Catch The Snitch

Miral found herself standing in the center of the Quidditch Pitch, staring up at the sky, her broom in hand. She'd been there for some time- since the sun had started to set and was now looking up at the stars. It was cold now and she could see her breath in the air, and she had started to lose some feeling in her fingers, but here she stood. Even though it was clear she meant to fly, she wasn't wearing the quidditch uniform, she was just in a pair of jeans and a sweater.

She'd been flying since she was young; it had always been her escape. To imagine flying far and away from everything that felt like shadows that were meant to drag her down. She'd come out here more than a few times to just fly around, and practice some tricks on her own, but lately, it was just... hollow.

She sighed, looking down and rubbing her eyes. She couldn't falter, she had too much riding on her being able to maintain everything she'd done thus far. But.... what did she want from all this? She shook her head, "Get it together, Mira," she chided herself before getting on her broom and kicking off, "A good brisk flight will clear our head of this funk," she murmured, though she didn't take off just yet, seeming almost unsure of her own words.

"Damn it," she swore, gritting her teeth a bit as she tried to get out of her head. She clapped her hands to her cheeks, "Come on!" she said a bit louder, like trying to hype herself up.

When Jade had visited her trust vault for the first time, in the days leading up to the start of her Hogwarts experience, she discovered that the Ministry hadn’t liquidated all of her parents’ possessions, but had preserved a few of their things that Jade would likely want to keep. Among these items were her parents’ wands and brooms. One of the brooms was a Firebolt, the other a Sonic Broom–both wickedly fast. Jade decided to take the Firebolt with her to Hogwarts.

In September, she’d learned to fly on a variety of the school’s crummy old brooms, the quality depending entirely on how soon she’d arrived to her lessons. To her delight, she proved to be a pretty good flier.

But she needed practice with a real broom. Her broom.

So for the last few months, whenever she managed to finish her homework early, she’d take her Firebolt for a ride around the grounds. Doing this between dusk and curfew meant she’d have fewer spectators, and fewer people asking for a chance to try out her broom–she was quite possessive of it and didn’t trust others to return it in quite the same condition.

When she rode her Firebolt at breakneck speed, it was easy for her to forget her struggles. The bully who'd made antlers painfully sprout from her head. The slacker who'd erased Katie's name on an assignment and replaced it with his own. Someone in her own house who'd stolen her towel and change of clothes while she was showering. A teacher who'd assigned entirely too much homework and put entirely too-difficult questions on a test. How her peers had laughed at her struggle to read when it was her turn to read aloud from their textbook.

In the dusk air, she had no cares in the world. It was liberating.

On this particular night, she thought to fly around the Quidditch pitch. Sometimes she liked to imagine what it would be like to play on her house team, and this was about as close as she thought she’d get, as she underestimated her own flying skill.

She made a couple high-speed loops around the pitch before noticing that she wasn’t alone, that she’d intruded upon someone else. Curious as to who else would be out here after dusk, she slowed and angled her broom down. Only when she drew near to Miral did she recognize her as a prefect and Quidditch player from her own house.

She brought her broom to a hover near Miral. “Is everything OK?”, she asked, nevermind the absurdity of a first-year asking this of a sixth-year she barely knew.