Much Deadlier Tournament Rewrite Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Chapter 3:

A Disastrous Date

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Harry arrived at the carriage house near the front gate to find Sue waiting for him there.

He imagined most people on first dated dressed up for the occasion so he made the difficult decision to spend a minuscule amount of money from his trust buying new jeans, sneakers and a dress shirt, which was mostly covered by his winter robes. Casual, but not drowning in clothes. He didn’t think slacks and a dress shirt were appropriate.

Sue seemed to have gone the opposite direction. Her casual clothes looked even more stoic and professional than her school uniform. She looked more like she was ready for a job interview than a date, with the long office skirt and long-sleeved shirt. She still wore her usual black stockings and school shoes though.

“Good afternoon Harry Potter.” Sue greeted.

“Good afternoon Sue Li.” Harry greeted back, trying not to laugh at her stony way of expressing herself.

They had agreed to arrive late to get one of the last carriages. Try to make it look like happenstance to outsiders. There was exactly one carriage left, so it was a mission success.

He opened the side door and let her climb in first. He was getting better at reading her because he noticed the ever-so-slight nod in gratitude as she climbed in. He followed suit, sitting across from her. Then, the carriage lurched forward and carried them off into a quiet, winter ride.

They both opted to sit there in comfortable silence, enjoying the scenery of frozen evergreens. It wasn’t until Hogsmeade came into view that he felt the need to actually have a conversation with his date.

“So, um. What do you like to do for fun?” He asked.

She shrugged daintily.

“Read.” She said. “Practice spells.”

Huh. All things he enjoyed doing as well.  It was a good thing they had so much in common, but it begged the question; why the hell did they bother going out on a date instead of just spending more time in the library?

“Anything we can do… together?” Harry asked. “That we can’t do at school?”

She thought on it for a moment.

“People watching?” She offered.

Yet another favorite hobby of his! He didn’t even know you could do it with another person. This opened up a world of new possibilities. But they might look weird if they were doing so out in the open.

He looked around the cabin, casting a directed homenum revalio, then did the same to the carriage outside of them. He didn’t find anybody or anything, save a beetle who had hitched a ride in the warm carriage.

Deciding the coast was clear, he sat back down and looked to the thoroughly confused, though it was hard to tell, Sue Li.

“I have a secret to share with you.” He said. “Can you keep it?”

“Have I ever done anything to give you the impression that I am one for gossip?” Sue asked. “Or socialize at all?”
Fair point. And so, Harry withdrew the folded piece of cloth from the interior of his cloak near the small of his back, where he always kept it for emergencies.

Sue eyes bugged out at the sight of the feather-light fabric in his hands.

“I knew you stood to inherit some money, but I didn’t know you had enough to afford an invisibility cloak!” She whispered excitedly. “I’ve always wanted to study one.”

Harry blinked as he processed her words.

“Oh no, I didn’t buy this.” He told her. “I got it for Christmas back on first year.”

She oggled him, and then took the cloak. She unfurled it and examined it intently.

“You expect me to believe you’ve had this for three years and it’s still in this perfect condition?” She asked, slightly stretching different parts of the fabric as if looking for a stain. “There isn’t a single hole in it. You must treat this thing like a holy artifact, careful not to even cast spells near it.”

Harry blinked at her some more.

“No, it was my fathers before mine. And I’ve cast spells right from under it. All the time actually.” He told her. “Is that bad?”

She looked at him suspiciously, like he might be trying to trick her.

“Harry Potter, that is impossible!” She told him. “First of all, invisibility cloaks cease to function after only a few years, a decade tops if they are cared for extensively and repaired regularly. Second of all, they are so sensitive that casting simple charms from underneath it can stretch them, any spell that passes through them rips tearing them or piercing holes in them.”

Now Harry had to look at her suspiciously.

“I don’t know what to tell you. Unless somebody has regularly snuck it away from me to repair it and return it without me noticing, I’ve never seen it take damage. And it absolutely did belong to my father when he still attended Hogwarts.” Harry told her.

This only scandalized her more.

“And why are you so certain it actually belonged to your father?” Sue asked. “Who told you this thing was, what, twenty something years old?”

