Chapter 4
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The Gryffindor Quidditch team trudged wearily out to the pitch, led by Oliver, who moved in something that could not by any means be described a trudge. Had young Mr. Wood not been so very proud of his manly nature, it could be said that his great exuberance led him to bounce. However, Oliver Wood was indeed very manly, and very proud to be, and thus would have buried the unfortunate soul who dared to suggest that he had bounced through the dew-wet grasses of early morning, beneath those same dew-wet grasses.
"Er...wasn't there something we forgot to do?" Katie Bell wondered, scratching her head as she wondered why exactly it was so drafty. Ordinarily, their Quidditch robes kept them warm – almost TOO warm.
"I don't think so," George Weasley yawned sleepily, rubbing his eyes with one hand and adjusting his polka-dot boxer shorts with the other.
Fred, catching sight of this, snickered.
"George, you're running around almost starkers!"
At this startling revelation, George blinked and looked down.
"Hey, so I am!" Then he, too, began to snicker as he caught sight of his twin brother's boxer shorts, identical to his own in a show of synchronized 'underwearing' that even the bravest soul wouldn't have dared to ask about. "And so are you!"
"And so is Alicia and Katie," Fred noted appreciatively.
"AND Angelina!" George added gleefully.
Together, the Weasley twins took in the sight of the three girls, indeed clad only in relatively modest knickers and brassieres that nonetheless managed to give the various young men wandering around the grounds at that ungodly hour quite a show.
Colin Creevy, watching eagerly from the bleachers, felt quite as though he had died and gone to heaven.
Until, of course...
Oliver came to a dead stop and turned around slowly, fixing his team with a suspicious gaze.
"What in buggery are you all doing outside in your underwear?"
Fred snorted.
"Now that you mention it, freezing off our-"
"THANK you, Weasley," Oliver hastened to interrupt. "Are you all really that tired that you forgot to put on your robes?"
"Yes!" came the collective shout of the team, save Harry, who had curled up on the ground, cuddling an unsuspecting bunny that had happened past, drooling slightly on it.
"Sleep," he droned happily, nuzzling the bunny's fuzzy little head with his chin.
Needless to say, the bunny did not approve.
"You bunch of wimps!" Oliver barked. "Alright! Back to the change rooms! And get some clothes on this time!"
"Sleep," Harry whimpered sadly as George and Fred stooped to haul him from the ground.
The bunny bounded gratefully to safety as the Gryffindor team started back to the changing rooms.
"Mother, I've become a man," Colin Creevy sighed reverently to himself, camera trained on Alicia's retreating backside, frantically snapping a final picture or two.
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"Now," Oliver began sternly fifteen minutes later, once the Gryffindor team had woken up sufficiently to struggle into enough clothing to reach a dress code of some sort, "as you all know, a new year is upon us. And you know what that means."
"Sleep?" Harry asked pleadingly, cuddling a towel close and preparing to curl up on the hard, wooden benches.
The older boy glared at him amid the snickers that followed at this.
"No! It means we've another chance to win the Quidditch Cup! And we WILL win the Quidditch Cup, even if it means all your lives!"
"He's got that gleam in his eye," Fred whispered to George loudly enough for anyone who wanted to, to easily overhear. "Be very careful. Any sudden movements might provoke an attack."
"Oh, shut up, Weasley!" Oliver bellowed. "Now. If I may, I'd like to discuss with you a few techniques by which we shall reach our goal."
As he spoke, the burly young man dragged out from behind a conveniently placed towel bin several sheets of poster board.
"He's got diagrams," Alicia whimpered to Katie.
"And lots of them," Katie groaned. "At this rate, our seventh year might end before we actually get to play!"
"Oh that won't happen," Angelina reminded them consolingly. "After all, this series would really go downhill if the next three books happened with Harry in the change rooms, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah," Katie agreed, quite comforted by this. Then she frowned. "Um, books?"
"N-never mind," Angelina hastened to say, looking away and whistling innocently.
"Now," Oliver was meanwhile beginning, "over the summer, I spent some time thinking about last year, and what happened. I realized that without knowing your enemies and their weaknesses, you can't exploit those weaknesses and crush them into a bloody, drippy pulp."
