Chapter Text
Look, I didn't mean to die because of a fictional character.
If you're reading this because you think getting flattened by a twelve-tonne delivery lorry is a glamorous way to kick off a supernatural adventure, do yourself a favour: close this book, go find a crossing, and look both ways. Twice. Because let me tell you, there is absolutely nothing heroic about getting your soul violently detached from your body while arguing about a seventy-somethin'-year-old children's book on a rainy Tuesday in South London.
If Severus Snape had actually materialised in the middle of the road, billowed his black cloak, and shoved me into oncoming traffic, that would at least be a story I could brag about in whatever afterlife I was heading toward. But no. I died because I was so thoroughly, pathologically consumed by an internet casting argument that my brain completely short-circuited its basic survival protocols.
My name is Oliver Bramwell. Until 4:32 PM last Tuesday, I was a twenty-six-year-old resident of Brixton. I worked in customer service for a logistics firm whose primary business model seemed to involve losing parcels in ways that defied the known laws of physics. I owned a single spider plant named Gerald (whom I fiercely denied naming), possessed a 4.7-star rating on our internal office feedback app, and paid forty percent of my monthly take-home pay for a box room above a chicken shop that smelled perpetually of grease and regret.
I was, by every sensible metric, aggressively ordinary.
Except for one thing: I knew more about the wizarding world than any healthy, functioning adult ever should. Ask me about the chronological order of deaths in the Second Wizarding War, complete with footnotes on how the film adaptations mangled the geography of the Astronomy Tower, and I could talk your ear off for four hours. It was a completely useless obsession. No one at the logistics firm ever said, *"Blimey, Oliver, you know the precise incantation for the Babbling Curse, let's give you a promotion."*
Until, of course, it became the only thing that mattered.
The whole mess started at 8:30 AM with a push notification on the Tube.
NEW HARRY POTTER SERIES ANNOUNCES FULL CAST.
By lunch, the internet had completely imploded. The reason? The production team had cast a Black actor to play Severus Snape.
Now, look—I'm a progressive guy. I'm all for representation. But the internet doesn't do nuance; it does thermonuclear warfare. By the time my flatmate Priya and I were trekking back from Waterloo station in the drizzling rain, I had read enough toxic forum threads to fill a library, and my brain was practically vibrating.
"Look, the problem isn't the actor's talent," I argued, dodging a puddle that looked suspiciously deep. "The problem is that the internet is treating Alan Rickman's face like it was etched into stone by the hand of God. People are acting like a Black Snape ruins the sacred text."
Priya adjusted her umbrella, giving me the look she usually reserves for when I suggest ordering from the sketchy kebab place down the road. "Oliver, it's not just about Rickman's legacy. Have you actually thought about the *optics* of this? The narrative architecture completely shifts."
"How?" I demanded. "Snape is Snape. The tragic double agent. The man who spent two decades doing the most miserable, thankless job in history because of a broken heart. The blueprint is the same!"
"No, it isn't!" Priya stopped on the pavement, turning to face me. "Think about the dynamic, Oliver. If Snape is Black, you are introducing a massive, blindingly obvious racial subtext into Hogwarts, whether the writers intend it or not. You're telling me James Potter and Sirius Black—two wealthy, privileged, incredibly popular white boys—spent seven years ruthlessly bullying and publicly humiliating the *only* Black kid in their year? Hanging him upside down by his ankles in front of the whole school?"
I blinked. "Well... I mean, James was a bit of a toe-rag, yeah, but—"
"And it gets worse!" Priya pressed on, her voice rising over the traffic. "Think about Harry! You're going to have a young white protagonist spending six whole years fiercely hating, disrespecting, and obsessively stalking his Black teacher. Every single time Harry calls Snape 'evil' or 'cowardly' or accuses him of being a criminal, it's going to look horribly, deeply coded. It changes the entire flavor of their antagonism from 'grumpy teacher vs. arrogant student' to... well, a borderline hate crime."
