Plan B
Seymour Mulciber stepped into the office of the Head of the Department of Magical Sports and Games and uttered a curse upon seeing the ridiculous pile of documents his boss, Matt Lament, had left for him. The Quidditch World Cup was fun and all, but the paperwork was a bloody bitch.
With a groan, Seymour flicked the door shut behind him, fluttering the poster of the National team pasted onto it. Natalie Malfoy seemed to smirk at him. He glared at it.
“Hope you caught the bloody Snitch,” he grunted, glancing at the clock above Matt’s heaping desk. The hands of the clocks were charmed to have Ricky Webster’s and Leonard Cadwallader’s faces on them (Mulciber had a suspicion they had bothered Malfoy or one of the Pottingers to cast the charm, since neither of them were very magically skilled beyond hitting Bludgers). Ricky winked from the minute hand. The Russian match should have just ended. Mulciber wondered when they would learn the outcome.
Approaching the desk, Mulciber glanced over one of the stacks of documents. The top was a bill from the Russian hotel where the national team had stayed the past two weeks. Picking it up, he skimmed it over and frowned. There was no way the team ate that much food. It was twice as much as what they’d spent in France.
With a sigh, he pulled his wand out and flicked it. An ink pot and quill appeared on the desk, and Mulciber sat down. Pushing parchment away to clear a spot so he could begin the dull work of approving expenses, scheduling travel arrangements, organizing logistics, sending whatever he didn’t want to deal with to the Minister’s office, and sending whatever he really didn’t want to deal with to the Department of International Magical Cooperation.
He glanced over the bill from Russia again. There had to be a mistake. How could the team have blown two thousand Galleons on Pepper-Up Potions when he knew for a fact that Triple I supplied the entire team’s potions needs per the contract with Natalie. That had been a literal goldmine for the Malfoy family company. Particularly once other teams started contracting with Triple I as well.
Maybe he’d send the suspicious bill to Antonin Dolohov in the Minister’s office. No, that wouldn’t do. Someone might call it a conflict of interest if the bill was refuted with Tiberius Malfoy’s signature. He’d send it to Evan Rosier or Zack Nott in Seamus Dawson’s office. They’d piss and moan about it but do bloody good work. And then he wouldn’t have to deal with it. Perfect.
Mulciber folded the bill up and put it aside to send off later. Glancing down at the next one, he grinned. It was a memo from the latest meeting between the Quidditch World Cup Committee over where to host the final match, given the precariousness of the post-war Muggle world. He eagerly devoured the words, almost completely oblivious when the office door burst open.
“Oi, Seymour, got a letter here addressed to the Department of Magical Sports and Games, and it looks bloody important.” Antonin Dolohov practically pounced into the office, waving about a scarlet letter that was starting to smoke around the edges. A delighted smirk on his sharp face. Behind him were Evan Rosier, Zack Nott, and Lloyd Avery. All with excited grins.
“Bloody hell!” exclaimed Mulciber as Dolohov dropped the letter on top of one of the piles on the desk. Mulciber hastily snatched it up before it could send the whole desk up in flames. Hissing as the hot letter singed his fingers.
“Who sent a bloody howler? The owls are supposed to sort through and not deliver them to us ever since that bloke McGaskey sent a howler over how he thought a witch shouldn’t be playing on the national team.”
“Look at the name,” said Dolohov and he raised a dark eyebrow. “Pretty important name.”
Mulciber glanced down at the howler, sighing upon reading the name of the national team captain, before yelping in pain. He tossed the howler into the air just as it exploded into flames.
“WE WON!” bellowed the voice of Eugene Dent. “WE BLOODY BEAT RUSSIA! MALFOY DIDN'T CATCH THE SNITCH BUT IT DIDN'T MATTER! POTTINGERS BLEW THEM UP WITH GOALS! WE WON — what? What do you mean? Bloody fuck get out of my way-” and the howler burst into flames. A miniature fireball accompanied by soot and ashes rained down on the heaping desk.
