Harry hadn't felt this much adrenaline since his first quidditch matches. Maybe he was a junkie because somehow he'd gotten used to the thrill of flying hundreds of feet in the air with only a broom beneath him and bludgers coming at him from every angle, so it'd been quite a while since he felt this much exhilaration in a good way.
And he loved it.
That… probably said something about himself but he wasn't really to face that yet.
He was sweating hard, that last spelling having taken a lot more than he'd been expecting, but the satisfaction that it'd gone exactly the way he wanted it to was so sweet he couldn't stop grinning and his head was light as a feather. Or maybe that was the endorphins…
Fighting Draco had been unfortunate, but at the same time he wasn't super shocked by it given Snape was involved. Merlin knew what the man was thinking by picking his godson but whatever it was, no matter how much he cared about Draco that wasn't about to stop him from giving his first honest go at seeing how good a fighter he actually was.
Not the supposed 'Boy Who Lived' or any other title or rumor people said about him—he needed to know just what he was actually capable of and how far he had to go when it came to defending himself or fighting off actual enemies. This was his first real shot and no matter if he didn't want to actually hurt Draco, he also respected his friend a hell of a lot: he knew the blond was one of the most talented people he knew and therefore was actually a perfect person to test himself against as a good metric. So far he'd only ever mock-dueled with a couple first years who posed him no challenge, but this…
This was his marker to know if his personal training was actually doing shit to prepare him or not.
So, friend or not, he'd taken it as seriously as he could without crossing that line into actually maiming or harming his opponent. If he couldn't win without that control after all, then he hardly considered that a real win.
On the other hand… after Quirrell, after having those memories brought up and confessed to Neville, to McGonagall… it had weighed very, very heavily on him. His training to be able to do magic while moving around and everything else was a constant, but recently he'd also semi-confronted the idea of his own helplessness.
It wasn't a good mental conversation to have, but indeed he'd started to reflect on it at least a little bit.
Fact was, he was pretty darn helpless against most foes. He liked to act cocky with others his age but against an adult? Against Voldemort?
Ha, no chance.
Last year with Quirrell, even when he'd had a wand in his hand he'd been left without much of a clue of how to—forget win, how to even survive except to break the rules of Transfiguration, which left a bitter taste in his mouth.
He wasn't Voldemort. He shouldn't need to cheat to win.
Against Voldemort himself that was fine because the bastard deserved it, but against normal opponents he'd be as dark as the Dark Lord himself if he couldn't use his talent to fight properly. Without resorting to those brutal, technically illegal tactics. Particularly since McGonagall had taken many hours in this past week to give him personal instruction on how to duel using Transfiguration, and he felt he owed her so much that to be able to do this properly in her eyes was the bare minimum required of him as not only her student, but as the human being she was treating him as.
All that being said… he felt accomplished by this fight in a way he'd never really felt before.
He'd put so much effort into this and, he was pretty sure, he'd actually done it.
Glancing to the side of the stage, McGonagall was actually smiling widely, and gave him a very proud nod. Which, was all the confirmation he needed that oh my god yeah I actually did it!
His heart clenched and he couldn't help but grin back, before remembering the boy he'd just tossed off the stage and ran the rest of the arena's length to inspect for himself his friend was alright. He was so light headed from everything that he burst into laughter at the very pouty and prickly look he was getting from below, Draco still flat on his back amongst a sea of sweet-smelling flowers and now glaring at him in that way only he ever managed to be able to.
Something annoyed but fond, insulted but also proud.
Cactus indeed—only he ever manages to look like that, he giggled to himself.
"You alright?" He called instead, not quite managing to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face.
"Sod off." Came the terse reply as he sat up and kicked at the flowers petulantly, but Harry could see the corners of his lips were itching to smile, if only he wouldn't lose face by doing so.
Harry really did appreciate how seriously Draco had taken this duel. They'd talked at length about magical combat this year, even before the dueling club was announced, merely because with Harry's new attitude about self defense he'd wanted to know everything about how witches and wizards traditionally, and untraditionally fought to prepare himself. Draco had been an incredible resource as clearly his parents had trained him well, but actually facing him was a whole other beast in and of itself… and the blond knew how serious Harry was about it even if he still did not fully understand why. The wonderful thing about Draco is that he rarely needed a why… he supported him anyway with no question about why Harry so desperately needed to train himself so intensely like this.
