Warning: cursing and unedited writing. read at your own risk. also universe bending.

When Jongdae crashes into the ground with a sickening crack, his broom splitting in two, the whole stadium holds it breath- not just because this is only the tryouts and nobody ever expects anything bad out of those, but also because this is Kim Jongdae and Jongdae never crashes. He soars with grace, sneaks past bludgers with Ravenclaw wit, and plucks the snitch out of the sky as if it’s candy. WIth the exception of his first Quidditch game, in which he caught the snitch by jumping to the ground and landing on both feet, Jongdae lives in the air.

Immediately, Madame Hooch rushes over to check it the broom is the only thing that’s cracked. When she finds Jongdae limp and some parts bending in ways they definitely should not, he calls over Luhan and Minseok to help him carry him to the hospital ward.

When Jongdae wakes up two days later, he finds Suho softly dozing off with his glasses almost slipping off his nose. Of the eight exchange students from Korea, Suho's the only one that Jongdae's ever spoken to, albeit only in the first couple weeks before he realized that an charming smile and innocently fumbling Mandarin could open up conversations faster than perfect grammer. Jongdae makes sure that Suho doesn’t stay asleep for long (a pillow his way takes care of that) and Jongdae begins to speak but the head boy cuts him off.

“Three weeks.”

“What?” Jongdae says, voice tight but controlled, like he’s trying not to choke.

“Three weeks in the hospital wing. You messed yourself up quite a bit and not even Skele-Gro can fix that immediately.”

Jongdae knows enough about medicine not to argue and demand to drink the bottle of Skele-Gro here and now. He still grumbles though.

“There’s a game against Hufflepuff next week. And one against Gryffindor after that. You can’t expect me to stay here through all that. There must be some way to get out of here faster; this isn’t the muggle world.”

“If this were a Muggle hospital, you’d be stuck in here for half a year, at least, and completely immobile and drugged on pain meds. It’s not pleasant so count your blessings.”

Jongdae often forgets that Suho is muggle-born, and the weary, brusque way Suho says that takes any possible comeback out of Jongdae’s mouth.

Instead, he rolls to his side and looks out the picture window next to his bed. The sky is an expansive blue, nothing like the cloudy day that was tryouts, and if he stares hard enough, he can almost feel the sun against his skin and imagine the school (and this damned hospital wing) as nothing but a little speck in the landscape.

“Oh stop looking so forlorn,” Suho breaks Jongdae out of his reverie. “You’ll be back in no time. I’ll visit. It won’t be that bad.”

Of course, Suho is a completely lying and of course, Jongdae gets restless. Mysterious things start appearing around the school: faucets producing dye instead of water and staining hair in various neon colors; incriminating owl delivery mix-ups; even Mrs. Norris tied to the chandelier. Nobody mentions Jongdae, but it’s in the back of every student and teacher’s mind that the school’s mastermind Ravenclaw just happens to be out-of-commission and perhaps a little too much time on his hands.

“How can you even move while you’re stuck in here, much less have the energy to do all this?” Suho sighs.

Jongdae smiles sweetly and bats his eyelashes innocently.

“Wha‘cha talking ‘bout?”

“Oh stop- we all know it’s you.” Suho responds, but he’s smiling and Jongdae counts that as a victory. Not that he likes making Suho smile or that Suho has a particularly bright smile when it’s genuine

Perhaps to divert Jongdae’s boredom, Suho starts coming more by more often, not that Jongdae can say he doesn’t enjoy it. He’s never hung out with the head boy all that much, except when eating with Kris in the Great Hall. But somehow Suho manages to be the most perfect combination of adorably horrible at not talking about studies and actually someone interesting to converse with. He ends up questioning Suho again and again on topics for his Muggle studies homework, but when Suho starts explaining what cells or atoms are, or tells him that it’s possible to create diamonds in laboratories and at some point, he lends Jongdae a couple novels about genetic engineering, they end up talking into the night and Jongdae ends up with more than enough material for his paper.

It’s not until a week later that Jongdae realizes that he hasn’t pulled any tricks in the past week. The lack of unusual activity in the school is definitely not because Jongdae has been too busy reading and he likes spending his nights talking to Suho instead of-

Jongdae stops that train of thought immediately.

The next few days are filled with chaos, with a nice touch of “Muggle magic” with the random knick-knacks that Suho showed up and left in his dorm. The remote control, toy-place is a particularly nice piece, especially after he found a way to enchant it so magic, including spells from teachers, wouldn’t meddle with the technology.

One day, Jongdae finds a box of knicknacks haphazardly shoved under his bed. The wood is worn and paint faded, but the handwriting on the parchment inside is unmistakably Suho's. He opens it to find some wires and parts and for a few moments, Jongdae can forget about the dull ache in his limbs and his cabin fever. Would it be improper, he wonders, to invite myself over to Suho’s house sometime. But then again since when has he ever cared about propriety?

The pounding in his chest and the stupid grin have absolutely nothing to do with Suho’s neat handwriting and annoyingly adorable smiley face.

