Oliver centric; thoughts as he watches the Tornadoes vs. the Canons. Completely disclaimed; J.K. owns all the characters, teams, etc. Possibly even a few peoples souls. Word count: 2,360. No pairing apart from brief mention of KB/OW. Enjoy.
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Reminiscence
There's a slight breeze around the pitch, cold, refreshing, thoughtful. A wind can be thoughtful, he mused, if it can move leaves like that, soft, slow, quiet.
Yet, the noise is deafening. But, Oliver Wood was born for it; the sounds of cheering, elbows digging into his sides, feet stomping hard onto his, the excitement of fans, the whooshing of brooms overhead; everything that made up quidditch, he was born for.
He isn't here to play, though. His coach had said, in his gruff, serious voice, "You got to feel the game from the inside, and the outside," a cough, a pause to sway, louder syllables, "be a spectator once in a while, pick up on how to please your fans, know what its like to be on and off the broom in quidditch." Here he'd surveyed the lot of them, shivering, covered head to toe in cold mud, sleeping on their feet, and cursed something colourful, "Aw, just watch a bloody game sometime and steal the teams moves, yeh pack o' dirt bags."
Oliver concluded that he was, a, drunk and b, genuinely advising them to turn into thieving quidditch criminals. He had decided that there were some truthful, utterly angelic reasons to watch the pros, and to pretend to be a simple spectator.
So here he is, sitting in the stands, not too high, not too low, yet enough to see the Tornadoes' keeper at work with ease. Here's here to learn, but also to sabotage. Maybe if he copies just a small percentage of their skill, he'll have a chance against them, if he ever plays them. No. When he plays them. He is adamant he is good enough. He has been on a broom since before he could walk, and he hasn't gotten off since. It takes over his thinking, as if he is possessed. But he is, because the wind rushing through his hair, dangerous flips and turns, homicidal swiftness… they are life.
Zoom. The tornado chaser speeds over the crowd, sending an extra cheer throughout the fans, letting them get a small taste of the adrenaline rush that comes with soaring treacherous heights into the air with only the thought of damage to the enemies in mind.
Oliver Wood has been off a broom less than a day, and he already misses the feeling.
And as he sits here, in his black woollen skivvy, black slacks, with a maroon cloak thrown over, he suddenly realises how odd he must look in the sea of sky blues and blacks. He is not going to wear another teams colours, though; that would be betrayal. Loyalty… it probably stems from his Gryffindor days.
Thinking back to where it all started caused a small smile to grace his lips. His Father had been an adamant quidditch fan, throwing him on a broom before he could walk, under the cover of dark when his Mother had been sleeping soundly in her warm bed. All the while, her husband had been dragging her shivering two-year-old out into a makeshift pitch in their backyard. Years later, he'd finally worked up the nerve to apply for the Gryffindor house team on his second year, having, not butterflies, but explosions in his stomach, and not shivers, but something resembling a house in an earthquake racking through his body. Of course, he had scolded himself the whole way there, and it had lessened to only a tremble of the hands, and a slight ache in the stomach, but with a defiant, confident and serious look superglued to his face. Oliver Wood blocked every shot, and made the team with a pat on the back to boot. And now it's even more years later, after acquiring his beloved Firebolt and he's a reserve on his favourite team ever.
But still.
Sometimes he is just so tired. He is physically tired, mentally tired, emotionally tired. He is triangularly tired. Oliver, resting his head in his hands, running his fingers across taunt skin and dark under-eye sacks, could not imagine how he looked. Like a flour sack, he reasoned, used and original. Maybe it was because he was original he wasn't up there on an actual team, blocking every goal in a championship game. It frustrated him to no end that the reserve team is all he's on. People have been talking, though, that Puddlemere's keeper is set to resign. Oliver Wood will be there to take his place.
What about when he is famous? Will he still be tired then? He's so confused… Oliver never really figured out exactly what it was that made him happy. It could have been a sum of small things, or just the small things, or just the large things, or the sum of the large things. Analysing things other than quidditch strategies never was his strong point.
Like romance. That word, to him, is cursed.
Katie Bell… he remembered in sixth year, he'd had a thing for her, and he was very surprised when she had a thing for him back. They had discovered this after she caught him in the change room with only a towel around his middle, causing her to blush profusely, mutter apologies and flee the room. It took Oliver a total of ten and a half seconds to stop thinking about how pretty she looked as a beetroot, to spring into action, putting his pants on backwards five times and his shirt inside out twice, before rushing out after her without really knowing why.
They collided just outside the door, him somehow managing to press her against the wall, her not quite knowing how her hands managed to gain a life of their own, pull to him by the crumpled shirt collar, and, together, completely confused, they started kissing right then and there. And in the team change rooms, a crevice near the charms corridor, in the middle of the night on the lounge beside the fire.
It didn't stop him from playing though, but it did cause problems. She began to take it personally when he told her she needed to up her game, or to remind her to wake up, "Yeh got your bloody team mates, lass! Now use em'!" It started to affect how she played, and more than once he swore she aimed the quaffle at him rather than the goal. Eventually, after a month of their 'relationship' he'd found her in the change room, looking sullenly at the floor.
He thought she'd understand, but the ultimatum still came;
"It's either quidditch, or me."
He chose the quidditch.
A week later, following a stony, tension-filled silence between them, she hung back after a disastrous and muddy training session, and shuffled her feet while he watched her, consciously indifferent. "Look, Wood," she began, obviously trying to swallow her pride, "I understand your decision, and I know it was wrong of me to ask you that." Katie frowned pointedly at the dirt, awaiting his reaction.
"Katie," he had said, grinning as she looked up, "It's nice talking to you again."
