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A Series of Malfoy Events	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 11220 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Eight—Why the Falcons Will Not Admit to Practicing With Harry Potter
            “I understand that you never made the choice to try for a professional Quidditch team, Potter.”
            It was the Chaser, Jessica Cassel, who had told him about Malfoy’s tendency to Transfigure people into dating partners. Harry nodded at her and went about pulling on the informal gear that the Falcons wore when practicing. “No, I never did. I wanted to be an Auror, so that was what I did.”
            “Why?”
            Harry grinned at her even as he flexed his fingers to test that the gloves, borrowed from Malfoy, would fit well enough for him to actually use them. “I just told you. Because I wanted to.”
            “I didn’t mean that.” Cassel rolled her eyes and flopped down on the bench that stood along the wall of the practice room. Harry thought she was watching his diamond ring, maybe trying to estimate how rich it made him, and he obligingly turned his hand over so she could do the maths more easily. Cassel promptly flushed and looked at his face. “Why did you want to be an Auror instead of a professional Quidditch player?”
            Ah. This was something Harry had enjoyed even before Malfoy taught him the trick of laughing at the papers. And he didn’t need any convoluted plan, the way Malfoy would have, to bewilder people.
            “To catch Dark wizards.”
            Cassel blinked. They all did. Then she said, “But you did that during the war,” like they all did.
            “No,” Harry told her patiently. “During the war, I ran around, got chased, cursed people, watched my mentor die, and walked into the Forbidden Forest to let Voldemort kill me.” He examined the wall so that he wouldn’t have to see her flinch from Voldemort’s name, if she did, and get impatient with her. “And if you want to extend the timeline back into my childhood years, then I got to kill a basilisk and destroy an evil diary and prevent Voldemort from getting hold of the Philosopher’s Stone and free my godfather and watch him die. But that’s not the same thing as getting to arrest Dark wizards.”
            “You like the arresting part most of all, don’t you.”
            Well. Perhaps she’s smarter than that question made her look, after all. Harry eyed Cassel with approval. “Yes. I never got to do that. I was fighting manifestations of Voldemort’s power, or they got away, or they died. Or maybe someone else arrested them,” he had to add, thinking of some of the Death Eaters he’d fought at the Battle of Hogwarts, who had later ended up in Ministry cells. “Either way, I wanted to be the one to stop them from hurting people.”
            Cassel looked thoughtful as she tugged on her boot. Then she said, “You can’t be good at Quidditch unless you want to catch the Snitch as badly as that.”
            “One reason I never went in for it, yes,” Harry agreed, and then grinned and picked up his equipment. “But I’m not playing Seeker today. I’m playing Beater.” It was partially because Malfoy had insisted on Harry showing him how he could—or “couldn’t”—do all the positions on the team. Harry had agreed because he wanted the chance to be close to the Bludgers if someone tried to interfere with them again.
            Cassel whistled slowly. “I never heard you were particularly strong.”
            “Oh, I’m not,” Harry said, and left her to wheel over the questions in her head as he walked to the door. He loved doing that, too.
*
            I’m not strong in the way Crabbe and Goyle were.
            Harry leaned away from the Bludger which one of the Falcons’ usual Beaters had hit to seek him out and “show what he was made of.”
            I’m just the bloody best you’ve ever seen on a broom.
            Harry reached out and tapped the Bludger flying past him with his borrowed bat, sending it ricocheting back towards the Beater. Then he twisted upside-down and knocked the Bludger that he’d been patrolling with in a slightly different direction.
            The Beater, a hulky bloke named Caleb Sparkman, seemed to think he only had “his” Bludger to deal with. He sneered at Harry and opened his mouth, probably to say something obnoxious like “you missed.”
            Then Harry’s Bludger hit the back end of his tilted broom.
            Sparkman tumbled end-over-end down towards the pitch, one of the broom spins that was the hardest to get out of. Harry followed in a more leisurely way, hitting the Bludgers into each other so they orbited in a tight circle. It was the tactic usually used to get them back into the box at the end of a game.
