Chapter 6
“You’re fucking joking, Prewett.” James couldn’t smother the genuine anger bubbling up in his stomach.
“About pretty much everything but this, Potter.” Gideon Prewett said with a smirk, not seeming even slightly contrite. “Having a place on the team last year doesn’t guarantee you one this year.”
“No,” James snapped, “being the best player in the school does.”
“I take objection to that,” Alice Fortescue chimed in merrily, playing with a rather docile-looking snitch.
“Take what you want, Alice, doesn’t make it less true.” James turned back to Gideon. “You’re really making me try out again?”
“I’m making everyone try out again, James. It’ll be good for the team. And if your ego is too big to handle that, then it’s probably too big to be on the team in the first place.” Gideon was still taller than James, and brawnier, his ginger hair cut close to his scalp. Even so, he had never been particularly intimidating. They’d known each other their entire lives. He’d gone to his older sister’s wedding, for Godric’s sake. Gideon Prewett was not about to cut him from the team.
“Okay, fine, theoretically, I’m happy to try out again,” he spoke louder to drown out Alice’s snort of laughter behind him, “but we’ve worked on this formation for a year now. This is the first time we don’t have to do try outs. No one left last year. Shacklebolt, McKinnon and I are tried and true. Why would we subject ourselves to try outs if we don’t absolutely have to?”
“Sort of sounds like Potter is willing to try out on our behalf,” Andi Shacklebolt joined the fray, dropping an athletic looking bag on the floor with a loud thump. “Which I, for one, have no problem with.”
“Me either,” Adam McKinnon followed her in, grinning.
James hadn’t seen much of Adam since his dream incident, but whether that was coincidental or by design, he didn’t know. He’d returned to the dormitory after one night of observation with Madame Pomfrey, but, other than saying he was considered perfectly healthy, didn’t mention the incident at all. And, so far, James hadn’t woken up to any more screaming.
“Fine,” Gideon said, and, for a moment, James tasted victory. “If James thinks he can play the role of three chasers at once, we should give him a chance. A timed match, Potter against the rest of the team. One hour. If you win, you get veto power over try outs.” A gasp echoed behind him. “If we win, you shut your mouth, do what I tell you, and clean everyone’s gear for the rest of the season.”
James opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. It was an insane proposition. It would be insane to accept it. But James Potter was good at quidditch. So, instead of responding, he offered his hand to Gideon. With a flicker of surprise, he took it, and the two shook hands amid the crows and cackles of the surrounding players.
***
The match–which was becoming known in Gryffindor Tower as the Potter Play–was scheduled for the second Saturday of the year, which gave him exactly a week to figure out how he was going to pull this off. He was an exceptional player, but he’d be facing the entirety of the team. He’d have to be chaser, keeper, and beater. And the rest of them would only have one target: him.
He couldn’t quite tell how he felt about the growing popularity of the upcoming match. The attention was gratifying. He’d already been well known about the school due to his other exploits, but this was the first time he’d had younger students pointing and whispering about him. The extra attention from girls didn’t hurt either. The main problem with all this attention was that they would all be present to witness the outcome of the Potter Play.
And, as of this moment, James had no idea how to win.
“You could stun them all,” Sirius offered, sitting in his customary place at the foot of James’s bed, leaning against one of the wooden posts.
“I think it might require a little more subtlety,” James remarked, voice muffled by the pillow he was currently pressing his face into. “Getting caught cheating is more embarrassing than losing.”
“Fair play,” Sirius responded, clearly thinking something over. “What if you did something to their brooms?”
James rolled onto his back and pushed himself up, running his fingers through his unruly hair. “Brooms are notoriously difficult to tamper with,” he said, not really in argument.
“Oh, right,” Sirius said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We would never do anything notoriously difficult, would we? We wouldn’t figure out how to cast corporeal patronuses in fourth year, or spend the better part of three years trying to become animagi just so we can run around with our best friend, the teenage werewolf?” He gave a dramatic sigh. “We just balk at a challenge.”
James threw a well-deserved pillow at him. “I’m at a roadblock in that research until I can figure out a reason to get McGonagall to let me into the restricted section again.”
“Just use the cloak,” Sirius scoffed.
“Tried,” James grumbled.
“ When ?”
