The murmurs swelled through the Great Hall, sharp with mockery and cruel amusement.
"Did you read that bit about him crying every night? Pathetic."
"He misses his parents so much it hurts. Like, get over it, Potter."
"And that Granger girl? Fooling around with Krum and Potter? What a tart."
A few Slytherins broke into jeering laughter, one of them pretending to sob loudly into his sleeve while others howled at the performance. Heads turned, eyes flicking toward the Gryffindor table.
Hermione sat very straight, her spoon frozen halfway between her bowl of porridge and her lips. Her face was a mask of icy composure, but the clench of her jaw betrayed the sting. She could already hear whispers traveling up and down the benches, snide remarks about her supposed romantic entanglements. Some of the looks thrown her way were openly scornful, others sly and knowing.
Harry, beside her, had gone rigid. His hand tightened around the Prophet until it crumpled noisily, the sharp edges digging into his skin. He forced himself to keep reading, but his eyes burned as line after line leapt out at him. Rita Skeeter had taken his curt "Yeah, I miss them" and twisted it into nightly breakdowns. She had spun his nervous dread of the Tournament into sparkling delight, as though he were grinning his way toward danger. Every word was false, but worse than that, they were falsehoods everyone else seemed ready to believe.
His stomach heaved with disgust. Heat rose in his face until his ears burned. He could feel the weight of stares pressing on him from every direction: Slytherins smirking, Ravenclaws whispering behind hands, even some Hufflepuffs exchanging looks of disappointment.
Ron sat opposite him, the Prophet propped against a jug of pumpkin juice. His eyes flicked from the page to Harry with a strange, unreadable expression. For a moment Harry thought—hoped—that Ron might speak up, might roll his eyes at Skeeter's lies or snap at the Slytherins for laughing. But Ron only shifted the paper higher, his mouth tightening as if the article had given him something else to resent. He said nothing.
Harry's hand trembled. The laughter from the Slytherin table rang in his ears, louder than the usual clatter of breakfast plates. The Prophet slipped in his grip, but then he slammed it flat against the table, the sound echoing through the hall like a thunderclap. A few younger students flinched.
His green eyes blazed, fury and humiliation boiling together until his whole body shook with it. Ron still did not speak, did not even look at him. The silence between them was louder than all the laughter, sharper than all the whispers.
"That filthy lying cow!" Harry snarled, his voice low but venomous, drawing startled glances from nearby Gryffindors. "She was scribbling the whole time… that bloody quill of hers…"
Hermione leaned in, her own copy clenched tightly, outrage shining in her eyes. "You should have seen her coming, Harry. She's notorious for twisting everything. It's all lies, every word!"
Harry's gaze fell on the offending paragraph about Hermione, the one where Skeeter had painted her as his "pretty but ambitious" confidante, hopelessly caught between him and Viktor Krum. The lie burned worse than the rest. He muttered, not quite able to meet her eyes, "And that bit about you… sorry. It's rubbish."
Her cheeks flushed, but she waved it away, her voice steady though her hand trembled against the parchment. "Don't. We ignore it. That's what she wants, to make us lose our heads. We don't give her the satisfaction."
The words steadied him more than she could know. Her calm in the storm was the rope keeping him from lashing out blindly. But the stares of the hall pressed in, suffocating, whispers laced with poison.
From the Slytherin table, Draco Malfoy's smirk cut through the noise like a hex. He brandished his copy of the Daily Prophet like a victory banner and swaggered toward the Gryffindor benches, Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini close behind, their laughter bubbling over. "Well, well, Potter," Draco drawled, his voice carrying easily over the clatter of cutlery. "The Boy Who Lived… more like the Boy Who Cries. 'Tears every night'—how touching. Do you need a handkerchief to go with your fame?"
A ripple of laughter answered him, mostly from the Slytherin end but punctuated by the snickers of a few Hufflepuffs who could not resist the moment. The chant started as a hiss, then caught like fire. "Crybaby Potter! Crybaby Potter!"
Harry's head snapped up, the fury in his chest momentarily eclipsing his humiliation. "Shut it, Malfoy," he growled, his fists clenching around the edge of the table until his knuckles whitened. His voice cracked just slightly, hoarse with rage and raw effort not to explode.
Ron, slumped across from him, glowered at Malfoy with undisguised contempt. For one taut second, it looked as if he might leap to Harry's defense. But he only dropped his eyes back to his plate, his silence as cutting as the laughter.
