Chapter Text
“I’ve already told you!” Hermione said very angrily. “I’m going with someone else!”
And she stormed off toward the girls’ dormitories again.
“She’s lying,” said Ron flatly.
“She’s not,” said Ginny quietly.
“Who is it, then?” said Ron sharply.
“I’m not telling you, it’s…”
Harry had stopped paying any attention to the conversation between the siblings. It had been a very painful fifteen minutes for him. His best friend was muddled in humiliation, and he was mired in heartbreak. Thankfully, it sounded as though his had gone better—his was in-private and kind, while Ron’s had a crowd and a look of disgust. Not to mention how his was just because Cedric Diggory had gotten to her first. Meanwhile, Fleur was apparently quite the free agent… albeit one with standards higher than Harry could go on his Firebolt.
That didn’t mean, of course, it didn’t hurt. He liked Cho—had since last year—and she’d told him no. He also felt miserable because he’d grown a severe dislike for Cedric in less than half an hour. He didn’t like not liking people, especially for petty grievances. But here he was, no better than the boy next to him.
As Ginny stood up, mumbling something about going to dinner, Harry concluded that he could wallow about Cho another time. He was a Triwizard Champion (much to his own chagrin), and he needed a date to the Yule Ball. He needed one for himself, but also for Ron. They’d only just recently managed to patch things up between them, and making Ron jealous again would possibly undo all of that.
“What’s gotten into them?” Ron demanded, looking at Harry with a face of sheer disbelief. However, Harry had something better to do: Parvati and Lavender, giggling like they almost always were, had just climbed through the portrait hole. He chose to go for it.
“Wait here,” he said to Ron as he stood up. He strolled right on up to Parvati, who turned to look at him with eyes filled to the brim with a newfound excitement.
“Parvati!” Harry began, “Will you—wha—hey!”
It was before Harry could get another word out that he suddenly found himself being dragged away and into the very shadowy corner of the common room. And it wasn’t until his arms were let go of that he realized who his captors were.
“Hello, Harry!” the twins greeted.
“Let me go!” Harry hissed, dusting off his robes and looking fiercely around the shadowy corner to make sure Parvati hadn’t walked away. “I was in the middle of something!”
“We saw,” Fred said, leaning casually against the stone wall with a grin that spelled absolutely nothing but trouble.
“And as your deeply concerned teammates, friends, and academic seniors,” George added, slinging a heavy arm over Harry’s shoulder and steering him further into the dark, “we felt it our civic duty to stage an intervention.”
Harry frowned. “An intervention for what?”
“For our pockets, Harry,” Fred said, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “See, we’ve got a bit of a financial crisis on our hands. A tactical miscalculation, if you will.”
“Lee Jordan,” George explained, leaning in close, “we decided to bet fifty Galleons with him that the great Triwizard Champion would have the stones to ask the most terrifying girl in Hogwarts to the Yule Ball.”
Harry stared at them, a bad feeling blooming in his chest. “What? Who?”
“Lyra Malfoy, of course!” Fred and George said in unison.
Harry froze. His mind immediately cataloged the absolute disaster that was his history with Lyra Malfoy. It wasn’t as much a standard schoolyard rivalry as it was a three-year saga of highly coordinated, deeply petty psychological warfare.
First year had set the tone when she had strutted up to him on the Hogwarts Express, pale, pristine, and flanked by Crabbe and Goyle like an eleven-year-old mafia don, offering her hand and telling him he shouldn’t go making friends with the “wrong sort” while sneering at Ron in the seat across from him. When Harry had rejected her handshake, she seemed to have responded by dedicating her entire life to making him pay for it. She had tricked him into a midnight duel just to tip off Filch, nearly getting him eaten by a three-headed dog, and left him to fend for himself in the Forbidden Forest.
Second year was even worse. Her father had bought the entire Slytherin team pristine Nimbus 2001s just so she could be Seeker, and she promptly called Hermione a Mudblood in front of the Gryffindor and Slytherin teams. When the Chamber of Secrets opened, she had spent months floating around the corridors like a vindictive ghost, actively cheering the Basilisk attacks, but at least Harry made her look incredibly stupid when he still beat her to the Snitch that fall.
But last year, her pettiness had reached levels that bordered on theatric. After ignoring Hagrid's explicit instructions and getting her arm lightly scratched by Buckbeak the Hippogriff, she had worn a dramatic sling for two months. She had even gone so far as to dress up as a Dementor during a Quidditch match just to trigger his psychological trauma—a brilliant plan that had ended with Harry casting a massive Patronus that knocked her flat on her back in the mud.