No, he hadn't really questioned it, he'd just given it his all when he'd seen Harry silently ask him to before the duel started. Harry knew there'd been other things on his mind when Snape called him up, but one pleading look and he'd seemed to set it all aside to fight him all out, merely because he'd asked.
Harry was thankful for it, unbelievably so.
Honestly thank Merlin for Draco because he'd even managed to get under his guard despite Harry trying everything not to let his wild heartbeat get to him, trying so hard to ignore throughout the entire fight how sick to his stomach he felt when remembering the last times he'd ever needed to raise a wand to someone. Harry's defenses had been so incredibly high in desperation to win and prove all his effort worth it… but Draco had managed to slyly sneak past it anyway with lightning fast spell work and excellent battle sense.
Harry knew, had it been anyone else, he might've just curled into a ball on the stage hyperventilating that he wasn't enough and he couldn't do this—
Ah.
But it was just Draco.
Just a little stinging jinx that didn't hurt that much, and just his best friend giving him a decent spar right now. Draco was not about to hurt him, and he respected the Malfoy heir as one of the strongest of their grade so it wasn't that much of a comment on his own skill, and more so he actually felt some pride at his friend's proven talent—talent he'd always believed Draco to have, right from the start.
Harry knew that was the only reason he was able to get frustrated about his loss instead, how he was able to stand once more and get fired up for the next round—the only reason his ego and his anxiety did not cripple him at the lost point.
He'd felt a little bad about the needles thing as he thought maybe it was slightly too far, but then again Draco had shown to be a really tricky opponent to deal with and, well…
Match to needle.
It was his first instinct even as a first year who knew nothing, so when he'd accidentally broken the stage and saw all that wood he'd just kind of acted. It wasn't until he saw how Draco froze in pain, unable to move while literally being pinned in place that he thought he might've gone too far—but Snape had fixed him in an instant the same way he'd fixed him after the potions incident. Draco had been shaken but also ready to fight again pretty quickly so Harry hoped he'd forgive him for that. It was a duel after all, that was normal right?
He'd been a little cautious after that though, unwilling to just instinctively hurt someone like that again, so he'd already been toying with non-lethal attacks even after Draco nailed him with a stinging jinx. The pain and frustration at his loss cleared his mind the way his temper always did and he'd gotten the idea for this new spell almost as if it'd simply been waiting for him the same way the improved duro spell for Operation Fox had simply fallen into his lap.
Orchideous was the spell he'd shown Draco back in Diagon, the one where flowers bloomed from the tip of your wand. It was a spell from a joke book, and he was fighting Draco, someone he'd already shown it to so the memory seemed to trigger something for him. It was a harmless spell and he was thankful to be fighting his best friend right now so… why not give him flowers again?
The thing about this particular spell was that, at it's core, it appeared as if you were conjuring flowers from nothing, but more technically on the Transfiguration side of things you were transfiguring air into flowers. Transfiguration had a ton of blurred lines when it came to things like conjuring and summoning, as those were two inherently different magics while sometimes it appeared as if you were 'conjuring' something, when really you were merely creating something from the air itself. It was definitely one of the harder things to do in the subject but Harry had had a lot of practice.
There were only certain things you could create from the physical air around you, and flowers were one of them. Flowers, as he'd already practiced and proven, could easily be transfigured into beetles just the same as buttons could and vice versa—a spell which he was exceptionally good at. So… say he conjured a flower and immediately half-transfigured it into a beetle following the 'falling' method he'd invented for duro… then all of a sudden he had a flower with wings he could control as he liked.
So let's say you did that a couple thousand times… you had quite a large amount of flowers at your disposal.
Potters don't need to see the broad side of a barn to level it.
Even he couldn't do it in one go, but his magical core had been burning as if itching for an excuse to go wild ever since Madam Pomfrey had taken off the block, and it had surprised him as he'd never really actively noticed what his magic was doing beneath his skin before, it was always just sort of there. It did what he wanted when he wanted it to, it just was… but to actually feel it bubble like lava in his stomach was a new, thrilling, kind of itchy feeling like he wanted to burst out of his own skin.