I froze on the edge of the kerb. My brain scrambled to process the sheer, terrifying weight of that narrative realization. *Oh God,* I thought. *She's right. If Snape yells at Harry for being an arrogant, rule-breaking brat, half the audience is going to think he's justifiably exhausted, and the other half is going to write ten-thousand-word essays on institutional bias.*
"But that's... that's exactly why it's brilliant!" I countered, desperately trying to salvage my argument as my enthusiasm overrode my spatial awareness. "It adds layers! It forces the audience to confront how privilege operates! James and Sirius being bullies becomes a much more realistic, uncomfortable critique of institutional golden boys. And Harry having to realize his dad wasn't a flawless hero, but actually a privileged bully targeting an outsider—"
"Oliver," Priya said, her eyes suddenly widening. "Wait—"
"No, listen!" I insisted, stepping boldly off the pavement to emphasize my point. "If you look at the architecture of the character, a Black Snape actually highlights the tragedy of his isolation! He's a man caught between two worlds, trusted by no one, bullied by the establishment—"
A horn blasted. It wasn't a polite, *'excuse me'* sort of beep. It was a roaring, apocalyptic, air-horn scream that shook the fillings in my teeth.
To be fair to the lorry driver, he didn't care about the sociological ramifications of casting choices in fantasy television. He was just trying to deliver a shipment of frozen sausage rolls to a Sainsbury's Local on time.
The last thing I heard was Priya screaming my name, though she only got as far as the *"Ol—"* before the sound of screeching tyres cut her off.
The very last thought that crossed my mind before everything went black was: *Oh, brilliant. I'm dying, and she was actually making a completely different, much more sophisticated point than the one I was arguing against, and now I'll never get to tell her she won the debate.*
Which, as final thoughts go, was spectacularly on-brand for me.
Then, the Tuesday ended. Very loudly.
— ✦ —
When I opened my eyes—or whatever passed for eyes when your physical meat-suit has just been turned into a Brixton road-decoration—I was sitting in a room that wasn't really a room.
It felt like a waiting area designed by an alien who had heard the phrase *"GP surgery waiting room"* described once over a bad phone line. There was light, but no lightbulbs. There was a floor that was very committed to its job of being flat. I was sitting in a chair that felt like an idea of a chair. Beyond that? Just endless, milky-white nothingness.
And then, there was the bloke standing in front of me.
He was tall, thin as a rail, and wearing black robes that didn't just hang on him—they billowed with a sort of dark, majestic drama, as if he had his own personal wind machine hidden in the hem. He had greasy black hair, a prominent nose, and dark eyes that looked like they'd seen everything the universe had to offer and found it all profoundly disappointing.
He looked exactly like Alan Rickman.
I don't mean a passing resemblance. I mean *exactly*. Down to the precise, microscopic twitch of mild disdain at the corner of his top lip.
"You," I stammered, my non-existent heart doing a phantom leap.
"Me," he agreed. The word dragged out, dripping with a complete lack of enthusiasm. It was that voice. That deep, gravelly, languid drawl that sounded like it was being filtered through double-cream and velvet.
"You look like—"
"I am... *fully* aware of what I look like," he interrupted, each word spaced out for maximum, agonizing dramatic effect.
"Are you actually—"
"No."
I rubbed my ghostly forehead. "Right. So you chose this face deliberately."
"Yes."
"Why?"
He looked down his impressive nose at me, adopting the measured patience of a secondary school teacher dealing with a particularly dim student.
"I have found," he said, his voice dropping into those rich, bass-heavy registers that practically vibrated through the floor, "that presenting myself as a beam of... *radiant light*... produces entirely the wrong register. Human beings inevitably begin reaching for tedious metaphors involving warmth, and welcome, and... *forgiveness*." He sneered the last word as if it were a bad smell. "And then we must spend the first twenty minutes of our acquaintance correcting the framing. This face, however, communicates immediately that I am here to provide you with *information* rather than absolution, that it will be delivered *once*... without repetition... and that you would do well to pay attention."
He paused, his eyes drilling into mine.
"Also," he added, his upper lip curling by approximately one-eighth of a millimetre into something that might have been amusement on a lesser mortal, "given the... *vocal* nature of your final moments on Earth, I thought you might appreciate the contextual irony."
"Right," I said, a bit breathless. "That's either very funny, or deeply ominous."
"Both," he drawled. "Frequently."
"Am I dead?"
"Technically."
"Technically dead? Is there an *untechnically* dead?"
"There is an 'about to be deposited somewhere else entirely,' which is functionally distinct from most people's rather limited definition of mortality, yes."
"You're transmigrating me," I said, the cogs of my internet-addled brain finally clicking together. "Like an anime. You're a ROB—a Random Omnipotent Being."
He looked at me with the expression of a university professor mildly surprised that the class clown had actually managed to answer a question. It wasn't praise. It was just a note for the file.
