Harry laughed, glad she was enjoying herself. Maybe it would ease some of the tension between them. As long as she didn't think too hard about Ron.
Accepting something bright green and bubbling from Cassius, Harry took a hesitant sip to find it was sweet and tasted of apples. "Not bad!" The Slytherin stole the drink from Harry's hand, taking a sip with a contemplative look. "Not as good as mine, you can keep it," he declared eventually, holding up his neon blue drink. Harry snorted.
"Gee, thanks."
Susan stole Harry's drink next, offering her own violently pink concoction in return. Harry shrugged, sipping and getting hit with a blast of cherry. "That's really good, actually," he said as he offered it back to Susan, who shook her head.
"I'm keeping yours," she told him. "You can have that one." Harry shrugged, and kept drinking.
As Luna had promised, after a fifteen minute interlude in which people got drinks, chatted and rested their feet, the Weird Sisters arrived on stage, and the students went wild. Harry was amused to see most of the adults had retreated to the back of the room; far enough away to still be chaperoning, but well out of the throng of screaming teenagers.
Harry looked around to see the others had all finished their drinks, and met Fleur's eye. She was smirking, surveying the group. "Let's dance."
They headed onto the dance floor, easily finding a group of familiar faces; Neville and Ginny, the twins and their dates, and Luna. Ron was still nowhere near the dance floor. Harry didn't even know if he was still in the room. "There you are, mate!" George cheered, his hand in Boris' and his lips already kiss-swollen. That explained where those two had disappeared off to during the interlude.
The first song started up to a riot of screaming, and Harry soon discovered that informal dancing was mostly a lot of jumping around and shaking your hips, with the occasional ridiculous overdramatic dance move thrown in usually courtesy of the Weasley twins. It wasn't a partner type of dance, so Harry was in the middle of a crowd of people, grinning as Susan shimmied up beside him.
He was having the time of his life! At one point, Susan was stolen for a while by her fellow Hufflepuffs, but she returned quickly with them and their dates in tow. Harry happily shuffled back to make room for the new additions, and was surprised when Blaise and Daphne joined them, dragging Millicent Bulstrode and Theodore Nott along with them. For a brief moment, Harry was hopeful Draco might join them, but he pushed the thought away; whatever strides they'd been making towards house unity, there was no way Draco could be seen fraternising with Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs. His father would kill him. Harry was even surprised Nott was there — from what he knew, the boy's father was pretty strict about blood purity, and had been one of Voldemort's most devoted followers. Sure enough, Draco and Pansy were across the room with a group of older Slytherins and Durmstrang students. Harry spotted Adrian Pucey getting rather cosy with a boy from Beauxbatons; clearly not too upset about George turning him down.
A hand tugged on his arm, and Cho nudged him into a dance hold that was very different from the waltz, laughing at the look on his face. "Loosen up, Harry!" she teased, placing her hands on his hips and forcing them to move to the beat. Harry's cheeks were burning, especially when Cedric wolf-whistled.
"Your girlfriend is manhandling Diggory!" Harry called. "Aren't going to do something about it?"
me, you "I could always manhandle you instead?" Cedric offered, laughing when Harry's face went even redder.
After a couple of minutes Cho seemed satisfied with his dancing and retreated back to Cedric's side, holding him in a much more comfortable — and more inappropriate — way than she'd been holding Harry.
Fred sidled up to Harry, dancing all the while, and opened his robes to reveal a plain silver flask in the inside pocket. "Firewhisky?" he offered with a smirk. Harry glanced around, then shrugged; fuck it, he was fourteen and probably going to die by the end of the year if this bloody tournament had its way. He reached into Fred's robes, flipping the lid on the flask and taking a swig, coughing as it burned his throat on the way down. Fred pat him on the back, chuckling. "That's my boy! Let me know if you want more, I've got plenty."
Fred moved off to go dance between Angelina and Lee, and Harry wondered how many other people had been drinking from the flask that night. Then he decided he didn't care, and kept on dancing.
.-.-.
Harry's limbs were aching and his head was pounding along with the bass of the music, but he didn't care one bit as he danced, spinning Hermione around with a grin. She was an entirely different person tonight, and it made Harry's heart ache at the cracks in his friendship cracks he was starting to think were irreparable. Dancing with her, laughing with her and Viktor, it felt… disjointed. Like they were once friends, and they were slipping back into what they used to be, but it didn't quite match up with the people they were now. He suspected Hermione could feel it too; every now and then he caught her looking at him with something sad and knowing in her gaze.
It was nearing eleven, but the band was showing no signs of stopping. Many of the students had gone to bed — or gone off to find a secluded corner of the castle — but there was still a good number of them out dancing. Harry was wedged between Ginny and Luna doing a move that looked like something he'd seen in 70s music videos when he was yanked back towards the Weasley twins, the two girls shrugging and merely grabbing Neville in Harry's place. Harry's brow furrowed when Fred and George started to slowly move him away from the dancing crowd. "What's the matter?"
"Courtyard, west corner, behind the rose bush," George whispered in his ear, shoving him towards the doors. "You can thank us later!"
Utterly perplexed, Harry stepped out into the courtyard, shivering a little at the evening air after being in the huddle of dancers for so long. There were couples dotted around the places, some poorly-hidden in rose bushes while others were making no attempt to hide at all. He raised an eyebrow at Seamus and Lavender, sat on a bench with hands in some very inappropriate places for being in public. Edging around them, he hurried to the west corner, hesitantly approaching the rose bush. A hand whipped out, grabbing him by the lapel and tugging.
A familiar voice muttered a Privacy charm, and Harry relaxed instantly, barely having a second to register the company before lips were pressed frantically against his own. "You're going to kill me, Potter," Draco breathed, hands sliding into Harry's robes and around to the small of his back. "You in those bloody dress robes."
"Like you can talk," Harry muttered, trying to figure out how to get hands on skin as quickly as possible. Draco's robes had so many fucking buttons. "I've been wanting to do this all night."
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