Harry's broom suddenly bucked upward, then jerked sideways so sharply that the entire stadium finally understood.
The scream changed shape.
It was no longer cheering.
It was something more animal.
Malfoy shot to his feet.
- What is he doing?
No one answered him.
Harry clung to the broom with both hands. His legs were wrong, one slipping dangerously. The Nimbus twisted beneath him as if it wanted to throw him off not through a fall, but through the humiliation of the very principle of flight.
I widened my focus.
And then I saw the second force.
Colder.
Cleaner.
It did not enter the broom like a hook. It did not tear. It did not bite. It was more like a hand pressed against cracked glass, trying to keep the whole thing from shattering at once.
Snape.
Of course.
He sat motionless, his lips moving almost imperceptibly. To the rest of the school, he probably looked guilty. It was almost comical. The most suspicious man in the stadium was doing the only sensible thing.
Harry dropped several meters.
The crowd roared.
My hand tightened around the edge of the bench before I noticed.
Do not move.
He will survive this.
You know he will survive this.
But knowing was one thing.
Watching a boy hang high above the ground from a broom that had stopped being on his side was something else entirely.
For one brief, disgustingly clear second, I thought I could try.
Not save him.
Not immediately.
Check.
Whether my pressure could slip between those two foreign intentions. Whether I could strike the hook itself, not the broom. Whether something that ruined motion could be broken the same way I had broken the stability of simple magic.
The thought came too quickly.
Too naturally.
I clenched my teeth.
That was not appropriate.
It did not go away.
Harry jerked violently, one hand nearly slipping from the handle.
Hermione moved down the stands.
Ron shouted after her, but the stadium swallowed his voice.
I stayed where I was.
Not because I was calm.
Because I was afraid that if I stood up, I would do something stupid. And I was not entirely sure I would call it a mistake.
I was not entirely sure I would call it a mistake.
Hermione disappeared between the rows with such determination that several older students only moved aside when she had almost run into them. She did not look like someone with a plan. More like someone who did not need a plan if the goal was clear enough.
Ron tried to follow her.
He managed maybe three steps before the crowd closed in front of him like a badly behaved wall.
- Move! - he yelled, which of course did not work, because everyone was yelling.
Meanwhile, Harry had stopped even pretending he was flying.
The broom had become something like a wild animal, only worse, because an animal at least has its own instinct. The Nimbus had someone else's. It thrashed beneath him, twisted sideways, dropped suddenly, and stopped a fraction of a second too late. Every twitch looked like a question asked with violence.
Harry was hanging more beneath the broom than on it.
A small point above the pitch.
Too small.
Too real.
Beside me, Malfoy finally stopped looking pleased.
- That is not normal - he said quietly.
I did not answer.
Blaise glanced at me, then at the pitch.
- Peverell?
- Watch the match - I said.
It did not sound as light as I wanted it to.
Blaise said nothing, but he did not look away from my face immediately either. Not good. He had that irritating quality of noticing when a person was trying to pretend boredom.
Lower down, near the teachers' row, Hermione finally reached her target.
I could not see everything clearly. Heads, railings, and the movement of the crowd blocked my view. But I saw enough. Her figure disappeared behind one of the seated teachers, then bent sharply, and a moment later something flashed low near the ground.
Fire.
Not large. Not dramatic. At first barely an orange tooth on Snape's black robe.
And yet the magic changed immediately.
Snape flinched.
Only that.
To the stands, it was probably the meaningless movement of a man whose robe had just caught fire. To me, it looked like the moment when the hand holding the cracked glass had to pull away for a second so it would not burn.
Quirrell flinched too.
And that was more interesting.
His focus did not break immediately, but ugly. Like a thin thread pulled too tight. The dirty hook lodged in Harry's movement jerked once more, deeper, almost desperately, as if something on the other side did not want to release its prize.
My left eye burned so sharply that the edges of the world darkened.
For a fraction of a second, I saw too much.
Not Quirrell.
Something behind him.
Not a figure. Not a face. Nothing that convenient.
Rather, pressure hidden beneath another pressure. Darkness pressed against a man from the inside, tight and patient. Something that was no longer entirely human magic, but still used his hands, his voice, his eyes.
I felt cold in my throat.
Not fear.
Not at once.
More like recognition.
As if my eye had noticed something familiar in a thing it should never have known.
I looked away for a second.
Too late.
The image remained beneath my eyelid.
Quirrell. Turban. False nervousness. And underneath, something that did not fit inside a living body.
Harry's broom made one last wild movement.
The stadium screamed.