"Your consciousness," he confirmed, "into an existing body, in an existing world. You may use your... internet acronym... if it comforts you, though it is entirely inaccurate on both fronts. It does, however, have the distinct advantage of being short."
"Which body?" I asked, a sudden spike of panic hitting my ethereal stomach. "Whose life am I taking over?"
He didn't blink. He just delivered the name very evenly, letting it drop into the silence like a stone into a dark well.
"Cedric Diggory."
I froze. My brain instantly fired up its internal Harry Potter database. Four hundred hours of opinions, timelines, and canon facts whirred to life at hyper-speed. Hufflepuff. Prefect. Quidditch Seeker. Triwizard Champion. Good hair. Tragically murdered in a graveyard by Peter Pettigrew on the orders of a noseless snake-man.
"The one who dies," I whispered.
"The one who is *scheduled* to die," the ROB corrected smoothly, crossing his arms over his black robes. "There is a... *meaningful* distinction."
"Only if the schedule can be changed," I pointed out.
The entity in the Alan Rickman suit let out a tiny, dark hum of satisfaction. "That... is rather the point."
— ✦ —
"Before we proceed," he said, turning away from me with the unhurried precision of a man who had nowhere to be because he existed outside of time itself, "there are things you need to understand about the mechanism you are being given. I will not repeat them. I will not summarise them. And I will not," he added, pausing to let the word land with considerable gravity, "be held responsible for the consequences of your failing to listen."
"I'm listening," I said, sitting up very straight in my idea-of-a-chair.
He turned back. Those dark eyes measured me for a long moment, the way a professor sizes up an exam paper before he's decided whether to feel optimistic or deeply disappointed.
"The system," he began, "is called the Golden Finger."
A beat.
"That sounds like a Bond villain's pet project," I said.
The silence that followed was geological.
"Are you quite... *finished*?"
"Yes. Sorry. Go on."
He clasped his hands behind his back and began to move in a slow, deliberate circuit of the space around me—not pacing, exactly. More like the kind of measured perambulation a barrister uses when he wants the jury to understand that what is coming next is Important.
"The Golden Finger System," he said, "is a multiverse reward engine. It assigns you *missions*. When you complete a mission, you receive an *ability*. These abilities are drawn from across the fabric of existence—fragments of power belonging to other worlds, other stories, other individuals who are considerably more dangerous than any wizard your destination has to offer. You are not receiving full power sets. You are receiving... *echoes*. Calibrated fragments. Carefully nerfed derivatives." He paused. "You may think of it, if you must think of it as anything at all, as a cosmic loot system run by an entity with extraordinarily high standards and extraordinarily little patience for incompetence."
"Right," I said. "And that entity would be you."
"That entity would be... adjacent to me," he said, which told me precisely nothing and was almost certainly deliberate.
He stopped circling and faced me directly.
"There are five tiers of reward. The tier you receive for any given mission is determined by the difficulty of that mission and the outcome of a probability roll that is entirely outside your control, so I would strongly advise against developing any attachment to the idea of fairness. Tier One abilities are foundational—minor enhancements, utility boosts, things that stack quietly in the background and do not announce themselves. Mana efficiency. Memory recall. Marginal improvements to your reflexes, your vision, your healing rate." He said all of this the way one might read out a particularly dull shopping list. "Individually, they are unremarkable. Cumulatively, they are the difference between a competent wizard and one who consistently performs better than he has any right to."
"Okay. And Tier Two?"
"Specialist abilities. These are where builds begin to form—where a collection of incremental improvements becomes something with *shape*. Combat instinct. Tactical thinking. Precision spellwork. They are situational rather than universal, which means they reward the practitioner who trains rather than the one who simply possesses them." He fixed me with a look. "Do not make the mistake of assuming that receiving an ability constitutes *mastering* it. It does not."
"Noted," I said, quite genuinely.
"Tier Three," he continued, the faintest darkening of his tone indicating that we were now in territory that deserved more respect, "is where you become genuinely dangerous. Spider-Sense at combat grade. Partial super-soldier physiology. Lightning channelled through spellwork. Combat-grade regeneration." He let a pause settle. "Each of these costs. Extended use causes fatigue, burns, nosebleeds, instability. And each Tier Three ability adds one point of System Strain."
I frowned. "System Strain?"
