"What was that you were saying about the Yule Ball?" Dean asked Hermione, as they headed back up to the castle. "If it's in Hogwarts: A History, how come it's never been mentioned before now?"

"Because there hasn't been one for two hundred years," Hermione replied. "Or just over two hundred years."

"It's about the Tournament, right," Neville realized. "And because there hasn't been one since the eighteenth century, there hasn't been a Yule Ball since the eighteenth century either."

He frowned. "Wait, is that why we all had to get Dress Robes?"

"We all had to get Dress Robes?" Harry asked. "I think I must have missed that."

"It was in the letter," Ron contributed gloomily. "I sort of hoped it wasn't, mind you. Then I'd have a reason to do something permanent to what Mum got me."

"Didn't you read your Hogwarts letter?" Hermione asked, in tones of mild disapproval.

"Sirius said he'd get everything because he was heading into Diagon Alley anyway," Harry defended himself. "Maybe he didn't bother to get Dress Robes because he never actually needed them and I'd have to have them fitted."

He frowned. "Actually, do we need to go to the Yule Ball? It doesn't really sound like the sort of thing I'd be interested in."

"I'm not sure if I want to or not," Dean said. "I'm pretty sure I don't have any actual dress robes, we didn't get them in Diagon Alley and I had a dressing gown in my stuff this year."

"I'll swap?" Ron suggested. "Mine are all maroon."

"Wait, hold on," Neville asked. "What are the rules for who goes to the Yule Ball? Is it open to everyone?"

"Traditionally it's only open to fourth years and up," Hermione reported. "But I think there's an exception for younger students if they have dates from older years."

"So what about-" Neville began, then looked around for Ginny. She was a little way behind, listening to Fred and George discuss how they'd have dealt with Nora (Harry listened for a moment and it sounded like it involved some kind of sweet called a Canary Cream). "Ginny? Did you have to get dress robes this year?"

Ginny nodded, and Neville returned his attention to Hermione. "So how does that make sense, getting all the lower years to buy dress robes they might not even be able to use? The Triwizard Tournament is every five years, and Ginny's in Third Year – not only can she not take part in the tournament, but she'll have graduated by the time it comes around again."

"To be honest I don't think most Second Years will be able to use their Second Year dress robes in Seventh Year," Dean contributed. "Unless they didn't have to get them."

The conversation went on from there, wondering about wizard fashion (something which Ron and Neville were unable to shed any light on) and Harry couldn't help wondering whether he should try to fix his missing robes at all.

It felt like that was something he should only do if he was actually interested in going to the Yule Ball, and – though the only thing he really knew about it at this point was that it was that it was a ball – he didn't think he was.

Later that afternoon, Harry got to see when Nora got her reward for helping out so well with the Triwizard Tournament.

Professor Flitwick had done most of the work on it after someone had had the idea, and he was along to watch as she got it. So was Professor Kettleburn, ready with the note-taking attachment to his artificial hand, and Charlie Weasley helped Hagrid carry the big heavy wooden chest out before putting it down in front of her.

"Now, remember," Charlie began, "it's tougher than normal, but don't be too rough or you'll break it."

"Careful you do not break it," Hagrid translated.

"Break what?" Nora asked, giving the chest a poke. "This seems heavy."

"It's not the chest, it's what's in the chest," Harry called, and she gave it a more focused (and curious) examination.

Hagrid undid the clasp, shifted so he was behind the lid, and pulled it open. Nora leaned forwards a little as he did, then reared back in surprise as a big silver Snitch – almost as large as a Bludger – hovered up out of the chest.

It stopped there for long enough to let Nora get over her surprise, and then Hagrid gave it a poke with his umbrella and it went zooming off – up, then over towards Hogwarts proper, then doing a corkscrew movement.

"Fetch?" Nora asked, eyes bright and wings half-raised.

"Fetch!" Hagrid agreed, and Nora took off with a whoosh. She charged straight after the Silver Snitch, only to miss as the enchanted ball jinked abruptly to the side, then Nora used her wings to slow to a halt in mid-air and looked around for where it had gone.

"It was quite interesting doing the enchantments!" Professor Flitwick said, as Nora began chasing her new toy again – a little more cautiously this time. "It's not quite as good as a real Golden Snitch, of course, there are a few tricks I don't know – but it's specially enchanted so it won't go more than two miles away from the chest it's kept in. That's instead of it staying inside the bounds of the Quidditch Stadium."

"It looks like she's having a lot of fun with it," Harry agreed. "It seems a bit slower than the snitches from the game, though?"

"Oh, that's a setting," Flitwick told him. "There's a key in the chest you can use to wind it up or down to make it easier or harder. At the moment it's… oh, I'd say about halfway up."

