December 25th. The Great Hall. Evening.
Someone had done something extraordinary to the Great Hall.
The house tables were gone, replaced by dozens of smaller ones draped in white and gold, each one glowing with floating candelabras that shed warm, honeyed light across the stone.
The enchanted ceiling had been transformed into a deep winter night — not the grey, featureless overcast of the past week but something deliberate and theatrical, stars sharp and clear above a canopy of frost-touched pine branches that had no business being inside a castle but were there anyway, because Dumbledore had apparently decided subtlety was for other people.
A band occupied the far end of the hall. The Weird Sisters, someone had said at breakfast, with the reverence usually reserved for religious occasions. They were setting up with the comfortable chaos of people who had done this a thousand times and intended to be loud about all of it.
Arthur stood just inside the entrance and took it in.
Then he found a corner and stood in that instead.
The doors opened properly at eight, and Hogwarts poured itself in.
The Champions and their partners came first, walking in paired formation through the main doors with the slightly self-conscious gravity of people who knew they were being watched and had decided to lean into it.
Cedric Diggory and Cho Chang — Cho in midnight blue robes that made half the Ravenclaw table audibly react.
Fleur Delacour and Roger Davies, who looked like he was still working out how this had happened to him.
Viktor Krum, broad-shouldered and slightly uncomfortable in formal dress robes, with Hermione Granger on his arm.
Arthur registered that last one and filed it away without comment.
Hermione looked — different. Not unrecognizable, not theatrical. Just herself, but with the volume turned up. Her hair was down and smooth in a way that suggested significant magical effort, and she was wearing robes the color of cornflowers that she clearly hadn't bought for everyday use. She looked like someone who had decided, quietly and without announcement, to stop being overlooked.
Arthur thought: good for her.
He thought it completely sincerely, which surprised him slightly.
Behind the Champions the doors opened to everyone else, and the Great Hall filled with the particular noise of four hundred students who had been anticipating something for weeks and had finally arrived at it. The temperature of the room changed immediately — body heat and perfume and the collective energy of people who had spent two hours getting ready and intended to be appreciated for it.
Arthur watched from his corner.
Ron Weasley came in with Padma Patil, who was wearing robes of deep pink and an expression that already suggested she had assessed the situation and found it wanting. Ron was wearing dress robes in a shade of brown that managed to be simultaneously too formal and not formal enough, with lace at the collar that belonged to a different decade entirely. He looked like he was being quietly executed and had decided to face it with dignity.
Padma said something to him. Ron nodded, said something back. Padma's smile stayed exactly where it was, which was the smile of someone who had decided to be gracious about a situation that did not deserve grace.
Arthur looked at Ron's robes again.
The lace, specifically.
He looked away before he could feel anything about it.
Harry came in with Parvati Patil, who had made significantly more effort than her date and was wearing robes of deep red that suited her enormously. Harry was in dress robes that fit well enough and had the expression of someone attending their own mild inconvenience. He was scanning the room — for Cho, probably, or for somewhere to stand that wasn't the middle of everything.
He caught Arthur's eye across the hall.
Arthur nodded once.
Harry's expression shifted into something between relief and exasperation — the specific look of someone who had expected Arthur to not be here and was now recalibrating. He raised his eyebrows slightly, a question.
Arthur tilted his head toward the room in a gesture that meant go, then, it's fine.
Harry went.
The Weird Sisters started up — something loud and complicated with a driving rhythm that immediately cleared the center of the floor. People began dancing with the reckless enthusiasm of students who had been sitting in classrooms for four months and had strong feelings about it.
Arthur did not dance.
He watched Ginny Weasley come in with Dean Thomas, the two of them already mid-conversation about something that was making Ginny laugh properly, her head tipping back. Dean was comfortable with himself in a way that translated well in a room like this — he moved like the noise didn't overwhelm him.
He watched Draco arrive with Pansy Parkinson, who was wearing robes of deep green that she had clearly chosen to coordinate with Draco's silver, which was either romantic or extremely organized, possibly both. Draco had his hair done differently — less severe than usual, which on Draco looked almost disarming. Pansy said something and Draco smirked and they moved through the crowd with the ease of people who had been practicing this particular performance their whole lives.
He watched Hagrid navigate the dancefloor with Madame Maxime, the two of them moving with a careful, mutual consideration for the tables around them and the people near those tables, which Arthur respected.
