All throughout the week leading up to Christmas, every time he saw Harry and Hermione, Ron kept trying to spring questions on Hermione about who she was going with to the Yule Ball, as if hoping to startle an answer out of her by asking when she least expected it.

It was one of these times, as Harry and Hermione walked across the entrance hall to the Great Hall for supper, that Ron walked up and asked, "Hermione — who are you going to the ball with?"

Like every other time he'd asked so far, Hermione merely replied, "I'm not telling you, Ronald. We'll just have another row, and I for one am enjoying the Christmas season far too much for that."

None of this was unusual in and of itself, as it was already the third time he'd asked her that just that day, but what was different this time was that they almost immediately heard from behind them a drawling, "You're joking, Weasel! You're not telling me someone's asked that to the ball? Not the long-incisored mudblood?"

Ron whipped around with his wand out, as if he hoped that by proving his chivalry that Hermione would admit that she'd been lying this whole time about already having a date, and finally just agree to go with him already.

"Think you're going to try to duel me, do you?" sneered the snake at Ron and his wand.

Harry and Hermione took this as their cue to exit scene posthaste, and quickly scampered into the Great Hall so they couldn't be associated with anything that happened next.

As they sped through the doors leading into the Great Hall and made the turn towards the Gryffindor table, they heard out in the entrance hall behind them, "Furnunculus!" and "Densaugeo!" Not risking pausing to see if they could hear anything else, Harry and Hermione increased their pace to the Gryffindor table, sitting down as soon as they found seats. But when they looked around to see who they'd sat next to, they realized that in their haste not to be associable with the duel going on in the entrance hall outside, they'd gone to the wrong table, and were sitting with Cho Chang to the left of Harry, Luna Lovegood to the right of Hermione, and Fleur Delacour and a few other Beauxbatons across from them.

" 'I, 'Arry," said the Veela cheerfully but in slight surprise. "I didn't realize students were allowed to sit at different 'ouse tables zan zeir own, even if zey are champions."

"Oh, umm…actually no, no one normally does — we were just trying to avoid punishment by association from a duel going on outside in the entrance hall between my former friend and my greatest student archnemesis," said Harry apologetically. "We can leave if you'd like, our table's just behind us."

"Not at all, not at all!" replied Fleur cheerfully. "We are more zan 'appy to 'ave you join us! I was just surprised to see you, zat's all. And by ze way, I sincerely apologize for not taking you seriously and calling you a little boy and too young to compete after your name first came out of ze goblet — I was being 'asty and you were magnificent 'andling your dragon in ze first task, and are clearly worthy of being in zis tournament."

"Uh, thank you," said Harry awkwardly, blushing slightly at the praise, before quickly changing the subject away from himself and asking her, "So how do you like it here at Hogwarts?"

"Well, zis 'Ogwarts' food is a lot 'eavier zan I'm used to in France, but I'm coming to like it," answered Fleur truthfully. "But I do 'ave to make sure I don't eat too much of it, or I won't be able to fit into my dress robes come Christmas."

Harry sincerely doubted the trim witch was going to have any such problems, but as his date was sitting next to him, he wisely kept this to himself — if he was going to compliment any witch's trim, healthy figure, it was going to be his best friend and Yule Ball date's.

But before he could reply anything, their conversation was interrupted by Snape jumping up from his seat at the high table and quickly sweeping through the Great Hall and out into the entrance hall. From whispers they heard around them now that they stopped to listen, it sounded like after both of their first few spells had missed, Ron and Malfoy had decided to just attack each other fisticuffs style in a knockdown, drag-out brawl. So now Draco was pounding the redhead into the flagged stone floor where Harry and Hermione had hurriedly left them to avoid becoming unfairly associated. And based on the fact it was Crabbe and Goyle who were standing at the high table next to where Snape had up until a few moments before been sitting, the two had finally come wandering through the entrance hall on their own quest for sustenance, and saw their master being attacked — even if said 'attacker' was a bloody and bruised heap beneath their master. At which point they had hurried as quickly as their lumbering strides could carry them to tell the chief Snake that there was someone hurting his pet snakelet, and therefore someone he could throw in detention.

