Who: Max Urquhart & Daphne Greengrass. Guest starring the Giant Squid. What: A post-run run-in. Where: The lake. When: Evening of Monday, 28 October 1997, First Annual Asshole Day. In the hours following Hangman-gate, after Slytherin Quidditch practice. [BACKDATED] Status: Complete.
It had been a good run, Daphne thought. She and Stella kept pace well, though given how out-of-practice Daphne still felt, she had a feeling that the Ravenclaw was perhaps slowing herself down a bit to accommodate the presence of a partner. It hardly mattered. If the last two days were anything to judge by, Daphne was going to start having to run on a daily basis. The other option was stew in her room and hide all her quills to keep from making an idiot of herself.
Yes, she’d be adding miles and cutting down minutes in no time.
After parting ways with Stella by the steps to the castle, Daphne considered returning to the Common Room but quickly decided she still had no desire to be in the castle at all. She’d have to return at some point, and saw no reason not to make the most of being out. So, foot halfway onto the first step, she turned on her heel instead and began wending her way down to the lake. She pressed her palms to her cheeks and rubbed briskly - sweat and cold October air did not mix well, especially not with one’s body cooling down and suddenly realizing just how chill it was out in the open.
As Daphne neared the lake, she spied a lone figure wandering around the banks, and fairly quickly picked it out as Max. She hadn’t been expecting to run across anyone else out here, but it didn’t really surprise her that he would be out on the grounds for fun. Or...something. What was he doing?
“Max, hi,” she called once she got a bit closer. Stopping close to where the grass began to turn into dirt and gravel, Daphne set her arms akimbo and tilted her head curiously. “All right?”
Max turned around when he heard his name, likewise not expecting to be disturbed. He had just picked up a smooth, round stone, which he nearly dropped. He looked curiously at Daphne, whose ruddy face spoke to the coming winter. The late-October chill barely tickled Max, who had grown up as far North as a Scotsman could and whose mother's frigid Scandinavian blood shivered through his veins. Southerners, he thought.
"Aye, I'm well," he called back. "Yourself?"
As much as he loved living in the dungeons, he could get claustrophobic and almost always delayed returning to the castle whenever he left. His broom lay on the grass a few yards away, discarded after Quidditch practice. Even if Daphne missed it in the diminishing light, surely she would be able to discern what he'd been doing from his windswept hair and Slytherin-colored rugby jumper. He tossed his stone from one hand to the other.
Daphne opened her mouth say ‘Just fine’ but stopped herself, teeth clicking together as her jaw tightened for want of words. ‘Just fine’ seemed a bit strong. Absently, she bent her right leg back at the knee and caught the ankle in her hand to stretch.
Teetering on one leg before finding her balance, she dipped her chin and counted in her head while she finally answered, “Better, now.” She reached a silent fifteen and let her foot drop, waiting a few moments to start in the next leg. “Realizing it’s been far too long since I made any effort to keep up with running.”
Her eyes wandered from Max, stone still in his hand, to the broom half-obscured in the grass behind them. Between that and what he was wearing, she supposed he’d been practicing somewhere, but didn’t know why that would entail a stop at the lake to play with stones.
“Fooled myself into thinking flying was enough,” she offered. Daphne shifted her weight to start stretching her left leg in kind. “Good practice?”
"A'right," he said, shrugging. Though he seemed noncommittal, Daphne had struck one of only a few conversation topics that Max could sustain indefinitely. With running, he couldn't do much more than agree that she needed to keep on doing it in addition to flying, a philosophy he too followed, but Quidditch? He would never tire of Quidditch.
The Slytherin team was good, as far as Max could tell. Better, he hoped, than his first year as captain (which did not end well), but he couldn't really judge any of Hogwarts's players or teams before the season officially started. "We play Gryffindor first an' we are gonna beat them," he noted. "Fookin' shame if canna beat a team 'at just lost their captain, aye?"
“Definitely,” Daphne agreed easily, her left foot dropping to crunch in the gritty soil. “I’m sure you’ll all take the first match easily. Though,” she swung her arms up behind her and linked her fingers, stretching up until she felt her shoulders pop faintly. “Not too easily. We still want a good show and no one likes a match where the other team gets flattened in ten minutes.”
