CEDRIC
XLIV
"I’ve heard you're going with Cho to the ball,” Tam placed an arm around Cedric’s shoulders, hugging him happily and smiling as if she herself had gotten the date she had been waiting for a long time.
"As friends," he reminded her, a detail he wasn’t sure that Cho had made clear.
He didn't mind people finding out since they would be seen anyway.
What he did not like was the thought that it encouraged the misconception that they were a couple or soon to be one.
"Come on, Cedric, really?” she continued, laughing. "When will you admit it?"
Out of his plans, he blurted out the two words that would make Tam open her mouth in greater surprise than Malcolm's when he heard them.
What was it that someone saying “I’m gay” made everything weirdly quiet for a second and then people acted like it was something unexpected?
He had never really shown interest in anyone.
Tam's first response was, "Does Cho know?"
When he shook his head, she made it her mission to convince Cedric to inform her. It didn't matter that he mentioned how much he had recommended that she attend with someone who could be more than a friend, like a real date and not just friends like the two of them.
Tam listened with a grimace, not convinced that it counted. "You should still tell her. She may think that…”
The sentence hung in the air.
If she was worried that Cho had a different idea, it would have been easier if Cedric let her know that he was in a relationship with someone else. In the event that he communicated it to Tam, which he did not. Even if Tam wasn't going to insist on finding out who that person was, he knew for sure that anything he talked to her would be like telling Willow, too.
That's how they were.
Like one of those couples who enjoy gossiping together even if they weren’t officially one —yet.
Will would want to know, and she would ally with Malcolm and suddenly their very secret relationship wouldn't be secret anymore and the night of the ball wouldn't even have arrived.
So he would wait to tell the news.
"I've talked to her and I think she understood," was another of his attempts, a little awkward because Tam's concern was too conspicuous not to be taken seriously. And that could only mean one thing, the very thing Cedric had wanted to dismiss. “But I'll tell her, I promise.”
With that, she relaxed and took his arm with a sigh of relief. "So am I, by the way. Welcome to the club,” Tam smiled, making Cedric laugh.
How much he would like to know that the whole world would receive him with such warmth.
At least he had his group of friends and that was almost enough.
HARRY
L
“Where are you going?” Ron asked as he grabbed the invisibility cloak.
Harry closed the trunk at the end of his bed and noticed that Seamus was the only one sleeping at ten o'clock at night. Dean looked at him curiously for a moment before continuing to doodle on his sketchbook.
"I'll go try to figure out the clue, maybe search for some reading."
He didn't have to specify that it would be in the forbidden section, judging by the time.
Ron nodded, uninterested in a visit to the library even if it was off limits, and raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were taking a break from the whole Tournament.”
That was what he’d told Hermione, who had been insisting for the last few days that Harry better start investigating about the second task. "I deserve a break" and "there's still time" were his most used phrases, and Ron would support Harry by repeating them or asking Hermione who she was going to the ball with, which would end the conversation.
"Hermione scared me,” Harry muttered. “I don't want to be at the last minute again.”
It was partly true that he would prefer not to repeat that experience.
Even so, his intentions to discover the clue were far from close.
Ron seemed to understand the first part and wished him luck.
It sucked to make false excuses to sneak out to see Cedric.
As Harry walked through the dark and thankfully empty corridors, he wondered how Ron might react when he told him. He thought about how Fred had never talked about it with his younger brother and wondered if it was because he thought Ron would take it badly or maybe not... When the side of his arm collided with something solid.
He didn’t stumble, but he stopped immediately.
Looking around, there was no sign of anything or anyone.
What would that have been?
All he could think of was a ghost, but they couldn't be felt.
Puzzled and confused, he jogged back to the meeting point because he was already late. Cedric wasn't upset that he had been fifteen minutes late and got under his cloak to kiss him so tenderly that Harry left that moment behind.
LI
This time he accompanied Cedric on one last round of the castle.
