The Slytherin Saga: Book One: The Year Without Quidditch

Chapter Three: November the twenty-fifth

"It's disgraceful!" Draco decried, picking at the food on his plate. "He clearly cheated."

"'E did not cheat," responded Viktor Krum, his mouth full of potatoes. "'E played to his strengths." Viktor swallowed his food and looked back at Draco, who was seated two places down and across the table from him. "I only vish I had thought of it," he added, "might have made tings easier."

"I'm sure it would have," Crabbe chimed in.

"Is good though," Viktor affirmed, taking a large gulp from the wine goblet in front of him.

Draco didn't think it was fair that he was allowed alcohol at school just because he was on a National Quidditch team... but he supposed it was better to get preferential treatment for having earned a position of high status, rather than the way people treated Potter, who had a fan club just because he had survived. Draco had survived thus far, and so had everyone else. What was so special? Draco actually lived with a Death Eater. No one let him ignore the school rules.

"Tied for first is as good as first," Krum continued, looking back and forth from Crabbe to Goyle and then back over at Draco. "Vil help me get the girl."

"What girl?" Goyle asked him. Millicent and Blaise leaned in from their vantage point on the far side of Viktor.

"Yeah," Blaise interrupted. "What girl?"

"Any girl," Viktor replied, his face contorting into a huge grin that was, quite frankly, disconcerting to Draco and probably repellent to any girl that Viktor might care to 'get'. "I could get any girl to go vit me to the ball as tied for first man."

"Ball?" Millicent repeated.

"What in the world are you talking about, Krum?" Draco asked him.

"You do not know?" Viktor asked, his eyes widening. Everyone looked at him blankly, a few of them shaking their heads. Viktor looked amazed that no one seemed to have any idea what it was that he was talking about.

"Please tell us what you're talking about," Crabbe asked Viktor.

"Vat I am talking about is the Yule Ball," Viktor answered, "a tradition of the Triwizard tournament. You have not heard of it?"

"No," Blaise replied.

"I've heard of no such thing," Goyle piped up, his face turning paler with each word.

"It is tradition," Viktor repeated. "Karkaroff told us before ve got on the boat to come here. He made us pack our dress uniforms, and he says the ball is on Christmas, so ve have to stay here and not go home for the holidays. But, he says, that ve kin go vit girls from Hogwarts or from Beauxbatons. Zere are many pretty girls from both schools and I am in first place. Am thinking perhaps of asking smart girl." Viktor smiled the near creepy smile again. Draco couldn't help but think that Viktor might start pounding on his chest any moment now.

"And all of the students are supposed to go?" Millicent sounded very interested all of the sudden. Prior to today, she had barely bothered to say two words to Viktor Krum.

"Is for not everybody," Viktor answered her. "I think fourth year and older, mebbe fifth year? I dunno..." He added, "fourteen, I think is the youngest. How old is that here? Fourth year?"

"Yes," Blaise answered, "all of the fourth years are at least that old."

"Why has no one told us anything about this?" Crabbe practically shouted, his voice in a near panic.

"The list did say we needed dress robes this year," Millicent reminded him.

"But it didn't say anything about dates," Goyle added, at the level of a near whimper.

"Never mind that," Crabbe added. "We're going to be expected to... dance?" he gulped loudly enough to elicit a chuckle from several others at the table.

"Yis," Viktor answered him. "You dance vit the girl. Is what a ball is- yes?" He leaned in toward the boys sitting across from him. "And then after," he laughed, knowingly, "after is better," he insisted. "After the girl is so happy that you dance vit her, and she is feeling good all dressed up in her fancy dresses, she let you have chuvstvam se easy." He grinned evilly.

"What?" Goyle looked over at Krum, his face showing clearly that he had no idea what the older boy was saying.

"Is Bulgarian word," Krum answered. "Means to..." he held his hands out and mimed touching the shape of a female body. "U.S. team beaters call 'getting to third base," he added. Krum was grinning from ear to ear.

Draco's mouth dropped open. Was he really expected to have a date to this cursed event... a GIRL? Was he really supposed to dance with whomever that was in front of the entire school? And was he really expected to get to 'third base' with her, whatever that meant? He stood from his seat, his plate of food largely untouched.

"We should get going," he turned to Crabbe and Goyle and said. Crabbe and Goyle, both of whom still had food on their plates, looked at him for a moment as though they were about to protest. The two then thought better of it and rose from their seats.