And now, Fred and George wanted him to ask her to a formal dance.
“No,” Harry answered flatly, already beginning to try and maneuver around the two. “Now, if you’ll just let me get back to—”
But the twins were fast.
“Hold on, mate!” Fred hissed, and it sounded just slightly stern enough that Harry knew better than to fight. He stopped, looking between the two in confusion.
“You see, Harry,” George started quietly, “we got in a little over our heads on this one.”
“Why?” Harry asked. But then he realized the answer. “You don’t have fifty Galleons, do you?”
“Afraid not,” George sighed, looking rather downcast until he visibly shook the disappointment away and put back on that trademark smug look. “So, with that in mind, could you do us a grand favor on this one?”
Upon hearing their issue, Harry felt rather inclined to help. The Weasleys never had much to spare, and Harry knew Fred and George had been pouring every single Knut they owned into their joke shop prototypes. If they lost fifty Galleons to Lee, they’d be completely wiped out.
Harry sighed, his posture slumping. “Okay. But what if she’s already going with someone? The ball is only in a few days, she’s bound to have a date.”
Upon hearing his shift in tone, the twins visibly brightened, their gloomy expressions instantly vanishing.
“Ah, that’s the beauty of it, Harry!” George said, clicking his fingers. “Malfoy has turned down half the Slytherin dungeon. Word is she’s so up in her own aristocratic head about her worth, she’s waiting for a Champion to ask her out.”
Harry raised an eyebrow, completely skeptical. “Surely not me, though.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Fred said cheerfully.
“She’d sooner go with a Dementor than you,” George added. “No, the rumor mill says she’s holding out for either Diggory or Krum. But we’ve heard Diggory is already taken.”
Harry’s stomach did a small, unpleasant sink. “Yeah. I know for a fact that’s true,” he said flatly.
The twins paused, their sharp eyes taking in Harry’s sudden drop in mood. For all their mischief, they weren’t stupid. Fred cleared his throat, his grin softening into something genuinely apologetic. “Sorry about that, mate.”
“It’s fine,” Harry muttered, shaking it off. “What about Krum, then?”
“Shaky intel on that front,” George admitted, waving a hand dismissively. “But that isn’t important—you don’t need to worry about her saying yes. The bet with Lee was just about if you would actually walk up and do it, not whether Malfoy accepts. You just have to make the pitch.”
Before Harry could process the fact that he was being used as social kamikaze for a fifty-Galleon payout, a pale, freckled shadow fell over their corner.
Ron had dragged himself out of his armchair, looking like a ghost that had been roughly handled by Peeves. His arms hung limply at his sides as he blinked blankly at the three of them, still recovering from the sheer trauma of Fleur Delacour’s rejection.
“What’s going on?” Ron mumbled, his voice completely flat. “Did I hear Malfoy? Why are we talking about Malfoy?”
“Nothing for you to concern yourself with, Ronniekins,” Fred said smoothly, trying to steer Ron back toward the rug. “Go back to staring at the ceiling.”
“They want me to ask Malfoy to the ball,” Harry told him bluntly.
Ron’s brain seemed to track the words at a snail's pace, his eyes slowly widening as the sheer absurdity of the suggestion cut through his rejection-induced fog. He looked at Harry, instantly wary, his face twisting into deep alarm.
“Are you completely mad?” Ron hissed, grabbing Harry by the arm. “Harry, don’t do it! Don’t you remember literally everything Malfoy has done to us? She got us into that stupid little hexing match last month! Have you forgotten her standing there laughing while Hermione's teeth grew past her chin?”
Harry’s jaw tightened as the memory flashed vividly in his mind. He could still hear the vicious, echoing snaps of the stray hexes in the stone corridor, the panicked crowd of students, and the horrible sight of Hermione clutching her mouth as her front teeth rapidly grew past her collar. And standing right under the shadow of Snape, happily dodging all the blame, had been Lyra Malfoy.
But then Harry looked back at Fred and George. They were looking at him with a rare, quiet desperation behind their usual mischievous grins. They really didn’t have the fifty Galleons. If he didn’t do this, his best friend’s brothers were going to be entirely wiped out before their dream of a joke shop could even lift off the ground.
Harry let out a long, defeated breath. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Fred and George instantly slapped their palms together in a loud, triumphant high-five.