Then, suddenly, everything let go.
Not calmly. Not cleanly. The foreign will simply lost its grip. The Nimbus jerked once more, as if trying to throw off the last remnant of an alien command, and then Harry pulled himself back onto the handle with such clumsy desperation that for a second he looked less like a hero and more like a wet cat fighting for the last piece of fence.
It was probably the most human thing I saw that day.
And that was why it worked.
The crowd did not understand at once. People were still screaming, still standing, still pointing, as if pointing itself could change what had happened. Then Harry suddenly moved.
Not downward in panic.
Sideways.
Fast.
Too fast for someone who had almost fallen moments earlier.
- What is he doing? - Malfoy hissed.
This time, he genuinely sounded as if he did not know.
Harry leaned over the broom, his body almost pressed to the wood. The Nimbus cut through the air low above the pitch. Flint turned his head too late. One of the Slytherins tried to cut him off, but Harry slipped past by a hair, more luck than elegance.
A Bludger whistled somewhere to the side.
Someone in the stands screamed.
Harry reached out.
For a second, I saw nothing except his hand.
Then something golden flickered between his fingers.
The Snitch.
Silence did not truly fall. With a crowd like that, silence does not exist. But for a fraction of a moment, sound seemed to lose confidence in what it was supposed to do next.
And then Gryffindor went mad.
The entire red section of the stadium exploded in shouting so violently that even the protective spells around the stands trembled at the edges. People jumped, hugged, screamed Harry's name. Ron nearly fell out of the row, trying to shout, laugh, and find Hermione all at once.
Slytherin reacted like a house that had just decided the world had made a formal error.
- That does not count! - someone shouted below.
- Hooch was blind! - someone else added.
Flint looked as if he was very seriously considering beating the air for complicity.
Malfoy sank back onto the bench with the expression of someone who had been robbed of something owed to him by birth.
- That was pathetic. That was Gryffindorish - Blaise said.
- There is no difference - Malfoy replied.
I was not really listening to them.
For everyone else, the match ended when Harry raised the Snitch.
For me, it had ended earlier.
The moment Quirrell let go.
The moment I saw that thing beneath his magic.
I looked once more toward the teachers' row.
Snape was standing now, putting out the last flames on his robe, with a face so icy it should have served as a cooling charm by itself. He looked absolutely guilty. Perfectly, almost artistically guilty. If I had not known what he had been doing, I probably would have suspected him too.
Quirrell was gone.
Not dramatically. He did not dissolve into smoke, did not teleport, did not disappear like a dark wizard from a story. He simply used the chaos and left before most people noticed he had been sitting there at all.
That irritated me.
It should not have. I knew, after all. Everything had happened more or less as it should have.
And yet the irritation remained.
Because for a moment, I had wanted to see more.
Not the result of the match. Not Harry's reaction. Not even Snape's face when he realized he had just become suspect number one.
I wanted to see what Quirrell would do after the curse broke.
Was he frightened?
Angry?
Did the thing beneath the turban look through him at the stadium?
That thought was too sharp.
I looked away.
Blaise was watching me again.
- You really are strange after this match.
- Everyone is strange after this match.
- Not like that.
Malfoy scoffed.
- Leave him alone. Peverell is probably mourning the house defeat in his gloomy way.
- Yes - I said. - Inside, I am devastated.
- It does not show.
- That is where the elegance lies.
Blaise smiled faintly, but still did not look convinced. Malfoy, however, returned to complaining, which was the best proof the world had not ended.
People began leaving the stands.
First slowly, then in waves. Gryffindors sang something no one should sing without prior training. Slytherins passed them with expressions so sour they could have spoiled milk. Hufflepuffs talked loudly about how it was "a truly amazing match," which from them sounded like an attempt at peace between nations. Ravenclaws were already analyzing the trajectory of Harry's flight.
Everyone had their own version of events.
And nearly every version was wrong.
I stayed seated a little longer, until the worst of the crowd had moved ahead. I did not want to push through people. Not today. The stadium after the match was too full of everything. Excitement, relief, jealousy, anger, disappointment, warmth, pride. Emotions had no lines or shape, but after a day like this, they seemed to hang in the air like steam after a badly brewed potion.
For most people, it was noise.
For me, it was too many things at once.
I stood only when the stands began to empty.
I went down carefully, one hand on the railing. Not because I might fall. The boards beneath my feet still seemed to tremble from the crowd's shouting. Or from my eye. It was hard to tell.
Halfway down, a first-year Gryffindor passed me, red in the face from screaming.