            Cassel hurtled past him, holding the Quaffle and grinning. Harry tilted his head back to look for Malfoy.
            He was hovering above, shaking his head. “Any ordinary Beater would have gone after a teammate the minute he saw him falling,” he said, and then turned and shot to the other end of the pitch before Harry could point out he wasn’t an ordinary Beater, and Sparkman hadn’t been treating him much like a teammate.
            Harry blinked, then shrugged and batted the Bludgers into the box. He would wait for Sparkman or the other Beater, whose name Harry thought was Lister, to decide if they still wanted to play with him before he let them out again.
            He was close enough, though, especially with five people at the other end of the pitch fussing over Sparkman and one hovering over Harry with his eyes fixed on his lonely destiny of autographs and tea, to cast a spell that would check the Bludgers for any foreign enchantment. He didn’t find anything. The spells on the Bludgers were supposed to make them fly and chase humans and hit, but not hard enough to kill.
            Harry sat back thoughtfully. He wondered if the person who had tried to assassinate Malfoy on the Quidditch pitch had been working only on the broom after all, instead of broom and Bludgers as he’d thought.
            A shout interrupted him. Harry looked up. Cassel was bouncing the Quaffle in the crook of her arm and grinning.
            “Think you have the ability to challenge me?” she asked.
            “Not think, know,” Harry said, and kicked his broom towards her.
            Cassel whistled. “You may find us a little harder to catch than a Dark wizard,” she said, and gathered the other Chasers in with her eyes. Both were smaller and more lithe than she was, a dark-haired woman named Anna Grey and a grinning man whose real name Harry didn’t know; the others just called them Jester.
            “But I won’t be chasing you,” Harry pointed out, peacefully. “I’ll be chasing the Quaffle.”
            “That’s what you think,” Cassel said, and she whistled a specific signal. Grey and Jester spread out in a triangle formation around her, and Cassel dramatically held up the Quaffle, then tossed it in a high, spinning arc.
            Harry rose up straight through the middle of the formation and grabbed the Quaffle as it began to fall. Jester, whose broom he’d passed closest to, squawked, and Harry took up and off towards Malfoy with Grey and Cassel close on his tail.
            Malfoy turned his head inch by slow inch and looked at Harry with remote eyes.
            Harry winked and threw the Quaffle right at him.
            Malfoy watched it come with a much dimmer expression than Harry had assumed he would. Then he tilted his broom back, just a little, and the Quaffle passed him and began to fall. Now it was heading for Grey’s arms, and she sped up a little to catch it at the same moment as Harry felt a tug from his finger.
            Malfoy was trying to Summon the diamond ring he’d given Harry. Whether it was because he thought Harry was unworthy of wearing it or because he was trying to distract Harry and give his teammates the advantage, Harry didn’t know.
            What he did know was that he had no intention of letting it happen. He flipped over and dived, scattering Cassel and Jester behind him, and then aimed straight at Grey and rose like a dragon.
            Maybe I can claim later it was all for my dragon, he thought, slightly hysterical.
            Grey flinched, tried to avoid backing, but her instincts took over—along with the expression of mad determination on Harry’s face, maybe—and she dived out of the way. Harry still scraped along her broom as he passed her, both his hands wide open, palms curved.
            The Quaffle dropped into right hand, neatly as the Snitch ever had.
            And Harry spun his left hand over and cupped and caught the ring in the same motion, then continued the spin so that he was on the same level as Malfoy and facing him. He didn’t know if the other Falcons knew what he had in his left hand, or if any of them would even care. This was really a private contest between him and Malfoy.
            And Harry was going to win it, because the thought of Malfoy winning it was intolerable.
            Harry bowed to Malfoy and tossed the Quaffle over his shoulder, opened his hand to show the ring, and tossed it towards Malfoy.
            Malfoy dived, and then had to fumble, after all. He was an excellent Seeker, but the ring had fallen short of him instead of exactly where he thought it would.