“Harry, you’re insane!” Ron wailed, his voice cracking with genuine horror as he stared at Harry like he’d just volunteered to wrestle another dragon. “What kind of prat are you to do that to Hermione? After everything Malfoy's done to her? If Hermione finds out you asked her out, she’ll go absolutely—!”
"You have to split the reward with Ron," Harry interrupted, turning his gaze back to the twins.
Ron’s jaw snapped shut mid-rant. The fierce, righteous indignation in his eyes flickered, replaced by a sudden, intense look of financial calculation. He blinked, looking between Harry and his brothers. “Wait... split it?”
“A full half of the winnings,” George sighed, rubbing the back of his neck but nodding reluctantly. "A true Potter tax, if you will."
“You’ve got my support now—let’s do this!” Ron said instantly. The complete flip in his sentiment was so fast it gave Harry whiplash. Ron cleared his throat, adjusting his robes and suddenly looking very businesslike. “Right. Well. If we’re going to do this, we should do it properly. No point in waiting around.”
“Spoken like a true businessman, Ronnie,” Fred beamed, slinging an arm around his younger brother’s neck. “Now, we shall accompany you to find Malfoy and make sure you actually go through with it. No backing out at the last second.”
“And don’t worry, mate,” George added, a dangerous, familiar glint entering his eyes as they began steering Harry toward the portrait hole. “If she’s too harsh, or if she tries to curse your face off before you can even ask, we’ve been practicing a few new jinxes on the third floor. We’ll have your back.”
As they marched to the portrait hole, Harry sighed. He was really going to stoop this low.
* * *
The clique of Slytherins were all cackling at their magnum opus. Even as a chillin wind blew snow into their faces in the courtyard, they laughed more and more as they watched the button change again and again.
Luminous red letters coalesced on the surface.
Support Cedric Diggory — The Real Hogwarts Champion
“Here it comes!” Crabbe wheezed.
The badge changed.
POTTER STINKS
It had to be somewhere around the fifteen-millionth time this exact shift in text had occurred. Yet the group howled like it always had. Countless students from the other three houses walked past, rolling their eyes. The first task had come and gone, and almost the entire school had come to recognize that Harry Potter—while his entry was certainly questionable—was a Champion, and currently tied in first. Thus, the whole “stink” bit had run its course. But, again, that was almost the entire school, and the pure-blood Slytherins would beat a horse far beyond its death, and even dig it up from its grave to continue doing so.
“Merlin, what an awesome button!” Goyle howled.
“Incredible work as always, Lyra!” Pansy said, desperate to kiss up to her best friend in any manner possible.
Lyra leaned back against the stone balustrade of the courtyard, completely unbothered by the biting December wind. While Pansy and the boys were wrapped in bulky, practical winter cloaks, Lyra wore a tailored wool traveling cloak fitted with heavy silver clasps—an expensive piece of pure-blood outerwear designed to look elegant while a subtle warming charm kept the cold entirely at bay.
She offered a slow, feline smile, checking her pristine, manicured nails before looking up at her court.
“Naturally it’s incredible work, Pansy,” Lyra said smoothly, her melodic voice carrying that sharp, aristocratic edge that commanded instant attention. “The Charm took three days of precise study and craft to put together. It’s not just a crude piece of metal—it’s an institutional statement.”
She reached out and tapped the badge pinned to Crabbe’s chest with the tip of her wand. The red letters flared a brilliant, venomous green, flashing POTTER STINKS twice as fast.
“The school might be developing a short memory because he managed not to get incinerated by a nesting mother,” Lyra continued, tilting her chin up as a stray snowflake caught in the sharp, platinum fall of her hair. “But a Malfoy does not forget. Potter is an illegal champion, a media stunt, and a threat to the decorum of this tournament. If the rest of the castle won’t remind him of his place, my badges will do it for them.”
She tapped her cheek thoughtfully, her cold gray eyes surveying the snow-dusted courtyard with the absolute confidence of a queen checking her borders. She knew exactly how beautiful she looked standing against the grey stone—pristine, untouchable, and completely dominant. She had the school’s premier pure-bloods eating out of her hand, her father’s friend was the Head of House, and her father’s influence loomed large over the Ministry itself.
In her mind, there wasn’t a single soul in this castle who could touch her. Which is why her head was currently on a swivel.
Beneath all her cool, unbothered composure, Lyra was actively hunting. She was waiting for a very specific type of boy to round the corner of the snow-dusted quad—either the golden, broad-shouldered silhouette of Cedric Diggory, or the heavy, brooding frame of Viktor Krum.