Mulciber leapt to his feet, frantically shouting spells to avoid a disaster as Dolohov, Rosier, Nott, and even Avery exploded into laughter.
“Not funny!” he yelled as he held up his wand, levitating all the parchment and documents and brushing off the remaining soot and ashes from the desk.
“It was funny,” sniggered Rosier and Mulciber shot him a look. Nott and Rosier high-fived each other.
“Hey, they won,”’ Nott spread his arms and raised his eyebrows. “Can’t complain about that.”
“Oh, he’ll find a way to,” Dolohov smirked and retrieved his own wand. With a flick, all the hovering paperwork crashed back onto the desk, in complete disarray.
Mulciber sighed, watching the little progress he had made get buried. “Seriously, Antonin? Don’t you have some new intern to bully or some witch to flirt with?”
“Why did you think I came here?” Dolohov grinned, but then blinked and corrected himself. “To bully, not flirt, so we’re clear. I didn’t come to flirt with Matt Lament’s bitch.”
“Rough day?” asked Nott as Mulciber scoffed at Dolohov’s comment.
“Yes, actually, and I’ve only just begun,” snapped Mulciber. “But while you two are here,” he turned to Rosier and Nott, “I’ve got work for you.”
“You’re not our boss,” sniffed Rosier.
“Shut up.” Mulciber shuffled through the piles of parchment, completely out of order from Dolohov’s hijacking of his hover charm, until he found the suspicious bill.
“Here,” he handed it over to Nott. “Bring that up with Seamus. Those prices look a little high.”
Dolohov snatched it from Nott’s hand and perused it. “Hm, Dent trying to poison the entire team with Pepper-Up Potions?”
“They just won, moron,” Rosier grabbed the parchment away from the Minister’s assistant and looked it over himself.
“Don’t you have actual work to be doing, Antonin?” Mulciber looked at Dolohov.
“I am working,” said Dolohov coolly. “I do whatever the Minister needs me to do. The Minister wanted me to deliver you that howler-”
“No, he didn’t,” interrupted Rosier, “Antonin saw it arrive and took it from the owl.”
“Shut up, Evan,” Dolohov continued without missing a beat, “and now I have to go inform the Minister that the national team has won their second round game, against the country everyone seems to hate at the moment.”
“Not to interrupt,” Avery coughed from near the door. “But did anyone think the end of that howler was a bit. . . dodgy?”
“Yeah,” Rosier nodded, a concerned expression coming over his face. “Sounded like Dent was bloody scared.”
Mulciber raised an eyebrow. “They just won, why would he be scared-”
“Wait,” Nott shared a look with Rosier. “He said Malfoy didn’t catch the Snitch.”
“They still won,” Mulciber reminded them.
Rosier reached into his pocket for something Mulciber couldn’t see and just smiled grimly over at Nott.
“What the fuck do you mean — we won-” yelled Dent as he sprinted off the field after being informed his Seeker fled the field immediately after Vladimir Solokov caught the Snitch.
“She looked pretty upset!” the referee managed to call after him as he sprinted towards their locker room, wondering what the hell had happened. They had just won! They’d defeated Russia! Didn’t she know that?
“MALFOY!” shouted Dent as he scrambled through the iron-clad tunnel and burst into their locker room. He couldn’t keep the grin off his face. They were moving onto the next round. Sure, Plan A had failed — very drastically, you could say — but he had gotten to enact Plan B. Plan B had saved everything. Thank Merlin he had actually concocted a Plan B.
He found his Seeker huddled on the floor in front of her stall, hiding her face behind her still-gloved hands with her robes spread all around her. He hurried over to her immediately, almost tripping over his own Quidditch robes in his haste.
She flinched as he approached and he slowed down, feeling buffeted by some unfelt wind.
“I’m sorry, Dent,” her voice cracked, face still hidden behind her hands. “I couldn’t catch it. I wasn’t focused-”
He understood now. She thought Solokov catching the Snitch meant they had lost. “WE WON!” he bellowed and she froze.
