Apoplectic: intense enough to threaten or cause a stroke.
June 5, 1992
The fifth year boys' dormitory was utterly silent. The windows were firmly locked against stray peals of laughter or shouts that might find their way up from the grounds. The door was charmed to block out any footsteps that might dare to thump past it. The clocks on all four bedside tables had been frozen within five seconds of each other. Not even the curtains around the four-posters were brave enough to flutter.
And at the center of it all, surrounded by heaps of textbooks borrowed, snagged or bartered from what looked like a dozen students besides the library, sat Percy Weasley. His horn-rimmed glasses slipped down his long nose as he bent over an ancient volume covered in miniscule text on old transfiguration theories. His lips moved silently as he sped his way along his seventh textbook in an hour, pausing now and again to jot something down on an illegible, ink-splattered piece of parchment.
In twelve hours' time he would be sitting his first O.W.L., and the concentration pooling around him would have bent any spoon into a hopeless curl of metal.
It was just as Percy reached a particularly knotty diagram involving a lot of squiggling arrows, some shifting statistics, and a porcupine, that the heavily charmed dormitory door burst open. Oliver Wood tramped in, still panting from the exhausting Quiditch practice he'd just captained and splattering mud everywhere. He groaned as he tossed his broom into the corner and collapsed on his bed with great creaking of the wooden frame.
"If we don't win the cup after this, I'm going chuck somebody – preferably a Slytherin – into the lake for the giant squid," he said between his fingers.
Percy didn't answer, but Oliver, used to his roommate's somewhat antisocial behavior around exam time, took little notice. He sat up, glanced at the stack of books piled on top of his trunk, then turned his back on them and began to rummage through the cabinet beside his bed, tossing things across the room when he couldn't find the playbook he was looking for.
It was the howling hacky sack that did it. The bright yellow thing whizzed past Percy's head an inch from his glasses, keening as it soared through the air and smacked into a tower of dusty old books. And something snapped behind Percy's eyes.
The shouting echoed down the boys' staircase all the way to the common room. A few more things got thrown, and soon Oliver Wood was fleeing his own dormitory, clutching his playbook and shouting over his shoulder, "Sheesh, lighten up, Perce! You're going to pop a vane one of these days!"
XxX
Six hours later found Wood bent over his squiggling diagrams beneath a pool of lamplight in a mostly-deserted common room, muttering to himself as he prepared for the final match of the season. He was so concentrated that he didn't notice George Weasley leap down the boys' staircase and begin crawling under tables, searching the floor.
"Hey, Oliver, you haven't seen my –"
Something snapped behind Wood's eyes, and the shouting echoed up to the top of Gryffindor tower.
A/N: Ah, a word that fit both of them. Hope it entertained you!