Bleeding hearts

There is a natural instinct that develops when one has to live in survival mode for a long period of time, a sensation deep in your gut that tells you to be wary of something approaching. In a world with ten foot spiders, three headed dogs and most importantly, Wooyoung, Hongjoong had learnt that that little tingle in your gut was crucial for survival.

And it is exactly that that has him turning his head just in time to whizz out of the way as a bludger roars past him, just missing his skull by an inch or two.

He gritted his teeth as he twisted his broom around to see four girls who had shown up to watch practice screech and roll over one another in an exaggerated attempt to avoid being hit by the bludger. It wasn’t really necessary seeing as the ball had already changed direction and they were also two stands away from its former destination but nevertheless, he doesn’t need their screaming to attract the attention of any of the professors and lose any points for his house so he turns his head over his shoulder to yell at his teammates who were still horsing around, unaware of their captains growing ire.

“Mingi! Jongho! Cut it out or I swear I will take those clubs and ram them so far up that you’ll be screeching owls!” His threat had both his beaters freeze and Mingi sheepishly sent the bludger he had been aiming for Wooyoung northside instead.

“Sorry hyung.” Mingi called back while Jongho just flew away, trying his stale tactic of just getting away from the mess to pretend he had nothing to do with it. Hongjoong rolls his eyes and reaches out to smack his head as he flies by but the younger swerves easily and he almost loses his balance.

A hand darts out to grab him and stabilize him but he swats at it in irritation and Wooyoung lets him go, holding both his hands up in surrender and then rolling his eyes when Hongjoong immediately begins to scold him.

“How many times have I told you to never let go of your broom?”

“Aw hyung-”

“I don’t care how good of a flyer you are, Jung Wooyoung. Stop being cocky and put your hands back on the tail and if I catch you flying like that again, I’m taping your hands to it.”

“What’s taping?” Wooyoung asks curiously, having already disregarded the rest of his lecture and Hongjoong mutters a stream of curses under his breath before he whips his wand out of his robe and points it at the younger. Wooyoung’s eyes widened and he immediately tried to grab his own but mid air his hands snap down and clasp tightly to the tail of his broom and they remain stubbornly stuck to them as he tries valiantly to pull them off.

“Then again, a sticky charm is more efficient.” Hongjoong said briskly as he pocketed his wand again as Wooyoung glared at him, still straining to pull his hands free.
“Let me go, you imbecile!”

“No.” He said calmly, even as he started feeling a headache forming behind his left eyebrow when he saw Jongho and Mingi have already shaken off the effects of his scolding and are now trying to knock each other off their brooms. “If you can’t remember to keep your hands on the broom at all times, then let magic do it for you. You don’t need them waving around the air anyway.”

“I’m the seeker! I need my hands to catch the snitch!”

“Well, it’s not like you do much of that anyway so let's just keep you like that!”

Wooyoung gaped at him and he kicked a leg out petulantly, “Okay, now I need my hands so I can beat you up because how dare you-”

“Finite Incantatum.” Someone said from behind him and Wooyoung’s hands spring free and he immediately reaches inside his robes but Hongjoong has learned that what he lacks in height, he makes up in speed so he leans forward on his broom and urges it into zipping away. He can hear Wooyoung yelling after him but he doesn’t stop until he’s at the bottom goal post and it’s only then that he turns to look back.

Wooyoung sends him a grinning stink eye as he flies side by side with his savior, his red robes billowing and contrasting with the green ones.

Un-fucking-believable.

He grips the broom so tight that it shakes a little, almost in protest but he ignores it as he flies back, dodging Mingi’s outstretched hand until he swerves in front of his teammate and the sleazeball that Hongjoong would love to knock off his broom. Wooyoung raises a brow, clearly not picking up or not caring about the heavy tension that had fallen over them and he opened his mouth to no doubt spew some stupid thing that would get him beat up by anyone who wasn’t as tolerable as Hongjoong (okay, he may not be as tolerable but he loves the damn kid so potato potato) but the other cuts him off to calmly order, “Wooyoung, go away for a second please.”

