Severus stood a few paces before her. His eyes were on the ruined cauldron.
"Tell me," his voice shook, and tears formed in his eyes, "why do you wear flowers in your hair?"
He kept looking to his cauldron.
"I don't understand."
"How does such a sim...
Anybody who dared open the Hogwarts Express compartment door would think a party had erupted. Deep in the corner seat, two hands held an upside-down magazine dripping goo. Only wild, white locks cascaded around the pages from which the girl's face hid.
Next to Luna, her best friend bit her lip in concentration, picking at the Stinksap gluing her dark, frizzing curls. Occasionally, Felicity closed her eyes, breathed in and out deeply, then returned to the tedious hair task. Luna giggled from behind the Quibbler.
Ginny kneeled on the floor with her wand, scourgifying any green slime in all crevices, then stood up, and vanished the mess from Neville and Harry. Then, for safe measure, she scourgified the leaking boils dotting the grey cactus, Mimbulus Mimbletonia.
The compartment door slid open. Ron and Hermione joined them immediately after the plant incident, ready to burst with information.
"Well, each house has two new fifth-year prefects," she said, looking Harry in the eye.
"Guess who's the Slytherin pre---" Ron started---
"Malfoy."
"And that complete cow, Pansy Parkinson!" With a fierce expression, Hermione snatched a chocolate frog from Ron's hoard. But then roughly bit into it herself.
They then discovered that Ernie Macmillian and Hannah Abbott lead the Hufflepuffs, and Anthony Goldstein and Padma Patil for Ravenclaw.
Felicity leaned on her seat holding a lock of her hair, and pointed her wand at it. The sappy ends sliced cleanly and landed into a feathered display upon the floor. She cast a vanishing spell at it, then smiled back at her friends. Hermione and Ginny stared at her in horror.
"Time for layers, I think." She then muttered an incantation at her ends while waving her wand in a diagonal motion. Slice by slice, her hair chopped in feathered, angled cuts, leaving the length original in the back, but gradually shortened to shoulder-length around her face.
"Where'd you learn that?" Harry asked.
"Three guesses."
Harry mouthed an O in understanding.
An awkward silence ensued, and they took care in avoiding looking Felicity in the eye. Those two may be good friends to the Gryffindors, but sometimes they thrived in their 'Loony' ways. Besides. Nobody could stop that.
Suddenly Ron and Hermione began quarreling about prefect ethics. And then . . . another vision came upon Felicity.
A nine-year old Felicity stood next to an unknown woman: her mother, perhaps? They waited next to a Muggle car connected with a hose from a sort of station. This Felicity drew out a long twig from her dress pocket, and pointed it at the hose connecting their car.
"Expecto Petroleum!" Nothing occurred but the child's giggles, and her mother chuckling along.
". . . I . . . must . . . not . . . look . . . like . . . a . . . baboon's . . . backside."
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