Peeking out over her hands, she stared up at him. “What?”
“We won,” he repeated and reached down to pull her up. Before he even brushed her robes, he found himself lying flat on the floor, a pulsing headache as a dreadful, horrible, awful feeling engulfed him.
Sure, they had just won and were advancing — but everything was terrible and the world was a frightening place and he just wanted to go home but he wasn’t sure what home was because it felt more like a who.
“Sorry,” she repeated from somewhere above him. It stunned him more than whatever had made him fall to the floor.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, slowly sitting up and staring at her. She was still crouched on the floor in front of the stall.
“We won?” she weakly asked, gray eyes illuminated from the redness around them.
“Yeah,” he explained in a slow voice, “the Pottingers drove the score up so high it didn’t matter that Russia caught the Snitch. We won by ten points — which is still winning. That was Plan B.”
“Ten points,” she repeated, looking dazed. “Plan B?”
“Well, yeah,” said Dent, rubbing his forehead and scooting slightly away from her. He still felt dreadful. “Plan B was drive the score up in case Plan A didn’t work.”
“Plan A?”
“Er, Plan A didn’t work, obviously, since you didn’t catch the Snitch.”
Natalie stared at him and Dent watched her gray eyes visibly darken. “What?”
He found himself moving farther away as something started buzzing in the back of his mind. He had a sudden, violent urge to jump up and sprint away. “Er, well, you know how you play better when you’re mad-”
“You didn’t,” she whispered, voice low and angry as a new strain of terror gripped Dent. There was something swelling in her eyes now and he could feel it in his bones-
“You planned that,” she wheezed, rising to her feet with a whirl of her robes. She stood above him now, glaring down at him. Dent wasn’t sure if he was insanely attracted to her or insanely afraid of her at that moment. “You told Ricky to piss me off? What the fuck, Dent? Do you know how dangerous that was?”
Dent pulled himself off the floor, eyes locked on hers. Her words were odd — the hair on the back of his neck stood up and he shivered. “Well, er — oh. . . .” Dent froze and gawked at her. He expected to be yelled at, screamed at, cursed at. But Malfoy now had tears running down her face. And for some reason, it was a bigger punch in the gut than if she had swung a fist.
A raw feeling exploded through him, starting in the pit of his stomach and rippling through his entire body. Guilt. He identified it immediately because he hated the feeling. And he found himself cursing his own actions. He knew trying to whip her up into a fury was playing with fire — and they had almost been burned off the map of countries left in the run for the Cup.
“I’m leaving this bloody country,” she muttered, wiping at her face and pushing past him. “See you at practice, captain.”
Lord Voldemort apparated onto the grounds of the magically modified mansion tucked away in the Irish countryside after receiving word from Evan Rosier. Upon arrival, he immediately knew something was afoot. And it wasn’t just the fact that the grounds looked like a tornado had bowled through. The grounds felt like a tornado was still there.
He stared up at the front entryway. The stairs had been restored once Natalie realized that not having stairs from the entrance gates to the front of the house looked ridiculous. But he wasn’t surprised that the stairs were now absolutely destroyed. Pulverized to such small pieces they looked more like a trail of sand trekking up to the front doors.
He was surprised that the imposing Ionic columns had massive chunks taken out of them, and the doors had been blown off their hinges. He spotted the doors halfway across the sometimes well-manicured, sometimes well-annihilated front lawn of the mansion. They were sticking up out of one of the rows of hedges that had been stripped of all their leaves and now looked more like skeletal trees.
Rosier hadn’t been too specific on what had occurred; Lord Voldemort hazarded a guess that Britain was no longer in the run for the Cup. But he told himself to be prepared for anything.
Trekking his way up the grounds to the front entryway of the house was a nightmare. Once he was there, he took a minute to inspect the destroyed Ionic columns. Then he pulled out his wand and repaired them with a wave of it.
