Whoops, this fic sorta got pushed to the side XD Here, have some nonsense.
"Hey, morning," Dorothea greets cheerfully, broom in hand.
Ryouko yawns widely, still half asleep, and leans on her own broom. "Why did we have to go so early…?"
"Conflicting schedules," she says with a frankly appalling amount of emergy for the fact that it's currently six thirty in the morning. "Come on, I snagged some food from the house elves to tide us over until breakfast."
Ryouko rubs her eyes, following Dorothea towards the common room exit. "How long have you been awake?"
"I dunno. Five? Five thirty? Here, have some toast."
Mechanically, she nibbles at the corner, then starts to eat in earnest when she realizes how hungry she is. "Why?" she asks flatly, still a little too sleepy to care that her mouth is half full.
Dorothea just shrugs airily. "Habit. Come on, you'll wake up more when you get outside on the pitch."
She's right about that, at least. After waking up enough that she won't fall off her broom, they fly to the pitch, and Ryouko starts to smile when she sees four familiar people already there.
Wait, four?
Philip and Fallon are apparently racing, streaking around the pitch in blurs of yellow and red and green and also loudly trash-talking each other, mostly about each other's home countries. Mildly alarmed, Ryouko looks at Dorothea awkwardly, pointing at the bickering racers, and she just rolls her eyes.
"Don't worry about it, they're always like that," she says dryly. With an exasperated expression, she adds, "Ask either of them anything related to politics and they'll just give you a blank look, but if you ask them about food in Britain vs Ireland, prepare to say goodbye to the next hour of your life."
But standing on the ground are Yuliy and, to Ryouko's great surprise, Professor Willard, both with brooms in hand. The two of them are talking about something or other, and Yuliy is oddly enthusiastic, gesturing with his hands and a certain liveliness in his posture.
All of them seem far more awake than any human being has a right to be at this hour.
Dorothea lands—well, more like jumps off her broom a meter or two off the ground. "Morning. I brought a friend."
Two sets of curious eyes land on her, and she waves, mustering a shy smile. She hasn't actually ever seen the new professor in person after the start of term banquet. Whenever she tries asking Dorothea about him, she just deflects the question. From what Ryouko has heard from her friends, though, the new professor is a pretty good teacher—Hogwarts alumni, stoic but knowledgeable, and quite patient, which, if he has to deal with those four all the time, isn't surprising.
"I won!" screeches Philip's voice from above.
"You did not win," Fallon protests. "Hey, Dorothea, who won?"
"It was a photo finish," she responds without even looking.
Philip scowls, flattening his windblown hair. "It was not! You weren't even watching."
He somersaults backwards into a dive before flattening out abruptly and screeching to a stop next to the others, hopping agilely off his broom. Fallon follows at a more reasonable pace.
"Anyways, what's she doing here?" the blond asks, gesturing at Ryouko curiously.
"Even numbers, of course."
Willard frowns. "I wasn't planning to-"
"You're playing," Dorothea tells him in a tone that brooks no argument. With a wink at a bewildered Ryouko, she adds in a stage whisper, "Take it easy on him. He's a bit rusty."
Willard gives the older girl a deadpan look, and Philip plants a hand on his hip. "Come on, Professor, it's boring if we don't have at least two Chasers per team. Now we can actually play with Keepers too."
"I call dibs on Ryouko and Fallon, by the way," Dorothea adds, and Fallon grins cheerfully at her while Philip scowls.
"What are you implying about my Keeping?!"
"Nothing at all," she says smoothly, "but he did save one more than you against us."
"I would've had that last one if Yuliy didn't fly right in front of me trying to catch the Snitch!"
Yuliy frowns. "It's my job."
"Yeah, which you failed at," Philip grumbles, and Yuliy levels a glare at the back of his head.
"To be fair," Dorothea interjects, slinging an arm around Ryouko, "our Seeker is pretty darn awesome." Ryouko blushes, and the older girl grins smugly, purring, "No one else can keep up. It's not their fault, really."
Philip's eyebrow twitches. "Well, that aside, why do I have to be on Yuliy's team?! He's got less hand-eye coordination than a blind squirrel."
Fallon frowns. "What do you have against squirrels?" he asks, sounding a little more personally wounded than squirrels merit, in Ryouko's humble opinion (though they are adorable, and there are some at her family's estate that are absolutely fearless of humans, and why are they talking about squirrels again?).
"Nothing!"
Yuliy meticulously straightens out one of the twigs in his broom. "Well, there was that one time when one of them fell out of a tree when we were in the states and-"
"We don't talk about that!" Philip practically screeches, and Yuliy blinks far too innocently to be innocent. Dorothea and Fallon are both stifling laughter, and even Willard looks mildly amused. Now Ryouko really wants to hear that story.
The sole adult present clears his throat. "I thought we woke up at six to play Quidditch, not stand around bickering?"
Yuliy tugs a baby blue jacket tighter around himself. "Yeah, can we just get flying? It's cold." He waves his wand around himself, probably casting a Warming Charm or something.
Philip snorts. "You're always cold."
"We're in Scotland."
"And somehow, you also found a way to be cold in the Sahara Desert-"
"Deserts get cold at night."
