February. Black Lake. Under. Cold.
Not the cold of a Scottish winter morning, not the cold of stone corridors or frost-covered windowpanes. This was the cold of something that had never been warm. The cold of places that existed before the concept of warmth was invented and had no interest in catching up.
Arthur was sinking.
He knew this the way you knew things in the space between sleeping and waking — not as information processed and filed, but as simple, immediate fact. He was sinking. The water was dark. His robes were heavy. His hair was floating around his face in slow, pale threads.
White.
He knew that too, distantly. White meant fear. His body knew something his mind had decided not to engage with.
His eyes were open.
The water above him was dark green, the light from the surface already too far away to be useful, already receding — not because he was falling fast but because he wasn't doing anything to stop it, and the lake didn't need his cooperation to keep doing what lakes did. Dark green became darker.
Became the colour of old glass. Became the colour of nothing in particular.
He was not struggling.
This registered somewhere in the part of him that was still paying attention, the part that had survived Basilisks and Varnhounds and a man who wore other people's faces. That part noted: you are not struggling, Arthur.
That part noted: this is wrong.
He didn't do anything about it.
The water pressed against his chest with a steady, patient weight. His lungs had started to make their feelings known — a dull, building burn that he was aware of the way you were aware of a candle on the other side of a large room. Present. Not urgent.
He had heard her.
Not words.
He would think about this later, in a cold corridor, and he would try to locate the specific quality of it and fail every time. It wasn't words. It was cadence.
The particular rhythm of a voice that had learned to say his name before he existed, the specific warmth of someone who had written him letters for eleven years he would never open, who had left him messages in enchanted ink and borrowed light and the shape of a woman's handwriting on old parchment.
His mother.
Jean Rosier-Reeves, dead since he was eleven months old, was somewhere below him in the dark of the Black Lake, and she was calling him down.
He knew it wasn't real.
He knew — with the part of him that was still cataloguing facts and filing them in the correct order — that this was the lake, and the task, and the merpeople, and the ambient magic of something old being disturbed. He knew the voice wasn't his mother. He knew his mother was in the ground in a churchyard he had visited exactly once, in the rain, with Sirius, who hadn't said anything the entire time.
He knew.
The voice got warmer.
Arthur.
Not a word. The shape of one.
"Arthur." Auren, from somewhere that felt like the other side of a very thick wall, his voice stripped of everything except urgency. "Arthur, MOVE."
He heard him.
"This is not real." Ardyn, harder, colder, the clinical precision of him cracked slightly at the edges in a way Arthur had never heard before. "This is a constructed auditory hallucination You know this. Listen to us. LISTEN."
He heard them both.
He heard Auren's panic and Ardyn's precision and the specific frequency of their fear, which was different from his own — higher, more desperate, the sound of people who had something to lose and had just realized they were losing it. He heard them both telling him to stop, to think, to move.
And he reached past them.
Past the door, past the room where they lived, past the architecture of his mind that they had helped him build when he was breaking. He found the deeper silence underneath. The one that had been waiting for him since he was eleven months old, since the first time he had been left alone in a room with the knowledge that no one was coming back.
He didn't lock them out.
He just... stopped listening.
The way you stopped listening to a clock ticking in a room you'd lived in so long you no longer noticed it was there. The way you stopped hearing your own heartbeat until someone held a stethoscope to your chest and reminded you it was still happening.
The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of something else.
The voice was clearer now.
Come down.
Not words. The shape of words. The shape of a mother calling a child home compressed into two syllables and threaded through the water like light through a crack in stone.
He was going to meet her.
He thought it the way you thought things that you knew were wrong and did not care were wrong, the way you made a decision that the rational part of you had already filed an objection to and then overruled. The decision felt like relief. Like setting down something he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten he was carrying it.
The burn in his lungs was closer now. Less like a candle on the other side of a room and more like a candle held directly under his chin, close enough that he could smell the wax melting.
The voice was warm.
The dark was warm.
He smiled.
