Better Angels

Better Angels

Chapter Five

Astronomy Tower

The semester progressed. The rumours about Draco and Granger died a natural death, without Weasley having to duel anyone. Draco had a lot of studying to do, and Snape loaded him up with fake detentions--probably trying to keep him out of trouble. He allowed himself to be persuaded to try a few preliminary Potions experiments, analyzing the reactions of certain magical substances to certain others. Snape gave him long lists of interactions to memorize, and quizzed him on them frequently. He was happy enough to learn what Snape wanted him to--he enjoyed the attention--but the Professors obvious fascination with such things was a bit over his head.

He did realize that the extra work, coupled with his Quidditch schedule, left him little time to learn Dark curses, if he had been inclined to do so. That may have been the point.

Snape disappeared for several more long weekends, and the Inter-House Quidditch Squad played several more scrimmages. Fortunately, the two did not always coincide. After the games Snape was able to witness, their extra potions lessons were peppered with congratulatory monologues on his performance.

"Malfoy." Angelina Johnson, the Gryffindor Quidditch captain, plunked herself down next to him one afternoon at dinner.

"Watched your team last weekend," she told him. "Some of them aren't bad."

"I know." A few of them were actually good. They were playing full games now, with all four balls, and Neville's beginners had joined the regular practices. Neville himself was even turning into a moderately useful Keeper.

"Gryffindor hasn't got a match on the slate until the final match against Slytherin."

"Yeah." As usual, Gryffindor was in the lead for the Quidditch cup. Slytherin, with a fairly pathetic new Seeker, wasn't the team to beat as they had been in past years, but it was understandable that Gryffindor still wanted to defeat them decisively.

"Some of us thought it would be a good idea to keep our hand in with an exhibition match. It was Granger's idea, actually, but if you want to do it, we're in."

"What?" He wasn't sure he was keeping up. "You want to practice against my team, so you can beat Slytherin next month?"

"Might be fun for some of the kids on your Squad," Johnson suggested.

"We'll lose," he pointed out. "Hooch might even make me let everyone play." That would just be embarrassing.

"Well, think about it."

"I'll see what the others think," he hedged. Helping Slytherin lose was tempting, as was the idea of trying himself against real players--none of the other Seekers on his team were any good; to make the games worth playing he had to devote half his attention to coaching his side and leave only half on the Snitch, otherwise they'd be playing depressingly short games. On the other hand, a Gryffindor exhibition match would bring out a larger, less sympathetic crowd than their scrimmages. He wasn't sure his vanity coul stand taking the field with his pathetic team against the Gryffindor stars.

"It'll be fun," Johnson encouraged. "Inter-House cooperation and all that."

"Tell it to Dumbledore," he grumbled. "I'll think about it."

#

"They all want to do it," Draco moaned. "I told them we'd lose like a bunch of pathetic losers, but they want to do it anyway."

Severus shrugged. "So?"

"So, I don't want to play a game I know I'm going to lose before we even start. These idiots don't even know how bad they are."

"They probably do," he said. "Some people don't care as much about winning as you do."

"No, some of them are convinced we have a shot," he insisted.

Severus had watched enough of their games to know better than that. "Perhaps they're delusional," he suggested.

"Maybe." Draco flopped down on the sofa. "It's just the first-years, really. There's this muggle born kid who started telling them about a film he saw where a plucky team of pathetic rejects beat the favored team at something-or-other. I pointed out that we're not in a film, but they weren't convinced. Granger's trying to bring them down to earth, but since the whole thing was her idea in the first place, she's not trying to talk them out of it. She thinks getting our tails kicked will be fun."

"It might not be so bad," Severus said doubtfully.

"Yeah, maybe I'll catch the Snitch in the first fifteen minutes and we'll only lose by a hundred points."

"There you go. If you think about it as damage control..." If there was one thing Severus knew about, it was no-win situations. "You're right, there's no way you can win. But if there's no avoiding it, you have to think about what you can accomplish."

"Utter crushing humiliation?"

"Besides that."

Draco stared at the ceiling. "You can't possibly be thinking of 'teaching the little brats a valuable lesson about being good sports,' can you?"

"Of course not." He didn't actually have anything specific in mind; he just knew that losing a game of Quidditch wouldn't do Draco any harm.

"Well...everybody knows I started with absolute rubbish, so I suppose if we score any goals, that'll show I'm a better Captain than that cow Johnson," he said hopefully. "I thought about sending them out to lose without me, if they were so set on doing it, but that didn't seem right somehow." Draco sounded a little embarrassed to have admitted to having moral scruples.

"No," Severus agreed. "That wouldn't be very honorable."

