A/N: Apologies for those of you who saw the wrong chapter posted for this story for a while there. Something odd is going on between myself and ffic dot net. I'm blaming gnomes.

Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition

Season Three: Round Four

Theme: Emotion

Main prompt: love

Optional prompts:

(style) First person POV

(word) overwhelmed

(word) tranquil

Disclaimer: I do not own the HP universe or its characters. That is all JKR. I am playing in her sandbox.

Beta Love: fluffpanda

Grammar-baton, beat-stick wielding author-friend: Moka

Word Count (w/o A/N): 2993

When You Wish Upon a Star

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I stared at the parchment for what seemed like hours. My mind was weighing the amusement I felt because my old friend had come up with yet another money maker for his store. I had to admire his affection and passion for all things humorous, but sometimes I questioned whether his products were truly as helpful as he believed them to be.

I was experiencing the desire to reach out through the Ether and throttle the man for giving the students of Hogwarts one more thing that drew their minds away from their studies instead of on it. Minerva would probably be running around trying to counter the damage the candies were doing to the academic drive, and I did not envy the staff of Hogwarts the mop-up duties those magical sweets would undoubtedly cause.

I passed my hand over the parchment and felt the jinx woven within the fibres of the advertisement, undoubtedly George's way to ensure no one took down the signs. Unfortunately for him, I wasn't considered one of the best Curse-breakers on this side of the planet for my looks. I traced my finger across the surface of the advertisement and whispered an incantation towards it, clenching my fist together. The parchment burst into flames and turned to ash.

There was a loud sniff behind me, and I turned to see a familiar head of platinum blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. I would never tell the boy to his face, but I found his hair extremely attractive when it was long like that. There was something about how it drifted in the wind like sentient tendrils, catching the sun or moonlight with equal brilliance, that just fascinated me.

"Granger," he said casually.

"Stalking me again, Draco?" I said with amusement, watching as his eyes flickered with half-concealed emotion.

"Psh," Draco commented. "Like I need to stalk you. I can't seem to get away from you, Urchin-breath."

"Nice one, Ferret," I answered. "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" There was a part of me that had come to enjoy our repartee. I had to admit, at least silently to myself, that I had been spending too much time with Slytherins after graduation. I blamed it on too many years working for the Ministry.

Politics, in my opinion, was about being paid to act the Slytherin. In that vein, I had lived, breathed, and been imbued with the spirit of Salazar Slytherin's House thanks to my two blatantly Slytherin friends.

I could sniff out a weakness in someone like Harry could hone in on Dark Arts influence in a person from across a Quidditch pitch. We made an interesting team in that way. He would find them and I would take them out. I didn't always have to resort to spells, which was the beauty of it. I could bury a person alive in legal paperwork that could keep anyone from seeing a knut from their family vaults if they pissed me off. Draco had coined it as one of my "endearingly useful qualities". That was around the time when I had langlocked his tongue to the roof of his mouth, stolen his wand, and enjoyed some random book from my bookshelf.

Draco would always come back with a bar of the most delectable Swiss chocolate known to the world to placate me or bribe me, depending on what mood I was in. I would confess that when it came to that particular chocolate, I was willing to be either placated or bribed. I even admitted that I would tolerate both at the same time, as long as the evil substance found its way into my mouth as fast as humanly possible. Theo had always said I was a chocolate aficionado or devotee. He might be right. I wasn't admitting it to him though.

Draco put his arm around my shoulder, rubbing the side of my neck with his talented fingers, and most of my coherency went right out the proverbial window. He and Theo had been the reason I had left the Ministry for Curse-breaking work. Draco had said that I'd needed to get out of "that stuffy office that you could die in, and no one would find your body for years". Theo had said that the Ministry had "deserved to realise who had been keeping their paperwork from blowing up in their faces." After the many years I had been holding down the fort with Popsicle sticks, sugar quills, and glue I swore consisted of one part chocolate frog and one part edible Dark Marks, I tended to agree.

Turned out the both of them were right. I really had needed to get out of that stuffy office. The Ministry had blown up after I'd left, to the point where they were now trying to bribe me out of Gringotts to come back and "make sense of all the paperwork."

To this day, I wondered if Draco, Theo, or some combination between them had caused Gringotts to up my commissioned rate and salary. It was to the point where I would have been a blithering idiot to not stay in the Goblin-run business. No one other than Draco and Theo knew what I was making by doing Curse-breaking work save the Goblins themselves, and I definitely wasn't sharing my financials with anyone else.

