Chapter Text
The perks of sitting where he does at the Ravenclaw table, facing inwards towards the rest of the Great Hall, is he can see everything coming in and out of the hall so he’s never surprised by a screeching student or staff member erupting in during dinner to announce some new monster or evil overlord wannabe has come to kill them (not that that happens very often, only that one time when the Prefects’ bathroom got infested with Grindilows, but it was always good to be prepared), and the other is that Michael can people watch without being noticed because he conveniently kinda has to face towards people. And by people watch, he means keeping an eye on a certain long-legged Hufflepuff who always seems to be either tripping over something or falling off things. It’s purely because Michael is concerned for the boy that he almost constantly has an eye on him, of course, and has nothing to do with the fact that he has pretty blue eyes and a black lip ring that is really distracting. Not at all.
The downside of sitting where he does at the Ravenclaw table is that he has the Slytherin table at his back, and there’s a group of particularly nasty boys in the year above who enjoy throwing food at him because he once dared stand up to them while they were tormenting younger students behind the greenhouses. In defence of Michael’s standoffish-loner reputation, he had been going for a walk to get away from the post-match Quidditch party-celebration-thing going on in the common room, and had heard someone crying, which, upon further investigation, had turned out to be a Gryffindor first year being hung upside down in mid-air while the burly seventh years picked through his robes for money and sweets like common bullies in a Muggle school. Michael may or may not have jinxed their asses all the way back to the castle entrance and then helped the poor boy back to Gryffindor Tower; no one saw, so no one could say.
Either way, at this particular moment in time, he’s midway through breakfast with one eye on the blonde Hufflepuff leaning back precariously in his seat to talk to his friends at the Gryffindor table, and the other on the goblet-turned-mirror next to his elbow so he could dodge any oatmeal or bacon that could be potentially flying his way. He’d rather not have to skip out on the end of breakfast to wash his hair. Again.
On the other side of the hall, he sees the Hufflepuff begin to windmill his arms slightly as he loses his balance and starts pitching backwards. Michael rolls his eyes and gives his wand a little flick under the table, muttering a spell under his breath to slow the boy’s fall just enough that his blonde friend who never stops giggling has time to steady him. Movement out of the corner of his eye causes Michael to turn his head and he gets his wand up just in time to have a shield around his face as a lump of scrambled eggs flies towards him. And, of course, in-between dodging edible projectiles and being given detention for doing magic outside of class (even if McGonagall did give him praise for the mirror as he turned it back into a goblet), Michael misses the blonde Hufflepuff looking over at him, his mouth open as if he were about to say something.
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Luke has known for a while that there is someone in the school watching over him and performing silent spells on him so he doesn’t miss the bottom stair and land on his face or lean too far over a banister only to fall and break his neck. It took him longer than it probably should to work it out, and, actually, Luke doesn’t actually realise himself until Ashton points out bluntly that you can only do a trip-fall-sprawl without actually touching the floor a few times before it’s obvious someone has their wand pointed at you, and it’s not just Peeves being abnormally friendly.
Eventually, after a particularly nasty accident involving his sixth year Charms class, a mysterious and badly timed bludger, and Luke’s face had been averted all in the time Professor Flitwick struggled to get his wand out of the comically large sleeves of his robe, Luke realises that it must be a student looking out for him, and he decides to briefly forgo his education as they had no major or life-dependent exams so he can figure out who it is.
He first thinks that it must be either Ashton or Calum, but he shuts that thought down because both Gryffindors were more likely to worsen a situation that could potentially end with Luke in hilariously unfortunate situations than prevent them, and neither of them were particularly good at non-verbal magic. Scratch that, they were both hopeless at it, and if Luke hadn’t let them copy his essay on it, they both would have failed (and by ‘copy’ he means he did three separate essays and let Cal and Ash fight over which one they could lay claim to.)
It takes two days of chewing his piercing and sending pouty faces to Cal and Ash during breakfast, lunch, dinner, and from across the room during Defence Against the Dark Arts to get them to help him find his guardian angel. And incident where Luke somehow, magically, only just avoided being crushed by a suit of armour on his way out of the Great Hall may have helped them make that decision. Especially when they didn’t hear the metal crash to the floor until after they’d walked out of sight.
“You’re pathetic,” Ashton tells him affectionately as Luke wraps him up in a full body cuddle in thanks. “You realise I’m only doing this because my life is in danger while I hang out with you because you’re so accident prone, right?”
Calum laughs loudly, and ducks his head when Madame Pince shushes him. “Yeah, I’d like to find this guy and ask if them if they can charm us to safety too next time Luke causes an avalanche of books because he couldn’t wait for someone to help him before pulling out the one at the bottom of the pile.”
Luke frowns at the dark haired boy. “That was one time, and no one even got hurt.”
“You didn’t get hurt because all the books suddenly flew three feet to the left and narrowly avoided crushing us,” Ashton says, booping Luke’s nose.
And, so, they joined forces and began systematically (read: making wild guesses and then yelling insults at each other) trying to pinpoint the person with the magic wand keeping dear Lukey from dying three times a day.
Ashton immediately rules out the Slytherins. “First, literally none of them would be caught dead helping a Hufflepuff, no offence Luke. Second, you have, like, one class with Slytherins, and who ever this person is, they’re in almost all your classes.”
“It’s gotta be a Ravenclaw then,” Calum deduces. “We’re not with you enough for it to be a Gryffindor.”
The two of them begin discussing it, but Luke isn’t listening. He heard ‘Ravenclaw’ and gets distracted thinking about brown hair and green eyes and shy smiles hidden behind black and blue robes. Luke doesn’t even know the guy’s name, but he’s been in most of Luke’s classes since first year. ‘Maybe it’s him,’ Luke thinks. He looks over to where Ash and Cal have started throwing paper balls at each other, then he looks further than that to where Madame Pince is walking towards them menacingly, and finally his eyes land on a table at the back of the library where the pretty Ravenclaw has his feet propped up on a chair and his head propped up on his hand and a book propped up on his bag as he lazily flicks through it. His wand is lying next to his elbow, within grabbing distance of the hand crossed over his chest, and Luke finds himself nodding.
It could definitely be him.
“Why would it be him?” Ashton asks, and Luke guesses he must have said that out loud. The blonde and Cal are peering around the imposing figure of Madame Pince as she glares pointedly at them from a few feet away to the Ravenclaw boy.
Luke shrugs, kicking his heels against the ground to get his chair back on two legs. There’s a dull thud as he hits the wooden bookshelf behind him, and then a sinister sliding noise as some rather large and hastily stacked books begin to slide off the shelf above Luke’s head. He glances up just in time to see a copy of ‘Hogwarts; A History’ that looks like it’s only been read once heading towards his face. He squeaks, squeezing his eyes shut and bracing for impact out of instinct. There’s a thump, and he peeks an eye open to see that the book has landed on the table squarely between Ashton and Calum’s shocked faces.
He glances wildly back at the Ravenclaw, but he’s still hiding behind his book. Luke feels momentarily disappointed until he sees the boy’s wand skittering across the table top like it had literally just been dropped.
Hmm.