Nora missed snagging the Silver Snitch again, but this time she was spreading her wings as she did and so it bounced off her wing leather with an audible boom.

"Is there a way to make it come back?" Hagrid asked. "Don't remember if you mentioned that."

"Yes, it'll come back to the chest if you call it," Flitwick agreed. "Come on, Rubeus, I'll show you how to do it."

For the rest of November, it seemed like the Yule Ball was almost the only thing anyone was talking about.

The way they talked about it was different for different people. Mostly from younger students Harry heard disappointment or envy, or at least confusion, about why it was that they couldn't go when Fourth Year students could.

That came from both boys and girls, which was a bit strange because once you got to students who were in fourth year everything changed. Suddenly it seemed as though almost all the girls – Hermione was the only exception Harry noticed – were giggling about it and talking in the corners about who they wanted to go with and who they hoped was going to ask them. And what they were going to wear, which was just baffling as far as Harry was concerned – surely they already knew, because of how they'd had to get dress robes?

The boys, on the other hand, were all gradually developing a sort of hunted look. Harry would have called it a harried look, except that as soon as he thought of that word he imagined Sirius saying it, and it wasn't really how he felt about it – he felt baffled, and everyone else seemed to be preparing themselves for the hardest things they'd ever done in their lives.

It all seemed very complicated to Harry, and – admittedly not for the first time – the things he'd read in books didn't really help. There were two ways that books he'd read treated things like balls, which was that either everything went quite well and it was just sort of a background to a single important conversation, or everything went badly wrong and the bit he read was about the ball going wrong (and sometimes that meant everyone died, while other times it just meant that the people involved ended up hating each other).

"So who are you asking?" Ron said after Transfiguration that Thursday, with a kind of resigned dread in his voice.

"I'm not sure I'm planning on going," Harry replied.

"Blimey, it'd be nice to be able to try that," Ron admitted. "My mum would tie my tail in a knot if I missed the only reason she got me dress robes."

"Could she actually do that?" Neville asked. "Don't you only have a tail when you want to have one?"

"She'd find a way," Ron declared, as they crouched to pass through a tapestry one by one.

"I'd suggest that you lend your robes to me, but that wouldn't work for two reasons," Dean said.

"Why not?" Ron asked. "That sounds like a great plan to me. Right?"

"Well, firstly, maroon isn't my colour," Dean explained.

"It's not my colour, but that's not going to save me," Ron muttered.

"How do you even tell what someone's colour is?" Neville asked.

"It's about complementary colours, right?" Hermione checked. "Some colours go well together, and some clash."

"Right, it's a painting thing," Ron realized. "That makes more sense."

"And second," Dean resumed, "If Ron didn't go, that would disappoint Hermione."

"...that doesn't make any sense, right?" Ron asked. "Right, Hermione?"

"No sense at all," Hermione agreed.

Harry noticed that both of their ears had gone a bit pink for some reason.

After almost a week of thinking about the Yule Ball – including a slightly awkward meeting of the Unusually Shaped club where everyone else was a bit mopey about not being able to go, except for Anna who seemed cheerful regardless – Harry was feeling a bit fed up with it, and on his Sunday trip to Fort William he decided that he was going to try and not think about the Yule Ball for as long as possible.

It seemed distinctly unfair that it was still on his mind after he'd decided he probably wasn't going.

It was quite a fine day, at least, and Harry flew out past Fort William and out to sea to really stretch his wings. He scudded along the surface of the water with his tail nearly trailing in the waves, then tilted up and climbed past the clouds until he could see the whole of the inlet with Fort William at its tip all at once.

Then he dove back down, air curling off the tips of his wings, and got up to really a quite high speed – fast enough that when he reached Fort William he had to circle a few times to shed speed and land safely.

That already meant he was feeling better, but then during his time in town Harry decided on impulse to go into a pub. He'd had vague thoughts of getting a snack while he was in there, but to his delight it turned out that going into a pub sometimes really did result in a talk with a bartender who was able to dispense excellent advice and help you sort out the things you were worried about.

It was certainly a more pleasant discovery that something from a book was real than – say – an evil ring that might try to take over your mind.

Buoyed by his talk with the bartender, Harry made up his mind quite firmly on the way back to Hogwarts, and it felt much more like a pleasant decision than the one he'd made before. In an odd sort of way, it felt like he now wasn't as worried because he'd made the right choice (while before he'd made a choice which turned out to not be the right choice and that was why he'd been uncomfortable) which was that the whole 'going out with someone' part of the Yule Ball was only the point of it if you wanted it to be. Otherwise it was just a chance to spend time with people, especially people from the other schools which were the whole point of the Triwizard Tournament in the first place.

So Harry could invite someone else if they wanted to go and couldn't have gone otherwise, or he could just show up by himself and talk.

