Part 1

Cedric is pretty sure Carrie hasn’t slept all week. As Head Boy, it’s his job to know things – and he knows, for certain, that the dusky violet bruises under her eyes have never been that dark before. She’s paler, thinner, and quieter. She seems to be nannied by her friends more than usual, or completely alone, and, honestly, her behaviour concerns him.

As per responsibilities of being Head Boy, of course.

He doesn’t think about how they’re sort of friends, but also sort of not. Not by his choice, of course, because he has tried to get to know her better, but everytime he talks to her, this innate, unyielding desire to be polite yet unobtrusive gets the better of him and he can’t stop.

But they’re friendly enough, as Hufflepuff seventh years.

Possibly.

Hopefully.

Surely.

She’s a bit of a mystery, to be honest, not because he doesn’t know how to talk to her but because of her personality. Carrie is just… there. Nothing fazes her. She doesn’t even seem to be bothered by less than perfect grades, the wackiness surrounding Harry Potter, nor whatever bullshit happens with the everchanging DADA professors. 

It’s an unshaken confidence that doesn’t smell right. Too much Gryffindor in there, and not enough Hufflepuff. She’s not perfect, though, and sits comfortably above-average but not outstanding in her grades. Friendly. Smart enough. Pleasant.

But… aaargh.

Cedric is going mental.

Because he’s the Head Boy and he knows things, he finds her in the kitchens instead of the Great Hall during dinner time. She looks a bit like a boy, to be honest, with that wild new haircut that everyone’s sporting this year (is this a fad? A new trend?), and the lanky body, so it’s always a bit jarring to see her in a uniform skirt instead of trousers.

Lots of the girls are wearing trousers nowadays. Cedric can’t blame them – he’d feel weird about having knickers out in the open like that, if he were a girl.

“Fancy having tea here?” Carrie asks.

He stands a bit foolishly, then quickly says yes and joins her on the small table off to the corner, near a shelf with hundreds of paper napkins. “It’s a bit loud in the first week of school,” Cedric says. “Mind if I escape here just for tonight?”

She smiles knowingly. “Be my guest.”

There’s a muggle novel on the table next to a cup of tea and a plate of cucumber sandwiches. She slips the novel into her book bag to make room for a horde of house elves pouring new plates of food on the table due to his arrival, and after a whirlwind of a meeting with diligent cooks, Cedric is left a bit swept away.

“Terrible manners to pick at your food,” he comments, hopefully in a playful manner. It would be awful if he somehow made her poorly condition even worse.

She blinks, almost taken aback, and stares at her slim pianist hand separating the cucumbers from bread. There’s a finger hooked into the squishy middle, offendedly. “Ah,” she says, slightly perturbed. “Force of habit, sorry. I’ve never really thought of bread as a meal before. Kind of feels more like a dessert, to be honest.”

Carrie isn’t Carrie’s real name, but she tends to wave people away from trying to pronounce her real name. Hogwarts is, unfortunately, incredibly white and British.

“You mainly eat rice at home?” Cedric asks, hoping that he hadn’t just said something horribly racist.

“Yeah,” she says, and there’s a faint smile on her exhausted face. “It’s not a meal without a bowl of rice.”

There’s a bit of camaraderie between the two Hufflepuff seventh years. They have, after all, spent the past six years in close quarters togethers. Their friends are all friends. They see each other every day, have heard stories about the other in casual conversation between mutual friends, and are both aligned with Hufflepuff values. He knows she’s Japanese-British, muggleborn, and left-handed. And yet, Cedric thinks this is the first time he’s ever sat down and talked to Carrie Ando. 

“Can’t the house elves cook your culture’s food for you?”

She shrugs. Cedric suddenly feels blisteringly hot and icy cold from never realising that this was an issue before. Do the second-culture students just not eat their native cuisine at Hogwarts?

“Rice in Europe is different from what I’m used to,” she says, and the exhaustion is back on her face, the under-eye bags darkening further. She’s lost so much weight compared to the first day of school last week that her jawline and cheekbones resemble a model’s from a magazine. “But it’s fine. The food’s still tasty here, and my family owls me an Asian snack box once a month.”

Cedric Diggory, star student and Head Boy, should do something about this.

He can’t just not.

“But enough about me, Mister Head Boy. I’ve never seen you skip a meal in the Great Hall before, you truant,” she says.

He can’t help it. There’s something in her playfully accusing tone that makes him want to laugh and scream at the same time, so he makes a breathy noise in response. “What can I say? It’s louder than usual – the tournament announcement has made everyone excitable.”

It’s not a lie, but it’s not the full truth. 

Under a careful eye, Cedric watches as Carrie finishes removing all the cucumbers from their bready prisons and finally starts eating her deconstructed meal. 

“They’ve got two months to get over the jitters,” she says. “Beauxbaton and Durmstrang arrive on the thirtieth of October, right?”

He shrugs and reaches for a salami-cheese sandwich once he’s satisfied that she’s eaten enough. “Around there, yeah. Why, do you have an interest in joining the competition?”

Carrie looks up from her plate. Her eyes are big, he realises, and curses himself for not realising. They’re big, dark, and a bit shimmery. Thick lashes frame her eyes, enviably thick, long, and black, but the hairs are straight instead of curled. How odd. “No need,” she says, and her lips are plush and wet (annoyingly so, what in the bloody hell is going on in Cedric’s mind?) from her lemongrass tea. “The competitor from Hogwarts will no doubt be either you or Harry Potter, Head Boy.”

Nobody can argue about Potter – the boy attracts trouble like no other. It’s a bit pitiful, honestly, and if Cedric had time to worry about Gryffindor fourth-years then he’d try his hand at befriending the poor boy.

But…

“Me?” Cedric asks. 

Carrie points a mayo-covered finger at him. He’s noticed that she likes to eat with her hands, for whatever odd reason. “Yes, you, Diggory. You’re an advanced seventh-year, at the top of most of your classes, and fairly well-rounded in your academic and personal life. The perfect embodiment of a Hogwarts champion.”

He’s not blind to his achievements and many people have told him to his face that he’s “amazing” and “utterly cool,” but the way that Carrie says it… It’s neat. Sort of. She doesn’t add any pizazz or emotion, it’s as if she’s talking about the weather. Bland, safe, and nice.

Why have they never talked like this before?

“You can call me by my first name,” he says. “We’ve known each other for six years, I hope we’re friendly enough by now.”

Carrie drums her fingers on what limited table space there is left. It’s a pleasant tap-tap-tap melody.

“Cedric,” she says, savouring his name in her mouth. “Cedric Diggory. Nice.”

And he freezes.

Oh no.

There’s a shiver down his spine, numbness in his legs, and a flash of panic in his mind because oh shit the way she says his name does something to his thought process.

“Call me Carrie,” she says.

Cedric inhales and exhales deeply. There’s something wrong with him for being this excited at making a new friend in his seventh year at school, especially someone that he’s already been acquainted with for the past six years. “Car– wait. I remember the Sorting Hat said something else, back in first year.”

Aaaand now he’s done it.

Is that a sensitive subject? Native names?

But Carrie doesn’t seem bothered by Cedric’s potential blunder – instead, she’s more amused at his question than anything. “My name is Akari Ando, yes, but it’s hard to pronounce correctly for most English wizards.”

“Ah–car–rhee…?”

She smiles, terribly awkward. “That’s… good.”

Akari Ando.

Akari Ando.

Akari Ando.

That’s her name. That’s her full legal name, the one her family calls her by, and not because Cedric is Head Boy but because he wants to be a good person, he knows she deserves to feel comfortable.

“I’ll nail down the pronunciation one day,” he says. “Promise.”

Akari is playfully bemused at his words, just like she is at most things in pretty much any situation, and the conversation turns to other matters. Cedric eventually hints about her under-eye bags by the time she finishes her cucumbers and bread, to which she startles significantly.

It’s the most reaction he’s seen from her, ever.

“Don’t worry about me,” she replies instantly, waving a hand. Maybe her casual words and normal actions distract others from her apparent issues, but Cedric’s been observing her for the past hour and almost feels like he’s learned a new layer about Akari Ando.

He sees that she’s acting.

Then, the moment flashes by, and everything feels normal again. Acting? What? How? She’s just tired and stressed, it’s natural. It’ll fade away. Lots of students have periods of drastic weight loss and fatigue throughout the school year for one reason or another.

What in the bloody hell is going on today?

The next day isn’t a school day, so he’s free to eat breakfast later than usual. But good habits instil good manners, or so Amos Diggory says, and Cedric can’t help but wake up early in the morning no matter what. Nobody’s ever awake first thing on Saturday and he doesn’t particularly want to walk all the way to the Great Hall (senioritis is kicking in fast and hard), so he simply swings up to the kitchens.

Thank goodness for being a Hufflepuff.

It’s the second time he’s skipped a meal in the mess this year and it’s still only the first week. Damn. Seventh year seems dark already. 

He’s almost disappointed when he doesn’t see Akari in her little nook in the back but he doesn’t know why. They’re friends now, officially, but there’s still a thin layer of tension in the relationship. From whom, he can’t tell yet.

She’s a muggleborn – he’s given out a few detentions to Slytherin students who’ve badmouthed her heritage during his prefect years. She’s left handed – an advantage in duelling practice. She’s confident but not brazen or outspoken, instead seeming a bit mature beyond her years but then mentally out of it at the same time. Cedric doesn’t think he’s ever seen her show fear.

At meal times, if she shows up to the Great Hall, he makes sure to make eye contact with Akari and smile. The seventh years sit next to each other, most of them all in the same friendly blob of a group, but she’s on the other end with the girls and he’s with the boys or walking up and down the aisle to mouth off the troublemakers. 

The perfect opportunity to socialise arrives in Defence class.

“I want to pair up with Akari,” Cedric tells his mates, who don’t seem surprised at all. He’d usually partner with Roger Davies, his Ravenclaw best mate, but instead Roger lets him go intact. No questions asked.

Roger smirks. “Go get her, tiger.”

“What?”

The Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw boys (and isn’t he glad that these two houses aren’t mortal enemies? Merlin, he feels bad for the Gryffindor-Slytherin classes) slap Cedric’s arse as he escapes the boys’ side of the aisle. It’s… concerning. Mildly.

That’s the story of how he ends up partnered with Akari Ando for the big seventh-year Defence Against the Dark Arts project, surrounded by giggling boys and girls alike.

What in the world…?

Akari lets loose a bit more of that reactive shock when things don’t go her way. It’s something Cedric has noticed – some things, mostly revolving around Cedric’s unpredictable actions, apparently, absolutely surprise Akari to the point where she lets the calm exterior wash away. She’s mysterious enough to be the type to plan out every single step of her life – so then why’s Cedric’s actions making her all perplexed?

Their conversation at their table turns to romance.

Strange, from what he knows of her. She’s one of the few seventh years who hasn’t been involved in any romantic trysts in these past six years.

“I hear from the gossip mill that Hu- Cho Chang’s got a crush on you,” Akari says as she’s scribbling down ideation notes for their project.

From this angle, her jawline is so sharp, almost masculine in a way. The boyish looks can be seen as attractive, perhaps, but Cedric is more concerned with the way the uniform skirt looks wrong against those pale thighs. Why is he staring at her thighs? Bad. Very bad. Akari’s legs are long and lean – again, androgynous. Very leggy.

“What?” He says. Then, again, “what? Oh. The fifth year chaser on the Ravenclaw quidditch team, Cho Chang.”

Cedric doesn’t think that’s her real name. He distinctly remembers the Sorting Hat saying something else back at her sorting, when he was a third year. Akari had gone to talk to the girl on the Ravenclaw table for some reason, that day – he wasn’t sure, and didn’t really care to ask back then.

“She’s pretty. I think you should go on a date and–,” Akari says, but then he interrupts her.

He barely hears her. “Did you say Hu-something before?”

Akari pauses. 

Cedric can’t read her right now, but he thinks that she’s making a decision.

After the great pause, Akari pursues her lips, stretches out her shoulders, and says, “yeah.” She looks into Cedric’s eyes. “Her name is Huiying. Everyone started calling her ‘Cho’ in her first year because they couldn’t pronounce it.”

Huiying.

What were they talking about again? Ah, right, dating.

“She’s definitely my type,” he agrees. “But I don’t know, I don’t reciprocate her feelings.”

“You–.”

For some reason, this subject makes Akari completely lose her grip on reality. She stumbles back, barely catches herself, then rests both hands on the desk. Her gaze blanks out, she doesn’t seem to be looking at anything anymore, and her hands tremble and shake. Those wide, dark eyes stare into the nothingness, pupils dilating, and it takes a good minute for Akari to come back.

“Um,” Cedric says, because what the fuck. “Akari? Are you feeling alright?”

Akari flips a switch and suddenly everything is back to normal. “Peachy. Sorry, I think that was my blood sugar.”

He’s never heard of a blood sugar problem before. He’s friends with her closest friends – Beatrice Haywood and Elspeth MacGillony, and more than acquainted with all of her other friends across sixth and seventh year. Is this new? Did something happen over the summer?

“Anyway,” she says, unbothered. “Really? I could’ve sworn you two were making love-eyes at each other at the end of last year.”

“Chang did ask me out after the final match last year,” Cedric says. “But I wasn’t interested.”

Akari makes a noncommittal noise. He doesn’t know why, but he stares at her throat for a second, then back to her face, the same offensively androgynous face. He wasn’t interested in Cho Chang – no, Huiying Chang – when she dragged him to a deserted corner on the fifth floor despite her pretty blush, floral scent, and long, feminine hair. He could’ve been interested, he knows, because he (and most boys on the quidditch teams) have had a good wank about Chang at least once, but there was something else on his mind that day.

Then she frowns, like Cedric’s done something wrong. ”Interesting.”

He bets that they’re friends. He’s seen Akari hang out with Chang more than once, alongside some of the other Asian students during their free blocks. Girls tend to travel in groups to prey on men, he’s heard, and maybe all the Asian girls are coming together to torment Cedric Diggory into accepting Chang’s feelings.

Then Akari reaches over to flatten out a wrinkle in the parchment paper of the right side, on Cedric’s half of the paper, and he suddenly finds himself with his nose right above the thick of her scalp and that huge mess of a haircut. Why does she have that horrible haircut that all the boys are sporting this year? Honestly, with a pair of clippers and hair gel she’d look so much–.

Cucumber.

He breathes in, deep.

Cucumber. Aloe. Lemon. Akari smells like a hippie’s herbal garden shop.

Then she shifts back to her side comfortably and scribbles in the final notes. He adds some arrows to connect the points and his own thoughts in the conclusion.