Up in the Owlery, resting securely in the beak of her family’s sleek eagle owl, was a letter addressed to Lucius Malfoy. Lyra had written it with her finest emerald ink on heavy parchment, detailing the pristine state of her studies and the latest political gossip of the castle. She had left the final paragraph entirely open, trailing down to a single, elegant sentence: *And with that, I’m sure you will be proud to know your daughter shall be attending the Yule Ball with—*
She had left the rest of the line blank. It was a matter of purebred pride. A Malfoy did not go to a high-society gala with a minor house heir or a bumbling fourth-year. She required a Champion. The letter was waiting to be sealed the exact moment one of them finally gathered the courage to step forward and ask her.
Surely, they were both just too nervous. She was a Malfoy, after all—men of status routinely froze in the presence of women of higher standing, and almost always with one as beautiful as her.
“Hey, Lyra,” Goyle mumbled, his thick fingers clumsily spinning one of the flashing badges. “I heard some of the Hufflepuffs talking by the trophy room. They said Diggory’s already taken. Said he asked that Ravenclaw girl—Cho Chang.”
Lyra’s feline smile didn't falter, but a cold, sharp annoyance pricked the back of her neck. She scoffed, tilting her head back against the stone wall. “Fine, then. Let Diggory waste his opening waltz on a girl who spends half her term crying over test scores. It saves me the trouble of teaching him how to properly steer a lady across a ballroom floor. I suppose I’ll simply have to wait for Krum.”
“But... what if Krum asks somebody else?” Goyle asked stupidly, blinking his heavy eyes in genuine confusion. “Like... what if he likes someone else?”
Lyra turned her gaze toward him, her gray eyes narrowing into two slivers of lethal, aristocratic ice. The look was so fiercely venomous that Goyle visibly shrank back an inch into his heavy winter cloak.
Pansy was the first to jump into the breach, her voice shrill with desperate loyalty. “Don’t be an absolute idiot, Greg! Viktor Krum is a global celebrity and a pure-blood. He isn’t going to look at some random schoolgirl when Lyra is sitting right here in the courtyard. Obviously, he won’t ask anyone before her.”
“Exactly,” Lyra said smoothly, though she felt a tiny, unprecedented flicker of nervousness tighten in the pit of her stomach. She forced her voice to remain flat and dominant. “Krum understands the social hierarchy of Europe perfectly well. He’s likely just calculating the proper protocol before making his approach.”
“But... if he doesn’t,” Crabbe mumbled, stepping forward and adjusting his heavy robes with a sudden, clumsy sort of hopefulness, “and if Diggory’s taken... I mean, you’ve gotta go with someone, right, Lyra? You could just go with me.”
Lyra didn’t even turn her head. Her gray eyes remained locked on the distant archway. “I would rather dance with a troll, Vincent. Do not insult me.”
“But Pansy’s going with Greg!” Crabbe protested, gesturing aggressively toward Goyle, who was currently trying to scrape a bit of frozen slush off his boot with a stick.
Pansy immediately crossed her arms, shooting Crabbe a look of profound disgust. “Yeah, because he’s not as stupid as you, Crabbe.”
Goyle stopped scraping his boot, his face lighting up with a slow, smug snicker. “Hear that? I’m smarter than you.”
“I said as stupid as, Greg, not smarter than,” Pansy snapped, instantly cutting his victory short. Goyle’s smile vanished, his brow furrowing as his brain painfully tried to process the difference.
Lyra let out a sharp, irritated breath, her fingers tightening around her wand beneath her cloak. The banter of her sycophants was starting to give her a headache. If Krum didn’t make his move by the end of the afternoon, she was going to have to take matters into her own hands. A Malfoy did not wait around to be chosen. She would simply have to march into the library, corner the Durmstrang champion herself, and dictate the terms of their attendance. She was already mentally drafting the opening line of the conversation when a figure emerged from the shadows of the corridors and into the courtyard.
For a fraction of a second, her heart gave a sharp, expectant thud against her ribs. The height was almost right, and the dark cloak looked broad enough against the gray stone. *Finally,* she thought, her shoulders squaring with automatic, victorious poise. *The Bulgarian has found his spine.*
Then the figure stepped out of the shadow of the stone archway and directly into the pale winter light.
Lyra’s smile vanished instantly, replaced by a sudden, intense spike of irritation.
It wasn’t Krum. It was Harry Potter.