Jongdae loves how Suho tries so hard to keep him busy, to keep him distracted. But sometimes, especially when it’s quiet and he has nothing to laugh over, he can’t help but gaze wistfully outside the window at the blue and bronze specks outside his window. The weather isn’t even that nice- the clouds threaten rain and chilly wind and reddening trees hint at autumn. But anything would be better than staying cooped up in his room, blanket over his leg and perched on his bed all day.

Suho catches him one day, long after the team is done practicing. Jongdae doesn’t even hear him come in until Suho coughs politely.

“You miss it, don’t you?” Suho asks. “Quidditch that is.”

Jongdae shoots him a look, like you couldn’t tell. But Suho smiles a little back and sits next to him on the bed. They sit, watching the birds fly and the sun wash the campus over in amber and gold.

Suho hums a little and Jongdae wonders if he’s just ignoring the haggardness of Jongdae’s face and the dark circles and Jongdae is grateful that he doesn’t comment on the redness of his eyes. Jongdae keeps his eyes fixated on the owls swooping over the Forbidden Forest for their nightly mean, but he leans into Suho’s warmth and rests his head on his shoulder.

He wonders if he’s overstepped a boundary when Suho freezes. But then the shoulder relaxes and becomes a comfortable rest for his head.

They sit, simply and quietly, and Jongdae doesn’t know how much time has passed when Suho speaks up.

“Why do you like Quidditch?”

“It’s not just Quidditch,” he whispers, “It’s flying. It’s everything.”

“Some people think it’s stupid,” he tries to elaborate, “to try to catch a snitch. It’s useless. You can just Accio it with a wave of a wand. There’s no strategy. But there’s something wild about the randomness, the adrenaline and the feeling of weightlessness.”

He pauses. “I fell, you know, working on a dive. I was practicing it all summer. But the thing about Quidditch is that it is random. It’s that anything can happen. If you focus enough, work enough, you can do the impossible.”

He leaves out the part where he has done the impossible- flown by broom from Korea to China just to come to Hogwarts and escape a suffocating family. Suho somehow manages to shut away those bad feelings and the restlessness and anxiety that comes from feeling trapped on the ground.

Suho stays silet and Jongdae wonders if Suho really understands what he means, because nobody else gets it, much less those who’ve never flown before, and he stopped trying to explain that there’s a difference between loving something and living for it and sometimes his bones ache to feel weightless and his brain is thrown off when his maximum speed is just too slow.

“Magic is...easier...simpler than the Muggle world.” Suho finally speaks up. “There’s no reason to run a mile if you can apparate there. Why spend an hour figuring out how to build a toy plane, when you can just conjure it. That’s what I miss most. That’s why I still do this Muggle stuff. If you’re smart enough, determined enough, have enough instinct and practice, you can do anything with magic. But it’s diferent when you have to put everything into doing something, both physical and mental.”

Jongdae’s quiet for a moment, eyes still closed, before he murmurs, “That’s Quidditch.”

"Perhaps," Suho acquiesces, "that's what everyone looks for in life."

Jongdae wonders what Suho looks for. To tinker with toys for the rest of his life or go back to the Muggle world or to stay here. He wonders if Suho could see him by his side in this (because when Jongdae imagines being a famous Quidditch star, the idea that Suho not being there to cheer him on makes his stomach hurt like that time in elementary school when the bullies at school burned his favorite teddy bear and he 'accidentally' set them on fire) 

Jongdae pauses, wondering if he has any s left to give because the gossip surrounding him is that he's the exchange student with the highest grades in the school but nobody told him that the stupidest thing to do in the world was to fall in love with a boy who may not like you back and Jongdae’s never been good at people or things that can’t be figured out with enough observing and to a boy that's more comfortable flying haphazardly through the air than actually conversing with people, talking to Suho is a familiar old sweater or going back to his castle in Korea and speaking a language where he doesn't have to create sentences in his head before opening his mouth.

“I’d like to visit your place someday, you know. In the muggle world.” he mumbles and holds his breath, praying that Suho’s still looking out the window and can’t see his blush.

"Only if you teach me how to fly on a broomstick first."

Jongdae pretends like his heart didn’t just jump, but he lets himself smile a little. "Of course. Just fly with me sometime."

Suho stays with him all night, and Jongdae doesn’t remember when he fell asleep but he finds himself tucked into his covers and heart fluttering when he wakes up.

When Jongdae finally is allowed back on his Firebolt again, he's not too out of shape, much to the team’s relief. He ends his first match barely half an hour in, breaking the tied score between Ravenclaw and Slytherin and too exhilarated with flying again to care about flair.

Suho finds him immediately after he exits the pitch and surrounds him in a huge hug. Suho -no Joonmyun, as Jongdae has started calling him- smells like lavender and old books and comfort and home and Jongdae finds himself burrowing into his shoulder to hide his grin.

Maybe, just maybe, getting injured wasn’t all that bad.