"Great job yesterday, Viktor," Goyle called out over his shoulder as they left the Great Hall. Draco was charging toward the Transfiguration classroom, and Goyle had to break in to a near run to catch up with him.

Draco hurried to Transfiguration, with Crabbe and Goyle in tow. He told them he didn't want McGonnagall to have an excuse to take off house points, but in truth he was just agitated about the whole idea of the Yule Ball. Viktor Krum had given them an early warning about it, and now the dithering of his cronies regarding who they could take and how they were supposed to dance was bugging him to no end and keeping him from walking at his preferred pace.

"We have to ask girls before everyone else knows about this," Crabbe offered.

"Good idea," Goyle agreed, sounding ever so slightly out of breath.

"Draco, who are you going to ask?" Crabbe asked him. Draco, who was still charging ahead, did not answer.

"Slow down Malfoy. We have plenty of time to get there!" Goyle asserted, his voice pleading. Draco stopped in his tracks and turned around to scowl at his comrade before turning on his heel to continue walking toward class, although at a slightly less frantic pace. He figured that one day really should get a minion that had some speed to him. While Crabbe could body check a troll successfully and Goyle could kill a small elephant by head butting it, it didn't do him any good at all if the victim ran away, they couldn't catch a limping house elf in a snow storm.

"Did you hear me?" Crabbe asked him. "Who're you going to ask?" Draco shook his head and shrugged a little.

"I think I should ask Pansy," he said after a long pause. Crabbe grinned widely.

"She has had her eye on you since first year," he reminded Draco. "You should have no troubles there."

"It's a pretty safe bet," Draco agreed. "I'm sure she'll say yes, and the last thing I want is to ask someone who won't say yes immediately. Better to be there with someone I find marginally insufferable than to be there with no one at all."

"Or to have it get around school that you asked some girl and she turned you down," Goyle added. He considered this for a moment and Draco noticed that his face seemed to slowly turn green. "Who the hell am I going to ask?" he thought out loud.

"Does it matter?" Draco snapped at him. "You and Crabbe can go with each other." He spotted Pansy standing just outside the Transfiguration classroom with Liese and another girl whose name he he'd never bothered to learn. "Pansy," he called out to her. She looked up at him with the most peculiar expression on her face. He suddenly felt a crazy rush of panic and dread. He hated the way his insides had suddenly begun to churn. He almost reconsidered what he was about to say, but it occurred to him in a flash that it wasn't going to be any easier later on. "Could I see you for a minute?" he asked her. Pansy's eyes got wide and she grinned, scurrying over to Draco, who held up his hand to his cronies in a gesture for them to stay where they were. Taking two steps toward the advancing girl, he caught her arm and pulled her slightly to the side. She looked up at him in a way that turned his stomach; who's bright idea had this been again? "Um, Pansy," he began, clearing his throat. She fluttered her eyes at him. He thought for a moment that she must have a speck of dust in them, but finally pegged it as some pathetic attempt at being alluring. Figuring that he might as well go on since he'd already come so far, he frowned and looked away as he continued. However, she interrupted him first.

"Yes, Draco," she encouraged. She was smiling at him, her eyes wider than he had ever seen them.

"Do you know about this Yule Ball thing they're throwing?" he asked her, trying to sound as disinterested as possible. He didn't want to encourage her to stay around at all in the period before and especially after this thrice-damned Ball.

"Oh yes!" Pansy answered, nodding her head with such fervor that it seemed as though her whole body was involved. "Mother told me all about it when she saw that we had dress robes on our lists for this year. She figured that it could be the tournament and she told me all about the Yule Ball and how wonderful it was going to be and then we went dress shopping and it was the most fun..." Draco figured Pansy could have gone on like this forever, so he chose to interrupt her and get his question out before she had the chance to bore him to death. He had never seen her so chipper or bubbly before, and frankly, it was leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

"Good," he quipped by way of interrupting her impassioned monolog. "I thought you might want to go with me?" he added, as though it were an afterthought. That stopped Pansy in her proverbial tracks. Her mouth flew open and she smiled at him so widely that it made her eyes crinkle in a most unattractive way.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. She started in with the nodding thing again and Draco frowned at her. Draco was worried for a moment that she had mistaken 'would you go to the Ball with me' for 'will you marry me and have my babies and spend my father's money.' He could tell her it was just as friends, but Pansy was a temperamental creature, and such a denial to her delusions would either cause her head to explode, or worse, get into a strop with him. Best to keep quiet for now and hope she figured it out on her own some time down the road.

