The schedule change came down on a Tuesday.
Oliver Wood found out at breakfast from the notice McGonagall had pinned to the Quidditch board, and he arrived at dinner that evening having clearly been thinking about something all day and having not improved his mood in the process.
"Slytherin," he said, sitting down at the Gryffindor table with the energy of someone placing evidence before a jury. "Slytherin have pulled out of Saturday's match."
The table gave him the attention this warranted.
"Flint submitted a medical note to Madam Hooch," Wood continued. "Three of their players — three — have apparently developed the same joint inflammation simultaneously. All in their wand arms. All confirmed by the school mediwitch." He paused. "Madam Pomfrey did not confirm it. A private mediwitch. One who apparently practices in Knockturn Alley."
"Can they do that?" Hermione said.
"Apparently," Wood said, in the tone of someone who had asked this exact question and had not enjoyed the answer. "The rules permit substitution of medical documentation from a qualified practitioner. The rules do not specify which practitioner. Madam Hooch looked at the note and made her ruling and the ruling is that Slytherin are medically unfit to play this Saturday."
"In a storm," Fred said.
"In a significant storm," George agreed.
"Which is forecast to be one of the worst of the season," Fred added.
"Purely coincidental timing," George said.
Wood's expression communicated that he had arrived at the same conclusion and had found it exactly as satisfying as Fred and George's delivery suggested. "The match has been rescheduled to December. We play Hufflepuff this Saturday instead." He looked at the table. "Hufflepuff, who requested the rescheduled slot with what I consider suspicious promptness."
"Cedric Diggory," Harry said.
"Is a good Seeker," Wood said, with the reluctant acknowledgment of a man who believed in accuracy even when accuracy was inconvenient. "Yes. In a storm. In the worst conditions of the season." He looked at his plate. "Slytherin are very lucky to have three simultaneous wand-arm inflammations."
"Miraculous, really," Fred said.
"Get some rest before Saturday," Wood said, to the team in general, in the tone of someone closing a subject. "We play in whatever comes down."
The storm had been building since Thursday.
By Saturday morning it had become a Scottish November storm that had decided to make itself known — not simply rain but the combination of horizontal rain and wind that had opinions about where you were standing and a low, pressured sky that had descended to somewhere between the castle turrets and the treetops and appeared to have no plans to move.
Wood had gathered the team in the changing rooms an hour before the match with the focused energy of someone who had assessed the conditions, made his peace with them, and moved on to logistics. "The wind is coming from the northwest," he said. "It's going to affect every trajectory from the left side of the pitch. Compensate early. Don't wait for the broom to tell you it's gone wrong." He looked at Harry. "Visibility is going to be poor. The Snitch could be anywhere and you're going to have to cover more ground than usual to find it. Don't chase what you can't see clearly."
Harry had the Nimbus 2000 in his hands — good broom, responsive, not the fastest available but entirely adequate in normal conditions and still functional in poor ones if the rider knew what they were doing. Harry knew what he was doing.
Ron, in the stands with Hermione, watched the sky with the attention of someone who had been watching it since Thursday and had thoughts.
"This is genuinely dangerous," Hermione said, beside him.
"The lightning will stay north," he said, which was what he had assessed from the morning's cloud formation and which he was approximately seventy percent confident about.
Approximately.
The match started badly in the way that matches started badly in storms — not through error but through the specific accumulation of conditions that made every ordinary action harder than it should have been. The Chasers were fighting the wind on every run. The Bludgers were unpredictable in ways that the Beaters were managing but only just. Cedric Diggory, on the Hufflepuff side, was flying with the contained, methodical patience of someone who had decided that the storm was a variable to be managed rather than a problem to solve, and he was doing it well.
Harry was doing it better. Harry in poor conditions had a specific quality — the absence of the mental layer that most flyers had between intention and action, the thing that made most people slower when the conditions were difficult. Harry got faster. Ron watched him cut across the pitch with the loose-limbed certainty of someone for whom the storm was not a complication but simply the current reality, and thought: he's fine. He's fine.