They were talking quietly and staying silent at certain places, not in an awkward way or anything. Harry enjoyed spending time together and even had the chance to see Cedric in action as a prefect, when they heard a noise in the distance and it turned out to be a Slytherin student outside his dorm.
Harry, who was wearing the cloak, stood against the wall.
“I know I shouldn't be here…,” was quite a lame excuse.
“What were you doing?” Cedric asked, and he got no answer from the unknown boy, who looked like a fifth or sixth year. “If I give you a warning, will you go back to your common room and stay there?”
He nodded, muttered a quick thanks and headed off in the opposite direction.
"Do you really think he'll listen?"
Cedric was startled by his whisper so close.
"You never know," he replied, looking where Harry’s chest was and not his face. Maybe it was a bit strange being under the invisibility cloak. “I can't escort him to the Slytherin common room.”
At least he had walked the right way, Harry knew.
"Don't you ask their name?" he asked out of silly curiosity.
“Sometimes. I'm good at remembering faces.”
Another of the hundreds of reasons why Harry would never be a prefect.
The only one he fairly remembered was Cedric’s.
Or so he thought, because while staring at him it seemed to Harry that no idea could do justice.
CEDRIC
XLV
"Do you think we could get into the forbidden section in the library?" he proposed instead of heading directly to Gryffindor common room.
Several times he had wanted to go, but he didn’t dare to do it alone.
Harry mentioned once that he had gone.
"Sure," he answered without hesitation. “Are you researching for the second task? Have you cracked the clue to the egg?”
"It's about a different matter," Cedric admitted, walking up the stairs. “All I did was open the golden egg once and close it. I nearly left Malcolm deaf with the noise.”
"Everyone made me open it at the party that day," Harry said, laughing.
"What a way to stop a party."
When they reached the fourth floor, Harry invited Cedric to join him under the cloak.
Harry took out his wand to open the padlock that limited the access…
And just like that, they found themselves in the part of the library Cedric had never seen before. Dark wooden bookcases reached the ceiling and spread out into dozens of aisles with no visible end. Harry removed the cloak from their heads and placed it on the first table he found. The dim lighting made it impossible to read any of the titles or golden category signs on the shelves, so Cedric used a spell to turn his wand into a flashlight.
"You should be careful what books you open," Harry warned as Cedric grabbed one from a top shelf. The rough texture of the spine felt strange against the palm of his hands. “These aren’t the classic sort of textbook. Some do bite, and hard.”
Cedric found it funny for some reason.
And no, not just because he imagined Harry biting him.
He let go of that idea to focus on reading each of the covers.
“What are you looking for?” Harry said, walking alongside and looking at the titles on the other side. “If I may ask. You said it had nothing to do with the task. I thought about using a book for that, but I don’t understand how I would find something here that might help me with a golden egg.”
Despite his accurate statement, Harry pulled a book from the middle shelf.
“I'm looking for, uh, something about time travel,” he said, turning briefly towards him.
Harry looked up from the open page. “Time travel? That is oddly specific.”
Cedric tried one of the search spells the librarian taught. No result. Another more complex, one of those that Cho had shown him, and no luck. How could it be possible? So it might not be a very frequent topic, but...
Really? Nothing?
Harry sensed his frustration and gently took his arm. "Why that particular topic?"
There was something in his face that made Cedric think that perhaps…
"Do you know anything about that?"
“Have you talked to a teacher or something?” was Harry’s answer, with a frown. “Why would you want…? Or is it that…?”
Cedric focused his full attention on his boyfriend and put a hand on his shoulders. “What are you talking about? Talk to a teacher?”
"I probably wouldn't notice it anyway," he muttered to himself. “Sometimes I can be so oblivious.”
"Notice what?"
Harry was watching him suspiciously. “Whether you are traveling in time to go to class or study.”
Instead of expressing how strange that answer actually was, he opined, "There's never enough time to study. It wouldn't hurt.”
"So you're considering it?"
“I'm not considering anything. How could I…?” he blurted out, puzzled by the conversation until he realized it. "Do you know a way to do it?"