- Did you see?! - he shouted at me, as if we were old friends. - Harry really caught the Snitch!
I looked at him briefly.
- It was difficult not to notice.
Apparently, that was enough. The boy ran on, happy that the world had confirmed what he already knew.
Simple.
I envied him for half a second.
Only half.
At ground level, the air was colder. The pitch already looked almost normal, which was absurd. A moment ago, something had tried to throw a boy from a great height, hundreds of people had screamed, magic had clashed in secret before the eyes of the entire school, and now grass was simply grass.
Hogwarts had a talent for pretending things had not happened if they failed to leave a large enough hole in the wall.
When I returned to the castle, the stone welcomed me with cold and shadow. It was better than the stadium. The corridors still buzzed with conversation, but at least there was no open sky above them and no hundreds of people trying to outshout their own excitement.
I walked with no particular destination.
That was, of course, untrue.
A person always has a destination, even when pretending he is only walking.
I stopped only beside a tall window overlooking the grounds. The stadium could be seen in the distance. Small, quiet, almost innocent.
I rested my hand on the cold windowsill.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
A mistake.
Harry did not return.
The Snitch did not return.
Not even the scream returned.
The hook did.
Dark, dirty, lodged in movement that did not belong to it.
And beneath it, the other thing.
The thing that had moved behind Quirrell for a fraction of a second.
I opened my eyes at once.
My own reflection stared back at me from the glass. Too pale. Too focused. My left eye looked normal, at least from a distance. That almost amused me.
Almost.
I pressed my fingers to my temple.
It hurt. Not much. Enough.
Good.
Pain was simple. Pain did not pretend to be a mystery. It came when something had a cost. It could be ignored, but at least it did not lie.
For a while, I tried to think about Harry.
Truly.
About how he had been hanging there so high above the ground. About how he had caught the Snitch anyway. About how he was eleven years old and did not even know how close he had been to something that could not be reversed.
But the thought slid elsewhere.
To mechanics.
To where exactly Quirrell had anchored the curse. Whether he was holding the broom, or the movement. Whether Snape was stabilizing the wood, the spell, or the very possibility of flight. Whether, if I pressed in the right place, I would cut that dirty thread or only make everything worse.
Whether I could do it better.
The thought came quietly.
Without pride.
Without laughter.
That was precisely why it was worse.
I looked at my reflection a moment longer.
- Not now - I said under my breath.
It sounded reasonable.
And then, almost immediately, the second part of the sentence finished itself.
Later.
I should not have allowed it to sound.
I allowed it.
I turned away from the window more sharply than necessary and headed toward the dungeons. Not to the seventh floor. Not to the Room of Requirement. Not immediately. I could still feel the stadium beneath my skin, and going there now would have been too honest.
And I did not feel like being honest with myself.
In the corridor, I passed a group of Gryffindors. Two of them were still trying to recreate Harry's flight with their hands. One nearly hit me with his elbow.
- Watch it - I said.
The boy turned, saw the green tie, and immediately straightened.
- Sorry.
He did not sound frightened. More like too happy to argue.
That was irritating too.
By the stairs, I heard a familiar voice.
- Oliver!
I did not stop immediately.
Harry caught up with me after a few steps. His hair was even messier than usual, and he had the face of someone who had survived something huge but had not yet decided whether it had been wonderful or awful.
Ron ran behind him. Hermione walked faster, but did not run. Of course.
- Good match - Harry said a little awkwardly.
For a second, I only looked at him.
Good match.
He had almost fallen off his broom, and now he was saying it as if commenting on the weather.
- Interesting - I answered.
Ron grimaced.
- That is all? Interesting?
- Did you win? - I asked Harry.
- Well... yes.
- Did you survive?
Harry blinked.
- Yes.
- Then my standards for praise have been exhausted.
Ron snorted, but this time he did not look truly offended. Harry even smiled, though briefly.
Hermione did not.
She was watching me too carefully.
- You saw what happened to the broom - she said.
She did not ask.
Of course she did not.
- Everyone saw it.
- Not like that.
Ron looked at her.
- Hermione...
- No, Ron. He was looking somewhere else.
That sentence stopped me more than it should have.
Harry frowned.
- What do you mean?
Hermione did not take her eyes off me.
- When the broom started going wild, most people looked at Harry. Ron did too. I did at first too. But Oliver was looking at the teachers.
Not good.
Very not good.
I smiled faintly.
- Granger, if you start keeping a record of where I look during sporting events, I will have to take that as a compliment.
- So I am right.
- So you are stubborn.
- That is not an answer.