Then the lightning came.
Not from the north.
The discharge was on the east side of the pitch and it was close — close enough that the crack and the flash were simultaneous, close enough that the air on Ron's side of the stands changed quality in the specific way air changed when lightning was immediate rather than distant. The ozone and the pressure drop and the specific feeling of something very large having happened in the immediate vicinity.
Harry's hands came off the broom.
Ron was moving before the thought completed.
He was out of his seat and down the stands with the specific speed of someone who had one clear objective and no competing considerations. His Nimbus 2001 was in the extended pouch secured along his hip, he had brought it to the match without consciously deciding to, the same way he had started doing a number of things without consciously deciding to, because the preparation was becoming instinct. He had the broom in his hand in the time it took Harry to fall thirty feet.
He was in the air in the time it took Harry to fall sixty.
Dumbledore's spell came from the staff section of the stands with the speed of someone who had been ready and had not been surprised — a slowing charm that hit Harry at the eighty-foot mark and changed the fall from a fall into something more like a very fast descent. Ron hit the pitch at an angle, broom nearly horizontal, and reached Harry in the last twenty feet — one arm around his chest, the other on the broom handle, the landing that followed a controlled disaster rather than an uncontrolled one. They hit the pitch mud together and Ron took the impact on his shoulder and kept Harry's head clear of the ground.
He sat up in the mud with Harry's weight against his arm and looked at him.
Harry was unconscious. Breathing — he checked this first, the instinct of the Healing reading, breathing and present and with a pulse that was fast but steady. No visible blood. He did a rapid assessment with the focused calm of someone who had drilled this and had the knowledge to read what he was looking at.
"He's alright," he said, to the people arriving around him, because they needed to hear it. "He's unconscious. He needs Madam Pomfrey."
Dumbledore was there. Madam Pomfrey was there approximately thirty seconds after that, with the energy of someone who had been watching the match from the castle windows and had not been idle.
"Good catch," she said, briskly, already running her diagnostic wand over Harry. Then, to Ron: "Your shoulder."
"Later," he said.
"Now," she said, and he submitted to it because arguing with Madam Pomfrey about triage priority was not a battle anyone had ever won.
"You still in one piece?" Ron asked jokingly.
"I think so," Harry said. "My hands— the lightning—"
"I know," Ron said. "I saw it."
Harry sat up with the careful movement of someone taking inventory. He was muddy and shaken and his wrist was going to need attention, but he was present and oriented and the immediate danger had concluded. Ron felt the specific thing he felt when something had nearly been very bad and hadn't been — the relief that arrived after the fact, quieter and more profound than the alarm that preceded it.
The match had been halted. Cedric Diggory had caught the Snitch in the confusion of the aftermath — not taking advantage, he thought, from watching Cedric's expression when he landed, but the Snitch had apparently arrived at the relevant moment and Cedric had years of Seeker training telling him to catch it and he had caught it without fully registering the context until afterward.
The Nimbus 2000 came down in pieces.
The landing point was on the far side of the pitch, past the Hufflepuff goalposts, where the Whomping Willow's outermost branches reached. He didn't see it happen — he was occupied with Harry — but Fred told him afterward, with the specific quietness Fred used for things that weren't funny, that the broom had come down in the wind, caught the edge of a branch, and the Whomping Willow had done the rest with the thorough efficiency it brought to everything within reach.
Someone brought him the handle.
Just the handle — the rest was in pieces that the storm had distributed across the pitch and the surrounding grass. The handle was intact up to the point where the wood had splintered, and it still had the quality of a well-made thing that had been someone's primary broom for three years and had been used seriously and maintained carefully.
He took a photograph of it.
Not for display. Not for the collection in the trunk lid. For Harry, later, when Harry was ready to have it. The record of a good broom that had done everything it was asked to do and had not deserved what the Whomping Willow had contributed.
