Chapter Text

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There were two things every single person at Hogwarts agreed on about the junior year, and Lando Norris was one of them.

The first was that Lando Norris was the most naturally gifted Seeker Gryffindor had produced in a generation youngest to make the house team in forty years, all reach and instinct and the kind of joyful, suicidal flying that made first-years cry and McGonagall close her eyes and pray.

The second was that Oscar Piastri was better.

Nobody said it to Lando's face. People weren't cruel. But it lived under everything, that second fact, a small cold stone at the bottom of an otherwise perfect lake, and Lando had spent two and a half years failing to ignore it with every ounce of energy in his loud and sunny body.

He was thinking about it now, at six in the morning, lying in the red-and-gold dimness of the junior dormitory, four hours before the first match of the season. Gryffindor against Slytherin. Norris against Piastri. The thing the whole castle had been waiting for since September.

Daniel Ricciardo snored across the room like a hippogriff with a head cold  technically Daniel was meant to be in the seventh-year dorm with the other super-seniors, but Daniel went where Daniel pleased and currently it pleased him to crash with the juniors before big matches "for morale," which mostly meant eating their sweets and telling them lies about his own first year. Pierre murmured something French and tragic into his pillow. Charles, somewhere down the corridor, was almost certainly already awake and ironing his match-day scarf, because Charles believed appearance was nine-tenths of victory and the other tenth was also appearance.

Lando grinned at the canopy for no reason at all.

This was his favourite feeling in the world. The hours before a match, when nothing that was going to happen had happened yet, and all of it might be brilliant. Today he was going to beat Oscar Piastri. He could feel it in his teeth.

He'd felt it in his teeth before five matches running and lost four of them, but that was, he'd decided, irrelevant.

By the time the houses poured out onto the pitch the sky had committed to being grey and theatrical about it, low cloud dragging its belly over the towers. The stands were chaos. Gryffindor scarlet roaring on one side; Slytherin green on the other, colder, more organised, the kind of crowd that didn't cheer so much as expect.

Lando soaked it up like a plant turning to the sun. He waved at a knot of younger students who screamed his name, blew a kiss at the Hufflepuff stand purely to watch Esteban Ocon's face curdle, and jogged out to the centre circle with his broom over his shoulder and his whole chest full of light.

"NORRIS." Mark Webber Head of Gryffindor, Quidditch supremo, built like a standing stone and twice as Australian loomed at the edge of the pitch with his arms crossed. "If you take both hands off that broom again I will personally end you. We had a conversation."

"We did have a conversation, Professor."

"And what did we agree."

"That I'm a tactical genius and you trust me completely."

"Norris."

"Two hands. Both of them. Always." Lando jogged backwards, beaming, both hands very visibly on the broom. Webber pinched the bridge of his nose with the air of a man who already knew how this ended.

At the centre of the circle stood Professor Rosberg, the flying instructor, immaculate as always robes pressed, hair perfect, a clipboard he absolutely did not need tucked under one arm looking like he'd rather be giving a lecture on safe altitude management to an empty room. Beside him, leaning on the staff barrier in the front of the stands with a coffee and an expression of pure unbothered delight, was Professor Hamilton, who taught Defence Against the Dark Arts, was beloved by the entire school, and considered Quidditch mornings the best part of his job.

"You letting them play in this?" Hamilton called, nodding at the lowering sky. "Bit grim, Nico."

"The conditions are within regulation, Lewis," said Rosberg, without looking up from the clipboard he did not need.

"Course they are. Wouldn't want anyone having any fun"

"Fun is not a regulatory category"

"There it is. There's the man I know."

Rosberg's jaw tightened by a measurable degree. The two of them had taught at the school for six years and conducted, the entire time, the politest and most savage cold war in the staffroom, the origins of which nobody remembered and everybody enjoyed. Lando lived for it.

"Captains," Rosberg announced, pointedly turning his back on Hamilton. "Shake."

Daniel Ricciardo ambled into the circle for Gryffindor grinning, gum-chewing, gloriously unserious right up until the half-second before he wasn't and crushed the hand of the Slytherin captain with a wink.

And the Slytherin captain was Max Verstappen, a year above them and approximately as warm as the surface of a frozen lake, who returned the handshake like he was trying to break it and stared Daniel down with a focus that could strip paint.

And there, falling into formation behind Max in the green line, broom held loose in one hand, was the other thing the whole castle had come to see.

Oscar Piastri stood at the back of the Slytherin side with an expression of total, infuriating calm.

