Champions

Violent dreams

Not much happened over the next few days, a fact for which Fleur was grateful. Things in Harry's life tended to move rather rapidly by her standards, and she occasionally felt like she might get swept away. The calmer things were, the happier she was.

Harry felt no differently, but he was clearly much more accustomed to the pace that fate forced upon him.

Another thing that helped her mood was that they knew exactly what to do for the last task — and Cedric and Viktor would be joining them. It was so simple and so obvious, that it really would make a total mockery of the Tournament. She could only see that as a good thing.

And it required no training time, which was even better!

When Monday rolled around, they went right back to their normal schedules. For Fleur, this meant sitting around in the Beauxbatons carriage and studying on her own; Harry and Hermione did so about half the time. They had just sat down for the afternoon session, in fact, and were happily studying.

Fleur noted that Harry looked sleepy, but ignored it. It had long since become clear that he was a very hard worker, and that he occasionally overdid things. One extra nap wouldn't hurt anything if he fell asleep, and might help in fact, so she didn't see the need to bother him.

While one might expect that Hermione might be annoyed be his lacking attention, she wasn't. She had noted the extreme improvement in his grades since joining the Delacour family, and so kept her own counsel. She didn't care how he studied, as long as he studied enough to do well in classes.

Fleur only knew this because they had discussed it a few weeks prior. It was a very new sensation having a friend at all, let alone a female one, and she certainly wasn't complaining. She also easily saw why Harry liked the girl; while she had her quirks to be certain, she was also extremely intelligent, and her morals and ethics were right where they should be.

She'd had to nip S.P.E.W. in the bud, though. Fortunately, however, the proper information had taken care of that very quickly. Elves were not slaves; they were symbiotic. Once Hermione understood that, it was fine. Well, that and calling her out on the name.

For such an intelligent girl, she could occasionally miss the blazingly obvious, and Harry was too overly polite at times to mention it.

Smiling faintly to herself at the thought, she moved aside her Arithmancy work and pulled her Runes book over. Ancient Runes was a favorite of hers, so she almost always saved it for last. She was just getting into it though, when she was interrupted.

Harry let out a pained scream, and suddenly sat bolt upright, wild-eyed and breathing heavily, one hand over the famous scar on his forehead.

Both girls moved like lightning; Hermione took to his side and put an arm around him, clearly thinking that he might have had a bad dream. This was far from impossible — he'd had more than a few since they started sleeping in the same bed — but some deeply-rooted instinct told her otherwise.

She knelt in front of him and looked him in the eye, noting the way that he locked onto her gaze, drinking her in as he slowly settled.

"'Arry?" she prompted.

"Vision," he grunted. "Voldemort. Not fun."

Fleur furrowed her brow in worry. "You 'ad a vision?" she echoed. "What did you see?"

"He was mad about something," he explained, his voice still pained and breathy. "Don't know what. Wormtail screwed up somehow, but they fixed it. He put the Cruciatus on him to punish him. That was when I woke up." His voice got even smaller as he added, "It really hurt."