They heard nothing more of what happened once Snape intervened, until they finally returned to the Gryffindor common room several hours later, having stopped by the library and an empty classroom to practice their dancing some more between finishing supper and making it back up to Gryffindor Tower.

But walking into the common room, they were almost immediately assaulted by an irate Ron Weasley shouting at them, "Where the bloody hell were you two?!" Turning his attention directly to Hermione he continued, "I was getting my arse kicked trying to defend your honor, and you completely disappeared!" Rounding on Harry he added, "And you! Not stepping up to help me defend her honor, making me do it all by myself! I got all bloody and bruised, and had to spend an hour in the hospital wing, and got a weeks' worth of detentions with Snape over Christmas break for it!"

Hermione rolled her eyes. "He calls me a mudblood every other other sentence — get over it already. If you payed any attention to me at all, you'd know I don't care what that pompous prick calls me. I've never once asked you to defend me when he's called me a mudblood, and if you really knew me, you'd know I'm more than perfectly capable of handling him myself should I so choose. Not to brag, but I'm kind of the smartest person in this castle."

"That's not bragging, that's just stating the obvious truth," replied Harry to Hermione, before turning to the redhead. "And you know fighting isn't allowed in the castle, so if you're going to do it, for Merlin's sake at least make sure you win, and if at all possible win so hard and fast that you can be long gone by the time anyone notices anything happened."

Ron stared at them in disbelief, clearly having expected sympathy from them for his heroic and noble act, not a reprimand and advice on how to fight better from someone who hadn't even stayed to fight in the first place.

"But— but—!" he eventually stuttered out. "He called you the worst insult there is!"

"But it's just a word. It only has power over you if you let it," explained Hermione patiently. "The same as 'Voldemort' is just a name. It's up to you whether you let yourself be controlled by it or not. I choose not to, be it mudblood or Voldemort. Also, I can think of several words worse than mudblood, at least from the muggle world, and almost exclusively used about females — not that I'm going to repeat any of them ever, but I would ignore them as well if Draco were to discover and call me any of them." Turning to Harry, she added, "Oh — and Harry, if you don't know the words I'm referring to due to your — unique — muggle upbringing, ask me later."

Ron noticeably flinched at both of her uses of You-Know-Who's name, and gaped (however briefly the first time due to having to immediately wince again afterwards for 'Voldemort') at both of her uses of the slur for muggleborn, proving her point perfectly.

But before Ron could actually come up with anything to say to Hermione's response, there was a pecking on the common room window, and Harry and Hermione looked over to see an owl sitting on the window sill.

"Isn't that — ?" asked Hermione. It looked to her like the owl they'd used to write to Sirius after the first task, but she didn't want Ron knowing that and thinking he was on good enough terms with them to find out what Sirius had written back.

Harry nodded, walking over to the window and opening it up. Taking the letter off the owl's leg before closing the window back, he looked over at Hermione and nodded shortly again to let her it was in fact from Sirius.

Leaving Ron without a word, Hermione walked over to Harry and said quietly, "We've still got ten minutes before curfew, if we want to find a nearby vacant classroom…."

So the two of them quickly walked back over to the portrait hole they'd just recently came through, and disappeared back out into the castle. Finding the nearest unlocked classroom, they entered and unrolled Sirius's letter, reading it together. Unfortunately it didn't tell them much, other than that Sirius had been going to suggest the Conjunctivitus Curse that Krum had used, and that he was of the same mind as Hermione in that there were still plenty of opportunities for whoever entered Harry's name to hurt him. With nothing to write him back about, as nothing out of the ordinary had happened since the first task, Harry simply rolled the letter back up and stuck it in his robes, before they returned to the common room to hang out until it was time to go to bed.