Lyra’s lip curled in automatic, deeply practiced disgust as she surveyed the boy she so thoroughly abhorred. He was, as always, an absolute walking disaster of Gryffindor anti-decorum. His winter robes looked like they had been hastily thrown on without a single smoothing charm, dragging carelessly through the wet slush. His ridiculous, messy black hair was completely wild, sticking up at the back in that stubborn, unruly way that defied gravity and made her want to curse him on principle.
And then there were his spectacles—bent slightly at the left frame, sitting crookedly on his nose, and currently fogged over from his breath in the freezing air. He looked small, stressed, and entirely out of his depth.
Yet, as he drew closer, blinking through his misted lenses, Lyra felt a traitorous, infuriating prickle of annoyance at the fact that he wasn’t entirely hideous. Beneath the soot of his reputation and the ridiculous, bright green eyes that always seemed to be glaring at her from across the Great Hall, he had a sharp, stubborn jawline that was becoming more pronounced this year. Even the stupid, faint flush creeping up his neck from the cold had an irritatingly healthy, vibrant color to it. She hated everything about him. She hated his fame, she hated his house, and she hated the way he carried the entire school’s attention without even trying.
Slowly, she leaned back against the balustrade, her fingers casually tracing the silver clasp of her wool cloak. She wasn’t going to let him trudge past without a proper lashing.
“Hello, Potter,” Lyra said loudly, her melodic voice carrying like a whip crack across the freezing courtyard.
On cue, her circle instantly shifted. Pansy let out a sharp, mocking giggle, and Crabbe and Goyle immediately stepped forward, their heavy shoulders squaring to form a wall of purebred muscle behind their queen.
The effect was instantaneous. All around the quad, the chatter of passing students died out. Heads snapped around from the warm corridors, books were lowered, and a sudden, highly expectant hush fell over the courtyard. Everyone knew the history between the Malfoys and the Boy Who Lived. They all stood still, bracing themselves for whatever venomous, pure-blood insult Lyra was about to drop on the illegal Triwizard Champion’s head.
Harry froze exactly three paces away, his boots sinking into the gray slush as his green eyes finally locked onto her gray ones.
“Are you looking for trouble, Potter?” Lyra asked, her voice dripping with lazy disdain. “Or are you simply here to admire my handiwork again?”
With an air of supreme pride, she raised her slender hand and tapped the brass badge pinned to her chest. On cue, the luminous red letters shifted, coalescing into the venomous green glow of POTTER STINKS.
Pansy and Goyle let out appreciative snickers, but Harry didn’t flinch. Instead, he just stood there in the slush, his expression remarkably indifferent.
“I’ve heard you don’t have a date yet,” Harry said, delivered as though bored out of his mind.
The casual, blunt delivery hit Lyra like a sudden slap. A flash of sharp irritation flared in her chest, but she covered it instantly with a practiced, elegant scoff, tilting her chin up.
“Obviously not,” Lyra sneered, her gray eyes flashing. “I am waiting for a Champion to finally gather the stones to ask out the most prized girl in this school… a true Champion, that is.”
Her cronies howled with laughter at the jab, and a few Slytherins leaning out of the corridor windows joined in. But Harry didn’t look humiliated. He didn’t even look angry. He just took a short, steady breath.
“Well,” Harry said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I’m actually here to offer the idea to you, anyway.”
Lyra froze. The laughter behind her died instantly. All around the quad, a wave of frantic murmuring and shocked whispers erupted from the watching crowd. Students from Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were practically hanging out of the archways, their eyes wide. Meanwhile, small clumps of Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students had also gathered, apparently quite curious as to whatever was occurring.
Losing her carefully cultivated composure for a fraction of a second, Lyra blinked. “What?”
“I’m asking you to go to the ball with me,” Harry said, his green eyes locking onto hers with terrifying directness. “Will you accept my invitation?”
A vicious, predatory sneer curled Lyra’s lips as the sheer, chaotic brilliance of the moment sank in. Harry Potter, the Gryffindor no Champion, was so utterly desperate for a date that he was crawling to a Malfoy. And he was doing it right here, in front of a massive crowd that included several stone-faced Durmstrang boys and a cluster of whispering Beauxbatons girls. What an unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime treat. She was going to tear him limb from limb, shred his pride, and leave him standing in the courtyard as a laughingstock in front of half the school.
“The fact that you even considered the possibility that I would accept an invitation from you, Potter—” Lyra began, her voice ringing out with theatrical venom.
