does that give?" Anthony asks, picking up a quill to work out the Arithmancy of it.

"Lisa, what other categories did you find?" I say loudly, because otherwise we'll waste the next hour crossing out arithmetical errors and debating whether the tasks are i.i.d.

"There are what I'm calling holding the line tasks, where you have to defend something for as long as possible," she says. "Here's one from Durmstrang, 1745. The champions were put on floating ice platforms in a … lake, or ocean or something, it doesn't say. They had to stay there for as long as possible while monsters swarmed them. Fire crabs melting the ice, a few different aquatic beasts with tentacles, aetherdactyls, that sort of thing. Or another from '52 where seven trolls apiece were heading toward a mock village, and the champions had to hold them off, to stop as many of them as they could as far from the village as possible. I don't think it'll be that, though, because someone seems to die in just about every one of those.

"There've been a few wandless tasks, although I can't see much of a pattern to them. Here's one where there was a buffet table of reagents and an impossible obstacle course, with things like twenty foot walls they had to climb; they had to eat the right herbs to get the abilities they needed to get through the course. Probably not that, since the Durmstrang guy fatally poisoned himself."

"Beauxbatons has held group tasks a few times," Pad says. "I read about this one from 1725, where the champions had to work in pairs to break into an enchanted vault while being attacked by chichevaches, so each person did the task twice, once with each other champion. It probably won't be that either; Beauxbatons is supposed to specialise in group work much more than Hogwarts, and we're not about to give them that sort of advantage."

"I'd thought duelling would be an obvious one, but I haven't found any mention of it; has anyone else?" Lisa asks.

Terry shakes his head. He corrected her about this last time, too. "Same reason. Durmstrang specialises in Dark Arts and combat magic; Krum would flatten you all. The tasks are supposed to be open-ended, you know, many possible solutions, so that one school isn't get screwed too hard if the only good method happened not to be in their syllabus."

"Can we agree that at least two of the tasks are probably going to be heavy on the dangerous beasts?" I ask. "Or maybe just difficult ones, like unicorns or maybe even that phoenix of Dumbledore's? It'd make more sense to use ones which are hard to control, but which won't hurt us."

"That's probably a good guess," Terry agrees. "So, what? We should be looking for spells which work well against lots of different four-X beasts?"

"Spells and potions," I correct. "And herbs, I suppose, if we can find any that don't work better in a potion."

Last time around, my friends and I had endless fun poking holes in the champions' tactics. We thought at first that it was bizarre that Potter used raw Gillyweed rather than refining it into a Water-Breathing Potion, because, as with most herbs, the potion form is more potent, has fewer side effects, and so on; after all, if potions weren't in some respect better than the sum of their parts, there'd be no point in making them. It was only later, when Hermione told us that he read about Gillyweed at the last minute and that the potion took a week to brew, and that he wasn't great at Potions anyway, that we accepted this.

"Say, Su, Padma," says Anthony, "if we're going to have dangerous beasts, Hagrid might be responsible for dealing with them. Have you heard him hinting anything about that, you know, 'Ar, it be a fine day for kavu handlin','?"

"He's a sociopath, not a pirate," Pad replies, "and no, we've been flat out with trying to stop the Skrewts from killing us and/or each other."

Maybe it's a little cruel of me to let my classmates waste all this time researching solutions to problems that I know I won't have to solve. I already have good ideas of how to do the tasks anyway. None is really all that technically demanding per se, not for a NEWT student who's seen how to do it; most of the difficulty is in being put on the spot, I think, and in judging what strategies are even worth trying. I've had months thinking about the tasks in the future, critiquing four different approaches plus my friends' suggestions; I should be able to acquit myself well even while holding back to fourth-year magic.

Still, I need to be seen working at it, and occasionally I do come across potentially good ideas. Here's a recipe for a topical potion which acts like a Flame-Freezing Charm, except safer because you get a second chance if you squib it, rather than just getting incinerated. Dragonfire is magical, so it would only reduce the damage, not prevent it altogether, but it would be nice to have some sort of body armour, just in case. On the other hand, I canonically don't know about the dragons yet, so it'd be a bit suss if I happened to equip myself with something which countered them specifically with no other real use. Unless I also had specific counters to other five-X beasts? I could try to learn the Patronus Charm, say I was preparing in case they brought Dementors back. It's really hard, though, and I don't think a fourteen-year-old could learn it in ten days. I'm not even sure I could, for that matter.

After a few minutes, Tracey storms in and takes a seat far from anyone else. She's introverted and quiet, but still wears her heart on her sleeve like an aura. Running into her when she's happy is like being hit by a weak Cheering Charm; meeting her when she's angry is like a Dementor at fifty paces. The Patronus Charm would probably work on her.

"What's wrong?" Lisa asks.