- With you, nothing is an answer unless it can be written in a full sentence.
Ron glanced at Harry.
- Is he always like this?
- More or less - Harry said.
That was almost kind. In an unnecessary way.
Hermione stepped closer.
- Snape was doing something.
Ron immediately perked up.
- See? I told you!
- But Quirrell was too - she added.
Ron fell silent for half a second.
- Quirrell? But he...
- I do not know - she interrupted. - But something was strange.
Harry looked at me.
And that was the worst part. Not suspiciously. Not accusingly. More like he truly wanted me to say something that would put the day into order for him.
I had that answer.
That did not give me the right to give it.
- If you want my advice - I said - do not assume the most suspicious person in the room is always the guilty one.
Ron narrowed his eyes.
- Is that supposed to be about Snape?
- It is supposed to be a general observation about life.
Hermione caught it immediately.
- So Snape was not trying to kill Harry?
I clenched my fingers in my pocket.
Too fast, Granger.
Definitely too fast.
- I only said you should not be too certain.
- But you are - she said quietly.
I did not answer at once.
And that was a mistake.
Hermione noticed. Harry too. Ron maybe not, but even he sensed after a moment that the silence had grown heavier.
- Good night - I said.
- It is afternoon - Ron said.
- All the more impressive that I am already tired of this conversation.
I passed them.
Hermione did not stop me a second time. But I felt her gaze on my back for several steps. I did not like that feeling. Not because of being watched itself. People watched all the time.
She watched as if she were trying to recognize a pattern.
And patterns, if observed long enough, begin to reveal meaning.
I reached the dungeons later than I had planned.
The Slytherin common room greeted me with the sound of defeat divided into voices. Flint was currently explaining to someone that Potter should not have been allowed to fly on a Nimbus. Someone else claimed Hooch had been biased. Another insisted Gryffindor had only won because Slytherin had been unlucky.
A normal, healthy refusal of reality.
Malfoy, who had arrived before me, pointed at me.
- Peverell saw it. Tell them it was absurd.
Several heads turned toward me.
Wonderful.
- It was absurd - I said.
Malfoy looked satisfied for half a second.
- See?
- But not for the reasons you are listing.
His expression immediately soured.
Blaise, sitting by the fireplace, raised an eyebrow.
- Then for what reasons?
- The kind you cannot shout loudly enough to feel better.
Flint snorted.
- What is that supposed to mean?
- That you lost.
Silence fell in the room.
Not complete. Enough.
Malfoy looked at me as if I had just betrayed my family, my house, and the aesthetics of the color green.
- You really have a talent for making the mood worse today.
- Thank you. I practice.
I did not wait for a reply. I went to the dormitory, washed my face with cold water, and looked in the mirror.
My left eye still looked normal.
Too normal.
No blood. No crack. No visible sign that for several minutes I had been looking at something that should not have been inside the body of a Defense professor.
It was almost insulting.
I reached for the towel and only then noticed that my hand was trembling slightly.
Not much.
Only a little.
I looked at it.
Then I clenched my fingers.
It stopped.
Good.
Control still worked.
At least over that.
In the evening, when the common room finally began to quiet and the first wave of complaints lost its strength, the same thought returned.
Not now.
Later.
I sat on my bed, textbook open on my lap and not the faintest idea what was on the page. Letters formed words, words formed sentences, but every sentence lost to the image of a dark hook lodged in movement.
After ten minutes, I closed the book.
After another five, I stood.
I did not justify myself. Not this time. I did not invent that I was going for a walk, that I needed silence, that I only wanted to check one detail.
I knew where I was going.
And why.
The corridors at night were better than during the day. Fewer people. Fewer voices. Fewer foreign emotions brushing against the skin. Portraits whispered among themselves, but more quietly, as if night made accomplices of them. Suits of armor stood motionless. The stairs did not change their minds this time.
The seventh floor.
The tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy.
Three passes.
I need a place to work.
Not rest.
Not study.
Work.
The door appeared without sound.
I entered.
The Room of Requirement already knew.
That was probably the most unsettling part.
The desk stood on the left, dark and empty. On it waited parchment, a quill, and an inkwell. Against the far wall stood a rack with two old school brooms. Not Nimbuses. Ordinary, worn, with scratched wood and twigs bound slightly crookedly. Beside them hung three metal hoops, suspended on thin, invisible threads.
The Room had not given me an arena.
It had given me a laboratory.
For a moment, I stood in the doorway.
I should have left.
I did not.
I went to the desk and wrote at the top of the parchment:
Match.
The quill stopped on its own.