She grinned back, and all was well.
It had been dry after that, his little river of love. Quidditch had always been the only thing he was exceptionally good at. Maybe he should have thought to have a bit of a back up, or something else, because, right now, as he watches the streaks of striking, fire orange and camouflaged blue across the afternoon sky, it doesn't seem like enough. It's not as if he doesn't have a purpose, to be the greatest keeper in the world is more than enough, it's more like something is missing. It's not a family, his Mother and Father are very supportive of his dreams, although his Mother worries a lot, but some days, they're not enough either. And it's not a friend, because he has a lot of them, well, sort of. He has team mates...
Is that what it is, a friend? He misses Fred and George, and Alicia and Angelina, and Katie and even Potter even though he's all over the Daily Prophet's front page every second week!, and all the fun they had together. Maybe he just feels left out, or discarded, or separate.
He doesn't know. Merlin forbid he's missing a girl. A girl. Someone to hold, to care for, to kiss, to love.
He is so confused, holding his head in his hands, he doesn't even notice the Cannon's chaser speeding towards the Tornado's goal. He doesn't notice the crowd going wild.
Maybe this was just a bad day to be a spectator. It's certainly a bad day to be playing.
Because Oliver doesn't feel like Oliver anymore.
Fred and George had said that quidditch never was the same afterwards, that they missed his speeches. He was sure that was an exaggeration on their part: he'd learned to never trust a prankster. Maybe they could put a little light back in his suddenly dark life, a little colour. Maybe they could make him laugh.
Laughter. It hit him that he doesn't laugh anymore. Sure he wasn't one to start cracking up every five minutes, but after a good game or sometimes a bad one, when he'd finished going over everything that went wrong, completely bypassing what went right he'd join in the celebrations that the twins and Lee made sure would happen.
He frowned, realising he had been too caught up in his thoughts to notice that the Tornadoes keeper had just blocked another goal. He scolded himself for going astray. Quidditch, he thought, quidditch.
He remembered his tryout for the Puddlemere reserve team. It had been a muggy afternoon, in the middle of autumn. There had been red and gold leaves falling from the trees, momentarily suspended by the gushing wind. It had reminded him of Gryffindor, and, unfortunately, sent a sharp pang of evocative longing for the school through his stomach, like a knife, like the bludger Flint had shot at him the year before, when they'd lost the cup.
Happy thoughts, Oliver, happy thoughts.
He'd started shaking then, just like Hogwarts, forcing a determined look on his face, showing the coach how badly he wanted to be a part of the team. Guess it had worked, or maybe it'd been because he'd blocked every goal, once again, just like Hogwarts.
Everything seems to come back to Hogwarts. It had been a second home for seven years. Oliver does not feel at home in Puddlemere yet. The other players don't really understand him. He's alone there, unlike at the witchcraft school. Maybe he'll go back there, one day soon. A kind of renewal to make life feel like life, of a better life. He doesn't know. Maybe he'll just go back for the sake of it.
Maybe. He doesn't like that word. It's too open, too insecure, unsure. It has no strategy, no rules, too many exceptions. It's the entity of possibility.
Too much hands onto the edge and balance can never relate to a maybe.
He thinks of the war that's been building ever since Harry became the Golden Child, the-boy-who-lived, since Voldemort first killed, since he was born if he was born. The war holds onto a maybe like a child to candy, and the glass that cuts into its hands as it grasps on, makes it bleed, could go either way, to shatter over the Light or the Dark.
A crescendo shall soon be reached. There will only be bleeding, and then a cry, a war cry. The tension is too high to wait further, each side too anxious, quivering in both watchful alertness and apprehension.
Maybe the world would have been better off uncreated, no matter who committed that great sin. Maybe humans, muggles, witches or wizards, will be able to get along, but that maybe is too much of a maybe, connected to too much controversy, hinged on something that is bigger than a population, void of balance or certainty.
Probability, Oliver mused as he smiled grimly to himself, is an important aspect of quidditch strategy planning, and he knows that there is a one in three chance of a chaser shooting at the centre goal, and there is a whole twenty percent chance that they will aim at him instead. It hangs on a maybe too, but this one holds some sort of certainty.
Once again, he's taken away from his thoughts, this time by none other than a nice looking girl trying to pass him. "Sorry, lass," he drawls, shifting so she can pass. She's tall, with long red hair, dyed though, not like the Weasley's, and a Tornadoes coloured cloak on. She's not a player, just a fan.
He wonders if he'll ever have fans like that, maybe pretty ones too. He needs something to fight for, and to be the best damn keeper in history should be enough. It's not, not at all.
The Oliver inside, the ignorant dreamer, is yelling that it should, that it is, but there's another in there, realistic, practical in saying that not everything is certain. That's why maybes were invented.
Oliver sighs, realising the game should be over now. Score: ten to ninety, plus one hundred and fifty for the snitch; a sure win. Why the Cannons bother, he doesn't know.
He thinks, suddenly, of Dumbledore. Oliver hadn't made it to the funeral, but he'd sent Dumbledore a memento for his grave: a Puddlemere scarf, complete with water-repelling and anti-unravelling charms. He thought the professor might like that.
The tornadoes succeed; their seekers finally stopped showing off and caught the snitch. They all come together to do their victory piece, spiralling, just like a tornado.
As the crowd bustles around him towards the exit, pushing him along, he wonders if he can join the spiral, if it will travel downwards or upwards, if maybe he'll end up somewhere worthwhile.
But all he can do is hope, hope for the best. And fight.
Fight to be the best keeper in the world. Fight for his home, fight for his friends, fight for his future, fight for the world.
Fight, if only, to be happy.
Fin.
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Critical reviews are appreciated.