"Good," he said again, since self-destruction wasn't an option. He started walking toward the classroom again and signaled with his hand to Crabbe and Goyle that they should catch up. He watched as Pansy bounded back over to the girls she had been talking to.

"That seemed pretty painless," Goyle observed. Draco nodded just as they heard Pansy and her friends squeal loudly from their station just next to the classroom door, making him wince.

"Until that moment," Draco corrected.

Transfiguration was miserable that day. It seemed as though the boys weren't the only ones to have gotten wind of the Yule Ball that day during lunch. Draco cursed aloud at his decision to sit where Pansy was in the way of this view of McGonagall. She kept turning around and making these absurd faces at him. Lucky enough he had more than mastered the switching spells they were working on and was able to mostly accomplish what he was attempting without having to think too much about it. Crabbe and Goyle, however, seemed to be regressing in their ability to switch parchment pages in to pie plates, a skill that they had begun to get quite proficient at up to this point. McGonagall took points every time one of them goofed up, resulting in Draco's changing their things for them as soon as her back was turned. As for the girls, they had all managed to find a way to turn whatever was in front of them into some bauble of jewelry or bunch of pink flowers. Draco had quickly progressed from dreading the ball altogether to wanting nothing more than for it to come so that it could just be bloody well over with.

If Wednesday had been miserable, then Sunday was doubly so. The girls had nearly refused to play Quidditch, owing to the fact that they might bruise themselves in a way that would affect their ability to look appropriately fetching in their dress robes. Only after Orinda had gotten them a signed statement from Madam Pomfrey attesting to the fact that there was no Quidditch related injury that could be incurred in November that she could not have wholly remedied by Christmas time were they willing to go out to the pitch at all. In truth, it might have been more fun without them because all Millicent and Liese could manage to do the entire game was run from the Bludgers and be generally annoying.

The next Sunday the girls did refuse to play. Instead they sat around the common room like so many hens in a hen house painting one another's fingernails and playing with make up. The rest of the girls, the ones who had never taken up Quidditch in the first place, were quite pleased to have Liese and Millicent back in their silly little fold, it seemed. Draco worried that their scrimmages were not going to be the same again, ever. The day was only salvaged when Derrick and Bole, the Beaters from last year's Slytherin team, agreed to play this week, as they were badly in need of a respite from their intensive seventh-year N.E.W.T. curriculum. The weather had been horrendous and Draco had silently almost wished that they had cancelled when the girls decided to stay indoors and preen themselves. He was certainly glad for the few hours of vacation he was getting from the incessant and incurably suffocating attentions of Pansy Parkinson, but he might had endured even that in place of this ungodly brutal Quidditch match. Orinda had fallen ill with some sort of fever that she hesitantly admitted to having contracted from someone whose name she had never caught when out in Hogsmeade after curfew. Draco was ready to pound her head in for such an indiscretion, for as a consequence they had been forced to endure having Professor Snape as a sort of referee. Snape barely paid attention to the game and seemed quite put out with the fact that he was there at all. He didn't call a single penalty, even when Derrick and Bole had clearly blatched poor Malcolm Baddock, who was playing keeper that day, so hard he fell off of his broomstick and they had to stop play until he could manage to quit crying. Draco would have gladly wagered that more blood had spilt onto the pitch that Sunday afternoon than had in any Gryffindor/Slytherin grudge match ever in the history of the school. The only joy Draco had managed to take from that entire week was the gossip that had gotten back to him that Harry Potter had yet to find a date for the ball. That would be entertaining, to watch the procession of the champions into the ballroom and Potter having to walk in alone. Maybe the Ball wasn't going to be all that dreadful....

The days leading up to Christmas were some of the most miserable that Draco could remember having been through since coming to Hogwarts. It was decided on Friday that Quidditch would be cancelled for Sunday in light of the bloody noses, fat lips, and black eyes that had only just now healed properly. Several of the boys had heard no end of their injuries from their Ball dates and had decided that they had best err on the side of caution so as to prevent any tantrums resulting from the girls' having to send home photos from the Ball containing visible Quidditch injuries. The decision against playing Quidditch might also have had something to do with the fact that Orinda was still not fully recovered from whatever it was she had caught in Hogsmeade and had been advised against physical activity. The team had decided unanimously that they would rather miss a week than to deal with Snape's officiating style again.