“Do you like cucumbers?”

Wait, no, that’s a horrible question to ask, what the fuck, Cedric.

Akari looks at Cedric with raised eyebrows. There’s a moment of silence, but she readily gives him an answer, back to being her unbothered and passive self. “The cucumbers are quite nice here. Yes.”

“Are they?” He asks, and feels like shoving a sock into his own mouth.

“The cucumbers here are sweeter and bigger than the ones in Japan,” she says. “I prefer the big cucumbers over the small ones.”

Cedric thinks he’s sweating. Thank Merlin the uniform cloaks are black. Why is he sweating? “So you like them… bigger?”

At that moment, Roger passes by their desk, holding a finished ideation paper to hand over to Professor Moody. Roger releases an unearthly, demonic giggle, slaps Cedric on the back of the head, which seemingly signals to the entire Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw male population in the classroom to hoot and cackle. 

He’s a madlad, someone whispers behind them. He’s doing it! He’s finally asking her–!

Akari stares, deadpan. “Sure, I guess.”

By then, the class ends, and all of Cedric’s mates are giggling and gossiping to themselves like first-year girls. Someone whoops. The flash of sickles quickly appears in a few peoples’ palms. Akari’s whisked away by her girlfriends, Cedric goes back to his friends, but they’re secretive arseholes and refuse to tell him what they’re laughing about.

He finds out by lunch.

Chester, a fellow seventh-year Hufflepuff, a half-blood with dark skin and curly brown hair, slides into the seat in front of Akari (several seats to Cedric’s right) and loudly says, “Carrie! I heard Diggory was talking about his massive cock in DADA.”

The students are split between paying attention between the seventh years and checking if the professors heard. Cedric chokes on his pumpkin juice and nearly trips on the way to confront Chester.

“I think he was talking about cucumbers,” she says.

“Don’t be having a laugh on me, Ando – oh, hey, Diggory. How’s it swinging? Left? Right?”

The first thing Cedric notices is a plate of sliced cucumbers and salmon on Akari’s plate. Then the fact that she’s sprinkling sugar and honey onto a slice of sourdough (bread is like a dessert to me, he remembers her saying). Finally, he notices that nearly all of the seventh-year Hufflepuffs are listening in to what he has to say.

“I wasn’t talking about my cock,” he defends. 

Chester snorts. Akari and her friends look terribly amused and Cedric wants to hex all of them. 

“You’re not denying that it’s massive though,” that prick Chester says. “How utterly confident of you, Head Boy. Maybe that title has more than one meaning, hmm?”

Cedric takes away points from Hufflepuff just to shut Chester up. He doesn’t look at Akari or her whispering girlfriends and storms off for some peace and quiet. It’s an unsuccessful venture, however, because by the end of the day, most of the boys across Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are calling him ‘Big Dick Diggory’ or ‘Seven Inch Cedric.’

Finding Akari in the kitchens during dinner time is equally a blessing and a curse, because she’s undoubtedly heard all of the nicknames by now, but she’s also nice enough as a person to not focus on embarrassing topics for too long.

“Fancy having tea in the kitchens, again?” She asks.

There aren’t any cucumbers today – probably for his psychological benefit. Instead, Akari has a cup of lemonade, beef stew, and an entire red velvet cake.

“I’ll nibble on your cake,” he says, because he doubts she’s really going to finish that entire platter by herself. Then he curses himself for another double-innuendo and hopes she doesn’t notice. 

They move onto a delightfully droll conversation about classwork and future plans. Akari says she wants to move to Japan to embrace her culture and heritage, and possibly find a job within the Asia Pacific Magical Alliance. “Britain’s becoming a bit shit nowadays,” she says, almost distantly, like she’s not really there. “I don’t want to be a part of the Dark Lord uprisings in the future.”

And… and there it is again. The stupidly high confidence in her own words, as if she knows, with one-hundred percent certainty, that You-Know-Who will be coming back.

“You sound so sure of You-Know-Who’s return,” Cedric says.

Akari shrugs and smiles lazily. “Oh, just thinking about the worst-case scenario, don’t worry.”

He notices she doesn’t bother asking him his future plans. She probably already knows – Cedric will work at the ministry, find opportunities through his father, and eventually work his way up to a minor but prestigious role on a council of some sort. Everyone’s thinking about it, even the professors. They’ve never asked Cedric exactly what he wants to do when he graduates, but it wouldn’t matter because he doesn’t actually know.

Might as well follow the flow.

“Speaking of, Cedric,” she says, and his toes curl when she says his name like that. “I suppose it doesn’t actually matter if you specifically get with Huiying or not. Sorry about earlier. You’ll find your own date this year, in time.”

He swallows. “Yeah.”

A date? Does he need a date this year, for the tournament? 

Cedric finds himself wanting to talk to Akari more and more. September passes, he’s finding himself staring at her during meal times (or the empty space near her friends if she’s absent). To make sure she’s eating enough, of course. Seventh year seems to be incredibly hard on her for a reason he can’t tell yet.

Then October arrives, she’s missed more meals in the Great Hall than she’s been present there, and at the end of the month, the foreign students arrive.

Not all of them, it seems. Durmstrang and Beauxbaton only let the students sixteen years old and up join the international affair, so most of the foreign students he sees are around his age – there are several dozen from each batch, and want to mingle with him specifically, for being the “representative” of the Hogwarts population. 

The responsibilities of Head Boy never die down.

Akari arrives near the end of the meal, looking a bit frazzled. Her hair is spiked up in all sorts of ways in what resembles bed head but she’s far too gaunt to have gotten any sleep lately. He catches her when the commotion dies down and all the of-age students are circling around the brand new goblet at the stage of the hall.

“Hey– Akari?”

She looks up. “Yes?”

Cedric bothers her into conversation. He makes her laugh a few times, which brings butterflies to his stomach and a pain in his heart. She should smile more – it’s a good look on her. “I’m glad we’re friends,” he says, and smiles, genuine.

And Akari drops her spoon. She blinks a few times, stares down at her ice cream, then something ripples across her face. It’s open and aching and wanting. “Oh,” she says, like she’s realised something. “Oh my. Sorry, I just, me too. I realised something. I need to talk to Potter.”

“What does Potter have to do with–.”

She leaves for the Gryffindor table, where Potter and his fourth-year friends are just about to leave for the night. Cedric watches Akari confront the famous trio with her familiar, unassuming charm, and how she drags a perplexed Potter away in private. He doesn’t think that she’s ever spoken to the boy before (after all, their paths don’t cross), but before he can go poke around, both of them return.

“Mister Head Boy,” Akari calls out, Potter at her side, walking towards the mostly empty Hufflepuff table. “I’ve discovered a concern that relates to the wellbeing of our Hogwarts students.”

“Have you,” he says, but it’s not a question.

What is going on?

What’s going on, is, exactly, not great. Akari confesses to having overheard Potter complain to his friendship trio about a nasty magical nightmare wherein an adult at Hogwarts slips his name into the goblet tonight. As such, given Potter’s track record, Akari felt compelled to help him out, as a concerned upperclassman. With Potter’s invisibility cloak (that he apparently owns, neverminding how bloody expensive those things are) and Cedric’s status as Head Boy, if all three hide in the Great Hall throughout the night to investigate, then no trouble will come about.

Cedric notices that Akari does all the talking. Potter looks alarmed and uncomfortable, but he doesn’t dispute any of her words. 

“Yeah,” Potter says, at the end. “That… sounds about right. I had a dream, yes.”

For whatever reason, Cedric can’t help but think that they’re both lying, but neither of them are disagreeing with each other, despite all the oddities. Potter is acting wary about Akari, who seems unbothered by everything as always, casting suspicious glances in her direction. 

Well. He’s not fighting her claims. Whatever.

Akari hands all of them pepper-up potions whilst they wait. Cedric doesn’t know why he’s going along with it, but everything about Akari makes him completely mental, even though involving a teacher would be the best option here. The plan kicks off once curfew hits, where a cloaked Potter arrives at the Hufflepuff common room door, and Akari slips under the invisibility cloak. The two start whispering about something, too quiet for Cedric to hear, and he leads the way to the Great Hall, shining his Head Boy badge to the on-looking portraits. But when he sneaks into the hall, Potter mutters something about innate paranoia and drags Cedric inside the cloak, where they all barely fit.

At around midnight, the large doors creak open.

It’s been a distracting past hour. Akari is very nearly sitting in his lap, and at the noise of someone’s entrance, means she leans back to make herself smaller and her arse is on his lap. On his crotch. 

Please don’t get a boner please don’t get a boner please don’t–.

Luckily, or unluckily for the fate of the school’s education system, Professor Moody creeps in. That creepy eye swivels every which way, but doesn’t pass through Potter’s invisibility cloak, which means this thing must be worth more than the minister’s entire salary, damn.

There’s a slip of paper in the old wizard’s hand.

“Plan A,” Akari whispers.

Potter flinches, swallows, then stands up and screams, “PETRIFICUS TOTALUS!”

There’s not much fighting against something you can’t see or expect, because the infamous Mad Eye Moody drops to the floor like a rock, completely paralysed for the next few minutes.

“My goodness!” Akari explains, loud enough to wake up the curious portraits. “This man has a slip of paper with Harry Potter’s name written on it! Was he trying to enter Harry Potter into the tournament?”

She leans over his body, kicks his side a bit, and a leather drinking pouch falls from his belt, rolling into a frozen hand.

Potter, still clutching his wand, stumbles. “You–,” he says, in a whisper. “You were righ–.”

The doors to the Great Hall thunder open. Several professors in their nightclothes burst in, to a harried Akari, an incredibly perturbed Potter, and a confused Cedric. Akari explains it all, except the story is different now, catered to present the students in the best possible light. Potter, she says, with furrowed eyebrows and perfectly glazed eyes, Harry Potter is a victim. The boy had snuck over to the Hufflepuff dorms to talk to Head Boy Cedric Diggory because he was so concerned for his safety this year and he wanted to talk to this trustworthy, responsible young man. Akari and Cedric happened to be doing homework together in the common room at the time, and they followed the poor boy to the Great Hall to assuage his concerns. Then, they discovered a professor at the school trying to put a note in the goblet of fire!

The story is weaved to perfection. Headmaster Dumbledore doesn’t take away any points for breaking curfew and sends them all to bed with concerned sympathy. 

Cedric has so many questions. He wants to demand Akari why she lied to the professors, why she couldn’t have told the first story, and what her deal was with Potter. She beats him to it in the Hufflepuff common room, immediately telling him that she was doing her best to make sure that poor, poor boy didn’t lose any house points for any reason. He was having such a hard time, already, with his Dark Lord dreams.

“Since when were you friends with Potter?” Cedric asks.

“I’m not friends with him,” she says. “But overhearing his odd stories about a troubling fourth year made me incredibly curious – you know how it is. That poor boy.”

She bids him goodnight before he can ask anything else, and he watches, haplessly, as she walks down to the girls’ wing.

The next morning, the school is in a tizzy. There’s no mention of Akari in the late night adventure, only Harry Potter and the compassionate Head Boy Diggory, fighting against a phoney professor who happened to be an escaped Death Eater in disguise.

Everyone watches as all the seventh-year boys push Cedric into the Great Hall during break. He crosses the age line, clutching a crisp parchment note, awaiting the greedy fire.

His name, in perfect cursive, is dropped into the goblet. It feels anticlimactic given the events of the night before, but everyone around him cheers and slaps his back, chanting his name and Head Boy title. All he wants to do is crawl back into bed and sleep, or maybe go to the kitchens to talk to Akari, or some weird dream-like mixture of both of those options.

So he tells his mates that he’s feeling a bit under the weather from the huge adventure and escapes in the direction of the common room.

Fred and George Weasley, the bane of anyone with a responsible bone in their body’s existence, shimmies up behind Cedric as he tries to hobble away to his common room. Rumour says they’re going to try their hand at joining the tournament with an ageing potion, which makes sense for them because they’ve got the common sense of a dying shrew.

“Hello Big Dick–”

“Seven Inch–”

“Diggory.”

And Merlin, the twinspeak can be so annoying sometimes. 

“A bit busy at the moment, Weasleys,” Cedric says coolly. Or, he hopes it's cool, because any fuel will generate a year of teasing.

They tell him, in their own irritating way, that they, for reasons they won’t explain, know that Akari and Potter are squandered away in the abandoned alchemy classroom on the third floor in the west wing. Fred mimics playing a violin and George starts dancing by himself.

Cedric doesn’t know why, but he starts thinking about the hollow of Akari’s pale neck against the shaggy mess of black hair, the way she smells like a garden, and the way she tears at mini sandwiches with her fingers like a complete savage. Then his legs move before his brain and he books it to the nearest stairwell without understanding why he’s running. Akari is free to befriend whatever boy she wants. It’s just Potter. Some gangly fourth-year kid.

He runs and runs regardless of rational decision, and nearly runs into Potter, leaving the alchemy classroom.

“Oh, hello,” Potter says, looking like he’s just been shedding a nice tear. His eyes are red and puffy under those hideous glasses and there’s a distinctive watery quality in his voice. Then, as if aware of his appearance, he ducks away and saunters to another corridor.

Bloody buggering hell.

“Wait, Potter!” Cedric calls out. “Are you alright? Did Akari say something?”

But Potter isn’t so much upset as relieved. He whispers her name in reverence, murmuring about how she’s on his side, she knew something was wrong and risked herself to help him, unlike everyone else. 

They’re at the northern stairwell. The portraits are only semi-sentient here. Out of the blue, Potter wisens up and stops his childish blubbering to interrupt Cedric’s concerned questions. “You have to understand,” he hisses, suddenly alert and watching the corridors for eavesdroppers. “Ando lied to me, too. I didn’t have a nightmare about this. I didn’t know about the plot against me to have my name in the cup. She told me to just follow along because she needed you for security in case things went wrong – you’re one of the best duelists in the school.”

Time slows down to a standstill.

“Come again?” Cedric asks, except his voice sounds far away in his own brain.

“I confronted her, just now, because she promised me answers,” Potter says. “She asked to borrow my invisibility cloak – I don’t know how she knew I had one, but it’s kind of an open secret in Gryffindor so I wasn’t immediately suspicious. She only told me why when I said that I’d only let her borrow it if I came along to wherever she needed to go, and she told me that she was concerned someone would put my name in the cup.”

She knew.

She knew everything beforehand.

“So when I confronted her about it, finally, I was thankful for her help but confused how she knew. But she came forth to help me, Cedric, you have to understand. She said she wanted me to have a normal year and for the new Hogwarts champion to not have to be dragged into potential Voldemort plots against me!”

