November 13th – Wand Weighing
The classroom chosen for the ceremony was too small for the amount of spectacle being shoved into it.
Cameras and tripods crowded one wall; officials and teachers lined the sides. A velvet-draped table displayed gleaming silver instruments arranged with ritual precision, like surgical tools for magic. The air smelled of furniture polish and flash powder, sharp enough to make Theo's nose itch.
"The champions, over here, please!" Ludo Bagman called, practically bouncing on his toes. His robes were slightly too bright, his smile slightly too wide. "Time for the Wand Weighing Ceremony! History! The perfect introduction for our brave competitors!"
Theo stood between Fleur and Harry, feeling like a sore thumb. Krum slouched to Fleur's right—walking Quidditch legend, shoulders like a boulder, expression like he was marching into war. Fleur stood composed and poised, silver hair catching the light, Veela heritage turning her stillness into something magnetic. Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived, visibly uncomfortable but oozing that accidental hero aura he does not realise he has.
Theodore Hale: Slytherin sixth-year who'd specialized in never being the center of anything.
Until now.
Garrick Ollivander moved down the line with birdlike precision, as he talked about his memory of each wand and their cores. His pale eyes gleamed as he examined each wand in turn as he tested them with unique spells. Fleur's produced a bouquet of roses that perfumed the air; Krum's conjured a flock of dark birds that wheeled under the ceiling rafters; Harry's phoenix-feather wand threw up a fountain of wine that made Bagman look personally blessed by the gods of entertainment.
Then Ollivander took Theo's wand.
"Ah," he murmured, eyes brightening. "Ebony. Eleven inches. Dragon heartstring. Rigid."
He turned it slowly, fingers reverent. "A most interesting combination. Ebony responds well to strong will and clarity of purpose. Dragon heartstring—very powerful, very responsive, sometimes temperamental. It does not enjoy being wasted on half-measures." He lifted his gaze to Theo, and something in that look felt uncomfortably penetrating. "You have not been giving this wand enough to do, Mr. Hale."
Theo kept his voice mild. "We've been getting to know each other, sir."
Ollivander's mouth twitched—not quite a smile. He flicked the wand once, a sharp precise motion.
Silver serpents streamed from the tip, liquid-bright, coiling upward into a sinuous shape that resolved, for a breathless moment, into a rearing basilisk with emerald eyes before collapsing into a fall of green sparks that rained harmlessly onto the floor.
Someone in the back—a Slytherin student, maybe—let out a low whistle.
"Excellent control," Ollivander said, handing the wand back. "It will serve you well, Mr. Hale. If you let it."
Theo slid the wand back into his pocket, ignoring the weight of eyes from the gathered officials and staff.
"Perfect! Wonderful!" Bagman clapped his hands together. "Champions, together please—yes, that's it, shoulder to shoulder—Rita, you're on!"
Rita Skeeter swept forward like a predator who'd just spotted wounded prey. Her acid-green quill floated at shoulder height, already scratching eagerly over parchment that hung in mid-air.
"Rita Skeeter, Daily Prophet," she announced, though no one had asked. Her eyes skimmed Fleur with brief interest, brushed past Krum's scowl, lingered on Harry with the hunger of someone who'd been writing about him for weeks, then flicked to Theo with sudden, sharpened focus.
"Theodore Hale," she purred. "Slytherin House. Sixth year. No notable academic awards. No Quidditch career. But a father with a very interesting file at the Ministry."
Theo felt his jaw tighten. He forced it to relax. "I don't see how that's relevant to the tournament, Ms. Skeeter."
"Oh, the public loves a troubled backstory," Rita said, smile wide and sharp as broken glass. "Son of an alleged contract killer—never convicted, of course, but the whispers persist—now thrust into the spotlight of the Triwizard Tournament. Tell me, are you here to cleanse the Hale name? Redemption through glory?"
"My father's choices are his," Theo said evenly. "My magic is mine."
The quill scratched furiously: Stoic, tight-lipped Hale distances himself from dark family legacy—what is the young Slytherin hiding?
Rita leaned in slightly. "But surely the shadow of such a reputation—"
"Is a shadow," Theo interrupted. "Not a leash."
"Plenty to explore there," Rita said, clearly delighted. "We'll talk again, Mr. Hale."
"I sincerely hope not," Theo murmured.
"Excellent, excellent," Bagman boomed, stepping smoothly between them. "Thank you, Rita", sensing the tension he stepped in. Rita then eagerly took Harry into the broom cupboard for as Harry became the next victim of her quill.
November 13th – The Dragon Problem
The Restricted Section had become their castle. The shelves were walls; their corner table was a fortress of ink, parchment, and borrowed books Madam Pince pretended not to notice leaving the regular collection.