He felt it happen — the specific pull of muscles in his cheeks, the unfamiliar shape of an expression he hadn't worn in so long he'd forgotten what it felt like. It was real. It was his.
Then — pressure.
Not the water's pressure, which was patient and even and had no particular opinion about him. This was different. This was directional. Something above him, dark against the darker water, moving fast.
Arms.
Around his chest. Under his arms. Pulling upward with the determined, graceless urgency of someone who had made a decision and intended to follow through with it regardless of whether he was cooperating.
He felt them the way you felt a stranger touching you in a crowd — present, unwanted, pulling you away from where you were going.
He didn't fight them.
But he didn't help.
He let them take the weight of his body upward while the part of him that mattered stayed where it was, in the dark, where the voice was still calling. He was being pulled away from something. He knew this distantly, the way you knew you were leaving a warm room for a cold one, and he resented it with a passivity that felt like grief.
The water changed pressure around him — green becoming lighter, old glass becoming green again, the surface a distant brightness that hurt to look at. The arms pulled harder. The smile broke apart into something else, something that might have been its opposite, and he couldn't remember anymore which one had been true.
Green became something close to the surface.
---
February. Black Lake Shore. Moments later.
His lungs made their own decision — contracting violently, independently, without consulting the rest of him. What came in wasn't clean.
He lay there.
The sky above him was grey. Flat, featureless February grey, the kind that committed to nothing. A gull crossed it from left to right and disappeared. The distant sound of the crowd at the lakeshore carried across the water — cheering, commentary, the particular noise of several hundred people watching something happen that he was not part of.
He breathed.
In. Out. In again.
His hair was in his face. He didn't move it.
"You almost died, bro."
Arthur turned his head.
Lena Voss was sitting on the stone beside him, arms resting on her knees, looking at him with the expression of someone who had recently done something physically demanding and was taking a moment to acknowledge that before moving on. She was soaked through — black shirt, black trousers, both plastered to her with the thoroughness of someone who had not entered the water gradually. Her dark hair was flat against her face. Her shoes were making a small, steady puddle on the stone.
She was not panicking.
She was not performing concern.
She was just there, wet and matter-of-fact, watching him breathe with the patience of someone who had decided breathing was the correct next step and was prepared to wait until it was complete.
Arthur stared at her.
Tried to speak. Coughed instead — one more convulsion, shorter than the others.
He reached up and touched his hair.
White. Still white. He could feel it without a mirror — the particular lightness of it, the way it sat differently on his scalp when it shifted color. His body was still afraid even though the voice was gone and the water was behind him and he was breathing air.
He left it.
"How did you—" His voice came out wrong. Too low, too rough, the shape of words without the full substance of them.
"Saw you drop in," Lena said. "You had that look."
"What look."
"The one where you're walking somewhere but you're not actually going anywhere," she said. "Like the destination was beside the point." She pushed a strand of wet hair out of her face. "You went to the ledge, looked at the water, and stepped in without taking your shoes off, which seemed like a bad sign."
Arthur looked at his feet. He was still wearing his shoes.
"You weren't swimming," Lena continued. "You weren't doing anything. Just sinking. So I jumped in."
She said this the way she said most things — flatly, like reporting conditions. Like it was the obvious thing to have done and required no further elaboration.
Arthur looked at her for a moment.
"What spell?" he said.
"Chest compressions first," she said. "You weren't breathing. Then yes, mouth to mouth." She met his eyes without expression. "Why? You wanna make it weird?"
He did, actually. He didn't say so.
He pushed himself upright, which took longer than it should have and involved his arms disagreeing with the project for several seconds before cooperating. The world tilted. He waited for it to stop.
He reached for the Arcane Core without thinking — not consciously, just the way you reached for a railing when the ground moved, automatic, instinctive. Heat flared outward from him in a slow, even pulse, moving through his clothes, through the water soaked into the fabric, converting it.
Steam rose from his shoulders, his sleeves, the front of his shirt. His shoes dried from the inside out with a faint hiss.
The warmth reached Lena before he thought to stop it.
