Magic of the All Hallows Eve

Stinks and Speculations

With Harry on top of the class, and a few big time pranks, it was all very worth it. The most fun however, occurred after the 'project' and the 'saving the day' on the whole school, but nonsuspiciously affecting the ego of ickle daddy's boy and his fat baboons. He had taken a bit of help from Gred and Forge as they called themselves. But it was really easy to define which was which! Fred's face was more round, George's cheekbones more defined, and his nose stuck down just a bit, unlike Fred's wider nose*. Not that he hanged around with them too much anyways, just enough to notice such subtleties.

He had taken it up to himself for it. He'd taken at least 27 normal looking pieces of parchment  and placed them under the tables of all the houses. He's thought of Slytherin only, but then it was better not to bicker on the bitter bickerings for who's better.

And then it happened just after the plates were clean after breakfast on the last day of term. Boom! (The sound was added for dramatic effect much later) and the parchments started materialising into mini-dragons, chimeras, griffins and hippogriffs and they started flying all around on people's heads and then bursting with the worst dungbombs Hogwarts had ever seen. And he'd made sure for 3 of them to burst particularly on Malfoy. The stink that followed could be smelled till Hogsmeade, at least, figuratively. The students reeked of the foul smell all throughout the trip, with no cleaning of freshening charms doing any better (courtesy of Marauders Co.)

As always, Harry was out of this while packing his trunk and eating the breakfast Blippy brought him in his dorm. He found an empty compartment which hopefully would still remain empty for the rest of the trip. Until. . .

"Mind if I sit here?", the Granger girl asked him.

"Until and unless you don't smell", he chided what he thought jokingly.

"Ok then! On with your stupid pranks and in no way you're gonna seemingly seem to know the counterspell, would you? You don't smell at all!", she angrily said and sat anyways.

"Man! The smell! I should have rethought it before", and with a flick at her and a swish in the air, the smell was as if it never existed.

"So you did do it!", the Granger girl snarled again.

"I can give a Veritaserum testimony with at least 7 elves as witnesses along with Neville Longbottom to prove that I didn't 'execute' the prank", he said smugly.

She coughed which could seemingly have sounded like 'liar'.

"I did the planning part. The horrible dungbombs were their idea", he added as an afterthought.

"So the animation spells. . .", she mused.

". . .were the courtesy of this brilliant wizard in front of you", and he did a bow with a grace greater than Tom Cruise.

She just rolled her eyes as hard as she could.

"Anyways, I've never thanked you enough for what you did, you know. . . That day", she said and looked down a bit.

"Hermione! Sorry, can I call you that?", she nodded, "You're sticking around with me instead of the others just because of that? Come on! I just saved you because you'd have died. And honestly, it was no big deal", he shrugged.

"Oh, of course", she huffed. "I couldn't find that crazy fire spell you did, but the way you controlled it, I can only dream I can compare to that"

"Come on runner-up, you're like you already knew everything before even starting school, even though you got to know magic at just 11", he said, arms crossed.

"Well that's because I got to study for one whole year — my birthday's in September", she added at Harry's look.

"Well, yeah. I hanged around you in hopes of teaching me what and how you did what you did", she said after an awkward silence.