He wasn't stupid so he'd immediately informed Madam Pomfrey of the feeling, but luckily she relented that because of what he'd already done last year, his core really had simply matured or grown larger than what his physical body could normally take. So he was still in a twelve-year-old body but he'd stretched his core to be able to do fourth-year level magic and now that he'd spent several weeks not doing that, it was all cooped up like one's legs would be if you sat cross-legged for 24 hours straight.
And the only way to really stretch magic that was feeling a bit restricted, was to use it.
Given the go ahead to stretch his wings so to speak, and recognizing that he needed a lot of power to pull this spell of properly, he'd decided to fall back on his 'falling' strategy once more.
Honestly, in hindsight there was no reason he should've thought this would work. He'd never tried it before, he'd just assumed that it would work given how he'd used it before, but really it was just a wild guess that this was actually how magic worked and somehow he'd been right. Which was a relief because he might've died of embarrassment if he'd done all that running around and waving his wand about only for a grand total of nothing to happen in front of all his classmates—heaven forbid he never would've lived that down.
He hadn't really questioned that it would work at the time though, and looking back he was abashed at his own baseless confidence, even if this time it had worked out.
His 'falling' method of performing a spell was useful in that if the start and end of a spell was point A to point B, anything could happen between those two points and the spell didn't nod need fall in a straight line down, which meant he could get as creative as he liked in doing whatever between starting at point A and ending up at point B. McGonagall hadn't been lying in that the potential uses were endless, even if not everything he tried always worked, he could still keep trying almost indefinitely and still stumble upon things that did work eventually. It did get boring so he had a ton of uses already for the improved duro spell, in which he could now turn things into not just 'stone' as the original spell was phrased, but into all types of stone—he could use one spell but end up with porcelain, pumice, marble, granite, and even things like salt and chalk! Literally any type of stone he could think of he'd found a way to use one spell to do it all, and though he was still working out how to make that useful, it was at least promising that he could start to do it with any other spell someday too.
He'd even used it in this very duel by turning the bird he'd launched at Draco into a very fragile, delicate obsidian that shattered violently when blasted apart, though he was sure most people thought it was a type of glass.
Actually, is obsidian a type of glass? But it's also a rock? I'm gonna need to look that up…
In any case, his instinct about orchideous was that it would also work the same way he'd proven duro could, meaning he could start and finish the spell in the same place, but he could also take some creative liberties with what happened between point A and point B. In this case, he needed to cast a modified orchideous which meant altering the pattern between start and finish, but he also needed to cast it about thirty times to get the right amount of flowers he estimated he needed to swallow Draco up like he imagined. I mean technically he was actually grafting two spells together, orchideous which 'conjured' flowers and a modified scarabaeibus which would turn a flower partially into a beetle to give it wings. Except following his 'falling' principle, he could 'start' orchideous to conjure the flower, perform his partial scarabaeibus in the middle of it, then 'finish' orchideous all in one motion to make it appear that he was conjuring a winged flower from nowhere.
But he didn't want to stop there, because he estimated he could create maybe forty to fifty flowers per spell, which wasn't nearly enough, and if he just had flowers hanging out around him while he built up the right amount then Draco would have time to see what he was doing and try to counteract it. He couldn't multitask in controlling the winged flowers to avoid attacks while also creating more, he didn't think, so he needed them to become visible to Draco all at once and launch them all at him before he could stop them.
Again, there was no way he should've expected it to work, but somehow he just… knew it would. Maybe he'd reached a level of Transfiguration that he knew he knew things, but he'd forgotten how he knew things at this point, his base knowledge had simply gotten out from under him and made conclusions for him before he could stop and think about how it was he got there. Whatever the reason for his foundationless confidence, he'd still acted on it in the end, which meant he had instinctually started to 'chain' his spells together.
Anything could happen between point A and point B, and he was already inserting an entire spell right into the middle of another spell to combine them. Was there then any limit to how many spells he could shove into the middle of another spell?
He figured, not technically. The limit was how much magical power he had to pull it off, and as no one ever let him forget it, he had plenty of that.
So he's started changing as he dodged Draco's attacks, doing the wand movement of his new spell that created a winged flower, but he never actually finished it. He just 'started' the spell over and over and over… and over and over and over and over…
Honestly he'd completely lost track of how many times he did it as it became an automatic hand movement he was doing while mostly focusing on dodging Draco's jinxes. After what had to be a full minute of doing it though he'd really begun to feel a severe drain on his magic, which was an entirely new feeling for him.
