The Quidditch finals was against Slytherin
The season had arrived at this point through its own specific logic. Gryffindor had beaten Ravenclaw in February by two hundred and thirty points. They had lost to Hufflepuff in the first match of the year — a clean loss, one hundred and fifty to fifty, which had sat in the standings like a fixed number ever since. The arithmetic was straightforward: to win the Cup, Gryffindor needed to outscore Slytherin by at least two hundred points across the two matches combined. The Snitch was worth a hundred and fifty. Harry could not catch it until the Chasers had opened up a sixty-point lead. Harry knew this. Wood had written it on a board and underlined it twice.
The Cup was still possible — the arithmetic still worked, just barely, if Gryffindor won by enough and Harry caught the Snitch at the right moment. Wood had scheduled six additional practices in the intervening weeks. The team had not complained about a single one of them.
He watched the match from the Gryffindor stands with Hermione on his left and Neville on his right. He had taken two photographs already — one of the pre-match warm-up from the stands, which caught Harry against the grey April sky in a way that he thought would develop well, and one of Hermione watching the match, which he had taken without her noticing and which he thought would be one of the better ones in the album.
He had been watching Harry for fifty-two minutes with the camera ready and had not taken a single photograph of the match itself. Not because nothing was happening — things were happening, consequential things, the Chasers building a lead in careful increments — but because the photograph he wanted had not arrived yet. It would be a specific moment, and he would know it when it came, and pressing the shutter before it came would produce a photograph of anticipation rather than the thing itself.
He watched Harry and he watched the scoreboard and he understood what Harry was doing. Harry had seen the Snitch twice — he was certain of this, had watched the slight shift in focus both times, the almost-movement that wasn't pursuit because the lead wasn't there yet. Forty points. Then fifty. The Gryffindor Chasers working with the specific controlled urgency of people who knew exactly what number they needed and were building toward it with everything they had.
He waited. Harry waited.
The sixty came in the fifty-eighth minute. A goal that took it from fifty to sixty and there was a half-second where the whole stadium seemed to understand simultaneously what that number meant, and then Harry moved
Harry caught the Snitch from a position that should not have been achievable and was — rising from below the Malfoy, coming up from underneath, the gold already in his fingers before anyone in the stands had fully understood what they were watching. The Snitch had been there, waiting, and Harry had known exactly where it was and had been waiting for permission to take it.
The noise from the Gryffindor stands had the quality of something that had been building for forty minutes and had nowhere left to go except outward all at once.
Hermione grabbed his arm without looking at him, which was the specific response of someone who was more invested in Quidditch than she liked to admit.
He took a photograph from the crowd which was surrounding the team who had lifted up Harry who in turn was raising the Quidditch cup.