"Couple of Gryffindors threw a Dungbomb at me. Missed, splashed Kevin instead," she mumbles. She's never spoken very clearly, now or in the future; a side effect of having three boisterous older brothers talking over her when she was a kid, I suppose. "Had to curse them and see him back to your tower."

I haven't been fourteen for a few years, but I don't remember the Gryffindor/Slytherin prank war heating up like this last time. I can't unravel the psychology of it at all. It's not like I've gone out of my way to provoke either side. I haven't attacked anyone, and I've never shown any interest in pranks. We Ravenclaws, generally being studious types, tend to take a dim view of them at the best of times; the rest of the school largely realises this and leaves us alone. We made an exception for Umbridge, though.

I feel sorry for Kevin and Tracey. It's not the first time they've been caught in the crossfire. She in particular really hates it. She's the black sheep of Slytherin, being the quote-unquote platonic best friend of a Muggle-born, so she's usually too busy putting the itching powder that Bulstrode keeps trying to sneak into her bedsheets into Bulstrode's underwear to bother causing problems for Gryffindor; but this doesn't mean she doesn't get hit with her share of Gryffindor pranks.

"Wait, what?" says Lisa. "Did you get their names?"

"Weren't really in much condition to talk, after," she says. She's never really internalised the difference between jinxing someone to have itchy eyeballs for an hour and cursing them into the hospital wing with three months' phantom pain. The other Slytherins stick to pettiness like hiding her shampoo, ever since one memorable occasion from first year.

Lisa shakes her head. "You and Kevin are Su's best friends. This isn't just the Gryffindor/Slytherin thing, this is an indirect attack on our champion. And I've heard about the same sort of thing happening in the other year levels, too."

"Um, guys?" I say. "I know I personally haven't been hit by any pranks …"

This is a lie, too, although not really a bad one: I caught a third-year upending an inkwell over my essay two days ago, but that wasn't a huge deal anyway because I just Vanished the offending ink when no-one was watching.

"… so I can't really talk, but could you please not escalate, at least as long as it's anything to do with me? I don't want to get blamed for anything."

Vendettas are unpredictable, unpredictable things are liable to mess up the timeline somehow, and a messed-up timeline is the one thing I want to avoid. Everyone else exchanges glances, but they shrug assent.

"What are you going to do for potions?" Anthony asks. "I assume you only have the one cauldron, but you know how some potions take months to brew; you'd only be able to have one for the task. And that's leaving ingredients aside."

In any given year, the materials lists tell you to buy exactly those ingredients which will be needed in that year's classes. This is fine for the coursework, but usually not enough for extracurricular activities, unless you only need a very simple potion or one which happens to be on the syllabus anyway. Given some of the antics we and other classes got up to, this is probably deliberate school policy.

"I asked some of the sixth- and seventh-years who've dropped Potions, and I managed to round up five spare cauldrons," I say. "I think that will be enough. For ingredients, I was thinking I'd ask Snape for one of everything from his supplies. We don't know what potions we'll want to try, so we want to be prepared, and I don't think Hogsmeade stocks everything I might want. And the other schools could be eavesdropping; we don't want to give them any clues about what we're planning, and ingredient lists would be pretty obvious."

Or, because 'one of each' sounds more innocent than 'whatever you need for Veritaserum plus a handful of OWL-level potions I've already picked'.

"D'you think he'll go for that?" Pad asks.

Probably not. And in any case, I don't want to give him any more opportunities to read my mind than necessary. "Tracey, would you mind asking him for me?"

"Okay," she says.

"I'm sure it'll be fine," says Terry.

… … …

I thought I'd like DADA before I first got to Hogwarts – being a tomboy, I fancied myself a Defender of the Meek, and even fantasised about a career as an Auror – but this died when I spent a year with Quirrell, who was a useless teacher, and also possessed by You-Know-Who. I liked it more in the next two years, having minor (very minor) crushes on both teachers, but seeing Fake Moody was what taught me that I would never be an Auror, and I lost interest. Needless to say, it went even further downhill next year, and I dropped it straight after I got my OWL.

That was the first time round. This time, I could pass the material easily enough, but I know that the teacher is a Death Eater, which is every bit as stressful as it sounds. It's even worse than Potions; Fake Moody isn't from the future so he can't compare what I do now against what I did last time, but he remembers past me better than I do, he's on the lookout for any character deviations, and he has that Vecnan Eye so I have to keep in character even when we're not in the same room. On the bright side, I – like most girls – was already skittish of him because of that eye, so there's nothing odd about me keeping my distance.

"Constant vigilance!" he shouts as the end-of-class bell rings; everyone jumps. Even now, years later, that still startles me every time. Of course, I have more reason to be nervous around him than anyone. "Read chapter eight by next class, and I want two feet on Self-Reinforcing Curses for next week. Li, stay behind."

