The third week of January, more specifically Sunday of that week, was finally the day we would face the Slytherin Quidditch team in our match.
I purposefully didn't punish the players of their team as much as I did before. Quite frankly, they would have deserved it, and I was curious why the professors didn't start expelling some older year students. But none of it was truly important because the students themselves fought back. And Harry Potter, with his new invisibility cloak, was at the very front of it - not that anyone knew.
I shouldn't have found out either, I reckoned, but sadly for Harry I knew that Dumbledore gave back the Potter heirloom to him as a Christmas gift in the first year in canon and that had not changed. I knew what to look for and found it rather easily.
Back on the pitch, Hilliard and I were talking just before the match Ravenclaw vs. Slytherin started.
I zoned out Lee doing his usual witty commentary, this time flanked by the eager Weasley twins who looked like they would be removed in a matter of minutes and spoke to the team captain.
"They've never played fair from what you all told me, and they've had it out for Harry and I since the year started. Trust me, you want me as a third beater this game if you want Harry to stay on his broom until the end."
Hilliard looked deep in thought, I knew he would agree eventually, so I added with a mischievous grin, "They'll be gunning for us so hard, you won't get much heat anyway. I know for a fact Flint had an upper year enchant their shin guards, so they're going to try to foul us all out of the air anyway. You want someone else on bludger duty this game."
"Have you improved your aim? With the kicks?"
I lifted a brow and shrugged, "You know I have."
"Good. The moment they go for unsportsmanlike plays, knock one of them out. I don't care how you do it unless it gets you sent off the pitch."
Inwardly, I was shocked, but outwardly, I gave my team captain a big grin.
"Don't look at me like that. I need this year's cup if I want a head start at the prophet. And, writing another article about the infamous third beater position you created would be the cherry on top."
Four minutes later, at a score of 10-30 for Slytherin, Roger Davies started cursing me for leaving him and Jeremy Stretton out to dry, but I barely paid him any attention.
I had already diverted three bludgers that would have hit either Potter or Hilliard out of the air and I stopped one of the beaters, Duncan Inglebee, from getting run into one of the stands by the two Slytherin beaters.
Originally, those two beaters were quite wary and kept a certain distance from me. But like every other Slytherin, they were too arrogant for their own good and got too close to me during another sneaky play to wipe out Jeremy Stratton, who wasn't even in possession of the Quaffle.
I swooped in from below by flying in a straight line up and used one of the broom's stirups to do a ridiculous backflip midair that football players would have likely called a bicycle or overhead kick to send back the bludger to Peregrine Derrick, one of Slytherin's new beaters and brother of the pregnant seventh year witch Bernice Derrick.
The hit landed square on the boy's chest, and he shot backwards immediately without his broom in hand. In the meantime, I managed to catch my hovering broom before I even started my descent because I stopped all its upwards momentum with my kick to gain the appropriate height.
After a moment of silence and gasps from the spectators, thunderous applause rang through the stadium. Derrick had been caught by Madam Hooch, though he was unconscious and the state of his ribs was in question so she sent him toward Madam Pomfrey who gave me a dirty look as I waved at those cheering for me.
"You're going to regret that," Pucey, the Slytherin 'star chaser' spat out as he flew close to me.
"With a move straight out of a muggle action movie, Macnair wipes out Slytherin beater Derrick! I can not believe it! Did someone get that on camera?" Lee Jordan shouted through his magi-phone, and I saw two people hold up their magical cameras.
I also saw Cilian Hilliard, my team captain and keeper, silently note down everyone with a camera to get that picture printed along with the article he was going to write.
A few more praises by even the Weasley twins were cut short as Flint, with Derrick's beater bat in hand 'slipped up' and lost the bat mid-swing to hit Inglebee, one of our beaters, in the face with it.
As a consequence he had to fly down to get his bloody nose fixed and Flint, because the rules in Quidditch made no sense, was not reprimanded due to a foul, he was even allowed to pick up the bat again because the team was down a player.
Through several boos he ignored, Flint tried that same tactic again on Samuels, our other beater, but Inglebee was back on the pitch and shot the second bludger at Flint.
With a score of 40-40, the pressure was high on my roommate and Slytherin's seeker Terence Higgs and got even higher when Flint started throwing the bat Harry's way for what was obvious unsportsmanlike behavior. With rules like that, I wasn't sure I really wanted to play another season of Quidditch.
At least Roger Davies stopped cursing me because with Flint going rogue, Slytherin's team was playing with two chasers as well, and the game was going alright for the pompous showoff.