            Harry went into the same backwards spin, head over broom bristles over heels, that he had sent Sparkman into. He could see the Quaffle falling and falling, sometimes near and sometimes far and sometimes upside-down, depending on the way that he was positioned at the moment.
            He knew what was going to happen. Knew it from the knowledge of the broom’s magic aching under his hands, and the knowledge of the winds on the pitch that he’d acquired as he spent time there this morning, and knew it from the weight and speed of the Quaffle when he’d caught it earlier.
            Down, and down, and over, and right.
            Right in more than one sense, like the river of rightness running through him. He had known he would be in the correct place to catch the Quaffle, and he was. It smacked into his palm, and the weight was a relief. Harry came out of the spin and bowed his head, struggling both to catch his breath and not to show that he was. He didn’t want to prove anyone right if they decided he was weak.
            He turned his free hand over, and the diamond ring fell into it. Harry cocked his head back. His first thought was that Malfoy had repented of his little temper tantrum and decided that he didn’t want anyone knowing he and Harry weren’t really engaged.
            From the look of Malfoy’s eyes as he Summoned the Snitch, though, that wasn’t the case. He bounced the Snitch up and down in his palm, and whispered, “You might have proved yourself as a Beater and Chaser, but you haven’t done it yet as a Seeker. Do you want to?”
            “No,” said Harry.
            Malfoy blinked and actually bucked on his broom for a second, always a sign that a player had been badly startled. It meant he was losing connection with the magic that powered his broom. Harry held his gaze, smiled, and said, “I want you to acknowledge that I’m better without a contest. I just am better. I don’t need to prove myself.”
            He and Malfoy locked eyes for long enough that he almost thought Malfoy would listen to him. Then Malfoy sneered and spun, tossing the Snitch high.
            Harry began working his hands to get the diamond ring back on the right finger and ensure that Cassel or someone else caught the Quaffle. He didn’t move. He only tilted his head back and to the left, like a falcon eyeing a noon snack.
            Malfoy was going in the wrong direction.
            Harry smiled a little. Of course he was. And then he would come back in a long swoop and hit the Snitch where it hovered over the middle of the grass.
            Let’s see. I have to do something that’s impressive and also takes into account the fact that the Snitch might move when he comes nearer.
            Harry didn’t think Malfoy would have enchanted the Snitch to hover where it was, even if he’d technically cheated by Summoning it just now. He would want to win fairly.
            Which is just what he has no chance of doing, Harry thought with a sad shake of his head, and then pulled back a little and made sure he was perfectly balanced on his broom. He knew what he was doing. He would prove that to everyone who looked at him with sad eyes and thought he should have chosen to be a professional Quidditch player when he could, that it was too late now.
            And he would only use magic to cheat right at the beginning.
            He cast a spell that pulled the Quaffle out of a startled Grey’s hands, and then began his Wronski Feint. He could hear howls and yells behind him, but he didn’t have to listen to them. It was sort of easy to let the wind sweep the sound away, anyway.
            He was heading downwards. The Snitch was below him but moving faster away in a long curve, exactly as he had thought would happen. The Quaffle was hurtling towards the earth. Malfoy was diving from above his left shoulder.
            All going exactly to plan.
            Harry was thinking with his joints now, his legs, his skin. He put on another burst of speed, and the earth grew and grew the way a spell always seemed to get bigger as it came towards him. The Quaffle had fallen below him now, and Harry spun to the side, turning the diagonal dive into a corkscrew one.
            Someone shouted. Harry hoped it was one of the Chasers. Watch and learn.
            He came in under the Quaffle on one curve of his spiral and grabbed it out of the air, tucking it down and against the broom. His free hand, meanwhile, was cupped off to the side, sticking out, breaking the motion he would have needed to continue corkscrewing down and land in the grass safely that way. Malfoy was almost opposite him now, and glaring like a hen that someone had decided to take eggs from under.
            Harry couldn’t help winking. He didn’t know if Malfoy saw it, and he didn’t have time to care. The world was dancing in a wild way, earth and sky and brooms and players folding around each other as if Harry was falling into the center of a cloth. The wind pressed hard against his cheeks as he turned his head in the right direction and saw the Snitch.
