Harry sat directly across from Neville, both hands locked around the struggling toad as he kept watch over Trevor on Neville's behalf.
When the Mimbulus mimbletonia suddenly discharged its Stinksap, he had no hands free to shield himself.
The result was inevitable.
Stinksap splattered across his face—his forehead, cheeks, the tip of his nose, even the corners of his mouth were streaked with dark green slime, leaving him in a thoroughly wretched state.
The smell was searingly foul, like rotting dung mixed with mouldy grass, it was so rancid it made everyone's brows curl.
Neville hadn't escaped either.
His face and the front of his robes were soaked through, and several gluey green strands clung to his hair. He shook his head instinctively, trying to blink the Stinksap from his eyes, but only managed to smear it further across his face, looking even more of a disaster.
He shook his head again, trying this time to squeeze the Stinksap out of his worst-affected eye.
"S-sorry—"
Neville gasped out the words, his voice was filled with panic and guilt, eyes were darting away from everyone's faces. When he saw Harry spit onto the floor, he added hastily.
"I've never actually tried it before—I had no idea it would do that. But don't worry, the Stinksap isn't poisonous."
The sight of Harry with Stinksap dripping down his face proved too much for Ron. He burst out laughing, doubled over, tears filling his eyes to spill, rocking back and forth with helpless delight.
"Oh, stop it!"
Ginny shot Ron a fierce kick under the table, then turned to Harry, her voice was gentling. "It's all right, Harry, I can—"
As if on cue, the moment the last word left Ginny's lips—before she could get out another syllable of comfort, the compartment door slid quietly open.
"Hello, everyone!"
A familiar, pleasant voice filled the compartment. "Harry—what happened to you?"
Harry wiped his glasses with his one free hand, and felt his expression go flat.
Cho Chang stood in the doorway, looking effortlessly pretty, watching him with an expression caught somewhere between surprise and suppressed amusement.
"Er—"
For a moment Harry's mouth moved without producing a single word. Heat crawled up his cheeks. He could only stare at Cho, every inch of him was radiating embarrassment.
"It's fine."
Cho walked straight to his side without the slightest sign of minding the smell or the mess. A warm smile was one her face, and she spoke in a soft voice. "This is easily sorted."
She drew her wand in a smooth, steady motion, aimed it at Harry, and murmured: "Scourgify!"
At the incantation's fall, the dark green Stinksap vanished from his face and robes as though it had never been and the rank, piercing smell dissolved along with it.
Harry let out a long breath. His shoulders dropped. The gaze he turned on Cho was full of gratitude and warmth, the last traces of mortification was slowly fading from his eyes.
Ginny: "…"
She watched Cho settle naturally beside Harry, and something lodged itself in her chest—sour and bitter, all at once. She cursed herself for not moving faster, for not being the one to clean him up first.
But what came next was even harder to bear.
"I'm sorry, Harry. I meant to find you the moment I got on the train."
Cho waved her wand to tidy the rest of the compartment, then looked at Harry with an apologetic smile. "But Lavender and Alicia kept talking to me—they simply wouldn't let me go—so I only just managed to get away."
"…"
"Cho, why should you have come to find Harry straight away?"
Luna tilted her head, her large, dreamy eyes wide with sincere curiosity, her tone as plain and guileless as a child's. "Does being in a relationship mean you have to do that?"
The words landed like a stone in a still pond.
Ron's eyes went wide as saucers. His jaw dropped.
Ginny went stiff, colour vanished from her face in an instant. She looked at Luna's perfectly earnest expression, then at Cho, then at Harry and felt her mind go blank, a sudden roaring sounded in her ears.
One thought, and one thought only, rang through her head: 'No—!'
Neville and Parvati stared in open surprise, their eyes swinging back and forth between Harry and Cho.
Cho clearly had not expected Luna to come out with something so blunt. A flush swept up her cheeks.
The ease she'd shown while dealing with the mess vanished. She turned her wand over in her fingers and said, gently: "Luna… we are actually together—"
"Oh, I know that!"
