Luck Still Counts When It Happens Three Times in a Row

By late April, Quirrell was close to breaking.

The shadows beneath his eyes grew darker, his face grayer, as though something were slowly hollowing him out from within. Worse, the endless little troubles had not stopped: strange smells in the corridors, minor curses on doorknobs, scraps of paper that suddenly screamed from inside textbooks, noises at precisely the wrong moment beside suits of armor, and the occasional sense of being watched from around a corner by something he could never catch.

Quirrell was exhausted. His nerves stayed taut every day, leaving him no chance to rest.

"Enough." Voldemort's voice came coldly from the back of his head that night. "We cannot wait any longer."

Quirrell leaned against the desk and caught his breath. His throat was painfully dry. "M-my Lord, Dumbledore has recently—"

"I do not care where Dumbledore has been recently," Voldemort cut in harshly. "Your body will not last until June."

Quirrell knew Voldemort was right. Lately, whenever he woke from a dream in the night, he could feel that his body had grown a little lighter, as though something essential were leaking out through the gaps in his bones.

"The Philosopher's Stone," Voldemort said, his voice low and raspy. "Go and take it. Now."

Quirrell did not object. More to the point, he could no longer afford to.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Hogwarts, the first week of May brought Hufflepuff against Slytherin. It was the last match before the finals that could truly determine where the Quidditch Cup would go.

The whole school was tense before the match had even begun.

Gryffindor was clearly among the houses most invested in the result. To them, whether Hufflepuff won hardly mattered. They just wanted Slytherin to lose.

A week before the match, Cedric had begun to get carried away.

After two wins, both secured by catching the Golden Snitch within ten minutes, everyone—including Cedric himself—felt the Quidditch Cup was already in the bag.

"I think we've got this one," Cedric said from the edge of the sofa, unable to keep all the smugness out of his voice. "Slytherin won't be able to beat us."

Gavin was writing something. He looked up at Cedric. "You think they won't have a strategy?"

Cedric paused. "What do you mean?"

"You've caught the Snitch within ten minutes twice in a row." Gavin looked at him as though he were an idiot. "Do you think they'll do something about you?"

Cedric froze. He had not considered that at all.

He opened his mouth, then visibly began running through the previous two matches in his head. The more he thought about it, the more sense Gavin made.

Ravenclaw and Gryffindor could both be said to have been caught off guard. Slytherin, though, was no pushover. When it came to winning through less-than-honorable means, they usually knew a thing or two.

"...So what do I do?" Cedric asked, suddenly nervous.

Gavin said nothing. He finished writing his last line, set down his quill, then gave Cedric a leisurely look that said, You finally thought to ask?

Cedric coughed.

"Gu."

"Mm."

"Now isn't the time to lecture me."

"I know," Gavin said. "So I've decided to try another approach."

Cedric had a sudden bad feeling. "What do you mean?"

"This time, figure it out yourself."

"What?"

"You can't rely on me for everything. As your personal coach, I've already done all I can. Anything more goes beyond what we agreed on." Gavin shrugged helplessly. "Besides, I'm not in charge of the Hufflepuff Quidditch Team."

For a moment, Cedric had no answer.

Technically, Gu Gavin was only a first-year. He was not on the house team, not its captain, and certainly not Hufflepuff's Quidditch strategy adviser. He had been training Cedric lately, but Cedric alone.

"But you clearly—"

"I clearly have already helped you a lot," Gavin said. "Use your own head for the rest."

"At least give me a hint."

"All right."

"What is it?"

"If Slytherin wants to shut you down, how will they do it?" Gavin asked. "Start by figuring that out."

With that, he lowered his head and went back to writing, ignoring Cedric.

Cedric stood there, his expression complicated. He had been ready to pop the champagne. Now he felt awful.

At dinner, Gavin discovered something was wrong.

The moment he entered the Great Hall, he saw a crowd gathered by the Hufflepuff table. At its center stood Cedric.

Cedric's eyes lit up when he spotted Gavin, and he waved excitedly.

Gavin stopped for a beat and prepared to turn around and flee.

Before he could, the members of the Hufflepuff Quidditch Team converged on him and surrounded him.

Gavin turned helplessly to the only person there he knew. "...What did you do?"

Cedric coughed, looking a little guilty. "Nothing much, just..."

Herbert, the Hufflepuff captain, interrupted him eagerly, his eyes blazing. "Gu, Cedric told us everything."

"You gave him a Nimbus 2000." Herbert lowered his voice, though he could not hide his excitement. "And the training ideas for the last two matches came from you too."

Gavin: "..."

"The whole team will listen to you," Herbert said with absolute seriousness. "If it means winning, we'll do anything you ask."

The others nodded at once, staring at Gavin as though he were a priceless treasure.

Gavin fell silent for two seconds, then turned to Cedric.

Cedric did his best to look innocently back at him, his expression saying, Well, we're already here. Please help.

Gavin rolled his eyes. "I just told you to figure something out yourself."

"And this is... what I figured out," Cedric replied quickly.