The columns were her favorite part of the mansion. She’d hate it if she knew they had been damaged. If she already knew he would just lie and say she hadn’t ruined them in her emotional turmoil. She wouldn’t believe him, of course, but then she’d be annoyed about something other than the columns.
He stepped over the rubble strewn along the doorway and peered into the darkness of the mansion.
The whole point of the house her Muggle father had once owned was to be a base of operations but also a sort of go-to, contained space she could destroy whenever in a mood. At first, he hadn’t understood why she wanted to use the old Muggle house, especially with so many memories attached to it — no matter how different it now looked. Until he had been there when she burned the basement to ashes. And then he understood.
The house was silent as he entered, as if it was holding its breath, waiting for the storm to pass. The entrance hall glittered with shards of glass, chunks of marble, and splinters of wood. The sweeping staircase leading to the upper floors was no longer a staircase but a ruin of polished oak. What was once the curling bannister was now a collection of sharpened spikes impaling the air above them.
A loud crack and a trembling house-elf appeared in front of him. It clutched some article of clothing proclaiming support for the English national team.
The elf stared at him with glassy blue eyes and blinked rapidly for a moment. It looked to be in extreme pain, along with being terribly confused, like its life had been turned as upside down as the house.
“Where is she?” he demanded and the elf shivered.
“Mistress has freed-”
“HIRAM!” shrieked a voice from somewhere inside the house. “GET OUT!”
The elf squeaked in fear but looked relieved. It disappeared with another crack.
Tom continued through the house, hurrying along now. Stepping over marble, glass, wood, and things he couldn’t even identify until he came to the back hall of the mansion. The door leading out to the woods behind the estate had also been blown off its hinges, and the walls looked ready to cave in from pressure, with deep cracks running up the alabaster.
But a figure was strewn about on the floor, still dressed in red national team Quidditch robes, loose blonde hair encircling her head, and murderous looking eyes with tear tracks etching their way down her face.
She took a bite out of a licorice wand and stared up at him from the floor. “I freed him because he wouldn’t stop fucking screaming.”
“Sounds logical,” he said and stepped over a chunk of the wall to settle on the floor beside her. He snatched the licorice wand from her hand and flung it out the open doors behind her.
“I was eating that.”
“What happened this time?”
“We won but we lost.”
Tom narrowed his eyes and pulled her into his lap. Shivering as a shock of her energy bolted through him. His mind went fuzzy for a moment before the chaos grew focused. And he understood why the house looked the way it did.
“Try again, making sense this time.”
She scowled up at him but settled herself against his chest and sighed. “I didn’t catch the Snitch. But we still won. But I didn’t catch the Snitch. And stupid Dent planned it to deliberately piss me off but all it did was ensure I didn’t catch the Snitch-”
“So he was meddling with something he shouldn’t have been meddling with.”
“Um. . . yeah, yeah that’s exactly what happened.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Well — no. Disappointed, maybe. Not surprised. The idiot will do anything to make sure we win.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
She froze, staring up at him for several long minutes before closing her eyes and growing limp in his embrace. “Yes.”
Eugene Dent dreaded practice the morning after the Russian game. Sure, they’d won and would be moving on. Russia wasn’t too happy about that.
But he fully expected someone to be dead when he entered the locker room at six in the morning and glanced around.
His jaw dropped. Apparently Natalie Malfoy had just cracked some amusing joke that had Ricky Webster and Leonard Cadwallader on the floor, tears streaming from their eyes. Even the Pottingers were snickering to themselves. Though that wasn’t at all surprising — the Pottingers were always snickering about something.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, stepping into the room and commanding their attention.
“Beautiful here was just proving my theory correct,” said Ricky with a smirk. “Notice how calm she is?”
“Wish I could try it,” said Caddy wistfully.
“Yeah, no one ever gives Caddy any attention because they’re too busy getting over how stupid Ricky looks,” cracked Natalie.
Ricky preened, thinking it was a compliment before sitting bolt upright and sputtering, “hey!”
