The Red Rose That Has Green Thorns

“Ah, I see we’re all here,” said Gwenog as she and Uncle Percy walked in. Madame Maxime and Uncle Viktor soon followed, and Professor Collins brought up the rear.

“That we are,” said Professor Collins grinningly as he sat across from Scorpius. “Shall we begin, then, Gwen?”

I snorted, unable to stop myself. To my surprise, so did Scorpius, Gwen, Ethan, and Andy.

“What?” Professor Collins asked innocently, although I’m sure he knew what it was we thought was funny.

“Yes, we shall begin,” Gwen said, ignoring the fact that the headmaster was playing rhyming games as she took the seat across from Andy again. “Percy, would you like to start?”

“Yes, well,” said Uncle Percy, in a slightly pompous tone - although he has gotten better about that in recent years, “the first task of the Triwizard Tournament will take place in one hour. The area covered ranges from Hagrid’s cabin to the center of the Black Lake, and even up to the Astronomy Tower. The concept is quite simple, it’s the execution that’s complicated.”

He paused there, and for a few long seconds no one took up the thread of his conversation.

“Oh, yeah, Uncle Perce,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. “Leave us hanging.”

“Yes, well,” he said again, grinning.

“The concept,” Gwen picked up the flow of the conversation, rolling her eyes at me and Uncle Percy, “is to make it through this…obstacle course, of sorts, without ever losing physical contact with your partner. Holding hands, piggy-backs, whatever you deem easiest. And if it was a normal obstacle course, it would obviously not be too big of a deal. However, being as this is the Triwizard tournament, it is no ordinary obstacle course, and therefore there are abnormal things in your way.”

“Creatures, enchantments,” Uncle Percy picked the flow up again, “even sudden holes and things that would force you to release your hold on one another. Now, how are we going to monitor whether you’re in contact? Rather simpler than it sounds - before you go out into the obstacle course, a sensory charm will be placed upon you.”

“It doesn’t tell us exactly how you’re keeping in contact,” Gwen said, explanatorily, “but it does tell us that you are in contact, and if you break contact. There are time penalties each time you break contact - this will sound as though we’ve no faith in you, but we expect all of you to lose contact several times. Each time you lose contact, the time added on to your final time will be equal to the time elapsed while not touching, plus twenty seconds. Am I clear?”

“Let me get this straight,” Ethan spoke up from the opposite end of the table. “If we break contact for five seconds, twenty-five seconds are added, right?”

“Yes,” Uncle Percy nodded.

“So then,” I chipped in, “If Scorpius were to, say, fall in a hole, and I caught my foot on - on a tree root, or something, and couldn’t fall after him, and it took us…three minutes and thirty three seconds to get back in contact, we’d have three minutes and fifty-three seconds added on?”

“Gee, don’t feel bad for me,” Scorpius said, rolling my eyes. “It’s obviously me who’s the clumsy one.”

Percy snorted at that, but cleared his throat quickly and said, “Yes, that’s correct, Rose. But you’re probably going to be the one falling in the hole.”

There was a slight chuckle around the table, but I grinned unabashedly. “Oh, well,” I said, shrugging. Scorpius just shook his head.

“That’s about all we can tell you,” Gwen said, shaking her head with a grin on her features, “other than the fact that you won’t all be going at once. You’ll draw the order when you get out to the Champion’s tent, where you’ll wait your turn to take on the obstacle course. There will be refreshments available while you wait, and after you’ve taken on the course.”

We all nodded to show that we understood.

It was about five minutes before Professor Collins would magnify his voice to begin the first task, and Andy had just been the first to stick her hand into a bowler hat to decide the order. She pulled out a blue piece of parchment that, when opened, had a number three on it.
Ethan drew for Durmstrang next, and they received number one, on a regular colored piece of parchment.

“Not like you need to draw,” Gwen grinned at me and held the bowler hat over toward Scorpius and I. I motioned for Scorpius to do the honors, and so he reached in.

