A/N: Man, finding the right word for 'senior' in Russian is more of a challenge than I thought. Also, this wasn't exactly what I had planned, but the basic idea is the same. Enjoy!

Written for the International Wizarding School Challenge – Round 1: Durmstrang (for Mahoutokoro students) – Main Prompt: (action) a fight), Other prompts: (object) a wand, (colour) purple

Word count: 2317 (MS Word)

Vladimir was having a tiresome, yet relatively peaceful day. That is, until his neighbour and, as far as the title goes, best friend, Andrei burst in, his hair more dishevelled than usual, and an agitated look on his face.

"What the hell are you doing, Vlad?!" Andrei asked, his gaze stopping on Vladimir's wand, out of which a stream of light purple smoke was coming out, drifting towards and up through the ceiling.

"Nothing," Vladimir replied, his pupils slightly diluted, as though he was trying to convey a feeling of genuine innocence. "I'm working on my project for Unseen Magics. I've got an idea going for the Wards topic. As you can see, it's still in the making, but my spell is looking better and better by the day."

"That's not what I'm talking about!" Andrei exclaimed, a slight red tint appearing on his cheeks. "One of the starshiy came up to me a few minutes ago and reprimanded me for apparently being responsible for the snake bites of a mladshiy! They said it couldn't have been anyone else, since their room is right above mine, and no one was in the vicinity at the time it happened!"

"And?" Vlad queried, raising his eyebrows slightly. The purple smoke coming from his wand continued making its way through the ceiling, up to where his upper dorm neighbour lived.

"It was caused by a cursed ward!" Andrei continued with a raised voice. His nostrils flared slightly, and his agitated expression soon turned into that of frustration. "There's no one in this dorm building who's experimenting with wards, other than yourself! The nearest person whose project topic is Wards is Tatiana Petrovna, and she lives in the Zhernakov Dorm. That's way too far for her to be involved!"

"Hmm," Vlad tapped his shaven chin and narrowed his eyes for a moment. "But that doesn't mean it was me. I mean, yeah, I do create wards and the like, but I've never seen any of them causing snake bites."

"Not just snake bites," Andrei added. "The boy had scars reminiscent of lightning strikes, and he was coughing up some sort of black slime all the way to the Infirmary."

"Huh," Vlad said, furrowing his eyebrows. "Well, I doubt it's my fault, but that's interesting. I never really thought about adding acute curses like that to my wards, but it'd definitely give some boost to my project. Don't you think?"

"That's not the point!" Andrei's face was now a bright red, and his narrowed eyes were sparkling, as though they were ready to strike Vladimir, so as to give him scars not unlike that of the poor boy's from the floor above.

"What is, then? I told you it wasn't me!" Vlad replied, his previous peaceful mood dropping a little.

"That boy is twelve years old!" Andrei shouted. "It's his first year in Durmstrang! You can't expect a child who's just finished Nachalnaya to be doing advanced grey magic like this!"

"I'm telling you, it wasn't me!" Vladimir retorted, a bubble of anger rising in his stomach.

"Then who was it?"

"How should I know?! I wasn't even there!"

"No one was there, except for me and the little boy!"

"How do I know then that you're not just trying to frame me for whatever you've done to him?" Vlad asked, stopping in his tracks for a moment.

"I've already been reprimanded for this! If it was me, don't you think I would've just accepted the whole thing and went on with my life? Why the hell would I accuse you, of all people, if I didn't know very well that you're the most likely person to have done it?!"

"Because you're always such a goody-two-shoes! I understand, you prefer light magic, but that's not all there is to it! There's so much more you can do with magic, but you're not open enough to see it!"

"Is that the 'so much more' you want to do? Cause snake bites, lightning strike scars and slime vomiting in children? Is that what you want to use your magic for?"

"I didn't do it!" Vladimir shouted, hopping up from his seat and gripping his smoking wand tight.