He watched Elena Potter come in with a boy Arthur recognized vaguely — Hufflepuff, fifth year, the kind of person who remembered people's birthdays and was reliably kind about it. He had offered Elena his arm at the entrance with a slight formality that made her smile. She was wearing robes of pale gold that suited her in a way that was completely obvious to everyone who saw her, and she moved through the room with the unconscious ease of someone who had always known how to be in a space without demanding it rearrange itself around her.
Arthur watched her for a moment.
Looked away.
The Weird Sisters shifted into something slower. The dancefloor reorganized itself. Candles drifted lower over the tables, the light warming from gold to amber.
Arthur turned to the window.
Outside, the grounds were dark and quiet under a heavy snowfall, the flakes falling thick and unhurried against the glass. The Black Lake was invisible beyond the white. The trees at the edge of the forest were soft shapes in the dark, the kind of scene that existed specifically to be looked at from inside somewhere warm.
He wasn't warm, particularly.
But the window was better than the room.
He put one hand in his pocket, the other resting loosely on the stone sill, and watched the snow come down, and let the noise of the Ball become something that was happening at a comfortable remove.
The Weird Sisters played.
Someone knocked over a goblet somewhere behind him. There was a brief, contained uproar. Then laughter.
Arthur watched the snow.
He had been there for approximately eleven minutes when someone said, from roughly two feet to his left:
"The frost patterns on this window are actually quite good."
Arthur turned his head.
---
December 25th. The Great Hall. The Window Corner. Same time.
She was looking at the glass.
Not at the grounds beyond it — at the window itself, specifically at the frost that had accumulated along the lower panes in branching, asymmetric patterns that did, objectively, have a certain quality to them.
Short dark hair, cut close at the back and longer at the front, tucked behind one ear on the left side. Brown eyes, currently tracing a particularly elaborate frost branch near the corner of the frame. Slytherin robes — not dress robes, just her regular ones, which meant she had made approximately the same sartorial decision Arthur had, which he noted without comment.
He didn't recognize her.
That was the thing that stopped him.
Arthur Damian Reeves had been in Slytherin for three years. He knew his year. He knew the names, the families, the specific social geometry of every person who had sat at that table since first year. He knew Draco's orbit and Pansy's hierarchy and Blaise's carefully maintained neutrality and the guy that's always angry for no reason.
He did not know her.
"They are," he said, because she was right and because it seemed like the correct response.
She glanced at him sideways. Not startled — she'd known he was there, clearly. Just checking whether he was going to be interesting or not.
"You've been standing here for about ten minutes," she said.
"Eleven."
"Counting?"
"Estimating."
She looked back at the frost. "The one in the corner looks like a river delta. If you look at it from the right angle."
Arthur looked at the corner pane. She wasn't wrong. The branching pattern spread outward from a central crack in the stone with the same logic as water finding the path of least resistance.
"Lena Voss," she said, not turning her head.
"Arthur Reeves."
"I know who you are."
"I don't know who you are," Arthur said. Directly, but not unkindly. Just a fact being stated.
She seemed to find this more interesting than offensive. "I transferred in September. From Durmstrang."
Arthur looked at her properly then.
"Last year," he said.
"Last year," she confirmed. "When you were in America, apparently. So we missed each other."
Arthur turned this over. A transfer from Durmstrang into Slytherin, fourth year, while he was at Ilvermorny.
"How did you end up in Slytherin," Arthur said.
"The Hat took about thirty seconds," she said. "Apparently I was obvious."
"It said that?"
"It implied it. Very politely." She finally looked at him fully. She had the quality of someone who assessed things carefully before deciding they were worth her attention, and having apparently decided, gave it without reservation. "Durmstrang was different. Louder, in some ways. More — performative about it."
"Karkaroff," Arthur said.
"Karkaroff," she agreed, with the mild distaste of someone who had formed an opinion and saw no reason to dress it up. "He ran it like everyone needed to know they were being trained. As if the training wasn't the point, just the knowing."
"And here?"
Lena considered the question with actual seriousness. "Here it's quieter about what it wants from you. Which is either better or more complicated. I haven't decided."
Arthur looked back at the window. Outside the snow was still coming down, thick and indifferent.
"Which classes," he said.