            It was further from him than he’d thought, but another wild kick and struggle on the broom changed that, and then he was once again in a spiral—sort of—with the Snitch off to the side. He could snag it in the midst of another spiral.
            Malfoy accelerated past him. He was going to try to grab the Snitch, Harry knew. To prove he was the better Seeker, and probably prove other things, too. On he went, almost flat to his broom. It was a wonderful performance. Harry would have applauded if he didn’t have one hand full of Quaffle and the other full of rushing air.
            Oh, and if he wasn’t going to win.
            He flipped upside-down because he had to, because the wind was tearing at him and trying to sit upright now was suicide, and the broom spun around and around on like a spit over a fire, with Harry its unwitting passenger. Harry laughed. He could still feel the magic of the broom, dancing as wildly as the world did, and he was in tune with it, his own magic roaring up and down his body like a tormented snake.
            The Snitch was heading away from him. Towards Malfoy, but turning so as to avoid him, too. Harry looked straight ahead, and on top of one of his dizzy spins, flung the Quaffle as hard as he could.
            It bounced into the Snitch and deflected its path, downwards. Malfoy pulled up, snarling in a way that Harry was absolutely certain had happened even though he couldn’t hear it.
            Harry knew Malfoy had pulled up because he was too close to the ground. He knew that heading further down would mean he would probably crash. He knew all those things, with his bones and his skin as he knew the magic of the broom, and he dismissed them. What mattered most was the wind around him and the chance to win the game and look really great doing it.
            Harry swung back around on top of his broom and took off after the Snitch. It had recovered and was heading back up, but its wings were fluttering slowly. Harry supposed even Snitches could be shocked by the measures taken to capture them by a really determined Seeker.
            Harry dived one more time and grabbed the Snitch. His other shoulder slammed against the stands, and he rolled and bounced, spinning around his broom again so that he was carried away from them.
            He still landed hard, on grass that was soaking wet with dew. But, well, he’d known that it wasn’t going to be an easy landing. He bounced to his feet, grinning.
            Cassel landed beside him, staring at him. Harry bowed to her and checked himself over. He was covered with scuffs, there was a small cut on his cheek that had started bleeding, and his left side ached in a way that would mean bruises later. Oh, and he had a cramping pain in his thumb, in the hand that held the Snitch, that meant it was probably sprained.
            “Was that a game, or was that a game?” he asked smugly.
            Cassel didn’t have the chance to answer, because Malfoy had also landed and was striding towards him. Harry turned to face him, feeling as though someone had filled his veins with bubbles of happiness. Whether Malfoy took the ring again or yelled at him or congratulated him between gritted teeth, Harry knew he’d won.
            Malfoy came up to him, seized the front of his robes, and kissed him.
            It was such a hard kiss that Harry promptly tried to fight back. It qualified as assault under all the standards that he’d learned in the Aurors. It hurt and it burned, and Harry would have punched Malfoy if his head hadn’t been whirling.
            It was still whirling when Malfoy stepped back, said, “I’m going to have a man who takes such risks as my fiancé only because I refuse to let anyone else have him,” and threw the ring Harry hadn’t even noticed him taking this time. It landed on Harry’s finger.
            He turned and stalked off towards the showers. Harry stood there with his lips bleeding, too, and his eyes slowly blinking.
            Cassel moved a little, drawing Harry’s eyes. She grinned at him.
            “Yes,” she said. “Some game. And just a warning, Potter. Malfoy likes playing rough.”
            She winked at him, and walked away, too. Then the others came around to yell various phrases, and Harry tried to nod back to them and act gracious, instead of feeling at his lips and staring into nothingness.
            Malfoy had—won. Or they both had.
            Either way, Harry knew his victory hadn’t turned out the way he wanted it to.
            Before ten minutes had passed, though, he was grinning again.
            No, it had turned out better.
*
Severus1snape: At the moment, Draco might just kick his arse for playing!
SP777: Thank you!
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A Series of Malfoy Events