It wouldn't be so bad if the Death Eaters couldn't literally order me to do pretty much anything they wanted. I busy my hands putting my things away as my friends file out, so that I can't do any nervous tics like forming them into fists or reaching for my wand or just fidgeting, any of which he can see.

"Sir?" I prompt at length, as he laboriously cleans the blackboard of the class' notes. "We're missing lunch."

"I was looking over last week's assignment," he says, pulling mine from a folder as he stumps over. They haven't been handed back yet; I see a pleasing stretch of my unblemished indigo ink on the yellow-white parchment, with a few small notes in red ink about mistakes I deliberately threw in. I'm perfectionist enough that that's irritating – there's something truly beautiful about homework with no mistakes whatsoever – but I wasn't a 100% DADA student the first time. "This section here about the Malvorius Curse. Where'd you find that information? That isn't in the textbook."

Humans aren't great at remembering when they learnt something, so Fake Moody and Snape have been occasionally dropping questions which I would answer more precisely with future knowledge. Snape's been setting tests asking about OWL-level potions, to my entire class' indignation. I've taken to never answering in class at all and double-checking everything on tests, making sure to keep my grades below ninety percent.

"Um, I think that was from On the Extraction of Truth, which I found left open on a table," I say. This is what we Ravenclaws say when we've been caught sneaking into the Restricted Section. It's technically even true in this case, although the book was from Tracey's personal collection in sixth year, rather than two days ago in the library as implied. "Do you not approve of looking into the Restricted Section?"

He shakes his head. "No. It's better to be prepared, to be aware of what's out there. Just make sure you're careful when you read those books. You know what can happen from reading the wrong book the wrong way?"

"Of course, Professor," I say.

These head games are wearing me down. Hopefully, he and Snape will get tired of them soon.

… … …

"So, Snape didn't give you anything?" Cho asks.

"Not so much as a blade of grass," I reply.

Hogwarts has a huge number of mostly-disused rooms. Most are quite useless for everything except giving the house-elves extra busywork, but they're good when you need a little privacy. I asked Flitwick, and he picked one near Ravenclaw Tower, slapped a password enchantment on it, and gave it to me for the year, which was nice of him. I could use it for practising charms, I suppose, but right now I'm only using it as a private potions lab. I could have reserved one of the bigger ones in the dungeons, but I'd really rather keep my distance from Snape. I assume he's locked me out of his stores out of nothing more than casual spite (he has an expense account for restocking them), but if he does think I'm from the future, letting me get killed in the Tournament through lack of reagents would solve one problem for him very neatly.

The room is on the seventh storey and smaller than a full classroom; it's basically just a few writing desks huddled together. This is enough space for me to set up my five cauldrons, although there's not much point without any supplies. Cho's still taken the time out for me to discuss it, for which I'm grateful. She's one of the best at Potions of her year.

"What are you going to do?" she asks. "Borrowing cauldrons that people wouldn't be using anyway is one thing, but ingredients are expensive."

"Flitwick's volunteered to try to wrangle the expenses forms for me," I say.

"I thought those were supposed to be completely horrible? Endless paperwork in quintuplicate, as far as the eye can see?"

"Yeah, but he agreed anyway. I think he's still bitter about Quidditch last year and wants to beat McGonagall." We would have won the Cup, if Potter hadn't had his Infinity Broom. "You flew really well, you know?"

"I tried," she says with a rueful smile. "I never had a chance against him, though."

"You could've if you'd had a Firebolt too. Anyway, Flitty says that he thinks he can get most of what I asked for, but it'll have to go through a Board review first, and that won't be done until after the first task."

Cho winces. "So you're shelving the potions idea until the second task?"

"We have a Hogsmeade trip on Saturday, right? And the task is on the Tuesday after. I'll visit the apothecary and buy a few things. Not everything, just enough for a few general potions that are pretty likely to be useful against most things, like that Strengthening Solution you mentioned."

I picture the dragon trying to swallow me whole, and me prising its jaws open, punching it in the nose, and running away with the egg under my arm. Unrealistic, maybe, but it'll be so awesome if it does happen like that.

"With your own money?" Cho asks.

I shrug. "I'm not going to forfeit a thousand Galleons because I'm too stingy to spend two or three along the way."

There comes a knock at the door. I open it, and in comes Pad, alone but looking quite pleased with herself.

"No luck?" I ask.

"Not with Morag, no," she says.

Our classmate Morag happens to belong to an obscure Druidic sect that teaches Potions and Herbs from a young age. She's always taken advanced placement classes, got Outstanding NEWTs for both in fifth year, and even now could probably teach me quite a lot. Unfortunately, she's always been the lone wolf of our year, and there were incidents over the summer between her and Anthony; it turns out she's rather revoltingly anti-Semitic. Since Anthony is popular, and since Morag was in fact completely out of line then, this drove her apart from everyone else, too, so now there's too much bad blood to wrangle favours out of her, directly or otherwise.

