May the Power Protect …the Quaffle?
Disclaimer: I wish I owned them but I don't; I'm just borrowing them for the duration of the story.
Chapter Five: The Match, Part 1
The match started off to a rousing early rivalry; within moments, each team had managed at least two goals, partly on luck and mostly on complete unfamiliarity with the opposing sides' playing style. After twenty further minutes of furious flying, Ron of all people scored goal three for the Gryffindors. While wheeling around to block a strong overhand throw from Chip, he whacked the Quaffle with the tufted end of his faithful Cleensweep, sending it sailing straight through Clare's left goal ring. "HA! I told you I'd get that trick down, Harry!" he crowed triumphantly afterwards.
Harry whirled and dove sharply, marking Vida's path more than keeping an eye out for the Snitch. With his Firebolt, he knew he could beat her to the catch if need be. He'd decided instead to keep her distracted and make the match last a bit longer. To that end, he kept up a steady retinue of loops just in front of her alternated with sudden charges for random corners of the pitch. At one point, he was literally flying upside-down backwards in front of her as she lapped the Ranger's goalposts when he had to choke back a guffaw of hilarity.
Apparently, the same joker who had enchanted the Snitch Hogwarts used was responsible for this new one, too. The bedeviled little bugger was zooming along leisurely right behind Vida's head, staying just out of her peripheral vision more by dint of Harry's distracting flying than anything else. He hurriedly faked a double-take over his own left shoulder, and barrel-rolled away from Vida fast enough to leave virtual scorch marks. He flipped over into a spiral dive that Harry hoped would lead her even further off to her right, glancing over his shoulder to see whether she had fallen for his ruse.
With an inward cheer, he watched her follow his mad ground-rush at a wary pace; he'd mistakenly explained the Wronski Feint to her and the others just well enough that they knew not to follow him at top speed downwards without also having seen the Snitch. At least she hadn't noticed it shadowing her a moment ago, and now it had flitted off again, leaving both Seekers to start their hunt afresh.
He heard over the roar of the wind that his stunt hadn't gone unnoticed by the other players either. Ginny had snuck in a goal while Clare was preoccupied watching the microdrama between Harry and Vida. While the Mystic Force team members were still rallying, Harry floated up next to Ginny, and proceeded to congratulate her in a decidedly nonverbal fashion.
"If you two are going to snog after every goal we score, at least try to keep it under a minute at a time," Angelina groused acidly as she looped around them. She zoomed back towards their team's goal hoops, leaving Harry and Ginny to whirl and speed off in the other direction, each in a furious blush. Harry resumed his high-end spiraling, watching for the Snitch with a renewed single-mindedness. Ginny started back around from the Force's goal, waiting for a chance to intercept the Quaffle.
Nick swatted at an incoming Bludger, whacking it towards Katie's retreating form. "What d'you suppose that was all about?" he asked a passing Vida. The wind-powered Ranger only shrugged and shook her two-tone hair out of her eyes.
The next quarter-hour was whittled away a goal at a time, first one side and then the other. Quaffle-intercepting battles erupted frequently between the fiercely competitive pairs of Chip & Charlie on the Rangers' side, and Ginny & Katie from Gryffindor. At one point, Harry could swear the four were just passing it back and forth in a cross-pattern, wasting time until he or Vida finally found the now very-elusive Snitch. Angelina came whipping through the four, a Bludger from Leanbow hot on her broom's tail, and they broke up to continue the never-ending point-battle.
Vida thought she was chasing the Snitch down at one point, following the shining golden spot as it danced frenetically back and forth across the center of the pitch, until she got right under it and realized she'd wasted a good four minutes running down the reflected afternoon sunlight from Daggeron's golden Quijudge whistle. She wheeled up and gave him a blistering telling off, all the while trying to keep an eye on Harry from one corner or the other of her vision. Daggeron gave Gryffindor a penalty for her attitude, but he did change his whistle into silver to cut down on the confusion. Ginny missed the penalty by such a narrow margin, Harry thought she was rather taking the Seekers' side of the argument, and he flashed her a smile in thanks next time they passed each other.
A few goals after that, Harry could have sworn the ghost of the jinxed Bludger had come back to haunt him. One of the two ensorcelled iron balls was continually coming back after him for several minutes as he wove and swerved around at nearly ground-level. Then he caught sight of the shadow circling carefully behind his. Pulling back sharply on his Firebolt, Harry shot straight up as the Bludger shot back towards him, and he caught sight of Nick floating off to one side, cursing as Harry ran out of his 'target zone' and away from his carefully directed Bludger-corraling.
George floated up next to Harry for a moment, after giving the other Bludger a swat back in the direction of Charlie "the Traitor" Weasley, the Rangers' third Chaser. "Pity we forgot to tell him you've got prior experience with a rogue Bludger, eh Harry?" he yelled to the Gryffindor Seeker with a grin as they watched Charlie dodge and go haring off after the Quaffle just as Maddie dropped it behind her. She'd become an expert at the Porskoff Ploy, seeming to 'lose' the red leather ball over her shoulder, but all the while passing it to a nearby waiting teammate. George shook his head sadly. "We're getting slaughtered, Harry. You might want to find the little bugger for real, instead of just pretending in order to confuse the Pink gal." Bad news delivered, the messenger hurried off before the general could decide to shoot him after all.