"Are you beginning to think that maybe we should've picked a safer extra-curricular?" Alicia murmured to Katie, who had adopted an expression very much like that of a particularly small animal staring down the wrong end of an Unforgivable Curse. "Like, maybe the quilting club or something?"
"Shh!" Katie hissed. The last thing she wanted was to attract Oliver's attention directly at her right now...
"Once it became clear that the only way to win is to do everything you can to draw your opponent's shortcomings to the forefront, I began to compile a short list of the said shortcomings of each other house's team," Oliver continued, totally unaware that anyone in the room was less than completely absorbed in his speech. "The Ravenclaw team, for instance, is very flammable."
"Why do I have a terrible sinking feeling about where this is going?" George wondered aloud.
"And so, I have here a diagram of something that might give us just a little bit of an edge."
Oliver proudly held up a diagram of a very complex-looking bit of machinery with little wiggling arrows pointing to various components of it. The Gryffindor team gawped in horror.
"A little bit of an edge," Fred exclaimed, voice shaking with what everyone else considered to be very ill-timed laughter. "Oliver, that's a flamethrower!"
"Yeah," Oliver agreed, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "I know the rocket launcher might have been a little more effective, but I figured we'd go easy on the Ravenclaws. They're good fellows. Save the rocket launchers for the Slytherins!"
Harry nodded thoughtfully at this, having a hard time disagreeing with the logic, and having a harder time banishing the delightful mental image of Draco Malfoy being blown into tiny bits. Rough luck, though, that he wasn't on the Quidditch team...
"Wonderful, Oliver," Angelina commented dryly. "So what do we use for the Hufflepuff team?"
"Glue bombs," Oliver replied beamingly. "I figure, they're a bit slower than the other teams, so I'm just emphasizing what's already there."
"That's sick," George announced, trying very hard to look appalled.
"Thanks," the older boy grinned.
"Now off to the pitch?" Alicia asked hopefully.
Oliver laughed.
"Are you crazy, Spinnet? I haven't even gotten started yet!"
The rest of the team exchanged long-suffering glances and settled back for a long, long meeting.
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Seven days, one hour, and twelve minutes later, the team left the change rooms, all looking, except for Oliver, as though they were really beginning to reconsider the wisdom of Quidditch as a general rule. Alicia and Katie, along with George in one of the more worrisome turns of events in recent days, planned to look into the Quilting Club the second practice ended. Angelina and Fred were doing what they could to dissuade their jaded comrades from this change in hobby. Fred in particular did not want to deal with being mistaken for "that Weasley boy in the Quilting Club; probably a little bent, y'know..."
Harry, however, was barely aware of the heated conversation going on just behind him. His mind was still churning with the meeting of the past week. Once Oliver had finished with his discussion on glue guns, rocket launchers, flamethrowers and the like, he had moved onto the idea of discarding brooms entirely and playing the game from the cockpits of gigantic robotic exoskeletons.
Then, once a piece of ceiling tile had come loose, completely of its own accord and not at all due to the meddling of any particular author, and certainly not the one who happens to be writing this story [whistles innocently], and dropped on his head, knocking him firmly back into character, he had moved on with his intended speech, pausing for a moment to wonder over all these diagrams of weapons of mass annihilation.
The intended speech, the Gryffindor team agreed unanimously, was scarcely better. It seemed that over the course of the summer, Oliver had picked up a new obsession: that of musicals, due likely to the tampering of the aforementioned author who had nothing to do with the ceiling tile landing on his head. As such, what had begun as an intention to use several magically enhanced diagrams to discuss the new plays that they would be practicing that year had quickly turned into a ridiculously overblown musical number. Where the dancing goats had come from would remain to Harry a mystery until his dying day. Not to mention, that massive chorus of ninety-eight singers, give or take.
Still, the team had been able to take their captain's rather...bizarre new methods in stride until the pyrotechnics had begun.
It may or may not be a commonly known fact that playing with fireworks, firecrackers, or fire-anything else when one is not trained in their use is a hazardous idea, to say the least.
Oliver was not trained in their use.
Thus, it had only been a matter of seconds after the pyrotechnic display had begun, before George Weasly had leapt to his feet, and gone careening wildly about the room, screaming in fear and pain due to the spark that had landed on his head, thus catching his hair on fire, and thus solidifying his intention of looking into a different pastime.