“It’s like I’m six again and you won’t let me play light whizbangs with you and hyung.” Wooyoung complained but to Hongjoong’s mix of relief and annoyance, he obeys, though he glides over to hang out on the opposite end of the field where more green robed goblins (or Slytherins as they prefer to be called) are flying. He gives himself a moment to mentally roll his eyes at the social butterfly before his attention is brought back to the boy in front of him, both of them having been silently sizing each other up.

Hongjoong opens his mouth to speak first when it seems the taller is seemingly content to spend the whole evening just glaring when he interrupts him in a faux polite voice to ask, “A problem captain?”

Hongjoong fleetingly imagines himself ramming his broom straight into the others and watches him plummet and splat like a pancake but decides that ultimately, Park Seonghwa wasn’t worth getting expelled over.

“What the hell was that Park?” He hisses and Seonghwa raises a brow, cocking his head so that some of the strands of his hair slip over his eyes. The golden light of the sunset is making his brown eyes gleam, his sweaty face glistening and with the wind having messed his hair up into a messy updo, the bastard probably thinks he looks like a right sight.

Hongjoong isn’t blind, nor is he deaf. It’s common knowledge in the school that Park Seonghwa was a rather extraordinarily good looking student, with his long nose and plump lips and his tall lean figure and his fake polite mannerisms. Girls from all years would walk down the same hallway he’d be lounging in just to catch his eye and then giggle manically when he’d glance at them. He returned from every hogsmeade trip to find piles of sweets left in front of his dorm, which he’d effectively throw away because they were almost always laced with temporary love potions. Teachers beamed at him everytime he did the bare minimum and got a good grade or answered in class or if the stuck up brat would greet them in passing. Even boys seemed to be taken by him, following him around like devoted puppies, awestricken by how smart Park Seonghwa was, how athletic he was, how well spoken he was, on and on.

Frankly, Hongjoong had never gotten the appeal and he privately wondered how stupid they all had to be to fall for the nice guy act because the Park Seonghwa he had the misfortune of interacting with was an annoying prick and had been since the beginning. As far back as Hongjoong could remember, the two had always rubbed the wrong way and as the years had passed, their relationship had developed from a general dislike and jabs to a full blown rivalry.

And it had only gotten worse in their sixth year when they had both been appointed as the new captains for their respective houses' quidditch teams.

Hongjoong had started this year on a high and in that momentary elatedness, he’d promised himself to be the bigger person and to get through his captaincy and straight up ignore Seonghwa’s existence. He wouldn’t give him the pleasure by rising to his bait and he knew it gave the other happiness when he managed to get under his skin because he always wore a stupid smile around Hongjoong and Hongjoong alone, one that had his lips quirked to a side as he grinned at him like a snake watching it’s bitten rat trying to escape.

No, Hongjoong had swore that this year would be different. No more cat fights with Seonghwa, no more jabbing conversations, no more pranks. Park Seonghwa and him would just coexist and that would be that.

But it was now October and Hongjoong’s patience had run out in the last five weeks and the constant interactions thanks to their shared practice schedules had grated him down.

“Where do you get off giving orders to my team?” He continued on, glowering at him and wishing he could somehow knock the sun out of the sky so it would stop illuminating the bastard like he was some tragic hero in the crappy soap dramas his mom liked watching back home. “Wooyoung is my team mate, not yours.”

“Where do you get off cursing my little cousin?” Seonghwa shot back easily and there’s a sharpness that overrules the usual silky way he talks. It’s clear his intervention came from a place of protectiveness rather than just for the sake of being a menace but Hongjoong can’t bring himself to care. He scoffs at the dramaticness but Seonghwa narrows his eyes and continues on. “Deal with your teammates however you want, but if you raise your wand at Wooyoung again, you and I will have problems.”

“It wasn’t a curse, it was a sticky charm, you melodramatic twit. Head gotten thick from all the bludgers you’ve taken?” He smiles out of his own ovation as he recalls just three weeks ago when Mingi had accidentally sent the bludger straight at Seonghwa and had landed the other in the hospital wing. They’d lost a lot of points for the house as Seonghwa had been on the ground and clearly not in the air for playing and no one believed that it had been an accident thanks to Hongjoong’s constant hostility towards the tallest but he had to admit, scrubbing the kitchen had been worth it to have a Seonghwa free week.

