"What happened to our more immediate concerns?" Harry joked. He'd never had a chance to even see pictures of the places she mentioned, except the reef during a documentary they watched over the summer. If the other places she suggested were as beautiful as that, he wanted to go as well. Hermione gave him the best puppy-dog impression she could muster, but she wasn't very experienced at it. "Okay, fine, we'll take a trip together after graduation. I want to see it, too."
Harry waited for Hermione in the common room after changing out of his dress robes. The other boys, for the most part, were completely used to various incidents causing Harry to end up in the hospital wing, so he had no difficulty getting to his dorm to get changed. Hermione, he suspected, was having much more trouble. While he was waiting, he caught some flaming red hair approach out of the corner of his eye.
"Hey, Harry. I heard what happened last night," Ginny said. "I wanted to say... um... y-you can... if you want to talk about it... um..."
Harry sighed. Ginny would be the fifth person to say that to him, and he'd only been awake for an hour so far. "From whom?" he asked.
"What?" Ginny was taken aback by Harry's response.
"Whichever story you heard, it wasn't from me... so which story did you hear?" Harry asked her as gently as he could, but he couldn't hide his frustration very well.
"Huh? Evelyn told me that you broke up with Hermione at the ball and she didn't take it so well... She may have heard that story from Ophelia in Hufflepuff, though, who probably got it straight from Cedric," she recalled. Seeing that Harry was still waiting for more, she continued. "Everyone was sitting on the opposite side of the Hall from the champion's table... he's the only one who could see everything. I only saw the aurors taking Hermione away, and she was absolutely hysterical. I didn't know what she did to you but I think she wanted to go back for more. She was fighting them tooth and nail to get back to you. They eventually had to stun her."
The story was entirely false, but he was waiting for what Ginny had seen herself. "Really? You saw them stun Hermione?" Hermione hadn't told him that part. Then again, a proper stunner shouldn't hurt. Perhaps she was embarrassed about completely losing her composure.
"Yeah, she must have been furious. At first I thought she was worried about you, but when I heard from Evelyn..." Ginny told him.
"She was worried about me, Ginny. We didn't break up. I'm... um... epileptic," Harry decided to use Hermione's excuse.
"Huh? You're what?"
"I'll get Hermione to explain it," Harry said, not really knowing what it was either. "But the point is, that story about us breaking up is false. So is the story about her trying to poison me. What really happened was I just fainted when the clock struck midnight and she overreacted."
"Oh... s-so you two are... um... still together?" Ginny's cheeks were starting to match her hair.
"Yes, happily," Harry answered.
"Oh... okay... um, that's... good..." Ginny darted away before Harry could say goodbye.
Hermione came running down the stairs a few minutes later. "Let's go, Harry!" She grabbed him without explaining why she was in such a rush, but Harry heard shouting from the girls' dorms and saw feet at the top of the stairs.
"Let me guess, they think we broke up and they want you to stay away from me?" Harry asked as they ran out of the tower.
"No, that's just Lavender and Parvati. They're just mad I washed off all their 'hard work' last night and went with something simpler."
"That's it? They're that angry over a little makeup?"
"And they thought we broke up, and it was because I wasn't dolled up the way they suggested. The break-up rumour seems to be the most popular theory in Gryffindor."
They ran down to the library, which was almost completely empty, except for a few Ravenclaws- the extremely studious ones who didn't attend the ball and didn't care about rumours anyway. They began with Hogwarts: A History to see what creatures lurked below the surface of the Black Lake. It seemed the Giant Squid had been there since the time of the founders. Grindylows and Merfolk were common. Harry would never be able to learn the merfolk language in time, but Hermione picked up a tome on merfolk culture to make sure Harry wouldn't accidentally offend them and end up with half the village chasing him across the lake. Jellices would be active during this time of year as well, which could instantly give Harry frostbite if he wasn't careful with them. Sadly, throughout the thousand-year history of Hogwarts, very few wizards had taken the time to bother exploring the lake at all. The most detailed map they could find only pointed to the general location of the merfolk village and a vague area marked "do not enter." It was also about three hundred years out of date.
After learning all they could about the creatures of the Black Lake, Hermione began looking up other aquatic creatures, while Harry studied some water-based spells that could be useful. Strangely enough, Harry was the one who had to keep Hermione focused, as she kept wandering towards the geography and travel section to look up more about the Sahara. He found a modified warming charm which could make the lake water more comfortable and a modified bubble-head charm to allow him to breathe, both of which Hermione insisted he learn just in case he ran out of, or lost, his gillyweed during the trial. He memorized a few offensive spells as well, like the freezing and boiling charms, and a wave charm. The wave charm was technically for a wizard outside of water casting on the surface, but they hoped it would work underwater as well. Hermione got the brilliant idea of performing featherweight charms on things, including Harry himself, to make them float away. After finding a good day's worth of material to practice, they headed up to the Room of Requirement and created the swimming pool again, this time to practice casting spells underwater. The room couldn't provide them with creatures, but it did manage to create target dummies underwater.
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