And when he explained all that to Sirius at Dogwarts, his godfather considered it for almost a minute.

"Maybe I should have expected that," he said, eventually.

"You mean that I'd be worried about it?" Harry checked. "Sorry I didn't ask you."

"No," Sirius replied, and it looked to Harry as if a grin was trying to escape onto his face. "I mean I should have expected that you'd be confused about whether you could go to the Ball on your own. It's what James did, you know."

Now Harry was confused all over again. "But there wasn't a Yule Ball while you were at Hogwarts."

"That's not what I mean, Harry," Sirius replied. "You should know better than most that your father often went stag."

After a long moment of thought, Harry got it.

After a much shorter moment of thought, Sirius got a cushion to the face.

"I think everyone's going a bit Yule Ball mad," Dean said, halfway through the five of them doing their Defence homework.

"Really?" Ron asked, in completely flat tones. "No. I never would have guessed. What a surprise."

"You weren't in Divination today," Dean explained. "Most of the class wanted to know how they could predict who their best date was."

He shrugged. "We ended up doing horoscopes to try and find who would have matching horoscopes on Christmas Day, or close enough to work."

"It was surprisingly logical," Hermione contributed. "For Professor Trelawney, at least."

"It does sound better than nothing," Harry agreed, thinking about it. "But you don't really need to go with someone who's a good date at all, do you?"

He waved his quill in the air to punctuate his point, then put it down and waved his paw instead so nobody would end up with ink on their spell diagrams. "Even if you wanted to go with someone in fourth year, and someone you knew who was in third year wanted to go with someone who was in third year, you could organize it so all four of you could go to the ball and then just switch around once you're there."

"That's-" Hermione began, then stopped. "...actually, I don't think that breaks the rules. It just sort of gets around them."

"So does that mean you are going to be coming to the ball?" Neville checked. "Because you're probably going to need to get some dress robes, and the place in Hogsmeade's going to be swamped."

"Especially if that idea of Harry's spreads," Dean pointed out. "There's going to be loads of first, second and third years who suddenly have the chance to go."

Harry thought about that, and decided it was a good point.

"Third years," Hermione corrected. "First and Second Years can't go to Hogsmeade."

"They'll probably get some kind of exception?" Neville shrugged.

"Is Diagon Alley going to be busy next weekend?" Harry asked. "I think that's a Hogsmeade weekend, but if I go to Dogwarts and to Diagon Alley then it might be less busy."

"Well, there's going to be Christmas shopping," Dean guessed. "But how bad can Christmas shopping be if there's only a few thousand wizards and witches in the country? There's probably more people on one floor of Harrods during the Christmas rush than in the whole of Diagon Alley."

He snapped his fingers. "Oh, yeah, I might ask to come along, because I don't have dress robes either."

"Kind of wish mine were better," Ron said, a bit wistfully. "Don't suppose yours are bad too, Nev? Hermione?"

"I've got some," Hermione replied, but her tone was a bit dubious. "I had this idea of colouring up my feathers, though."

That made everyone stop for a moment.

"That sounds really cool," Ron declared. "You're thinking of going to the Yule Ball as a dinosaur?"

"Well, didn't your dad say that wizards like to show off when they get together?" Hermione asked, blushing slightly. "I thought that would work..."

"I whole-heartedly agree with this idea," Dean contributed. "And – wait, hold on, I know you, Hermione. You've already looked up the spell to colour your feathers, right?"

"I couldn't find one that worked on parts of an animal," Hermione replied. "I did get one that works on clothes, but I think I'll just have to use makeup paints or something."

Dean turned to study Ron carefully, then nodded to himself.

"...okay, now I'm worried?" Ron said, a little nervously. "What does that mean?"

Harry sat back a bit, deciding that he probably wasn't going to be finishing his Defence homework until this was over.

"Go and get your dress robes," Dean told Ron. "If you don't like maroon, they're not going to be maroon."

It took a few minutes for Ron to come back down, holding his bundled-up dress robes like he didn't want anyone to get too good of a look at them – Harry could see maroon and some fluffy lace – but Dean went upstairs too, and vanished for several minutes longer than Ron had.

"...he is coming back, right?" Ron asked eventually. "He was rummaging in his stuff, but he must have found it by now."

"There's only one way out of the dorm room stairs," Neville said.

"Unless he flies out," Harry added, carefully filling out another bit of the spell diagram they were doing for homework. "Hmm… next bit is what to do if someone has a Protego shield up. Could I just say hit them with my tail?"

"Would your tail go through a Protego spell?" Neville asked.

Harry shrugged, but then looked over to the stairs as Dean came back down.

He'd brought with him his latest big box of pencils, plus a pad of white paper, and put the paper down on the table (in about the only clear space) before unboxing the pencils and sketching a few colours.