Sometimes Mingi’s clumsiness and airheaded behavior was rather handy.

Seonghwa merely laughs, rather goodnaturedly and it just makes Hongjoong all the more irritated. There’s a familiar coil in his stomach that always seems to appear whenever he’s forced to talk with the taller and Hongjoong sometimes worry that Park Seonghwa will annoy his lunch out of him. “You’re in a prickly mood today. Feelings still hurt over our last game, Joongie?”

The coil tightens at the nickname and Hongjoong splutters as he says, “Your captain fucking cheated and you know it.”

“Wow, a whole summer and you haven’t mellowed over your loss. Not that I blame you. It was a- what did they call it? Devastating? A disgrace? An embarrassment?”

“Now you’re just repeating what your mom says about you.”

“Haha.” Seonghwa deadpanned but he was smiling and there’s a shine in his eyes as he continued watching Hongjoong. It’s something he had noticed over the years. Just as Seonghwa has a particular smile reserved only for Hongjoong, there’s a twinkle that appears every time he’s bothering him. Hongjoong doesn’t think it’s fair that he gets stuck with a painful twist in his stomach and Seonghwa just gets quirks that make him look even more handsome.

If he can just knock some teeth out, maybe use a boil charm on him, maybe people would stop falling for Seonghwa’s acts without his pretty looks.

He takes a deep breath and forces himself to relax. Just because Seonghwa gets under his skin doesn’t mean he has to make it this easy on him.

“Just stick to your side of the field, Park. Focus on controlling your own gremlins and stay away from mine.” He grumbles, hoping that was that but when had the Slytherin ever missed a chance to provoke?

“I have mine under control. Ya know, not all of us need to yell our tiny lungs out to try and be heard.”

All the calm he’d managed to gather slipped away like slippery slime and somewhere in the distance, birds actually flew off in a startle as he indignantly screeched, “Tiny?!?”

Seonghwa laughs loudly and then before Hongjoong can react, he zooms past him in such a speed that his own broom trembles and just barely manages to latch on as Seonghwa flies around the stadium, taking a longer unnecessary route back to his team, no doubt so that he could fly past his hoards of fans on the stand.

Git.

He’d like nothing more than to follow after him and maybe actually go through with some of his threats but the sun is almost down and his team has barely practiced and with their first match coming up in two weeks, he can’t waste anymore time. It would make Seonghwa all the more pleased to know that he had managed to distract the Gryffindor captain enough that he tanked in both rehearsals and the real thing and the mental image of Seonghwa like a cat who had just gotten a filling of cream is what makes him reluctantly turn away and call for him teammates to gather.

But that doesn’t mean he’s letting Seonghwa off the hook.

Practice flies by, with plenty of interruption and sneers from the Slytherin team to the Gryffindor and vice versa. Some of the sneers were lighthearted and exchanged as a means of friendly competition and rivalry because ever since the second war, there had been an active effort to integrate more interhouse friendliness and push past the previous stereotypes and prejudice forced on young kids. Hongjoong isn’t particularly against the new norm of interhouse friend groups and overall, he too believes that the notion that every single student that enters Slytherin is sly and evil was ridiculous and that they were just normal kids, like any other house. Hell, he’s even friends with a few of them, specifically San and Yeosang, two chasers on the slytherin team.

But when it comes to Park Seonghwa, he privately thinks they were onto something because that man is everything rotten under the sun and Hongjoong would rather lick an elf’s foot than ever give him the benefit of the doubt.

And some parts of the old labels were still true because Hongjoong was a gryffindor through and through and who was he to disrespect the long standing tradition of some reckless payback that some would say only a fool with a brave heart would risk.

He uses the water break to make a quick tour to the changing rooms, specifically Slytherin’s changing room and when he returns, he’s in a much better mood than he has been all day. He knows it doesn’t go undetected because his teammates keep sending him looks, torn between suspicion and curiosity but Hongjoong ignores it all, his mood just continuing to improve the closer they get to the end of practice.

