Chapter 9

"I wonder what creatures think of us." Wright said while she stuffed her mouth with pieces of toast she'd tore off. Wright carried the controversial opinion that the more food you propped into your mouth at once, the better it tasted. I wasn't sure if I agreed with her.

"Witches have categorized, labelled and researched their behaviours. Even lived with them for long periods of time only to study them! But do you think the creatures care about us in the same way? Do you think they'd ever do the same for us? I don't think so."

I couldn't help but smile at her absurdness. "Maybe they do. Maybe that's why gnomes infest our gardens."

"That would explain a lot actually." She laughed, and I believed she understood that I was only making with the funny. But her expression turned into that of a thoughtful one and she looked down at her bowl of cereal in a way that could only be explained as absent for there was no way she could find cereal that interesting otherwise.

I scanned the Great Hall and I had to mentally slap myself because that was maybe the seventh time I'd done so since Wright and I had sat down. Apparently my subconscious wanted to see Oliver but I wanted to not care. Instead I caught sight of the rest of our friends coming to finally join us for breakfast.

"Finally, you guys are up!" I called and simultaneously woke Wright from her daydream in doing so. "Took you hours to get here, didn't it?"

"Honestly Will, we left like 30 minutes after you guys." Said PJ, a sleepy expression on her face. "Did Oliver get a hold of you yesterday? I thought referring him to the tower would be the safest bet, although I have been wrong about these things in the past."

I gave her an incredulous look. "He did find me, and about that — why couldn't you have just told him something instead of referring him to me?"

"Because, he was all upset with you about the fact that you had accidentally booked all week, he thought you'd tried to cheat or something." PJ explained.

"But you knew that I hadn't, you knew it was a mistake, so why didn't you simply tell him that and it would've been sorted!" I wasn't even sure why I was mad to her. Oliver and I had after all sorted the whole thing out and were now on what I believed to be pretty good terms. But how could anyone have known that yesterday when all I wanted to do with Oliver was avoid him at all costs. Why couldn't she have respected that?

PJ looked around the table where we sat to make sure no one had noticed out argument, and proceeded to whisper frantically at me, "Because! I don't want to have to act like an owl between you two. Besides, I can't be bothered with this little feud of yours anyway, I want you guys to talk, so that you guys can sort it out!"

I sat back in disbelief. I couldn't believe PJ was actually upset with me. I didn't think that had ever happened before. It got me thinking that maybe I should tone down my complaining about Oliver. Maybe that was what annoyed her. Hopefully, following yesterday night it would naturally set into motion down a spiral.

"When are you going to stop being this irate with everyone?" PJ asked. "It's Flint then Oliver and now it's even me you're angry with." She buttered a piece of bread firmly. "You're going to have to stop somewhere, it won't be good for you otherwise. Maybe try imagining others complexly for once." Disregarding the sandwich she turned her attention fully toward me. "I mean think about it, why are you even upset now? Because I wanted you to patch things up with Oliver?"

Before I could retort though, right out of nowhere, Wright just said, "Wonder how creatures know where to pee? When they're marking their territory and all that. I mean, it's not like they have maps of that shit, do they? How do they know?"

PJ glared at Wright, "They obviously have a heightened sense of smell than we do." She answered, visibly annoyed at the interruption.

"So they just smell where others have peed?" Wright asked and Bianca rolled her eyes for all of us. It was quite obvious what Wright was doing.

"Guess so." PJ said and bit hard into her sandwich.

But Wright only kept on going, apparently she had thought about this matter long and hard and had a lot of questions, "They'd have to smell everything, wouldn't they? Wouldn't that get really tiring in the long run?"

"No, they sodding love it!" PJ ejected with bread still in her mouth. "Have you ever seen a hippogriff? They smell everything. They love to smell stuff! It's what they do all day and they love it. The hippogriff goes around smelling others' pee, and then the hippogriff pees, itself, so that the others can smell it in return. It's an endless cycle."

"Hmm, okay." Wright finally seemed to be finished with what was an infinitely unnecessary conversation.

Wright often acted as some sort of guardian to us. Whenever we would enter a risky conversation, she would steer the subject in a safer direction. The reason behind it being that she didn't care for arguments and drama. She was probably the most chilled person I'd ever met. She just wanted to have a laugh. Which was why we worked so well together.