Harry woke up in the hospital wing on Sunday morning.
He was told about the Nimbus by Fred, because Fred was there when Harry woke up and Fred, for all his many qualities, did not have the specific skill of withholding information that someone was going to need to process. Ron had been there earlier, had gone to breakfast, and returned to find Harry sitting up in bed with the expression of someone who had received news they were still finding the shape of.
"Fred told you," Ron said, sitting down.
"About the broom," Harry said.
"Yes."
Harry was quiet for a moment. He was not being dramatic — Harry was rarely dramatic about his own losses, which was one of the things Ron respected about him. He was processing, which was the correct response. "It was a good broom," he said finally.
"It was," Ron agreed.
"Three years," Harry said. "Every match." He looked at the ceiling. "I know it's a broom. I know it's just—"
"It's not just anything," Ron said. "It was yours. One of the first real thing that was yours." He said it simply, because it was true and Harry didn't need it softened. "It's alright to mind about it."
Harry looked at him. Then he nodded, once, and looked at the window, and gave himself the minute or two it required.
Ron let him have it.
After a while Harry said: "The match."
"Hufflepuff won," Ron said. "Cedric caught the Snitch in the last minute. Good catch, properly good — the visibility was nearly zero on that side of the pitch and he found it anyway."
"Diggory's good," Harry said, which was the specific fairness Harry applied to things even when he'd rather not.
"He is," Ron said.
They were quiet for a moment.
"You came off the stands," Harry said.
"Yes."
"You had a broom."
"I brought it," Ron said.
Harry looked at him with the quality of attention he deployed when he was reading something carefully. "You brought your broom to a match you weren't playing in."
"I bring it most places," Ron said, which was true since approximately October and which Harry was now visibly filing.
Harry appeared to decide not to pull on that thread for the moment. "Dumbledore's spell slowed me down."
"Enough," Ron said. "The landing was still significant."
"My shoulder—"
"Fine," Ron said. "Pomfrey checked it. Bruised. Nothing structural."
Harry looked at him for a moment longer. Then: "Thank you."
"You already said that," Ron said.
"I'm saying it again," Harry said.
Ron accepted this and moved on. He reached into his bag and put the photograph on the bed — the Nimbus handle in the mud, the splintered end, taken in the grey light after the match. Harry looked at it for a moment without speaking.
"For when you want it," Ron said. "Not now necessarily."
Harry picked it up carefully and looked at it with the expression of someone committing something to memory, and then set it on the bedside table.
"I'm going to need a new broom," he said, after a while, in the tone of someone stating a practical fact and not asking for anything.
"Yes," Ron said.
"Not immediately," Harry said. "I can fly the school brooms for the rest of the season if Wood doesn't have a problem with it." He paused. "Wood will have a problem with it."
"Probably," Ron agreed.
He waited a moment. Then, because it was the right thing and he had decided this before coming to the hospital wing: "Use my Firebolt. Until you get something sorted."
Harry looked at him. "No."
"You have matches to prepare for," Ron said. "Wood will have a problem with the school brooms and he won't have a problem with the Firebolt. It's sitting in my trunk not being used on match days."
"It's your broom," Harry said.
"It's a broom," Ron said. "I have the 2001 for the Tuesday and Thursday sessions. The Firebolt is available."
"Ron—"
"You're going to argue about this for ten minutes and then accept it," Ron said, "or you can accept it now and we can go to breakfast."
Harry looked at him with the expression of someone who had identified that the outcome was determined and was deciding how much energy to spend on the journey to it.
"Fine," he said, eventually. "Until I get a new one."
"Until you get a new one," Ron agreed.
"I'm paying for the Firebolt maintenance service during the summer," Harry said. "Whatever the annual service costs."
"You don't have to—"
"I'm paying for the service," Harry said, in the tone that was Harry's version of absolute, which was quiet and entirely final.
"Alright," Ron said.
They went to breakfast.