Six years of knowing Akari Ando, and six years of never quite understanding her despite all the chances in the world. Cedric thinks he’s unravelled a new layer.

“She’s a seer,” Potter whispers.

Part 2

Seers are rare in the magical world. Divination is a finicky subject, where most schools around the world don’t actually teach it anymore, calling it more of a muggle pseudoscience than actual magic. Hogwarts may be one of the last great wizarding schools that has it on the curriculum. Hence, true seers, no matter what shape or form, are highly sought after by all the wrong people. 

Cedric has heard stories from his father about the great seer exterminations of the eighteenth century. Apparently that’s how his great great grandmother passed away. They’re not always crystal balls and fortune-telling, because sometimes they deliver prophecies randomly, in verbal poetry. Sometimes they see visions in mirrors. Sometimes they profess to having lived a previous life that contained all the knowledge of the current world in a neat timeline.

But either way, true seers hide their identity at all costs.

The first thing Cedric does is slam Potter against the wall, teeth bared, to make Potter promise to never tell anyone of his interactions with Akari. 

“Hermione and Ron know – they’re the ones that figured it out when I told them, not me,” Potter says, choking the words out in a rasp.

Cedric tightens his grip. “Well, if they tell anyone, I’ll get them expelled. Do you understand?”

Potter nods, frantic, and Cedric lets him scurry away.

Bloody hell.

This means that Akari personally prevented Harry Potter from joining the triwizard tournament because the future she saw was too terrible to remain passive. Seers are supposed to let time take its flow, and avoid interfering with fate as much as possible. Only in times of true emergency, historically speaking, they could try to change the course of the future.

Is that why she’s been so stressed these past two months? Akari must’ve seen the future, the events of this academic year, and worked herself up from the horrors of knowing.

He grits his teeth, slams his forehead against the cool stone of the wall, and tries to decompress. It doesn’t work very well, so he heads back to the Hufflepuff common rooms just to sit down in a cushioned chair and become one with the pillows. It’s nice, the common rooms, appearing more as a homey living room than an actual dorm setting. The ceilings are low, the walls are decorated with centuries worth of newspaper clippings and hopeful graduate letters, there are potted plants along all the walls, and there’s a plush seat for everyone. Most of the beanbags are in ugly shades of yellow, but, well, Cedric supposes comfortable doesn’t mean pretty.

Around the time everyone should be at dinner, he hears the badger’s den door open. He knows it’s Akari before she even enters, and he stands up and faces her.

“My room is private,” he says. “Nobody will listen in.”

Akari bites her lip and follows him silently to the Head Boy’s dorm room. Whenever a Head Boy or Girl appears in a house, Hogwarts opens up an unused room within the respective common room for their private use – a reward for being a good student. Cedric doesn’t really use it, as he prefers being with his seventh-year friends, but every now and then he’s abused his solo room privilege to have an extra long wanking session.

Because she drives him insane, Akari sits on the foot of the bed whilst he leans against the opposite wall. The image of them together like this isn’t great, especially for his dick, so he forces his nasty teenage boy thoughts away.

“I won’t tell anyone you’re a seer,” he says, and that’s a promise.

She looks at him demurely through her upper lashes. “It was a mistake to help Harry out, if you found out so quickly.”

Cedric can feel the blood rushing from his brain to extremities already.

“Why did you?” He asks numbly.

“Because of you,” Akari says, and he’s gone. “I realised how much I liked you and I couldn’t let you–. Well. If Harry got forced into the tournament, something bad was going to happen to you. I wasn’t going to change the future, but you changed it without me. You were supposed to date Huiying – Cho Chang. But you didn’t, and the future was already different. You didn’t want to date her because you had me.”

She swallows. The muscles of her neck flex addictively.

“So Potter wasn’t the main goal,” he says.

Akari looks away.

Cedric walks forward, one step at a time, until he’s kneeling down at the foot of his bed, staring into Akari Ando’s face. “It was me.”

He’s not too sure who reaches out first, but then they’re both on the bed and kissing without a care in the world. Things might be going too far, too fast, but he thinks he’s had a crush on her since the beginning. She’s obviously been having a hell of a time deciding whether or not to interfere with her seer duties, and that stress is released through her mouth.

Lots of biting.

In between bites and scratches and being disgustingly sweaty, she tells him that she’s only technically a seer. There’s one future that she knows, and she doesn’t exist in it, so she’s tried to be a passive player and not interact with Potter and his friends as much as possible, so she can avoid the Dark Lord’s attention.

“Still a seer,” he says, panting. “Still dangerous for you. Wait, what?!”

Akari’s on his lap. He’s pretty sure his erection is moments away from splitting the hem of his trousers, but then her eyes widen at the slip, she stumbles off, and his penis deflates from the terror of what she just said.

“What? Did I say something?” She says immediately, back to normal.

“You just–.” He stutters. “You– the ‘Dark Lord.’ You-Know-Who returns?”

He thinks she’s mentioned something like this before, when they were discussing their future plans over tea. I’m moving to Japan, just in case Britain falls apart, or something along those lines. Cedric hadn’t taken it seriously at all because half the wizarding population in Europe is irrationally paranoid about potential Dark Lord activity, but now that he knows she’s a seer…

When she doesn’t immediately respond, Cedric becomes very, very still. He says, “oh fuck” with lots of heart, watching Akari collapsing into a boneless heap and screaming into a pillow.

“I involve myself with Potter for one day and this is how it turns out,” she says, muffled. 

He can’t help it. He laughs, sharp, loud, and bitter, and the noise surprises them both. Bloody shit, that Potter boy. The kid’s been a menace since the day he got here, and his shit luck affects literally everyone who interacts with him. No wonder all the Slytherins find his existence so funny. Then the hilarious absurdity turns into frantic worry when she starts to shake then cry.

There have been so many emotions in the past day. Cedric’s cock has been going up and down and up and down for the past hour and now it’s going up again because she’s cuddling him for comfort and warmth even though he knows it’s a terrible situation. 

“The Dark Lord is still alive,” she says through sniffles. “He’s been alive all this time, but in a dormant half-ghost state. He needs to have Harry Potter, alive, for a ritual to fully revive him. The tournament was the perfect excuse to quietly transport him off campus without the staff suspecting a thing, because sometimes the tasks can be off grounds. But now, I don’t know. The Dark Lord’s followers are going to be doing their damn best to try to lure Potter away from Hogwarts. The future has changed, but maybe it’s worth it.”

She curls on top of him, face buried in his chest. 

The future changed… because something happens to Cedric in the future where Potter is a triwizard champion. Akari changed the evil path of You-Know-Who’s plans because Cedric wanted to snog Akari Ando instead of Huiying “Cho” Chang.

Fuck.

Out of all the things to happen today, learning that his crush is a seer and that You-Know-Who is still technically alive had not been on Cedric Diggory’s radar.

At all.

“Do you want to be my girlfriend?” He asks.

Akari kisses his cheek. “Yes.”

“Nice,” he says. He’s freaking the fuck out about the news still, but like his mum always said, one step at a time. Akari is a seer – cool. Dangerous for her, but as long as it’s a secret, it shouldn’t be a problem. Potter is a bloody fucking idiot, but he’s not the type to break promises, and his friends are brave Gryffindors who’d probably kill themselves before revealing secrets to enemy factions. Problem solved. The genocidal maniac who killed thousands of witches and wizards being back? Not fun – but as long as Potter stays safe in Hogwarts, nothing should happen. “Can I tell my parents about us?”

She hums and nods into his chest, then moves up to lick his neck. It’s a funny situation that makes his eyes roll to the back of his head, so he sits up and kisses the tears off her cheeks in payback.

Wait. Oh no. Thoughts are jumbling in his head. 

Harry Potter needs to stay safe. Akari’s status as an ultra rare true seer marks a huge target on her head, even bigger than Potter’s, so she can’t spill anything more about her knowledge without potentially getting assassinated. Which means, unfortunately, Cedric’s about to lose a lot of free time in his near future as a brand new upperclassman mentor to some idiot fourth-years.

Fuck his life.

Wait, no, Akari’s kissing his ears. Maybe it’s not that bad.

Nobody told Cedric about the OWLs study group in the common room (which is bad, in hindsight, because Head Boys are supposed to know everything about what’s going on, especially in their own house), so he emerges from his private dorm, running straight into a fifth-year Hufflepuff prefect Edwin Macmillan.

The entire common room hears the collision, then stares, eagle-eyed at Cedric. He’s sweaty, flushed, and covered head-to-toe in hickeys. The only saving grace is that Akari wanted to settle for a nap instead of heading out for a snack, so it’s just him taking the brunt of the embarrassment instead of both of them. But, well. It’s still not an ideal situation.

“Diggory?” Edwin squeaks.

“Uh,” Cedric says. “Bye.”

Does he feel bad for leaving her behind without a warning? Yeah, but she’ll have to learn how to deal with the teasing anyway. He leaves to wander the halls of Hogwarts, checking for stray students and breaking up potential fights. There’s a tiny Slytherin first-year who accidentally got lost on the seventh floor east wing, so he consoles the kid whilst escorting her down to the dungeons. The entire seventh floor is like a maze – it’s almost a rite of passage to get lost there at least once during a student’s academic tenure at school.

The kid, a tiny Bulstrode girl with poofy hair, stares, unimpressed, at Cedric’s neck. He casts a wordless spell used to temporarily hide skin blemishes on his neck after he drops her off and continues his Head Boy duties.

The next few days are blissful hell. Everyone’s clamouring about the brand new relationship – the popular Head Boy and the generally well-liked but aloof Ando. Roger and Chester feed into each other’s perverseness, spitting out raunchy jokes one after another, and the nickname Big Dick Diggory makes the rounds again.

A few Ravenclaw fifth-years give weird looks to the couple, but Cedric still sees Akari and Huiying hanging out with the other Asian girls in the courtyard, so he hopes there’s no bad blood. 

Because of the chaos of someone trying to tamper with the champion results, the tournament announcement is put off by a week whilst the poor administrative staff deals with the bureaucracy and security concerns. But once all the foreign ministry members arrive and check the integrity of the ancient goblet, the schedule reconvenes.

“Hogwarts apologises for the security incident,” Professor McGonagall announces, at dinner exactly one week after the disastrous Harry Potter-induced event. “But many foreign officials have flown in to check upon the goblet’s magical wards, and we can now proceed with the triwizard tournament!”

She’s met with polite applause.

Cedric supposes the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students are wholly unamused by the entire affair and just want to get it over with by now, considering he can hear a lot of disgruntled cursing in French at the Ravenclaw table.

The first student called in is Beauxbatons’ Fleur Delacour – a beautiful seventh-year with Veela ancestry. He’d sighed along with most of the male population at school upon first laying eyes on her, but now, she just looks like any other attractive young woman. Delacour’s hair is shiny and golden, but Akari’s is wild and darker than the night. He can ruffle Akari’s hair – kind of like a dog, actually – and she doesn’t complain about messing it up, because it’s already an androgynous explosion. 

Hmm. The boyish looks might give Cedric a sexuality crisis down the line, but he doesn’t need to worry about that right now.

Then the Durmstrang student, Viktor Krum, is called up, and everyone screams. He’s an international quidditch star, of course he’d get picked.

“And finally, from Hogwarts…” The Headmaster says, drawing out the pause. “Our very own Hufflepuff Head Boy, Cedric Diggory!”

What.

He looks down to see a smirking Akari.

That bitch. She knew this would happen. But didn’t she say Potter was supposed to be the champion?

These aren’t his exact thoughts, but he’s frustrated and emotional enough to elbow her in the ribs, guiltily kiss her cheek, then let himself be paraded out to meet the rest of the champions in a private room.

“Is it cheating if you tell me what the first task is?” Cedric asks. He instantly feels bad. “Actually, no, nevermind. If I start abusing your powers for my gain, nothing good will come out of it.”

Akari hums. “You’re too responsible sometimes, Head Boy.”

The silence afterwards, he’s come to learn, isn’t from awkwardness, but from Akari thinking about the best possible plan for the future. She’s been more cautious about her words lately, after the fiasco the first time they snogged. Being told that the most evil wizard of all time is still alive is one hell of a mood-breaker. 

“No,” she replies, after a minute or two. “Because originally, Potter’s friends find out what the first task is and tell pretty much everyone in the school. But now that he’s out, I don’t know who'll find out in time.”

He groans and thumps his head against the backboard of the bed. “Potter, Potter, Potter. Why is he everywhere?”

The Head Boy dorm room is the only place they can talk freely about these issues. It’s an excuse for Akari to talk about all the things she’s kept bottled up for her entire life, and an excellent reason to calm all the negative emotions down with slobbery kisses and even more hickeys. 

“It’s like he’s the main character or something,” Akari says, bemused.

Cedric rolls his eyes at the joke.

It’s been a few days since he wrote a letter to his parents about his new girlfriend, so by the next morning’s breakfast, he’s not at all surprised when his owl, a fat brown thing called Bon Bon, drops off a massive package from mum and dad. Firstly, a box of chocolates that he’s meant to give to his new love, a three-page letter from each parent about how happy they are that he’s finally decided to dip his toes in the dating scene, and a contraceptive potion.

That’s it.

He’s going to murder his parents.

“That’s a muscular owl,” Chester observes, then peers over the table to investigate the gifts.

“No,” Cedric says, screaming inside. “He’s actually really fat.”

Bon Bon shrieks, pecks at Cedric’s fingers, and flies away with an owl’s equivalent of a snobby harrumph. 

After two weeks of rotating substitute teachers, taken from the Auror academy, the real Mad Eye Moody makes an appearance in Defence Against the Dark Arts class. Despite having his identity taken over by a psychotic madman with severe daddy issues, Moody is still employed by Hogwarts to teach classes as a salaried worker.

Oddly enough, the fake Professor Moody was cooler than the real one. This one is skinnier, sallow, and talks to himself a lot instead of actually teaching. There’s more theory work than application, and when asked about the teaching differences, he simply barks out a depressing statement. “The real world has a fuckton of paperwork, you shits. Come back and complain once you’ve finished a five-foot dissertation on the ethics of using the Imperius curse in battle.”

Definitely not as fun.

“I think I’m going mad. Am I going mad?” Cedric asks Akari. “Is it wrong of me to prefer a serial killer over a heroic Auror?”

They’re at Hogsmeade, wandering around with a shared bag of wizarding candy. Speaking of, Cedric needs to make sure that Potter has adult supervision at all times if he goes on the Hogsmeade trips. That sounds important.

“Absolutely,” she says.

Zero sympathy.

He sighs loudly then swoops down to kiss her on the cheek just because he can. “Rude.”

