"Right," the voice that spoke was the kind yet firm tone of one Gabriel Truman, Quidditch captain, prefect, and overachiever extraordinaire "These are the balls Quidditch is played with."

He bent down to undo the clasp on the side of the brown case in which the balls were kept, looking at Ichigo rather than the case that appeared to be writhing. Then the bag popped open of its own accord.

Ichigo felt his hand tightening around the handle of his broomstick, to the point at which his knuckles looked to be as white as alabaster.

"This," Gabriel began as he picked up a mundane seeming ball from the case "is a quaffle - that's us chasers' jobs. We've got to pass this through the hoops on either end of the court that are being blocked by the opposition's keeper. You got that?"

Ichigo did get that, so he nodded. "Sounds simple enough."

Gab made to continue on his explanation, gently bouncing the leather ball in his hand, when he was interrupted by the approach of a tall, broad Gryffindor boy and Ichigo's own cousin.

The second Harry saw Ichigo, he looked up from the ground and smiled. Ichigo smiled back in return.

"What's this Truman," Oliver Wood began, hands placed on hips but face never devoid of slight smile "Has Hufflepuff got themselves a first year member too?"

"It would seem. We've got the cousins."

"This'll be fun."

Two pairs of eyes turned to face Ichigo and Harry as they discussed their understanding of the wizarding sport known as Quidditch, or lack thereof.

"So," Gabe turned back to Ichigo, this time including harry in the discussion as Wood watched with a smirk on his face "Let's pick up where we left off. This is the quaffle - it's our job as chaser's, that being mine and Wood's, to score with this. You needn't concern yourselves with it too much. There are only two balls you need to worry about."

Wood bent down and unclasped the quivering section of the case after a bat had been handed to the two rather confused first years with no explanation aside from a simple, humorous utterance of "You're gonna need those."

The instance the constraints were removed, a lively ball that flew straight to Ichigo.

Reflexively, Ichigo's arm moved and the bat made solid contact with the centre of the ball. He brought the bat through, feeling the weight of the ball on his right hand as he forced it forwards.

He dropped his arm back to his side a moment later, bat dangling from nimble fingers, watching the sphere as it sped away in a long, high arc.

Wood watched, hand pressed to brow-ridge as though he were a golfer watching his latest shot fly. Gabe whistled as he craned his neck, trying to keep his eyes on the disappearing ball.

"You sure you're not our newest beater?"

"You'd be a great one to have." Wood agreed.

"That's great - oh wait, I still don't have a clue what that means!" Ichigo crossed his arms across his chest as harry continued to stare in the direction the ball had travelled.

"We'll discuss that in a second." Wood confirmed as Gabe's hand pointed at the spherical object that was beginning to fly back to them.

"Here it comes," he said, stepping back from the case as Wood readied himself to receive the ball.

He restrained the ball back to its space in the case as Gabe continued.

"Those are bludgers,"

Wood cut him off - "Nasty little blighters!"

"They fly around the pitch trying to knock you off of your broom. It's the beaters' job to hit it away from their team and towards the other."

"And the last one?" Harry asked timidly.

The ball in question was tiny in comparison to the others, small enough to be able to fit in the mouth, gold and ornately decorated with translucent, fragile-looking wings to either side that fluttered rapidly, slowly lifting the ball from its place in Wood's hand. T then began to fly around sporadically with a buzzing noise, strongly reminiscent to a fly or bee. It flew around their heads, darted this way and that, fast and jerky in its movements.

"This is the golden snitch," Wod said as harry reached out to catch the ball hovering by his ear. It ended up held delicately between his thumb and forefinger, wings flapping once, twice more before dying out and drooping to the sides of the golden orb.

"This is your responsibility." he continued as Harry confusedly passed the ball.

"You've got to catch that," Gabe picked up, fumbling his school tie between his fingers, stained with chlorophyll and caked with the remnants of planting soil, specifically beneath his slightly over-long nails, from his herbology lesson the period before then "While the game is going on. The snitch is hard to see - see? It flits around the pitch so you've gotta be quick and sharp-eyed." Harry scrunched his nose as he subconsciously fiddled with the round glasses perched on it "When you catch that the game is over and you earn your team one hundred and fifty points. You'll almost always win."

Ichigo looked back from him to the animated ball, not sure which boy to look at when he spoke.

"Then what's the point?"

"Huh?" Wood was looking at him with one eyebrow raised.

"What's the point. If all you need to win is the snitch, why does the rest of the game exist?"

"Because you can win even without the snitch - seekers, what you are, often prefer to catch the snitch when they can, rather than letting the other team do so even if they won't win; if you catch the snitch when you're losing, you lose by less."