She stepped back, but not fast enough — her shirt had already started to steam, the water in her hair evaporating in thin white wisps. She looked down at herself, then at him.
"I have to learn that spell," she said.
"It's not a spell," Arthur said.
She looked at him. Not afraid. The same expression she'd had at the Yule Ball looking at frost patterns on glass — interested, assessing, deciding whether something was worth further investigation.
"What is it then," she said.
He stood. Too fast — the world tilted again, harder this time. He didn't fall. He also didn't pretend the near-fall hadn't happened, because Lena was watching and she had already seen him unconscious on a rock so the dignity window had closed some time ago.
"Something else," he said.
She accepted this with the equanimity of someone filing it under things to revisit later.
Arthur looked at the lake. The surface was disturbed near the center — champions still down there, the task still ongoing, the crowd still watching from the far shore. None of them were looking this way. They had no reason to.
"You said that at the Ball too," she said.
"About the frost on the window."
Arthur paused. "You noticed that."
"You touched the glass and the frost pattern changed," she said. "It spread from where your fingers were. I noticed." She tilted her head slightly. "I notice most things. It's annoying, according to most people."
He looked back at Lena.
"I believe it," Arthur said.
She had wrung out the hem of her shirt while he wasn't watching and was now doing the same to her hair with the practical efficiency of someone accustomed to solving problems without making a production of them.
"I owe you one, Voss," Arthur said.
She glanced up. "You owe me considerably more than one," she said, "but I'll start a tab."
"Generous," Arthur said.
"Exactly," she said.
He turned toward the castle.
"Voss," he said.
"Reeves," she said.
He almost said something. Decided against it. Turned toward the castle instead, his footsteps even, his posture recovered into something that would read as normal from a distance.
He didn't look back.
He knew she watched him go — not because he could see it but because he'd learned in the last two months that Lena Voss paid attention to things other people missed, and he was not, currently, an easy thing to miss.
He walked until the castle wall was between him and the lake.
Then he stopped.
The corridor was empty. Stone on three sides. A torch bracket with no torch. The distant sound of the crowd still carrying faintly through the walls, muffled into something almost musical.
He looked at the wall in front of him.
He reached for Auren and Ardyn — not the door, not the lock, just the awareness of them, the background hum of their presence that had been there since Ilvermorny, since the Arcane Core had fractured open and the pieces of him had started insisting on being heard.
Auren, from very far away, his voice stripped of its usual warmth: "You stopped listening."
Not angry. Something worse than angry. The tone of someone who had been frightened and was now on the other side of it and didn't know what to do with the residue.
Ardyn, closer, harder: "You would have died. You would have died smiling and you knew it and you did it anyway." A pause. The clinical precision of him reasserting itself over something that was not clinical at all. "You absolute—"
Arthur shut them out again.
Not with a door. Not with force. Just with exhaustion.
He leaned his head back against the stone and breathed.
In. Out.
The world had kept going while Arthur stood at the bottom of a lake waiting to meet someone who wasn't there.
He stayed in the corridor until the cheering faded. Until the stone under his back was familiar again and the white had fully left his hair — slowly, the way paint dried, until it was just normal.
Then he straightened up.
And walked toward the dungeon stairs, and the common room, and the fire.
As he was going he thought silently to himself: "what in the world actually happened to him?"
He didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure he wanted one.
---
The Weeks Before.
January had arrived without ceremony and proceeded to make everyone miserable.
The post-Yule Ball atmosphere at Hogwarts had the particular quality of a party that had gone on slightly too long — the decorations were down, the goodwill had evaporated, and everyone was left with the aftertaste of whatever had happened and the dawning realization that normal life had not, in fact, paused for the occasion.
Hermione had returned from the Ball quieter than she'd left it, which was the kind of quiet that meant something had happened rather than nothing. She hadn't explained. She had, however, begun spending considerable time in the library on research that had nothing to do with her coursework, which for Hermione meant something had genuinely captured her attention. Arthur suspects it had something to do with Ron's jealousy.