Bundled up in a thick coat, scarf, and a pair of trousers, Akari resembles a boy more than ever before. Cedric’s tempted to flat out tell her this, but there’s an angel on his shoulder telling him that she might get offended. At least she’d be a pretty boy. He decides there’s no harm in making up a hypothetical situation.

“You’d make a really hot guy,” he says.

Maybe that’s not how he’s supposed to word that.

“What the fuck, Cedric.”

“Not in a weird way,” he immediately protests, full of regret for not listening to his shoulder angel. “I mean, you’re really pretty, but also androgynous, so you’d make a pretty boy?”

Akari stops walking. “Would you prefer it if I had a cock?”

He thinks she’s teasing him because her tone is light and her eyes are crinkled into half-moons, but the wording of her question doesn’t sit right with him and he says, perhaps a bit too loudly: “No! Sorry, ignore what I just said. Intrusive thoughts are bad.”

“You wanna suck my fat cock?” She asks, and Cedric dies a little inside.

Then he hears a mortified gasp from behind them – just his luck – and he turns around and sees three of the most annoying fourth-years that have ever lived. Just his fucking luck. Why are these three literally everywhere?

Akari turns around, too, and shows off a friendly smile and wave. “Oh, hello Potter, Granger, Weasley. What a coincidence!”

The golden trio are red-cheeked (hopefully from the weather) and trying not to stare. 

“You have a–.” Weasley says, but Granger interrupts him with a loud shushing noise.

“Oh my, look at the time,” Cedric says, staring straight at an empty wrist. “I forgot that I have to water my pet rock. Time to go, sorry.”

Then he grabs Akari’s hand and drags her far, far away from those bratty miscreants. They have lunch at a decent pub, where he forces her to finish the shepherd's pie before he allows himself to eat. She’s still boney despite his best efforts, and he orders an extra sausage roll for her. But then she does her weird habit of separating the bread from filling (with utensils, because she’s in public), then makes a horrific joke about eating sausages. 

“Did you learn that from Chester?” He asks, dreading.

“No,” she says, poking at the sad bready remains with a spoon (Akari doesn’t believe in forks, sometimes it’s really weird to watch her eat). “I’m telling you in a roundabout way that I want to suck your cock.”

They manage to get back to Hogwarts in one piece. Cedric’s stopped caring about who’s in the common room to witness his crimes, and drags his girlfriend into the Head Boy dorm. The buckles on their winter clothes are a hassle and he loses his erection by the time they finally get all the cold gear on the ground, but Akari revives his dick when she fingers his belt loops and a warm palm is pressed against his lower stomach.

It immediately becomes unsexy when she doesn’t know how to take off his belt with one hand, since the other is holding his thigh, so he does it for her. 

“I should probably use my dominant hand for this,” she says, after another minute is wasted trying to unbutton his trousers.

He frowns. “Is it that hard?”

She squishes a finger against the bulge in his trousers. “It’s pretty hard, yeah.”

“That’s not–.” And then she successfully unbuttons the top hook, does away with the zipper, and pulls the elastic band of his pants down. It feels more awkward to have a dick in her face whilst he’s waddling around, trapped by stiff winter trousers and pants at his knees, so he kicks off the rest of his bottoms. Then his shirt, because it’s hot.

Akari is back with her wide-eyed gaze. “Should I also take my clothes off?”

“Yes please.”

There’s nothing more unsexy than being the only naked one in the room, so he tries to help her hurry the fuck up, but then she slaps his hands and tells him to wait.

“Alright,” she says once she’s done, then pushes him down on the bed and starts out with a kiss. 

He kisses back, gets in the rhythm that they’re used to, then flips her over and pushes her down. Now that there’s more skin surface, there’s more room to explore, and he looks up at her face for confirmation to touch her boobs. They’re a lot squishier than he’d expected, and bigger, and if it weren’t for all of his arteries shutting down to supply blood flow to his boner then Cedric thinks he could play with them forever.

“You’re so hot,” he says, because he’s a stupid teenage boy lacking basic vocabulary during this important time. “I want to kiss you again. Can I kiss you?”

“Of course,” she says, a touch perplexed.

Cedric thinks he’s in love. Like, actual sappy love – the kind of love that lasts well into old age. He loves his seer girlfriend so much he could cry. He doesn’t, because that would be so uncool, but he does make an embarrassing noise in the back of his throat when her hand finally trails down his stomach and onto a massive boner.

“The fabled ‘ Seven Inch Cedric,’” she muses. “Honestly, it looks pretty nice. I didn’t expect that, huh.”

“What, were you expecting scales?”

Akari jolts upwards. Cedric watches her boobs bounce from the sudden motion, mesmerised. She snaps her fingers and makes an aaaah sound. “I forgot to tell you! You mentioned it a few days ago but then we got distracted. The first task is dragons!”

As expected, his erection completely dies.

“Why would you say that?” He asks, aghast. 

She grimaces. “Oops?”

He falls back down on the bed, right next to her, and even though he’s not thinking with his dick anymore, it’s still nice to stare at her tits despite the chaos in his mind right now.

Dragons. Fucking dragons. He has to fight a dragon to move on to the next task? How does one even do that?

As if reading his mind, Akari snuggles into the crook of his armpit and plays with the smattering of hair on his chest. “You’ll figure it out.”

Instead of sex, because she keeps dropping traumatising mood-killers whenever they get frisky, he listens to her voice as she rambles on about her life. Her uncle is also magic, apparently, so it wasn’t too surprising for her parents to accept the fact that their daughter was different. She’s a muggleborn, he’s a pureblood, so their lives outside Hogwarts are incredibly different, and he tries to piece together her childhood story. Born in England to two Japanese immigrants, then raised as a second-culture kid, going to these muggle-academies specifically for Asian kids, and going to visit Japan every summer. Her family’s from Hokkaido, she says, and describes it as an icy hellhole but with good food. 

“You should take me to muggle London during the Christmas break,” he says.

She kisses his shoulder. “You’ll have to apparate – my parents’ flat doesn’t have a floo set up. Can I visit your place, too?”

So he describes his childhood back. There are a lot of things she knows from her pureblood friends, but with him, she can ask all of the stupidest questions that most people take as basic knowledge. Most purebloods hire ministry-approved tutors as soon as the child displays their first case of accidental magic. There’s also an unofficial academy, of sorts, to learn how to read, write, and do numbers, if the parents are too busy to teach their children themselves. It’s on the third and fourth floors of the pink shophouse in Diagon Alley, and he went there for a few months when his mum went to Tanzania for a work-study. Akari listens to every word silently whilst her soft puffs of breath tickle his sensitive skin.

He’s happy.

Cedric is ridiculously happy. Even though she’s a hazard to his mental health, she’s made him the happiest he’s ever been in his waking memory.

Part 3

Cedric is not happy.

“I haven’t told anyone about Ando’s secret,” Potter yelps when Cedric corners him in an empty corridor.

“What? Okay, good,” he says. “But I’m here because I’m looking after you from now on, Potter. If someone ever asks you to leave the grounds, tell me first because that’s mighty suspicious You-Know-Who behaviour. Akari foresees that there’s a lot of trouble waiting for you outside these walls and she’s pretty concerned for your wellbeing. Wait, can I call you Harry?”

Harry nearly drops his bookbag. “You’re what?”

Cedric mentally pats his own back. This should be a good enough introduction. He wants to go back to the Hufflepuff common room and snuggle with his girlfriend, then reluctantly draft up a plan of action on how to fight a nesting mother dragon. “Listen, Harry, I’d love to chat, but I have to go walk my pet fish.”

And he leaves, because being around Harry for too long is bound to cause trouble, and books it to the nearest stairwell.

As the Hogwarts champion representative, all of his professors are more than happy to help him with general fighting magic. Professor Flitwick makes Cedric stay back for duelling practice, Madam Hooch pulls him aside in the hallway to update him on strength-training facts, and even Headmaster Dumbledore wanders into his classes to randomly recommend a good book in the library, then wanders back out, completely disruptive.

The only time Cedric feels normal is when he’s with Akari, so it’s a bad day when she kicks him out of his own bedroom to go socialise with his friends.

“When was the last time you had a butterbeer with Roger?” She says. “That’s right. Go on, now. Enjoy your last weekend before the first task with your best mates.”

He goes off to Hogsmeade on the coldest November day he’s ever felt, and his mates tell him to man up and take a shot of firewhiskey. There are all of the male seventh-year Hufflepuffs, a few Ravenclaws, and one Slytherin. 

Malfoy’s an anomaly and a right cunt, Cassius the seventh-year Slytherin has said more than once, to Cedric and the boys. Most of us are trying to distance ourselves from blood purity arguments.

Yeah, stupid fourth-years. They’re all cunts down there.

And thank fucking Merlin for his girlfriend, because he lets loose and wild for what feels like the first time in ages. Chester whoops his arse, saying he’s warming it up for Akari, Cassius out drinks them all, Roger, Eric, and Flynn take turns pissing on a haunted piece of wood behind a less than reputable pub, and several Hogwarts girls passing by them in the cobbled streets send disgusted glares.

“It’s your stupidly pretty face, Ceddy,” Roger says.

Cedric yawns. “My what?”

Roger pantomimes a tragic character in a play, putting a fluttering hand on his face and fainting. “Oh, goodness, Ceddy Boy is no longer single? Yeah, that. D’you know how many knickers dropped for you when you hit puberty? I swear, as soon as you grew into that chin, I could hear all the dripping from the owlery to the whomping willow. If Ando were anyone else, she’d be getting death threats from your fans.”

He ignores several parts to that statement. “What?”

Roger pats his back. “Good talk, mate,” he says. “I think Ando’s been sucking your brain out through your cock, but she’s an alright bird. Good for you, I’m glad you’re happy.”

The first task arrives shortly thereafter. Cedric’s brain overfills with knowledge stuffed into him by overeager professors, and he can’t really think about anything until he changes into the Hogwarts representative uniform – a black suit with the four house signias on the back, forming into a shield – and reaches into a leather satchel to pull out a moving dragon figurine. He’d been in the library all morning reading up on the different breeds, and his breath catches in his lungs when he recognises the colour, stature, and snout.

Common Welsh Green.

Native to Wales, they prefer a mountainous environment to hunt quick, small prey. They aren’t great fliers, apparently, and those massive wings are more to balance themselves when jumping from rock to rock and to manipulate wind streams in the high altitude. Their firebreath is weaker than most dragons, but they can build it up in their throats very quickly and with little recovery time – so being caught unaware is certainly a death sentence.

As the Hogwarts representative on school grounds, he’s up last to build up the most momentum. It’s going to go either way – the judges must be super tired by now, but they might also be lax on his points because they just want to get the task over with.

The cheers outside are massive, and his name is chanted in chaotic rhythm by students, teachers, and parents alike. Akari’s not one for noise or crowds, but he spots her in the stands – at the very top of the wooden bleachers, sitting next to his parents (oh no). They look like they’re having a lovely chat, but knowing them, Cedric is sure that they’re already scheming wedding plans and grandchildren.

This is his first girlfriend, after all, and the Diggories are very, very passionate about family.

“I welcome you, our very own Hogwarts representative! He was the Hufflepuff prefect for two years and our current Head Boy, so I bring you our star-studded student, CEDRIC DIGGORY!”

There are many screams. And tears.

Fighting the dragon isn’t so much of a priority as is running away from the dragon, because the Common Welsh Green is fast as a viper and much deadlier. Cedric shoots out several bombarda curses, high-level burning jinxes, and a bastardised version of the bubble-head charm to temporarily stop the buildup of fire-breathing magic in the dragon, but he’s still all the way over here and the eggs are all the way over there.

Because dragons. Honestly, what were the event planners thinking?

Well, time to pull out the back-up plan that may or may not get him disqualified, depending on how far the arena barrier is. So Cedric pulls out a shrunken Nimbus 2000 from his back pocket, hides behind a rock to unshrink it, and waits until the current jet stream of orange flames dies down before grabbing on for dear life and flying up.

Akari is a fucking genius. Who would’ve thought about out-flying a dragon? He’s lucky his opponent is the Common Welsh Green and not something like the Hungarian Horntail, because then he’d get snapped in half and gobbled up as a mid-afternoon snack. Viktor Krum must be fuming in his seat in the infirmary right now, but oh well. Cedric didn’t come here to make friends, he came here to win.

He narrowly avoids the next fire stream, then listens to his stupid quidditch brain to hang upside down on his legs and fly at top speeds to the nest. 

“Confringo!” He shouts, not because seventh-year blasting curses work on dragons, but because it can slightly alter the trajectory of dragonfire due to the sheer force of magic he puts behind the spell.

Cedric doesn’t need miracles. He only needs to change a certain outcome.

The fire burns, hot and terrible, into his right shoulder, and he thinks he screams but he can’t hear anything except the crowd screaming and the piercing wind in his ears. He feels his skin crackle and meld with the thick material of the tournament uniform, twisting around in pure, undefined agony. But the upswing of the broom and the extended left arm means he scoops the golden egg up and away, high in the air where the dragon doesn’t dare fly to.

The nurse doesn’t seem as amused as the cheering stadium.

“No, no, no,” Madam Pomfrey says. “Children fighting dragons? I swear, I’m going to retire soon.”

Madam Pomfrey says that every year, so Cedric smiles guiltily and drinks his healing potions under her careful eye. The champions’ tent has too many gawking fans and news reporters outside, but luckily the professors are only letting in certain people. His parents and Akari drop by, with dad bursting into tears at the injury, then a warbled congratulations at the victory. His mum joins in on the crying, and soon enough, he’s the one comforting them even though his entire right shoulder is covered in medical plaster.

On the other side, Krum is staring intently at the ground. Headmaster Karkaroff is biting off some nasty words in several different languages – Bulgarian, Russian, and Finnish –, and Cedric almost feels a bit sorry for stealing a star quidditch player’s shine.

Key word: almost.

“Out-flying a dragon,” Akari muses quietly, sitting at his side. Her hair’s even more messed up from the wind and Cedric fights the urge to ruffle the fluffiness like he would with a dog. “Wow, sounds a lot like something Potter would do.”

He stares at her. “It was your idea, though.”

Akari smiles knowingly.

After an appropriate amount of time fermenting in the infirmary, the three champions are brought outside to the mercy of the judge’s table. The most difficult champion to decide a score upon is Fleur Delacour, because she showed an incredible aptitude for surviving continuous dragon attacks (Veelas are resistant to fire magic, duh) , but she also took the longest to secure an egg. Viktor Krum pulled out some impressive dark magic feats, but he caused quite the pandamonium in the arena because a layered hypnosis charm made his dragon destroy her own eggs, which made the beast stark-raving mad enough to tear a hole into the barrier protecting the audience. Which means, apparently, Cedric’s battle was the least controversial.