"I can't believe you two made the quidditch teams in your first year!" Ron exclaimed as he threw his freckled arms, draped in the thick masses of black fabric forming his school-uniform-cloak, fastened askew and slipping from his shoulders to a mild extremity, out to either side of him, striking Harry's glasses lightly, knocking them wonky.

Harry laughed and rubbed the back of his neck as Ichigo twirled his wad between his fingers as he had found to have become habitual in the short amount of time he had owned the elder marvel.

"It was luck," Harry told his friend as he fixed his glasses.

"No." Ron was defiant "I saw what you did. You were great harry - Ichigo, you must've been just as great if you got onto your team too."

"Well…"

Ichigo lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling as he watched the blurs of lighting and abnormalities in the overhead woodgrain form something akin to the image of a man, ornately and oddly dressed, riding a broomstick. He may have found that to be amusing or, perhaps, somewhat fascinating, but he knew it was only his sleep-deprived mind twisting the reality around him into something more desirable to his clouded consciousness.

But it was too loud to sleep. It was not the snores of his roommates that kept him awake, not the guttural noises that left their slightly open mouths in their sleep, but, rather, it was the screaming.

Ichigo had pulled the pillow up over his ears the second he began to hear it. But he knew, for the noise was loud to the point of deafening and shrill to the point of earsplitting, that he was the only one to hear the incessant wail, full of sorrow that made his chest ache as well as his pounding head.

The ghosts he had seen recently had been visible to everyone around him, but he was alone again now, as he lay in the dark, trying not to look at the figure that was making it.

Why?

Because that figure was terrifying, even by his altered standards.

He supposed it was once a girl but there was barely a remnant left of that existence aside from the fairly minuscule size and long hair. At least, what was left of it.

The ghost was coloured, unlike most, though much desaturated, entire being coated in thick films of crimson. The red matted her hair, already appearing to have fallen out, or to have been pulled out which happened to seem more likely as her scalp seemed to be emitting at least a proportion of the blood in which she was drenched,

Her face was more a series of slits and slices and scabs than it was a careful arrangement of features. Her skin was more alike to parchment than it was actual skin, hanging off of her as though it were too loose in many places, genuinely hanging in strings and strips, laced with gory viscera Ichigo wished not to focus on.

Her eyes were, to put it simply, lost to the void, the sockets intended to house them empty and dripping a viscous substance that looked, in the dim lighting, to be entirely black, the colour of tar. The droplets traced trails down her shredded cheeks like tears, running at a laborious pace, travelling over the bumps and curves of her face, dripping from raised points. Each track was easily traceable.

There was a component of the girl that reminded him tremendously of one of the school's ghosts.

Her neck was cut, slit in the centre, lines of dried post-scarlet decorating it, held in place by a few scraps of sinewy, ruined flesh.

Her lips closed, nothing more than small sections of flesh, just as torn as the rest of her, as her lone remaining hand knotted itself into the burned, tattered hem of her too-big tunic, the hand covered in purpling skin, violent red marks and blisters. Her legs were the same.

The screaming stopped as she opened her mouth again. Before a decipherable word came, there was a rough, hoarse rasp that grated on his ears almost as much as the screams had.

Ichigo looked right at her as she tucked one arm behind her back, bringing the other forwards, reaching it out before her with splayed fingers that bent in ways they should not have in a few instances.

Then, slowly, the rasp melted into a hissed sound, loosely resembling decipherable speech.

"You…"

Ichigo looked around, unable to ignore her any longer as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. The world spun before his eyes, blobs and blurs mixing to form a further slew of things that did not exist there, or, most likely, anywhere else.

His eyes landed concisely on her hollow sockets as she spoke a further word.

"Eat…"

He shook his head, eyebrows furrowed.

"Do you want to know if I'm hungry?" he knew that wasn't right and she confirmed it needlessly with a slow nod that caused her barely-attached head to wobble precariously.

"Are you hungry?" She nodded this time, catching her head as it fell.

"You want to know if I have an food?" He didn't think ghosts could eat, if they had working stomachs and other organs - surely those ceasing to work was a side effect of death.

Her head shook again, tilting with the movement.

Then she began to spin, a flurry of burnt fabric, tendrils of dark, matted hair, and strings of peeling skin.

But, the instant before she disappeared, she paused abruptly, facing him as though she could see, the dim light in the room being reflected by the substance around the eye sockets, almost making it seem as though there were some sense of humanity left there.

Then she fizzled and phased out of existence in a mere instant, like a computer game glitch. She reappeared, appearance altered but she was still certainly recognisable.

There seemed to be eyes, or something similar, there that time around.

But they were partially concealed by the white bone mask, decorated with streaks in the same colour as most of her had been stained, that sat on her face.

She said a single, final, parting word:

"Tasty…" As she flashed bloodstained, yellow teeth - no, fangs.

Needless to say, Ichigo didn't get any sleep that night.