Whispers follow Harry through the halls as he makes his way up to the entrance hall of the castle. They're from every house, even from the other Slytherins, but Harry ignores them, keeping his head high and his hands in his pockets as he walks out into the courtyard and, after that, down the grassy knoll and towards the lake.

At the edge of the lake, Harry can see the empty ship from Durmstrang, its black, tattered sales completely unstirred. He sees Cedric standing by the water's edge, having left footprints in the sandy dirt of the lake's soft beach. Cedric has a copy of the Daily Prophet in his hands, and he stares down at it.

It's beginning to get warmer, now, and the heat in the air isn't ruined by any kind of breeze: there's barely any wind at all, and the water makes the quietest whisper as it washes up onto the beach. Looking over the lake, Harry looks through the dark spaces in between the trees on the other side of the water, and he frowns slightly.

"Cedric," Harry says. "Are they-"

"Webs," Cedric agrees, nodding his head once. He has a frown pulling at his handsome features, and when he looks to Harry, his expression is one of concern. "Cho and I went for a walk the other day: I wanted to show her the unicorns; she never took Care of Magical Creatures. The Acromantula are right here, at the edge of the forest. I dropped her up with Madam Pomfrey before I came down here for training."

"Is she okay?" Harry asks immediately, and Cedric nods his head.

"She's fine. Scraped her leg badly as we came out of the woods, but she gave as good as she got - we killed maybe a half dozen between us. I know that-" Cedric hesitates a moment, and then says, in a half-murmur, "I know how Hagrid feels about them, but we had to. They would have killed us."

"I know," Harry says. "I don't think anyone will blame you." Harry reaches out tentatively, touching Cedric's arm a second, and then he drops his satchel on the ground near a sandy rock. He glances to the paper in Cedric's hand, and he reads the headline.

BOY-WHO-LIVED PUBLISHES FAKE PROPHECY

Harry Potter, Hogwarts Champion, Tries To Shrug Off You-Know-Who

"And about the paper..." Harry murmurs, but Cedric interrupts him.

"I heard the Patils talking about it with Cho," Cedric says quietly. "I heard what they said, Harry, I know it wasn't fake - no one can fake a prophecy like that. But if he- if- if Voldemort... If he thinks the second one is fake, he'll stick with what the first one said, won't he? He'll try to kill you, and if he kills you, people can defeat him. That's the plan, right?"

"So much for Hufflepuffs being stupid," Harry mutters. Cedric laughs, the sound tumbling out of his mouth, and he grabs Harry hard by the shoulder and pulls him into a rough hug; he ruffles Harry hard, grips him tightly, and then he lets him go.

"So much for Slytherins being cowards," Cedric murmurs back. He crouches down, picking up a flat stone from the beach, and he flicks his wrist as he throws it: it skips once, twice, three times across the water, going out almost twenty feet, and then a tentacle shoots fast from the lake's calm surface. The stone flies high into the air, hitting Hagrid's hut up the hill with a clatter on the wooden roof, and Harry tries not to laugh at Cedric's distraught expression. "Are you really okay with that?" Cedric asks as the squid comes up to the lake's surface, dancing just visibly in the water and basking in the sun. "If he kills you- that's just a chance someone else can kill him. It's no guarantee of anything."

Harry puts his hands in his pockets, looking away this time.

Cedric holds up the paper, scanning it and looking for some phrase or other. Harry knows that it isn't actually Rita Skeeter, as there's a Missing Persons report all over the back page of the Prophet, but it's obviously someone trying to mimic her style.

"Obviously worried about You-Know-Who's consideration of the first prophecy, Harry Potter has attempted to sell the world an updated, fake prediction. So much for painting himself as a hero: this little boy is willing to do anything, sacrifice anyone, so long as he can stay alive himself."

After reading the passage aloud, Cedric holds up the paper, and he doesn't even say an incantation, just flicking his wand at the base corner of it and setting it alight. The greying ashes of the pages float out onto the water, but the squid doesn't bother to brush those away like it had the stone.

