The thief followed Ploward and quickly caught up to the ambling man, squeezing between his bulk and the brick wall to create an opportunity to pickpocket in the momentary scuffle. Hurrying over, Clare drew her wand and cast “[i]Locomotor Mortis[/i]!” at the back of him scurrying away when Ploward unwittingly stepped into the fray. Struck by the purple light, his legs bound together, shocking him, he fell like a log onto the wet cobblestones.

“Dammit!” she swore under her breath. The thief escaped. Ploward sputtered yells into the puddle.

Clare turned him over - “I’m gonna getchu! You’re going to pay for this!” - whose eyes widened in surprise at the sight of her, a long-time family friend; his nose was smashed crooked and bleeding. “I’m sorry Mr Ploward, I’m so sorry!” she apologised, feeling genuinely guilty for the accident. “I was aiming at the thief! Now hold still.” She pointed her wand at the injury. “[i]Episkey[/i].” The bridge mended itself straight to leave only the dark red blood dribbling from a nostril down his lips and chin. Clare reversed the curse on him: his legs unstuck themselves and he immediately struggled to get up away from her with his bags. 

“What are you talking about, Clare?!” Ploward hissed after he had wiped off the stain on his face. “There was no thief!”

“I saw him steal from you when he passed you by!”

“Do you mean Miss MacAlistar?” he asked with sudden realisation. “She is a star, why would she want dirty old herbs and skins?” Ploward opened his satchel and checked it over. “They’re all here.” 

“MacAlistar?” Clare repeated the familiar sounding name. 

“The Prides’ Chaser, that’s who!” Ploward was beaming and swept away in the excitement, he carried on rhetorically, “I’m going to ask her for an autograph. It isn’t too much, is it? I won’t take up too much of her time, wouldn’t want to bother her. Just a quick scribble will do.” He absentmindedly fingered his scarf coloured in the Prides’ royal purple. It had been carefully tucked away from the rain. 

“Mr Ploward,” Clare said hesitatingly with a touch on his forearm, worried if the fall had knocked his wits out. “Are you sure it’s Ainsley MacAlistar?”

“Of course I am!” he insisted with utmost certainty. “She looked at me dead in the eyes!”

Clare absorbed the revelation that it had been her own misunderstanding with some small measure of relief. It was pure luck that she had done no lasting harm to a friend and had missed a curse at the popular quidditch player. Clare wondered aloud, “What is she doing out here this late?”

“Off to see Betty - good ol’ Betty, gotta get her a bunch of pink wineberry for this. She sent me an owl to tell me that she’s picking up supplies tonight.”

“Supplies?” 

“Well,” he moved in closer to say in a lower voice, “Betty wouldn’t tell me what she’s buying, apothecarist confidentiality and all, but MacAlistar comes by regularly just after the shop closes. I suppose it’s hard to get around being a famous Chaser. So I thought to myself, why don’t I bump into her? And I did! But flobberworms! Lost my bloody tongue right when I needed it.”

The quick light footsteps returned. Clare and Ploward turned to see Ainsley MacAlistar carry a box under her arm, head down and hooded to keep her privacy. Clare had never known Ainsley to be the friendly sort and now didn’t seem like a good time for Ploward to ask a favour from her. The cliquish ex-Slytherin, as most of her House were wont to stick to their own haughty, dark kind, was flagrantly contemptuous of non-pure-bloods; the likes of Ploward, a squib, weren’t taken kindly to either. While Clare didn’t think Ainsley would offend them with more than a few choice words, she readied her wand hidden beneath her sleeve for defensive spells should the notoriously ill-tempered witch decide to send one of them to St Mungo’s. Clare never forgot the dazed, drooling boy and his mother crying at his bedside. 

Ploward went to meet Ainsley, shy like a schoolboy and holding the end of his scarf, now exposed and trailed on his chest. “Good evening, Miss MacAlistar,” he greeted, sounding uncharacteristically formal and polite. “I’m terribly sorry about before, bit clumsy I was there. If it isn’t too much to ask of you after that….” He held out the scarf getting rained upon. “It would mean so much to me and mine.”

It had been more than a decade since they had last met in person, but Clare thought it would be best to assume Ainsley remembered her from their quidditch days in Hogwarts. After all, they had been frequently neck-and-neck in the air, quaffle in hand, and Ainsley would elbow hard into her ribs and face or try an unscrupulous curse. More than once Clare had gone home bruised in tender areas, usually after a visit to the hospital wing, and ranted to whomever would listen about the foul, incorrigible Ainsley who, as the darling of the Slytherin Head-of-House, had been penalised far less than what should have had been fair. And from what sports journalism reported, age didn’t mature the hard-nosed Chaser whose nasty underhandedness had been normalised as her insignia, much to Clare’s disdain. 

Putting aside the deep-rooted grudge, Clare said simply with a courteous smile, “Hello.” She didn’t expect a decent response from the snobbish MacAlistar whether to herself or Ploward.