I dodged another bludger that came my way by doing a barrel roll and spotted the snitch while upside-down. With a quick look towards Higgs and Potter, I noticed neither of the two were even looking in this direction, so I decided to get the most out of this game. I casually flew closer to the snitch and when the attention of most were on a flashy play with Davies and Stretton as well as Flint and Slytherin's second beater Lucian Bole because of their ridiculous behavior.
I caught the snitch, but instead of showing it to anyone, I hid it under my cloak. The snitch wasn't enchanted to report it being caught, another stupid thing about Quidditch, and I wanted to legally send some more Slytherin bastards to the hospital wing.
Two minutes later, that was exactly what I did after I hounded Bole for a while and finally managed to send a bludger to his hip right as he hit away the second bludger.
I got more nasty looks from Pucey and Flint, the two chasers turned impromptu beaters who took over the bats for their knocked-out beaters, but I couldn't scoff at them openly because Flint had managed to knock out Stretton, which meant Davies was now the lone player playing as chaser for Ravenclaw at this moment.
I made it easy for him by knocking out Miles Bletchley, the Slytherin keeper, when the score was 70-50 for our team, but Bletchley would likely come back soon since it was only a glancing blow.
Some time later, at a score of 140-50, with Davies continuously scoring on empty hoops, Flint seemed to lose his temper even more. Instead of 'accidentally' losing his bat, he outright tried to hit Harry in the head with it. He excused this by saying he didn't mean to and thought there was a bludger there, but nobody was buying it.
And, the Quidditch rules did nothing about behavior like this. I was losing my mind after I heard Hooch explain that chasers didn't fall under the same rules as beaters and that only beaters were disallowed from hitting other players with the bats and that chasers who picked up the bats in absence of their team's beaters were treated as a different kind of player.
Flint would have to actively follow a player for three seconds before any hit would be counted as bat hit... whoever thought up these rules was a complete lunatic and Quidditch was a sport in dire need of reform.
Slytherin only had Higgs, their seeker now positioned in front of the hoops, the chaser-beaters Pucey and Flint, as well as their third chaser Graham Montague on the field. Montague was one of the people involved in the attack on me, so he became my next target as the match turned more into a match of violence instead of 'clean' Quidditch like McGonagall wanted to see and when I looked over I knew she hated every second of the game as it went on.
Montague was in possession of the Quaffle, trying his best to get past Davies and Inglebee, which was when he sharply dodged to the left. I had kicked a bludger toward him from what I hoped was a dead angle, but he was alright on a broom and got away from it at the last moment. But that was his undoing as he dodged right into a bat that Pucey had 'lost' and aimed at Davies. The bat hit him right in the eye, and he was squealing like a pig over his lost eye as he dropped to the ground, sadly still sitting on his broom.
'That went better than I thought it would. Too bad he should be out for the count. Let's get Davies the highest scoring record of the school and be done with this farce,' I thought.
Flint showed no sign of stopping trying to hit all of us in random fly-bys, so I picked up the quaffle, aimed it right at Higgs' head who ducked down because he wasn't wearing the keeper's headgear and scored. Davies caught the quaffle from behind the hoops, looked at Higgs with a condescending smirk, and sunk in another quaffle.
By that time, I was behind the hoops and passed it back to Davies.
Slytherin only had three players on the pitch at that moment and Pucey tried his best to get the bludgers back into their own team's half of the court while Flint was still trying to get both Harry and Hilliard off their brooms. His behavior was getting more and more unbearable, and even most Slytherin students looked at the man with loathing at his severely lacking cunning.
Less than ten minutes later, with Pucey and Higgs getting wiped out by stray bludgers even more often than Davies and I, the scoreboard was at 580-50, one of Slytherin's most humiliating defeats with 510 points scored by Davies alone. The prior record of 360 points during a match with similar circumstances after a thunderstorm took out four players on the enemy team in the 16th century held by a Hufflepuff chaser was thoroughly beaten.
"Hey Davies, you wanna go four digits, or do you want to end this?"
"It's not like you got the snitch in your pants pockets, so what can we do?" The chaser shouted back.
"What if I did?"
Higgs looked back to me with horror in his eyes as soon as I asked. He had been humiliated thoroughly by the two of us, especially me, who aimed every pass right by aiming at his head, and wanted nothing more than to end this match by accidentally catching the snitch and then forgetting this tragic event.
"Let me make it an even 620 so the score will read 770 - sounds like a lucky number!"
I shrugged and allowed Davies to score four more goals before I flew over to Harry, who looked pretty hagard. Flint had done a real number on him and managed to land quite a few glancing blows that shattered one of the lenses on his glasses.