"Arithmancy. Ancient Runes. Potions." A pause. "Care of Magical Creatures, which I added because Durmstrang didn't offer it and I was curious."
"Was it worth it?"
"Hagrid released a Niffler into the classroom last year October," she said. "It stole Parkinson's ring. She didn't notice for forty minutes. So yes."
Arthur's mouth did something brief and involuntary that might have been the beginning of a smile.
"You don't talk much," Lena said. Not critically. Observationally.
"Neither do you," Arthur said.
"I was making an observation about the frost patterns."
"And then you kept going."
She tilted her head slightly. "Fair."
The Weird Sisters shifted into something with a heavier beat. Behind them the dancefloor reorganized, couples moving closer together, groups breaking apart and reforming. The candles drifted lower. The noise of the room swelled briefly then settled into a different register — warmer, less frantic.
"You're not dancing," Lena said.
"No."
"Me neither."
"I noticed."
She looked at the room over her shoulder — a brief, comprehensive sweep that took in the dancefloor and the tables and the general organized chaos of four hundred people having a sanctioned good time. Then she looked back at the window.
"It's a lot," she said.
"Yes," Arthur agreed.
They stood there for a moment in the specific comfortable silence of two people who had independently arrived at the same conclusion about a room and found each other in the corner that conclusion had led them to.
Then a large, familiar shadow fell over both of them.
Viktor Krum stopped beside Arthur, holding two glasses of something that steamed faintly. He looked at Arthur with the expression he usually reserved for opponents he was calibrating — assessing, but not unfriendly. He held out one of the glasses.
"You are standing in a corner," Krum said.
"I am," Arthur agreed, taking the glass.
Krum looked at the window. Then back at Arthur. "Alone."
"Evidently not," Arthur said, and gestured with the glass toward Lena.
Krum turned.
A beat passed.
Then another.
Krum blinked, with the expression of a man recalibrating something he thought he'd already calculated. "I did not see you," he said to Lena, with the directness of someone for whom social niceties were a second language learned out of necessity.
"Most people don't," Lena said pleasantly.
Krum looked at Arthur. Then back at Lena. Then at Arthur again, with an expression that said several things without saying any of them.
"I will leave you to it," Krum said.
"You don't have to—" Arthur started.
"I do," Krum said, with the serene certainty of someone making a strategic withdrawal. He took his remaining glass and moved back toward the dancefloor with the deliberate unhurry of a man pretending he had somewhere to be.
Arthur watched him go.
He turned back to the window.
Lena was gone.
Not gone in the sense of having made an exit — there was no movement he'd caught, no particular moment he could point to. She had simply — stopped being beside him. The space she'd occupied was just space again.
Arthur looked at the window for a moment.
Then at the room.
He couldn't find her in it, which was interesting given that he was very good at finding people in rooms. Either she moved differently than most people or she'd wanted not to be found, and he couldn't tell which.
He looked back at the window.
The river delta in the corner pane branched outward from its center, patient and unhurried, following the logic of water and cold.
He looked at it for longer than he meant to.
December 25th. The Great Hall. Later.
Krum reappeared twenty minutes later without preamble, materializing beside Arthur's corner the way large, quiet people did when they had decided the conversation wasn't finished yet.
He wasn't with Hermione. She was somewhere across the room — Arthur had tracked her briefly, noted she was laughing at something her tablemates had said, noted she looked comfortable in a way she didn't always, and filed it away.
Krum stood beside Arthur and looked at the window.
"She was interesting," Krum said.
"Yes," Arthur agreed.
"You did not get her name."
"I did actually."
Krum glanced at him. "And?"
"Lena Voss. Transfer from your school."
Something shifted in Krum's expression — a slight recalibration, the look of someone cross-referencing information. "Voss," he repeated, quietly. Not elaborating.
Arthur looked at him. "You know the name."
"Her father is — someone with influence," Krum said, which was a very careful way of saying something. "He is not a simple man."
Arthur filed that away without comment.
They stood in silence for a moment, watching the dancefloor. The Weird Sisters had slowed again, the music settling into something that required less coordination and more patience. Padma was talking to Parvati with the focused intensity of someone debriefing after a moderately difficult mission.
"You are leaving soon," Krum said. Not a question
"Soon," Arthur confirmed.