"My dad's been talking about it," Cedric says, holding his wand in his hand and twirling it slightly. "About the war - he's been talking about me going somewhere else if it starts up again, you know. He wants me to go get a job in America, or Australia, maybe. Says he'll get someone to set me up in the Ministry. He was furious when I told him I wouldn't go." Cedric turns his head, looking over at the boathouse at the base of the castle, and then he turns back to the water in front of him, murmuring a spell and Conjuring panels that come together on the water in front of them.

Harry watches, interested, as Cedric conjures up a wooden platform that floats on the water, and two chairs on top of it. Harry grabs his bag before stepping onto it with Cedric, and he settles on the chair across from him, hovering for a moment as he tries to think of something. He knows that he can't Conjure things as easily as Cedric, but he takes two sheets of parchment from his bag, and he concentrates hard as he taps on each of them.

The cushions are thin, and they're the same pale beige as the parchment they've been transfigured out of, but it's better than sitting on the hard wood: Cedric grins at him as he takes the cushion and slides it onto the chair beneath him.

"Why won't you go?" Harry asks, and as the platform floats slowly out towards the middle of the lake, Cedric sighs, shaking his head. "You could be killed, Cedric. Everyone who can should get as far away from here as they can."

"That's why I have to stay," Cedric says. "I don't-" He breathes in, clenching his fist and looking down at the water. He reaches forwards, holding his palm barely a few inches above the surface of the water, and the squid pushes one tentacle from the water, brushing the tips of Cedric's fingers. "I'm like you, Harry. You're basically going out of your way to make sure Voldemort's still willing to kill you, right, because of what the second prophecy means? You're ready to stand and fight, because it's your duty - because you know what you can do."

"You want to protect people," Harry says quietly, and he leans back against the back of his chair. He doesn't reach out to touch the squid, but he watches it as it moves gracefully in the water, dancing under the surface. "Like a real fierce badger, I guess." Cedric laughs, sitting back a bit. "I've never met your dad. I know Lucius hates him." Cedric snorts.

"Yeah, Dad is- He's very passionate. He's passionate, and he's angry. And for him, a lot of the time, they're the same - it drives Mum mad, 'cause he always gets into fights at work." Cedric taps his foot on the wood underneath him, and with his wand he works absently, laying flowers around the edges of the platform, flowers and vines and the smallest carpet of grass Harry has ever seen: Cedric does it as naturally as breathing. "He couldn't fight in the war, you know. He gets an anxious shake in his hand, and he just couldn't do anything on a battlefield, not with people. When he got his job at the Ministry, he was fighting Dugbogs, giants, trolls, pixies, everything. He could fight a dragon and not worry about it, but he couldn't stand to duel a real person, even if they were a Death Eater, you know?"

Harry looks at Cedric as he speaks, examining his features and the look on his face; Cedric looks quietly pensive in a way Harry's never seen him before. He's never really thought of Cedric's parents all that much, or what they might want Cedric to do after school is done with.

"What about the Triwizard Tournament?" Harry asks quietly. "They wanted you to do this, right?"

"This is a competition," Cedric says. "No Death Eaters who might want me dead." Harry hesitates. He thinks about Ludo Bagman, and the goblins, and the bet. "If it comes to it, Harry, I want you to know that I'll fight by your side. I know that you're young, but you're doing as well as any of us in this competition. And I'd trust you with my life."

"I'd trust you with mine," Harry says honestly. At a flare of movement from the edge of the woods, Harry turns his head, and he stares, his mouth dropping open.

"Merlin's beard," Cedric whispers. It's only about ten in the morning, and bright light filters down from between a few white, fluffy clouds, shining on the surface of the lake and glittering in the dew on the cobwebs at the very edge of the forest. It reflects off the many eyes of the first Acromantula to walk out of the forest and into the open.