He'd pushed… not wanting to not have enough flowers for his attack but also being cautious of magical cores going boom that everyone around him had been unsubtly hinting at. He didn't want drain himself completely and lose control of the spell, but it was kind of fascinating as he pushed and pushed, to feel how each new performance of the spell sliced away a little more of his magical stamina until it was actually very noticeable that he didn't have much left in reserve to be doing this. Never once had he ever felt a lack of magic or been tired like some of his classmates were at the end of a rigorous class, but now he realized exactly what they must've been feeling—it was super weird.
As a sweat broke out over his brow he realized he should call it here, enough flowers or not. It only took a moment to find and opening and finally finish the spell with a countless amount of spells shoved inside of it—and the effect had been perfect.
He'd never doubted that it would work, but as soon as Draco landed safely on the ground it hit him that that confidence was wild. It actually had worked but… god damn.
Maybe I'm just lucky,
He sighed, wiping his brow of its perspiration and flexing his shoulders some as he got used to the brand new feeling of being magically drained after his whole life of never having this issue before. That was a huge waste of magic he'd just dumped over his best friend in the form of flowers, but he couldn't think of a better use for it.
He grinned and as he relaxed the flowers faded back to nothing, back the air they'd once been as the pure magic holding it all together dissipated and the room flushed thickly with the scent of flowers once more before also slowly dispersing. Draco huffed as he got up from the stone floor now, dusting himself off but giving him a wry look as he chuckled and hopped off the stage.
Lockhart was saying something really loudly and probably talking about how famous he was again, but Harry could not give a fuck about him right now as he looped his arm in Draco's to pull them back through the crowd. He vaguely recognized McGonagall and Snape were trying to regain control of the very excited crowd of second years to continue the duels, while Lockhart was in no way helping and instead hyping them up more, so thankfully they could slip away from the stage finally.
"You okay? For real though," He asked Draco quietly as everyone they passed gave a loud cheer or tried clapping them on the back as they parted way for their retreat.
Grey eyes flashed him a slightly warmer look that showed his amusement beneath the pouting front he had on.
"What do you think practicing this healing factor is even for? They're already gone." He brushed it off, showing him his wrist and Harry felt bad to see small streaks of blood here and there where the needles had once been, now vanished but the pinpricks of blood left behind now dried and smeared across his skin. True to his word though, Harry realized there was no active wound.
Well that's a relief.
He blew out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding, grabbing Draco's wrist tightly as if to reassure himself, to which the blond just gave him a subtle smile back as they returned to their original seats.
"Congrats Harry!"
"That was so cool!"
"Well put Malfoy as well, I have to say!"
The Gryffindors cheered and Draco tensed a bit to actually be complimented by a lion but chose to remain blank and not really acknowledge it. Harry accepted their cheers on both of their behalf instead to cover, flashing them all an abashed smile and thanking them for their accolades.
"Thanks everyone—it was a lot of fun! Kind of terrifying too though," he only half joked, catching the incredulous look Blaise shot at him. Also, Blaise was sitting with the Gryffindor… what?
"You don't say?" Nott mumbled sarcastically off to the side though his sharp hearing picked it up.
Harry was more distracted when Blaise seemed to unfold himself like a jungle cat ready to pounce on him and he considered that far more in need of his attention for now—mostly his caution actually, not just his attention.
"You stabbed him with needles then showered him with flowers. Do make up your mind on if you actually want the boy dead or not, dear." He cooed, sweet as honey but the sharpness hidden beneath it not missed.
Harry just rolled his eyes, gripping Draco's wrist a bit tighter behind him as if to reassure he was still there, and snow-cold fingers twisted to squeeze back.
"My first thought was to turn the stage into porcelain, but I didn't know if I wouldn't just crash through it too nor how not to get myself injured as well while doing it." He admitted with a shrug, deflecting away from the fact this duel had been against Draco specifically… for some reason he wasn't fully comfortable with that line of conversation and would rather talk tactics instead. "Besides, orchideous is a fourth-year spell I just learned, so I was trying to show off for Professor McGonagall a bit, I think."