"Well, what did we really expect," I say. "You look like you've had luck with someone, though? Your first kiss?"

Pad sticks out her tongue at me.

"Wow, really?" Cho asks. "Aren't you fifteen?"

"It's easy for you to talk, but there aren't any good boys in my year," Pad says.

I give a gentle cough which might possibly sound arguably like 'Terry' to someone who wasn't paying much attention. Cho giggles; Pad glares.

"Have you looked into the other Houses?" Cho asks. "A lot of people think you can only date within your House-year, but that cuts out almost everyone."

"A little, but they all seem to fall under one or more of boring, unhygienic, racist, sexist, or just plain annoying." Some of the Slytherins and one or two of the others are all of those. I suspect that she would have added 'ugly' to that list if an older student weren't present. "Anyway, no, but one of the Beauxbaton boys just asked me on a date to Hogsmeade on Thursday."

Cho and I squee.

"I've been wondering who'd snag one of them first," she says. "Is he cute?"

Padma nods.

"French people always are," I say.

"What's he like? Details!" Cho says to Pad.

"Well, he's a bit older, obviously," Pad says. "His English is pretty much perfect, which is nice. His name's Claude –"

There's a crash as I knock my inkwell off the table and it shatters against the wall.

"– and I take it you and he have met," she adds, not missing a beat.

"I – yeah, briefly," I say. "He was there at the Weighing of the Wands yesterday. I – um – I was pretty sure he was Fleur's boyfriend, is all."

She has no idea how much havoc this could wreak on the shipping grid. Last time, I went to the Yule Ball with Claude, and she went with Weasley to spite Terry for taking a Hufflepuff groupie rather than her. I can only hope Snape doesn't remember who went with who last time; teachers must have more important things to think about than students' love lives, right?

"'Pretty sure'?" Pad asks. "Why, what did they do?"

What to say? I can't really lie, because Claude, like most of the Beauxbatons students, is openly hostile toward Fleur, out of sheer jealousy; if Pad pays attention to him at breakfast for two seconds, she'll see his body language. I could try another Confundus, but that's really an emergency measure; if I used it any more than absolutely necessary, I'd get caught sooner rather than later, and I'd probably be strung up for interfering with people's heads. I suppose I could just tell the truth for once. Just as long as I don't make a habit of it.

I shrug. "I don't know. He said he was there for her. I mean, if he were just there as a friend, her entire class should have come, shouldn't they? Ditto for Krum, but he's single."

Pad frowns. Straight girls always hate competing with Fleur.

"She has incredible perfume," I add, going misty-eyed.

She snorts and looks over at the stack of parchment I have out for notes. "Hey, what's that?"

When I knocked over the inkwell, I disturbed the parchments, and now the one top is written in handwriting not my own.

Triwizard business taking place on grounds from midnight after 22nd – keep castle in lockdown

– BC

I stare for a moment, holding it out of the other girls' lines of sight for a moment.

"I think it's just," I begin, then catch myself.

"Su?" Cho presses.

My instincts say I should scrunch it up and say it's scrap working parchment and think about it later, but that's a mistake. It's an idiot trap. Fake Moody must have planted it. I don't know what his game is, but whatever it is, I'm not biting.

I hand the parchment over to Cho; Pad reads it over her shoulder. Their eyebrows rise.

"You think they're going to be, what, setting up for the task?" Cho asks.

"It looks like it," Pad says consideringly. "Meaning that if you sneaked out after them …"

"That would be cheating," I say virtuously.

I see three possibilities. The first is that he realises that I'm from the future, and will have a trap waiting. Since I'm fairly sure they're moving the dragons around, I imagine this would involve an accident in which one of them eats me. Pass.

"Technically, I'm pretty sure there isn't a rule against it," Pad says. "I mean, there's obviously the curfew, but school rules aren't part of the Tournament, are they?"

"I don't think the judges will see it that way," I say.

The second is that he thinks I'm not, and he's trying to give me some heads-up so I can come up with a plan. If I got myself killed on Tuesday, the Tournament might be cancelled, and there would go his master's plans. In that case, I think I'd prefer to see him sweat a little.

"Only if you get caught," Cho notes.

"Look, I know I'm an underdog, but we haven't even done any tasks yet," I point out. "I'll maybe think about bending the rules if I lose horribly or start almost dying, but I'm not going to risk being disqualified this early for what might not even be anything useful."

The third possibility is that he's still trying to decide, and somehow this will tell him. Maybe whether I go is a test? My younger self probably would have at least tried. She might have got Pad to Bet Terry that he couldn't figure out what the deal was; no sense risking disqualification. But then, maybe there's a trap waiting, and that'd be manipulating him to his death. I'm not a Slytherin.

"Let me mull it over," I say. Is that wise or cowardly?