"A mechanic you should take considerably more seriously than your expression currently suggests." He produced what appeared to be mild disdain from somewhere beneath his composure and aimed it at me with precision. "System Strain accumulates with every ability above Tier Two that you acquire. At one or two points, the effects are minor—fatigue after extended use. At three or four, your magic becomes unstable. Spells misfire. Your control degrades at the worst possible moments." He paused. "At five points or above, the system itself intervenes. It will assign you a forced mission you did not choose, or apply a temporary nerf to an ability you have come to rely on. It does this not out of malice but out of a philosophy that might be summarised as: *power without consequence is not interesting. It is merely overwhelming.*"
"That's actually a reasonable philosophy," I said.
"Yes," he agreed, his voice carrying the faint, surprised undertone of a man who had expected an argument and was slightly wrong-footed by not getting one. "It is."
He resumed his measured circuit.
"Tier Four abilities are what your internet communities would call Game Changers. Short duration. High drain. And—this is the part you should carve somewhere prominent in your new brain—*highly visible*. A Speed Force burst. A conjurable barrier that deflects curses. Magic amplified to twice its normal output, though with corresponding instability. Time Slow." He said the last one separately from the others, the way a chess player places a queen. "One second. Twenty-four-hour cooldown. At Tier Four, these abilities do not go unnoticed by powerful practitioners. Dumbledore will notice. Snape will notice. And noticing, for men like those, is the first step toward *asking questions you cannot answer*."
"Right," I said slowly. "And Tier Five?"
The ROB stopped walking.
He turned to face me, and for just a moment, something shifted in those dark, evaluating eyes. Not warmth, exactly. More like the expression of a man who is about to say something that is true in an uncomfortable and very final sort of way.
"Tier Five," he said, "is what happens when the probability rolls in your favour at odds of roughly one in fifty. These abilities carry their own restrictions built into the fabric of their existence. Kryptonian physiology that functions only under direct sunlight, rendering you effectively ordinary inside Hogwarts Castle. A Phoenix fragment—Jean Grey's—that cannot be voluntarily activated and triggers only in moments of extreme emotional crisis. Reality anchoring that makes you resistant to mind control at the cost of permanent, low-grade migraines." He folded his hands. "Tier Five abilities are not rewards. They are *contracts*. And contracts," he added, with the precise, quiet enunciation of a man who has watched many contracts go catastrophically wrong, "have terms."
I sat with that for a moment.
"You said the system might have a hidden agenda," I said.
He said nothing.
"You're not going to deny it."
"No," he drawled, the syllable stretching out like a lazy cat. "I am... *not*."
"Is it going to try to kill me?"
"Not... *intentionally*."
I wiped a hand down my face. "That qualifier is doing an absolutely massive amount of heavy lifting."
"Yes," he agreed, his voice dripping with smooth, dark satisfaction. "It... *is*."
He let me sit with the weight of that for approximately five seconds—which, in a place with no time, felt like an indulgence—before continuing.
"There is another principle the system operates on that you would do well to internalise before you arrive. Synergy." He said the word cleanly, without particular emphasis, the way a mathematician states a theorem before the proof. "Two mediocre abilities that complement each other will consistently outperform one powerful ability used in isolation. Spider-Sense combined with a Speed Force burst produces something very close to genuine time-slow in combat—you react before opponents can physically process what has happened. Magic amplification layered over lightning channelling produces spells that hit harder and faster than any Hogwarts student has any right to cast. Healing factor paired with the willingness to take hits others would flee creates something the tactical literature calls a tank." A pause. "Which is not a term I find edifying, but it is accurate."
"And anti-synergies?" I asked. "Things that fight each other?"
He regarded me with what might have been approval, if approval were a temperature several degrees below room.
"Magic overload disrupts chakra-based techniques. Speed Force drains ambient magic, which makes spellcasting mid-burst actively counterproductive. Dark magic exposure—Cruciatus, Avada—interferes with regeneration rates in ways that could be lethal if you are relying on your ability to heal and are hit by the wrong curse at the wrong moment." He paused on each of these the way a doctor reads a list of contraindications—not to frighten, but because the information is simply true and failing to know it has consequences. "The system rewards the practitioner who builds intelligently. It does not reward the practitioner who accumulates power recklessly and hopes the numbers are large enough."
"What's the mission structure?" I asked.
"Four types. Main quests, which are timeline-altering objectives tied to the canon events you already know. Side quests—character work, training, social integration. Hidden quests, which trigger based on your choices and which I will not tell you about in advance, as that would defeat the purpose of them being hidden. And survival quests, which are exactly what they sound like and whose existence you should not find reassuring." He stopped directly in front of me. "The first mission has already been assigned. You will see it when you arrive."