"That's not the spell you said though." Theo immediately pointed out with a frown, damn observant as always and unwilling to let things slide.
"No, I fixed it a bit for my purposes. Normal flowers don't have beetle wings."
He said it like it was obvious but then he realized literally everyone was just staring at him now.
Seamus suddenly shook his head and muttered something Harry missed, but Blaise leaned all the way forward to get into his face which forced him to give the tall Slytherin a warning look for whatever he was up to.
Thankfully the Zabini didn't start shit, he just gave him a narrowed, unpleasant look that he normally reserved for Daphne.
"You… really are a weird one." He decided succinctly.
"Thanks Blaise, love you too."
"Flowers with beetle wings?" Dean tilted his head curiously, and Harry shrugged it off immediately.
"It's magic. Anything should be possible."
"That's not how magic actually works though."
"Lame." He huffed. "You just need to be more creative is all!"
"I think the world would've ended long before now if everyone was as creative as you." Blaise sneered, tone implying 'creative' was somehow a scandalous word. As if Blaise himself weren't the walking, talking, human definition of scandalous.
Wizards, honestly.
Draco nudged his side to catch his attention once more, inclining his head to the main point here.
"Seriously though. Summoning and conjuring charms are fifth-year material, so you summoned flowers only to transfigure them into flowers with wings?"
"Sort of, though not technically," He relented, seeing they were all genuinely intrigued—particularly the Slytherins and he didn't really need an excuse to talk Transfiguration to be honest. Most of the time they were actually telling him to shut up, so it was actually a refreshing change of pace.
"Summoning and conjuring is still a bit above my level, but orchideous doesn't really conjure flowers out of nowhere, it's actually transfiguring the very air around you into the flowers. The real intent of the spell is to create a bouquet at the end of your wand." He held up his wand to make the point and out bloomed several gorgeous blossoms on its tip. Huge white lotus flowers with bright yellow stamens—he hadn't made these earlier as they were much too large but now he could flaunt his skill easily on this relatively small scale compared to what he'd just done.
He didn't even realize he hadn't said the spell out loud during this demonstration, but the Slytherins sure did and shared brief looks over his head.
He continued, "I essentially created a ton of flowers with wings from the air itself, so no conjuring involved. Although technically it isn't purely orchideous but I also threw half of a scarabaeibus in there too, so it was like one and a half spells done in the same motion."
"One and a half?" Theo blurted out incredulously, being awfully chatty for being in close proximity to Gryffindors, but perhaps it was just the fascination—or disbelief—about what Harry was talking about.
"Scarabaeibus is a button into a beetle or vice versa, but you can do it backwards and also not with a button but a flower instead. If you turn a flower into a beetle but stop halfway in the transfiguration process, you end up with a flower with wings. So… half a spell as I only had to start it but not finish it to get what I wanted." He shrugged, both annoyed but also kind of flattered that they were staring at him like he had a second head. He was proud of his Transfiguration skill, what could he say?
"Several thousand times simultaneously?" Draco deadpanned, only half amused.
"I've transfigured more than a million beetles at this point; they're great practice material. It came naturally." He flippantly deflected the unspoken accusation that he was crazy for this magical development.
"You know I hate to agree with Blaise on anything, but you really are a weird one." He commented lightly and Harry would've been more indignant over it if his grey eyes weren't soft when he turned to make a face at his teasing.
They didn't get a chance to say much more as the rowdy crowd finally settled down and McGonagall was primly calling up new students for the next duel. They just took their seats again, and although people kept leaning over to congratulate the two of them on the wild show they'd just put on, Harry was relieved to finally sit back down again with Draco safely by his side.
It turned out well, he thought.
He'd wanted to test himself and… in a way, he felt he'd made progress. He'd changed, he'd improved… and this showed he still had a long way to go, but all this effort he'd been putting in… it was working.
He couldn't help but yawn though as they settled down to watch the next duel, Draco leaning comfortably into his side and the relief that everything had worked out soothing the tension he always seemed to carry around with him. On top of all that, he also realized he really was tired from how much magic he'd just expended on that fight… maybe there was something he could do about that…
He was so wrapped up in his own self-satisfaction at his victory, that he failed to notice the group of sixth-year Gryffindors grouped behind him with dark frowns on their faces.