But mid-sentence, her words died in her throat.
Her sharp eyes had just tracked past Harry’s shoulder, catching a sudden glint of movement under the shadow of a stone pillar across the quad. Three distinct puffs of bright red hair. The Weasleys. Fred, George, and Ronald were all huddled together, and to her absolute fury, they didn’t look horrified. They looked incredibly smug. In fact, they looked happy that she was already getting vicious.
More importantly, she looked back down at Potter. He looked... calm. Relieved, even.
The gears in Lyra’s sharp, Slytherin intellect violently slammed into reverse. *He wouldn’t be doing this without a catch.* Potter hated her. He would never willingly subject himself to a public Malfoy execution unless he had a reason. He expected to be rejected. He actively wanted her to say no, likely to win some stupid Gryffindor wager or get out of some ridiculous dare.
If she screamed a refusal at him right now, she would be handing Harry Potter exactly what he wanted on a silver platter. He would walk away clean, victorious, and relieved.
*No,* Lyra thought, a dark, calculating thrill replacing her anger. *A Malfoy does not let a Gryffindor win.*
Suddenly, the broader political chessboard laid itself out in her mind. If she said yes, she wouldn’t just be ruining his afternoon—she would be hijacking his entire life for the next four days. She thought about the blank line in the letter to her father, and how Lucius could use a public association with the Boy Who Lived as the ultimate diplomatic shield against the Ministry’s dark artifact raids. She thought about the sheer, unadulterated shock it would cause on the international stage, keeping the House of Malfoy and Britain itself at the absolute apex of global attention. She thought about the utter misery Harry would have to endure, forced to bow, hold her hand, and open the historic tournament with a snake on his arm.
And, her eyes flickered over his messy hair, his crooked glasses, and the stubborn, flush-cheeked definition of his jawline—he really wasn’t as visually disgusting as she usually liked to think. He would actually look quite striking if someone forced him into proper dress robes and wrestled a comb through his hair.
The predatory sneer vanished from her face, smoothing out into a slow, terrifyingly beautiful smile. She stepped closer to him, her silver cloak clasped elegantly around her, her gray eyes gleaming with a triumphant, malicious delight. And when she picked up where she’d left off, the tone of her voice had done a complete flip.
“—is a fact I find rather endearing,” she continued tilting her head to the side, and it took everything she had to not snicker as she saw the boy’s brows slowly furrow. “And, frankly, I suppose a true Champion wouldn’t keep me waiting any longer. I accept, Potter.”
Harry’s green eyes went entirely vacant. The casual, indifferent posture he had been holding completely shattered. His brows pinched together so hard it looked like his forehead might split, his jaw dropping open a fraction of an inch as his brain completely stalled out.
“You...” Harry choked, his voice cracking like dry parchment. “You what?”
“I said yes,” Lyra smiled, her voice dripping with a sweet, venomous warmth that was infinitely more terrifying than her usual sneers. She stepped so close that the crisp scent of her expensive peppermint-and-parchment perfume cut through the freezing air, intentionally forcing him to look up at her. “I’ll be seeing you on Christmas night at eight. In the entrance hall. Do try to find a pleasant set of dress robes, Potter. And for Merlin’s sake, buy a comb.”
Around them, the crowd erupted. The silence shattered into absolute, chaotic pandemonium.
“Did she just—?” a Hufflepuff fifth-year murmured.
“Malfoy and Potter?!” a Ravenclaw girl gasped, dropping her heavy copy of Advanced Rune Translation straight into the snow.
Pansy Parkinson looked like she had just swallowed a whole toad, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Crabbe and Goyle blinked like bewildered bloodhounds, completely unable to process the tactical masterpiece they had just witnessed.
But Lyra wasn’t quite finished with her performance. To truly cement this as an absolute, inescapable nightmare for him—and to feed the school rumor mill enough ammunition to last a century—she stepped completely into his personal space.
Slowly, she leaned in until her shoulder brushed against his stiff, frozen frame. She tilted her head up, her lips inches from his ear, and let her voice drop to a low, smooth whisper that was entirely intended to drive the point home.
“Don’t look so miserable, Potter,” she purred, a wicked, triumphant edge to her words. “I’ll make sure to look all nice and pretty... just for you.”
She could feel the violent, immediate tension radiating off him. The sheer thought of a Malfoy flirting with him was clearly making him the absolute opposite of happy. And then, to cap it all off with the definitive coup de grâce, Lyra pressed a soft, lingering kiss right against his burning cheek.