“End of last year. Book started screaming at me until I put it back. Nothing worked, not silencio, nothing.” James shrugged. “Apparently some of them don’t allow themselves to be read unless you have the proper documentation.”
“Stupid books.”
James nodded, still thinking about the match. Sirius’s suggestion about brooms was the best one he’d made so far. And as long as James could figure out a way to inconvenience his opponents without putting them directly in harm’s way, well…at this point in his life, it was hard to imagine he could do something more impressive than beating an entire quidditch team singlehandedly.
“Could also just try to get some of them to throw the match for you,” Sirius said, “I mean, I doubt they want to do try-outs much, either.”
“Yeah, except Gid told them I’d clean all of their gear for the rest of the season.”
Sirius made a face. “Ugh. Foul.”
“I know.”
“Well,” Sirius said, clapping his hands together with a manic kind of practicality, “we’d best make sure you don’t lose, then.”
They spent the rest of the evening flicking through whatever quidditch books they could find under their beds to get a better understanding of what they were up against. Most of them were useless. It would have been too convenient to find a step-by-step guide on how to hex a quidditch broom. But if they could find a passage regarding the protections against hexes on brooms, they could be getting somewhere.
However, they were easily distracted, and soon had unearthed a cornucopia of forgotten items under their beds, even more impressive given they’d hardly been at Hogwarts a week. By the time they were joined by Remus and Peter, the entire dormitory was a mess.
Remus sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not cleaning this up.”
Sirius shot him a look. “No one asked you to.”
“Not yet .”
“I’ll clean it up,” James interrupted them, rolling his eyes. “Don’t you have patrols tonight, anyway, Moony?”
“I’m not even going to question how you know that, but yes, I do.” He looked at his watch, a small, silver thing that told both the time and the moon cycle on its dented face. “I’m going to miss next week’s thanks to my furry little problem, but it’s not like I can tell her that in advance.” He made a face. “I don’t even know why Dumbledore gave me this,” he fiddled with the badge on his robes. “He can’t have expected much.”
“Probably thought you could control the rest of us,” Sirius said, stretching as he got to his feet. James politely pretended not to notice the way Remus’s eyes followed the movement. He’d decided years ago that this was not his problem.
“I suppose you’re in luck then,” Remus said, as Sirius waved his wand and began to organize the books into neat stacks. “I’m hardly going to take points off you lot.”
“That’s what Lily’s for, I reckon,” Peter chimed in with a yawn, dumping his bag by his bed and sitting on the floor, examining a Puddlemere United jersey that had been caught up in the chaos. “Is this mine?”
“You can have it,” James offered, somewhat vainly thinking that it would now be too short on his taller frame. Then, he turned back to Remus. “You could step down, too, you know. We’ve got plenty of other things to be getting on with.”
Remus raised his eyebrows at him. “James Potter, suggesting quitting? Are you feeling okay?”
James rolled his eyes, ignoring the laughter of both Sirius and Peter. “Fuck off.”
“Seriously,” Remus went on, cracking a smile, “you’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. You would actively think less of me if I even thought about stepping down.”
“That’s not true,” James argued. “I suggested it, didn’t I?”
“Besides,” Remus continued as if James hadn’t spoken, “I wouldn’t want to leave Lily without a partner, even temporarily. Some strange shit is going on around here. Did you hear about that group of Slytherins?”
“Which Slytherins?” Sirius asked, his smile faltering.
“Not, uh, I mean, they were seventh years,” Remus said, awkwardly. “Apparently Hagrid found them completely unconscious by the Black Lake. No signs of anything, just some burned grass. None of them are talking, which means it was probably another student.”
“How’d you work that out?” Peter asked.
Remus shrugged. “Sounds like they’re embarrassed, s’all. Otherwise they would have told the teachers what happened.”
“You never know with Slytherins,” Sirius said, darkly, having settled back down. James wondered if he was thinking about Regulus.
“When did this happen?” James asked, as Remus changed into a thick woolen sweater.
“Some time last night,” he said, slightly muffled. Once his head was through, he pinned his badge back on his chest, and gave him a suspicious look. “It wasn’t you, was it?”
James shook his head. “I’d never miss the annual Welcome Back to Gryffindor Tower First Friday Night Celebration Bash.”