With his nod, a deep sense of uneasiness appeared.
He had been under the impression that the Harry he had come across was from another timeline or something similar. However it worked, Cedric didn't really think his boy here could ever get into trouble like that.
Perhaps there was so much, too much that he didn't know.
XLVI
“I don't know if I should talk about this.”
There was no way Cedric didn't want to hear all about it.
"Is it a secret?" he questioned, intrigued.
Harry shrugged. “I'm not sure, but it's not the kind of thing you tell freely.”
"Have you traveled in time?"
“Yeah. Last year.”
Okay, it was a surprise.
At the same time, Cedric understood that he didn't mention it...
"Did you do it to study?" was the part that didn't make sense.
"No, of course not," Harry began to laugh. “Not me. Hermione wanted to attend more extracurricular classes than she humanly could. She spent the whole year going to several classes at the same time and no one noticed. Neither Ron nor me. At the end of the year… We had to, uh, it's illegal information…”
Cedric nodded his consent.
"That was how we saved Buckbeak and helped Sirius escape."
He continued to shake his head because he was still processing it. “How did you do it?”
“A Time-Turner, it's called, or so she told me. We didn’t talk too much about it,” he murmured, suddenly as if surprised that it was so. “I know it was something McGonagall gave Hermione. That's why I asked you if you had talked to a teacher…”
“No one has ever offered me time travel, if that's what you want to know.”
It made Harry laugh, who commented heading for the exit, "I wouldn't say someone offered it. Rather, one moment I was here and the next it was the day before and we had to avoid running across ourselves. Are you done? I can tell you more if you want.”
"Wait, I'll try one more time.”
A different combination of search words and a book came up.
It was named The Philosophy of Time and Space.
With the safety of the cloak, they returned to the corridors and even when Cedric thought it would be best for each of them to return to their rooms, they entered an empty classroom and cast the usual silencing and blocking spell.
Cedric wanted to know everything almost as much as he wanted to kiss Harry.
XLVII
Harry did tell him everything he knew.
He noticed it because it reminded him of that day when he told him about the events that had happened that night of the full moon. Harry explained the rush he was in when he hadn't stopped to talk in the hallway after exams and even why he hadn't mentioned it to him back then, even though Cedric had no problem with it.
He understood well that there were things that could not be said...
Exactly like the answer to his question at one in the morning, "Why did you want a book about that?"
“Curiosity?” was all Cedric could think of. “Malcolm and I talked about it and I assured him that I could find something to read about it.”
He felt so bad for lying.
How Hufflepuff of him was it to think that it could have been true?
Malcolm would totally be interested.
"I can lend you the cloak so you can both go to the library one night," Harry suggested, so sweet of him to offer one of his most prized possessions. Cedric was saying how much Malcolm would appreciate it when Harry interrupted, "Before I forget! Would you happen to have an extra dress robe? I don't have one for the ball… Well, I did, but I lent it to Ron because his was… A fashion disaster.”
Maybe Cedric should be honest.
Assuming Harry time traveled. would he be okay with him telling his other self…?
He hadn't even wanted Cedric to know about it in the first place.
“I have one. It’s yours if you want it.”
Harry was so grateful that he flashed the loveliest smile before kissing Cedric.
Restlessness ached mixed with soft feelings and all the things that boy caused all over his body when Harry bit him delicately, as if testing it out. Cedric had never received a kiss like this before, and he loved it. So much so that he wanted to try it too and they both went to sleep with slightly swollen lips.
----------------
No one else found the end like fire 🔥?
Translating this story fron Spanish hits different.
I’ll admit that after getting them together I sort of worried about it not being interesting enough. Like slow burns keeps you waiting, but they are already here. An official couple, and it changes everything somehow.
I’m so happy I dared to write the fic I needed to read myself. All the relationship content I longed for. I really like their dynamic and I can’t wait for you to read the rest of this story I’m still working on.
I hope you all stay for this long run :)