The chaos in the corridors around the courtyard went completely nuclear. Several Gryffindors looked like they were on the verge of fainting, and a cluster of Beauxbatons girls began whispering furiously behind their silk gloved hands—the latter seeming to have picked up that this was something juicy.
Lyra pulled back, her gray eyes glittering with a terrifyingly gentle delight as she watched the sheer, unadulterated horror take root across his face.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” she said loudly, ensuring her melodic voice carried over the din of the crowd, “I have a rather urgent letter to send before dinner. Goodbye... Harry.”
She could distinctly hear him retch in the back of his mouth at the sudden use of his first name. Lyra offered him one last gentle, mocking smile as she finally turned and walked right past him.
Her path took her straight toward the stone archway where the Weasley siblings were huddled. Fred, George, and Ron were all staring at her in uniform, wide-eyed horror. The smugness from their wager was entirely gone, replaced by the crushing realization of what they had just unleashed.
Lyra paused for only a fraction of a second as she brushed past them, her silver cloak swirling elegantly against the grey stone.
“You know,” she murmured, looking down her nose at the red-headed trio with a look of supreme, unbothered pity, “for all the stupid games you Weasleys like to play... I really thought you’d know by now that they only ever result in stupid prizes.”
With that final parting shot, she swept out of the quad and took the stairs in the direction of the West Tower, her chin held high as she headed toward the Owlery, feeling exceptionally proud of herself.
Meanwhile, back in the courtyard, Harry was in total shock.
He stood entirely frozen in the snowfall, his stomach churning so violently he thought he might actually throw up his lunch right there. His right cheek was burning—not from the winter wind, but from the terrifyingly soft, lingering pressure of her lips. The faint, crisp scent of her expensive peppermint-and-parchment perfume still hung in the air, suffocating him.
Around him, the bubble of absolute silence finally burst into a renewed roar of whispers. The students lingering in the high-traffic corridors began to drift toward the Great Hall for dinner, their heads huddled together as they cast wild, disbelieving glances back at him. Nobody wanted to approach him. He was radioactive.
A few yards away, Pansy Parkinson finally found her feet, sprinting after her best friend with Crabbe and Goyle trotting behind her like a pair of thoroughly confused trolls.
Harry was totally alone in the center of the courtyard, blinking through his fogged glasses, his brain completely short-circuiting. *She said yes. Lyra Malfoy just said yes to me. And then she kissed me.* He’d gone out there expecting a quick, brutal jinx to the face, a harsh laugh, and an easy fifty Galleons for the Weasley brothers. Instead, he had just been thoroughly, mathematically out-maneuvered by a fourteen-year-old Slytherin girl.
A sudden, cautious crunch of boots in the snow broke his trance.
Harry didn’t move as three shadows fell over him. He slowly turned his head. Fred, George, and Ron were standing a few feet away, their faces completely drained of color. The smug, businesslike grins they’d been wearing five minutes ago had vanished entirely. They looked like they had just witnessed a horrific dark magic ritual. Frankly, Harry would have preferred that over this.
“Harry...” Fred started, his usual confident voice dropping to a rare, completely genuine tone of horror. “Mate. We are so, so sorry.”
“We had no idea,” George swallowed hard, looking genuinely sick. “We thought she’d hex you. We thought she’d scream. We never—we never meant for that to happen.”
Ron just stared at Harry’s cheek, his chest rising and falling in rapid, panicked breaths, his freckles standing out sharply against his pale skin. “She kissed you,” Ron whispered, sounding entirely traumatized. “Harry... a Malfoy kissed you. At least it was on the cheek, but it was in front of half the school. Hermione is going to murder us. She’s going to skin us alive and feed us to the giant squid. And we probably deserve it—at least I do.”
Harry didn’t yell. He didn’t even drop his shoulders. He wasn’t mad at them—he couldn’t be, because the sheer, paralyzing shock of the situation had completely numbed his brain. He just looked at the three of them, his voice coming out entirely flat and vacant.
“Well...” Harry said, his voice sounding hollow even to his own ears. He swallowed hard, trying to force his face into what he hoped looked like a reassuring nod, though it felt more like a grimace. “At least you three are getting your Galleons, yeah?”
Fred and George didn’t celebrate. They didn’t high-five like before. They just looked at him with the kind of grim, somber pity usually reserved for people about to be sent to Azkaban.
