Girl Who Escaped {Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire} [BEING EDITED]

[13] Hagrid, Hogsmeade, and Honeydukes.

EDITED

February 16, 2014

If you find any grammatical/spelling errors, please politely let me know. I am not a professional, nor do I claim to be an experienced author. I do make mistakes that I am trying to clean up. Thank you, enjoy.

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[Chapter 13: Hagrid, Hogsmeade, and Honeydukes.]

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 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.

     Lucky for us, Crookshanks and Simba got along quite well. They played together, and in mine and Hermione's absences, they curled up together for sweet little cat-naps.

     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 and I 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. I already knew he was, based on genetic traits.

     "Well, I thought he must be," she said, shrugging. "I knew he couldn't be pure giant because they're about twenty feet tall."

     "Simple genetic patterns." I pointed out, "Have you never noticed Hagrid's temper? He's got a tendency to let that mouth run before his head. Very emotional, that man."

     "Sound familiar?" Ron mused, shooting me a pointed look. I glared at him.

     "But honestly, all this hysteria about them. 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?" Hermione added, though not contadicting my claim.

     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 we had neglected during the first week of the holidays. Everybody seemed to be feeling rather flat now that Christmas was over-- everybody except me, that is. I was still unbelieveably excited and happy about my new relationship, and Simba seemed to somehow increase the happiness.

     The trouble was that February the twenty-fourth looked a lot closer from this side of Christmas, and Harry still hadn't done anything about working out the clue inside the golden egg. Cedric had gave him some sort of clue, but wouldn't tell even me the straight forward way to open it-- he had good morals, which included fairness-- without cheating.

     Harry was being rather cold towards Cedric lately, and I was starting to wonder if it was his less-than-friendly feelings toward Cedric were the reason that he was keen not to take his help if he could avoid it.

     And so the first day of the new term arrived, and I set off to lessons, weighed down with books, parchment, and quills as usual.

     Snow was still thick upon the grounds, and the greenhouse windows were covered in condensation so thick that we 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 us up nicely, either by chasing us, or blasting off so forcefully that Hagrid's cabin would catch fire.