Ginny, at Harry's side, slammed her fork into her eggs with a violent stab, glaring daggers at Malfoy. "Ignore him," she muttered, though her voice was sharp as steel. "He isn't worth it."
The jeers did not stop. They swirled together, a steady undercurrent of gossip and cruelty. From the Ravenclaw table, someone muttered just loud enough for others to hear, "Granger's got three famous blokes on a string—Potter, that Rowen kid, and Krum? Shameless."
A Gryffindor fourth-year shook her head in open disgust. "Using them for status. Typical."
Hermione's shoulders stiffened. She stared straight ahead, determined not to flinch, but her cheeks burned scarlet. Harry saw it. It twisted in his stomach worse than Skeeter's lies. She had been dragged into this because of him, and now the whole school was tearing at her reputation with their teeth.
Harry shoved his chair back an inch, half-rising as if to lunge at Draco, words boiling over. "You wouldn't know the truth if it hexed you—"
But Malfoy's mocking laugh drowned him out. The blond raised the Prophet higher, his voice cutting across the hall. "Admit it, Potter! You love it—all this attention. Center of the stage, crying for sympathy, lapping up the fame. Don't be shy now!"
The taunt sent another wave of laughter rolling through the Slytherin table, spilling into other corners of the hall. A few students jabbed fingers toward Harry, delighted at the spectacle, while others craned for a better look at the article being passed from hand to hand. Headlines blared in every direction, Skeeter's twisted words flapping above the tables like victory banners.
The pressure was unbearable. Harry's heart hammered in his chest as if it would crack his ribs. Heat seared his face; his hands shook with the effort of keeping himself in check. He could hear his own breath, ragged and furious.
Hermione's hand shot to his sleeve, her voice a fierce whisper. "Harry, don't. He wants this. Please."
Ginny glared at Malfoy, her fork poised as though she might hurl it across the hall. Neville, further down the bench, muttered, "Shut up, Malfoy," though his voice was swallowed by the laughter.
Ron's jaw worked silently, his eyes locked on Malfoy with a smoldering hatred. But still, he said nothing.
Harry's chair screeched against the stone floor as he pushed himself fully upright. The sound cut through the din, drawing even more eyes. For one wild second he considered vaulting across the table and throttling Malfoy where he stood, headline or no headline, detentions be damned.
Instead, he slammed his palms down on the wood so hard the bowls rattled. His voice tore from him, raw and furious. "Shut your filthy mouth!"
The laughter faltered, caught on the edge of his rage. A few students snickered nervously, but most fell silent, sensing the coil of temper ready to snap.
Harry could not bear another second of their stares. He grabbed his bag and shoved past the bench, striding out of the hall with the Prophet left crumpled behind him like something diseased.
Hermione scraped her chair back almost at once, shooting Malfoy a glare of pure loathing before hurrying after him. Ginny started to rise too, but Hermione caught her eye, shaking her head. This was something only she could do.
The Great Hall buzzed in Harry's wake, whispers rushing back to life as soon as the doors swung closed behind him. Crybaby Potter. Granger the tart. The poison of Skeeter's quill seeped deeper into the morning air.
Eira watched from her seat as Harry shoved his way out of the hall, the Prophet left crumpled on the table behind him. Hermione followed quickly, her head held high but her cheeks red, determined not to let the Slytherins see her falter. Ron stayed where he was, silent and tight-lipped, eyes fixed on his plate.
For a moment, Eira almost pushed back her chair. The urge to go after Hermione, to say something to cut through the whispers, tugged at her. But she stopped herself.
If she rose now, if she followed Hermione out or stood up to Malfoy in front of everyone, it would not end with Hermione. She would be pulled into Harry's mess as well. To defend Hermione was, by extension, to defend Harry, and that was exactly what the hall wanted—a fresh angle, a new rumor. Skeeter's words were already spreading like fire; the last thing she needed was for students to start saying that White's heiress was backing Harry Potter, or worse, tied to him in some private way.
She tightened her grip on her goblet, taking a slow sip of mango juice to keep her hands steady. She hated leaving Hermione to face it alone, but getting involved would not silence the whispers. It would make them louder, sharper, more personal. The matter was already bad enough; her stepping in would only feed it.
So she stayed where she was, watching the smirks and the laughter ripple across the hall. Her lips pressed into a thin line. She would remember every face that jeered today, but for now, silence was the wiser choice.