"So the idea is, we use magic to re-colour your robes," he explained. "If the main problem is that they're maroon, that is."

"I'm not a hundred percent sold on the lace, either," Ron said, snorting. "But the maroon is the big problem."

"Well, then, what colour would work better for you?" Dean asked, holding up the paper.

There was a big swatch of Ron's hair colour, and next to it were three or four shaded-in colours. One was a bright forest green, another was blue, and then there was a sort of deep purple.

Ron looked at them, then at his robes, and unfolded them to look more closely. His little animated griffin statuette fell out of them, spun around in mid-air until it was able to start hovering, and zipped up to glare at him.

"Sorry," Ron apologized. "I didn't realize you were there."

The griffin cocked its head, then seemed to accept that as an apology and sat on the table.

"Wondered why I hadn't seen him for a week," Ron added. "Um… the green, I think?"

Hermione had obviously worked out where this was going, and she had her wand out already. She waved it in a careful movement – sort of two circles with the same downstroke – and then tapped the collar of the robes. "Pigmento fabricae."

A sweep of forest green spread from the point her wand had touched, leaching down the robes as if it were soaking into the fabric. The first few shades of change moved quickly, then the greener colours followed slowly behind, and within ten seconds or so the whole of the robes were like a spectrum – from bright green right at the top down to a sort of brunette at the wrists and maroon at the base of the fabric.

After another ten seconds or so, Neville coughed.

"Is it going to move any more than that?" he asked.

"I… don't think so," Hermione replied. "I should have remembered – um – don't wizard clothes usually have a spell on them to make them colour safe?"

"Well, now I look sort of like a Christmas tree," Ron said, inspecting them. "The good thing is it's still better than just maroon everywhere."

It was next Saturday that Harry went to get his robes fitted, and Dean tagged along as well to sort out how he didn't have any yet either.

Sirius was only too happy to Floo them through into the Leaky Cauldron, and to accompany them to make sure nobody decided that they were terminally lost Muggles or something, and Harry got his first sight of Diagon Alley at Christmas.

Much to his delight, it was snowing. It wasn't snowing anywhere else in London, but it was snowing in Diagon Alley – just a light, glittery dusting that rested on window tops and made the air look pleasantly clean.

It was also a bit less busy than Harry had expected, perhaps because it was still two weeks until Christmas, and they were halfway to Madam Malkins' before Harry suddenly spotted a familiar face.

"Remus!" he said brightly. "How are you?"

Remus still had some marks from his fight in the summer, but he looked a lot better, and they spent about ten minutes catching up even though Harry had been mirror-calling Remus a couple of times a week and Sirius had been over to visit several times.

Two of the other werewolves were with Remus, who they kept referring to as 'Dad' - something that made Remus roll his eyes but look quite pleased anyway – and when Harry asked what that made Harry there were some confused frowns as everyone tried to work it out.

"…a dragon," Dean said eventually. "I think that's the only sensible answer."

"That'll do," said the really big werewolf – Harry couldn't actually remember his name, if it had ever been said while he was around, and it felt sort of awkward to ask. "We're doing Christmas shopping."

"Greyback said Christmas was a human invention and not worth celebrating," the sallow-cheeked witch added. "Which in hindsight was stupid, we're humans."

"Well, I'll come and enjoy it with you," Sirius suggested. "I'd ask if Harry and Dean here wanted to come along, but I think they'll be busy – that's why we're getting dress robes."

"Boxing day?" Harry suggested, then shook his head. "No, the Yule Ball might go on for ages. So maybe the day after that."

Everyone decided that that was at least worth thinking about, and then (and somewhat belatedly) Harry finally got to Madam Malkins.

She had a smile for him and said something about giving her lots of interesting challenges over the last few years, and then Harry spent about an hour with Madam Malkin trying to work out what would be a good colour for him and how to best reflect what he was like. They considered and rejected cloth-of-gold, bright blue and a deep burgundy red, while the attempt at using fuchsia only resulted in them all deciding that it was proof that Harry's-scales black didn't actually go with everything after all.

Dean, being an arty sort, had come with sketches of what he thought would be good and was in and out in ten minutes. Then he started helping to pin down what Harry should wear, and finally they decided on something that was a lot like his normal robes only with a nice deep bottle-green colour to them.

It did feel like an awful lot of fuss as far as Harry was concerned, but at least he now had the dress robes he was after.

The next Monday, at breakfast, Neville got a letter.

It asked him to help someone sneak into the Yule Ball (the exact words it used were 'openly smuggle') and wasn't signed, but Luna came over two minutes later to see if Neville had decided to agree yet anyway. She said she was going to be doing a news piece on the Yule Ball and that for some reason nobody had got back to her about press access, so she thought she'd see if she could get an 'in' that way.