"If we make a decent showing, some of them will have a shot at their House teams next year. Especially Zenobia, if she proves she can play like a Slytherin."

"Hm, yes." Severus was a little bored. Draco had already worked through a much more complicated moral dilemma than this one--perhaps it was the simple fact that no one was going to die that was making him dither so badly.

"So I have to...show off my best players to their advantage, and--" he shuddered "--not care about losing."

"I'm afraid so."

Draco sighed. "This being-decent business is really no fun."

"I'd noticed," Severus said dryly.

"Oh, right. Could be worse, I guess. It's just Quidditch."

Finally, he'd noticed. "Yes. But I understand. I don't think too much of the humiliation will rub off on you. The rest of them might even make you look good."

"Now with Saint Potter out there. Standing next to him, I wouldn't look good if I simultaneously saved the lives of an entire Sunday-school picnic, caught the snitch, and bought everybody ice-cream."

"Don't worry about Potter. All he proves is that it's sometimes more useful to be lucky than to be good. Not just in Quidditch, unfortunately."

"Tell me about it," Draco sighed.

"He's the only person I've ever seen fall off his broomstick in the middle of a match and still come out looking like a hero," he elaborated. "It's enough to make a person sick."

"You do realize that 'tell me about it' is an expression, don't you?"

"Yes, I know." But he couldn't stop himself. "He didn't defeat the Dark Lord. He was in the room when it happened. Pure luck. Or maybe Evans did something--she, at least, isn't a Potter by birth..."

Draco was watching him with an expression of amused boredom. He'd heard all this before.

"Oh, shut up," Severus told him, crossly.

"I didn't say anything," Draco said mildly. "Tell you what, I'll catch the Snitch for you, Sunday after next."

"That would be nice," he agreed. Seeing his Draco finally show up Saint Potter wouldn't make up for anything, but it would be something. "But," he added mock-seriously, "It's far more important to play a fair, clean game, and shake his hand like a little gentleman when he's done mopping the pitch with you."

Draco nearly fell of the sofa in hysterics.

#

"First, we aren't going to win." Draco paced in front of his assembled team. "Get that out of your heads, because I'm not drying anybody's tears after we lose. We have to remember that the Gryffindors are a lot better than we are, and they've been playing as a team lot longer than we have. If we manage to score some goals and keep out some of theirs, we have to count that as a victory.

"Second, we're only putting our best people out there. That means some of you are going to have to sit out the game, and take a backseat during practices until the match. If we can't agree on that, I'm out. Does anybody have a problem with that?"

Nobody did.

"Third, we're putting our best players on our best brooms. If you have a decent broom but don't make the cut for the match, you'd better be prepared to lend it to someone who did. Fourth, the Gryffindors among s had better be reading to face up to your own House. Even though we aren't going to win we're still going to play like we think we can.

"Fifth, and most important, we're going to make it look like being vastly overmatched and losing badly is our idea of a hell of a good time."

Granger waved her hand in the air.

"What?"

"Sixth, we need a name. Our supporters can't yell out "Go, Inter-House Cooperative Squad, can they?'

"I guess not," he admitted.

"So, I thought we ought to hear suggestions on the name and then vote. If you're finished, that is."

"Very well." He was finished, but he wished Granger didn't have to hijack his speech.

"How about the Hippogriffs?" Violet Huffnargle, a second-year girls, suggested.

Ick. But a few of the others like the idea. What was it with girls and hippogriffs?

" 'Griffs' sounds too much like 'Gryffindor,'" Zenobia pointed out.

"Good point," Draco said. "Any other ideas?"

"How about something that combines the names of the four Houses?" Grumbine suggested. "Huff-rav-gryf-slyth..." She tried out the syllables.

"Not a bad idea, but I'm not sure it'll really work," Draco commented. "Too many consonants."

"Ravyndors?" Somebody tried.

"You left out the Hufflepuffs," Draco pointed out. "Huffravyndors? Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue."

There were a number of other suggestions along those lines, but most of them were barely pronounceable.

Then Neville started nudging Granger. She shushed him, but after a few more minutes of four-syllable names she said, "Well, some of us thought The Dragons would be good."

There was some muttering.

"Dragons is good." Grumbine was the first to say it out loud.

"Yeah," a few other said.

"Well, at least you can pronounce it," Draco agreed, wondering if any of them knew enough Latin to know what they were playing at. Granger must, and probably Grumbine--she was a Ravenclaw, after all.

"Are there any other nominations?" Granger asked bossily.

There weren't.

"Show of hands, then," she said. "Who wants...Huffradorins, or whatever the last thing we thought of was?"

Nobody.

"Hippogriffs?"