"Tell me about the graveyard," I said.
He looked at me without blinking. "You already *know* about the graveyard."
"I know what happens in the books," I corrected, leaning forward. "I want to know what I'm actually walking into. Real life doesn't have chapter breaks."
He inclined his head by a fraction of a millimetre. It was the first genuinely approving gesture he'd made—the kind a strict headmaster offers when he realises the student isn't completely brain-dead.
"The Triwizard Cup is a Portkey," he said, each word heavy and precise. "It activates when both champions make contact with it simultaneously during the final task. Both Cedric Diggory and Harry Potter are transported to Little Hangleton Cemetery. Peter Pettigrew is waiting. Lord Voldemort's resurrection ritual requires bone, flesh, and... *blood*. Pettigrew is instructed to... *kill the spare*."
"Kill the spare," I repeated, a cold shiver running through my ethereal spine. "That's the line."
"Yes."
"And in the canon version, Cedric never sees it coming."
"He has absolutely no reason to," the ROB said, crossing his arms. "He is sixteen years old. He has survived three exceptionally dangerous tasks, and he arrives in that graveyard with every right to expect that the worst is... *behind* him."
"Right. But I arrive knowing exactly what's hitting the fan. Plus, I'll have ten missions' worth of accumulated abilities. Including Time Slow."
A fractional pause. Those dark eyes bored into mine. "You have... done your research."
"One second of slowed time. Twenty-four-hour cooldown. It's the tenth reward. That's what saves my skin—if I use it correctly."
"One second is... *sufficient*," he said. "Whether you use it correctly is a question that cannot be answered in advance. That is why it is called a... *test*."
"No pressure, then."
"Considerable pressure," he countered smoothly. "But you already knew that." He paused, his gaze sharpening. "There are two people in that school you should concern yourself with before anyone else."
"Dumbledore," I said instantly, ticking them off on my fingers. "He operates on patterns. As long as I'm not consistently interesting to him—just occasionally impressive but frequently forgettable—I should stay off his radar."
"Yes. And... Snape."
He said the name in the exact tone a Londoner uses to say 'the weather,' or 'the council tax'—something ambient, thoroughly miserable, and completely unavoidable.
"Snape is not a problem to be solved," the ROB warned, his voice dropping an octave into a low, gravelly rumble. "He is a condition to be... *managed*. You will not avoid him. You will not charm him. Your objective with Severus Snape is to remain, at all times, entirely... *beneath*... the threshold of what he considers worth his time."
"Which means performing adequately in Potions," I nodded, mapping it out. "Not brilliantly—brilliance from Cedric Diggory in that classroom would be a massive red flag. Just adequate. Never react to his provocations. Give him absolutely zero reason to examine me. And never, under any circumstances, get into a situation where he has a reason to use Legilimency."
"He would see... *everything*."
"He'd see a lot more than a teenage Hufflepuff should contain, yeah. Strategy number one: give the scary Potions master no reason to look at me. Got it."
"And Hermione Granger?"
"A completely different kind of nightmare," I sighed. "She's methodical. She's going to notice within the first month that something about Cedric is... off. She'll file it away and wait for more evidence. My job is to make sure she never gets anything she can actually verify."
The ROB lifted one elegant, pale hand, like a schoolmaster turning a page. "You know the story, Oliver. Use it. But remember... the story is not the people. The books are a perspective. Compressed. Selected. Shaped for a specific readership. The actual human beings are considerably more... *themselves*... than any written account managed to capture. You will meet people who behave in ways the narrative did not prepare you for, simply because the narrative was busy watching... *someone else*."
"Including Cedric."
"You *are* Cedric now," he said, his voice ringing with a sudden, heavy finality. "What he might have thought or done is no longer the question. What matters is what *you* do, wearing his face, carrying his history, and being watched by people who... *loved him*... before you ever arrived."
Oof. That landed with a lot more weight than I'd expected. A sudden wave of guilt washed over me, thinking about Cedric's dad, Amos.
"One last question," I said.
The ROB tilted his head the precise width of a degree. Permission granted.
"The system. The missions. The hidden agenda you won't deny." I looked up at him steadily. "Is any of it designed to get me *out* of that graveyard alive? Or is the graveyard just the opening test to see how I perform under conditions that are technically fatal?"