Harry rolled his eyes.

For somebody raised in the magical world, she sure had strange ideas about what was and was not possible. Between the sorcerer’s stone, basilisks, time travel and dragons Harry had a very hard time believing anything was impossible for magic. Impossible to do under certain restrictions? Yes. Impossible full-stop? No.

“Well, there was the man who my father left it with for over a decade and said so when he returned it to me, a nobody by the name of Albus Dumbledore.” Harry started. “Along with two men who went to Hogwarts with my father, both of whom confirmed it was the same cloak. They all talked endlessly about how he constantly used it to sneak down to the kitchens at night to snag some food, while I use it to get into the restricted section.”

She still seemed unconvinced, passing the cloak back to him.

“I find it much more likely that your father left A cloak with Albus Dumbledore and he felt honor bound to give you one, so bought a replacement.” She said. “But I admit it is theoretically possible to invent a cloak that lasts longer, or is sturdier. But both? I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell ya, other than that there is room enough for two under here.” Harry told her.

“So what? Your idea for our date is to hide underneath it and people watch?” She asked.

He shrugged again.

“There are worse date ideas out there, and with us both being so socially retarded it might be the best we can hope for to start.”

And there it was. That high laugh she hid from the world, like a grass whistle playing a song for him.

“Yeah! And we can grab some candied popcorn or something to snack on while we do it.” She added seemingly half-jokingly.

Just then, the cart stopped. They had arrived.

Harry opened his cloak and raised it half over himself, looking at her expectantly. She joined him beneath it and he covered them both. The world around them became that usual curtain of glass and stars like every other time he’d used it.

They both barely fit, and only then because they were so short and skinny, even for fourteen year-olds.

They exited the carriage to be immediately buffeted by the cold winter air of Hogsmeade. Said wind didn’t reach them at the Hogwarts entrance where the thick forests protected them. But Hogsmeade didn’t have those forests.

“We’re going to freeze to death before we find ap lace to sit and relax!” Sue said.

“Then cast a warming charm on us.” Harry told her.

“But Harry, the cloak…” She said before he interrupted.

“Will be unharmed. I promise. Besides, it’s my cloak. If I’m lying then I’m the one who pays for it, aren’t I?” He told her.

She accepted his logic and cast the warming charm on them. The cold fled from them and Harry watched Sue tentatively anchor the spell to the cloak, watching for it to take any damage. When it took none she looked at him in surprise. Or at least he thought it was surprise.

“Let’s go find a quiet spot to watch people.” Harry said.

And they did. They tucked themselves away in a crook between the window to Scrivenshaft, which was seeing far less traffic than Honeydukes and Zonokos adjacent to them. From there, they watched people interact and whispered fictional tales to one-another.

They made from their classmates grand stories of romance, late night fights, and small, quasi businesses to rival the Weasley twins and their little joke item black market.

They did this until the sun began to grow low in the sky and Hagrid came down the Hogsmeade street ringing a handbell, yelling for the Hogwarts students to get back. Then, the two of them parted, exiting the cloak somewhere nobody would see them then getting into separate carriages.

It was only after Harry sat himself beside a Slytherin couple in their Seventh year and a some third year Ravenclaw that he realized his mistake. He really ought to have kissed Sue before letting her out of his cloak.

Lesson for next time. For now he just smiled, fully, for the first time in what felt like forever. His mood was finally where it should be, and he was back to his normal cheerful self. It ought to last him a good long while.

-

Potter’s Impossible Invisibility Cloak

by Rita Skeeter

And like that, his good mood was gone. It lasted one whole night, ending with the arrival of the Daily Prophets and latest Witch Weekly issue in the morning. He had been fortunate enough to be sitting next to Lav and couldn’t miss her spitting her drink out and forcing said issue into his face.

His fury at the deliberately incorrect or misconstrued information within was outweighed only at the sheer confusion at how accurate other things were.

Yesterday afternoon saw Harry Potter, the boy who cheated his way into the Triwizard Championship seemingly to enact some twisted desire to slay endangered species, going on a date with a pretty Ravenclaw girl by the name of Sue Li. This might not seem like anything strange or untoward, until one learns that Sue Li is not Harry Potter’s girlfriend, that title belongs to a Hermione Granger in his own house.