As the flames were barely a different color for the young man's hair, the rest of the team reflected that poor George had gone quite mad from sheer boredom.
Still, by the time the Gryffindor Quidditch team had reached the pitch, their mutual love of Quidditch had overcome what had been surely one of the worst meetings they had ever had, and all were feeling quite friendly to Oliver again, and quite anxious to mount their brooms and get the practice underway.
Just as Oliver called for everyone to take their positions, two figures became visible on the horizon, both waving frantically at Harry.
"Where've you been all week, Harry," one of them shouted.
Immediately recognizing his two best friends once they had drawn a little nearer, he waved back, and turned his attention to Oliver as the two turned their attention back to the conversation they had apparently been engrossed in.
"Please?" Harry overhead Hermione say pleadingly as she and Ron approached the pitch.
"No!" Ron replied immediately.
"Pleeeease?"
"No!"
"Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?"
"Hermione, I don't care how long you draw out the word 'please,' I'm still not trading copies of 'Voyages with Vampires' with you, just because you bent a couple of your pages in that fight with the pixies!"
"But why, Ron?" she asked sadly, fixing him with huge, sad eyes, trembling adorably with tears that Harry wouldn't have bet a Knut were real. Unfortunately, he also wouldn't have bet a Knut that Ron would figure that out. Then and there, Harry made a pact with himself that he would never, ever let a girl play him like that. "You don't care what condition your books are in!"
"Forget it! It's not like mine's in any better shape, anyway," he added with a grin as he withdrew his copy.
Hermione blinked.
"Ron, why are you carrying that around in your pocket?"
Ron shrugged.
"I figure it might be good to throw at some small, annoying creature – or, y'know,
Malfoy. With my wand broken and all – but anyway, see? My book's pages are all bent, too."
Accepting the copy, the little brunette sighed disapprovingly.
"Ron," she began, patronizing and vaguely
irritated in an instant, "you ought to take better care of your books."
Ron sputtered helplessly.
"Isn't this whole conversation because YOU didn't take care of YOUR book? And anyway, you wanna talk about what happened to mine? Who was the one who threw it at that pixy?"
"Alright," Hermione agreed reluctantly. "But I certainly didn't do this."
She held up the book, open to the photo of Lockhart in the back cover. 'Death to Lockhart' and 'Lockhart Stinks' and 'Stupid Pretty-Boy Git' were scrawled across the glossy picture on the book jacket in angry red ink.
"What can I say?" Ron shrugged, sullen and just a little sheepish. "I thought I'd lose it and kill the real one if that photo winked at me one more time."
Doubtlessly, Hermione's answer to this would have been an angry one, and in the glorious and oddly adorable tradition of these two, would have prompted a quarrel of epic proportions, had the plot fairies not chosen just that moment to decide that they were bored and thus kick the Slytherin Quidditch team, waiting just off-screen, in the head until they approached. Not only this, the fairies thought enthusiastically as they kicked joyously away, but the Slytherin team were just so darned much fun to kick in the head! They made such interesting hollow wooden sounds!
"Hey, what are they doing here?" Ron demanded angrily as the Slytherins approached.
Hermione squinted.
"And why do they have...little fairies with t-shirts that say PLOT, kicking them in the heads?"
"Dunno," Oliver growled as he pushed past the two, "but it almost makes me wish I were a fairy."
Harry, who had chosen this moment to stop mourning the loss of a few more precious hours of sleep, or at least a nice, crisp piece of toast slathered liberally with marmalade to help wake him up, and to start paying attention to what was going on around him, decided mournfully that he desperately hoped he had simply heard his team captain's comment out of context, and that the context would remove any...worrisome implications from the words.
"All right, then," Oliver muttered, starting toward the Slytherin team. "Clear off!"
"'Fraid you'll have to do the clearing, Wood," Marcus Flint, the Slytherin team captain, smirked.
"We've got the pitch booked this morning!"
"Not anymore."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Wordlessly, the other boy handed Oliver a note.
Grimacing inwardly – he had never liked reading particularly – Oliver unfolded the note and read it quickly. At least, as quickly as he could.