Her distraction seemed to have helped. Both PJ and I had cooled down and were now staring at the table in silence.

PJ turned to me, "Maybe it wasn't a good idea to direct him to you. I don't even know what's going on with him. He seems to have some sort of vendetta against you. I mean seriously, what was he even angry about yesterday?" She took a deep breath. "Anyway, I just thought maybe you guys needed to talk alone for a bit and you'd sort things out. It might have been wrong of me."

Jokingly I said, "Maybe Oliver should imagine me complexly." with a smile her way. "I'm sorry I've been so angry, you guys." I said on a more serious note and turned to the whole group.

"We think you might have been under a lot of pressure lately with the captainship and school and… yeah." Wright said sympathetically. I had my suspicions that her 'yeah' might have referred to the Gryffindor captain.

"I think so too." I said uneasily. "But I've had you guys to help me. And Oliver and I, we sort of… talked yesterday. Things will be better now, I think." I laid my hand on PJ's shoulder with a sheepish smile, "So maybe it wasn't such a bad idea at all. I think it might actually have worked."

"Good that." PJ replied.

It wasn't until later in the day that I met Oliver again. I was in the library trying to finish last week's homework, before my friends would arrive and we would all finish this week's homework.

I was submerged in reading the same sentence in one paragraph of The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts over and over again, waiting for my mind to function, when he slumped down right next to me. I looked up in surprise, hair doing a pirouette as I did so.

Oliver inhaled sharply.

He was sitting so far down in the seat that his neck was leaning on the top of the backrest. It didn't make sense to me how that could be a comfortable position. But he was smiling with his hands in his pockets and bag disregarded on the dusty floor.

"Are you trying to annoy me? Like, are you deliberately doing this to me?" I laughed. I had been feeling quite giddy about Oliver all day, though I hadn't seen him around. That giddiness rose in me again at the encounter.

"What?" he asked nonchalantly and his smile spread even wider.

I was referring to his general appearance. He was as untidy as ever, wrinkly shirt and all. Although I didn't mind his hair, my eyes traced the mess on his head. It did something to me, his hair looking like that.

I took a deep breath and my muscles relaxed. "I hadn't thought, before now, that it was possible to lie down on a 90 degree angled couch. It's like when a baby is playing with one of those toys and it's trying to fit a rectangle shaped piece inside a round hole." I said and laughed. "Can't you at least sit up?"

Oliver sort of shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, still smiling, still as untroubled as ever. "Are you saying I'm a baby?"

"I'm not saying you're a baby, it was merely an analogy. What I'm saying is you have baby like traits." I shut the book in front of me with a flick of my hand, which made a muffled popping sound. I had given up on finishing the paragraph anyway.

Oliver raised his eyebrows, "I have baby like traits?"

In lack of anything to reply with, I strummed a rhythm against the table and peered at the rows of bookcases, bedecked with large books I would never read.

"Merlin, I really do have a talent for stirring you up don't I?" he looked almost proud.

Oliver had laid a stack of parchments on the table in front of us. He had written on them what looked like actual notes from lessons, and I almost wanted to congratulate him, but I then discerned that all the space around the notes were covered with different Quidditch diagrams. "Typical." I thought.

No wait, I'd said it out loud.

I grabbed the piece of parchment and examined it closer. "You're such a stereotype of yourself, you know that? Why couldn't there have been, I don't know… drawings on here? Why does everything have to be about Quidditch?" I realised as I spoke that, much like yesterday with PJ, this wasn't a solid reason to be frustrated. But Oliver was still smiling at me from his concave position like he appreciated the unsolicited ramble, so I kept going, "You just had to transform this innocent piece of parchment into a display of your unwavering obsession. None goes unharmed when it comes to the epidemic that is your affinity for Quidditch! Not even this parchment of what is supposed to be notes, which you are supposed to be focusing on during class."

Oliver didn't look all that fazed, he sat up slowly and slid the book in front of me toward him, "You're the one to talk?" He said, "As if you never think about Quidditch during class? Here you are doing last week's defence against the dark arts essay." He motioned at The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, "Or is that book just a trick of the light?"

I tried not to look fazed either, tried to keep the light-hearted expression Oliver was wearing. But honestly, I felt kind of fazed. Maybe I was just as two-dimensional as I had long believed Oliver to be, only one thing in my head. Unable to read so much as a sentence of something that wasn't Quidditch Through the Ages, or the likes of it.