Harry suspected it was because he'd mentioned it at their club meeting a few days ago. Now that it had started, though, lots of those sorts of working-out-useful-setups began taking place, and it seemed like it had released a lot of pressure on people to get the asking right.

Or maybe it was that Luna had sort of pointed out that it didn't have to be boys asking girls but could be the other way around.

Whatever the reason, as the end of term approached it seemed like just about everyone was either taking a date to the ball or was taking someone to the ball who was interested in going to see what the ball was like (or in the case of some third years they were being taken by someone else's dates, and then planning on reshuffling once they were actually through the doors).

Harry did sort of wonder when the people who weren't going to be going to the Yule Ball would actually be eating. Normally the Christmas Feast was sort of the big moment in the middle of the Christmas Holiday, but the Yule Ball was going to be taking its place, and while most people who were staying at Hogwarts (and there were a lot of people staying at Hogwarts) were going to be going to the Yule Ball there had to be some people who were staying but who didn't plan on going to the Yule Ball.

Somewhere.

Ron hadn't said if he was going with anyone, though. And nor had Hermione, but they were the only two Harry could think of – Parvati Patil had asked Dean out to the ball that Saturday and Harry himself had ended up involved in letting Tanisis see what all the fuss was about. (It was hard for Harry to really call it a date, as they'd both been very clear what was going on.)

On Monday the nineteenth – the first day which properly felt like the Christmas Holiday, as it was the first day they should have a lesson but didn't – Ginny came up to them in the common room.

Well, mostly she came up to Ron, Fred and George, as far as Harry could tell. The rest of them were sort of just incidentally there.

"I got it!" she said.

"Got what?" Fred asked. "Galloping Glumption?"

"That's not a real thing," Hermione sighed.

"Not yet it's not," George replied. "How does feeling really awful only when you have an urgent appointment you forgot about sound?"

"Oi!" Ginny said. "I mean I got it. You know, the Animagus thing."

"Oh, you did?" Ron asked. "Cool. What are you?"

"Well..." she began, and frowned. "I don't actually know, not for sure."

She put her hands on the table and demonstrated, showing the usual Animagus-style blur-of-change-which-didn't-look-instant-but-was, and then there was a sleek bird of prey standing on the floor.

A moment later there was another blur, and she was back to Ginny.

"Whoops," she added. "Still getting used to this."

"If you want to end up on the table you have to focus your transformation on your hands," Ron told her helpfully.

"Yes, thank you," his sister muttered, then did another blur-transformation. This time she got the end location right, ending up as a sleek bird of prey standing on the table, and raised a wing to inspect it.

"Is that a falcon, an eagle, or what?" Neville asked. "I'm not very good with them."

"I think she's a falcon," Hermione replied. "Where's that nature book?"

Harry went to get it, flipping through the pages on his way back down the stairs, then passed it to Hermione and she began looking through as well.

"I think… yes," she said, eventually. "The colour of the head feathers is wrong but that's got to be her Animagus tell. She's a peregrine falcon."

"Aren't they the fastest birds in the world?" Dean asked. "Except for ones like phoenixes and stuff which are magic."

There were three more transformation blurs in quick succession. Ginny turned back to human and found herself standing on the table, said 'bugger', changed back to falcon and then back to human but this time she was on the floor properly.

"Language!" Ron said.

Everyone looked at him.

"What?" he asked. "Everyone does it when I say something like that."

On Christmas Day itself, Harry made sure to sleep in as much as possible in case the Yule Ball went on very late.

That didn't actually mean he got much extra sleep – everyone started opening their presents as soon as they woke up, and that roused Harry – but that was fine, because at least he'd not got up earlier than anyone else had. Some of the presents were real surprises, as well, and Harry was particularly pleased by a penknife from Sirius with all sorts of bizarre magical attachments.

He was sort of aware that Muggle penknives, or Swiss Army knives (even though they seemed like an odd sort of weapon for the Swiss Army) could have a lot of attachments, but when you could tease out one of the bits of metal and unfold it into a chair that was the sort of thing that only a magical one could do.

And the telescope attachment was helpful as well.

It was an odd Christmas in general, though, because it was a Christmas where the whole of the feeling of it was that it was the lead-up to the Yule Ball. Christmas Lunch was still very nice, but people kept reminding one another not to have too much or they'd be too full at the Yule Ball.

Professor Dumbledore reminded everyone that the Yule Ball was that evening, and that if you turned up for it next evening you would be sadly disappointed. He also said that if you turned up for it last evening then he hoped you didn't feel too embarrassed.

Outside, everyone had fun in the snow for hours – Ginny in particular seemed to be spending almost as much time transformed as human, getting used to being able to fly, and Harry couldn't really blame her.