Nobody but Violet.

"Dragons?"

Most of the team. Draco modestly abstained, as did Granger and Zenobia.

"And...no name at all?"

Nobody.

"Good, then. Dragons carries."

Draco wondered if he ought to say something else. "All right then. Good idea, Granger. Thanks. Everybody, get your brooms."

They had hard practice. On the way back to the castle afterwards, he pulled Zenobia aside. "Look, in ours scrimmages we've been playing clean. But you know how to play the other way, don't you?"

"Hell yeah." She grinned.

"Good. I want to schedule some extra practices to work on your dirty tactics. Blocking, cobbing, bumping--everything. And there's--" He took a book out of his bag. "Fifty Greatest Fouls. The only Quidditch book in the Restricted Section. I marked some parts you should study in particular. There's something called the Grumphawk maneuver--it involves staging plays so to look like the other side fouled your players. It's the only way we're likely to score any goals, so learn it. And pay special attention to the Mangle-Wurzel offense. I'm going to put Neddington on defense--keeping the Bludgers away from our people. Your job is going to be to do as much damage to the other side as you can reasonably get away with. Pull hair and scratch out eyes if you can get close enough. If you have any sense of fair play, bury it. Clear?"

She saluted crisply. "Aye-aye, Captain."

He returned the salute gravely. "Oh, and Snape signed for that book, so don't let anything happen to it."

#

Practicing with his handpicked, streamlined Dragons, Draco found himself more confident of their chances for avoiding total humiliation. The better half of the squad played better when they didn't have to compensate for weaker teammates.

Occasionally, he caught himself noticing that he hadn't thought of Voldemort, or of a defeat that meant more than a Quidditch game, for hours at a stretch. It was dangerous, that, but it was exactly what he wanted--to live, to pass his N.E.W.T.s, to play Quidditch. Forgetting about the war felt like a victory.

One day, with a little over a week to the match, a barn owl swooped to his shoulder as he crossed the courtyard back to the castle after Care of Magical Creatures. "For me?"

The owl nodded, and he plucked the scroll out of its beak.

"Draco," the note read. "Meet me in the Astronomy Tower after the last lesson. Zenobia."

She must have a question about one of the tactics in the book, he decided, but didn't want to chance the other Slytherins seeing her talking to him outside practice. That was sensible--she was already catching enough flak for playing on his team without being seen with him in public.

Except--the Astronomy Tower? Was she, somehow, so innocent she didn't realize that it wouldn't exactly be a private spot?

He was still wondering about that when the Grumbine girl stopped him. "Malfoy, I'd like to get a little extra playing time in before our next official practice. Patricia and Violet--" she indicated the two younger girls, who were walking with her, "--offered to help. Can you arrange it with Madame Hooch? We thought maybe Tuesday afternoon."

"Okay, I'll talk to her and get back to you." The younger girls didn't have their own brooms, so they'd have to get special permission to use school ones unsupervised. "Zenobia might want in on it too--I'm supposed to meet her in the Astronomy Tower at four. She doesn't say about what."

Patricia and Violet looked at each other and giggled.

"I'm sure it's nothing like that," he said, wishing he hadn't mentioned it. "Slytherins don't snog in the Astronomy Tower. We use the alcove behind the statue of Dirk the Devious." Not that he'd been there in a long time.

"Doesn't that get crowded?" Violet asked, still giggling.

"Only if someone's lost a bet and has to visit Dirk with the Blustrode excrescence." It was a popular penalty; Millicent didn't seem to mind. He supposed a girl who looked like her had to take what she could get.

He went to Arithmancy--which just kept getting trickier and trickier, he really wished he'd gone for Muggle studies, and damn what his father would have said--and then to his 'assignation' in the Astronomy Tower.

With the part of his mind that wasn't still occupied with Invisibility Algorithms, he wondered idly if Zenobia, possibly, did want to meet him for Dirk-the-Devious purposes. She was reasonable to look at, and she did like him more than the other Slytherins did--but not, he thought, that way. He wasn't even sure she was interested in boys yet. Or possibly ever. A girl Beater was, almost by definition, a bit of a tomboy.

He knocked at the Observatory door, signaling any couples inside to de-clinch themselves, and, after a pause sufficient for the rearranging of clothing, went in.

The first person he saw was not Zenobia, but Parkinson.

Oh, shit.

He turned to go, but Goyle had already put his massive body between Draco and the door.

Oh, shit.

He reached for his wand, assessing his opponents as he did. Parkinson, Crabbe, Goyle, Nott, Bulstrode, and Zabini.

"Expelliarmus. Accio wand." His wand flew out of his hands and into Pansy's.