I thought it as kind of weird that the parchment was black, with a white number on it. I vaguely wondered if the lighter the parchment, the easier the task for you, or the other way around. Not that it would make any sense as for difficulty, since they’d have to change things in the maze as soon as the current participants passed, so I shook the thought out of my head.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is it!” Professor Collins’ voice boomed over the stadium, magically magnified several times louder than normal, but we could still barely hear it over the roar of the crowd. “The official beginning to the Triwizard Tournament!”

As Gwen and Uncle Percy, who had accompanied her to see the drawing, left in a rush after telling us when we were to come out and blah, blah, blah, I tuned out my headmaster and turned to Scorpius. He was a little pale, but he still had an air of confidence about him. I felt a little nervous, but then again I knew we could handle it because there were two of us and we were in our final year at school.

A few minutes later, the honking sound that the Honking Flurfy (a weird creature discovered by Luna Lovegood-Scamander and her husband, Lysander and Lorcan’s mum and dad) made sounded, and Carmela and Ethan left the tent.

I looked around, realizing that Andy and Carl were once more deep in conversation and had their wands out, practicing the movements of spells. Scorpius caught my eye and raised an eyebrow, jerking his head toward them, and I just shrugged and poured myself some pumpkin juice to have something to do with my hands. Scorpius walked up beside me and did the same.

“That was a close call!” Professor Collins’ voice said, louder than before. I did my best to tune him out again. I didn’t want to know what was coming - by my way of thinking, it might be better if I was surprised, because then I wouldn’t have time to worry about it beforehand. “Oh, they broke contact there - already back together, but twenty-three seconds will still be added on to their time. Tough luck for the Durmstrang champions, but I’m sure that’s not going to be the last of their trouble. They’ve still got nine-tenths to go!”

Okay, take two on trying to block it out.

“Scorpius,” I said, realizing we hadn’t figured something out yet.

“What?” he asked, nearly choking on his drink of pumpkin juice when I suddenly addressed him.

“What do you think the easiest way to keep in contact will be?”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “the easiest in keeping in contact would be the piggy back option, but the easiest for movement would be by hand, so we could have the maximum range.”

I nodded, thinking about it. “By hand, then?”

“By hand,” he agreed, nodding. Then something occurred to me, and I leaned closer to him (ignoring my warming cheeks) to whisper.

“They never said there was anything against using a binding charm,” I told him softly, “so maybe, if we find we’re slipping, one of us could cast a non-permanent binding charm on our hands, so we don’t.”

He chuckled. “You’re sounding so conspiring,” he retorted, “but that’s probably the best way to avoid losing time, even if we were knocked off balance or something and fell.”

I nodded, and we fell silent, letting ourselves listen to the incoherent whispers of Andy and Carl and the gasps and cheers of the crowd.

“Rose?” Scorpius asked, unable to remain silent for much longer. I was grateful, because the anticipation was killing me slowly.

“Yeah?”

“I - um…”

“Are you nervous?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.

“Absolutely,” he let out a shaky laugh. “I was about to ask you how you were so calm.”

“Calm?” I asked, in honest curiosity. “I thought I was shaking like crazy.”

He snorted, and shook his head, taking another slightly nervous drink of pumpkin juice. “You’re not,” he told me after a minute. “You’re standing there as calm as the black lake on a windless day.”

“Oh,” I said, shrugging. “What all do you think we’ll be up against? Time, obviously, and I wouldn’t doubt a chimera, or something. Maybe a sphinx - there was at least one in the Triwizard maze last time, Uncle Harry told me. And obviously there will be a whole bunch of enchantments…”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find bowtruckles.” Scorpius said seriously. I stared at him, thinking he’d lost it with his nerves, and he noticed and explained, “I mean, they’re nasty little buggers when you get too near their tree, and if you hadn’t noticed, they’ve grown several wand trees here lately, along with a few hedges and things to make it seem kind of mazelike.”

I shook my head, a laugh bubbling from my lips at the strangeness of his bowtruckle statement and the fact that he’d thought it through enough to tell me that.

We fell into a slightly more comfortable silence, then I said, “You’re always surprising me.”

“How?” he asked, sincerely dumbfounded.

“The first thing that came to your mind was bowtruckles, Scorp. Bowtruckles, of all the things that could be in the obstacle course.” I let myself laugh again. “Of all the things.”