Krum nodded, as if this had been established earlier and he was simply acknowledging it. "The egg," he said.
"You've figured it out."
"Obviously."
"Potter is still struggling."
"He'll work it out."
"Before February?
"Probably."
Krum considered this. "You will help him again."
Arthur said nothing for a while. Then: "Not this time."
Krum made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "You are very bad at helping people, Reeves."
Arthur looked at him sideways.
Krum's expression was composed, but there was something in the set of it — dry, almost fond — that suggested he found Arthur genuinely amusing and had decided not to make a performance of it.
"Good luck with the rest of the evening," Arthur said.
"And you," Krum replied.
Arthur watched him go.
Then he set his own glass down, straightened his blazer, and walked toward the side door.
---
December 25th. The Grounds. Twenty minutes later.
The cold was immediate and total.
Arthur pulled the door shut behind him and stood for a moment on the stone steps, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. The snow was still falling — softer now than earlier, the flakes smaller and more deliberate, the kind that accumulated quietly rather than making a statement about it.
The grounds were white and still. The castle behind him glowed amber through its windows, the muffled sound of the Weird Sisters drifting out through the stone.
He started walking.
No destination. Just the particular relief of space after a room full of people, the crunch of snow under his shoes, his breath clouding white in front of him.
He had been walking for about five minutes when he heard the voices.
Low. Urgent. Coming from somewhere near the greenhouse wall where the stone path curved toward Hagrid's hut.
Arthur slowed.
He recognized Hagrid's voice first — the deep rumble of it, lowered to what Hagrid considered a whisper, which was still audible at twenty metres. Then Madame Maxime's response, softer and more controlled.
And behind the greenhouse wall, two figures crouched in the shadows that were very obviously Ron Weasley and Harry Potter, both of them wearing the slightly guilty posture of people who had decided eavesdropping was justified and were not entirely comfortable with that decision.
Arthur looked at them for a moment.
He considered intervening.
He didn't.
Harry and Ron were making their own choices. Whatever Hagrid was telling Maxime was information that might matter, and Harry was a champion who needed every advantage he could find. Arthur had no principled objection to any of this.
He was about to move on when something in his peripheral vision stopped him.
He went very still.
There was a beetle on the greenhouse wall.
Which was not, in itself, remarkable. Beetles existed. They went places.
But this one was wrong.
Not wrong in any way a non-magical person would notice — not glowing, not oversized, not vibrating with obvious dark energy. Just wrong in the way his specific senses had learned to register wrongness. The magical signature was too dense for an insect. The stillness was too deliberate. And underneath the cold and the snow and the general smell of a Scottish winter night, there was something else.
A trace.
Faint, familiar in structure if not in person — the specific compressed quality of a human magical core forced into a form it wasn't designed for. He'd grown up around Sirius Black. He knew what an Animagus smelled like from the inside out.
Arthur looked at the beetle.
The beetle did not move.
Arthur reached into his pocket, closed his fingers into a fist, and thought: Accio.
The beetle lifted off the stone wall and shot into his palm with a small, indignant impact.
He closed his fingers around it loosely — enough to contain, not enough to harm — and walked away from the greenhouse wall, away from Harry and Ron, away from the path, until the voices faded and the grounds opened up into the wide white expanse that sloped down toward the lake.
He stopped.
Opened his hand.
The beetle sat in his palm, perfectly motionless, with the absolute stillness of something that had decided if it didn't move it might not be noticed.
"I know what you are," Arthur said quietly, to the beetle. "And I know you can hear me perfectly well."
The beetle's antennae moved. Just once.
Arthur regarded it for a moment. Then he crouched, set it carefully on the snow, straightened up, and looked at it with the expression of someone who had already decided what came next and was simply waiting for the formality to complete itself.
The air around him dropped two degrees. The snow nearest his feet crystallized into something denser.
"Change," Arthur said, his eyes glowing.
---
December 25th. The Grounds. Moments later.
The transformation was not graceful.
It rarely was, in Arthur's limited experience — Animagus reversions had a particular quality of reluctance to them, like watching something remember it was supposed to be bigger. There was a sound like displaced air, a brief luminescent shimmer in the dark, and then where the beetle had been there was a woman sitting in the snow.