Harry was at least polite enough not to ask. Ron, of course, asked me every time I went to Sunday dinner at the Burrow when I was going to "settle down and let a nice Wizard take care of me." Ginny had told me she was impressed I hadn't smeared the custard pie on his face each time he did it, and my reply had been that I happened to adore custard pie. Wasting good pie would just be pound-foolish as my mother would often say.

My time spent with Draco and Theo had built our reputations as one of the best, if not the best team of Curse-breakers Gringotts had available in house. They would often send us on missions that took years. They didn't really care how long it took because they knew we wouldn't come back unless we had it in our hands. If we came back without whatever it was, that thing was written off as being a goose-chase meant to distract those less apt to clue into the deception.

One time, we had found ourselves trapped in a sunken city at the bottom of the ocean. We had received good intel that there had been an artefact in the ruins that would have paid the equivalent of our salaries for the next twenty years. We'd, strangely enough, easily located the artefact, but, we'd also found the water trap that had taken the lives of countless other skeletal victims. What the ingenious engineers had not planned for, perhaps, was for a team like ours to come knocking.

Theo, other than being a perfect gentleman at the dinner table, was also the only one I knew who had the Animagus form of a great barracuda. He rarely shifted, for obvious reasons, but when he did, he was an intimidating specimen of predatory perfection. The nice thing about being a barracuda in a sunken city on an ocean mission was that you were especially hard to drown. Theo had shifted forms, swam through the grated bars that had trapped us inside, and attacked the lever with his mouth. He had been showing off, of course, because he could have just shifted into a human and pulled the bloody lever, but Theo liked reminding us who was the apex predator of his coral reef.

It had been after that mission that Draco and I decided to meet up with Headmistress McGonagall and beg her for lessons in becoming proper Animagi. She had been almost too excited to teach us. I could only guess that not many people had approached her officially for that sort of thing, despite the advantages. Theo had been her last student, and like a typical Slytherin, he had kept that tidbit completely secret. The reveal had been worth the combined looks from both Draco and myself, judging by the massive grin on his normally reserved face.

I could have easily looked up his name in the Animagus registry, but I'd already done that back when we had still been at Hogwarts. It hadn't occurred to me that I should've look at it again for new additions. There was another lesson in Slytherin tactics there: when in doubt, do more research. It might not be useful now, but damn it could be useful later. Personally, I believed I had had the right to know one of my best friends was a giant predatory fish. I worked with him every day for the past decade, after all. Surely that came with a few rights?

Theo had put up with us learning our Animagus meditations and forms during our more bored moments in between missions. He probably took great pleasure in rubbing it in our faces that he'd managed to master something before "the know-it-all" and the "Prince of Slytherin."

As it turned out, I'd ended up as a sea otter. It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. Sure, McGonagall's Patronus was a cat, and she was a cat. Sure, Remus' Patronus was a wolf, and he was a wolf three nights out of the month. Sure, my Patronus was an otter but did that mean I should have known better? Okay, I should have known. It worked out though as Theo and I spent a lot of our off days in the reefs swimming around together after I'd found my otter form.

And Draco? Well, we could just say we were a merry bunch of aquatic Animagi. Draco had turned out to be a sea snake. We'd spent an entire weekend in a library looking up his species in the reptile handbooks. And by "we", I mean I had done the majority of the looking. Draco had kept trying to slither off into the bookshelves to scare random Muggles, and Theo kept trying to keep him from biting anyone. After a few days of that, we'd settled on the Dubois' seasnake. By settled, I mean, Theo and Draco had dragged me off to eat dinner at some restaurant my parents would have given their spleen to just walk into. Travelling with the pair of them never ceased to keep me on my toes.

It seemed that I had traded my membership in the Golden Trio for membership in the Slytherin triumvirate. It was common knowledge that I wasn't a Slytherin by schooling, but it didn't seem to matter in the slightest to either Draco or Theo. The fact that we had become friends after the Second Wizarding War was still a note of contention between Ron and myself. I was fairly sure Ron had never forgiven me for that particular sin against Godric Gryffindor himself. If it had been his choice, he would have ripped off my Gryffindor stripes and thrown me into the proverbial snake pits—not that the snakes would have minded at that point.

At least Harry and Ginny were more reasonable and had stated that they'd just wanted me to be happy. Even Molly had seemed to agree that seeing me content and happy was worth far more than a marriage into the family. The very thought of me getting married into the Weasley family and popping out 6.5 red-headed children with horrible table manners, a propensity of blowing things up, and endless talk about Quidditch made my stomach churn.