Herbert clearly had no intention of giving Gavin room to refuse. "Gu, tell us. How do we play against Slytherin?"

Under the older students' eager gazes, Gavin felt himself melting. At last, he accepted reality. "Then meet me tomorrow at six in the morning."

"Six?" Malcolm, one of the Chasers, repeated instinctively.

"Is that a problem?" Gavin asked at once.

Herbert was the first to recover. He gritted his teeth. "No."

The other players were already looking pained, but they nodded too.

"...No."

Cedric stood to one side, watching their faces. The sight felt remarkably familiar, and he could not help feeling a little pleased. Time you all experienced my suffering.

"Good." Gavin nodded. "Now you can finish your dinner."

Only then did the others disperse, their steps noticeably heavier.

In the first week of May, Hufflepuff faced Slytherin.

Before the match even began, something was different about the Slytherin side. The players huddled close together, occasionally glancing toward Cedric.

The Slytherin students in the stands were quiet too—unusually quiet, as though they already knew the plan for the day.

The whistle blew, and the match began.

Slytherin had no intention of letting Cedric fly freely. Their two Beaters immediately sent Bludgers his way, while their Chasers kept cutting across his path to stop him from concentrating on the Snitch.

Lee Jordan saw through it at once, his voice rising. "Oh—Slytherin's strategy today couldn't be clearer! They've surrounded Diggory! This isn't Quidditch; they're hunting Diggory!"

Cheers erupted from the Slytherin stands.

The Hufflepuffs booed, but halfway through, they realized things were not going so badly.

With so many Slytherins elsewhere, fewer were left to contest the Quaffle.

The Hufflepuff Chasers played with unusual aggression, as though they were different people. Whenever they got the ball, they charged downfield, and the shorthanded Slytherins could not stop their attacks.

"Hufflepuff scores! Hufflepuff again!" Lee Jordan shouted with obvious delight at Slytherin's predicament. "Slytherin has put far too much effort into Diggory, and now they can't handle the Quaffle—thirty points! Hufflepuff has thirty points!"

That was Gavin's strategy. Sometimes being weak was an advantage: the less threatening you seemed, the less attention anyone paid you.

Everyone saw Cedric as Hufflepuff's greatest threat, so Gavin had done the opposite of what they expected and strengthened the rest of the team.

The week of training was paying off. Gavin had focused on using a numbers advantage. There were only so many tactical options in Quidditch: if Slytherin committed players to containing the Seeker, they would leave gaps elsewhere. So Hufflepuff had practiced breaking through those gaps quickly.

The Hufflepuff players had always worked hard and played well together. Their tactics had simply been too straightforward, making them look clumsy.

Gavin's guidance had addressed that weakness. They had not improved enormously in such a short time, but they had improved enough to exploit Slytherin's thin defense.

Gavin had also told them not to worry about conserving their strength. They only needed to attack hard at the start, and they caught Slytherin completely off guard.

The Slytherins grew anxious. This was not what they had expected. According to their pre-match analysis, Hufflepuff's Chasers would pose no threat even if Slytherin diverted two players.

Instead, every Hufflepuff Chaser was playing as though fired up on Dragon Blood, nothing like the team that used to do little but defend.

If Slytherin kept surrounding Cedric, they would contain him but lose the score. If they went back to defend against the Quaffle, they would free him.

Marcus, the Slytherin captain, shouted a couple of orders from the air. The wind swallowed half his words, and the half that carried clearly did no good.

Cedric, meanwhile, was in no hurry. He drifted about on his broomstick, sometimes accelerating, sometimes stopping, circling high above the pitch. He kept the Slytherin players marking him close and drew them as far from the Quaffle as possible.

The atmosphere in the Hufflepuff stands gradually relaxed. As the spectators began to understand what was happening, they found their voices and cheered on the team.

Ernie stood by the railing, eyes bright but lips pressed tightly together, as though afraid that one word from him might startle the Hufflepuff players and give Slytherin an opening to score.

Before Slytherin could adjust to the pace of the match—

Cedric moved.

Without warning, he accelerated with everything he had. He and his Nimbus 2000 shot forward, the broom's tail carving a short, sharp arc as he raced toward the right side of the pitch.

"Diggory's spotted the Snitch!" Lee Jordan blurted. "He's accelerating—the Slytherin Seeker is following! Both Beaters are after him too! They're going all out to stop Diggory!"

A huge section of the stands rose to its feet.

The Slytherin Seeker stayed right on Cedric's tail, almost touching the end of his broomstick. Behind them, the two players assigned to harass him pushed their speed to the limit, the wind shrieking past their ears.

Everyone thought the Golden Snitch was ahead. Cedric certainly looked as though he did. He leaned low and flew faster and faster, as if the Snitch would slip away before his eyes if he arrived half a second too late.

Then, at full speed, he hauled back on the broom handle and stopped abruptly.

The Nimbus 2000 jolted to a halt in midair. The Slytherin Seeker overshot him, sliding half a body-length ahead with his broom. In that sliver of space, Cedric twisted with the momentum, swung almost sideways against his broomstick, and cut diagonally in the other direction.