“That’s enough,” barked Dent, glaring around at them all. This was not the atmosphere he expected, but it was an atmosphere he could handle. Thank Merlin. “Get on the field you lot. We got the next game in a few weeks.”
There was some grumbling but they picked up their brooms and marched out of the door. Dent brought up the rear, pulling Natalie aside to talk before they went out to the field.
“Hey, uh, Malfoy, er-”
“Save it, Dent,” she said with a grin. And he was relieved. She was not mad at him. He hated when she was mad at him. “All’s fair in Quidditch. But next time you try to piss me off, just let me know, okay? Because I’ll help you out in doing so.”
He stared at her in astonishment. “Er, alright. Good to know.”
“Hey, beautiful!” called Ricky as they stepped onto the field. The crisp autumn wind was blowing his blond curls all about and he knew it. “You know you’re still always welcome at my place, right?”
Natalie rolled her eyes and glanced at Dent. “Is this one of your plans?”
“No,” he said, “Ricky’s just like that.”
“Of course,” she snorted and then glared over at Ricky, who started hovering on his broom and flexing his muscles under his Quidditch robes. “Don’t you have a girlfriend, Webster?”
Ricky looked miffed. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Did she dump you?” asked Caddy with fascination. “I’ve never dated a Veela.”
“You’ve never dated anyone, Caddy,” sighed Dent, sharing a look with Natalie. Sure she was bloody mental, but it wasn’t the same kind of mental as the rest of the team.
“She didn’t dump me,” sneered Ricky and he ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t get dumped.”
“So she’s single then?” continued Caddy, excitement coming over his pimply face. “Think she’d find me handsome?”
“She didn’t dump me!” yelled Ricky, jumping off from his broom. “I said I don’t get dumped!”
“Alright!” shouted Dent, attempting to assert control over the situation. He ignored the sniggering of the Pottinger triplets in the air above them and outright laughter of Natalie beside him. “Enough! We’re never going to win the bloody Cup if you lot find something stupid to argue about every five minutes!”
“Make Caddy understand that Ricky Webster does NOT get dumped,” insisted Ricky, flinging a finger in Leonard’s direction and stamping his foot like a five year old. Caddy just looked bewildered at what was going on.
Natalie had to clutch at Dent’s robes to prevent her from falling to the ground in her laughter. “Oh, I’m so happy I’m not the captain of these morons.”
“Ricky, stop acting like a child,” snapped Dent, feeling much more energetic and focused with Natalie holding onto his robes, even if she was laughing. “Caddy, get on your broom. Tommy, Tucker, Ted, stop laughing-”
“I’m not laughing,” said one of them. Dent thought it might be Tucker.
“Tucker is laughing,” said another and Dent changed his mind.
“Malfoy gets to laugh but not us?” said the third.
“Stop laughing, Malfoy, you’re making me look like an idiot,” muttered Dent to the blonde witch beside him.
She let go of his robes and straightened up. Letting out one last snort before saluting him. “Aye, aye, captain.”
“Anyway,” Dent cleared his throat and glared around at the team. One by one, they all fell silent. “That Russian game was too bloody close. From here on out, we aren’t taking things lightly anymore.”
“We were taking things lightly?” muttered Ricky Webster, sounding flabbergasted.
“Shut up, Ricky,” Dent said immediately. “Do you want to win the Quidditch World Cup?”
“Well, uh, yeah, duh-”
“THEN BLOODY ACT LIKE IT!”
Ricky flinched, a brief look of astonishment coming over his face, but he remained silent.
“Malfoy, wipe that bloody smirk off your face or we’re staying here overnight,” snapped Dent.
Natalie dropped her face but glanced over at him. “You were gonna make us stay overnight anyway.”
“Yeah, I fucking was.”
Everyone was silent, staring at a now incensed Eugene Dent.
After he got his fill of glaring around at them as if trying to infect them with his own mania, he barked, “well, what’re you lot doing? Get in the goddamn air!”