I didn't want to advertise that I caught the snitch, not only to not steal Harry's thunder but also to save myself from even more animosity that I knew was going to come my way. Nobody was going to believe Higgs anyway, and Davies would be boasting about his legendary feat so much that our little conversation will never even be an afterthought in Davies' mind.
I flew past Harry and kicked away another bludger back at Flint, whose broom I managed to hit and snuck the golden snitch into Harry's hand. He didn't even know it happened as he looked around really paranoid until Lee started shouting.
"Potter's got it! Look at his right hand! The boy-who-lived caught the snitch! How did he even do that? I don't think I've seen him move other than dodging Flint's ugly should-be-fouls!"
Not even McGonagall reprimanded him this time around because she, too, was incensed over this match. The Slytherin fans were barely even on the stands anymore, and the remaining half didn't utter a word as they left. The Hufflepuffs and some Gryffindors gave polite applause, but the Ravenclaw fans weren't quite sure yet if they wanted to celebrate.
This had been a match unlike any other.
I landed in the snow and walked toward our changing rooms under the hateful glares of Flint and Pucey. Once inside, I peeled out of the protective gear and watched my battered body.
Enchanted shin guards and reinforced gauntlets, robes, and coats were nice and all, but the iron bludger was still an iron bludger. My legs and chest were covered in dark blue and green bruises from what I could see, and my shoulder shouldn't be looking too different.
"I don't think Pomfrey will be too gentle if you go to her with that," Harry said with a gloating smile as he watched me look at my bruised form.
"Is that any way to speak to the real seeker on the team?" I asked with a condescending smirk.
"When did you catch that? I didn't see the snitch once during that match?"
"Right after Flint picked up the beater bat, I think..."
"Wow, give me a heads-up next time. I could have just joined you in scoring then. If you can double as a beater, I can double as a chaser."
"Hey, Macnair," the team captain said as he entered at that moment. "Remind me to never again give you the okay to 'knock them out'. I don't think any other match had seen such loathsome plays since the Wimbourne Wasps thought it funny to bring a giant wasp nest to their match against Appleby Arrows as mascots and they had to play an entire match unaided by wands as they all got stung hundreds of times and let out their resentment on each other back in 1874."
"Is that why live animals are not allowed to be the official mascot of teams anymore? I thought it weird that such a rule existed in the official rule book, but chasers like Flint were allowed to throw bats at people for an entire game. Have I told you that the game is stupid yet?"
"Shove it, Macnair. Your opinions are as stupid as your plays are disgusting. I'm glad you weren't sorted into Slytherin."
I looked at Hilliard with an amused smile as he more or less ran to the hot showers.
"Which is it then? Do you think I played well because you say you're glad I wasn't on the enemy team, or do you think I shouldn't have played at all?"
"The latter!" He shouted back with no regard for my feelings.
"Neither!" He shouted, probably reluctantly, a little later.
Samuels and Inglebee were next as they winced at the sight of my blue and green legs.
"Mate, turn it down a notch next match, will ya?"
"Yeah, your body will thank you for it. We will, too. Scary stuff."
I gave them both a thumbs up and went toward the showers.
With a hiss escaping my mouth every step, I walked toward the hospital wing once I got dressed and sent Hilliard with my Firebolt towards the Ravenclaw tower. Pomfrey gave me an earful as expected, but still healed the bruises as best she could and sent me back after shoving a potion down my throat.
Back up at the tower that housed our house's dorm, I saw Flitwick walk towards me.
"Talion... I know I told you to win the inter-house cup and make sure Slytherin gets a good beating... but I didn't mean that literally."
"You didn't?" I asked in mock surprise.
"No, but I will admit it was nice to see Severus' face turn as red as a pig's liver for once instead of swallowing down my own grievances with the shameful way the Slytherin team usually conducts itself year after year. You should probably look out for his misguided anger and not give him too many opportunities for lost house points and detentions."
"Huh, I'll keep it in mind. Anything else you need?"
"Indeed. You will stay with me for the first week of your summer vacation. We're going to Rome."
"Rome, professor?"
"Rome, Italy. I thought geography was part of the muggle school curriculum?"
"No, I know Rome. I was asking why we would go there?"
"The under-18 duelling circuit, of course. I signed you up as a seeded candidate, so you'll be starting in the knockout round immediately instead of going through qualifiers. It was my last favor of that kind to cash in, so don't leave me hanging."
I gave the professor a polite nod and thanked him for the opportunity before limping into the common room where a party was about to start in our team's honor.
A party I hoped didn't include proud pats on my bruised back.