Theo's notes on dragons sprawled across one long roll of parchment: weaknesses, strengths, behavior patterns, flame range, territorial responses. Hermione's parchment was neater, her headings aligned, cross-references tidy and color-coded.
"Eyes," Theo said, tapping a line in Dragon Species of Great Britain and Ireland. "Underbelly. Standard 'if you get this close, you're already dead' options."
"The Conjunctivitis Curse," Hermione said, flipping a page in another tome, "might work if you can land it. But distance, stress, moving target—"
"Low odds," Theo finished. "I'd rather not build my survival on hoping my hand doesn't shake while a dragon tries to roast me."
"Fair," Hermione said. She made a note. "What about fire suppression charms?"
"Might buy a second," Theo said. "Wouldn't last. Dragon fire burns hotter than most charms are rated for."
They read quietly for a while, only the scratch of quills and the occasional rustle of turning pages breaking the silence. Candlelight flickered across the spines of ancient books. The library felt vast and empty at this hour, like they were the only two people awake in the castle.
A small broken piece of wood had fell onto the table from a shelf earlier. Without really thinking, Theo picked it up and turned it over in his fingers while scanning a paragraph about flame range and breath recovery time.
His wand moved almost on its own.
No incantation. Just intent, pressure, the feeling of change flowing through his arm and into the stone.
The wood flowed like heated wax and reformed—this time as a small stone hawk, wings half-extended as if caught mid-flight. Every feather was distinct, individually carved. Its beak was slightly open. It perched on the edge of his book as if it had always been meant to sit there.
Hermione's quill stopped mid-word.
"Did you just…?" she began, then leaned closer. "Theo."
He glanced up. "Hm?"
She set down her quill and picked up the hawk carefully, turning it in the candlelight. "You transfigured this? Just now? Without saying anything?"
"I was bored with reading about dragon nostrils," he said. "Hands needed something to do."
Hermione's eyes narrowed—not in suspicion, but in the kind of focused analysis she usually reserved for particularly difficult Arithmancy proofs. "How long have you been able to do this?"
"Third year, maybe?" Theo said. "I don't try it in class. McGonagall would notice."
"She should notice," Hermione said, more sharply than he'd expected. She set the hawk down and picked up a second stone from the table, holding it out to him. "Do it again."
He raised an eyebrow but took the stone. Another flick of his wand—this time a turtle, legs tucked in, shell textured with tiny hexagonal patterns.
Hermione stared at it. Then at him. "This is serious transfiguration, Theo. Silent casting, fine detail work, and you weren't even fully focused on it."
"It's just a turtle," he pointed out.
"It's not just a turtle," she said, voice rising slightly before she remembered where they were and dropped it back to a fierce whisper. "It's proof you have better control than you've ever shown in class. Why haven't you been doing this all along?"
Theo considered how to explain six years of Slytherin social calculus. "Drawing attention in Slytherin is a good way to wake up hexed," he said finally. "Or worse. So I don't."
Hermione's jaw tightened. She looked at the hawk, then the turtle, then back at him. "You've been hiding in plain sight," she said slowly. "Deliberately."
"Worked so far," Theo said lightly. "Until the Goblet ruined the plan."
She was quiet for a moment, fingers drumming on the table. Then her expression shifted—from frustrated to calculating, the same look she got when she was three steps ahead of a problem and working backward to explain it.
"You know what you could do in the arena with this level of control?" she asked.
"A tiny statue isn't going to impress a dragon," Theo said.
"Not a statue," she said, leaning forward. "Barriers. Moving cover. Decoys. Terrain manipulation. You don't have to match a dragon in raw power. You can make the arena itself work for you."
He stilled, quill forgotten in his hand.
"If you can transfigure a pebble into something this detailed," Hermione continued, tapping the hawk, "you can raise stone barriers in less than a second. Or throw obstacles into its path. Or create moving shapes that pull its attention somewhere that isn't where you are."
"Maybe I could impress the dragon into giving up," Theo joked, but there was something sharpening inside him now. Possibility. Structure. A strategy that didn't rely on raw magical power he didn't have.
Hermione's eyes were bright now, the way they got when she'd solved something. "Transfiguration is the one subject where you seem to be very talented," she said. "Let's work on that"
"All right," he said. "How do we weaponize my bad habit?"
Hermione smiled—sharp and focused. "We go to McGonagall," she said. "And we show her what you can do."
November 14th – McGonagall's Office
"Professor," she said, standing in McGonagall's office with her shoulders squared and her voice politely firm, "Theo can do silent, high-precision transfiguration he's never demonstrated in class. He's the school's, thus your champion. You need to see it."
Theo, standing slightly behind her shrugged but obliged.
McGonagall folded her hands on her desk. Her expression was unreadable. "Mr. Hale?"
Theo stepped forward and taped a cracked teacup from the edge of her desk—one she'd clearly been meaning to repair or replace for weeks.