By the time they kicked off the brooms and began to make their way back to the changing rooms, he was practically soaring. Not just because of his detour, but because practice had gone well. Wooyoung had caught the snitch four times, a new record on his half and once Mingi and Jongho had gotten serious, they’d been excellent with detouring the bludgers and keeping them away from their teammates. Ryunjin and Eunhyuk, his two new chasers had begun to develop a good chemistry with one another and him and they were working together more seamlessly than ever, passing and scoring with ease. Dokyeom was still a little too aggressive as a goalkeeper but he was still getting the job done and overall, the team was working together smoothly and not to get cocky, but Hongjoong thinks they have a good shot against ravenclaw in the match to come.

Of course, there is the small damper on his mood based on the fact that the Slytherins were also doing good. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to ignore how well they had worked together or how skilled they were, especially Seonghwa. He cut through the air like a lightning bolt, robes and hair billowing behind him impressively as he weaved around teammates and obstacles to pass the Quaffle.

Disgusting as he was, Seonghwa was an excellent player and Hongjoong had a sinking feeling in his stomach that the finals would once again have them two in a showdown.

“You know, next time you want to accidentally whack Seonghwa with a bludger, hit him hard enough that he stays out.” He grumbles to Mingi, half joking, half serious. The others laugh, all except Wooyoung, who gives him a pout and Hongjoong winces.

“Sorry, Youngie.”

“You know he’s a nice guy.” Wooyoung protests, affronted at having his family so openly made fun of. Hongjoong forces himself to nod along, for the sake of his and Wooyoung’s friendship more than for Seonghwa’s character. As much as he complains about the younger, Hongjoong would be absolutely broken if Wooyoung and him were to actually fight. Annoying as he could be, Wooyoung was his friend, a good friend and there was nothing, not even his distaste for Seonghwa, that he would risk that over.

“We’re just teasing, Youngie. It’s just some lighthearted rivalry.” Mingi reassured, clapping a hand over his shoulder. “I love Yunho but he’s still a git and if he scores against me in our match in November then I will absolutely hate his guts.”

“Oh please.” Jongho interjected, rolling his eyes. “You’d pout for days if he ever even joked about hating you and the poor guy would have to follow you around for days to make it up to you.”

“Ridiculous.” Mingi scoffed even as his ears turned pink. “I find Yunho annoying.”

“Is that why you practically begged the sorting hat to put you in Slytherin after Yunho was sorted or why you sulked for a week straight until Yunho promised you for the hundredth time that you’d still be best friends?” Wooyoung asked innocently and Mingi spluttered as he fumbled to take off his gloves in some lost attempt to look unaffected.

“You’re one to talk! You cried when Yeosang and you got separated and you were practically green with jealousy over San and his friendship until you realised he’s not half bad.” Jongho added, laughing as he recalled the stories he’d heard from his big brother.

“I was basing my opinion on San on you, brat.”

“I wasn’t even at Hogwarts then, hyung.”

“You were just that annoying then that I felt before I ever met you.” Wooyoung was grinning like a Cheshire cat but it quickly fell away when Jongho reached out menacingly. He yelped and ran behind Ryunjin, who rolled her eyes and shot him an unimpressed look for using her as a shield.

“Wooyoung, stop bugging the girls.” Hongjoong chastised and Ryunjin lightly whacked his head with the end of her broom before walking to join her other teammates by the lockers. Wooyoung shrugged but then fixed Hongjoong with a rather shrewd look as he asked, “You don’t actually mean what you just said about Seonghwa hyung, do you?”

Hongjoong is a little taken aback at the seriousness of the question and he is starting to regret the detour. Wooyoung has always known his dislike for his older cousin and he had never seemed overly upset by it. It’s not like Hongjoong spews hateful words every single minute of the day about the taller or anything, though the few times he’s maybe taken things too far, Wooyoung had always given him a look and maybe it bothered Wooyoung more than he let on.

So he tries to comfort him and says, “Um…I don’t really want him to die?”

There’s an awkward silence and Mingi blows out a breath as he just says, “Wow. Touching.”

“Oh shut up.”

