This is the very last. I promise.

High above the castle grounds, a lone figure soared and swooped.

"Grimsley to Montague - Montague to Pike - he catches it, he dodges, he rooooooooohhhh no..."

He'd fumbled the Quaffle. He watched it drop downwards, dwindling into a reddish speck.

Harm wasn't very good at Quidditch, which was a shame because he had all the advantage of a flying barricade. Whereas other children might have been sneaking onto brooms at the tender age of six or seven, Harm's parents had barred him from sports on the grounds that they fostered an unhealthy spirit of competition. Thus deprived, the boy had channeled said spirit into whaling on the kids who did, in fact, play sports.

The fact was, the other House teams had breathed a sigh of relief when the hulking Slytherin turned out to have zero interest in a lawful outlet for his aggression.

Or so they thought: the respective captains had canceled practice over the winter holidays, since less than half the school remained. Finally, Harm had the empty Quidditch pitch to himself.

"Accio Quaffle!"

The ball zoomed past his outstretched hand, landing in the mud several feet away. Harm sighed and dismounted to pick it up.

Respect, that was the problem. Ever since he'd quit beating up people, they'd started thinking that he was nice or something. It was like he was invisible! He needed to build up his image again, make people flinch when he walked into the room. Even a slight eye twitch would be enough, or a whisper along line of, Did you see how he knocked Sloper off his broom?

As he was thinking, a snowball arced into the back of his head.

Harm spun around, wand at the ready. If someone'd been spying on him, he'd make sure they kept their mouth damn well shut, and patch up his street cred as a bonus.

No one was there.

A flutter of movement caught his eye, as if a person had just ducked behind one of the bleachers. Harm started to run, then paused and jumped onto his broom.

He circled the seats, but didn't see whoever was hiding. He squinted, trying to discern if there were tracks around the canvas-covered commentary tower.

The fabric at the tower's base twitched.

Harm dropped down, not bothering to be stealthy. He wanted them to know he was coming.

"Right, you little sod, if you think you can get away with this..."

He pulled back the canvas, and a torrent of snow hit him in the face, muffling his shouted jinx.

Someone tried to push past him, and Harm snatched wildly. His hand closed upon the handle of a broom, which the sneaky personage tried to yank back. He held on grimly, wiping away snow with his wand hand.

"You think you can run," he started. Then he got a good look at his victim. Harm goggled.

"You!"

"Oh, hi, Harm," said Jack. "Just anted to check how you were doing. You fly like a brick wall, by the way." He tried to pull his staff back, but Harm was still clamped to the end.

"You..."

"Yep, me," answered Jack cheerfully. "If you could just loosen your fingers a little here."

"You're alive."

"And you're attached to a deadly weapon." He pried ineffectively at Harm's grip. "Let go, Harm."

"Did you know," said Harm, "that Lucretia cried for a week afterwards? To me? And I had pat her on the back for an hour before she'd go away?"

Jack looked up. "Nope," he said. Then he resumed the task of scrabbling at Harm's fingers.

"Did you know," continued Harm, striding purposefully, "that they never told us what happened? Even when Maurice asked?"

"Harm, give it back," said Jack, a note of panic creeping into his voice.

Harm was slowly but steadily dragging him in the direction of the castle. It was easy, really. The kid weighed as much as a sponge cake made of feathers.

"And did you know," Harm went on, "that I'm going to get some answers out of you? And that this time, you're not going to weasel out of it?"

"Harm," said Jack levelly, "if you don't let go, bad things are going to happen."

"You mean, worse than an entire dungeon getting blown up? We know that was Pitchiner. You can't do a shred of magic, can you. I want to know just what - just how you did whatever it was you did to him."

"I meant for you," said Jack.

Harm faltered for a second. He strode on, dragging his guest behind him. "If you try to strand me in a blizzard again," he growled, "I looked up spells against that kind of thing."

"I'm giving you one last chance," warned Jack.

Harm kept towing, wand gripped tightly in his fist.

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

Harm turned around, Shield Charm at the ready -

"PROTEG - "

Harm's world went white. And cold. Very cold.

Old traditions die hard. The professors recognized this, especially since they were the old traditions, so they let the House tables remain as they were for the majority of the year. But during the winter holidays, few enough students stayed in the castle for them to declare separate House seating unnecessary.

It's more efficient to seat you all at one table, they said. Think of the house-elves, they said. And, oh, we almost didn't think of this, but it will foster a healthy sense of inter-House community so hopefully our students will stop trying to kill each other.

Old tradition, and young wizards and witches, took one look and scoffed at their sparkling intentions. They may have forced us to sit at the same table, they reasoned, but they can't make us mingle. Some helpful soul actually burned boundary lines into the benches.

Maurice Kimberly found one of the blackened lines and sat on it. Not that he had much of a choice; halfway through lunch, everywhere else was already occupied. The Hufflepuffs and Slytherins on either side of him didn't mind, since it meant they were technically no longer sitting next to each other. Plus, it was Maurice.

It would not be true to say that everyone liked Maurice. Rather, no one actively disliked him. He was neither precocious nor slow at magic. He answered questions posed to him, and was invariably correct, so they treated him like a sort of amiable human almanac. It did him no harm, so he did nothing about it.

Other than that, people tended to avoid Maurice. When you talked at him, you felt like he was sucking your brain in through his ears. And that was only when you managed to avoid eye contact.

Maurice helped himself to shepherd's pie as the dish passed by and surveyed the table.

Lucretia was at her parents', as was Feral. Appleby, he knew, was still asleep.

Where was Harm?

Not the Slytherin Common Room; he would have seen the others heading down. There was no reason for him to be in the empty classrooms. The library? He'd been furtively researching something lately. Maurice had looked at the books he left out, and they were all to do with folklore and magical creatures. Well, Maurice knew what that was all about. If Harm was too thick to figure it out, he'd have to start dropping some discrete hints.

Harm was interested in his little research project, but not enough to miss a meal. Even the dungeons had lost their mystery by now, so that left one place for him to be: secret Quidditch practice.

You could argue that any activity that involved flying around on a broom in a huge open space was hard to keep a secret, but no one really bothered to go out on the pitch if a match was not, at that very second, in full swing. If Harm fell off his broom, it was quite likely that he'd have to wait a few days before anyone thought to wonder about his absence.

Maurice methodically speared the last chunk of carrot, sopped up the gravy with a piece of bread, wiped his hands, and folded up the napkin.

Then he trotted off to check up on Harm, but not too quickly. After all, he had just eaten an excellent lunch.

Ok, I jest. Second to last one. It was just too long for one chapter.