Draco and Theo agreed with me on that front. Draco always swore to Merlin that if I was ever so Confunded or Imperiused to the point where I would find marrying the Weasel to be a good idea, he would Stupefy me. Shortly, after that, he would apparently drag me to St. Mungo's for a long chat with a healer inside a safe, padded room. Theo, at least, had said he'd bring me cookies every Tuesday while I was enjoying incarcerated life. He'd also promised they would be double chocolate with macadamia nuts. That was just one more reason to worship the ground the man walked on.

He was, oddly enough, a stellar cook. I'm pretty sure that he could have cooked Brussels sprouts, and I would have eaten them with glad tidings in my heart and a song upon my lips. I might have even spouted a sonnet or two, depending on what spices he cooked them in and if it involved balsamic vinegar and honey. His cooking was just that good, and I am not ashamed to admit it.

"Come on, Whiskers," Draco chuckled, extending his arm out for me. "Let's not keep Capitan Reefwallow waiting. You know how cranky he gets without his evening swim."

I had to chuckle. We had so many nicknames for each other that it had become increasingly hard to settle on one. Most of them depended on the mood of the day. Draco had been everything from the more traditional "ferret" to "fangface," "slither," and a host of other snake-related humour.

I was not immune to the naming sensation either. I was called "webfoot," "urchin-breath," "clambake," and "abalone-butt." Some of them had been thought up by a knackered Theo or Draco. I blamed 'abalone-butt' on Theo.

I wove my arm around Draco's and felt the tingle of his apparition pull us to the ocean. The blast of warm ocean air hit me across the face like a slap.

This particular beach had become special to us. It had been one of the first places we had found to relax on that neither Muggle nor Wizarding folk seemed inclined to visit. Perhaps it was the steep cliffs or the less than habitable shorelines that deterred the visitors. The sunsets were always gorgeous, and there was an island just offshore that was too small for human habitation but perfect for a visiting trio of aquatic animals.

"Bout time you got here, slackers," Theo sniffed, tossing a shell into the waves.

"Yeah, yeah, stuff it Mr. Cranky-tail," Draco huffed. "We have the next month off before our next assignment. It's not like we had to rush."

"Psh," Theo answered him. "What good is all this money we get if we never use it?"

"Right, and money is so useful out here in the middle of nowhere," Draco quipped.

Theo scoffed at him, his hair flipped in a manner that would have some Muggle hair conditioner marketing director stalking him to sign commercial contracts. He dove into the water changing mid-movement , leaping up into the air and back into the water with a grand splash.

"Show off," Draco muttered. He gently clucked his tongue against his teeth and tucked his wand away in his sleeve. Letting his water snake form overtake his body, he slithered into the water, chasing after the ornery Barracuda.

I watched them for a while before taking my otter shape, admiring the strangeness and the warmth in our oddball and unlikely friendship. If someone back at Hogwarts had told me that I would befriend Draco Malfoy and Theodore Nott and travel the world together with them, I would have called them all lunatics. I was pretty sure Draco and Theo would have done something unspeakable to anyone that did, back in the day. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

I took up my otter shape and bounded down the beach, my webbed paws making odd tracks in the sand. I chased after my two compatriots, splashing into the water with a series of otter squeaks.

We swam together towards the far island. Sometimes, Draco would get tired, and I would float across the calm ocean surface on my back and let him curl up on my belly fur. Theo would swim circles around us, half-guarding and half-playing. It was all a part of the ritual, really. We could have apparated, but we preferred not to. The journey really was a great part of what made it special.

By the time we'd paddled to the distant shore, Draco had whipped out the small canvas tent whose inside had made the tent I had shared with the Weasleys at the Quidditch World Cup seem utterly minuscule. We didn't sleep in it though. Instead, Theo set up a campfire, laid out a blanket on the warm sand, and flopped on his back. We nestled in together to watch the sunset and the following cascade of stars dance across the summer sky.

It was there that I realised why I had never truly settled down. It was in the smell of the woodsmoke combined with Draco's scent of bergamot and freshly mown grass that touched something inside of me. It was also Theo's musky smell of parchment and ancient places and the combined salty scent of the sea that spoke of something so much more than I could put into words. My home was here, with the two people who had become my partners, my friends, and the greater part of a whole we only had when we were together.

A shooting star shot across the darkening sky, interrupting my thoughts.

"Make a wish, Granger," Draco said.

I wrapped my arms around both Draco and Theo's shoulders with a contented sigh. My wish had already been granted. There was no need to be greedy.