This alone would be newsworthy, were it not for the borderline criminal behavior and strange secrets he discussed with his date.

You see, Harry Potter has purchased for himself an invisibility cloak and told Sue Li, between bouts of declaring the well-respected Albus Dumbledore a known liar and berating her as being “socially retarded”, that he regularly used it to sneak around Hogwarts at night. Admitting to breaking into the kitchen to steal food and the forbidden section of the school library to research dark magic.

If this weren’t bad enough he then spent a whole five minutes inventing a cockamamie story about how his brand new invisibility cloak was actually over twenty years old and still in perfect condition, without a single hole or tear in it. Any onlooker with even a passing knowledge of invisibility cloaks would recognize it as being brand new.

From there Potter got angry at his date for daring to question his ridiculous story, and played dumb when she explained what even Muggleborns know about invisibility cloaks. For those of you who are as uninformed as Harry Potter pretended to be here’s a rundown.

1 – Invisibility cloaks fade over time, losing all enchantments in about three years of use.

2 – They are highly sensitive to spells being cast on or through them, and will tear or develop holes from such.

And yet Potter insisted that not only had he been using it for three years, but regularly cast spells from underneath it. He further claimed that Albus Dumbledore himself gifted it to him on Christmas of 1992, continuing with his claims of its age. If even remotely true, this shows a thorough lack of judgment on the Headmaster’s part, giving an eleven year old boy and a voyeur to boot a tool with which to sneak around unseen, and this reported a proper investigation and rewarding of the girls dorms and locker rooms, for what did Potter decide their date should be?

He invited a, by now visibly uncomfortable, Sue Li to join him under his cloak to go spy on people in Hogsmeade all day.

Harry put down the article and sighed.

He looked up to the staff table to see Dumbledore and Minerva hunched over their own copy of the rag. The latter was whispering animatedly to her boss, and he nodded along politely as he tried to read it all over her words.

When he finished, he looked up to meet Harry’s eyes. He then made a motion with his eyes. He indicated Harry and then himself. Harry immediately recognized his meaning as “Would you like to handle this, or shall I?”

Harry smirked. It was nice of the old man to offer, but Rita had picked a fight with Harry Potter here, not Albus Dumbledore. It seemed like the public didn’t learn from his public dragon slaying that he wasn’t to be fucked with. It seemed they needed some more lessons on the matter.

And so, Harry stood up, withdrew the cloak from his robes, and in front of the entire great hall, disappeared. It was a rather public statement, but a poignant one.

Nobody would see or hear from him for the rest of that day.

-

Monday morning was charms class with the Ravenclaws. It provided a golden opportunity to make a scene, and so he did.

He entered the already-filled room, slowly removing his invisibility cloak for all to see.

He spotted Sue’s straight ropes of perfect black hair, and the noticed the wide berth her fellow Ravenclaws were giving her. Even more perfect!

He sat down noisily next to her and planted a firm kiss on her cheek, which she leaned into.

“Good morning socially retarded girlfriend of mine.” Harry greeted cheerfully.

“Good morning socially retarded boyfriend of mine.” She greeted boredly. “It’s nice to see you sitting with me instead of my sister wife over there.”

She tilted her head to indicate Hermione, who blushed crimson at the moniker. Ron next to her had to cover his mouth with one hand and squeeze his nose shut with the other to stop himself from laughing.

“Meh. Ron ought to keep her warm from me until I get bored of you.” Harry said.

“While I approve of you all taking this attack in good humor, I would prefer you not joke about polygamy while in my classroom.” Flitwick announced his presence to the class.

He appeared in style, having been on his podium and invisible the entire time. Unlike Harry, and much like Dumbledore, he didn’t need a cloak to be invisible. He canceled his spell and it melted off of him like honey, leaving him visible where the liquid

Harry had a lot to learn about making a proper entrance.

-

I think I overdid it with the Rita article. I felt my OWN blood pressure rising as I wrote it.