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Oliver Wood knew that he was being a little overdramatic. The quidditch match with Hufflepuff had been over for some time now. Every single remaining member of his team had left for the castle hours ago. Even Fred and George had given up on trying to coax him out of the locker room. All Oliver seemed capable of doing was standing underneath the stream of warm water in the shower with his forehead pressed against the cold, wet stone wall. Okay, so maybe he was being a lot overdramatic. Unfortunately, this realization did nothing to spur him back toward Hogwarts.
“Oliver? Oliver, are you in here?”
A sudden familiar voice, echoing against the sides of the empty chamber, made him move at last. He jumped, scrambling to summon the towel he had foolishly left sitting on a bench some distance away. The sound of footsteps caused him to fumble repeatedly in his attempts to wrap the fabric around his waist before the owner of the voice appeared.
“Bloody towel!” he snapped. “Just get—”
“Ahem.”
Heat flared up from his chin to his hairline. “[Name]! This is the boys’ locker room!”
“Like there’s anything on display in here right now that I haven’t already seen,” you replied.
“That’s not the point!”
“Then what is the point?”
“It’s the principle of the matter. You’re a girl, and a girl shouldn’t be in the boys’ locker room.”
“There’s no one else here, so who cares?”
More footsteps followed the question, then you wrenched the curtain between the showers and the lockers open. Oliver yelped.
“Would you get out of there?” you demanded. “I didn’t come to stare at your nethers.”
Scowling, he shut the water off, then brushed past you with one hand holding his towel in place. His filthy, still-sodden quidditch robes lay in a heap on the muddy floor. Oliver toed them and sighed heavily.
“The whole team’s waiting for you back in the common room,” you said.
“How do you know?”
“I just came from the hospital wing. Angelina told me where they all were headed.”
He grunted.
“I think Harry would like you to go see him.”
“And say what?” Oliver demanded as he collapsed onto the bench. Cooling water droplets ran from his hair down the back of his neck.
“Maybe tell him not to beat himself up for falling off his broom?”
“Why in the name of Merlin would I tell him that?”
For the first time that day, he really looked at you. He rather wished he hadn’t. You were just as wet as he was, and much less clean. Obviously you had walked through the freezing storm outside just to talk to him. As his eyes settled at last upon your face, a line appeared between your eyebrows: a clear sign you didn’t appreciate his attitude, though the arms crossed over your chest indicated that well enough themselves.
“Because he shouldn’t feel bad about falling off his broom,” you said pointedly.
“I know it wasn’t Harry’s fault, all right?”
“Then why don’t you tell him that?”
After he wrenched his gaze away from your face, Oliver grumbled something unintelligible even to himself. He did not want to talk to his girlfriend just then. What he did want was to wander into the Forbidden Forest and never come out. Then again, the centaurs weren’t likely to let him teach them quidditch, and then he’d never get the chance to play again.
A strange sensation prickled against his scalp. Oliver flinched back to reality to find you sitting beside him, your fingers worked gently into his hair.
“It’s going to be okay, Ollie.”
“It is not.”
He stood up to march over to his locker. Once there, however, he made no move to open it to retrieve his clean, dry clothing. The wind moaned audibly outside the entrance to the locker room. Goosebumps erupted over his bare chest and arms, but Oliver didn’t care. He deserved to be cold and wet. He deserved to miserable.
“Three years,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Three years I’ve been captain, and I haven’t won a single cup. I try and I try and I try, and I’m just not good enough.”
“Oliver—”
“Training session after training session!” He turned to face you. “I’ve got the best damn team in the entire school. We should have won last year. Hell, we should have two years ago! Every single time I have victory in my grasp, something happens to pull it away. What’s the matter with me? Why can’t I just…”
Thrusting his fist into his other palm, he closed his eyes. He wanted to cry. Thank Merlin you were there so he couldn’t. What if he couldn’t stop once he started?
All the same, he couldn’t forget why he felt that way. The day McGonagall brought Harry right into Defense Against the Dark Arts to tell Oliver she had found him his seeker, Oliver had thought—really thought!—he’d finally met someone to rival Charlie Weasley in talent. Gryffindor’s victory had been assured from that moment on. Instead, the most spectacular games to Oliver Wood’s name were those involving a handful of spectacularly odd losses and forfeits.
“You done?” you interrupted his thoughts.
Oliver opened his eyes again, frowning at you. “You just don’t get it. Quidditch isn’t your life. You don’t care about it.”
“You really think that after dating you this long I haven’t picked anything up? None of this has anything to do with your skills as a captain or a keeper, idiot.”
“If you only came here to insult me—”
“You’re a victim of the circumstances. No one could have predicted dementors raiding the field during the match. No one could have guessed what they’d do to Harry either.”
He paused, feeling a faint flurry of hope surge through his veins right to his chest—only to be doused by his next morose thought: “I should have. Malfoy was saying something like that happened on the train here this term. I just didn’t want to listen to him.”
“As well you shouldn’t. If I found out you listened to a word coming out of that slimy git’s mouth, I’d have taken you straight to Madam Pomfrey myself.”
“But if I had listened to him…” He trailed away into another what-if scenario.
That time, you pulled him back by standing, walking over, and touching his cheek. “You’re still in this game, Oliver. I talked to the team. You could very well still win the cup.”
Only if the rest of the matchups went very specific ways, he nearly argued. Even if Gryffindor made it that far, who knew? They’d probably wind up with something like a rampaging giant in the middle of the pitch with the luck he had. Then you kissed him on the mouth, and Oliver found his desire to fight about his chances in quidditch draining away long enough to kiss you back.
“Did you only come out here to give me a checkup?” he asked, but only after you both separated breathlessly a few minutes later.
To his surprise, you looked flustered by his question; the thumbs behind his neck paused in their efforts to draw faint circles in the skin there. “Not exactly. You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Never.”
“No, it is stupid. Fred and George—well, they sort of implied they thought you might be in here trying to drown yourself. I got worried.”
“Me? Do something like that? When there’s no way to know if they play quidditch in the afterlife?”
“You could always stick around post-death. Be the first-ever quidditch-playing ghost.”
“Wouldn’t the quaffle go straight through me?” he asked.
“I never said you’d be a good quidditch-playing ghost.”
“They’d kick me off the team after a single game!”
Despite the emotion in his protest, Oliver laughed. This was why he loved you: No matter how bad a funk he got into after a loss, you always showed up to pull him back out. You grinned at his own smile before shoving him back toward his locker.
“Put some robes on so we can head back to the common room, would you? It’s freezing. Bet I can get George and Fred to swipe us some butterbeer from the kitchens. We can spend the whole evening cuddling, and then you can get up early tomorrow to make a new training plan and apologize to Harry.”
He paused only long enough to kiss you on the cheek. “Sounds great.”
It couldn’t have just been his imagination that you looked so pleased with yourself as you turned to leave. Oliver felt pretty pleased himself. Just before you got out the door, however, he thought of something else:
“Do I have to do that last bit?” he asked.
“Yes,” you answered forcefully.
With one last roll of your eyes, you disappeared around the corner. Oliver’s smile did not vanish along with you. You were right. He still had a chance to win the cup before he left Hogwarts for good. Apologizing to Harry wouldn’t be so awful with that in mind. And in the time before that? He could look forward to several hours of your undivided attention. Perhaps he hadn’t been truly overreacting earlier after all. Not if it earned him so alone time with you in the end.