This was a matter that required much less thought than the parsing of her current mood, which was still complicated, if improved by activity. Strangely, she’d nearly forgotten that the season was starting so soon. Ordinarily Daphne looked forward to it with a great deal of eagerness. At least this would be another thing to look forward to between now and returning home in December. Better still if the team proved as good as Max’s confidence seemed to suggest.
Which reminded her. “Have they found out who the new captain is, yet? I thought they’d go with Finnegan or Robins, probably.”
"Haena heard a thing," Max said, with another shrug. It didn't matter much to him. He was still preparing the Slytherin team as though they would be headed against a Gryffindor squad captained by Ginny Weasley. They would have been practicing in her style for too long for much to change in the time between the switch and the match, and he had his suspicions that she would be unofficially calling a good number of plays. That's what he would have done, he knew. A part of him wondered how much he could really enjoy a victory against a weakened Gryffindor, already missing their star Seeker, but it was a very small part.
Behind him, the surface of the lake rippled, and a lazy tentacle curled above the black surface. Max whipped around and hurled his rock at it. The rock connected with one of the suckers, and the tentacle fainted back into the water like a Shakespearean actor at the climax of a tragedy. "Ha ha!" Max barked.
Daphne nodded quietly and watched with mild interest as Max chucked the stone mightily at the lake. She had not noticed the tentacle until she turned for a view of the projectile’s sharp descent, and its weirdly noiseless collision with the giant squid’s sucker. The tentacle slithered and slipped dramatically and then was gone with nary a ripple on the lake’s surface.
“Nice shot?” she observed, hands back on her hips as she ventured a bit closer to the edge of the water. Like everyone else, Daphne had heard rumors and stories – always highly sensationalized – of students getting pulled in, tossed about, half-drowned, even one where a Ravenclaw firstie had been tickled violently but left otherwise unharmed. Still, she had yet to witness such a thing, and by all accounts thought the tales firmly untrue.
Dropping to a crouch where the water lapped up onto the soil, she reached in and retrieved a smooth stone the size of her hand. Daphne stood and took a few steps back, wondering if the squid would make another appearance. She threw Max and inquiring look over her shoulder. “You come down here just to throw rocks at the poor squid?”
"It's a game!" Max cried, indignant, the compliment already forgotten. "To practice my aim. He donna mind! What's a wee rock gonna do to a great big squid?" And, indeed, Max had tossed rocks at the squid since he was a firstie, and he'd never seemed to get in too much trouble for his game -- though it had, admittedly, taken a few years before he was any good at it.
He barely noticed that Daphne had picked up a rock of her own until he stooped down to pick up another of his own. He knew Daphne wasn't quite the same as her dormmates Pansy or Regina, but tossing rocks at the giant squid wasn't something he thought of pureblooded Slytherin girls as doing. "You gonna give it a go now?"
“Ohh.”
Daphne inclined her chin and looked down her nose at the lake. She rolled her stone between her palms, enjoying the slick coolness of it, then clutched it in her left hand. Max had a very good point, and she couldn’t help smiling at the near outrage of his response. While she doubted that she had insulted him, it was a bit funny how enthusiastic he was over a very peculiar game of catch. But he was right. The squid was enormous and, for all she knew, had been through a lifetime of underwater frays and hardships. It probably got lonely and bored out here. Why shouldn’t she give the game a go?
“Yeah, why not?” Despite her boasts of hammer-wielding strength at Regina a few nights past at Fangtastic, Daphne wasn’t actually overly confident in the quality of her throw. When she and her family played pickup Quidditch during holiday parties, she liked to play Chaser, but this was a bit different. “So, I just wait for him to –“
As if the squid had detected their need, another tentacle (or perhaps the same as before) broke the surface and rose, dripping, a few feet out of the lake. It thrashed back, revealing an underside lined with rows and rows of different-sized suckers, easy enough to make out even in the failing daylight.
“Ah!” Daphne grinned and narrowed her eyes, took aim, and launched her rock toward the squid’s arm. The stone soared out a ways, far enough to have hit the tentacle but curving too wide to the right to make contact. It splashed into the water with a plunk and Daphne wrinkled her nose. “Blast. That could have gone better.”
"Widna a expected you to get it on your first shot," Max said plainly. Though, yes, he thought it was a bit strange for a pureblood girl to throw rocks, he wouldn't have expected the other Slytherin Chasers to hit a tentacle on the first throw either. While good practice, it wasn't the same as sending a Quaffle through a hoop. Maybe he should try it as a drill, he thought idly.