"It's a trick of the light." I tried disgracefully and made an attempt to hide the book under my robe, but Oliver had another plan. He snatched the book away from me and once again slid it back toward him, flipping the cover open. There, all around the pastedown, one could see clearly that I had doodled small (you guessed it) diagrams.

"Is this a trick of the light as well, then?" He feigned some well-acted disappointment in me, "And a book belonging to the school's very own library as well!" he said. "This is vandalism, you know!" he continued humorously. "What would Madam Pince say?"

At that moment, both our heads turned toward a gap between the bookcases ahead of us where Madam Pince had a clear view of us from her desk. Only, the typically highly attentive librarian was currently busying herself with other tasks, to my pulse's benefit. Once again Oliver had stunned me, making me realise that I was just as bad as him. I hadn't even realised I'd been scribbling on a library book, and suffice to say, I now had a hard time looking Madam Pince's way.

Instead of replying to any of Oliver's remarks I shot him a glare. But once again, Oliver wasn't fazed. He leaned forward, and said with sudden sincerity, "Also, I thought you liked Quidditch? Right now you're sounding like you detest anything that has to do with the sport. What's up with that?"

"I do like Quidditch! Just look at the book for Merlin's sake!" I had to stop and take a breath, gather my thoughts before I continued in a calmer state, "It's just that… people are unities — containing many parts that make a whole. You can't just like Quidditch. That can't be all of you."

"Okay." He said, expression becoming determined, determined to think of something. To my intrigue, he took the parchment I had studied minutes before, the one with the Quidditch diagrams on the sides and handed it to me. Then proceeded to sink down his seat to the peeving position he had been in earlier. I decided not to mind him and turned my attention toward the parchment.

With a barely distinct "Ooh…" out of my mouth, I saw that in the middle of the paper, inside of the diagrams, were not words, but number charts.

Once I tore my eyes from the charts I saw that Oliver had now sunk all the way to the floor to take solace under the table. "I like arithmancy." He said.

I had to briefly deliberate whether sitting down on the floor was an ordinary thing people did when in the middle of a conversation. But settled on, no — it was definitely not.

"You take arithmancy?" I asked, and after some careful consideration I slid down until I was sitting right next to him under the table. Oliver mumbled something in response but I didn't catch it. His shirt had rid up a little around the stomach area during the motion of his decent and I had to make sure I didn't look anywhere that was skin.

Skin is annoying, because whenever it appears you have to regard where you keep your eyes. Suddenly, there are rules to where you can have a look and even though it might not be a sexual look, you can't have it! It's annoying as heck because if there is ever a certain place you aren't allowed to even glance at, then that's where your mind will automatically wander. You just have to pray that your eyes don't tag along.

"I was thinking…" Oliver began tentatively. He was toying with a hem on his bag. "…It might be fun to play Quidditch sometime."

I was about to act ignorant and remind him that he does play Quidditch 'sometimes', if 'sometimes' is every other day. But I decided this was one of those moments that didn't need a snide remark from me. "Yeah, that might be fun." I settled on saying. "If one wasn't as automatic as their broom."

Damn it! I cursed myself for being unable to hold my tongue.

Oliver laughed heartily, to my relief. "Alright, you already said that." He reminded me. "And anyway, I could be… less… automatic." For the first time since I had sat down next to him under the table, he looked me in the eyes.

"You think so?" I asked, genuinely curious.

"Well… It wouldn't be a practise, and so it wouldn't have to be structured. It would just have to be… fun, I guess." He sounded like he wasn't sure if he was using the word right, like the word was a new addition to his vocabulary. But instead of finding his stiffness agitating, like I usually do, I caught myself being amused by it. It felt sort of nice experiencing Oliver with a tinge of reluctance as he spoke of this hypothetical Quidditch playing that was simply just for 'fun'.

"And you're sure you're up for it?" I asked. "Because as you say, it would have to include fun, it would entail loosening up."

He rolled his eyes, "Oh come of it Willow! I can be loose."