He chuckled, running a hand through his already slightly messy hair. The effect of looking windswept (like Uncle Harry said he’d heard his dad used to do) made me flush and turn away. His hair, now unrulier than it had been, just accentuated his handsome face more than usual. To distract myself from turning back to stare at him for a few minutes, I pulled my own crazy red curls back into a ponytail, to keep them out of the way.

After my prolonged stretch of pointedly ignoring him - well, not pointedly, but nervously, he asked, “Are you all right, Rose?”

“Y-yeah,” I said, finally turning back to him. “The nerves are just catching up to me, now.”

It was an easy lie, considering all that was coming up as soon as Ethan and Carmela could finish the course.

Hooooonk.

I jumped, surprised, out of my dozing state. I leapt up from the chair I was in and shot Scorpius a glance. He pointed to his ear, telling me to listen.

“And they’ve made it through! The final time for Durmstrang’s champions is two hours, twelve minutes, and fourteen seconds. This is with the added time penalties which totaled twenty-three minutes and seven seconds. The scores will come afterwards, when all the champions are together. You two are dismissed for now - you might want to drop in for a quick medical check-up. The first aid tent is near the champion’s tent outside. And in just a few moments, your Hogwarts champions will take on the course!”
If it was possible, my heart stopped for about ten seconds, and when it started again it was only to leap into my throat. Scorpius looked at me and chuckled.

“What are you laughing at?!” I asked, gasping as I regained the breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding.

“You looked so strange,” he said, composing himself. “Almost as if you weren’t expecting to be called upon. It was such a change from nearly asleep to jolting up when the Flurfy honked.”

I punched him in the shoulder, about to open my mouth to say something, but the Flurfy honked again and my blood ran cold. The tent flap opened as Ethan came in, arm in a sling, and Carmela followed with a bandaged cheek.

“That’s you,” Ethan said, nodding back towards the beginning of the obstacle course. “Remember, enter the stadium in contact with one another.”

I laughed, causing them to look at me as though I was crazy. “Thanks,” I told them, pushing Scorpius out of the tent ahead of me.

The reason I had laughed was because Ethan and Carmela hadn’t been too badly injured from the looks of things, and that Ethan had bothered trying to help us, even though we were opponents.

As soon as we were out of the tent, I stepped ahead of my slowpoke partner, took his hand, and walked as confidently as I could toward the opening meant for champions. I was walking more confidently than I really felt, but I had to act strong. Practically my whole family was watching - everyone besides the parents, Teddy, Victoire, their baby, and James.

Okay, cue wave of nervousness in the form of nausea. As though reading my thoughts, Scorpius squeezed my hand tighter and stepped up beside me, whispering in my ear, “I feel like I need to puke.”

“Save it until after the task,” I retorted, laughing slightly.

Maybe I laughed a lot when I was nervous, or something. I certainly seemed to be doing quite a bit of laughing right now, at any rate.

“Stop acting like a dork,” Scorpius managed to chuckle, using his free left hand to bonk me playfully on the head. “Gotta stay focused, now.”

“I know,” I said, looking ahead and surprisingly not letting the fact that I was holding hands with Scorpius get to me. “I know I have to be focused, but is it so bad that I have to act like a dork before we get in there and have to be serious?”

“I guess not.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his lips curl into a slight smile.

“Here they are!”

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to my headmaster’s voice being several times louder than it usually is. “Your Hogwarts champions!”

I raised a hand, whispered, “Let’s see if we get some sort of reaction,” to Scorpius, and he raised his free hand to the other side of the crowd. I actually heard our names from a primarily redheaded section, and flushed.

“We got some sort of reaction,” he stated.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“Captain? Cool. Do I get a cape?”

I snorted into laughter, composing myself quickly and looking at Scorpius. He just grinned mischievously and repeated, “Do I get a cape, Rosie?”

I elbowed him, hissing a “Don’t call me Rosie,” half playfully, and Professor Collins was talking again, doing a countdown from ten - we would start when he told us to begin.

“Five…four…”

The rest of the school joined in.

“Three…two…one…”