Atropos → george weasley

xxi. party crashing

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twenty one

party crashing

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Every other Saturday morning, for the rest of September and the entirety of October, Ottilie rose before the sun. She'd get her Quidditch gear on, grab her broomstick, and then walk down to the common room where Graham would be waiting for her by the fire.

He would often have a hot drink for her—usually black tea—and she'd drink as the two of them made their way to the Quidditch pitch.

The grounds would still be dark, though a bright, glowing blue would halo the mountains, foretelling the inevitable sunrise. Dew on the grass permeated her shoes by the time they'd reached the pitch. She'd eventually learned to cast a Drying charm to stop her feet from going numb because a Warming charm wasn't quite enough to protect her from the dampness in the air.

She would usually make idle chat with Graham, learning things about him, like that he had a sister five years younger than him, just as Ottilie had Adelaide, and a dachshund at home named Templeton.

He was a good coach. He taught Ottilie new flying techniques, set up obstacle courses for her throughout the grounds, and launched apricots he'd stolen from the kitchen across the pitch for her to catch.

The sun would slowly rise as they trained, eventually brushing pink on blue, washing Ottilie's skin in warmth.

Hogwarts was the most beautiful then, she decided. Darkness clung to the silence and, finally, the first birdsong would breathe life into the stillness. Light suffused the grounds. Everything glittered.

By breakfast, she would be completely windblown and exhausted. The two would walk back and eat breakfast together, their cheeks dusted red from the cold.

It was something to look forward to, a chance to get a breath of fresh air when the rest of her life involved round two of a useless Defense professor and another couple of failed attempts at becoming an Animagus.

The first practice session they decided to skip was October thirty-first. Halloween.

Ottilie didn't mind much. She spent much of her day with Justin and Ernie. At twilight, before the Halloween feast, they strolled the darkened grounds. She and Justin took turns describing the plots to horror films to scare Ernie, which wasn't exactly hard to do in the first place. They held their wands glowing with Lumos below their chins and watched Ernie hug his cloak to himself, half for solace and half to block out the freeze in the autumn air.

"...and then, they start to cut open the moth pupa..." Justin said in a grave voice, walking backward as they made their way through the quad back toward the castle. Fallen leaves crunched under their feet, and a crisp wind whistled through the trees.

"...and the cross-eyed entomologist starts to hit on Clarice..." Ottilie added, smirking at the sour look Justin gave her. She opened the door to the entrance hall.

"...it's strange because the particular moth is only found in Asia..."

"...Clarice asks the guy if he's hitting on her, and he says he says yes he is hitting on her..."

"...and they figure out that Buffalo Bill was raising the moth he lodged in his victim's throat..."

"...the significance of the moth is change..." Ottilie said, doing her best impression of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.