He wasn't doing anything. That was the thing. He never did anything. He didn't preen for the crowd or trade looks across the circle or bounce on his toes the way Lando did. He just stood there, dark-eyed and still, looking at the pitch like it was a problem he'd already finished solving, the cool green of the stand settling around him like it knew he was the one who'd win it something.

Lando caught his eye across the circle and gave him the grin. The wide, sunny, you're-going-down grin that worked on absolutely everyone in the castle, students and staff and at least two portraits.

Oscar looked back at him for exactly one second.

Then he looked away. Bored. Like Lando was a notice on a board he'd already read.

Something hot and small went off behind Lando's sternum, the way it always did, the specific private detonation that only Oscar Piastri had ever managed to set off in him.

"Mount your brooms," said Rosberg, who had clearly already mentally filed his post-match report.

The whistle went and the ground dropped away and Lando came alive.

This was the only thing better than the morning before a match: the match itself. The wind tearing tears from the corners of his eyes, the green reeling away beneath him, the great wheeling chaos of fourteen bodies and four balls and a stadium screaming his name. Up here Lando wasn't too much or too loud or two and a half years into a rivalry he was technically losing. Up here he was right-sized. He flew the way other people only meant to.

He climbed above the play and let his eyes go soft and wide the way Webber had drilled into him don't hunt it, kid, let it come to you and circled, and watched, and kept one entirely involuntary fraction of his attention pinned to the green shape circling at the far end.

Because the maddening thing about Oscar Piastri was that he flew like he stood. Economically. No flourish, no wasted motion, every adjustment so small and so exactly right that it looked like he wasn't trying, like the broom was doing the work and he was just riding it home. It was the most arrogant flying Lando had ever seen and Oscar had never once done a single showy thing to earn the word.

It made Lando want to do something insane just to get him to react. It usually worked on everyone. It had never once worked on Oscar.

Up in the commentary box, George Russell was making the most of his platform  "—and that's a gorgeous save from Bottas, who I'm told has never once raised his voice or his pulse" "MISTER RUSSELL, the score" "—yes Professor McGonagall, Gryffindor sixty, Slytherin forty, and might I add" "You may not."  and the rain finally committed, coming down in a fine cold mist that beaded on Lando's eyelashes and turned the pitch to glass.

And then he saw it. A flicker of gold, low, hugging the curve of the Slytherin posts. There, gone, there again.

Lando moved.

He didn't think thinking was for the ground. He folded forward over his broom and dropped, the dive opening beneath him like a held breath let go, the crowd's roar arriving a half-second late the way it always did, and the Snitch was right there, fat and shining and his, and he was already grinning, already composing the celebration, already imagining the green stand going silent

—and a shoulder came out of nowhere on his left and matched him.

Of course it did.

Oscar had read it. Not the Snitch  him. He'd been watching Lando the exact way Lando had been pretending not to watch him, and the instant Lando's weight tipped into the dive Oscar peeled off his patrol and committed, and now they were falling together, neck and neck, shoulder to shoulder, two brooms screaming toward the same scrap of gold and the same patch of streaming grass coming up very, very fast.

They were close enough that Lando could hear him breathing. Close enough to feel the heat coming off him through the cold and the wet. Oscar's face was set, jaw tight, dark eyes fixed on the gold not on Lando, never on Lando and his hand was coming up, level and unhurried, and Lando felt the first cold drip of doubt down his spine because Oscar wasn't panicking and Oscar wasn't grandstanding and Oscar was, very slightly, ahead.

So Lando did the thing he was famous for. The thing Webber had threatened to end him over not two hours ago.

He let go of the broom.

For one held heartbeat he flew with no hands at all, body flat along the handle, both arms flung forward, every inch of reach he had thrown at that scrap of gold a beautiful, stupid, spectacular thing to do at sixty feet in the rain and the Gryffindor stand came up off its benches in a single rising scream, and somewhere far below Mark Webber was very probably having a stroke, and beside him Lando felt rather than saw Oscar's head finally, finally turn

Oscar looked at him.

For one whole second, falling, in the rain, with the ground rushing up Oscar Piastri looked directly at him, and his calm cracked, just slightly, just enough, into something that might have been alarm and might have been something stranger, and Lando's heart did a stupid swooping thing that had nothing to do with the dive.

Lando's fingers brushed the Snitch. Felt the cold metal flutter against his fingertips for one perfect instant.

And then Oscar tore his eyes away, snapped them back to the gold, and his hand closed around it.

No lunge. No grab. He had simply put his hand exactly where the Snitch was going to be, half a second before it arrived, the way you'd reach for a cup on a table  and the wings folded against his palm with a tiny mechanical click that Lando somehow heard over the entire screaming world.