Fallon walks by the two, ruffling both their heads and eliciting an indignant squawk from the blond. "Alright, let's get flying, gentlemen! And ladies," he adds, flashing a grin at said ladies, and Dorothea rolls her eyes. "Once the game starts, it's on!"
o0o0o
Out of all of the 'Chasers', Dorothea is the only one who seems to have any hand-eye coordination, which is something that they maybe should've thought of earlier. Ryouko has it a bit better, since she's used to chasing around an unpredictable little orb smaller than her fist, but it doesn't translate all that well to catching a large red ball slightly larger than her head.
Luckily, Yuliy and Professor Willard are...just as bad at it as she is. They seem to have a pretty good grasp on the concepts and strategy, actually, but not so much on the execution. Philip and Fallon spend more time laughing at them from the goalposts than actually Keeping, despite how excited they were to get to play Keeper in the first place.
Yuliy makes an awkward toss, and Dorothea snatches it out of the air with a smirk. Philip cackles from where he's floating by the goalposts.
"You throw like my grandmother!" he jeers. Ryouko can see the tips of Yuliy's ears go red from the other side of the pitch.
"Aren't you guys supposed to be on the same side?" she asks, bemused, as she drifts up next to him.
"Try telling him that," Yuliy grumbles before racing after Dorothea, and she follows him, giggling.
Dorothea catches Ryouko's eye and hurls the Quaffle at her. She nearly rolls off her broom catching it, since she has to use both hands and the Quaffle is significantly heavier than a Snitch. Yuliy is arrowing towards her, eyes zeroed in on the Quaffle, but she quickly zips around to Willard's side. So far, he's been neutral on engaging her, choosing mostly to stick to messing with Dorothea. He's actually a good flier, but it's pretty clear he hasn't played much Quidditch either.
She chucks the Quaffle back at Dorothea at the last moment and swerves around the professor, grinning. Despite her lackluster and slightly crooked toss, Dorothea still manages to catch it and make it look effortless, and she draws back as she approaches the goalposts.
In a rather impressive show of acrobatics, Philip does something in between a flip and a roll, kicking the Quaffle away with a grunt. "Professor, heads up!"
Thud.
The Quaffle shoots right past Willard's outstretched hands and into his face. He sways alarmingly on his broom, and his nose starts to bleed before he claps a hand over it.
...heads up, indeed.
For a split second, the entire pitch is dead silent. Philip is staring with his mouth agape and eyes as wide as Snitches, Fallon has just about the same expression but without the 'oops' look, and Dorothea looks like she's not sure whether she wants to groan or laugh.
"Are you okay?" Yuliy exclaims, rushing to the professor's side, his wand already in hand.
He flicks his wand, and the professor winces, but the bleeding stops. Ryouko, who caught the Quaffle since Willard obviously didn't, wanders closer, not sure what she should be doing here.
Dorothea catches her alarmed expression and offers a wry grin. "Don't worry about it, he's fine. It's just a nosebleed."
Philip drifts closer with a contrite expression, and Yuliy rounds on him.
"Really?" he snaps, bristling; his defensiveness compared to his typical stoicism surprises Ryouko. She has a feeling that the professor is more than just a teacher to him.
"I'm sorry, it was an accident!" the blond yelps, pouting. "He's on my team, you think I did it on purpose?"
"Hey, hey, no harm done, right?" Fallon offers, ruffling Philip's hair affectionately.
"Quit it!"
Dorothea doesn't look all that concerned, just asking the professor calmly if he's alright, to which he responds affirmatively. Those two seem to be the voices of reason here.
"Except I now look like I walked out of a bloodbath," Willard adds dryly, glancing down at his jacket and sleeve, which has several large, dark red splatters on it now.
To Ryouko's mild confusion, the students just exchange awkward looks, seemingly at a loss for what to do.
"Um," she finally says, "I can do a cleaning spell if you want…"
At Willard's surprised but grateful nod, she clears her throat, flicking her wand at his jacket. "Tergeo."
Instantly, all the blood vanishes, and she smiles in satisfaction.
"You have to teach us how to do that," Dorothea says instantly. Ryouko is startled to see that the seventh year girl even looks moderately impressed.
"You don't kn—I mean-"
"We know the spell," Fallon says, saving her the awkwardness of asking, "we're just all really bad at…"
"Housekeeping spells," Yuliy supplies, looking mildly embarrassed in a highly adorable manner.
Philip snorts. "Yeah. Yuliy can't even do a Scourgify on the dishes."
"Like you can do any better."
Ryouko stifles a giggle. Willard is apparently an expert on the most obscure ancient rune languages. Dorothea can perfectly Transfigure a person (read: Philip, when she was giving a demonstration) into an animal and then back with no issues (she did leave him a pair of cat ears and whiskers as a joke, though). Fallon can Charm vinegar into firewhiskey without a word (the assignment was to Charm vinegar into wine, apparently, but Flitwick thought it was funny and gave him extra points). Philip can multiply four digit numbers inside his head in the space of two seconds and look bored doing it. Yuliy can snap off half a dozen Stunners in the time it takes to blink once.
And apparently, none of them know how to do the dishes with magic.
And it was at this moment that she knew...
...they're all just nerds. XD