He was quiet for a long moment. In the milky-white nothingness, the silence had a texture. He looked at me the way a man looks at a chess board when the student has just made a move he didn't anticipate.
"The system," he said at last, "is designed to make you formidable. Whether you use that to survive is, as with everything else... *your* decision."
He paused.
"Though I will note," he added, each word placed with the deliberate care of a surgeon setting down instruments, "that the system does not invest ten missions of carefully calibrated power into a host it intends to discard. It simply does not tell you what it intends to do with you *after*."
That was the most honest thing he'd said since I sat down.
It was also, I realised, the most frightening.
"Good luck, Oliver Bramwell," he said.
He spoke my name like a firm, definitive full stop at the end of a long sentence. And just like that, the weird waiting-room between-space began to come apart at the seams. Everything that had ever been me—the flat in Brixton, Gerald the spider plant, my glorious 4.7-star employee rating, and that last, unfinished argument about character architecture—all of it folded inward. It compressed into something tiny, quiet, and sharp.
Then, that tiny spark of *me* was thrown somewhere else entirely.
Tuesday was officially over. Whatever crazy, magical, death-defying nonsense was coming next had already begun.
— ✦ —
The first thing that hit me was the weight.
It wasn't pain, thank God. No jagged, bone-shattering agony from getting snuffed out by a delivery lorry. It was just sheer, undeniable *mass*. It was the feeling of occupying a body that had been built for athletic stuff over a very long period of time—a body that remembered how to move not in the brain, but deep down in the muscles and bones.
The second thing was the ceiling.
It was white, peeling, and completely familiar in that specific way a ceiling becomes when you've slept under it for six years of summer holidays. There was a hairline crack snaking southeast from the light fitting. A Hufflepuff pennant was tacked slightly crooked above the door, its corners curling because absolutely no one had ever bothered to re-fix it properly. There was a solid oak wardrobe with one handle missing, and a desk buried under the organised chaos of a bloke who knew exactly where everything was and didn't give a toss about anyone else's opinion on the matter.
I was in Cedric Diggory's bedroom.
Which meant I *was* Cedric Diggory.
The information hit my brain in two distinct waves. First came the blunt, immediate fact. Then, a split second later, the context flooded in behind it like a burst water main. Suddenly, I had sixteen years of a life I'd never actually lived, sitting right next to my memories of South London.
His earliest memory: a tiny garden, chasing what he was absolutely convinced was a garden gnome but turned out to be a particularly lumpy rock, feeling enormously pleased with himself before he figured out the difference. His dad's booming laugh. His mum's voice—warm, precise, the voice of a woman who had been a Ravenclaw and never stopped finding things worth investigating.
His mum.
I paused on that one. The books had never given her a name, a face, or even a single line of dialogue. In canon, she was just a tragic, silent shadow in the background of Amos Diggory's overwhelming grief. But the memories hardwired into this body knew her inside out: Eleanor Diggory, née Fawcett. She'd died of a long illness when Cedric was eleven, but right before she went, she'd made her husband promise that Cedric would go to Hogwarts no matter what. She didn't want him kept at home as a comforting memento; she wanted him to have the full, magical experience she'd loved.
And Amos had kept that promise. Five years of school holidays in a house that was way quieter than it used to be, with a dad who cooked because people needed feeding, tended the garden because things needed to grow, and went to every single Quidditch match because his son was playing. It was the shape of a man doing his absolute best with what was left, and doing it well enough that Cedric had grown up knowing he was deeply loved, rather than feeling like a consolation prize.
I filed that away with a massive amount of respect. Amos Diggory might be a loud, boastful tactical nightmare in public, but he was a bloody good dad.
The memories kept rolling in like a playlist on shuffle. The Hogwarts letter. The Sorting Hat—sitting on his head for less than ten seconds before shouting *HUFFLEPUFF!* The yellow-and-black table erupting with the genuine warmth of a house that's actually chuffed to have you, rather than just putting on a show. The first time he'd mounted a school broom and realised, with the absolute certainty of his limbs rather than his mind, that he was going to be brilliant at flying.
His birthday was the seventh of September.
Turns out, Cedric had been six days too old for his school year. The Hogwarts cutoff is the first of September—you have to be eleven by then to start. Because his birthday was the seventh, he'd missed the boat by less than a week. He'd spent an entire extra year waiting around at home while kids born in August, some of them eight months younger than him, got to go off and learn magic. Amos had been quite philosophical about it. Cedric, however, had been quietly, thoroughly furious in that special way only ten-year-olds can manage when told they have to wait for something they can see right in front of them.
