"So let me get this straight. You saved the 'very attractive Auror Tonks' and thought you would tell me how cool she is?" Hermione interrupted as soon as Harry had used the words "very attractive".
"Urm… yeah?" Harry was thoroughly confused at her reaction. "She is cool," he finished. At that Hermione looked very annoyed and rose to leave without saying anything else.
Left even more confused about the turn of events he turned to his friends to try and find out what happened, only to find them trying not to laugh.
"What?" Harry questioned, which unfortunately resulted in everyone laughing at him.
"You've been courting Hermione for almost a year now and you've just gone and said that. She's pissed at you," Draco answered, the first to control his laughter.
"Courting!? That's not what I've been doing…. I'm just her friend, sure I like her… but I have not been courting her… have I?"
"Wait, so you mean to tell me, you've been courting her and you didn't even know it? That's fucking brilliant," Elias laughed at Harry, becoming more intense at the look on Harry's face. After a minute he got up and ran after her, inspiring another round of laughter from his friends.
/*** **-** ***/
"GAAAHHH. I manage to finally get you to talk to me, only to piss off Hermione. When I apologised to her she told me to give her a week to calm down." Harry complained to Dudley.
"A week? That means she's really angry. I remember when Mom told Dad that she wouldn't talk to him for a month after he broke the only thing she had left from her sister. It was a vase that she had made herself."
"I'm going to meditate, I might as well try to envision my Animagus form. I've not tried since before our… falling out."
He sat down and tried looking inwards despite his mind being on Hermione the entire time, or maybe because of that, he saw what could have been the face of an animal, still clouded in fog and shadows.
/*** **-** ***/
Hermione had forgiven Harry after a week of silence between them, privately she regretted saying a week, but that couldn't be changed. In addition to that Blaise and Theo had explained to her that they had used the phrase "very attractive" to describe Tonks and that Harry was parroting their description to help them understand who he meant.
Considering the fact that this was the first time Blaise had sought her out to talk to her, it helped to confirm to her that Harry hadn't sent them to talk to her.
Once the week was up, Hermione went to sit at her usual place in the library and upon arriving she saw that Harry was already waiting for her. When she saw how nervous he looked she began to feel bad for overreacting.
After some apologising, and conversation about miscellaneous things of little interest, things were back to normal between them, though this time Harry had expressed that he was too young to begin courting her. This made her reply with confusion.
"Courting? Is that what you were doing?"
"What? Draco said I had begun a courting ritual with you and that's why you reacted how you did." There was an awkward silence before they laughed and Harry suggested a Patronus lesson.
After some magical warming up and mental exercises to help with focus, they began. Hermione had managed to conjure the mist form of a Patronus before and had been working to coalesce it into a form. Harry always had his Patronus in the room during these lessons to help with the happy feeling.
This latest attempt had seen the most progress since they had begun, resulting in a ball of mist that tried to morph into a shape. He told her to hold it while he tried something, he walked his Patronus over towards hers and had them touch. Once they joined something magical happened, Harry's Patronus started to change from a silver to gold colouration. This lasted but a moment and once it had ceased there was a bright light and two Patronuses stood in front of them. They matched, both being deer, though Harry's was a doe. Both of them knew the implications of matching Patronuses and blushed upon seeing them. Recovering his composure, Harry asked her to dispel hers and then re-summon it. She tried, but wasn't able to progress beyond the ball form again, though she now knew what it felt like to have a fully corporeal Patronus and could possibly recreate the feeling.
She hugged Harry, both of them excited about the progress.
/*** **-** ***/
May just couldn't end without something happening, it just didn't happen at Hogwarts, at least that's what Harry was thinking. So it was that he walked around Hogwarts at night, paranoid that something would happen, with the Slytherin Vipers keeping him company, all but Elias under Invisibility Charms while the boy himself had the Cloak. They were using the Marauder's Map, given to them by Fred and George, to navigate the castle when they saw that Mad-Eye Moody was on the way in their direction, the only way they could go to avoid him was up the stairs. As they ran up the stairs, they were already at the fourth floor, Moody rounded the corner and into view at the bottom of the stairs. He called out.
"I know you're out there, kids, I can see you. Glamours and Invisibility Charms don't fool me."
As soon as they heard this the boys all bolted up the stairs, past the fifth, sixth, and onto the seventh floor, the whole time with Moody in pursuit, he was pretty spry for a man of his age and with his disabilities. Fortunately for them the four floor advantage they had was enough to lose the seasoned Auror, he gave up after running up five flights of stairs, and so they wandered around the seventh floor for a while.
In their wandering they came across Ron, who jumped at the sight of so many people.
"What are you doing here?" Harry asked him.
"I could ask the same of you lot, this is the floor of the Gryffindor common room after all. I got in the habit of walking around at night after our patrols on the third floor in first year ended."
"We wander around a bit at night sometimes, you should have said, you could join us."
"Maybe sometimes, this can be the only alone time I get occasionally. When I'm not with you guys, I'm with my brothers or the other Gryffindors in my year. Dean and Seamus are good lads, though I don't really interact with many of the others, except Parvati, she and I study together."
"Oooh, you 'study' together," Elias teased and Draco punched him lightly in the arm and told him to "lay off him" while Ron blushed at the insinuation. Harry checked the Map again and Moody had walked to the other side of the castle, somewhere on the fourth floor, and so the Vipers walked back down towards the bottom of the castle.
"Scabbers, there you are!" Ron called out once they had gotten on to the grounds. He picked the rat up, only for it to try and escape, biting him in the process. He dropped the rat and it ran towards the Whomping Willow, spurring the group to chase after him, and causing Harry to unknowingly drop the Map. Harry tried to summon the rat, but nothing happened, which was odd for an animal of that size, and so the chase resumed.
They were sixty feet away from the hostile tree when they saw something that scared those raised in the Magical World. It was a giant black dog who was snarling and barking at the rat that Elias had just picked up. With an unnatural speed the dog charged at Elias and grabbed him by the ankle, dragging him towards the Whomping Willow, and causing him to scream as he vanished beneath the tree.
"Fuck!"
"Shit!"
"Fuck"
"I'm coming, Elias!"
Ron, Blaise, Dudley, and Harry respectively all shouted out in unison before Theo came up with an idea, though unfortunately not before Draco tried to run straight after Elias, causing him to get attacked by the tree. He was knocked fifteen feet away and was unconscious when they reached him. Theo and Dudley used their knowledge in Healing Magic to stabilise him, Theo was more advanced with his study, but ever since his incident with Aunt Marge, Dudley still missed her every bit as much as his dad, he had been studying Healing Magic in his spare time. The way he viewed it was, even if he couldn't help his aunt anymore that didn't mean he couldn't help others. His main area of focus was mental Healing Magic, and even then he wasn't anywhere beyond his initial foray into the subject. The last time he had studied it was before he and Harry had fallen out.
With Draco attended to they could pursue the dog and Elias, however they couldn't just leave him lying there alone.
"Someone needs to stay with him and take him to the Hospital Wing," Harry informed the group and immediately Ron responded.
"Do you promise to get Elias and Scabbers back?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll take him there, just make sure you're all safe when I return." With Draco being floated away Theo could finally articulate his plan to the group.
"If we all hit the tree with a Petrification Charm then the tree should freeze and we can avoid the fate of Draco. I'll be honest I didn't expect him to be so… brave? Stupid? Both? I don't know."
So they all pulled their wands out and cast the charm at the tree, which miraculously froze, and began to descend beneath the tree.
/*** **-** ***/