My eyes widened in surprise. It once again took him a moment to realise he'd said it, and when he did, he sat up straight (for once in his life,) although in doing so he quite unfortunately hit his head on the edge of the table right above us. It looked painful yet I couldn't help but fall into a grin from the entertainment of witnessing the chain of events unfold before me, like domino pieces tumbling to the ground, one by one. Especially when what had caused them to cave, to me, seemed like the touch of a light breeze.

"You're right, you can be loose." I giggled, "Just not when it comes to Quidditch, or using my first name."

From what I'd gathered, Oliver wanted to have fun — and he'd used my first name for a second time! This was too good to be true. I looked at him in a way that one just can't take their eyes of a new-born kitten as it fumbles around on the floor, trying to take its first steps. He really was fumbling. He was fumbling for his bag; he fumblingly stood up and he fumblingly said;

"Anyway, I should return to my studies." Not even minding what I'd just said.

He gave my approaching friends a nod and then turned the corner of a bookshelf and was gone from sight. As soon as he'd gone and my friends drew nearer to me, I became rapidly aware that I was sitting under a table.

"Why were you and Oliver sitting on the floor?" Wright asked curiously.

"I think we might be friends." I smiled as I tried to get up from under the table, a tricky business.

"That's nice." Said Bianca. "Do you think it'll work out?"

"I don't know." I felt an urge to contradict the friend-conjecture I'd just made and therefore said, "He's a bit of a slob isn't he?"

"We should probably find a bigger table if Alicia and Angelina are joining us later." Wright interrupted. I gathered my things and we all moved further into the library.

"Why do you care if he's slobby when you're the biggest slob in the world?" Bianca asked upon getting seated at the bigger table.

"I'm not the biggest slob in the world!"

"You haven't even started on the game plan for our match against Gryffindor." PJ contended before I had barely finished defending myself.

"That's sloppy, not slobby." I reasoned.

PJ didn't seem to find my reasoning to be reasonable, and she stared at me intently. "I think they're the same thing, if slobby is even a word, that is."

Choosing to ignore PJ's last statement, I pondered further the intricacies of Oliver's behaviour out loud, "I guess it's not so much that he's a slob and more that he's just sort of… careless."

"Careless like not bothering to come up with a game plan when there's only two weeks until the actual game in question?" Wright suggested with an ironic undertone.

I gave Wright an unamused look, the others laughed and once they'd settled down we all seemed to unspeakably agree to end the conversation and open our books.

I kept reflecting over the interactions Oliver and I had had over these past 24 hours. (It's just what I like to do when I'm supposed to be studying.) We'd been acting toward each other in an entirely different way than just a day or two ago. Now we were being sort of ludic toward one another and… having banter? I think the culprit was the events that had taken place yesterday in the tower. As soon as he'd shown a little compassion toward me and I had, in return, begun to joke around with him, all hostility had melted away and a somewhat serene atmosphere had taken its place.

When studying with a group of dear friends, it can be quite entertaining, but it can also take many more hours than it should. A couple of hours passed and we decided it was best to go back to our dormitories. We collectively shook Angelina awake. She drowsily stood up to gather her stuff without saying anything; she looked dead. It can't be easy having Oliver as your captain. He really must run them down. He really must be run down himself.

I went ahead of the others and turned the corner where Oliver had disappeared a couple of hours earlier. I found him sitting alone in an armchair with a single light brightening his array of parchment spread out un-neatly over a small table. He looked half asleep and his hair was thoroughly dishevelled. Again, it can't be easy being Oliver Wood, captain of Gryffindor Quidditch team.

He looked up at me with his sleepy eyes and I gave him a tentative smile. He looked down at his parchment.

"We're leaving now." I said.

He gave me a nod back.

Is he embarrassed or something?

I waited for him to say something, even look at me.

"Okay... Goodbye then." I said once I'd realised he wasn't going to spare me any more pleasantries and turned my back to leave.

"Goodbye, Penderghast." Oliver mumbled behind me.

Slowly I treaded back to my friends. Body tight, shoulders tight. I felt like everything was contrasting greatly to how it had been just a couple of hours earlier, when I'd thought Oliver and I had got on quite well.

A comment someone had made a couple of weeks ago re-entered my memory, "Maybe he's only callous when he's talking to you."

The comment latched itself to my brain and stayed there for the remainder of the evening until I fell asleep back in our dorm that night.

16 September 2018

A/N: Did you like/dislike anything about this chapter? Please let me know!