No Good Deed
A Harry Potter thing
By
EvilFuzzy9
Rating: K+
Genre: Friendship
Characters/Pairings: Ron W., Harry P., Hermione G.; [canon ships where applicable]
Summary: Actions have consequences. Between provocation and punishment lies an impulse decision and a stroke of luck, whether good or bad, that will lead to results which few would have dreamed of and fewer still would have hoped for. Whether it is fair and whether it is right is entirely subjective.
"You'll pay for that one, Malfoy!" snarled Ron Weasley, his ears turning violently red.
BANG!
A jet of sparks flew from the tip of a careworn, spellotaped wand clutched in a freckly hand, awkward and gangling fingers wrapped around the handle. Green, beige, and yellow in an ugly mix of colors viscerally reminiscent of bile and pus, the sparks scattered through the air with a fizzing noise, shortly followed by a plume of smoke and another loud bang.
Draco barely knew what hit him.
He staggered back quite suddenly, the light and smoke quickly fading and dissipating. His eyes were bulging in their sockets when it cleared, and he clutched a hand to his throat; a normally pale face had turned a distinct shade of olive. Gagging, choking, he stared in a repugnant mixture of shock and fury at his assailant's equally livid expression.
Coughing and hacking, Draco Malfoy doubled over in front of everyone and belched up a mouthful of fat, slimy slugs.
The quidditch pitch exploded in an uproar.
The Slytherin team howled in outrage, Marcus Flint growling trollishly and swelling up to an impressive size. Burly, green clad beaters like moss-covered boulders grabbed their bats, while the other equally large and menacing members of the Slytherin team whipped out their wands and pointed them at Ron.
The Gryffindor team was quick to react. Fred and George muscled their way free of restraint and moved to cover their brother, expressions fierce as they trained their wands on Flint. Katie, Alicia, and Angelina were just as swift to take up their own wands, the tips sparking and hissing in an unspoken threat.
Gryffindor and Slytherin were at a standoff on the pitch, sending black looks and silent warnings at their respective counterparts. Tension had permeated the air in a matter of seconds, rivalry and mutual antipathy rapidly evolving into nearly open aggression.
Harry could only stare in shock as all of this happened, so fast and so extreme that he frankly had no idea what to think. One minute it had quite been like any other encounter with Malfoy, the blond snidely drawling insults, when Hermione had sniped back about him buying his way onto the Slytherin quidditch team, provoking Malfoy to redden and venomously retort.
"You stay out of this, you filthy little mudblood!"
Mudblood.
Just the way it had been spoken was enough to tell Harry that this was something very foul, and the gasps and cries of indignation from the nearer Gryffindor players only cemented that impression. Still, the violence of Ron's reaction seemed remarkable—if not in the sense of it being out of character, for the youngest male Weasley had always been hot tempered and impulsive at the best of times.
But Harry could not remember Ron ever actually jinxing someone in anger before, even if this was not necessarily for a lack of trying when it came to Malfoy. Hermione, for her part, was paler than the Hogwarts ghosts as she gripped Ron's elbow, looking at him in a mixture of worry and disbelief.
"You shouldn't have done that!" she squeaked shrilly, horrified. "Do you want to get expelled, Ron?!"
Malfoy retched and spat another mouthful of slugs onto the grass before Ron could give an answer. Draco was livid, and despite the indignity of his position there was something undeniably chilling about the look he shot them, his eyes glaring daggers keen and frigid.
"You'll pay for this, Weasley," he darkly muttered. "You, Potter, and that uppity mudbleargh—"
Draco doubled over halfway through the final word, gagging yet again, before expectorating an especially corpulent slug. Mucus dribbled from his mouth, a clear and vile-smelling secretion that spattered nauseatingly over the front of his undoubtedly expensive and brand new quidditch robes. His face twisted in disgust, and indignation smoldered in his eyes.
Fred and George sniggered despite the tension, amused by Malfoy's humiliating position. There was a slight glimmer of pride in their eyes as they glanced at their youngest brother. A fuming Slytherin chaser snapped his wrist, seeing this, and produced a jet of violet light from his wand.
Alicia Spinnet flicked her own wand, and the light was stopped a foot from its target. It burst harmlessly into sparks as though it had just impacted an invisible shield, and bolts of electricity flashed over a transparent bubble, a lens of air that rippled and wavered before dispelling.
She glowered coolly at the one who had shot the jinx.
Katie and Angelina advanced menacingly, flanking their fellow chaser with wands held aloft. Wisps of ominously colored smoke rose in curling, languorous tendrils from the points of their wands, aglow as the tips of burning faggots. Sparks popped out once or twice, fizzing like fireworks about to go off.
Harry looked worriedly from Malfoy, to Ron, to Hermione, and to his fellow Gryffindor quidditch players. Normally he would have felt a rush a glee, a mixture of schadenfreude and vindication to see Draco Malfoy knocked down a peg and so afflicted. Right now, however, he felt none of that.
The only thing this scene brought to Harry's mind was a grim recollection of Dumbledore's warning on the evening of their first day back at Hogwarts. His heart dropped into the pit of his stomach, and he pulled anxiously close to Ron as though hoping to shield him from retaliation. Malfoy deserved to be hexed a hundred times over, but the two of them had been warned quite clearly that if they got into any more trouble this year...
He shivered, barely noticing as Marcus Flint and Oliver Wood got into a fistfight—the Slytherin captain's sheer bulk and brute strength lent themselves better to pugilism than curses, and he was infamously dull besides, so Flint had chosen to throw himself at Wood and initiate the fight on his own terms rather than wait for conflict to erupt naturally. Harry wasn't even paying attention.
He didn't notice George swishing while Fred flicked, shooting out all sorts of nastily amusing hexes at the Slytherin team, or the Gryffindor chasers transfiguring every body part they could get a bead on. Nor, likewise, did he notice Hermione pulling on his collar and dragging him and Ron away as jinxes began to fly in earnest.
Harry's mind was a jumble of thoughts, swirling around and around like socks in the Dursley's washing machine. He thought of the trouble he and Ron had gotten into, flying the Ford Anglia to Hogwarts, and the warning they had been given.
If they broke any more rules, they would be expelled.
Dueling was forbidden at Hogwarts, wasn't it? So, surely, was hexing one's schoolmates. He and Ron were on thin ice already, and Malfoy wasn't the kind of person to let this sort of thing go. He would tell, and he would spin the story to make it sound as though he was a blameless martyr.
The only hope in Harry's mind was that, whatever Malfoy's snarl of "mudblood" had meant, it was vile and provocative enough to excuse Ron's actions.
But even that might not be sufficient if Professor Snape got involved.
A/N: This is an idea I've been entertaining for a few weeks, a "what if" scenario based in CoS, which was probably one of my favorite of the HP books back when I was a kid. This author's note would be longer if I wasn't so sleepy and incapable of thinking of stuff to put down.
Updated: 1-15-16
TTFN and R&R!
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