Luna tilted her head; her long lashes fluttered like wings, her expression baffled in the most innocent possible way, entirely oblivious to the wave she had just sent crashing through the compartment. "I simply don't understand whether going to find someone the moment you board the train is required for people who are together."
Cho: "…"
Only Luna Lovegood could ask that question with a completely straight face.
Most of the others wore much the same expression—until Sherlock spoke, unperturbed as ever.
"As far as I'm aware," he said mildly, "there is nothing that people in a relationship are required to do."
Silence.
Everyone was, once again, rendered speechless.
Sherlock Holmes. Luna Lovegood.
Those two really were something else.
Since there was no recovering from it, the compartment simply moved on.
Ron immediately set about reproaching Harry for not letting him in on this secret, insisting it was terribly unfair.
Harry protested that he'd actually been planning to share the news during the journey and hadn't been hiding anything—only that certain unexpected events had got in the way.
"Sorry," said Neville again, very quietly.
He was evidently the unexpected event in question.
Harry, for his part, had clearly already stopped caring.
Luna, however, seemed inclined to press the matter a little further. "So is it really like that? People who are together don't have to do anything specific?"
Cho laughed—Luna's earnest puzzlement had dissolved the last of her blush.
"Sherlock's quite right," she said. "There aren't any rules about what you must do. I just haven't seen Harry in a while, and I wanted to come and say hello—have a proper chat."
Ginny stared at Cho, her chest still thick with that aching feeling. Yet she couldn't quite bring herself to look at Harry directly.
They were sitting so close together, close enough that she was aware of the warmth of his breathing. And somehow that closeness, which she had once treasured, had become its own small torment.
"Actually, the two of you ought to patrol the corridors now and then," Ron said suddenly, turning to Neville and Parvati as though something had just occurred to him. "If anyone's up to no good, you can give them detention. Especially the Slytherins—if I were a prefect, I'd be out there right now looking for something to pin on them!"
"That seems… a bit off," Neville murmured.
"It is a bit off!" Hermione frowned, her voice was firm. "Ron, you can't go encouraging Neville to abuse his authority."
"Right, as if Malfoy wouldn't abuse his."
"That's your justification for dragging Neville and Parvati down to his level?"
"Hermione's right," Parvati said, stepping in loyally. "So long as they're following the rules, there's no need to go looking for trouble."
"Don't listen to them, Neville," Ron continued, undeterred. "We're just making sure that before he has a chance to bully our friends, his lot already know what's coming."
Ginny gave Ron a silent, private nod of approval.
'Nicely done.'
His cheerful meddling had, at least, done something to loosen the tight, miserable knot that had settled in her chest when she'd heard about Harry and Cho.
"Er—" Neville, faced with two conflicting camps, hesitated, genuinely unsure which way to fall.
'When in doubt, ask Sherlock.'
"Sherlock—"
"Malfoy won't trouble us," Sherlock said, in that level tone of his. "Or our friends."
Neville absorbed this, gave a single decisive nod, and the uncertainty left his face for good.
He straightened up and said, with real conviction: "Understood."
Ron pressed his lips together. He grabbed a Chocolate Frog, bit off its head, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
With their course of action settled, Parvati stood and collected Neville, and the two of them went out to patrol again.
The moment the compartment door clicked shut, Ron perked up immediately.
He nudged Harry's seat with his foot, eyebrows doing complicated things: "Harry, what are you just sitting there for? Cho's right here—go sit next to her! You two talking across the whole table is ridiculous."
He gave Harry a shove to illustrate the point, entirely missing the way Ginny's expression shuttered the instant he did.
The shove sent Harry lurching sideways. His cheeks went scarlet to the ears. "There's—there's no need to make such a fuss—"
"There's absolutely a need!" Ron declared, slapping the table.
Ginny's fingers tightened in her lap, nails were pressing into her palm.
She was fuming silently at Ron for being such a traitor—he knew perfectly well that she'd been in love with Harry since she was small. Not only had he refused to help her, he was actively creating opportunities for Harry and Cho.
And yet, hard on the heels of that anger came a wave of helpless, hollow dejection.
Ron wasn't wrong, was he?
