All Cedric could hear was grunting. The brute force of a man that seemed to have a permanent scowl and a stern, sharp stare was harder to deal with than he thought. He sighed; rolling his eyes, and ran his fingertips through his maple locks. Cedric had spent nearly five hours holed up in a tight corner of the library and they had made no progress, had gone nowhere. There had been a slew of third-year girls from both Beauxbatons and Hogwarts that had hidden themselves in the next row, sliding books left and right to try and catch a glimpse of the Bulgarian superstar, and that really hadn't helped either party's concentration. The Hufflepuff almost wanted to bang his head repeatedly into the desk. The concept of arithmancy was so simple; so easy to follow.
"Okay. Let's try a different method."
Cedric feared the tutoring lesson would stoop to this level, but he had tried nearly every other method. There was only one thing he could do; use his last resort. Cedric pulled out a bag of Bertie Bott's beans. He poured out a handful of beans, separated them into three piles by kind, and shoved one sort towards Krum.
"Alright, you have six beans. The book says that I have three more than twice the amount you have. So what do you need to do to your pile first?"
The two champions sat in silence; Cedric staring pleadingly at Krum to at least tell Cedric he understood the question, and Krum sitting there with a visible question mark hovering over his head. Somewhere in the atmosphere were mixed signals and wrongly-fired messages. Tension started to gradually fill the air, slowly choking them, the miscommunication reaching a new level of frustration.
Finally, Krum slowly raised fingers two fingers from beneath the table, indicating the need to double his beans. Cedric beamed back; maybe it wouldn't be as hopeless as he figured it out to be.
"Yes! Okay. Now, what's the last thing you need to do to get the number of beans in my pile?"
Cedric looked hopeful, eyes urging Viktor on. Maybe the Quidditch professional had something stored in that head of his... Maybe Viktor wasn't silent because nothing seemed to be in his mind... Maybe the reason why Viktor was so quiet was because he was actually...
The Hufflepuff watched in horror as Krum reached his overbearing hands and grabbed a portion of his beans and dropped them into his mouth, slowly chewing and then grunting after he swallowed. He then proceeded to shrug, looking at Cedric with that apathetic face of his.
Cedric sighed. This would take longer than he thought.