Harry had eventually worked out the egg. Arthur knew this because Harry had appeared at breakfast one morning in mid-January looking like a man who had been awake for thirty hours and had recently had a revelation that he wasn't entirely pleased about, and when asked by Ron what was wrong had mouthed, flatly: it's merpeople, and then eaten an entire plate of eggs without further comment.
Arthur had noted this from across the Great Hall and filed it appropriately.
Rita Skeeter had published two more pieces in January. One about Harry's supposed emotional fragility in the wake of the first task, full of quotes that Harry had definitely never said in any form that would produce those particular words. One about Hagrid, which Arthur had read in its entirety with the focused attention of someone checking the quality of a contractor's work and come away with mixed feelings — effective, certainly, and the information was accurate enough, but the framing was what Skeeter did, which was take a true thing and dress it in language designed to make the reader feel a specific way about it.
He'd sent her a note. Brief. She'd sent one back, briefer, which he'd interpreted as acknowledgment.
The second task had been announced for the 24th of February.
Harry had gone quiet in the specific way of someone who knew what was coming and was building toward it rather than away from it, which Arthur recognized as the better of the available options and did not interfere with.
Draco had spent January being publicly vile about Harry and privately tense about something he wasn't discussing, which Arthur noted and filed under things Draco would bring up when he was ready.
Lena Voss had appeared in his Potions class on the second Tuesday of January, taken the seat two rows behind him, and said nothing. Which was fine. He'd said nothing back. They had, between them, managed an entire class period of productive silence and one very brief exchange about the incorrect temperature at which the potion should be stirred, which Snape had been wrong about and which neither of them had pointed out to Snape because they both had more sense than that.
She'd been in the seat again the following Tuesday.
And the one after that.
Arthur had stopped being surprised by the third week. He'd also stopped pretending he hadn't noticed which direction she walked after class, which was information he was not doing anything with and had no plans to do anything with and was simply aware of, the way he was aware of most things.
The 24th came quietly, the way important days often did — no fanfare, just the same grey Scottish morning and the same stone corridors and the same floating candles in the Great Hall, and then the entire school making its way down to the lakeshore with the energy of people who had been anticipating something and were now slightly afraid of what they'd find when it arrived.
---
February 24th. The Lakeshore. Before.
The dock extended about twenty feet over the black water, old wood that creaked under the weight of students who had arranged themselves along it and the surrounding banks with the instinct of spectators at a sporting event — the ones who'd arrived early claimed the front, everyone else arranged themselves in a descending hierarchy of enthusiasm and visibility.
The Slytherins had, as a bloc, declined enthusiasm in favor of commentary.
Draco stood with his arms folded at the near end of the dock, positioned with the unconscious precision of someone who had calculated exactly how visible he was from the judges' table and adjusted accordingly.
Beside him, Blaise had his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man attending something he hadn't chosen but intended to find something to say about.
Pansy was to Draco's left, Theo to his right. Several fourth and fifth years clustered behind them in the loose, instinctive formation that Slytherin social gravity produced when left to its own devices.
Arthur stood slightly apart from the group, at the far end of the dock where the wood ended and the water began. He was watching the lake surface. The water was dark and still, the way it always was when it was waiting for something.
"—and I'm telling you it's Krum," Blaise was saying, in the tone of someone who had been making this argument for some time and had no intention of stopping. "It's always going to be Krum. He caught the Snitch while losing the match. The man operates on a different level."
"The man operates on the level of someone who went to a school that teaches you to do magic in a fur coat," Draco said. "That's not sophistication, Blaise, that's desperation."
"Results-based analysis would suggest—"
"Results-based analysis would suggest Krum flies fast and everything else about his life is deeply uncomfortable," Draco said. "I maintain Cedric."
"You maintain Cedric because Cedric is Hogwarts and you'd back a flobberworm if it wore our colors—"
"I'd back a flobberworm with good technique," Draco said. "Which Cedric has. Unlike Potter, who has—"l
"Luck," Theo said, without looking up from the notebook he was writing in, because Theo had apparently decided to document the task and was doing so with the focus of a researcher rather than a spectator.