He balanced his own, flat rock in his hand, judging its weight and balance. Having deemed it acceptable and in the absence of another tentacle, he twisted his arm back and skimmed the stone across the surface of the lake. It skipped two, three, four times before plinking into the water. He took a step back and crossed his arms in front of his chest, not satisfied with his own performance either.
"So what brought you here?" he asked, glancing over at Daphne. "Taking the long way back after your run?"
While it didn’t seem to be in the cards for her to be providing the squid with any worthwhile entertainment, Daphne could certainly skip a stone. She let her eyes wander along the ground to find a good contender.
“Not really,” she said absently, thinking that she’d practically been in the castle again when she changed her mind. “Just I wasn’t quite in the mood to return to whatever new brand of – I saw no reason to rush back indoors when curfew’s soon enough. I like it out here. It’s a nice enough night. For October.”
Her muttering answer was interrupted when the toe of her shoe bumped a stone that looked about the right sort. She scooped it up and gave it a toss or two before flinging it at the lake, watching it do its little dance over the surface before it sank on the fifth skip. Looking back to Max, Daphne scratched the tip of her nose and ventured a relative non sequitur that had come to mind as she’d watched him casting his second stone.
“Is Sully as light a hit as I’ve been hearing?”
"You think he can throw a punch with those noodle arms?" Max gave a snort of laughter. If they hadn't been thrown into the same dormitory at age eleven, Max doubted he would have spent much time with a boy like Sully, but he'd enjoyed witnessing the tantrum. Even a Sully that hit him weakly with a shoe was more Max's style than… whatever Sully was normally.
"No, he wasn't much good at it," he confirmed. "I thought maybe he'd get to practicing, but he's back to normal now." Max picked up another stone and examined it closely, to make sure it was right for skipping.
Daphne laughed. She’d seen a bit too much of Sully’s “noodle arms” in the Great Hall Saturday night, when he’d abruptly begun to strip for the sake of not wrinkling his fine clothing. Thank god for Slughorn being on hand with pajamas as he had been.
“Ah, well,” she said lightly, giving a sharp kick to one of the smaller stones at her feet. “At least it helped work some of that...” A frown furrowed her brow as she tried to think of a tactful word to describe Sully’s ferociously dramatic tendencies. “…energy out of his system. The journals are making it far too easy for people to soapbox without thinking about, well, anything.”
She sighed and ran her hands over her hair, adjusting the tie holding it back. The sun was setting more quickly lately, which meant it also got colder earlier. Daphne folded her arms over her chest and threw a glance back toward the castle. “I’m sure it won’t be long until he finds another excuse to tell the student body to take a walk into the lake. Maybe hitting classmates with a shoe would be a better outlet for the lot of us and our noodle arms.”
"Oi, watch who you're calling noodle-armed!" While he might have said something about how he preferred his dormmate when he was hitting people with shoes and how he didn't bother to read most people's journal entries (particularly those with a lot of text), Max's indignation once again took charge. Still clutching his rock in one hand, Max mimed flexing his arms. The muscles underneath his striped sleeves, while admittedly more solid and defined than Sullivan Burke's, were about as impressive as one might expect of any sixteen-year-old boy's biceps, even an athletic one.
Unsure of just how to take Max’s response, Daphne smiled a little bemusedly and ducked her head as if she’d been proven duly wrong.
“Certainly not you,” she said, hoping to placate the offended party. Biting her lip, she narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re perfectly, you know…not-noodley.”
Merlin, her brain tonight. Nothing like a mindless conversation now and then. Quidditch, squids, and noodle-arms seemed to qualify. A breeze cut over the grounds, ruffling Daphne’s ponytail and giving her a chill as the air hit her damp running clothes. This had been a nice diversion, but now she was feeling about ready to return to the castle, wash up, and curl up in the common room with a book until she was sleepy.
“I think I might be going back now, myself,” she told him. One of her hands batted absently at some stray hairs that had blown into her eyes. “Want to come along, or are you and the squid due for a few more rounds?”
Max looked at the stone in his palm, shrugged, and tossed it over his shoulder. It clattered onto the other rocks on the shore. "Nah," he said, reaching for his broom. "We're goin' the same place, aye? Might as well."