No incantation. Just a tap with his wand and a clear image in his mind.
The porcelain shimmered, stretched, darkened. In a heartbeat it became a stone wolf, low-slung and compact, muscles carved with rough realism, teeth bared in a frozen snarl. Another tap, and the wolf collapsed into a spread of smooth paving stones that clattered softly onto the floor. A third motion, and the stones surged upward into a waist-high curved barrier, dense and clean-edged, angled like it was designed to deflect rather than absorb impact.
He let it dissolve back into the original teacup and set it carefully on the desk.
McGonagall's face didn't move much, but something eased around her eyes.
"I see," she said quietly. "And you have not shown this in class because…?"
"In Slytherin," Theo said, choosing his words carefully, "being harmless is safer than being gifted."
Hermione watched McGonagall, not Theo, at that moment. The professor's mouth thinned in a way that said she understood more than she liked.
"This is not Slytherin House," McGonagall said. "This is the Triwizard Tournament. Hiding your abilities here is not self-preservation, Mr. Hale. It is foolishness."
Theo inclined his head. "That is why I am here," he said simply.
"Good," McGonagall replied. She stood, crossing to a shelf and pulling down a thick, leather-bound tome. "Combat transfiguration is not part of your regular syllabus for a reason. It is powerful, precise, and it can go catastrophically wrong if you panic or lose focus. If we are to use it, we will do so properly."
Her gaze flicked to Hermione. "Miss Granger will assist you with theoretical preparation and strategic planning. I will oversee the practical work."
Hermione straightened like someone had just awarded her top marks on every essay she'd ever written.
"Three evenings a week," McGonagall continued. "Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Seven o'clock. You will work in the third-floor abandoned classroom—it has sufficient space and structural reinforcement."
"Understood, Professor," Theo said.
November 14th–23rd – Training Montage
The abandoned classroom became the center of their world.
By day: regular classes, essays written as quickly as possible, dueling practice with Harry and the other champions under Moody's supervision, who volunteered to help. Theo absorbed footwork and instinct, learned how to move under pressure. But his real edge was elsewhere.
By evening and night: transfiguration.
McGonagall arrived promptly at seven every session, wand in hand, expression stern. She watched their early attempts like a hawk tracking prey, correcting Theo's stance with a tap of her wand, adjusting Hermione's note-taking with a curt nod when she got something right.
"Again," McGonagall would say, every time Theo executed something he thought was adequate. "Sharper. Faster. Think with the spell before you cast it. Transfiguration is not construction. It is precise persuasion."
They focused on three pillars.
1. Instant Defense
"Barriers," McGonagall said on the first night, conjuring a miniature model dragon that spat tiny puffs of smoke. "But not static walls. They must be angled to deflect, not absorb. You cannot outlast dragon fire. You can only redirect it."
Theo practiced raising stone arcs from the flagged floor—half-domes, slanted slabs, low ridges just tall enough to crouch behind. Silent casting only. Every time he spoke an incantation out loud, McGonagall rapped his knuckles lightly with her wand.
"Words are crutches for you," she said. "You do not need them. Picture the change. Command it."
Hermione, sitting cross-legged near the wall with her notes spread around her, charted his progress. "When you think of the barrier as an extension of your own body," she said one night, "it comes up faster. When you think of it as a separate object, you hesitate."
Theo tested that. She was right. Integrating the barrier into his own imagined movement—picturing it rising as he dropped, flowing with his motion rather than against it—made the transfiguration feel less like lifting a weight and more like shifting his center of gravity.
"Better," McGonagall said when he executed it smoothly three times in a row. "Now do it while moving."
He did. Sprinting across the room, dropping, barrier rising in the same breath. Again. Again. Until his legs burned and his wand arm ached.
Hermione appeared at his elbow with a conjured cup of water. "Drink," she said. "You're no good to anyone unconscious."
He drank.
2. Area Control
"You cannot out-muscle a dragon," Hermione insisted on the third night. "You have to out-think how it moves."
They experimented.
Low spikes to catch feet and force the dragon to adjust its weight distribution. High spikes as temporary vision blocks. Loose stones that would roll unpredictably under claw and tail. Ridges that would divert a charging line by just a foot—enough to buy a heartbeat.
"Think like you're setting traps," Hermione said, pacing. "Not killing it. Slowing it. Confusing it."
Theo created a field of uneven spikes, each one slightly different in height and spacing.
"That path is suicidal," Hermione pointed out, gesturing to a gap he'd left. "You'd box yourself in."
He dissolved a row of spikes, leaving a zigzag escape route. "Better?"
"Better," she said. "You want the dragon to hesitate. You don't get to."
At Hermione's suggestion one late night, Theo tried larger constructs.
"What if," she said, chewing the end of her quill thoughtfully, "you transfigure something big enough to be more interesting than you?"
