Harry's voice. Draco looked up. The wind whipped his hair across his face.
For a moment, he could see nothing. 'Oh, yes. It would have been a great surprise gift.' He reached up a hand and pushed back his hair, and saw that Harry was already sitting astride his Cloudburst, and his grin was back. 'Potter, what are you — '
Harry pushed off, and his Cloudburst rocketed into the air at approximately the speed of a hurtling comet.
'…doing?' Draco finished. He sighed. 'Goddammit,' he said wearily, swung his leg over the stick, and kicked off from the ground.
Immediately it felt wrong. The broom soared upward after Harry's on a near vertical pitch with a soundless, slippery, gliding motion that made Draco feel as if he were about to fall off. He grabbed desperately at the broom, which succeeded only in canting him violently to the right. He held on tightly as the Cloudburst spun once, righted itself and subsided into stillness.
Cold air whistled in his lungs as he gasped mouthfuls of oxygen. His heart was pounding. I'm sick. I shouldn't be doing this. I'm sick. I can't fly properly. Harry knows that. Where is he?
Draco tilted his head back. The icy air stung his eyes to tears, but he could see Harry just beyond the immediate blurred field of his vision, hovering above him, a patch of darkness against the silver clouds. Harry looked down at him, laughing, then took off again. Later, Draco would wonder why he'd followed; at the time, it seemed the only thing to do. He leaned forward and the Cloudburst exploded under him, rocketing up into the sky like a meteor in reverse.
In winter, the Hogwarts teams usually flew in heavy sweaters, with shin guards and elbow guards and high leather boots. Now, the elegant party clothes Draco was wearing provided hardly any barrier to the cold. He shivered as he soared upward and the wind cut through the fabric of his shirt like so many tiny knives. His cloak blew back; up ahead, he could see that Harry's cloak was doing the same, snapping behind him like a flag in the wind. He fixed his eyes on that as a target and willed his broom forward.
It banked sideways instead.
Draco's hands, icy and numb with cold, clutched convulsively at the broomstick's shaft. His heart was pounding. He had remembered, suddenly, what he had read in that issue of Quidditch World News.
The new Cloudburst models carry a unique anti-theft charm. Before being used, the broomstick must be calibrated to its specific user, or it will not respond properly to attempts to fly it.
'Hell,' he muttered. 'Bloody, bloody hell.' He threw his head back. Harry was a disappearing speck high above him. 'Potter!' he shouted, and pulled back on his broom. It jerked upwards several feet, went into a lazy slow roll, and righted itself reluctantly. 'Potter!' he shouted again, leaning far forward.
This turned out to be a mistake. As if shot from a cannon, the Cloudburst hurtled forward so swiftly that Draco had no chance to do anything other than clutch at it blindly. It veered hard to the left, and then to the right, and then shot forward, as straight as an arrow.
Directly towards a large oak tree.
Draco jerked hard at the Cloudburst, but it would not be budged from its course. He thundered towards the tree as inexorably as the Hogwarts Express — the branches scraped at his face — he threw his arms up — and something hit him hard, not from the front but from the side, knocking him decidedly off his broom. The same something tangled in his cloak and then he was falling, which felt almost like flying but was far more terrifying.
It only lasted a moment, though. He hit soft-packed snow and the impact knocked the wind out of him. He choked and rolled over, spitting snow, blinded by it. There was a sharp stinging pain in his arm.
'Hey — Malfoy — ' It was Harry, of course. Draco sat up, pushing wet hair out of his eyes. Harry was kneeling on the snow next to him. His glasses were frosted with snow; so were his clothes. 'Sorry about knocking you off your broom, but you were going to hit the tree. Why didn't you steer away from it?'
'I'm fine, thanks for asking,' Draco said, through his teeth. 'Potter -
where are the broomsticks?'
Harry waved grandiosely in the direction of the oak tree they had narrowly avoided smacking into, and almost overbalanced. 'They weren't as lucky as we were.'
A feeling of foreboding in his heart, Draco got shakily to his feet and looked where Harry had indicated. At first he didn't see what Harry meant; then, craning his neck back, he saw both broomsticks, high above their heads. The force of impact had driven them into the tree; they looked like two oversized arrows that had been fired, willy-nilly, through the branches and into the tree's trunk.
'Those Cloudbursts must be made of something really tough,' Harry observed, with desultory interest. 'You'd think they just would have shattered, really.'
'You mean like our skulls would have, if we'd hit that tree?' Draco said, seething coldly. 'Is that what you mean?'
'But we didn't hit the tree,' Harry pointed out breezily.
'No thanks to you, you daft bloody Gryffindor!' Draco exploded. ''Let's just ride these broomsticks, shall we, never mind that they need to be calibrated first, never mind we're going to get ourselves killed-''
'I didn't know that,' Harry said, surprised.
'Five more seconds and I would've been splattered all over like an Impressionist painting. 'Head Smashed Into Oak Tree,' you could've called it.'
'Don't joke about that. Look, if you knew they needed to be calibrated then you should have said — '
'I didn't have time, did I? You just jumped on that broomstick and took off — '
'You didn't have to come after me!'
'I always have to come after you!'
'Good God, what's all this yelling?' said a voice, and Draco whirled around to see Sirius standing just behind him, Lupin at his side. Several other figures were standing on the path back where the carriages were; Draco couldn't see who they were, but knew that they were staring.
His heart sank as he stared up at Sirius. Sirius looked absolutely furious.
'What on earth have you been doing?' he demanded coldly.
The two boys looked up at Sirius with their mouths open. Draco had never really seen his stepfather-to-be angry before. He seemed to loom over them, his eyes black with anger. 'And just what is this meaning of all this noise?' he demanded.
Lupin cleared his throat. 'Ahem,' he said. 'Sirius…'
Sirius turned to look at his friend. 'Yes?'
In answer, Lupin pointed upward. Sirius turned to follow his gesture, and gaped up at the two broomsticks embedded in the tree. 'I see,' he said slowly, his voice flat. 'I knew you two were flying. But I didn't think you'd be quite such bloody fools as to fly two uncalibrated Cloudbursts!'
'We didn't know they needed to be calibrated,' said Draco in a small voice. He turned to Harry for some assistance, but immediately realized there would be no help from this corner. Harry had his hand over his mouth and appeared to be laughing.
'Ah, but you still felt qualified to fly them? Not even addressing the issue that those were your Christmas presents, which I will certainly not be replacing. Of all this damn fool, impetuous, thoughtless, rash and stupid things you could have done — '
'We're sorry,' Draco interrupted desperately. Harry was still giggling beside him. He resisted the urge to smack Harry across the back of the head.
'I don't think you realize how serious this is,' Sirius glowered.
The laughter finally escaped from behind Harry's hand. 'Sirius,' he said.
'Your name means two things. Hee.'
Sirius blinked at his godson. 'Harry? What on earth is wrong with you?'
Harry just giggled in response.
'He's fine,' Draco said in a small voice. 'It's just an, er….a Cheering Charm. I put it on him earlier.'
To his surprise, Sirius reacted as if he'd said 'It's just a bucket of poison' instead. 'A Cheering Charm? You gave him a Cheering Charm and then you let him drink alcohol?'