"Oh, shit."

"We're not just a nasty little blood traitor," Parkinson sing-songed. "We're a very, very, stupid little blood traitor."

Draco had to admit she had a point.

He moved into a fighting stance, feet apart, with his weight forward. Not that it would help.

Pansy flicked her wand at him. "Crucio."

She wasn't, a very small part of his brain noted, as good at it as Father had been. But she was good enough to send him to his knees, screaming.

Which was okay, really--someone might hear.

"You try, Vinnie," Pansy said, as the pain ebbed away.

"Crucio," Crabbe said, but nothing happened.

You have to want it, Draco thought.

"Concentrate," Pansy hissed. "Try again!"

He got it right that time.

Pansy gave each of the others a turn, except--maybe--Bulstrode. He wasn't sure.

Time stretched out. Why was nobody coming? It felt like he had been up here for hours.

"Now let's try..." Pansy paused for effect, resting a foot directly over his larynx. "Imperio!"

Draco had never had a full-on Imperius curse laid down on him before. The version the fake Moody had used in class had given him a sensation of floating stupidity--not unlike the effects of the pills he'd taken in Muggle hospital, only more so. That curse, he'd felt like he could break if he really wanted to--he just hadn't, particularly, wanted to.

Pansy's Imperius felt like a boot on his throat, even when she'd moved away from him.

"Get up," she said.

He did.

"Kiss Milly. Like you mean it."

He did. Long, slow, and deep. Bulstrode was unresponsive, an expression of embarrassment and loathing on her broad face.

"Beg her to be your girlfriend."

This was just stupid. As he mechanically obeyed, he tried to marshal his wits and think. They couldn't have done all this just to humiliate him. They had to know he'd tell.

If they were practicing their Unforgivable curses, chances were they were going to try all three. If their Avada Kedavra turned out not to be up to scratch, they could always order him to jump out the window.

He couldn't fight them off--even if he'd had his wand, he was no match for six of them. All he could do was vamp for time--put on a good show, and hope Professor Snape--or somebody would come along before they got bored.

When Pansy ordered him to lick Milly's boots, he raised his head and mustered all the will he had to say, "I'll not."

He did, of course, anyway, but they all laughed and shouted suggestions for what he might do next.

Matters progressed, and he had moved on fron Pansy's boots to Goyle's by when the door broke down.

#

"So Zenobia said, 'What are you talking about, I didn't send Malfoy a note.' And that's when we knew something was up," Violet said.

They were in the corridor outside Dumbledore's office, under the watchful eye of Professor McGonagall. The Slytherins had been promptly hauled before the Headmaster; Granger had had to intervene to prevent Zenobia from being taken up with them.

Zenobia picked up the story. "So we rounded up as much of the team as we could find--" SHe nodded to Granger, Longbottom, Knotroach, Neddington, and three more of the younger kids, Clouth, Smyth, and Banger-Jones. "--and headed for the Astronomy Tower. We had a little trouble getting in--Granger reckons they put up a repelling charm. Twice we turned around and decided to look for you other places, but we finally made it in."

He knew hwat had happened after that-there had been a few moments when he'd been fairly sure the younger kids were going to die (he'd spent those moments racing around after Goyle on his hands and knees as Goyle quickstepped around the room under a Tarantallegra jinx), but then the elder Dragons had gotten their wits together enough to say "Expelliarmus" and collect the Slytherins' wands. Granger had diagnosed his Imperius curse and case Finite Incantatem on it, and then they had Stupefied the Slytherins. Draco had gotten his wand back, and taken the time to give each one a good swift kick while Violet and Neville went to fetch the first teacher they could find, which had turned out to be McGonagall.

"You don't think we'll get in trouble, do you?" Banger-Jones, a Hufflepuff boy, asked.

"I doubt it," Draco said. "Not you lot, anyway." Snape was going to have something to say about his going alone to a secret rendez-vous in a deserted place.

"But I'm not going to be real popular in the common room for a while," Zenobia said glumly. "I might have to crash on your sofa, Malfoy."

"It's technically magic in the corridors," Grumbine continued, "But it's allowed in self-defense, isn't it?"

"We can't get in trouble for saving Malfoy," Granger said. "We--Hello, Professor Snape."

Draco turned. Snape was striding down the corridor, looking furious.

"Are you all right?" he demanded.

"Uh...yeah."

"Good. We'll talk later." He cast his eye over the Dragons. "And you lot..." He shook his head, and addressed the stone gargoyles. "Ice mice."

After he'd gone upstairs, Grumbine said, "He didn't look pleased."

"He wouldn't," Draco said. "I'm glad I'm not up there right now."