one saturday in january, a gryffindor quidditch team choose-your-own-adventure disaster
Percy ignored the warning and ran into the shed. (Somewhere, James Potter felt a burst of joy without knowing why.) His eyes had barely adjusted to the dim environment - indeed, he had hardly stepped over the threshold - when Eddie shouted, “Catch it!”
The spike of adrenaline, perhaps, was part of why Percy immediately, instinctively, obeyed. But being a Chaser, he'd expected a Quaffle-sized object, the shape and feel of which he knew like his own back garden. Whatever zipped past him was much smaller, a flash of gold in his line of sight that vanished over his shoulder at once.
“Oh, Merlin,” Eddie moaned, a hand clapped over his mouth. “I've— Someone moved it, it wasn't my fault, honest—”
“Moved what?” Percy said, swivelling around and squinting into the sky to try and spot what had evaded him. But of course, he knew. A certain leaden worry settled in his stomach.
“What's taking so long?” Quentin called. “We've dawdled long enough that we'll have to skip the warmup.” Of course, he didn't sound too put off by the idea. But soon, Percy knew, he would not be smiling.
“You believe me, don't you?” Eddie was saying, in a tone of abject desperation.
“C'mon, we ought to tell the others what happened,” Percy said, instead of offering reassurance he wasn't sure carried any weight. “Someone might have a way of getting it back.”
They trudged back to the pitch, where the other four waited none too patiently.
“Something's happened,” Percy said, then paused delicately so that Eddie might fill in the rest — which, in any case, he hadn't witnessed.
“The lucky Snitch,” Eddie said, “it wasn't in the usual spot — Potter showed me, before, how it's stuck fast into a holder on the shelf, isn't it?”
He glanced around for validation, which the others readily gave. They all knew exactly where the thing was hidden away, a Gryffindor lucky charm that other houses, legend had it, had endeavoured for years to get to.
“It was in the practice trunk, somehow,” Eddie went on, “because the moment I'd unlatched it, well—“
Now Percy recalled the bright golden thing that had escaped his too-clumsy grasp. Might as well have let the Quidditch Cup slip through your fingers, a voice in his head said — one that sounded not unlike the absent team captain.
Lisa Kelly was frowning. “If someone found it and wanted to get rid of it, why wouldn't they just...steal it?”
“They wanted us to know,” said Germaine slowly. “That it's gone, I mean.”
The horror of that settled over them like an added chill. The morning suddenly seemed frost-bitten, hard, forbidding.
“We can't lose the Snitch, not on our first practice without Potter,” said Lisa Kelsoe. She'd blanched at Eddie's story, thinking of her own performance against Slytherin — not good enough, by her own estimation and surely also by James's. And now, without the talisman that had kept generations of Gryffindors safe... Sacred Circe, how much worse could she get?
And they all began to speak over one another, voices rising in volume and in panic both, alternately offering up ideas and apocalyptic predictions and—
“Paracelsus on a pogo stick, enough!” Germaine said, much louder than she'd meant to. Her voice echoed about the empty stands. But at least her teammates — her charges, she thought, with a sickening lurch of her stomach — fell silent. “Can we... Can everyone put aside the worst possible scenario they're imagining at the moment—” which Merlin knew she needed to do “—and think up a way to fix this?”
“The Snitch went off towards Hagrid’s hut, I think,” Percy said slowly. “We should—”
“Go after it,” said Eddie.
“To the Forest?” Lisa Kelsoe said.
“—no, ask Madam Hooch for the spell she uses to find lost Snitches!” Percy said, aghast at the turn things had taken.
“It’s just a Snitch,” Germaine offered limply, convincing no one. “Maybe…”
“We should replace it with a fake,” said Lisa Kelly — and, to everyone’s surprise, Quentin Kravitz, who glanced at Lisa Kelsoe as though he thought his own words might have come out of her mouth. Both Lisas seemed equally puzzled they hadn’t spoken in unison.
What should they do?
Go after the Snitch now
Speak to Madam Hooch
Give up; it’s just a Snitch
Try to it with a dummy
Voting ended onFeb 21, 2023