She was wearing robes that had clearly been chosen for an indoor occasion — deep purple, elaborately trimmed, with accessories that suggested she had strong opinions about being seen. Her hair was elaborately arranged in a way that the transformation had done no favors to. She was wearing glasses with jeweled frames that had survived the change intact, which said something about how attached to them she was.
She looked up at Arthur.
He looked down at her.
She had, he noted, already composed herself into something approaching dignity despite sitting in several inches of snow in the dark on Christmas night, which suggested she was either very experienced at recovery or very committed to the performance of it. Probably both.
"Well," she said. Her voice was bright and sharp and immediately reminded Arthur of something designed to cut through noise. "This is unexpected."
"Is it," Arthur said.
She tilted her head, reassessing him with the speed and efficiency of someone who made a living from rapid reassessment. "You're a student."
"Fourth year," Arthur confirmed.
She blinked. The reassessment accelerated visibly. "You forced me."
"I asked," Arthur said. "The force was implied."
She looked at his hand — at where the Arcane Core had surfaced briefly, the air still slightly wrong around him. Then she looked at his face, and he watched her cataloguing him the way she'd catalogue a story — angles, details, implications.
"Rita Skeeter," she said, apparently deciding introduction was the appropriate next move.
"I know who you are," Arthur said.
A pause.
"You've been reading the Prophet," she said.
"I've been watching Harry Potter navigate a month of damage control," Arthur said. "The Hermione Granger romance angle was particularly creative. Completely fabricated, I assume."
Skeeter's smile was the smile of someone who had never found that particular accusation especially troubling. "The public has an appetite—"
"For things that are true," Arthur said, "when the person writing them has any interest in that distinction." He looked at her evenly. "You must have been in this school for months. In that form. Listening to private conversations, attending events you weren't invited to, collecting information without consent from minors."
Skeeter's smile didn't waver, but something behind it recalibrated. "That's a very serious set of accusations."
"They're not accusations," Arthur said. "They're a summary. The accusation would be unregistered Animagus, which carries a sentence, not a byline."
The smile stayed. The eyes behind the jeweled frames went very still.
"What do you want," she said. The brightness in her voice had dropped to something more direct. More real.
Arthur considered the question as though he hadn't already decided the answer several minutes ago.
"You keep working," he said. "You're efficient and you're thorough and you have access I don't. That's useful."
Skeeter stared at him. "You want — you want to use me as a source."
"I want an arrangement," Arthur said. "You continue what you're doing. You add me to the information you're collecting — anything that comes through regarding the tournament, the Ministry's involvement, anyone moving around this school who shouldn't be. In return, I don't expose you, and I don't—" he paused fractionally, "—do anything more immediate."
He said the last part without emphasis, which was more effective than emphasis would have been.
Skeeter was silent for a long moment.
This, Arthur noted, was unusual. Rita Skeeter's public persona was constructed entirely around never being silent. She filled spaces with words the way other people filled them with furniture — compulsively, immediately, until there was no room left for anything else.
Right now she was sitting in the snow saying nothing, looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen on her face in any of her published photographs.
"You're fourth year," she said again. Differently this time.
"Yes."
"Who are you."
Arthur looked at her for a moment. The castle glowed behind him. The snow fell around them both, patient and indifferent.
"I'm a student," Arthur said. "And your worst nightmare. Not necessarily in that order." He reached down and offered her his hand, which she took after a brief pause, allowing herself to be helped to her feet. "We have an arrangement, Miss Skeeter."
She brushed snow from her robes with the automatic efficiency of someone reclaiming composure. She looked at him once more — one final, comprehensive reassessment.
"You'll want things in writing," she said.
"I'll want results," Arthur said. "Writing implies I trust you. I don't. Yet."
Skeeter's mouth did something that in different circumstances might have been respect. "And if I decline."
Arthur looked at her pleasantly. "Then I reconsider the immediate option."
She held his gaze for three seconds exactly.
Then she transformed.
The beetle lifted from the snow, oriented itself, and disappeared into the dark with the purposeful trajectory of something that had somewhere to be and a story to file.
Arthur watched it go.
He stood there for a moment in the quiet — the snow, the dark, the distant amber glow of the castle, the muffled sound of music drifting across the grounds.
He thought briefly about Lena Voss and river deltas in frost.
Then he turned and walked back toward the castle, his footprints filling slowly with snow behind him.