Author's note: This started as a drabble and keeps getting longer. This is the first thing I've posted here, and more is definitely coming.

Written for Melinda. Mwah!

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It was dark in the Gryffindor common room. Only a single candle guttered in the window, and only a single one of the room's five occupants was still awake.

Harry Potter, hair tousled, dressed in a rumpled nightshirt, sat on the window seat next to the lone candle, gazing out the window into the near blackness. He had tried to sleep, but to no avail. He had made an attempt at finishing his transfiguration essay, but found that even staring aimlessly into the night sky held more appeal than the ten inches of parchment that McGonagall had asked for.

He had watched the smoke curling from the chimney of Hagrid's hut, saw it sketching vague images in the air, until the lights had gone out in the hut and the last puff had drifted away. The night was quiet, the stillness broken only by the occasional Thestral swooping over the Forbidden Forest. Suddenly, another movement caught his eye, but off to the side of the forest. There was a dark figure swooping lightly and easily over the quidditch pitch. But who could possibly have the nerve to make such a brazen display, without the fear of extreme consequences?

His question was answered when he saw a flash of silver-blonde hair in the moonlight. Malfoy. A smirk crossed Harry's face. He recognized this as a chance to give back some of what Malfoy always dished out to Harry and his friends. All he had to do was lean over and shake Ron, and his best friend, Gryffindor prefect and Malfoy hater that he was, would be only too happy to make sure that Malfoy was reported to the Headmaster immediately.

Harry gazed out the window a moment longer, and the smirk slowly faded from his face. Maybe it could wait until the morning, he thought, as he watched Malfoy make a particularly acrobatic fly-by of the grandstands.

Yes. Morning.