"Luck," Draco agreed. "And a concerning amount of outside assistance from—" He stopped.
Several people looked at him.
Draco was looking at Arthur.
"—from somewhere," Draco finished, in a slightly different tone.
Blaise followed his gaze. "Arthur, who do you have."
Arthur didn't look away from the water.
"Krum first, Harry last. Cedric second."
"Krum first I'll give you," Blaise said, "but why Harry last? Last means he still surfaces. Last means he completes the task."
"Last means he saves everyone else's hostage before his own," Arthur said.
"Which is exactly what he'll do."
A brief silence.
"That's oddly specific," Pansy said.
"It's Harry Potter," Arthur said. "It's not specific. It's pattern recognition."
Theo wrote something in his notebook without comment.
The judges took their positions at the long table on the bank — Dumbledore, Karkaroff, Madame Maxime, Bagman, and... Percy?
Arthur looked at Percy for a moment. Where's Crouch?
The cannon fired.
The four champions hit the lake simultaneously — Cedric with a well-executed bubble-head charm, Fleur prepared and practiced, Krum with the particular focused aggression of someone who had decided the fastest route was the only relevant route. Harry went in last, Gillyweed already working, his transformation visible even from the shore before he submerged.
The crowd surged forward. The noise started immediately.
"—Krum's already gone, he's fast—"
"—Cedric's heading east—"
"—where's Delacour—"
Draco was saying something about technique. Blaise was disagreeing. Theo was writing.
Arthur turned and looked at the lake.
The voice was soft.
He almost missed it entirely — it came from beneath the surface noise of the crowd, beneath the creak of the dock, beneath Blaise and Draco's ongoing argument. Just a cadence. Just the shape of something familiar pressed up through the cold water.
He went still.
Arthur.
Not loud. Not urgent. Just — present. Like it had been waiting.
"Arthur." Auren's voice, from somewhere inside, quiet in a way that was not calm. "Arthur, don't."
"The merpeople use a specific auditory lure calibrated to the most significant emotional attachment of the nearest susceptible individual," Ardyn said, and the precision of it was still there but underneath it something else, something that didn't have a clinical name. "You are not a champion. You should not be susceptible. The fact that you are suggests the ambient magic is—"
The voice was warmer than anything else in February.
Arthur looked at the water.
It was dark. Still. Patient.
"Parkinson." Draco's voice, from somewhere behind him. "You're quiet. Even for you. Did Blaise say something offensive? Because I'll have you know I've been managing him for four years and there's no cure—"
Arthur took one step toward the edge of the dock.
"—which is, now that I look at it, a lot like this conversation, which is going nowhere—"
Another step.
Auren: "ARTHUR."
Ardyn: "Don't you dare—"
He reached the end of the dock.
Looked down.
The water looked back.
He thought, very briefly and with complete clarity: I know this isn't real. But...
He stepped off anyway.
The cold was immediate and total and he was already sinking before he had time to reconsider, the noise of the crowd swallowed instantly by the dark water closing over his head, and the voice was everywhere now, all around him, warm and patient and his—
Come down. I'm here. I've been here.
He closed his eyes and sank.
On the dock above him, it took exactly forty-seven seconds before anyone noticed he was gone.
"—which is why I think Karkaroff has been coaching Krum specifically for underwater—" Blaise stopped. Looked left. Looked right. "Where's Arthur."
Draco turned.
The end of the dock was empty.
Theo looked up from his notebook.
The four of them looked at the water. It was dark and still and gave nothing back.
"He was just—" Pansy started.
"He's not here," Draco said.
The crowd around them cheered for something happening in the center of the lake. Nobody was looking at the dock.
Nobody had seen.
Draco stared at the water for three seconds.
"Did he fall in?," Blaise asked, carefully.
"He didn't fall," Draco said. His voice had gone very flat. "Probably just went away."
Nobody had an answer to that.
They stood there, four Slytherins at the end of a dock, watching dark water that wasn't moving, while the crowd cheered around them and the task continued and somewhere underneath them Arthur Reeves was sinking toward something that wasn't there.