Gregory Goyle had never been particularly good at anything, really. He wasn't smart, or funny, or handsome, or charming. Whenever he tried to cast a spell or make a potion it was always doomed to go wrong and he was absolutely sure that he had failed more tests than he'd passed. His parents were clearly ashamed of him, as they tried to avoid speaking to him whenever possible and always requested that he stay at Hogwarts for the holidays. The few friends he had only kept him around because he could intimidate people and to them he wasn't a friend, he was a bodyguard. He wasn't too good at that either because, despite being in Slytherin, he was actually sort of sensitive. Nobody knew that, though.

He'd never kissed a girl.

He was sixteen years old, and he'd never even held hands with a girl, never even had a girlfriend, and it was beginning to get to him. For Salazar's sake, even Crabbe had kissed someone! Sure, it was Millicent Bulstrode so it didn't really count because, well, she danced like a Hippogriff so Merlin knows what she kissed like. Goyle imagined it was something similar to kissing a slug.

But then, she could be the best kisser in the universe and he wouldn't know because the only other person he'd kissed was his grandmother, and even she had looked reluctant. That had hurt.

However, there was actually a reason why Goyle hadn't kissed anyone yet. There were plenty of girls who would kiss him – or so he liked to think – but he was saving himself for someone special, someone he'd had his eye on since day one. And he didn't care how far-fetched and delusional it was, because he was completely and utterly in love.

Rolanda Hooch was rapidly approaching her 97th birthday and she did not like it. She knew she was in no danger of being fired – Dumbledore himself was nearing 150 for crying out loud – but she could feel her joints beginning to seize up and it was getting harder and harder to stay on a broom for prolonged periods of time. Still she went about her job with continued fervour, happy to help the first years who were still struggling, and to referee the matches with a firm hand.

Nevertheless, she wasn't happy with her age – most women wouldn't be by the time they had clocked up such a grand number of years. She could feel the students watching her with pity as she strolled slowly through the halls because, even though she never went faster than she needed to, she still had to stop occasionally to stretch out a stiff leg or something to that effect. From time to time some pupils even offered her a hand, the kinder ones, but she always turned them down. She wasn't that old, yet.

But she noticed that there was one pupil who watched but never offered to help, who stared but never came to her assistance, whose eyes chased her everywhere but whose voice followed her nowhere.

His name was Gregory Goyle.

He sat in the stands of the Quidditch pitch, his broom abandoned beside him, and watched her fly around the pitch, looping between the hoops, and looking like a swan flying. To him, she was a swan when she flew because she was just so graceful and beautiful that he couldn't take his eyes off her. It was funny; he only had relatively deep thoughts if they concerned her.

"JONATHAN ACTON, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?" Her sudden screech of fury caught him completely off guard and he jumped out of his little daydream to watch as she swerved over to catch a first year by the neck of his robes mere seconds before he would have hit the ground from quite a height. He chuckled lightly as she dropped him to the ground and angrily told him to go and find his Head of House and explain what he had been doing.

She looked up, then, as if she had somehow heard his chuckle and was curious as to who dared laugh at her. Their eyes connected and Goyle couldn't help the feeling of joy that swooped through his stomach as they stared at each other; his brown eyes searching her beautiful eyes which were a curious shade of yellow.

And then one of the first years let out a small cry of fear as her broom cornered too fast and the intensity they had been sharing in their eyes was gone as she whipped around on her broom to go to the first year's aid. Goyle chewed on the small smile that had appeared on his face as he collected his broomstick and trudged up to the castle.

It would never happen, he knew that much. He wasn't deluding himself into anything. But they had just had a moment and he knew it had been more than just curiosity that he had seen flicker in those golden eyes.

And so he would go back to the common room and he would be teased about not having a girlfriend and never having kissed a girl and it would be the normal nightly torments that chased him relentlessly to his bed. But then when the mocking and jeering had finally stopped and he could escape, he would be able to dream of her and her wise beauty and, despite that it would never happen, he would go to sleep with gentle dreams of a place where a relationship like that was even remotely possible.

I'd just like to point out that this bizarre pairing was given to me for a competition and I will probably never write something like this again. Hope you enjoyed it... ;)