We walk side by side and I look down at our legs stretching, his strides much shorter than his usual to match mine.

He talks, lost in his explications, sometimes gesturing with his hands, sometimes glancing down at me. I watch his elegant hands and thin "piano fingers" make motions in the air. I am very tempted to look up and fasten my eyes to his pink lips, so very soft I know from experience.

But I'm determined not to gawk and not to stare (as I so frequently do from the Ravenclaw table in the Great Hall -such an image of us Ravenbrains to give the Slytherins...) so I keep looking down. I nod my head as I listen to him tell me about Kappas, magical creatures we'd studied briefly with Lupin third year -before our ex-professor was interrupted, as we discovered later, by the lunar cycle- utterly fascinating magical creatures according to him, but that sound pretty stupid not to mention uber gross to me. But whatever he's talking about doesn't really matter right now.

The lullaby of his voice stops at once. I look up into his face, curious, and I see him frown, but its effect is ruined by the large smile that spreads from his mouth all the way to his crinkled eyes.

"You re not listening."

"Yes I am" I retort. "You just said that Kappas eat live fish, and that they feed their progeniture with dra...gons" I stop. Shit.

"And that's when you nodded." He's smirking now.

"Yeah well, everybody knows that the Kappa's ways are very mysterious." What's so fascinating about the things sure is a mystery to me.

"Bullshit" he throws his arm around my neck and drags me to him, laughing. My heart skips a beat, then it's pounding. Never got used to that. I lace my arms around his waist.

"Let's head back in. We'll hit the practice room and I'll play you the ballad you told me about. It's actually a great one."

"Deal."

I smile. A ballad on piano sounds great. Yet there's just something to say about listening to the soothing tones of the voice that is just exactly him, Theodore Nott. Even when it's to talk about stupid and gross magical batracians that apparently have more powers than Spiderman.

So on our way back to the castle, I ask him what it is that their babies eat then.

TBC