Harry swerved over to the scoreboard side for a quick glance. He'd lost track of the lively commentary Luna and Phineas were delivering in the heady rush of being on his broom again, and was horrified to find that the Rangers were a solid ninety points ahead. Even as he was flying off to try to find the Snitch in earnest, he heard a chime sound behind him, and everyone on the pitch was treated to one of Ron's Tourette's-like rants of self-recrimination. Ginny, Charlie, and Hermione all screamed "Ronald Weasley!" and their combined voices blended into such an eerie match for Molly Weasley's Howler-tones, the poor red-headed Keeper nearly fell out of the air in shock.
That was the next goal for the Rangers, by Chip, and Harry careened straight up to a level with the topmost banners of the surrounding stands, a good fifty feet over the Keeper's hoops. Pulling his wand out, he renewed the Impervio spell on his glasses. The rainforest-like air in Southern California's mountains was more humid than that in Northern Scotland, and his glasses kept fogging over at the speeds he was flying. Wand put up again, he started a high-level circle, looking first down, then up, trying to figure out where this Snitch had decided to hide.
"Harry! Harry! Get this thing off of me!" The Chosen one whirled around to see the damnable thing was in a tight orbit around Angelina Johnson a hundred feet below him. He snapped into a steep dive, cruising right for her and it, only to scream in anger as he saw Vida closing in from Angelina's left. Urging his Firebolt on to new speeds by sheer will, Harry flattened out over the broomstick, trying anything he could to streamline himself. It all turned out to no avail, though, but thankfully for the Gryffindors, in a good way.
Just as Vida was reaching out to grab the fluttering Snitch, her hand was swatted away by a bone-snapping Bludger that came so close to the still-orbited Angelina as well, the brown-skinned Welsh native screamed and fell off her broom. Everybody swerved to help catch her and the bleeding Vida, and Harry lost track of the Snitch again in the ensuing confusion.
After a two-minute time out for Udonna to fix Vida's arm, and for Angelina and Ron to beat their frustrations out on a practice dummy in the changing room, the two teams reconvened in the center of the pitch. Daggeron gave each team an encouraging nod, and threw the Quaffle back into the air with a toot of his whistle. Play resumed at an immediate furious pitch, but with Ron back on his game, the Rangers suddenly found their steady rise in points stalled out. Meanwhile Katie, Angelina and Ginny began a ruthless campaign against Clare, determined to even out the score. The poor Moon Sorceress, overwhelmed by their relentless assaults, didn't stand a chance. The gap slowly fell to forty points, thanks to the three Gryffindor Chasers, and Maddie and her two Charlies started to fly the whole field instead of passing the Quaffle in an effort to reduce their opponents intercepting opportunities.
Maddie managed another goal finally, performing a dizzying corkscrew maneuver straight at Ron in the center hoop, but releasing the Quaffle at the last second off to one side so the red ball arced into his left ring instead. Unfortunately, her momentum was such that she couldn't quite stop in time, and though she swerved at the end, Maddie ended up hanging out of the right hoop herself by her waist, her broom dangling from one hand as she clung with the other for dear life.
"You people are trying to drive me crazy, aren't you?" Daggeron swore, as they took another thirty-second time-out while Ron and Chip helped Maddie back out of the hoop and onto her broom again. Vida gave her a thumbs-up for the whirlwind maneuver, cheering the while, even as she and Harry were using the break to try to spot the elusive Snitch again. And play resumed.
Twenty more minutes saw no change in the score, not for lack of trying from the six Chasers. They were stymied by an equal amount of effort from Ron and Clare as Keepers, and the two pairs of Beaters from each side. Bill in particular found great delight in letting his feral instincts lead him towards the next Bludger target, although he had to take great care to spread his servings of grief out evenly. His wolfish side had a tendency to try to hurt Chip and Charlie more than Maddie, seeing her as a pack-member through their common Lycanthropic curse.
Demonstrating their uncanny connection again, Leanbow and Nick weaved their way to the same space just as George caromed a Bludger up-field from the Mystic Force's end of the pitch. Swinging their Beater's Bats in synch, father & son were about to deliver yet another devastating Dopplebeater Defense aimed at the fast-swerving Ginny, when with an unexpected clap like thunder, the Bludger vanished amid a shower of faerie fire right as it reached the two men's position. The Beaters, already committed to their swings, whirled in complete 360-degree spins at breakneck speed through the expanding fireworks pattern. Nick lurched so hard to a stop he dropped his Bat trying to hold onto his broom. The unattended Bat whistled as it fell straight onto Harry's head from above. With an abrupt cry of pain, Harry went pin-wheeling to the ground, unconscious.
Harry came to a few moments later with a splitting headache. Ginny was leaning over him pensively, her fiery orange hair wind-tossed and scrunched to her forehead by her goggles. When she saw his eyes open, she let out a sob of relief and practically suffocated him with the force of her following hug.
"Alright, everybody, he's clearly still alive, so I guess we can call a few minutes' rest while Hermione conjures up another Bludger and Harry regains his wits," Daggeron called out with a barely restrained chuckle from about ten feet over their heads.
Vida scooped up the offending Beater's Bat, and flourished it in front of her like a microphone. "Good thing too. I could just see the dateline now. 'The Boy Who Triumphed Killed by The Light of Briarwood, Film at Eleven.' She gave a moue of disdain and tossed the Bat back to Nick, who nearly joined Harry on the freshly-concussed list when he barely caught the underhand throw in time.