They pulled up hard, both of them, mud spraying, brooms shuddering, the ground missing them by an arm's length. The whistle shrieked. The Slytherin stand detonated.

Lando hung there in the rain, heart slamming, fingertips still buzzing where they'd touched it first he'd touched it first, it didn't count but he'd touched it and turned to look at the boy who'd beaten him. Again.

This was the moment. This was when the winner whooped, or pumped a fist, or flew a lap with the Snitch held high this was when you got to see what beating Lando Norris meant to someone.

Oscar was looking at the Snitch in his hand.

He turned it over once, checking the wings had stilled, the way you'd check a tool you'd set down. Then he closed his fingers around it and flew not a victory lap, not toward his roaring house, but in a straight unhurried line down toward Professor Rosberg to hand it over, because that was where it went.

He didn't look back at Lando once.

The whole Slytherin stand was chanting his name and Oscar Piastri descended through the rain with his shoulders loose and his face gone calm again, sealed back over, like he'd won a hundred of these and would win a hundred more and not one of them had ever been worth turning around for.

And Lando, sixty feet up, soaked to the skin, discovered that he was thinking about the one second. The crack. The half-instant in the dive where Oscar had turned and looked and something had moved behind his face. Lando had spent two and a half years trying to get a reaction out of that boy and he'd finally got one at sixty feet in the rain with no hands on his broom, and now Oscar had folded it all back up and flown away with it and Lando wanted, with an intensity that frankly alarmed him, to do it again.

He flew down slowly. His house caught him at the bottom Daniel's arm round his neck, Pierre fierce and consoling, Charles materialising from somewhere immaculately dry to pat his cheek and say "you looked beautiful losing, chéri" and Lando smiled for them, because smiling for people was the easiest thing in the world.

Across the pitch, the green tide was carrying Oscar off toward the castle. Lando watched the back of his dark head until it vanished under the stands.

You looked at me, he thought, and was deeply alarmed by how warm the thought made him. I got you to look.

He did not get another chance on the pitch for three weeks.

He got something much worse first.

It was the following Thursday, double Potions in the dungeons, the one class where the junior year got stirred together across houses because Professor Alonso believed and said so, often, with relish that a cauldron didn't care what colour your tie was, and neither did he.

This was a lie. Alonso cared enormously. Alonso was Head of Slytherin and the most quietly partial teacher in the entire castle, a man who had perfected the art of favouritism so deniable you could never catch him at it, and he ran his classroom like a man enjoying a long private joke at everybody else's expense.

Lando dropped into his usual seat and was halfway through retelling the dive he'd reached the part where his fingers touched the Snitch, which got better every time when Alonso swept to the front in a swirl of dark robes and clapped his hands together once.

"New partners," he announced, with the warm and terrible smile of a man about to ruin several afternoons. "Yes, yes. You are too comfortable. Comfortable students make lazy potions." He unfurled a roll of parchment like a herald. "I have chosen for you. You will not enjoy my choices. This is, how do you say the point."

Pierre groaned. Across the room a Ravenclaw was already objecting on principle.

Lando wasn't worried. Lando was never worried. Whoever he got, he'd charm by the end of the lesson; he always did.

Alonso read down his list, pairing Gryffindors with Slytherins, Ravenclaws with Hufflepuffs, savouring each small betrayal of friendship like a commentator calling a crash. And then he reached the bottom, and his dark eyes lifted from the parchment, and found Lando's, and the corner of his mouth curled, and Lando felt the whole afternoon tilt under him a full second before the words landed.

"Norris," said Professor Alonso, with enormous and unhidden satisfaction. "You will partner with Mister Piastri."

The dungeon did something complicated a ripple, a few low ooohs, somebody's barely-smothered laugh. Lando turned in his seat.

Oscar Piastri was already looking at him.

Not bored, this time. Not the notice-on-a-board look. Something flatter and far more assessing dark eyes steady across the length of the dungeon, taking Lando's measure the way he'd read the Snitch's flight: calmly, completely, like a problem he hadn't yet decided whether he could be bothered to solve.

Lando's heart did the stupid swooping thing again, the dive-thing, the no-hands-on-the-broom thing.

He grinned at him anyway. Wide and sunny and bright as the morning before a match.

"Hi, partner," he said.

Oscar held his gaze for one long, unhurried second.

Then he picked up his bag, crossed the dungeon, and sat down beside him without a single word close enough that Lando could feel the warmth coming off him again, the way he had at sixty feet in the rain and at the front of the room, Professor Alonso watched the two of them settle in side by side and smiled to himself like a man who had just placed a very, very good bet.