“Would it not be most appropriate to award points based on speed?” Headmaster Dumbledore interjects, and the entire Beauxbatons faction stands up and screams French vulgarities.

Next to Cedric, Fleur hisses and turns her hair on fire.

The judging takes longer than Cedric’s actual battle, and he doesn’t even care if he wins first place anymore because he just wants to sleep.

Then, unexpectedly, the crowd cheers. Cedric looks up, half-asleep, and sees his name on the enchanted podium poster.

HOGWARTS – CEDRIC DIGGORY – 1st PLACE, it reads.

Nice.

The party in the Hufflepuff common room goes absolutely wild. There are guests from other houses, mostly sixth and seventh years (because anyone below the age of sixteen is icky), and Professor Sprout turns a blind eye to the festivities. She’s an active adult in her students’ welfare and comes to check on the common room every night before curfew, but she doesn’t check in tonight.

Probably for her own benefit.

Cedric thinks he sees someone giving a handjob in the corner, so he resolutely ignores it and accepts Roger’s offer of another shot of firewhiskey.

Akari doesn’t drink alcohol, which is probably for the best because seers require a sound mind at all times or else things can go wrong very quickly, so she sips lemonade on a beanbag, talking to one of her girlfriends who also can’t drink. Aisha or something – Cedric thinks she’s Muslim, but he can’t remember right now.

“Gotta piss,” Cedric groans, and his mates let him go from their cheerful pestering. 

He curves through the crowd to the toilets by the common room (because the Head Boy room is all the way over there and he’s too drunk to walk far), and pauses at the corner.

One of the Weasley twins, Fred or George or maybe there’s a hidden third demon child somewhere, has his hands down the trousers of Cassius Warrington, the Slytherin quidditch chaser.

“Wow,” he says, and both boys are too drunk to see or hear him, so Cedric stumbles on by.

Bloody hell.

He doesn’t think anyone else notices the forbidden couple, because there aren’t any rumours spilling around the next morning at the Great Hall, so the secret is safe with him. To be honest, he hasn’t given much thought to homosexual activity before, but the Diggory family values say to love everyone for their merits, not for things outside of a person’s control, so Cedric decides he doesn’t care. But the fact that it’s a Weasley, from a family of notorious Light side Gryffindor muggle-lovers, and a Warrington, an infamous Dark-aligned family…

Well.

Cedric would love to see the public reaction to that, if they ever get caught.

Akari asks him why he’s staring off into space. 

“Uh,” he says, ever so eloquent. “Food.”

She’s so hot when she’s confused. Her eye bags have made a comeback, she looks sickly from the cold morning, and the back of her head resembles a dead hedgehog.

Merlin, he loves her.

“Food, yes, I agree,” Akari says, and shovels eggs, bacon, and toast on his plate. Cedric eats it all before realising that she’s falling back into bad eating habits, poking at the yoghurt with her finger and making shapes with the granola. So he takes her plate, separates all of the toppings from the yoghurt, and puts both of them in separate bowls. She needs protein, though, so he takes a sausage roll from the pasty basket and tears the bread off for her.

Diagonal to them, Edwin the prefect laughs in surprise. “What are you doing?”

Akari’s hands tremble.

“Mind your own breakfast, Macmillan,” Cedric says. 

They’ve never discussed it, but he thinks he knows why Akari prefers to eat in the kitchens, where the house elves don’t judge her as long as she finishes the plates they provide. The amount of food isn’t usually the problem, it’s just… everything else.

When he gently pushes the plate back, Akari forgoes the utensils entirely to pick up each chunk of granola with her fingers.

Is it strange? Yes. But she’ll tell him what’s going on when she’s ready.

Eventually, they make it through the day without any mishaps. The high of winning has worn off, and so has the hangover, so Cedric is able to digest the news of the Yule Ball perfectly. Only sixth and seventh years are guaranteed an entry ticket, so most of the younger students are disgruntled to bits and falling over themselves trying to get an older date. He even sees a second-year girl rolling up her skirt to approach a sixth-year boy in the central courtyard.

“Excuse me,” Cedric says loudly, barreling straight through both of them. “Coming through. Oh, hello little miss, I didn’t see you there. Are you okay, little miss?”

She blushes, stares at him dumbly with an open mouth, then runs away.

This happens on more than one occasion, and Cedric asks Professor McGonagall to make an announcement in the Great Hall about how the younger students will be having their own dance in the west ballroom, if they didn’t get the memo already. There’s going to be a lot of drinking and shagging at the Yule Ball, and he’d be damned if a testy little brat snuck in to witness a brand new core memory.

“You’re going to the dance with Ando, right?” A Gryffindor girl asks him one day during dinner. Akari’s skipping today, with the promise of eating her deconstructed sandwiches in her own dorm room.

Cedric pauses, because he doesn’t know how to answer that without being rude. Obviously?

“Yes…?”

The Gryffindor girl frowns, scoffs, and heads back to her own table. 

His mates cackle, because apparently being girlfriend and boyfriend isn’t enough to fend off the more serious harpies, especially now that they smell fortune and prestige through his name. He’s not fond of that idea – wait, is this how Harry feels everyday?

Poor kid. 

Speaking of, it’s about time that Cedric has another talk with the golden trio, just to check on their You-Know-Who slaying effort. They’re easy to find, and he corners them during their homework in the library. Oddly enough, Viktor Krum is standing in the middle of the aisle behind the golden trio’s table, staring straight into the spines of first-year transfiguration books, still as a statue.

Is Krum looking through the shelves or is he really bad at transfiguration?

Poor guy. He probably only does quidditch and never has time to sit down and study.

“Oh my god it’s Cedric Diggory,” Ron Weasley whispers loudly, and the two other brats gasp and pretend to be vigorously working on their homework. Then when Cedric plops down on the extra seat at their table, Granger twirls a piece of her hair innocently, and Weasley stammers out a greeting.

“Good morning,” he says.

Harry looks out the window. “It’s four in the afternoon.”

“Oh, you know, apparently it’s always morning in Bulgaria,” Cedric says.

They all turn around to stare at a suspicious Krum in the library after he coughs and mutters something like what the fuck that’s not a Bulgarian saying.

“So I should probably explain more about the mentorship programme,” he continues, as if nothing happened. “I’m the Head Boy, so I can do lots of things, like mentor troublesome young students who may or may not be targeted by You-Know-Who. Anyway, Akari says that if for any reason, someone tries to make you step off Hogwarts grounds this year, you come straight to me and I’ll report them to the Aurors. Also–.”

Granger raises her hand like she’s in class. 

What a nerd.

“A mentorship programme? Did you make that up just now for Harry’s benefit or is it serious?” She asks. Then she asks about a gazillion more questions that Cedric tunes out because she’s the most annoying little shit he’s ever had the displeasure of meeting. 

“Oh, it’s very serious,” Cedric says unseriously. “Because of… you know, we’re doing our best to keep you safe. If you ever need anything, feel free to ask us, Harry. We’re on your side.”

The three fourth-years blink their big shiny eyes and he thinks he hears one of them sniffle. But the precious moment is ruined when Harry and Weasley start gushing to him about the broom trick against the dragon in the first task, and Cedric has to endure the fanboying and Granger’s endless questions about offensive spellwork.

He needs to escape.

“I think Krum would love to teach you about advanced wand movements,” Cedric says, looking up to stare at the weirdo Durmstrang student through the open space on the bookshelf. “Look, he’s been staring at this table for the past ten minutes, how kind of him.”

Krum starts breathing deeply, eyes widening. 

Then without a word, Krum tenderly walks over and stands over Granger, shivering weirdly. “Yes,” he says, in a thick Bulgarian accent. “I vould love to teach you my vand moveh-ments.”

Granger brightens. “Oh, thank you!” Then she pulls her wand out from her sleeve and asks for a demonstration. “So I was studying that exploding spell you did in the first task against the Swedish Shortsnout, and I checked three textbooks but they all described different wand movements! Can you show me the correct form?”

“Ah,” Krum says, in his intimidating voice. Cedric didn’t know a single noise could sound so fierce. “Easy.” Then he pulls out his own wand and starts shaking it the way most boys do when discovering the joys of wanking for the first time.

“Is it like this?” Granger says, then starts mimicking the motion.

Cedric stands up and leaves.

Durmstrang and Beauxbatons are known as “international” schools in the European wizarding world because they take in students from all across the continent, plus more. Hogwarts is only a part of the triwizard tournament because it used to be considered a highly-sought after wizarding academy for prosperous witches and wizards around the globe, but then the blood wars with You-Know-Who brought down the international student body (and the general magical British population) to practically zero. Thus, Cedric knows for a fact that Hogwarts used to preach diversity and whatnot, so he’s surprised when he witnesses things like racism or religious discrimination.

Long story short, he hands out three detentions to first-year Hufflepuff students for being intolerant of a Ravenclaw girl’s identity, and rants about it to Akari in an abandoned charms classroom on the eighth floor. 

There are a lot of abandoned classrooms in Hogwarts.

“The prefects will keep an eye on them in the future, too,” he says, wrangling his hands. “But it’s sickening, this stuff.”

She sighs and sketches randomly on her homework sheet. “You’re a good Head Boy, Cedric.” Then she stands up to stretch her back and wow that makes her skirt lift up a bit, so he stares at the pale, long legs and the way her thigh muscles shift when she sits back down to doodle. Thinking about her legs makes his dick wake up from the pits of hell, so now he’s crossing his legs and cursing at himself for being horny whilst angry about racial prejudices.

“It’s just– aah,” he says, and stuffs his face in his hands.

Akari’s quill stops scratching at the parchment. “Cedric,” she says carefully. “Is that a random boner or is that a boner from finding racism to be immensely attractive?”

“Random boner!” He exclaims.

Cedric is sitting on an old wooden chair with his back to the wall, and the poor legs creak when Akari crawls over to sit on his lap. He’s eye-level with her chin, so he nips it with his teeth, then gradually moves down with his tongue to suck on the sweet spot of her neck. She gasps, bucks her hips forward, and he feels her knickers laying right on top of a rock-hard erection in his trousers.

“Fuck,” she groans, throaty and loud, and Cedric is gone.

He blindly grabs his wand, aims a locking spell on the classroom door, then unbuttons Akari’s blouse. “I’m still,” he says, panting, “carrying the contraceptive potion in my bookbag.”

“It expires soon,” she says, breathing into his mouth.

He doesn’t need another reminder. He undoes his trousers, pulls down his pants just enough for his cock to spring out, and pushes Akari’s knickers aside. Despite all their alone time, this is the first time they’ve actually gone all the way, so the first thing he does is wish to the high heavens he doesn’t bust a nut right then and there.

About three thrusts later, he thinks he’s going to fail because everything is warm, wet, and tight, but then they both hear footsteps against the stone tiles just outside the door.

“Ah, yes, Miss Lovegood, in this room here I store the old charms journal publications,” Professor Flitwick’s disembodied and muffled voice says. “That’s strange. Is it locked?”

There’s never been more of a moment of panic in Cedric Diggory’s seventeen years of living. There aren’t any other doors, he’s zipping up his trousers with speeds this world has never seen before, there’s a professor and a student right outside, rattling the door, and the only exit is through the windows, from the eighth story.

Actually, that’s not a bad escape route.

“Hold on tight, spider monkey,” Cedric whispers, grabs Akari by the waist, pulls out a broom from his pocket, unshrinks it, and flies out the window. 

Whilst in the chilly air of an early December night, Akari asks him, ridiculously, why he’s still storing his broom in his pockets. Cedric doesn’t really know, other than the first task has given him a certain amount of paranoia and it never hurts to be prepared. What he does know, for certain, is that their sex life is a mess and he wants to scream his fucking heart out.

He wants to get laid.

Wait, no, scratch that, technically his penis has been inside a vagina. Does that count? No, he wants to hump her leg and bark or whatever, then cum on her face. There are a lot of things he wants, but they mostly have to do with his cock. Because he has a minutiae of self-preservation, he doesn’t complain about it to her face because she’s a strong independent woman who doesn’t need to hear about his blue balls, and has a freezing cold shower before bed time.

The exertion of the champions’ dance practice keeps his hormones temporarily abated, because in the week prior to the Yule Ball, Professor McGonagall assigns mandatory lessons for the publicised ceremony. Cedric has no clue how Roger fucking Davies successfully asked Fleur Delacour out to the dance, but he thinks he feels sorry for her. 

“She gave up looking,” Akari says. “Too many people asked her, so she just chose whoever would complement her colouring the most.”

Cedric does not pass the information on.

And then there’s…

“Her-mee-o-ninny,” Viktor Krum says breathily. “I have learned ancient proverb for you: if you were Tatar person, I vould be sad to kill you. But no vorry, I prefer death, and I vill kill myself for you. Blyat!”

Granger sniffles. “Oh, Viktor, you’re so sweet.”

It is sweet, but in an incredibly disturbing, Marxist type of way, but Cedric wants no part in any of that and leaves the two awkward ducks to their own devices. 

When Yule finally arrives, the school goes all out in millions of glittery decorations, with banners, pretty plants, and mini fireworks all around the castle. The Great Hall transforms into something white, wintry, and wonderful, with enchanted snowflakes and crystals floating by the ceiling, twinkling down at the centre stage. Everyone’s dressed up in their very best, with silk, satin, fur, and lace, and Cedric’s eyes are working overtime because his girlfriend has cemented herself as the hottest thing on the planet and he is just a man, at her mercy.

Cucumber perfume.

He chokes down a startled laugh.

“What?” Akari asks.

“You smell like cucumbers,” he says, and watches her eyes crinkle. Merlin, he loves her eyes. There’s this fatty layer on her under-eyelid that scrunches into this puffy shape when she smiles, forcing her eyes into half-moons. She’s pinned her bangs up into a hair clip and gelled down the rest of her hair into a smoothed hairdo. “And your hair’s super straight.”

They match, on the dance floor, with her emerald green ball gown and his emerald green bowtie, and also in temperament, because he’s smiling like a goofball whilst she’s wrinkling her eyes and bloody hell Cedric’s going to combust.

The ball quickly turns into a Weird Sisters concert, which he’s not mad about, but Akari doesn’t do well with these sorts of things and he sits next to her on one of the many snow-themed tables. She tells him to go have fun, but he can’t stop staring at her like a creep so he shuts up and enjoys her presence, breathing in the cucumber scent.

Roger shows up to the table, that miserable bint, because Fleur obviously never liked him, and hangs around like crawling lichen.