Flying was pretty good.

About three in the afternoon things got a lot more chaotic as Nora plus Olly, Sally and Gary arrived, and a confused snowball fight developed where Harry was never entirely sure what was going on except that snowballs seemed to be everywhere at once.

It seemed an awful lot like the three dragonets were working together, with Sally distracting people by flying at them before Olly and Gary dropped big snowballs on them – snowballs which Hagrid was making but which kept being stolen by dragons before they could actually be thrown – and Harry wasn't sure if that was what you'd expect from a normal dragon of that age or not.

He was well aware that he wasn't anything like being a 'normal' dragon, but he was also well aware that he hadn't ever been a dragon of that age. Though admittedly it was sometimes hard to remember that.

The girls started to vanish about four thirty, three and a half hours before the start of the Ball. Harry was aware that it was something to do with how long it took girls to get ready, and at first he wondered what they could be doing for three and a half hours before realizing that it was probably something to do with how they'd be helping each other. So each individual person wasn't having all that time spent on them, but was using a lot of it to help the others do their prep work.

That was Harry's guess, anyway.

Then he asked Hermione, just to make sure, and she gave him an odd look.

"No?" she said. "It's because it's getting really dark. We won't be able to see anything soon, sunset was nearly an hour ago."

Harry had to admit that that was a good point – he could still see sort of okay but humans had bad eyesight – and over the next ten or twenty minutes just about everyone else went inside.

As for Harry himself, he was last of all, but that was because he'd helped Nora and Hagrid carry three now-snoozing dragonets back to where they were going to be spending the night.

"They will probably play later," Nora said, thinking about it. "They're just tired for now."

"Yes," Hagrid agreed, speaking in Dragonish as well. "They like snow."

"They're right!" Nora said sagely. "Snow is good."

One thing that Harry could certainly say about putting on dress robes as a boy (or a male, if that was the difference) was that it was a lot quicker.

Girls had to do their hair, and make sure that everything was just right, but for someone like Dean or Neville or Harry all you really had to do was make sure your robes weren't too creased.

And perhaps comb your (much shorter) hair, if you had it.

Then everyone who was going with someone else in Gryffindor started meeting up in the common room, ready to head downstairs, and everyone who wasn't going with someone else in Gryffindor tried to remember where they said they'd meet the person they were going to the ball with. That led to Harry getting slightly worried about whether he'd remembered right, and after worrying for a bit he sent Ruth off with a message to Tanisis to the effect that he was going to be waiting near the top of the grand staircase.

Unfortunately for Harry, that got noticed, and for the next few minutes he was sending off Patronuses with messages for various other people who couldn't remember their prepared meeting-up point. It was nice to be able to help, but Harry did sort of feel a bit put-upon, and he was still wondering who exactly Ron was going to be going with.

As it turned out, though, Ron's partner for the Ball was quite eye-catching.

In hindsight, Harry should have realized that it had to be Hermione, and he had heard her talking about colouring her feathers. But the way Hermione looked as Clever Girl was something else entirely, with a gradient from green to iridescent blue running from her head to her long tail – and with a kind of light-and-dark ripple as well, so it looked like every third row of feathers was much paler than the rest.

"What do you think?" Sally-Anne asked, as Hermione did a twirl – after making sure there was nobody close enough to get knocked over by her tail, of course. "We spent ages working on it!"

"After making sure that it wouldn't wear off if she transformed back," Lavender Brown added. "Hermione reminded us about that. Twice."

"Wicked," Ron summarized.

"I think that might be a slightly offensive thing to say about a witch, mate," Neville joked.

Because a quarter of the school was in Gryffindor and another quarter was in Ravenclaw, almost a sixth of the total pairs of Ball attendees who weren't going with people in their own house were meeting up on the seventh floor landing outside the doors to the two common rooms.

Combined with all the groups of people who were going with people in their own houses, it meant that Harry got to see quite a lot of Wizarding dress robe fashion all at once over the next five or ten minutes. Very occasionally there was someone who seemingly hadn't made much of an effort, like one Sixth-Year boy who just seemed to have put glitter on his robes, but then again Harry was no good at fashion (and it did look shiny, so there was that) but more often it was quite impressive.

Luna's dress in particular was something that was simply impossible for any Muggle designer to make – or at any rate any Muggle designer not allowed to use large numbers of nearly-invisible wires – because it had a two-layered skirt, thin silky white over a thick and quite eye-catching purple, and the outer layer was tethered around the edge with twenty-four floating dirigible plums to give it a thoroughly gravity-defying image.

It didn't exactly coordinate with Neville's outfit, but it didn't seem to clash either. Though after the World Cup Harry was a little less sure that wizards understood that colours clashing was actually a bad thing.

