Ron's feet had barely touched the ground before his knees gave way, and he nearly fell into the snow.
Seeing Ron stagger forward, Harry quickly stepped out and reached for him, intending to give him a hand.
Unexpectedly, Fred and George were faster. Each grabbed one of Ron's arms and held him up.
They even said in deliberately concerned tones, "Oh dear! Ron! You'd better be careful! Don't go hurting yourself in a fall!"
Although Fred and George's words were as nonsensical as ever, Ron still found them somewhat surprising.
Why did his brothers seem like completely different people, suddenly being so warm and friendly toward him?
Under normal circumstances, Fred and George definitely would not have said such things, much less taken the initiative to help him up.
Before he could investigate the reason, he heard Harry's concerned voice. "Ron, are you all right?"
"I feel... uh..." Ron nodded. He had just shaken his hand when an embarrassed smile appeared on his face, and he swallowed the words he had been about to say.
Based on his experience from the previous two matches, his wrists should have been throbbing painfully after such an intense game of Quidditch.
But this time was completely different. His wrists felt perfectly fine—better, even, than they had after doing homework last night.
There would be O.W.L. exams at the end of this school year, and the professors had been assigning more and more homework to help the students prepare.
Professor Binns's A History of Magic assignments were especially typical, usually involving all sorts of tedious copying tasks.
Like the assignment Professor Binns had given this time: they had to write an essay over five feet long based on the goblin rebellion material in A History of Magic.
To finish that assignment, Ron had copied