“Harry, mate,” Fred said quietly, placing a heavy, uncharacteristically gentle hand on his shoulder. “If we could undo this... we would. Honestly. We’d refuse all the Galleons, probably give Lee a few on top of it just to make sure.”
“We offer our most serious, deepest condolences,” George added, his mouth drawn into a tight, unhappy line. He glanced toward the warm, loud light spilling out of the Great Hall doors. “Come on. Let’s go to dinner. You look like you need about four plates of roast potatoes just to shock your system back to life.”
Harry shook his head slowly, his stomach giving another fierce, unhelpful roll at the mere mention of food. The faint scent of peppermint seemed permanently lodged in his nose. “No. I’m not hungry. You guys go ahead.”
“Harry—” Ron started, looking torn between his desperate desire for dinner and the clear moral obligation to make sure his best friend didn't collapse into a snowbank.
“I’m fine, Ron. Really. Just... go eat.”
Without waiting for a response, Harry turned his back on the Great Hall and began the slow, awful trudge toward the grand staircase. Every step felt like he was dragging iron weights behind him. As he walked, the echoes of the courtyard pandemonium seemed to follow him through the corridors, the whispers of passing students already mutating into wild, impossible rumors before he could even reach the first landing.
He climbed the stairs blindly, his right cheek still burning where her lips had touched his skin. He had spent the last several weeks in a state of absolute, suffocating dread, terrified of the humiliation of being turned down in front of the whole school. He had convinced himself that rejection was the absolute worst-case scenario.
But as he reached the portrait of the Fat Lady, completely alone in the quiet corridor, Harry found himself genuinely, profoundly curious how acceptance could possibly feel this much worse.
* * *
Far away from the chaotic corridors of Hogwarts, the quiet of Wiltshire was broken only by the rhythmic, golden ticking of a pendulum clock.
He sat in the deep leather armchair of his private study, the high windows casting the grey, muted glow of a December moon across his desk. The room smelled of old leather, expensive wood wax, and the distinct, crisp scent of Earl Grey tea. He picked up his porcelain cup, the silver spoon clicking softly against the rim as he lazily stirred the dark liquid, his mind occupied by the increasingly tense political shifts within the Ministry.
A sharp tap against the glass drew his attention.
His eagle owl stood on the stone ledge outside, its feathers dusted with frost. He set the spoon down, unlatched the heavy window, and took the crisp roll of parchment from the bird’s beak. It was heavy, expensive parchment, sealed with the distinct emerald wax of his daughter’s house.
He settled back into his chair, taking a slow, elegant sip of his tea as his eyes drifted across her pristine, sloping cursive. He read through her flawless updates on her Arithmancy scores, her calculated notes on the political leanings of the Durmstrang delegates, and her sharp, dismissive commentary on the overall lack of decorum among her peers. A faint, proud smile touched his lips. She was a true Malfoy, sharp and unyielding.
But as he reached the final paragraph, he tilted the cup back to take another sip.
His eyes scanned the last few lines. His hand stopped.
The porcelain cup slipped entirely from his fingers. It hit the polished hardwood floor with a sharp, echoing *crack* before shattering into dozens of white fragments as the dark, hot tea pooled rapidly across the expensive rug. He didn't even look down at the mess. He just sat entirely frozen, his chest locked, his grey eyes staring in absolute, disbelieving horror at the final ink strokes on the parchment.
Dearest Father,
I hope this letter finds you well and that the winter meetings in London have yielded the legislative results you required. The climate here at the castle has turned predictably bitter, though my warming charms have kept the elements perfectly at bay.
My studies under Professor Snape continue to progress flawlessly. He was kind enough to commend my recent draught of peace, noting that my execution was the only one in the fourth-year cohort to achieve the proper silver vapor. I am also currently working on a rather complex piece of independent tracking magic, which has allowed me to successfully direct the school's general opinion regarding the illegitimacy of the local tournament.
Regarding the upcoming Yule Ball, the behavior of the student body has been utterly beneath our standards. Several minor heirs have attempted to secure my company, all of whom I rejected immediately, as I refuse to compromise the social standing of our House for the sake of a mediocre evening.
Rather than accept the first boy to ask me, I chose to wait for one of the Triwizard Champions to come and ask me out, as I was more than prepared to serve the Malfoy name with the highest possible visibility on the international stage.
And with that, I am sure you will be proud to know your daughter shall be attending the Yule Ball with Harry Potter.
Your devoted daughter,
Lyra Malfoy