“Go on, then,” Akari says. She kisses Cedric on the forehead. “I’m going to go talk to Fred Weasley.”

Now that is certainly a questionable thing to do, but she goes off, dragging her long gown, to a sulking redhead around the entrance doors. Being able to tell which twin is which sounds like a solid seer ability, so he keeps that in mind. 

He spends the rest of the concert partying with his mates (whose girlfriends have also ditched them, those poor lads), screaming along to the lyrics to the latest song. And when the playlist ends, a hassled Headmaster Dumbledore makes a speech about inter-school unity, says something like bumbletwit and crackwagon, then lets the Yule dinner begin.

Traditionally, the champions and their dates feast together, so Cedric and Akari settle down at a circular ice table with the two other pairs.

“So, Fleur, how’s the night been?” Roger asks.

Fleur orders a bloody rare steak and slams a large meat knife with serrated edges into its juicy centre.

“Ah,” Roger says painfully. “So, uh. You like steak. What’s your favourite part of this dinner?”

“Ze food,” she says.

In what will haunt Cedric for days to come, Fleur’s face grows pointer, her canines grow out into razor sharp spikes, and smoke exudes from her hair. She grabs the steak with her bare hands and tears into it with bloodthirsty gusto. See, this is why Veelas are considered high-class predators in Newt Scamander’s books on magical creatures.

The other couples fare more romantically. 

“You are like pearl in ocean,” Krum tells Granger, who’s actually fairly pretty tonight in her blue ball gown and pink lipstick. “If I see you at bottom of ocean, I vould fall off ship and simply allow myself to drown.”

Akari slips her hand into Cedric’s.

So far, so good. 

Because Krum’s attempts at wooing a girl with his continuous suicidal ideation are equally funny as they are disturbing, Cedric decides to turn off his brain and listen to whatever Akari wants to tell him.

She looks up at him, stars in her eyes and roses on her cheeks, and says, “I’ll teach you about Japanese food.”

The menu did brag about being able to bring forth any dish from any cuisine, so Cedric watches, in rapt attention, as Akari orders her meal in a string of confusing staccato sounds. She points at a pancake dish she calls okonomiyaki, fried ginger pork called buta no shogayaki, and a glass of white grape juice. He fails horrifically at pronouncing the names, but she laughs it off and rips into her meal.

He’s never seen her eat like this before. Like– like she’s happy.

“You’re so fucking hot right now,” Cedric says.

Akari has soy sauce on her cheek and her breath smells like cabbage and mayonnaise. She continues to look happy when the plates change for dessert, and she orders a bowl of something called anmitsu, which is a mix of ice cream, jellies, fruits, and sweet beans. She smiles like the sun, but it’s not at him, sadly enough, but at the tables behind them.

In the back row, Cedric sees one of the Weasley twins – Fred, probably, given all the context clues of the night – sitting next to Cassius.

“So many ships,” she says, bemused.

“Where?”

“Not those kinds of ships,” Akari says. “Ships as in– actually, you probably shouldn’t know. I’m just surprised at how compatible Granger and Krum are, I never knew.”

The two freaks are literally all over each other, moments away from fucking on the table. Krum enjoys talking to a girl that’s not one of his rabid quidditch fangirls and Granger enjoys the undivided attention of a man with professional seeker-based focus and the subtle references to depressing Eastern European literature. It’s a match made in hell because Cedric thinks they’re the weirdest people ever, but good for them. Akari, on the other hand, is surprised at how well suited they are for each other, as if she was expecting something else.

She does that a lot lately, he’s noticed. There are loads of things with small little tweaks that she gets unnecessarily stressed over, having expected something different. 

Nevermind. It’s probably a seer thing.

The afterparty of the Yule Ball is loud, bright, and drunk, and Cedric lasts approximately two minutes before the Russian liquor from the Durmstrang students makes him feel warm and horny, and runs off to the Hufflepuff dorms to catch Akari before she sleeps.

“Akari!” He shouts. 

Several Hufflepuffs in the common room startle at the commotion. His beloved girlfriend bursts out from the girl’s wing with dog-patterned pyjamas and a catastrophe of a hairdo.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the afterparty?”

“I just had to let you know that I love you!” He says, slurring his words. It’s probably from the alcohol. “Akari, I love you!”

The common room starts giggling.

She sighs, but there’s a painfully gentle smile on her face. “Go back to the afterparty, Cedric. I love you, too.”

Part 4

Cedric meets the Ando family on Boxing day. They’re a delightfully small family – a tiny lady with a wrinkly smile and dimples for a mother, a tall and skinny man with unruly white hair for a father, and a magical daughter.

Oh, and three tiny poodle dogs.

Mrs. Ando has a thick Japanese accent, almost indecipherable to Cedric’s ears, but he nods along and converses with her using context clues and the occasionally perfectly pronounced English word that pops up in the middle of a sentence. From what he can surmise, she’s happy that her precious daughter finally found a man, even if Cedric is white.

Akari spits out rapid-fire Japanese at her laughing mother. Cedric hopes his girlfriend is arguing something along the lines of it doesn’t matter if he’s white!

Mr. Ando’s English fares better, but he doesn’t speak much, preferring to silently listen in on the conversation and nod. Mr. Ando’s older brother is also magic, but he went to a wizarding school in Japan, so Akari’s uncle couldn’t help much with all the British customs and magical traditions.

The family unit reminds Cedric of his own – two proud parents and their child – but they’re definitely not very Christmas-y and they kick the two teenagers out of the house to go walk around somewhere. 

“We’ll have to take the tube to get to central London,” Akari says.

She inserts paper bills into a muggle machine at the end of her neighbourhood street and it spits out a ticket. Akari has something called an oyster card and doesn’t need the paper ticket, and she drags him down moving stairs and into a tube station. 

“Muggle technology is wicked,” Cedric says, upon hearing a lady’s voice echo around the carriage. The doors close and the underground train starts moving. 

They hit all the muggle tourist attractions. Most of them are closed on Boxing day, but it’s still fun to walk around London and point at the big metal buildings. When the sun sets, Akari takes him to a sweaty man selling Mediterranean food in an enclosed tiny metal box. His name tag says “Bossman” and his doner kebabs cost six pounds each. Akari explains that they’re pricey, but everything’s expensive in the big city – and Bossman always heaps in extra chips and sauce in the takeaway boxes.

Cedric frowns. The doner kebab tastes good, but… “It’s a bit spicy, don’t you think?”

“It’s ketchup,” she says.

He’s about to agree, but then he remembers that it might not be good to make her disappointed in his weak spice tolerance, so he moves the conversation elsewhere. 

Two days later, Akari arrives at the Diggory manor. It’s not much of a manor, more of a large and old house with a vast backyard, but the Diggorys are an old pureblood family and it’s proper for purebloods to refer to their homes as manors. Anyway, she arrives bright and early in Ottery St. Catchpole by using a muggle train and taxi service and Cedric’s parents are all over her.

“Oh my goodness, you’re so thin!” His mum says. “Come inside, breakfast is on the table.”

Cedric had told his parents earlier about Akari’s eating habits, and they still don’t really understand, just thinking that she’s a picky eater, so he awaits the potentially terrible misunderstandings. But, Akari uncomfortably uses the fork and knife and eats the full English breakfast despite the beans touching the fried eggs. Sometimes she’s okay with eating normally, like whenever she has Japanese food, or when they enjoyed a doner kebab together in muggle London, but Cedric can tell that today is not one of those days. 

She takes forever to swallow the eggs, and she slows down by the time she gets to the beans, eating them one by one. She uses the utensils to move the food around her plate to make it look like she ate more than she actually did, and by the time everyone else finishes eating, she also proclaims to be full.

“Are you sure?” Mum asks. “There’s more in the kitchen–.”

“I think I’ll show Akari around the house. Thanks for the meal, mum, dad,” Cedric says, putting on a smile. He grabs a basket of fresh pastries, though, to make his parents happy.

“Don’t have too much fun up there, Cedric, Carrie!” Dad says.

He yells back, “we won’t!” He doesn’t really care what they’re assuming about them because Akari looks like she’s going to be sick, so he quickly drags her up the stairs to his room. She doesn’t end up puking, but she lays face down on his bed silently. Cedric lays down next to her. 

This isn’t how he’d imagine having a girl in his childhood bed, but as long as it’s her, he can’t complain.

“You’re going to think it’s stupid,” she finally says, voice muffled by the blanket.

“I won’t,” he promises. 

Akari takes a deep breath, reaches out to hold him, and tells him the beginning. When she was a Hogwarts first-year, she was in heaven for the first week. She only ate her parents’ home cooking for eleven years, and eating the rich bread and meat based British food for a week straight felt like she was at an amusement park for food. Pastries, pasties, stews, steaks, pies, and more. Then after a week, she tried the risotto, but it tasted nothing like rice at home. The vegetables were also cooked differently, the fruits were okay but the kitchen inventory didn’t have her favourite Asian fruits like yuzu or nashi, and the realisation that she’d have to eat this foreign cuisine for nine months of the year for seven years made something inside an eleven year old Akari Ando break down.

It was easier to pretend she was eating home food, she says, still face down on the bed, if she could control how she ate her meals. 

“It’s not stupid,” he tells her. “For me, Hogwarts food tasted like home. But for you, it wasn’t. You felt isolated when everyone was meant to be at their happiest. Akari, it’s not stupid. You’re so strong.”

She doesn’t cry, but she curls up into his side and stays silent for a long time before reaching over him to grab the pasty basket on the desk and eat three lemon scones. Then she tells him that she wants to suck his dick.

Cedric doesn’t think he hears that correctly.

Is it attractive to comfort a sad, sad teenage girl on her disordered eating? If it is, then this might make sense, but he thinks that for once, Akari might be the emotionally dumb one in this relationship.

It hurts to say it, but he lies and says he’s not in the mood. For once, he doesn’t have a random boner interrupting his life plans, even though his hot girlfriend is in his arms and begging for a blowjob. It would be perfect. His parents already think they’re having sex up here, but they’re not and his hormones are running wild. 

“Let’s go to the greenhouse,” he whispers, and drags her out of his bed.

The return to Hogwarts comes another seven hour train ride. This is the seventh-year students’ second to last train ride from Platform nine and three-quarters, and the pain in Cedric’s chest is more than he realised. 

Graduation.

Oh, Merlin, Cedric couldn’t worry about that yet because he still had to worry about the second task.

Freshwater mermaids? Not cool. Not cool at all. Professor Lupin from last year hammered into all of their heads for NEWTs about the dangers of the watery world and the power that mermaids have in their natural environment. 

Freshwater, saltwater,  Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic – it doesn’t fucking matter because all mermaids are high-class magical creatures.

The planning for surviving the second task comes into a full blown tilt upon his return to Hogwarts after the winter hols, where he finds himself stuck up in the library or practising a multitude of creative spells with his professors. Mad Eye Moody comes around and eventually gets to teaching Cedric about seventeen different ways to legally kill someone without a trace. Yes, it’s concerning. Yes, he’s still grateful for the help.

Cedric asks Akari for wisdom – not necessarily for her to give away the future, but any out-of-the-box thinking that he’d benefit from. She mentions that Veelas do terribly underwater and leaves it at that.

Does he have to fight Fleur and the mermaids?

There’s another heavy matter weighing on Cedric’s mind that he can’t do anything about at the moment but suffers from immensely. You-Know-Who is alive. His ghostly spectrum is out there, haunting the country, and given Harry’s previous track record, something disastrous relating to Dark Lords will most likely occur around the end of the academic year. Akari confesses to millions of crazy plans in her head to change the future, to disturb the natural progression of fate, but she’s too terrified to commit.

“If I do decide to change the future any further,” she says one night, whispering into his neck as they hide in the comfort of the Head Boy dorm. “Promise me that you’ll stay away?”

Cedric holds her, wrapping his arms around her angular frame, and shifting the position of his knees so that Akari, on top of him, is trapped by his aching soul. He runs his hands up and down the smoothness of her back, fingers grazing over the shifting muscles around her spine and shoulder blades. He can feel tiny indents – stretch marks – on the flared curve of her hips, and he makes sure to feel every one of them because he wants to know her body for all of its glory. Her scent is maddening, intoxicating, and an affront to the remains of his sanity. Cedric holds her and she feels like a precious doll in his arms.

“I don’t think I can,” he says.

“Cedric–.”

“I can’t,” he says, quiet. “Because I could never let you go.”

There is a reason why the school staff chose him to be Head Boy, and why the goblet decided upon his name above all others. Cedric isn’t stupid. He’s bright, he knows he’s bright, and he knows that the real reason Akari’s having trouble with her seer abilities this year has to do with him (and the return of You-Know-Who, but that’s pushed aside at the moment). If Harry became champion, Cedric would be in danger. And now, in this new future, he may still tumble down to the same ending if she doesn’t micromanage everything into perfection.

Her fear speaks a thousand words.

“I don’t want you to die,” she admits, finally, and Cedric’s suspicions are confirmed. 

He holds her tighter, until it’s like their bodies are melded into one and all he can feel with his five senses is Akari Ando. “I won’t die,” he promises, even though it’s cruel to say out loud. “Akari, I’m not going to die. Tell me anything else, not revolving around leaving you, and I’ll do it. I’ll help you manage your abilities because I–.”

I love you, he was going to finish, but he’s interrupted by a sudden burst of laughter.

“Oh, sorry,” Akari says. “No, I– huh. You said my name perfectly.”

That’s better than any I love you, in Cedric’s humble opinion, so he joins in on the laughter. It’s not a perfect resolution to the night, but there are things he can’t push by the very nature of a seer’s existence, so he listens to her heartbeat and watches her fall asleep.

Whoever designed the second task to be a nice dip in a lake on a February morning in Scotland deserves to conveniently fall off a cliff and perish. There are lots of cliffs around here, in the Scottish highlands. 

Cedric is cold, miserable, and sad.

“Where’s Ando?” One of his Hufflepuff mates asks, on the bottom deck of the floating lake rafters. It’s Chester, that annoying cunt, but seeing a familiar face is better than nothing. 

Probably at the bottom of this fucking lake, he thinks, but doesn’t say out loud next to the judges table because they’re all so smarmy and pleased with themselves for thinking up this shitbrained task. The hint from the golden egg was way too easy to solve, once Cedric crossed out the less obvious answers. His most precious thing? Of course it’s Akari, nothing else could compare. And he has exactly one hour to rescue her or else watery savages are going to let her drown.

“READY, SET–!”

The cannon fires before the signal.

