"Come on," Marcus said, leaving no room for argument, dropping into the seat across from Aegeus with a piece of toast still in hand. "I will drag you if I have to!"
"I said I am coming!" Aegeus said, exasperated.
"That's the spirit!" Marcus pointed his toast at him with unwarranted confidence. "It's your House Quidditch match, Aegeus. Everyone has to go!"
"Although I have read enough about the game to have serious criticisms about its rules," Aegeus said.
Chasers score with the Quaffle, Beaters knock Bludgers at people, Keeper guards the hoops, and the Seeker catches the Snitch, which ends the game and is worth a hundred and fifty points, which basically makes all other roles pointless.
"There is nothing wrong with the game, the problem is with you!"
Rosalind arrived a moment later with rather more composure, sliding in beside Aegeus with a book already tucked under one arm— for later, presumably, on the assumption the match wouldn't hold her attention the whole time.
Marcus looked between them. "Can't both of you just watch the match like normal people?"
They found seats high in the Gryffindor section, the wind sharp enough at that height to make Marcus complain about it twice before the players had even mounted their brooms.
Truth be told, Aegeus could have stopped the draft wandlessly if he so wished—he had been capable of doing that even before arriving at Hogwarts— but where was the fun in that?
Below, the pitch stretched out green and enormous, fourteen figures in red and yellow gathering at the center in a loose, restless knot.
"Finally," Marcus said, rubbing his hands together, all his complaints about the cold apparently forgotten now that the match was actually starting.
Madam Hooch's whistle cut through the noise, and the balls went up together— Quaffle first, then the two Bludgers snapping free of their restraints, and finally the Golden Snitch, a flash of gold that hovered for a single beat before vanishing into the sky.
Aegeus watched the first several minutes without comment, tracking not the Quaffle— which seemed to be the thing everyone else's eyes were locked onto— but the game around it. The way the Beaters positioned themselves not reactively but ahead of the play, anticipating where a Bludger would be useful two moves from now. The way the Keeper's stance shifted subtly depending on which Chaser was in possession, reading players' tendencies rather than just the ball.
"You're doing the thing," Rosalind said, without looking away from the pitch herself.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you get quiet and start taking everything apart and analyzing it."
"I'm just watching."
"You're watching analytically. You should try to really enjoy it." she said simply.
Marcus, for his part, was on his feet screaming something about a foul that Madam Hooch had apparently missed.
It was the twentieth minute, Gryffindor up by thirty, when one of the Gryffindor Chasers took a Bludger badly off the shoulder and lost her broom entirely, falling a clean fifteen feet before another player caught her arm and hauled her back onto the tail of his own broom, both of them wobbling dangerously before he leveled out.
Aegeus watched the same fall with a different kind of attention— the angle of the drop, the margin the second player had needed to close it, how much worse it would have gone another ten feet lower. "Don't worry, she is fine," he said. "He caught her in time."
"You don't know that," Marcus said, not taking his eyes off the pitch.
Marcus didn't look reassured, still watching until the Chaser was safely handed off to a substitute broom and waved toward the stands. Only then did Rosalind's shoulders drop, some of the tension going out of her at once, though she didn't say anything about it, just picked her book back up without actually reading it.
But Aegeus's eyes still remained on the injured Chaser— the guarded posture and subtle tilt as she favored her left hand, betrayed the true severity of her injury despite the brave face she put on for the crowd.
"That looks bad," Aegeus said again, quieter now, more to himself.
"Didn't you just say she was fine!"
"Yeah, but—" Aegeus didn't finish it.
The game found its rhythm again a few minutes later, and so, gradually, did Aegeus— though he noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that he'd stopped analysing entirely and was simply watching, caught up in the same rising, wordless tension as everyone else around him when the Hufflepuff Seeker made a dive for something that turned out to be nothing. He didn't examine that shift either.
Charlie caught the Snitch at the hour mark— folding into a tight dive from twenty feet up and coming out of it with his fist raised and the small golden ball clutched inside it, the whole stand surging to its feet before the whistle had even fully sounded. The match ended two hundred and ten to sixty, and the noise that followed had less to do with winning the match than with the fact that it was Charlie who'd done it.
Marcus was on his feet immediately. "That's our prefect!" he shouted.
Rosalind clapped with rather more restraint, though she was smiling in a way Aegeus hadn't seen from her before. Down on the pitch, Charlie was already being mobbed by his own teammates, the Snitch held aloft, grinning in a way that looked nothing like the brisk, faintly reasonable prefect who took Aegeus back to the tower after the corridor fight.
"Well?" Rosalind asked, once the noise had settled into something conversational again. "How was it? Did you like it?"
Aegeus considered the question properly. "It was better than I thought."
"You enjoyed it!" Marcus said, pointing an accusing finger at him.
Aegeus nodded and couldn't hide a small smile that warmed his features.
Rosalind's smile didn't get any bigger, but it settled into something a little more satisfied. "There it is."
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TO BE CONTINUED
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