Maybe it wasn't?

"Any idea where Ginny is?" Ron asked. "I asked Hermione but she hasn't said anything."

Hermione rolled her eyes, and Harry looked askance at Ron for a moment before realizing he was grinning.

"Well, she'll turn up," the Weasley added. "At some point, anyway."

The flow of students exiting Ravenclaw Tower was slowing down, now, and Harry was finally able to satisfy his curiosity about how Tanisis would end up dressing up for the ball.

The answer was sort of like the way Egyptians were dressed in history books, the sort of stereotypical way, but it wasn't quite like that. Tanisis had a headdress on that draped down both sides of her head, but there wasn't any of the really obvious eye makeup that Harry thought was called kohl.

Then she had a dress that was made to be a bit like a network – it reminded Harry of a string vest except that all the strands were covered with tube-shaped beads and there were circular beads on the junctions – that went from her shoulders to her waist. It looked like it must have taken a long time to get on, unless magic was involved, but magic was involved so that was probably what was going on.

"I asked my parents what would be a good outfit to wear," Tanisis explained, raising a paw and showing the bangle around it – one of a set of four, Harry noticed, one just above each foot. "Apparently this is an old design."

"It's certainly going to be unusual," Harry said. "And eye catching, with all the beads."

He shrugged a bit. "It's more effort than I went to."

"I think that's how it's meant to work," Su Li contributed. "Girls have to spend hours and hours but get to be really excited, boys get to spend about ten minutes but have to be nervous."

People were heading down the stairs, now, and Harry noticed in a slightly interested sort of way that Su was heading down the stairs along with Sally-Anne Perks. For a moment he wondered if their dates were going to be in Hufflepuff or Slytherin, then he thought about it a bit more and realized that that didn't have to be the case.

Nothing about the rules for the Yule Ball had said you had to have a boy going with a girl, after all.

When they reached the ground floor, everyone had to start lining up outside so they could go through the doors into the Great Hall in a line. Harry didn't mind, but he imagined that quite a lot of other students would be getting quite cold – Tanisis might be quite cold with what she was wearing – and he was about to ask until some of the older students started quietly offering Warming Charms.

Somehow it seemed like there were more students queueing to get into the Yule Ball than there normally were in the whole castle, because of all the different-coloured outfits and the way everyone was in a line instead of going back and forth a bit at a time.

Harry could see Draco, who looked sort of a bit like a vicar in his dress robes, and then a bit further along there was James from the dungeons and dragons club who was accompanied by one of the Beauxbatons girls. He also happened to catch sight of June, who appeared to have braided her fur, and who was shifting her weight a little in her place in line alongside someone who Harry assumed was from Durmstrang.

"I wonder what's causing all the delay?" Dean said, sotto voce. (Harry liked to think of it as sotto voce, which sounded much more intricate than quietly.) "Any ideas?"

"I think maybe they didn't expect this many of us," Tanisis suggested, turning and rising onto her hind legs for a moment to see just how far the queue extended behind them. "It's going to take us five minutes just to all get in once they open the doors properly."

Her paws crunched back down onto the packed snow, and she checked for a moment to make sure she hadn't splashed anyone. Fortunately everyone's outfits were fine, and she stretched in a feline manner – which was entirely understandable. "Maybe ten."

"Blimey, I hope Fred and George are somewhere near the front," Ron added, in the same tone as the rest of them, though presumably a lot of people had noticed when Tanisis reared up. "If they're bored for long enough the Ball could end up sort of more exciting than it's meant to be."

At that point, fortunately, there was a ripple of movement at the front of the line. Harry could mostly tell because Hagrid and Madame Maxime seemed to be among the first to enter, and you could see Hagrid moving from a mile off.

Actually Harry could see Hagrid from several miles off in the right conditions, but for most people it was closer to one.

As far as Harry could tell, neither Fred nor George actually did get bored.

He based this conclusion on the lack of explosions.

The Great Hall, when he actually reached it, had been significantly redesigned. Instead of the four long tables for the four Houses that normally filled the space and the slightly smaller High Table, there were dozens of smaller twelve-seater round tables in a kind of double layer around the edge of the Hall.

The floating candles had gone as well, and lanterns had taken their place – bobbing up and down over each of the tables – which had a surprising effect on how the Hall looked, it even seemed to look bigger.

Then Harry looked again and realized it was bigger. A bit, anyway.

"Maybe they weren't expecting quite this many people," June guessed, in front of him.

The Champions and their dates – Cedric with Cho Chang, Fleur with Roger Davies, and Krum with someone Harry had never met before – took places up at a table along with some of the Triwizard judges (though not all of them, because having both Madam Maxime and Hagrid at the same table with ten other people would strain the amount of space people had), and Harry looked around for a moment before spotting a nearby table that was still about half-empty.

