The seven looked at each other.
Four of them dropped their wands, and in the second that their peers looked at them in betrayal, Blake struck.
"Stupefy," he said only once, but he pointed his wand at each of them, and the four of them crumpled to the floor unable to move and stunned. Wordless magic is coming along nicely, Blake thought through his jumbled mind, wincing at the pain.
Malfoy, Crabbe, and a seventh year whose name Blake had never bothered to learn looked at each other, apparently regretting their decision to choose their pride over their wellbeing. A bit late now.
Malfoy acted first, with a Reducto that Blake sidestepped casually, even despite his reduced brain power.
"Really?" Blake said.
He hit the unnamed seventh year first - Diffindo across the wand arm, not the hand, and just strong enough to make the arm buckle and the wand drop, and the boy went down clutching it and screaming.
"Confringo." The blast erupted on the seventh year's chest, knocking him out cold instantly, and burning through his robes and onto his skin. Malfoy and Crabbe looked at the fallen senior student in a mixture of shock and horror. Blake rolled his eyes. Relax, the spell barely had any power behind it, he's not going to die.
Then, Crabbe, who had the magical talent of a particularly uninspired houseplant and had somehow still thought this was a good idea, raised his wand, but before he could get a spell off, Blake decided to end his part of the fight.
"Expulso!"
Crabbe smashed into the wall behind him with several loud cracks that sounded suspiciously like a lot of bones breaking at once. Oops.
That left Malfoy.
Malfoy, who had somehow kept his wand up through all of this, was looking at Blake with an expression that had moved through several stages and landed somewhere between fury and fear.
"Last chance," Blake said.
"F*ck you, Renshaw, you mudblood!" he roared, suddenly spawning in a fighting spirit, before firing off as many curses as he could. Blake raised his eyebrows in surprise as he dodged the curses he could and blocked or sent back the others.
Malfoy's gotten stronger, he noted. Even more surprisingly, he was still standing even after Blake redirected some curses back at him, having blocked a few. Unfortunately, however, one thing he clearly hadn't worked on was his endurance, as evidenced by his panting and sweating as he tried to raise his wand once more.
"Bom- Bombarda!"
Blake didn't bother dodging it this time, and instead just redirected it with a flick that sent it straight back, and Malfoy went into the wall behind him and stayed there.
Blake looked at the corridor, the pain in his head growing by the second.
The four who'd dropped their wands were still on the floor, the Stunning spell still clearly active, and the rest were very unconscious. There was blood splattered in various patches across the floor. As he looked at the students who had crumbled at the very beginning of the first, he scoffed. Is this all the mighty purebloods of Slytherin have to offer?
He picked up his bag, stepped over Crabbe's outstretched arm, and stumbled to the infirmary.
/
Madam Pomfrey's reaction to him arriving at eleven o'clock at night could most charitably be described as controlled fury.
She didn't ask how it happened. She didn't ask who did it. She did a diagnostic sweep that took about ninety seconds, made a sound that was not quite a word but communicated everything that needed to be communicated, and got to work.
"Honestly, coming here by yourself too! I don't even know you managed!" she said as he fussed over the bruising on his shoulder.
Blake grinned.
"You should see them."
"What?" she screeched.
Two cracked ribs, concussion, moderate to severe, bruising across his back and shoulders, a Leg-Locker Curse that had partially set into the muscle tissue.
She fixed everything in approximately forty minutes, told him he was staying until tomorrow evening at the minimum, and left him with the look of someone who had decided not to ask any of the questions she clearly had.
"I'll be letting the Headmaster know about this, Renshaw."
Blake was asleep within two minutes of her leaving.
/
He woke in the afternoon to the ward being quiet and the particular quality of light that meant it was past three. Connor came first, sat on the edge of his bed, and said nothing for a moment.
"Are you alright?" Connor said.
"Yeah," Blake said. "I'm alright."
Connor looked at him, exasperated.
"Would I be wrong to assume you're here on purpose?"
"Who knows," Blake said smugly. Connor just rolled his eyes.
"You think you're some kind of mastermind genius strategist fighter, don't you?" he said, teasing. "Calm down, Blakey, all you did was fight f*cking Crabbe and Goyle - you're not Merlin!"
"Shut up, Connor!" Blake snapped, rolling his eyes back at him. That guy always knows how to piss me off. The guy in question just laughed, and they fell into a comfortable silence.
"Okay," he said finally. "I'll go and watch the task tonight."
"Cheer for Harry," Blake said.
"Obviously," Connor said, and left.
The others came in clusters after that - Tracey, Zabini and Charlotte first. Daphne's not here, he thought, trying to push down the bitterness he felt as Tracey and Charlotte explained what the rest of the school were saying about what happened. What else is new?
"So?" Zabini said smugly. "How was my work?"
"It was alright," Blake said with faux boredom. "I was expecting more though."
"You ungrateful little-"
"Quiet, Zabini!" Madam Pomfrey roared.
After them, it was the Golden Trio.
"Was, uh, this your plan?" Hermione asked, looking around the ward at the Slytherins that were bandaged up to varying degrees, most of them still unconscious or in a forced sleep.
"No idea what you're talking about, Hermione," Blake said serenely, munching on the Chocolate Frogs they'd brought him.
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