“We’ve got to figure out a way to shorten that,” Sirius snickered.
“I think it’s part of the charm,” Peter argued, and James privately agreed. Remus just rolled his eyes and headed back out the door, leaving James with another mystery to solve.
***
He made headway in solving his first problem on the Wednesday night after Defense Against the Dark Arts. James typically avoided the library. One could argue he avoided books, unless the subject was interesting to him in its own right. It wasn’t that he looked down on studying, exactly. But he did look down on the idea of needing to study. And if he could get top marks without it, wasn’t that better? It was certainly easier. And it left time open for other pursuits.
All modern brooms came with a concoction of charms to improve the experience and protect against tampering. Some of those charms could be altered, for the flier’s comfort. For example, almost all brooms came with a pre-applied cushioning charm, to make the seat more comfortable for flying. He dreaded to think what it might feel like without that.
But, people had different desires when it came to comfort. Which meant the cushioning charm could be altered. It was also possible to charm brooms with extra protections against losing your seat, for wizards with disabilities. It was possible to fly with no legs at all, if you had the right broom.
Which all meant that it was possible to charm a broom, as long as the broom could be convinced that you were doing it with good intentions. And James Potter could be very convincing.
Two hours of research later–done mostly in a solitary corner of the library where he sincerely hoped no one would see him–and he had a plan.
The tricky part would be timing. He had to make sure the brooms weren’t noticeably jinxed during their warm up, or the game would be cancelled. He also had to give enough plausible deniability to ensure they would play out the game even if they did notice something odd.
He was going to alter the cushioning charms on the rest of his team’s broomsticks to falter once they reached a certain height, and to reestablish themselves when they got back down to an appropriate altitude. James would then be the only one with access to half the field, given that if anyone chased him up there, they’d be stuck with a broomstick up their arse. He hoped the surprise of that feeling would be enough to slow them down.
The next avenue of attack would be visual. The goggles they played with in bad weather had virtually no protections on them, aside from the obvious impervious charm. He debated trying to use some kind of disillusionment charm to change how the quaffle looked to them, but after a whispered debate with the rest of the Marauders, they decided they’d be no way to control the outcome of that jinx, and if he wanted to remain plausibly innocent, they’d need a different plan. Then Peter suggested an Entrancing Enchantment.
There was no way to really recreate actual love, even with something as powerful as Amortentia, which James did not see a reason to mess around with. But there were a number of charms that could tamper with someone’s perception of you. Dulling their senses to surrounding interference, and creating feelings of infatuation.
“So you’re going to make them all in love with you?” Sirius asked, dubiously. It was a testament to their friendship that he didn’t immediately argue against the idea.
“No,” James said, still thinking through the idea. “I just need to change their perception. Make them care less about me, if anything. Less about the quaffle, too.”
“So you’d charm the goggles to make the quaffle less… interesting to them.” Sirius nodded, slowly.
“Exactly. They’d still see the ball, but there would be some kind of hesitation in actually chasing it.”
“You’re missing rather an important element here, James,” Remus’s mouth twisted. Contrary to what his prefect badge might suggest, Remus Lupin was no stranger to breaking school rules. In fact, he was often the lynchpin in ensuring their reckless operations were a success. “You need the goggles for this to work, unless you plan on jinxing your actual teammates without them noticing. And you’d only wear the goggles in bad weather. The weather report in the Prophet predicted sun all week.”
James frowned. Pesky werewolf. Bringing practical logic into his machinations.
“Could do a Metelojinx,” Sirius offered. “They’d need their goggles for a storm, surely.”
“Bit dramatic,” Remus said, as James shook his head.
“If it’s that big of a storm, they’d probably just cancel the match. It’s not like it’s for the Cup.”
“You’d also need someone maintaining the jinx during the game, and before,” Remus said, “to avoid suspicion. And, James, as impressive as your spellwork is, I find it hard to believe you could maintain a thunderstorm while flying in it.”
“I also think we’re ignoring the fact that Gideon is going to expect you to cheat,” Peter added, looking a little regretful to be pointing it out. “Even with the cloak, it’s going to be difficult to get away from him.”
At that objection, James grinned. And the other three’s faces quickly turned to either resignation or amusement.
“And that, my fellow Marauders, is why you have friends.”