That Sunday before Christmas, the girls had holed themselves up in the seventh-year girls' dormitory and refused to see or to speak to anyone. The prevailing opinion as to why they had done so had something to do with Millicent Bulstrode, a beautifying potion, and copious amounts of unwanted body hair. Even Orinda, a girl herself, had not managed to get through the door to find out the exact nature of the problem because the girls had suspected, and rightly so, that she had only come asking at the behest of the boys. Draco, for one, could not have cared less what it was that was keeping the girls cloistered in their dormitory, he was just glad to have the common room in relative peace for once. Relative peace... at least there was no squealing or giggling, but it seemed as though the boys had gone just as mad as the girls had. It was enough to drive a person crazy. Draco had managed thus far to keep himself relatively sane, but he was beginning to rethink his mental state as he watched Warrington toying with a bow tie and his wand. Warrington, ever the resourceful one, had been tying and failing for a week to learn the way to properly fasten up his bow tie for the Ball. After days of trying it by hand, he had set off to find a charm that would do it for him. Several boys were watching in awe and amusement as he tried yet another charm to tie the thing properly. Orinda, who had progressed from staying the whole day in her bed to spending a good part of it lounging on the couch in the common room, chuckled at the result of Warrington's charm. He had, indeed, managed to tie a knot in the thing. More accurately: he had tied it in several knots. The tie was twisted in some kind of decorative looking macramé and Warrington looked quite confused.

"Have you tried doing it the old fashioned way?" Orinda asked him.

"Every night this week," Crabbe informed her. Just because she'd been out of the loop didn't mean she shouldn't get to laugh at Warrington's ineptitude with the rest of them.

"And you haven't gotten it yet?" she asked. Warrington looked over at where Orinda was sitting on the couch and shook his head. "Well," she grinned at him, "just get one of your mates here to tie it for you on Friday."

"They can't do it either," Warrington told her. Orinda sat up a little straighter.

"Can't be as difficult as all that," Draco dismissed Warrington's obvious worry.

"Have you tried?" Orinda asked Draco, pointedly. Draco shook his head. She looked around at the rest of the boys in the room. "Can any of you tie a bow tie?" she asked. Silence.

"Do you mean to tell me that every last one of us has to wear a bloody bow tie on Friday night and that not a single man among us knows how to tie the wretched thing?" Montague sounded very concerned all of the sudden.

"That seems to be the long and the short of it, mate," Warrington confirmed for him.

"Damn," Miles Bletchley sounded as though someone had just punched him in the stomach. "But we still have five days to learn how...?"

"And remember, you're going to have to be able to do it up in the dark without a mirror and as drunk as you intend on getting," Orinda counseled them.

"I hadn't even thought of that," an even more panicked sounding Miles said back to her.

"What the bloody hell are you people talking about?" Crabbe interjected. Theodore Nott turned and swatted Crabbe in the arm.

"You're kidding me, Vincent," Orinda answered him. Adrian Pucey, with a knowing grin on his face, shook his head. And Nott's head had dropped into his hands.

"No, he's really not," Pucey countered.

"Merlin's Whiskers!" Orinda exhorted. "Do you people not shag at this school?" A few of the older boys averted their gazes and most of the younger ones could not help but giggle at her remark.

"So you'll tell me how I can do this thing up again, in the dark, without a mirror, and as drunk as I intend to be?" Miles asked of Orinda. He seemed quite nervous about the prospect of needing to re-fasten his bow tie under such circumstances. Miles got an encouraging punch in the shoulder from Montague for that remark and Warrington and Vaisey high-fived each other behind his back. Miles had managed to get a date to the Ball with Therese Collette, a dark haired siren from Beauxbatons, and his friends had done nothing but egg him on about it since they'd heard.

"I'll do you one better, Mr. Bletchley," Orinda answered him, in a tone that said to Draco that she was both completely sincere and wonderfully up to no good. "I'll do up the ties for any of you lads who need them done the night of the Ball," she offered. "And on top of that, I promise to stay awake until at least two o'clock that morning to re-fasten any tie that might be needing it. Just shoot me a messenger spell and I'll come to wherever you are. I won't have a curfew, and it's less likely that Professor Snape will be taking house points away from well dressed gentlemen strolling back to their rooms as three a.m. as it would be that any one of them might take house points from a disheveled gentleman skulking back to his room who is obviously up to something." She looked Draco squarely in the eye. "And if you are not able to shoot off a Patronus as a messenger, then you're likely in no condition to be having your ties undone for you." Draco shook his head. He was counting the days until this blasted event was over.