“Don’t worry, hyung.” Jongho interjects seriously, nudging the other with his shoulder. “Hongjoong hyung is just in a feisty mood today because Seonghwa called him tiny.”

The mood lifts immediately but Hongjoong isn’t overly thrilled about it as the others laugh at him. He groans and asks, “How did you even hear that, brat?”

“You literally screeched it out. I’m sure everyone in the astronomy tower even heard.”

Hongjoong considers smacking Jongho with his broom but decides against it because Jongho can retaliate with both his own broom and the club he’s still holding. Plus Jongho is faster than him and he can’t really outrun all three of his friends if they decide to band together to tease him. He’s found it’s their favorite thing to do but as much as he feigns annoyance, he’s not really mad about it.

So he sighs and turns to Wooyoung. “I was just making fun of him, Youngie. He got under my skin with the comment and I was just compensating for that. Atop the other thing.”

“Yeah, okay. I was just asking-”

“I mean he didn’t say anything wrong.”

“Wait. What do you mean atop the other thing?” Jongho asked, catching the words he’d muttered under his breath. Hongjoong shrugged as everyone turned to look at him and he was amused by the disparity in their expression. Mingi was looking excited, Jongho worried and incredulous and before Hongjoong could answer, a commotion arose from the changing rooms opposite theirs.

“Oh my god, what is that?”

“Gross!”

“Gah! Get them off!”

And the last yell, louder than anyone, sent a thrill of excitement down his spine as Seonghwa thunderously boomed, “Kim Hongjoong, what the fuck?”

“Hyung, what did you do? I can't get caught up in a prank war, I have to study this semester!” Wooyoung asked, his whine undercut with how he giggled. The rest of the team surged forward to crowd at the door to get a peak and Jongho roared with laughter as the Slytherins door was thrown open and a swarm of frogs bounced out, followed closely by some members of the team as they gagged or shook off green mucus. Hongjoong can barely see through his own tears, doubled over from laughter and he laughs harder when Mingi starts to shriek, “No, no, it wasn’t me, I had nothing to do with it- Yeosang, keep your slimy hands off me!”

Mingi peeled past him, San and Yunho hot on his heels and the rest of the team, both his and Seonghwas are now intertwined in a wrestling match as the Slytherins try to swipe the mucus and slime on the Gryffindors. No one bothers to verbally defend themselves, as was the long standing tradition of the prank wars between the two teams and the loyal mindset of one for all and all for one. It has been a mindset that Wooyoung had exploited many times and Hongjoong had been dragged into more prank wars than he could count.

He supposes it's only fitting that he is the one to initiate one this time and to use the mantra to his own benefit.

Namely, it didn’t matter if Hongjoong had acted alone and without informing them, this was a collective war.

And Hongjoong can’t bring himself to feel overly bad about it. He’s been dragged into plenty of his friends' messes and has been put through hell thanks to their pranking.

And also because it’s all worth it when he catches sight of Seonghwa glaring at him, though his giddiness hitches into something uncomfortable when he catches sight of him.

Seonghwa is shirtless, hands over his hips as he glares daggers at Hongjoong. Even with the green slime glazed and dripping over half his face and shoulder, his hair sticking in an unflattering swoop over the eye, he still somehow manages to look handsome.

A frog ribbits on his shoulder and Seonghwa shakes it off in disgust, swooping the hair off his face and grimacing as the sticky substance drools over his fingers. Somewhere in the back of his head, Hongjoong is acutely aware that the room seems to have fallen silent, though his eyes show that everyone is still yelling, running, laughing.

But for Hongjoong, all his senses seemed to have dulled so that he could hyperfixate on Seonghwa’s muscled arms and his deep collar bones.

His stomach is coiled tighter than ever.

God, what is it about Park Seonghwa that always leaves him so vexed? Even when he’s winning, he still can’t escape the swoopy pit.
Seonghwa drags a hand over his face and then flicks his fingers to rid them off the sticky substance and then he smiles, all coy and challenging, a look so familiar and yet strangely captivating because he can’t look away.

Which is how he can make out every word that Seonghwa mouths, despite the commotion.

“It’s on, Kim.”