But the practical consequences of those six days were massive. It was currently August 1994. His birthday was three weeks away—three weeks until he turned seventeen and reached legal magical majority. He would be the very first person in his year to legally Apparate, the first who could perform magic outside school without the Ministry throwing a wobbly.
Three weeks, and he'd cross the line. Right now, he was still sixteen.
*The ROB had it right,* I noted distantly. *Sixteen. Not seventeen yet.*
Being first at things was something Cedric had developed some pretty complicated feelings about, and now I had front-row seats to all of them.
Prefect since fifth year. Hufflepuff Quidditch captain. 'Outstanding' grades in every single OWL except Divination, which he'd dropped with the sheer relief of a man putting down a massive sack of coal he should never have picked up in the first place. People liked him. Not in that fake, slippery way popular kids are usually liked, but because he was consistently worth knowing. He didn't perform decency; he just *was* decent, which is a hell of a lot harder to maintain than it looks.
The weirdest part was that these memories didn't feel like *mine*. It felt like reading a hyper-detailed, beautifully textured biography of someone else. Every word was perfectly legible, but it was still a book held very close to my face.
Still, it was going to be an incredibly useful cheat sheet.
I swung my legs out of bed and caught sight of myself in the wardrobe mirror. I froze.
"Right," I muttered, blinking at the reflection. "Well, Hollywood lied."
In the films, Cedric was played by Robert Pattinson—all moody jawlines, pale indie-vampire energy, and floppy hair. The bloke staring back at me right now did *not* look like he belonged in an arthouse cinema. He looked like Alan Ritchson. Not the absolute human brick wall he plays in *Reacher* nowadays, mind you, but exactly how Ritchson looked back when he played Arthur Curry in *Smallville*. (And yes, I watched *Smallville*. I loved it. Don't judge me.)
I was broad-shouldered, ridiculously thick-chested, and had the kind of square, classic superhero jawline that made me look like I should be saving Metropolis in a pair of swimming trunks. My hair was a thick, honest dark blonde, and I was easily pushing six-foot-one. If this body was sixteen going on seventeen, it had been eating its three Shredded Wheat a day without fail. I looked less like a tragic, delicate teenage poetry student and more like a golden retriever that had been trained by the SAS.
Outside the window, the Diggory garden was doing that classic British summer morning thing—everything was dewy and completely still, under a sky that specific shade of pale blue that means the weather hasn't quite decided if it's going to rain yet. Birdsong. A tractor rumbling somewhere beyond the back hedge. And from downstairs, the muffled sound of Amos Diggory clattering about making breakfast with the wireless on. My memories confirmed this was his exact routine for important days.
The Quidditch World Cup was today.
Our Portkey was booked for seven in the morning.
The moment I sat properly upright, a glowing system notification popped up in my field of vision, patient and sharp as a well-trained guard dog:
**GOLDEN FINGER SYSTEM — INITIALISING**
**HOST CONFIRMED:** CEDRIC DIGGORY
**WORLD:** HARRY POTTER (CANON TIMELINE, AUGUST 1994)
**ENTRY POINT:** MORNING OF PORTKEY, QUIDDITCH WORLD CUP
**MISSION 01 — ARRIVAL & FIRST BREATH**
**DIFFICULTY:** EASY [TIER 1]
**OBJECTIVE:** Confirm timeline. Reach the campsite. Maintain cover. Do not alter canon before the match.
**REWARD ON COMPLETION:** TIER 1 ABILITY
**SYSTEM NOTE:** You are currently in the year you are scheduled to die. We recommend treating this as motivation rather than context.
"Noted," I murmured quietly to whatever cosmic entity was monitoring my progress.
A sharp little *ding!* echoed in my head, and the screen slid gracefully to the edge of my peripheral vision—present but out of the way, like a polite butler waiting for me to ask for tea.
I looked down at my hands. They were broad, powerful, and heavily calloused in that specific, brutal broom-grip configuration unique to a Seeker who had been flying in freezing rain since he was twelve. I flexed my fingers once, feeling the bizarre, alien-yet-familiar tug of tendons that weren't mine, but moved the exact second I told them to.
Cedric Diggory's hands. Well, my hands now.
Right then. Time to go to a football match with broomsticks.
I got out of bed.