"What?!" he exclaimed fifteen minutes later. "'By the authority given to me in the name of the Brotherhood of the Large-Nosed Greasy-Haired Yet Oddly Alluring Right Bastards, I grant the Slytherin team special permission to use the Quidditch pitch this morning, owing to the need to train their new Seeker. Professor Snape. Also, I give them special permission to rummage through other peoples' book bags and eat all their sweets.' I think you put that last part on yourselves."
"Did not," Flint shot back, looking away guiltily.
"Then why's it in a totally different handwriting?"
"Er...because his alternate personality took over right then."
"Hey!" a smooth, oily voice, the smoothness and oiliness of which was slightly lost amid its clear annoyance, exclaimed from behind him. "You're forgetting something, aren't you?"
Flint blinked, his expression totally blank with confusion.
"Huh?"
The owner of the voice, yet unseen, blocked by several very large boys, sighed.
"The new addition to the team?" it reminded them, beginning to get rather miffed.
"Oh, right! Our new brooms! Aren't they purty?" Flint beamed as the entire team, in unison, lifted and waved their brooms, gleaming fetchingly in the light of early morning, before the eyes of the horrified Gryffindors.
"Not the brooms!" the voice from behind him exclaimed. "Your new Seeker!"
"Oh, right, right, right. We have a new Seeker," Flint announced, this revelation rather less impressive than it might have been, had the wind not been totally robbed from its sails by his own stupidity.
"Oh, yeah?" Oliver sneered. "And who is he?"
The members of the Slytherin team stepped aside, and a small, slight boy stepped forward, his trademark smirk, without which his face very well might have fallen off, revealing him immediately to be none other than young Draco Malfoy.
"Draco!" Harry exclaimed in horror, which quickly melted into delight as it occurred to him that now he could very well see Draco blown apart by a rocket launcher, if Oliver was indeed serious about his...slightly antisocial game plan.
"Wow!" Colin Creevy called from the bleachers. "She's really pretty! So delicate and refined!"
"Shut up!" Draco bellowed as best he could.
"He's right, though," Harry smirked. "You are very pretty and delicate, Draco."
"Pretty, and he buys brooms for all these players in order to secure his place on the team!" Hermione added, giggling. "What a prize, this one!"
"No one asked your opinion, you filthy little Mudblood," Draco snarled, feeling that this phrase was oddly familiar, although the set-up the last time he had used it had been distinctly less silly.
"I am not filthy," Hermione protested, quite wounded. "I took a bath just last night! No, hold on, last night I read my book. Well, last night – no, I read that night, too. The night before, then...no, wait a second..."
However, no one paid attention to Hermione's odd little speech, as they were all slightly occupied in shouting at Draco in fury.
Ron was doing slightly more than shouting. After his nose had ceased its bleeding at the thought of Hermione in a soapy bathtub filled with bubbles, taking that bath, whenever it had been, he reached into his robes and withdrew the first item that might prove itself useful.
"You'll pay for that, Malfoy," he growled, feeling much the same sense of déjà vu that Draco had, as he wound up and let the large book fly at the blond boy's head.
The Lockhart on the cover was exceedingly proud of this young redheaded boy at that moment. To be sure, he had had his doubts after he had found himself scribbled on – his favourite photo, too! But it seemed as though things were looking up. The boy seemed to be very well aware that one must protect a pretty girl's honour at all costs. After all, chivalry was no less important than it ever had been, and could often lead to getting one's picture in the paper. A wonderful human-interest story! And so, then and there, the Lockhart in the photo decided to reward the young man for his behaviour.
However, Lockhart's photo was little, if any, better at this whole 'doing things right' business than the real Lockhart was...
A bolt of blue light shot from the book, and the next instant, Ron found himself doubled over as a steady emigration of slugs from his mouth began to occur.
"Oh, no!" Hermione shrieked. "We've got to get him to Hagrid's, Harry!"
"Why?" Harry wanted to know, scratching his head. "Wouldn't he be better off in the medical tower?"
She wheeled on him furiously, dropping Ron's arm so that he sagged weakly to the ground on one side.
"Don't ask silly questions like that! I just have this feeling that something really important will happen when we get to Hagrid's, alright?!"
Harry shrugged, gripped Ron's arm more tightly, and the two dragged their slug-spewing friend across the fields.
"Y'know the worst thing?" Ron gasped between retching. "My wand would've done the same thing, probably."