Please Be There If I Remember

Chapter Thirty-Six: Crowds

A/n: This is where the chapters start to get quite long--this one with a whopping 3200 words xD Because the word count stays consistently longer after this for each chapter, and it takes me more time to finish them, updates will now be every four days. Also, there are parts taken from The Order of the Pheonix. Enjoy! <3

Draco was having one of the worst days of his life.

The first part of the day had been great—he had gotten a letter from his mother and then learned that there was a quidditch game between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. And, what was probably the best part of it all, was that he had heard someone say something about Harry being the Gryffindor Seeker. His day had been bright and cheerful, and he was completely ready to be in those stands screaming his mind out for Harry to get the snitch, while maintaining a nicely created facade for himself on the outside so no one thought he had gone mental.

Then he had gotten to the stands, and the Gryffindor team flew onto the pitch, Draco's eyes catching no sight of that unruly black hair. Instead, what he did see, was Ron's bright orange flying unsteadily to the goal posts where he was Keeper.

The following match was one of the saddest things Draco had ever seen in his limited, barely-remembered life.

The game began with Draco fervently twisting around in the stands looking everywhere for Harry on the pitch and having no such luck. Draco never found him, but what he did find was Hufflepuff practically decimating the Gryffindor team, and Ron being so nervous he let in almost all of the goals. Almost.

There was one that the boy was able to stop when the ball came straight towards him, and he was too nervous and frozen on the spot to move out of the way in time before getting smacked in the face by the quaffle.

Even from where Draco was sitting, he could see that Ron looked like he was about to throw up.

Although Draco had done that small amount of training with him, he still let in an embarrassingly large amount of goals, (okay, so it was all of them except for the accidental save, but at least he stopped at least one, right?) and the game was over in about twenty minutes. Ginny, who was apparently Gryffindor's seeker—Draco was going to have to find whoever said anything about Harry being the Seeker, because he was going to hex the living daylights out of them—caught the snitch, but the score was already so low in their favour that even with the 150 points from the snitch, Gryffindor had lost by a saddening ten.

Draco actually felt bad about it and he wasn't even playing. The stands were subdued and the Gryffindor was in absolute shambles, red hastily leaving the stands with their heads low and clenched fists as they looked like they wanted to give some strongly worded opinions to their team who had failed spectacularly on the pitch.

The Slytherin side, however, was cheering and somehow insulting the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindor at the same time.

"I can't believe Gryffindor was so bad that they lost to the Puffs," someone said behind him.

"That's a new low, even for Gryffindorks. And that's saying something."

Draco had to physically restrain himself from turning around and shoving his wand into the person's throat. Could no one in his house show common human decency? It really wasn't that hard to just shut your mouth and walk away, so why did everyone in this bloody school have to be so up in other people's business? Also, if you were going to talk about one certain Harry Potter being the seeker to one certain house, at least be telling the truth.

Draco got out of the stands and stalked back to his dorm, his mood completely soured.

~*"*~

Draco dipped his quill in the black ink in front of him, getting ready to send a response to his mother. It had been a few weeks since that horrendous quidditch game, and he and Harry were finally getting somewhere in the occlumency sessions. Harry's shields were still weak, and Draco could pass through them without much trouble, but he now needed to push harder and would come back to himself sweating. Harry wasn't faring much better, their last session almost ending in a quarrel when Green Eyes got heated when Draco said something about Snape just trying to teach him.