He sat on the edge of his bed with the trunk locked and the room quiet around him and the morning beginning outside, and thought about what the year was going to be.
The Tournament. The first task in November, the second in February, the third in June. The graveyard. Pettigrew. The thing at the end of all of it.
The mechanism that put Harry in the graveyard was not the Tournament itself. It was the man running it. Bartemius Crouch Junior --- presumed dead, escaped from Azkaban, kept prisoner in his own father's house until Voldemort had use for him --- would arrive at Hogwarts this year wearing Alastor Moody's face. Polyjuice. A whole year of it. He would steer Harry through every task and deliver him to the cup and then to the Portkey and then to Little Hangleton. That was the mechanism.
And Cedric. He had written Cedric's name down at thirteen, in the notebook from his second year, the night after the Chamber: pull him out of the tournament before the cup. He had meant it then. He still meant it now.
The problem was not the intention. The problem was the mechanism. Cedric entered the Tournament of his own will, and the Tournament selected him fairly. There was no obvious pressure point before the final task, no single moment where an intervention would change his path without creating worse complications. What he had was the third task itself: the maze, the cup, the Portkey. Between now and June, he needed to find a way to be in proximity to Cedric when it mattered, or to ensure Cedric was never alone at the cup, or to know in advance which route through the maze led to the right place at the right time.
He had not solved it yet. He intended to.
Ron had thought about this since February and had not arrived at a solution he trusted. Exposing Crouch too early meant the real Moody stayed imprisoned or dead and the Tournament ran differently in ways he could not predict. Exposing him too late meant the graveyard still happened. The window for intervention was narrow and required more certainty than he currently had.
He would watch. He would learn Moody's actual baseline from the duelling memories in the fourth compartment, and he would watch the man who showed up wearing Moody's face, and he would look for the gaps. There would be gaps. A year of Polyjuice was a year of maintenance --- potions, timing, the specific discipline of being someone else every hour of every day. That kind of sustained performance produced errors. He would be patient and he would find them.
He had been preparing for two years. He had the preparation. He had the relationships. He had the things in the trunk and the things at his waist and the knowledge — partial, gapped, transformed in some ways by the fact that things had already gone differently — of the shape of what was coming.
He picked up his camera from the windowsill.
He took one photograph of the room as it was — bed made, trunk at the foot, window open on the August morning, Mira on her perch, the Kato painting of the Kampala light on the wall beside the Nile painting from Egypt, the carved Snitch on the desk that he had not packed because it belonged here, not in the trunk. The room that had been his — properly his, inhabited rather than occupied — since he had come back into it after the Chamber and decided what it was for.
He developed it that night on the train, in the compartment bathroom with the small kit he kept in his bag.
He looked at it.
He knew where it went.
Last page of the summer section, before September began.