Before, she'd been able to half-convince herself that Harry and Cho were still something undefined—that the window between them hadn't quite been opened yet.
But now?
They'd made it official. It was out in the open. They were together.
Given that, she really had no good reason to keep hovering at Harry's side.
Ginny drew a slow breath, started to rise, meaning to give up her seat.
But at that very moment, Cho smiled and waved her hand. "Really, no need to move. It would only be a bother."
And she simply sat herself down beside Luna instead.
Luna, who had been resting her chin in her hand in a pleasant daze, lit up the moment Cho settled next to her.
"Oh, look at the clouds!" she said happily. "Don't they look like flying whipped cream?"
Cho followed her gaze to the window, laughed, and leaned in. Within moments the two of them were deep in conversation.
The tight coil of anxiety in Ginny's chest released all at once. She let out a quiet breath, and when she looked at Cho, her eyes held something close to gratitude.
Harry, too, relaxed, sending a silent, thankful look in Cho's direction.
Ron just made a face, muttered I'll never understand any of you, and reached for another Chocolate Frog.
After that, the journey passed without much drama.
The group fell to talking about their summers—what they'd done, where they'd been. At some point during the journey, Cedric Diggory, Harry and Sherlock's frined from the year before stopped by the compartment to say hello. He'd been appointed Head Boy this year, and everyone gave him their warmest congratulations.
"I have to say, Ron, I've developed quite a respect for your brother Percy," Cedric remarked.
Preparing for N.E.W.T.s was already an enormous amount of work on its own, he explained. Add Head Boy on top of that, and it was nearly crushing. The fact that Percy had managed both at once, and managed them well, was genuinely remarkable.
Still, what everyone was most curious about was Harry's Occlumency lessons. Starting this term, Snape would be giving him private instruction every Monday evening at six o'clock.
"So, Snape's already given you one lesson," Ron said. "How was it? Did he try to make things difficult for you?"
"I want to know too," Ginny added. The matter clearly concerned her.
"It was… fine, actually," Harry said, his expression was somewhat complicated. "I think it mainly came down to the mask."
"The mask?"
Everyone except the small inner circle who already knew about it looked baffled.
"What does a mask have to do with Occlumency?" Ron asked.
Harry explained. "With a mask covering your nose and mouth, all he can see are your eyes."
"Oh!" Ron's face brightened with sudden understanding. "Harry, everyone who ever knew your parents says you're the image of your father—except your eyes. Your eyes are exactly your mother's. That's absolutely inspired—did you come up with that yourself?"
"It was Sherlock and Hermione," Harry said honestly.
"Brilliant!"
"Actually, it isn't just Harry who benefits from this," Cho said, smiling.
"What do you mean?" Hermione asked, intrigued.
"Try an experiment—have the same person wear a mask, then not. They'll look better with it on."
"Really?" Hermione was immediately interested.
"The eyes and eyebrows are the parts of the face that carry the most emotion and life. When a mask covers the lower half, your gaze naturally gravitates to the eyes and eyebrows. Under those conditions, advantages like lashes, eyes, or a strong eyebrow shape are amplified—a focal-point effect."
Sherlock cut in quietly: "There's also the brain's completion mechanism. We actively fill in what we can't see. When someone is masked, we unconsciously extrapolate from the attractive features that are visible and construct an ideal version of whatever's hidden."
"Sherlock—do you actually study things like this?" Hermione asked, staring at him.
"For a detective, it's rather useful knowledge. There was a thief who always wore a mask while working. Witnesses described him as sharp-eyed, well-presented. In reality, he had a scar behind his left ear—a detail every witness overlooked, because the mask's beautifying effect had drawn their attention inward, toward his better features.
Understanding this visual psychology lets you strip away surface impressions and reconstruct a suspect's real appearance. In my view, it's as fundamental to detective work as reading shoe prints or tobacco ash."
The effect of Sherlock's explanation was: the whole group felt they'd just been given an impromptu lecture and had rather enjoyed it.
Just then, that same familiar voice spoke up again.
"I suppose we ought to get changed."
Cho stood, gave Harry a warm smile, then turned to the others. "I should head back to my own compartment and get ready."
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