“It bit me!” a girl squeals from the back row, holding her now bleeding finger as if it were going to fall off.

Luhan stares at the blue, sharp-toothed pixie rattling the bars on its cage, which is sitting on his desk. 

He really doesn’t want to deal with the thing. It keeps grinning at him and muttering something in an unintelligible, high-pitched voice. 

It reminds him a great deal of Chanyeol, who’s sitting a few desks away, but he would never say so out loud. Because that would be rude. 

“Awesome,” Chanyeol breathes, almost pressing his face completely to the bars of his pixie’s cage. 

“It looks like you,” Baekhyun points out, trying to keep from laughing. The thing does look like Chanyeol. It keeps bouncing around like it had one too many sugared mice. It’d certainly happened to Chanyeol before. 

Chanyeol doesn’t seem to hear him. He keeps trying to pet the thing, but it keeps scurrying around the bars, never letting him get close to it. 

Chanyeol suddenly turns to Baekhyun excitedly. 

“Uh-oh,” Baekhyun thinks. “That’s the look he gets when he’s come up with another one of his stupid brilliant plans.” 

“I’m keeping him,” Chanyeol whispers, leaning in closer to Baekhyun. 

“Uh-uh. There is no way I’m going to keep a Cornish pixie in our room.”

“Please Baek? Please, please, please, please, please.” There’s a pause. Then, “PLEASE!” 

Baekhyun throws his hands over his ears. “Aish, stop! You’re giving me a headache!” 

There’s no way they can keep that thing in their room. It’ll get loose and kill Mr. Fluffy, Starling, or worse, him. But now Chanyeol is looking at him with wide eyes, and Baekhyun can’t help it. 

He opens his bag underneath the desk. 

“Hurry up,” he whispers, and Chanyeol slips the cage into the bag. 

He isn’t going to sleep tonight.

Sehun is ready to do nothing but crawl into bed and sleep. After the Quidditich match this morning, and then all of his classes this afternoon, he feels like his whole body hurts. 

He hopes that Kai is asleep and not lurking by the door to the common room, waiting for his secret admirer to drop off those ridiculous cupcakes again. Because Sehun is not spending the rest of his night helping Kai catch a creeper. 

The rest of the hall is mostly empty. A few ghosts drift through the walls and past the moving portraits. There’s a handful of students gathered near one of the statues that Sehun knows has a secret tunnel that leads to Hogsmeade. (He’s used it a few times himself.) 

He rounds a corner, and stops. “What was that?”, he thinks. He could’ve sworn he just heard someone yelling farther down the hall. 

But now, everything is silent. 

Sehun shrugs and keeps walking.

He’s too tired to take a different route. There could be a horde of Cornish pixies up ahead and he wouldn’t care as long as he made it to his bed.

Luhan feels like he could bang his head against the wall. 

He’s got so much homework to do, and he still isn’t back to his room yet thanks to Lay’s spontaneous Quidditch practice. 

Luhan really thinks Lay needs to calm down. Lay was almost feverish during practice, and Luhan could’ve sworn he kept seeing him nod off on his broomstick, which made Suho keep shouting at all of them to, “Wake him up! He’s going to fall and kill himself!” from down on the field. 

Luhan sighs, running a hand through his hair. 

A sudden sound makes him stop. 

He looks around, now very aware that he’s alone in the hall he’s in, and that it’s getting darker outside. 

Shivering, Luhan hurries down the hall. 

“Baekhyun’s going to kill me,” Chanyeol thinks with increasing panic. 

He stares at the empty cage on his nightstand. 

He hadn’t meant to let the pixie out. He had just wanted to hold it for a little bit, maybe let it loose on some first years on another side of the castle. 

And then it had bitten him, and had said something that Chanyeol thought must have been very rude, before it had flitted through the door, sticking its tongue out as it went. 

Now Chanyeol’s trying not to completely lose his mind because Baekhyun just went out to go grab some books he forgot down in the common room and he’s going to be back soon and Chanyeol is going to look like an idiot and Baekhyun is never going to let him have another pet again ever. NEVER. 

With a barely contained scream of fear, Chanyeol, still dressed in his pajamas, sprints from the room, rushing to find his pixie. 

“Don’t drop those,” D.O. whispers threateningly from behind Xiumin, making him jump and almost drop the fluffy pink cupcakes he’s holding. 

Xiumin still can’t believe he let this Ravenclaw talk him into helping him bake cupcakes for a Slytherin. 

But since he gets to taste test some of them before delivery, he guesses it isn’t so bad. 

The two walk quietly down the hall, trying to stick to the shadows in case someone recognizes the cupcakes or them. 

Personally, Xiumin thinks that D.O. should just tell Kai that he likes him. It’s better than leaving cupcakes outside the Slytherin common room. It’s a little creepy down there, what with the cold air and all. 

But no. Instead, Xiumin has to hope that Kai won’t catch them carefully setting the cupcakes down in front of the Slytherin door. 

And he almost had, once. 

It had been last year, just after dinner, and D.O. had been anxious to get back to his room so he could finish some homework. 

They had just set the cupcakes down when the door swung open and Kai leaped out with something like a battle cry.

Xiumin had been so scared he had sprinted the rest of the way to his room, leaving D.O. behind, and imagining he heard Kai behind him the whole time. 

D.O. had managed to escape, he later told Xiumin, by hiding behind a tapestry next to a portrait that wouldn’t stop telling anyone who passed by about, “The scared little Ravenclaw boy being chased by the scary Slytherin one.” 

And yet, even after that, D.O. had refused to stop making Kai cupcakes.

“You’re going to smush them,” D.O. hisses frantically, and Xiumin is snapped back to the present. 

There’s a sudden clattering ahead of them in the hall, and both boys immediately freeze.

“What was that?” Xiumin whispers to D.O..

“Chanyeol,” Baekhyun half-whispers.

He’s in the hall when he should be in bed, asleep. Not creeping around the school in his pink pajamas looking for a very tall, very annoying boy. 

He had figured that’s where Chanyeol went after he came back in their room to see an empty pixie cage. He’s going to kill him when he finds him. 

Sehun keeps hearing noises. 

“Pull it together Sehun,” he tells himself fiercely. “Stop being a baby.”

He hurries through the halls faster, trying to focus on something else.

The Quidditch match. “Think about the Quidditch match,” he tells himself.

Okay.

So there had been Kris, the weirdo. Sehun had never seen Kris miss that many Quaffles.

And then there was Kai, finally catching the Snitch, which had seemed like it had wanted to be found. 

And then there was Luhan, who-

Wait. What?

Sehun shakes his head. Why on earth is he thinking of Luhan? That clumsy, tiny, big-eyed Hufflepuff is the last thing he wants to think about tonight.

Luhan had been there, at the game. Sehun had seen him sitting next to those other two Hufflepuffs he was always with, Say and Luho, or something like that. Sehun had seen him fall asleep for a little bit, his head dropping and then snapping back up, hair falling over his forehead, those eyes-

“Stop it,” Sehun thinks furiously. 

He’s too tired, that’s what it is. He’s tired and sore. 

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