He casts the bubblehead charm, a heating charm, then jumps down and starts swimming. Fleur has the same idea, but Cedric’s a faster swimmer so he quickly loses sight of her past the seaweed forest. Krum, on the other hand, turns into a shark. Cedric only hopes that he’s a stupid shark.

In under thirty minutes, he navigates through the maze of the lake floor to find three people chained to a coral-encrusted hanger. He doesn’t recognise the third person, a tiny girl who couldn’t be any older than eleven or twelve, but the presence of Akari and Granger implies that this girl is Fleur’s person of choice.

Speaking of, the last time Cedric saw Fleur, she was being attacked by grindylows. It’s pretty unfair, seeing how grindylows can smell Veela blood and they absolutely hate their species subcategory. Does that mean the tiny French girl will drown, if Fleur doesn’t get here on time?

Veelas have trouble underwater, Akari had said.

He looks at his sleeping, half-drowned girlfriend, as if she’ll give him any more clues. 

Oh my, Cedric suddenly thinks, an evil plan on how to earn a resolute win forming in his head. Oh dear, oh my, indeed.

About five minutes later, the Hogwarts champion breaks the surface of the water with his prizes – all three of the champions’ treasured people. Akari pukes out lakewater, Granger screams in confusion, and the mini Delacour girl starts crying for her sister. The judges are too stunned to be properly mad at Cedric’s insanity, and then they all wait for the other contestant to turn up once they realise their precious people are no longer in the lake.

“Actually,” Akari says nonchalantly, once Cedric layers warming and drying charms over her. “Fleur’s a Veela, so if she encounters a mermaid then they might just kill her on the spot out of spite. And if Krum can’t find Granger, it’s highly likely he’ll let himself drown out of guilt. Or to make a fashionable media statement.”

Cedric frowns.

That’s not good. 

But, at that moment, two figures emerge from the dark waters. Fleur Delacour and Viktor Krum, both heavily injured, help each other to the docks, all while cursing each other out.

“‘Ou are an idiot!” Fleur hisses. “Suicidal maniac!”

Her heavy French accent is difficult to parse through, but her English is otherwise fantastic. 

Krum looks solemn as ever, even as grunting Durmstrang students drag him out of the water and cover him in fluffy white towels. “I die for my love,” he says.

From what Cedric understands from their banter, Krum the shark could not find his Her-mee-o-ninny and very nearly went on a rampage, then found Fleur and ate enough Grindylows to rescue her from their battalions. Upon the aftermath of bloody destruction, Krum grew morose and tried to drown himself, if only to find his girlfriend in death. Fleur, obviously gobsmacked, sliced him up with her Veela claws until he was compliant enough to let her help each other escape to the surface.

“But I’m not dead?” Granger says, in the corner.

Krum gasps. “You are alive! My pearl in ocean! I thought Tartar fish people in water kill you. I go to rotting prison for you, and put evil in my heart, Her-mee-o-ninny.”

That has to be the least romantic sentence Cedric has ever heard, but to everyone’s palpable shock, Granger blushes.

“That’s a Solzhenitsyn reference!” She says, teary-eyed.

Anyway.

The judges debate for a disastrously long time because of the headache Cedric caused with his plan, and also because the Beauxbatons Headmistress brings up the unfairness of putting a Veela in her natural opposite environment. Karkaroff argues that Cedric caused the Durmstrang champion to unlock a deep depression at the potential thought of a missing girlfriend, to which Dumbledore not so politely reminds them all that the majority of the points in this tournament are awarded based on speed and completion, not sportsmanship.

The rules are complete bullshit, Cedric thinks, as he witnesses his loophole points added into his total score, rounding him off into first place for the second time.

“And the first place winner of the second task is, CEDRIC DIGGORY!” The Headmaster yells through a sonorus charm, and the Hogwarts students cheer.

The foreign schools look thoroughly miffed.

There’s another wild party in the Hufflepuff common room, with more alcohol, bar food, inter-house guests, and noise. Cedric gets piss drunk in the first hour, but mental visage of a responsible Akari tells him to slow down and drink water, so he slowly sobers up as the party dies out in order to help with the cleaning effort in the end. Most of the guys ended up ripping off their shirts for losing butterbeer pong (the alcoholic version) against the girls, so he steps over several half-naked unconscious teenage boys whilst waving around cleaning spells. 

He doesn’t hear anyone in the toilets, so he barges in to make sure nobody’s accidentally died from alcohol poisoning in there.

Wait, no. Scratch that. There are people here.

“Wow,” Cedric says, because he’s still mildly drunk. “Nice hickey.”

The Weasley twins look up. The twin with a giant hickey on his neck is red-eyed and rubbing away tears and snot whilst the other is comforting him. 

“Not now, Diggory,” The unbitten one says. That one is probably George, because Cedric vaguely remembers Akari needing to talk to Fred about… well. Whatever the fuck is going on, that’s for sure.

Cedric puts his hands up, innocent. “If Fred needs to talk, I’ll be in the common room.”

And he leaves, perturbed. The love life of the famous redhead pranksters sounds like a nightmare to deal with, so he tries to remove the image of Fred crying in his mind by aggressively waving his wand around the room and bringing up all the cleaning spells his mother taught him. A good man is a clean man, or so she told him, and Akari definitely approves of Cedric’s ability to clean up after himself. 

A few others are mulling around in the beanbag corner, still awake. There’s a blonde fifth year Gryffindor girl that looks familiar, a few Ravenclaw girls, and Chester, who’s just taken a vow of sobriety in an attempt to woo Aisha.

“Hey, Cedric,” the Gryffindor girl calls out. 

“Oh, hello…” He wracks his brain for her name. “Trish…?”

Akari is better at remembering the girls’ names because she’s casually acquainted with pretty much the entire female population at school, but Akari is sleeping in her own dorm room tonight, wanting no part in a drunken mess of a party.

He must’ve gotten her name right, because Trish’s pale blue eyes sparkle. “Yeah! That’s me. I was noticing you cleaning up – that’s so nice of you,” she says, then pulls out a nondescript dark pink vial from her skirt pocket. “Here, I brewed this hangover prevention potion. I was going to give it to my friend, but she disappeared. Take it, please!”

One second later, and she’s shoved the vial into his hands.

“Are you sure?” Cedric asks, but people have been giving him lots of free things lately, ever since he became the Hogwarts champion, so he doesn’t think of this encounter with much thought at all. He flicks the top open and downs it in one go.

His throat burns.

The last thing Cedric remembers is staring into Trish’s smiling face.

He wakes up in someone else’s room. 

“He’s alive!” Someone shouts, and Cedric blearily sits up, head pounding, and comes face to face with Chester.

Blink. Blink. Blink. Where the fuck… Oh shit, this is the Ravenclaw seventh-year boy’s dorm. Cedric tries to blubber something out, but his throat feels dry and itchy, so he ends up coughing. Because his friends are bastards, none of them offer him a glass of water, so he sits there, dehydrated out of his mind.

“It was pretty bad,” Roger, sitting on a bed, says. “The Weasley twins came out of the toilets and recognised the bottle, so they caused a ruckus. Chester and Aisha had to hold you back, the twins ganged up on her, and one of the Ravenclaw prefects woke up from the noise and dragged you up here before you’d do something you’d regret.”

There’s Roger Davies, the Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor prefects, Fred and George Weasley, Cassius Warrington, Chester Jones, Aisha Abdullah, and Akari Ando.

Cedric tries to stand up. “Aka–!”

And he immediately falls on his face. 

Soft hands help him back up, and he’s met with the face of his girlfriend, peering over him sadly. She smooths down Cedric’s hair and props his head in her lap. “Don’t worry,” she says, but she doesn’t sound well. “Fred and George caught you in time before anything happened.”

Because Trish gave Cedric a love potion.

“I’m sorry,” Cedric says numbly.

“Don’t be,” Akari says. “You didn’t know. And you didn’t even do anything with her, so it’s– fine.”

His friends dragged him to the Ravenclaw tower just to get away from Trish, and Aisha fixed up a potion in the common room (because apparently the Ravenclaws have an entire fucking lab up here) to expunge his system of the love potion. It took Chester, Cassius, and the twins to hold him down to take the potion, because he was going berserk trying to find Trish. One kind soul woke Akari up and informed her of the situation and now, well…

They’re all here, waiting to see if he’s alright.

Love potions aren’t illegal on school grounds – not yet, anyways – so by the next morning, the entire school has heard the story, but Trish wasn’t given any kind of detention. Fred and George promise to make her life hell, though, but Cedric doesn’t pay attention because he’s going back to the kitchens to check if Akari’s alright.

She’s sitting in her nook with a lemonade pitcher and a platter of bacon.

“I’ve just realised,” she says, not looking up. “How precious our relationship is. Don’t apologise for the Trish incident, it wasn’t your fault, Cedric. But it made me realise that it’s so easy for accidents to happen, not just with love potions, but with any kind of magic around here. Hexes, jinxes, curses – one wrong move and everything could be over.”

They’re back to the argument on Cedric’s involvement with her future-telling.

“It doesn’t matter because I’ll be with you no matter what,” he says, and sits down in front of her to hold her hands and kiss her wrists. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

A plate drops in the background and the house elves all scurry about, making chirping noises and clanging pots and pans together.

Akari laughs. He loves watching her laugh, but this one looks painful and forced. “Well, I suppose you know the fiendfyre curse, then?”

“Pardon?”

“I’ve never been great at offensive magic,” she says, ignoring Cedric’s stammering. “I’m great at wards and barriers, though. I had amazing marks for my OWLs and NEWTs in Defence because the exams mostly test us on defensive magic, not any of the actual attacks. Tough luck, I guess, because if I can’t master fiendfyre then I’ll have to talk to Potter again.”

She pulls out her wand and charms mini fireworks above her head in a self-deprecating celebration. Pine wood, unicorn hair, eight inches, and with a mild curvature to adjust for left-handedness – Cedric likes Akari’s wand because it’s pretty, just like her.

“Don’t,” he says.

Akari raises her eyebrows.

“I mean,” Cedric corrects, because he’s done it again, he’s lost concentration by staring at her. “I do know the spell. Fiendfyre. Professor Moody taught me a whole bunch of advanced curses before the first task.”

Fiendfyre, a dangerous and uncontrollable dark magic curse, was the most dangerous curse in his entire spell arsenal. There’s been numerous debates in the ministry whether or not to make it an illegal spell, but the existence of its far more difficult counterspell, one to extinguish the beastly flames, meant that the debates never reach a satisfactory conclusion. Many people know that Cedric’s a great duellist, with top marks in offensive magic, but he’ll never ever brag to anyone about being able to cast this curse.

It’s far too risky.

So he doesn’t expect her to stand up, open-mouthed, and gasp. “You do?!” She exclaims brightly. “Holy shit. You know how to do fiendfyre! Fucking hell, this is amazing!”

The ensuing evil-sounding cackles shouldn’t turn Cedric on as much as they do now, but Merlin’s bloody bollocks, Cedric has a boner and it’s not going away any time soon. He hates being a hormonal teenage boy for this reason alone, and Akari is a pro at noticing whenever he’s aroused, so she vibrates in excitement and smiles creepily at his eyes then at the front of his trousers.

“So, uh, I won’t tell you everything, but I think I’ll tell you a little bit, first,” she says, vibrant, cheeks flushed with positivity. “There are some items that need to be destroyed, preferably within the next two years, and the only way anyone can destroy these items is through casting it in fiendfyre, drenching it in basilisk poison, or slicing it with Godric Gryffindor’s sword. There might be other methods, but these are the only ones I know for certain.”

He hadn’t expected the conversation to turn out like this, so he nods along and tries not to ask too many questions.

Seers and their secrets.

Valentine’s Day causes quite the commotion in Hogwarts, because the influx of hot new foreign students means everyone’s knickers are in a bunch and Cedric’s pretty sure the plumbing system is working overtime from all the semen clogging the drains. He aims on buying a bouquet of roses from a shop at Hogsmeade, runs into Akari at the same shop, and drops the plan to run away and get something else.

When the day comes, he gets her a box of chocolates and a hairclip he’s pretty sure she’ll never wear but it came with the candy set for free so he got it anyway. Akari pulls him aside and shows off a box of contraceptive potions.

“Really?” He says, and hates that he sounds like an overeager puppy.

“I’ll try not to ruin the mood again,” she says. “Pinky swear.”

Well, there can’t be anything else she could say that would spoil their fun time. He already knows that without her meddling, he’s probably going to die a horrific death, and there couldn’t be anything more mood-killing than that. 

Hopefully.

He leans, brushing her bangs up and kissing her forehead. His nose is in her hair and it smells wonderful, just like cucumber perfume.

“You have a boner.”

“Fuck.”

The perfect moment arrives a few weeks later, far away from Valentine’s Day but Cedric supposes that it doesn’t matter because he’s going to get laid, thank Merlin. According to his lucky friends, it’s best to wash beforehand to make sure there’s no hidden gunk anywhere, so after dinner he and Akari walk back to the Head Boy dorm room to take a shower together. 

He can’t stop thinking wow and I love boobs when they’re both naked in the shower, and his thoughts must be obvious because she glances approvingly at his rock-hard cock whilst massaging shampoo into her hair.

“Should we put on music?” She asks.

“Um,” he says, because he’s thinking of a way to wash his foreskin in the shower without it being awkward since his girlfriend’s right there and being a ninny about his personal hygiene feels kind of unsexy even though it’s important. “We both listen to different genres.”

“Then we compromise – the wizarding radios have muggle classical music, I believe. No, you don’t call it classical.”

“You mean the instrumental channel?” He asks.

Music doesn’t discriminate between the magical and muggle worlds, it seems, because he recognises the names Mozart and Chopin from his mother’s old music books, and he delights in informing Akari that Tchaikovsky was a famous Russian wizard and proud Durmstrang alumnus. 

Cedric washes her back with a cloth, and because he wants to and he can, he pushes his arms against the tiled wall, trapping her under him, his cock throbbing against the soft skin of her back. He bites her neck, releases a caging arm to slowly move down her waist to explore whatever the hell is going on down there. The clitoris shouldn’t be too hard to find, right?

“It’s at the front,” she says, reading his mind.

“Good to know,” he says. He turns off the shower, grabs her thighs and carries her bridal-style back into his room. She yelps at the manhandling, but if there’s a time to show off the strength training from quidditch, it has to be now, so he carries her around and then throws her on the bed.

Akari finds her wand on the bedside table, murmurs an incantation towards the record player (a Christmas gift from his dad) on the dresser, and the sound of violins fill the room. 

“On second thought, classical music might not be the best choice,” she says, frowning. “I don’t want to orgasm to Brahms.”