Not because I lacked words. Quite the opposite. There were too many. Dirty hook. Cold hand. Harry hanging above the pitch. Quirrell disappearing from the stands. Hermione watching too closely.
I chose the simplest.
Quirrell - interference.
Snape - restraint.
Broom reacted at correction points.
I underlined the last one once.
Then I set the quill down.
I placed the first broom on the rack. The wood was cool beneath my fingers. Supposedly dead, and yet not entirely. A broom had no thoughts, but it had purpose. Things made for motion carried some kind of readiness inside them, even when they lay still.
I raised my wand.
- Leviosa.
The broom rose a few inches above the rack.
It was simple. Too simple. The spell held it evenly, effortlessly. Nothing like the stadium. Nothing like Harry.
I nudged it lightly with my fingers.
The broom shifted sideways, and then something changed.
The spell had to keep up.
That was where a faint scrape appeared. Not a mistake. More like a correction. A small point where movement tried to pull the object farther, and magic reminded it where it was supposed to be.
My left eye burned.
I smiled before I had time to wonder whether I should.
So it is here.
I did not press immediately.
I watched.
The broom rocked slightly. The spell corrected it again and again, with tiny twitches of an invisible hand. Each correction was weaker than the main structure. Thinner. Easier to touch.
Now.
The pressure appeared faster than I intended.
Short. Sharp.
The broom jerked sideways and struck the rack with its twigs.
I released at once.
Silence fell in the room.
I stared at the broom.
It was not broken. The spell had not snapped either. But for a moment, it had stopped being certain what to do. Exactly for that one moment.
My heart was beating a little faster.
It was small.
Almost nothing.
And yet it worked.
The second attempt was more careful. A smaller movement, weaker pressure. This time, the broom only trembled and turned a few degrees too far, as if it had lost its own center.
I wrote:
Movement creates weak points.
No need to break the whole. It is enough to enter the correction.
I looked at those sentences.
They sounded good.
Too good.
I tried the third thing.
Not break.
Support.
It should have been possible. Snape had done it. If I understood correctly what I had seen in the stadium, his magic had not yanked the broom. It had held. Strengthened what was trying to fall apart.
I set up the second broom.
- Leviosa.
Slow movement. A slight sway.
This time, I looked not for weakness, but for the place that could be stabilized.
And immediately, I felt resistance.
Not from the spell.
From the eye.
It was strange. As if my sight slid on its own toward the points easiest to damage. As if it sought the crack even when I was trying to find support. Three times, I tried to enter the movement more gently. Three times, the pressure slipped toward overload.
On the fourth try, I managed it for a second.
The broom steadied its tremor.
Only slightly.
The cost came immediately. Pain beneath the eyelid, hot and sharper than with destabilization. As if the eye did not like being used against its natural direction.
I released.
The broom swayed and returned to its ordinary motion.
I stood still, breathing through my nose.
Of course.
Obviously.
Breaking was easier.
That should not have surprised me.
And yet it did.
I returned to the desk and wrote more slowly:
Destabilization easier than support.
The eye searches for cracks.
For a moment, I held the quill above the parchment.
Then I added one more sentence:
I do not know if that is a flaw.
And that was the worst part.
Because I should have known.
I should have considered it obvious. That a tool which breaks more easily than it protects is a problem. That if it reacts faster than I make decisions, then it is no longer only mine.
Instead, I sat over the parchment and wondered whether a flaw was simply a direction I did not yet understand.
Warmth gathered beneath my left eyelid.
I touched my face.
Blood.
Not much. A thin smear on the tip of my finger.
- Wonderful - I muttered.
That was stupid.
Not the blood. Blood was only the price. The stupid part was that I felt irritation because I had to stop.
Not fear.
Irritation.
I wiped my finger with a handkerchief, ended the spell, and both brooms dropped onto the racks. For a moment they still swayed slightly, as if remembering motion longer than they should.
I hid the parchment between the books.
Before leaving, I looked at them one last time.
Not at the brooms.
At the possibility.
If movement creates weak points, then everything alive is full of corrections.
Breath.
Step.
Dodge.
A hand moving with a wand.
Heart.
The thought was beautiful.
And terrible.
I did not know which part bothered me more.
I left the Room of Requirement before I could return to the desk and write it down.
The door vanished behind me without a trace.
The corridor was cold. Normally. Pleasantly. For a moment, I stood in the half-dark, one hand near my left eye and the handkerchief tucked deep into my pocket.
Then I headed toward the dungeons.
Slowly.
Evenly.
Like someone in control of himself.
And almost able to believe it.