A collective gasp swept through the stands.

It was a feint.

They had fallen for it.

Gavin smiled faintly and took a strategic sip of water. "It's over."

Cedric had spotted that glint of gold long ago. He reached it at full speed, stretched out his hand, and caught it cleanly.

The next second, Lee Jordan's voice exploded across the pitch. "He's got it—Diggory's caught the Golden Snitch! The match is over! One hundred and eighty to zero! Hufflepuff wins!"

The Hufflepuff stands fell silent for one second. Then everyone leaped to their feet.

Someone sent a scarf flying. Someone else lunged against the railing and nearly toppled over it.

Justin grabbed the person beside him and shook them wildly. Only afterward did he realize he had grabbed Susan Bones. He let go in a hurry, but Susan did not mind at all and happily hugged him back.

Even Ernie could not resist slapping the railing twice. Then he remembered that such behavior was beneath his upbringing and hastily pulled his hands away.

The Slytherin side was silent.

They had made their preparations. They had sacrificed their own scoring chances to box Cedric in, yet he had still ended the match within ten minutes.

Terence, the Seeker, was pale when he landed. He opened his mouth to speak, but after a long moment, all he managed was, "But he was clearly—"

"Clearly tricking you," Miles Bletchley, the Keeper beside him, finished sourly. "You're just too stupid to see through such an obvious feint."

At the High Table, Snape looked grim.

"This is impossible." He stared at the pitch. "They had a plan. How did this happen?"

Professor McGonagall glanced at him but said nothing.

Snape watched Cedric disappear into a crowd of Hufflepuff players, his brow furrowed. "With that many people harassing him, he couldn't possibly search for the Snitch. How did he know where it was?"

"He found it," Professor McGonagall said.

"I'm going to investigate," Snape said coldly. "No one can catch it within ten minutes every—"

"Why not?" Professor McGonagall interrupted, as calmly as if she were discussing the weather. "Everyone has a run of good luck sometimes, don't they, Severus? You can win it back next year."

Snape turned sharply toward her, his face dark.

Those were his own words, handed straight back to him.

Professor McGonagall kept her eyes on the pitch. The corner of her mouth twitched, so slightly it was almost impossible to see.

After the match, talk of Hufflepuff swept through Hogwarts once again.

Nobody dismissed them anymore as a house that had merely played surprisingly well this term.

Even Gryffindor had to start accepting the reality of it. At dinner, Ron did not even begin by mocking Slytherin's humiliating loss. Instead, he said heavily:

"If Hufflepuff plays like this next year too, won't we be out of luck?"

"Maybe," Hermione said after a moment's thought. "But I keep feeling there's some secret behind it. I just checked the school records. No one has ever caught the Snitch within ten minutes three times in a single year. It's incredible."

"They're just lucky," Ron muttered. "I thought so from the first match. What do you think, Harry?"

Harry did not answer. He looked up at the Hufflepuff table, where Cedric was surrounded by a crowd. His expression was serious, as though he had marked Cedric as an opponent to remember.

Gavin did not join the celebrations after the match. He went straight to St. Mungo's.

It was Saturday, the day of his regular visit to Cordelia. Before stepping through the fireplace, he had received Professor McGonagall's congratulations on their victory over Slytherin.

Professor McGonagall had worn an odd expression, as though she wanted to say something more, but after a moment's hesitation, she had left it unsaid. Gavin had not pressed her. He had taken some Floo Powder and traveled to the fireplace at St. Mungo's.

Cordelia was still taking an afternoon nap when he arrived. Gavin found that strange; she rarely slept this late.

Still, he did not think much of it. He picked up a book and began to read.

By the time Cordelia woke, it was dusk. Seeing Gavin seated beside her, she looked a little embarrassed. "Sorry for the wait. I don't know why I slept so long today."

Gavin grew concerned. "Did that only start today?"

Cordelia shook her head. "It happened a couple of times over the last two days. Maybe I just haven't been sleeping well at night."

Gavin did not feel much reassured. He entered the Consciousness Space to check on Cordelia and found no change. The distance between her and the black hole was still within an acceptable range, increasing at a steady rate. Maybe she really had just slept poorly.

After coming back out, he said nothing more about it. Instead, he told Cordelia about that day's Quidditch match. Her eyes lit up as she listened.

"That sounds fun. Slytherin must have been stunned, right?" she said with a giggle.

"They were. I don't think they managed another word before leaving the pitch," Gavin said, nodding. "I wonder if they'll start fighting in their changing room."

Cordelia rolled her eyes and gave him a light punch. "If they do, it'll be all your fault, you schemer!"

They laughed together for a while. Then Cordelia said, "I've suddenly realized Quidditch sounds interesting. I want to play too."

"I can tell." Gavin nodded. "You like violence too."

Cordelia punched him again, a little harder this time. Then she looked out the window and said softly, "I just think flying through the sky on a broomstick must be wonderful."

Gavin looked at her. He did not joke this time. "It will be," he said quietly. "You'll get the chance."