Chapter Eleven: Invitations

Seamus did not have to look too hard to find Lavender and Parvati. In fact, he found them in the first, and consequentially, the last place he looked. Lavender was crying into Parvati's shoulder as she held her. Seamus sat behind Lavender and rubbed her back gently to calm her down, and it was working. Lavender turned from her friend's shoulder to look at him. She smiled at him as did Parvati.

'Please don't cry, Lav,' he said.

'What do you expect me to do?' she replied tearfully.

'To realise you made a mistake. You went after someone completely unattainable and you humiliated yourself in public. Could you not see that they are meant to be together? If an ignorant git like me can see it, how could you, the undisputed Queen of Gossip, not see it? Did you hear what he called her? He called her a Goddess. He feckin' worships the ground she walks on, Lav. They've been together for over two years, and you tried to come between them. Why?'

Lavender looked at him with a cold look, and said, 'I wanted someone brave to take care of me, someone who could make me feel safe. I thought that person could be Ron, I mean who better than Harry Potter's best friend?'

'He's taken, though. You don't know him, you could never know him like Hermione does. He could never know you like he knows Hermione because he loves her. He could never know you like I do!'

'Seamus, what are you trying say?'

'I'm sayin' that this year I promised meself I would tell you how I felt about you. But then I saw that you only had eyes for Ron Weasley, Harry Potter's right hand man, the Gryffindor Keeper, the Prefect, and all that other shite … How the feck could I compete with that? I've liked you fer ages. We went to the Yule Ball as friends, and we kissed when it was over. Last year, we were friends with occasional benefits, and it was then I realised I wanted more from you. I want all of you – to meself. But when I found out you were going after Ron, I was gutted, Lav. If you want someone to keep you safe and make you feel loved, you've got me. Okay, I'm not Ron Weasley or Harry Potter. I'm Seamus Finnigan, the bloke who spent the first year blowin' stuff up during lessons, nothing more. If that's not enough for you, then you let me know now. Break my heart clean, Lavender.'

'Oh, Seamus, I'm so sorry. I've been such a fool, haven't I? But he could've let me down gently, instead of, well, that …'

'Would you have listened?' he asked gently.

'No … probably not,' she whispered.

He looked into her blue eyes with his brown ones, before he pulled her into soft kiss. When they stopped, he rested his forehead against hers and said, 'I'm crazy about you, please be my girlfriend?'

'Oh, Seamus …' she said before she kissed again as Parvati left them to re-join the party.

Meanwhile, Ginny had taken Dean aside and led him away from the party and into an empty classroom.

'Dean, we need to talk.'

'We do?'

'Yes, because I can't go out with you anymore. I'm not in love with you and I don't think I ever will be, and to string you along would be wrong and completely unfair to both of us. I'm sorry,' she said gently.

'Ginny … I … don't know what to say. I guess I should've known. I'm not Harry Potter, am I?'

'No. I'm so sorry, Dean. You're nice and everything, but …'

'I know,' said Dean.

'Can we still be friends?'

'Yeah, I don't see why not, c'mere,' he said before he pulled her into a friendly hug. When he let her go and said, 'Good luck with Harry; I hope he comes to his senses soon.'

Ginny chuckled and said, 'Yeah, me too,' before she left to go back to the party with Dean a few steps behind.

Severus Snape, meanwhile, was most aggrieved at having to sit through the worst performance from a Slytherin Quidditch Team that he could remember. Instead of having to watch that crap, he could and should have been at home where he had left Narcissa in his bed asleep. He should have been there pleasuring her and having her pleasuring him. But no, he had had to endure that … He arrived back in Spinner's End and then entered his house and made his way upstairs to see if she was still asleep. He opened the door to find that she was awake.

'How was the match?' she asked.

'A complete and utter fiasco, I cannot believe that I left you naked in my bed to watch that crap. We lost three hundred points to zero, Narcissa,' he replied.

'Merlin, that's dreadful. Now, why don't you come over here and we can make up for lost time?'

Snape undressed before he joined her in the bed to shag away the rest of the weekend.

0o0

November had begun and the trio were once again busy with lessons, homework and the occasional trip to the Room of Requirement to enhance their animals' senses in human form. December arrived and with it, snowy weather and an invitation to Professor Slughorn's Christmas Party for Harry and Hermione. Ron had not so much been looked at by the Potions Master, despite the improvement in his own potion making. He had copied the notes from the Half-Blood Prince's book in to his own new book, once it had arrived from Flourish and Blott's, along with Harry's. Harry had swapped the covers over, and given back the new book.

Ron did not care that Slughorn ignored him, but Hermione and Harry were livid. It seemed that Slughorn assumed that Ron's improvement was because he was being tutored by either Harry or Hermione, but this was not the case, because Ron was, to some extent, doing it all by himself. Ron had had to restrain Hermione from going to give the Potions Master a piece of her mind on several occasions in the last two months. So, when the invitations arrived, both Harry and Hermione were sorely tempted to throw their invitations onto the fire in the Gryffindor Common Room, but instead they realised that they could not get out of going to the stupid Christmas Party.

Hermione invited Ron to go with her. Harry, meanwhile, had not invited anyone yet. Hermione had told him to get a move on and invite someone because she had overheard girls talking about him and how they would get him to invite them to the Christmas party. She warned him about the possibility of being slipped a love potion, but unfortunately, Hermione had not been able to confiscate them because the girls did not actually have them on their person. Instead, the three of them joked about a possible secret relationship between Filch and Madam Pince, the Librarian. To get him to invite her, one girl, by the name of Romilda Vane, had already given him a gift of chocolate cauldrons, but Harry had simply thrown them into his trunk and forgotten about them.

Eventually, Harry invited Luna Lovegood. He had not seen or spoken to her much this year and found that he had missed her unusual outlook on life and her crazy creatures that she liked to talk about, too.