There was a menu, with about half-a-dozen options for each course, and Harry looked through it in interest.

"What do you think would be nice?" Tanisis asked.

"Well, I could have any of these," Harry replied. "Or the menu. Sometimes paper can be quite tasty."

The sphinx sniggered, caught by surprise, then nodded to June as she took her own place at the same table. Neville had come over as well, along with Luna, but the rest of Harry's friends were elsewhere.

He supposed that was how it was supposed to work, though, so said hello to June's Durmstrang date.

At that point, though, something caught his eye.

"Hey, Tanisis?" he asked, nodding. "Is it me or is that Tyler?"

"Where?" Tanisis asked, craning her neck a little – she was sitting on the chair in a quite feline way, so she had more height than most – then saw where Harry was pointing. "I think you're right."

Harry realized that, in hindsight, it made an awful lot of sense that Tyler would bring Ginny. It was just like him to try and slip past the rules, and with how many third- and second- and even a few first-years there were here already it would be a lot of work for the teachers to actually tell when someone didn't have a proper date (or 'date') to get them in.

And it looked like the teachers were mostly trying to enjoy themselves just as much as the students right now, so nobody was bothering to check.

It was another few minutes before everyone was seated, and Professor Dumbledore tapped his glass with a fork before rising.

"Please allow me to welcome you all to the Yule Ball," he said. "I would like to say a few words."

He lifted up the menu from next to his plate, opened it, examined it carefully, and then sat down again.

"Pork chops with mash," he said, and pork chops with mash duly appeared on his plate. "Thank you. Please feel free to begin eating."

"Is he always like that?" June's date asked, with an accent Harry couldn't quite place, as everyone began looking through their menus again.

"Salmon en croute," decided the warg herself. "And yes, I think he always is. Sometimes he's even sillier."

She took out her wand and tapped her knife. "Mobilis."

Harry watched, interested, as the knife rose a little way into the air before starting to cut the newly-arrived pastry up into pieces.

Tanisis started doing much the same thing after her own choice (of pork chops) appeared, and for a moment Harry wondered if that was what qualified as 'best behaviour' for quadruped table manners.

Then he ordered himself some risotto, because it sounded tasty.

"It is sort of strange here," the Durmstrang boy said, most of an hour later.

He'd said his name was Alexander, but then a bit later he'd mentioned an anecdote where he was called Sasha, and it sounded like Sasha was a nickname but it was a funny sort of nickname for someone called Alexander.

Maybe it was spelled Aleksander, like he'd seen in a book once?

"Durmstrang has a lot of space, so it sprawls out," he added. "Here everything is in the same very tall building. But that also means we have much bigger grounds, we can go a lot further before we might meet Muggles."

"Britain is sort of crowded," June agreed. "But this is a very empty bit of Britain, as bits of Britain go."

"You know that the British Ministry of Magic once made a law that nobody could play Quidditch within two hundred miles of a Muggle town?" Harry asked. "I don't think they really know how far a mile was."

"I think we could actually do that," Alexander mused.

"Where are you located?" Tanisis said, then. "Sorry if that's rude, but – you know where Hogwarts is?"

"Well, mostly," he said. "We get in the ship, the ship goes through the whirlpool, and tada, we are at Hogwarts. But it must be Scotland, even if the days here in midwinter are longer than the days at Durmstrang."

"But Viktor Krum is Bulgarian," Harry frowned, then took another mouthful of risotto. He waited until he'd finished it, making sure all his thoughts were in order and stuff, then continued. "And Bulgaria's surprisingly far south compared to Britain."

"How far south is it compared to Britain?" June asked.

"It's down near Greece," Harry replied. "We're further north than Edinburgh, and Edinburgh is about the same as Moscow."

"That is surprising," Neville agreed. "You really delivered there."

"Is it some kind of secret?" Harry added. "That you don't even want other wizards to know?"

"Well, the headmaster, he says so," Alexander replied, spreading his hands. "But I think it is just so that you do not work out that Durmstrang is a fleet of ships."

"A fleet of ships?" June repeated, baffled. "But… how would that work?"

"The history books always say that Durmstrang is a castle," Tanisis said.

"Silly." Luna shook her head. "Haven't you ever heard of a forecastle?"

"That's just a joke," Alexander added, chuckling faintly.

Harry had to admit, it was a really good trick.

Now he wasn't sure if it was a joke or if saying it was a joke was the joke. He might have said where (or what) Durmstrang actually was, and they still wouldn't know.

AN:

Interestingly, this particular chapter has subsidiary material.

If you want to know what Harry might have discussed with the publican, a possible conversation can be found in the fic Sunset's Isekai – specifically chapter 33, Weyr Drinks.