They move, initially, in a comical single file, one man-sized spider followed by another, and then another, until dozens of them are moving in a neat, orderly fashion, and much smaller spiders nestle around the legs and underneath the bodies of the biggest spiders as they move. Harry can hear their voices chittering and echoing over the surface of the water, calling for release, and Harry narrows his eyes. The spiders, hundreds of them, gather on the grassy hill, until instead of it being green, it's black and brown with their hairy bodies, and shining with their eyes.

Harry thinks of Hagrid's dead roosters, and he thinks of the deadly fear that spiders have of the mighty beast, the Basilisk.

---

Harry and Cedric are forced to stay out on the lake as one Acromantula, bigger than all the rest, steps forwards to talk with a contingent from the castle. Harry recognizes Dumbledore, Maxime and Karkaroff, members of the Hogwarts staff, members of the Board of Governors (Lucius is conspicuous with his brightly blond hair), and Cedric's father.

There are thousands of spiders by the time the full group is there and speaking with the Acromantula; they can't hear what they're actually saying, and they're so far away that Harry can't even glean something from their expressions, or the way they hold themselves. He can see when Amos Diggory paces one way and then the other, but that's all.

It takes perhaps an hour or two, long enough that every window of the castle is wide open with students and staff pressed up against the gap and looking outside, and he can see a few of the Gryffindors sitting on the roof of the entrance hall in a neat row. He sees that two of them have bright, red hair.

Harry knows that it's over when the gates of Hogwarts come open on the other side of the grounds, and the spiders begin to move as one great, dark wave, stepping over the dark ground of the path and towards the gate. No one goes too closely to them, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them, thousands, even. They move fast, and they just keep coming out of the forest, more and more and more of them.

Harry stares after them as they go, and when the last few spiders dribble from the forest's edge, they all follow after each other and out towards the gates. The giant squid, gently and with a surprising delicacy for its size, guides the platform they've been sitting on back towards the beach, and Cedric and Harry step off in unison. The group of people outside move down the grassy bank, and as soon as Lucius sets eyes on him Harry braces himself.

Lucius grabs him hard by the shoulders, looking into his eyes and his mouth and his ears, holding the sides of his face to examine him as if he'll be able to see some evidence of Harry being injured or ill. If this hadn't happened to Harry before, or if he hadn't seen Lucius perform similar treatment on Draco, Harry might have laughed at the ridiculousness of it. When Lucius lets Harry go, Snape steps forwards, and his examination of Harry is cursory: he looks Harry up and down, and then gives the slightest inclination of his head when Lucius looks at him for some answer or other.

Harry's never going to stop being weirded out by the two of them.

Amos is hugging Cedric tightly, speaking to him with quick, hurried words, and Cedric nods several times, patting his father's back and holding him tightly - Cedric is taller than Amos by almost a head.

"What the Hell were you boys doing out there?" McGonagall demands, and Harry shrugs his shoulders slightly. Up at the castle, Harry can see children gathering in the courtyard, looking down at them from up the hill.

"We were talking about the Tournament," Cedric says, shrugging his shoulders slightly. "We decided to go out on the lake - we thought it best to stay there once we saw the Acromantula coming out. Me and Cho already faced some of them this morning."

"What happened?" Harry asks, and suddenly the mix of teachers and Ministry people go awkwardly silent. He looks between them, examining each of their faces, and Lucius breathes in.

"The Acromantula have fled the forest. They've gone into the mountains: with so many of them, we could no more stop them than we might wish to stop the flow of the sea," Lucius says quietly, curling his lip with obvious distaste. "No doubt they will have to be dealt with by the Ministry at some later time."

As the two of them are hurried up towards the castle, Harry thinks about the Basilisk, and then he thinks about Gilderoy Lockhart and his people, hiding out in the mountains. He wonders, vaguely, if the Fidelius Charm has any effect on Acromantula, and he walks with Cedric into the castle proper.