NIGHTMARE ₁, Harry Potter °

xiv. 𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘢 𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳'𝘴 𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘱

RITA SKEETER'S SCOOP

— ( chapter fourteen. ) —

Everybody got up late on Boxing Day. The Gryffindor common room was much quieter than it had been lately, many yawns punctuating the lazy conversations. Hermione's hair was bushy again; she confessed to Harry that she had used liberal amounts of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion on it for the ball, "but it's way too much bother to do every day," she said matter-of-factly, scratching a purring Crookshanks behind the ears.

Ron and Hermione seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement not to discuss their argument. They were being quite friendly to each other, though oddly formal. Ron and Harry wasted no time in telling Hermione about the conversation they had overheard between Madame Maxime and Hagrid, but Hermione didn't seem to find the news that Hagrid was a half-giant nearly as shocking as Ron did. However, Aurora and Harry had not come to such an agreement, the former point blank ignoring Harry's very existence, only engaging with Ron and Hermione.

"Well, I thought he must be," Hermione said, shrugging. "I knew he couldn't be pure giant because they're about twenty feet tall. But honestly, all this hysteria about giants. They can't all be horrible....It's the same sort of prejudice that people have toward werewolves....It's just bigotry, isn't it?"

Ron looked as though he would have liked to reply scathingly, but perhaps he didn't want another row, because he contented himself with shaking his head disbelievingly while Hermione wasn't looking.

It was time now to think of the homework they had neglected during the first week of the holidays. Everybody seemed to be feeling rather flat now that Christmas was over - everybody except Aurora, that is, who was starting (once again) to feel slightly nervous.

The trouble was that June the twenty-fourth looked a lot closer from this side of Christmas, and Aurora still hadn't found any cure to the continuous countdown in her head. Nothing seemed to stunt it. And when sleep eventually caught up with her, it was soon followed with anxiety and fear as the day drew closer and closer with harrying pace.

Harry had not forgotten the hint that Cedric had given him, but his less-than-friendly feelings toward Cedric just now meant that he was keen not to take his help if he could avoid it. In any case, it seemed to him that if Cedric had really wanted to give Harry a hand, he would have been a lot more explicit. He, Harry, had told Cedric exactly what was coming in the first task - and Cedric's idea of a fair exchange had been to tell Harry to take a bath. Well, he didn't need that sort of rubbishy help - not from someone who kept walking down corridors hand in hand with Cho, anyway. And so the first day of the new term arrived, and Aurora set off to lessons, weighed down with books, parchment, and quills as usual, but also with the lurking worry of this impending countdown ticking away in the back of her mind.

Snow was still thick upon the grounds, and the greenhouse windows were covered in condensation so thick that they couldn't see out of them in Herbology. Nobody was looking forward to Care of Magical Creatures much in this weather, though as Ron said, the skrewts would probably warm them up nicely, either by chasing them, or blasting off so forcefully that Hagrid's cabin would catch fire.