“Too late,” he whispers, because he can’t hear the music due to the rushing blood and heavy pants, and crawls over her. He bites her neck again, then leaves a trail of hickeys from collar to belly button. He licks down, down, and down, until he reaches trembling thighs.

He finds the clit on the first try. Maybe he just has a fat tongue, but that doesn’t matter because her breath hitches, her stomach flexes, and she bucks her hips up and forces her cunt back into his face.

Her pubic bone hits his nose and ow, but passion overrides pain and he continues licking and sucking until his jaw hurts.

“Don’t stop,” she breathes out, making all sorts of lovely noises. His tongue feels like it’s about to fall off, but Cedric isn’t a quitter and Hufflepuffs always get the job done, so he incorporates fingers to the mix to help speed the process along.

Akari will hate him for this later, but she grips his face with her thighs, wrinkles the sheets with clawed fingers, and climaxes to Brahms’ third symphony.

She’s panting and dying, his cock is throbbing like crazy, and she says, “I hate you so much,” then makes him crawl up so that they can kiss. Cedric needs to fuck her now or he’s going to explode, which she can sense because she’s the most amazing person ever and she wraps her legs around his hips and smirks.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” he says.

Akari blinks and nearly jumps out of her skin.

“No! Wait, sorry, bad wording,” he immediately adds. “I mean, metaphorically speaking, because you’re literally so hot even though I thought you were a boy when we first met.”

“Cedric,” she says, then pauses to digest the confusion. He wants to punch himself. “Do you want to fuck me or not?”

His cock jumps to attention.

“Yes! Yes, I do, very much so,” he says.

Cedric thought Akari was a boy in first-year, because she was tall with short hair and had a relatively low voice, for an eleven year old. It’s hard to tell if someone’s wearing skirts or trousers with the dragging traditional black robes, and even more so when everyone’s bundled up in winter cloaks. He supposes he hadn’t realised that Akari wasn’t in the boy’s dorm until a few weeks later, out of the blue, and he never told a soul about the story out of shame. She’s kept her hair short since the beginning, but this year it’s gotten truly unruly and rockstar-esque. But he can’t think of her as boyish much anymore because his cock is going inside her.

It takes an embarrassingly long time to build a rhythm, but when they do, the rutting and rocking movement is as natural as it can be.

Everyone finds Akari Ando to be this nice, charming, cool-headed seventh-year, but Cedric looks down at this quivering mess and a dark sort of madness takes over upon seeing her like this. Everyone else sees her as calm and collected whilst he gets to stake his claim on a ravaged soul. Cedric drags his lips with ghost breaths against her pulsepoint as he thrusts deeper.

“Are you going to get this over with or what?” She croaks out, barely holding onto that effervescent pleasantness. 

“I think I can enjoy this for a bit longer,” he says. “Have I ever told you how hot you are?”

“Everyday.”

Heat grows and tightens in his lower stomach, his toes are curled, and his heart beats so fast in his chest he might pass out. “Is that so?” He asks. “And how often do you call me hot?”

Akari tilts her head up to swallow down a moan, which is bad because he desperately wants to hear her scream her lungs out, but also good because he gets to see her lightly bruised throat bob and flex. “Not enough, I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

Their bodies are pulled together over and over again with each rocking movement and grabbing hand and bite mark. Her legs keep squeezing his sides, bringing him closer into her, and the sensation of her toes tickling his sweaty back and her fingers rummaging against his chest and neck sends shivers into all of his extremities.

“Fine,” she says, breathy. “Fuck, you’re so hot right now, you drive me insane.”

Cedric can’t take it anymore. The words trigger a spirit-deep, subconscious need to fall apart into mush, and he climaxes.

Holy shit.

His brain is broken. His poor, overused cock finally finds release, and he falls to her side and stares at the ceiling for ages. Wow. I did that. I got laid. Wow.

“Wow,” he says, dumb as rocks.

Akari hums, escapes to use the toilet, then returns to hold him before Cedric’s hormones make him cry.

“Wow,” she agrees, but her voice has that bemused tone again, like she’s on top of the world, as she plays with his chest hair. “I didn’t know that you had a praise kink, Cedric.”

“What?”

She clears her throat and flashes a devilish smile. “You’re a good boy.”

Oh no.

Part 5

Cedric’s on the moon. He got laid. He got laid. He’s living out any teenage boy’s best dream, with the world’s hottest girlfriend, really great friends, and intense popularity.

“Best week ever,” he says.

Fleur and Krum scoff at him, a nonverbal shut the fuck up.

They’re in a classroom on the seventh floor, waiting for reporters to stop by for interviews. Now that the third task is coming in and the tournament is nearly over, all three champions have been bombarded with interview after interview. All of them hate it, so Cedric thinks they’re only enduring it because their respective Headmasters have threatened them into compliance.

“Ugh, nasty men,” Fleur says, rolling her eyes. “Don’t ‘ou ever stop talking about girlfriends?”

Krum sniffs. “My Her-mee-o-ninny is angel. When I stop talking about angel, I am dead. I vill die one day because death is inevitable, but I hope my angel never die. She is like Mongol in China – beautiful.”

“Yeah,” Cedric says. “Akari’s also great.”

Maybe Viktor Krum isn’t so bad. The unconventional language choices aside, he’s actually pretty sweet. 

Fleur rolls her eyes again, picks at her nails, and huffs. Smoke rolls out her ears. Cedric might have felt bad for her if he was thinking clearly, but he’s not, so he happily ignores the Beauxbatons champion and continues humming to Brahms.

The schools are all in a tizzy as the third task gets closer, and as Head Boy, Cedric has had to break up more than a few fights (with and without sexual tension) and broom cupboard trysts. He can’t wait to finish the damn thing. Sure, being the Hogwarts champion has its perks, but the academic year falls to a close and homework, tests, studying, and graduating all weigh on his mind, heavy bricks on his shoulders.

On a very fine spring morning, he wakes up, eats breakfast, then finds his parents and friends and girlfriend and everyone outside waiting for the third task to start.

The maze has grown nicely since Bagman first introduced it to the contestants, and is now hovering around eight or so feet tall at the entrance, and maybe fifteen feet the further in the maze goes. He can hear the cries of magical beasts inside, which isn’t great, but he read up on all of Newt Scamander’s creature guides and spent several hours interning under Hagrid for a chance to experience the more “dangerous” creatures out there.

Cedric is ninety-nine percent sure Hagrid unknowingly spoon fed him information about all of the species inside the maze, seeing as how the half-giant was a part of the committee to create the maze in the first place.

How nice, to be spoiled with all the answers.

He finds, in the stands, those irritating little fourth-years cheering him on in the Hogwarts section, touting around foam hands and posters. Harry’s standing next to Huiying Chang – oh, how interesting – and red-faced, whilst Weasley’s standing next to Granger, looking very put out with life in general. Cedric sees the rest of the redhead family, and spots a very interesting development of Cassius standing in between the Weasley twins, with all three of them being jovial.

The sky’s a nice, deep blue, and the lazy clouds floating in the air remind Cedric of floating bollocks. 

“GET READY!” Dumbledore announces, as if he’s a DJ at a wizarding nightclub. “GET SET… GO!”

Cedric is the last to go, provided as he has the most points, so he suffers through the charging announcement three times in a row before he gets to escape the watchful eyes of the crowd and head into the hedges. They’re cold, dark, and frightening, and it takes exactly thirty seconds before he runs into trouble in the form of fully matured Blast-Ended Screwts. Then Dementors. Then an entire glossary of ugly ass semi-sentient creatures. He runs around for what feels like hours, feeling useless, and slows down to a jog.

He hears a high-pitched girly shriek from his left that sounds suspiciously like Fleur, and his instincts override common sense and he chases after the noise.

At the end of a hedge corridor, Cedric sees a dirt-covered Viktor Krum.

“Did you just scream?” Cedric asks.

Krum looks constipated. “I can no longer scream. My mother stabbed throat when I was baby. My mother, so kind, the beauty of Bulgaria.”

“Okay…? Nice chat.”

And Cedric leaves, because the only thing scarier than the magical creatures in the maze are the people inside as well. All’s well, because he gets far away enough from Krum that he moves to the part of the maze that isn’t hidden under cloud cover, and he can see the pretty periwinkle blue skies again and the burning flames from the distance.

Wait a minute.

Cedric sets his wand in his palm. “Point Me.”

The fire is from the direction of the spectator stands, so he runs off back to the entrance, then runs faster once he hears screaming. He feels silly about running, then takes his broom from his pocket, unshrinks it, casts a temporary invisibility charm over himself, and flies up to assess the situation.

Ah. Nevermind. It’s just Fleur being Fleur.

Hey, speaking of, being on a broom might be the key to avoiding all these creatures. The barrier on the maze doesn’t reject the flying, so Cedric skims lowly over the hedges, keeping his feet just out of reach of the hungry leaves, towards the centre of the maze. Wow, this is so much easier than running around crazily with the bone-breaking vines.

Look, there’s a Blast-Ended Skrewt, there’s a giant spider, and haha how funny, they can’t fly so they can’t try to kill Cedric. And over there, there’s a funky looking creature wearing a Gryffindor tie and–.

“Harry, what the fuck?” Cedric shouts.

Harry looks up. Cedric undoes the invisibility charm, flies down, and confronts the Boy-Who-Lived on why he’s in the maze.

“I dunno,” Harry says, looking every bit exasperated as Cedric is. “I got lost!”

“You got lost? I just saw you on the stands!”

“Moody came over and asked to chat, really urgent he said, in the forest, because the Aurors just discovered new information about Voldemort this morning and he needed to tell me,” Harry says. “So I followed him to the forest but then he kept walking really fast and then all of a sudden I accidentally ran into this bush, and when I crawled out, I was trapped in these stupid hedges!”

This dumbass.

“Was Professor Moody nice or mean to you?”

“What?”

Merlin, what a bumbling idiot. How hasn’t You-Know-Who killed this boy by now? Harry’s basically a walking catastrophe.

Cedric inhales and exhales calmly. “Answer the question.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Harry says thoughtfully, showcasing the exact reason why he was not placed in Ravenclaw. “He was pretty pleasant today.”

Splendid. 

“Lovely,” Cedric says. “That means you talked to a phoney teacher. Okay, Akari prepared for this exact situation, bless her. Whatever you do, Harry, do not touch the Triwizard Cup.”

Professor Moody keeps getting replaced by all these Dark Lord followers. That man seriously needs to invest in better personal security.

Harry blinks, like he was about to do just that despite all the red flags. “Then how else am I going to get out? I was planning on finding the cup and a contestant because the cup’s a portkey back to the judge’s table, but–. Oh, no. Voldemort wants me to touch it?!”

“Yes– I mean, no, don’t word it like that, but yes. It’s a conspiracy.”

It really is a conspiracy, because the two Hogwarts boys find the glowing blue cup in the next section of the maze with ease.

Akari warned Cedric to not touch the cup if Harry also somehow ended up in the maze (he doubted her back then, he really did), and because dying a painful death due to Harry Potter related shenanigans is not the way to go, Cedric casts a strong camouflage spell on the boy and they both get on his broom, and fly up. He uses a levitation spell to let the cup gently float alongside the broom, a careful three feet distance away, and they all gradually inch towards the starting line.

Someone must’ve put out the fires at the entrance, because all Cedric sees is smoke and ash at what used to be the primary hedge wall. Because of this, the entire crowd witnesses Cedric return first, on his broom, delicately floating the cup on his right.

He gets down, shrinks his broom, and floats the cup onto the judge’s table.

“I touched it,” Cedric lies. “But the portkey didn’t work.”

Bagman looks offended at the insinuation of a faulty portkey, especially in front of all these news reporters, ministry officials, foreign dignitaries, and judgy students. Half of them are cheering for his mighty return, half of them are muttering confusedly at his method of return. Either way, it appears that he’s won the Triwizard Tournament.

“Impossible!” Dumbledore says. “We all charmed the trophy cup ourselves! Well, let’s see…”

All three Headmasters reach up to grab the cup, and all three disappear in an instant. The next few minutes pass by in an incredulous haze, wherein Harry’s chameleon charm wears off and the boy goes to Professor McGonagall to tell her that Mad Eye Moody is a fake, again, and the teaching staff over-hears and turns mental. 

Then Headmaster Dumbledore and Headmistress Maxine (no more Karkaroff, Cedric notices) return in a shine of bright light and declare that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s Death Eater army has succinctly been tied up into a knot in a graveyard in Muggle England. They apologise, strained, for the continuous security mishaps, and the media fucking riots.

Cedric has a headache, and he thinks the entire tournament has been cancelled, so he finds his parents and Akari on the stands

“Well done, son!” Dad says. “Even if they cancel this damn thing, I’m still so proud of you!”

Mum dabs at her eyes, also proud.

They all wait patiently for Akari’s response, who appears entirely frazzled and perplexed. “I think I’ll stick around Britain for a year or two after graduation,” she says. “Things have gone really strange, but at least I’ll be with you.”

In the end, the ministry pressures Hogwarts to not cancel the event, so Cedric Diggory is declared the ultimate winner.

Akari is simultaneously pissed off at what she says is an “unforeseen future” and grateful that her boyfriend isn’t dead. She rants to him, more open than before, about the things she still needs to do to make sure Cedric’s death sentence (according to the cogs of fate) is lifted, of which includes breaking into the Lestrange family vaults in Gringotts, finding a diadem that belonged to a ghost, burning an abandoned muggle house down in order to destroy an heirloom ring inside, beheading a snake, and stealing a locket from a grumpy house elf.

“Well,” Cedric says. “You said it yourself – you’ll stay in Britain for another year or so. Let’s do it together.”

Akari makes a sour face. “We’ll have to include Potter for some of the adventures, though. There are some things I can’t work around without him there.”

Cedric doesn’t like the idea of hanging around ickle fourth-years (or fifth-years, next year), but he’ll do anything to keep Akari safe and content. “Gross. But okay. As long as I’m with you, Akari.”

“How romantic,” she says.

They’re in the kitchens, for their last breakfast of the year. The house elves piled plates upon plates of food at the tiny table in the back, of which include jasmine rice, fried tofu, and peeled edamame. Cedric made that happen through a series of petitions to change the school’s sales inventory, with several comments from students of a non-British background. Starting next year, every Tuesday will be international food day, with cuisines featured per any student’s sign-up.

“I suppose so,” Cedric says.

Akari smiles cutely. “Hey, guess what?”

“Yes?” He asks, leaning forward. He’s close enough to kiss her like this, but he doesn’t because the house elves might throw them out. “What is it?”

“I love you,” she says.

Cedric Diggory graduates as a very happy man.