"Such as?" Theo asked.
"A decoy," she said. "Something that moves. Something loud."
He thought about the mass of stone in the floor, the potential locked in every slab.
They tried a boar first—stone and noise, charging in a straight line across the room before collapsing back into rubble. Then a pack of crude stone dogs that scattered in different directions. Then, because Hermione dared him and he was too tired to remember caution, an elephant.
The floor heaved. Stone rose in a surge of grinding, scraping noise, forming massive legs, a trunk, ears that fanned wide. The construct shook its head, sending dust cascading from its back, and let out a trumpeting bellow so loud the windows rattled.
McGonagall rushed in, wand drawn, eyes sharp.
She took in the sight of the rumbling stone elephant, Theo's white face, Hermione's barely suppressed grin.
"Overkill, Mr. Hale," McGonagall said.
"Effective?" Theo asked weakly.
"Potentially," she conceded. "If you had magical stamina of Professor Dumbledore"
Hermione bit the inside of her cheek to stop laughing. When McGonagall left, she let it out—a short, bright sound that made Theo grin despite his exhaustion.
3. Non-living to Living
"Living constructs are risky," McGonagall warned. "They require more focus and more magic. But a moving decoy may buy you the seconds you need."
Theo practiced on smaller things. Mice that scurried, not perfect but something that makes noise. Dogs that ran in zigzag patterns. Birds that took flight and circled before dissolving. Short-lived, simple, nothing requiring complex behavior. Just enough to draw a dragon's eye or flame for a critical second.
Hermione called out suggestions from her spot by the wall.
"Three dogs, spaced apart. Make them converge on a point the dragon can't ignore."
"A bird that hovers at eye level and then dives past its face."
"Something small and fast near its feet—make it feel threatened from below."
The nights blurred together. Practice, critique, adjustment, repeat. Theo's muscles ached. His focus frayed at the edges. But the magic itself felt sharper, cleaner, more responsive.
One night, very late, Hermione fell asleep mid-sentence, her head pillowed on an open book. Ink smudged her cheek. Her quill had rolled onto the floor.
Theo paused, then wordlessly conjured a cushion and levitated the book out from under her carefully so she wouldn't wake with a spine imprint on her face. He draped his robe over her shoulders and went back to practicing barriers in silence.
Another night, when he was testing angles and she was pacing, he realized he'd unconsciously started placing himself between her and the imagined line of dragon fire. His body already understood what his mind was planning: put something between the threat and survival. Redirect. Endure.
She noticed. "You keep shielding me," she said quietly.
"Practice," he said.
"I'm not in the arena with you," she pointed out.
"No," he agreed. "But it helps to imagine someone worth protecting."
Hermione looked at him for a long moment, expression unreadable. Then she turned back to her notes without saying anything.
November 23rd – Final Night
The night before the First Task, McGonagall dismissed them earlier than usual.
"You are as prepared as time allows," she said, surveying the classroom—rubble scattered everywhere, chalk marks on the walls, scorch marks from experimental flame-deflection tests. "Mr. Hale, you are not required to defeat a dragon. You are required to survive it and retrieve the egg. Do not confuse the two."
"Understood, Professor," Theo said.
She studied him for a moment longer. "Your father's reputation is his own," she said quietly. "Your magic is yours. Do not let anyone—least of all yourself—forget that."
He nodded, throat unexpectedly tight.
As they walked back through the darkened corridors, Hermione was uncharacteristically quiet.
"You're going to be fine," she said finally, as they reached the staircase where their paths would split.
"Or ash," Theo chuckled.
She shot him a look. "Theo."
He glanced at her. Candlelight from a nearby sconce caught gold in her hair; determination sharpened her features. That odd, bright feeling from the training room stirred again in his chest.
Alive, that feeling whispered. Like he mattered. Like the world had suddenly snapped into focus.
"I'll try to keep ash levels to a minimum," he said. "We've put too much work in for me to reduce myself to charcoal."
She smiled, tension easing slightly from her shoulders. "Good. Because if you die, I'll be extremely angry and I'll turn you into a ghost and torture you as the price."
"Noted," he said.
Both just stood there, feeling comfortable, neither quite yet willing to leave.
"Thank you," Theo said. "For all of this. I wouldn't have gotten here without you."
Hermione's expression softened. "You would have," she said. "But I'm glad I could help."
She turned to go, then paused. "Theo?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't try to be a hero tomorrow," she said. "Just… come back."
He watched her disappear up the stairs toward Gryffindor Tower, her footsteps fading into silence.
Then he headed down to the dungeons, mind already running through barrier angles and spike placements and the geometry of survival.
Tomorrow, there would be dragons.
Tonight, there was only preparation, and the quiet knowledge that for the first time in six years, Theodore Hale had someone waiting to see if he'd walk back out of the fire.