"But you did!" Andrei retaliated, drawing his own wand. "Whether you're aware of or not, you must know somewhere deep inside that it was your doing. And you know what? I'm fairly sure it's all about that purple smoke you've been letting out of your wand!"

"Silencio!" Vladimir shouted as he aimed his wand at Andrei, who deflected his spell with ease. As the spell, on its redirected way, hit the window, a rumble seemed to shake the floor, but the two boys seemed not to notice.

"Reducto!" It was Vladimir, this time, that deflected the spell which struck the dorm room's wall.

"Confringo!" "Expulso!" "Incarcerous!"

As the curses kept on flying, the rumble shaking the dorm seemed to increase in magnitude, though Vladimir and Andrei were preoccupied with their duel. Some spells hit the walls and various objects in Vladimir's room, and some of them flew out the window and into the distance.

But then, a shrilling scream rang through the dorm, coming straight from above Vladimir and Andrei. At the same time, the building shook like it had never before, almost to the point of collapsing as it were. Meanwhile, some of the professors and teaching assistants could be seen hastily running towards where the border of the school's grounds was. Vladimir and Andrei, losing their balance from the apparent earthquake under their dorm, toppled to the floor. Vladimir, scrambling to his feet and reaching for his wand, noted that the purple smoke seemed to have vanished. Yet, he could sense a weird spike in his magic, and a weird tug in the direction of his upper neighbour. As though he was connected to something in there, something that may have caused the shriek moments earlier.

Vladimir furrowed his eyebrows in concentration as he stumbled across his room to a stationary Andrei, trying not to fall over as the violent rumbles continued.

"Hey, Andrei!" He shook his friend's shoulders, but he only received a few painful blinks in return, as though Andrei was struggling to keep his consciousness. "Andrei, are you with me?"

His friend blinked a few more times, then nodded slowly. "Can't…" he spoke, but couldn't finish his sentence.

"Okay, okay," Vladimir pressed his index finger to Andrei's mouth. "I think I fucked something up. I'm not sure what it is, but it probably has to do with that purple smoke I conjured up earlier. It disappeared, but I still feel the magic, and…" he stopped briefly, trying to decipher whether he should go into more detail. "And I think it might be causing some of this mess."

He looked at his friend's face once again. Andrei was still on the verge of passing out as he stared with an empty expression at Vladimir. The latter stood up all of a sudden, and took a few steps in the door's direction.

"I must see what's going on. Hold on, mate," he said as he stepped out of the room and rushed towards the stairs leading up to the next floor.

"Oh, blyat!" Vladimir muttered under his breath every other second as he borderline flew up the stairs and towards the room he felt that magical tug coming from. Once there, he pushed the door open, and was instantly hit by a large cloud of purple smoke. Although he couldn't see where his steps took him, he went forwards, searching for the source of the smoke in the blind hope that he could possibly do something with it. After a few steps, however, he almost fell over as he bumped into the body of who he assumed to be his neighbour.

As Vladimir crouched down to take a look at the boy, he saw blood steadily flowing out of his nose, and his right arm bended in an unnatural angle, along with a couple of scars on his face, vaguely reminiscent of snake bites.

It didn't take long for the realisation to hit. For a while, Vladimir crouched there, inside the room of a stranger, as the weight of the situation dawned upon him. He might have just caused some irreversible damage to a person, the school, and his own best friend. He sat there, pondering his decisions, as a wave of desperation washed over him.

He wanted to make it better. He's already done what he's done, and he wanted to try to stop it, but he had no clue. He didn't think about a counter-spell for the ward he'd been working on.

Vladimir looked at his wand and felt another tug coming from his right. Before standing up, he muttered a quick Sanguis Stupor at the poor bleeding boy—the only spell he knew for stopping bleeding. He then let his body be carried by the magical connection to whatever object he cursed with that purple smoke.

Only a few moments passed before he was holding an innocuous-looking pen, one that, amazingly enough, was letting out an enormous amount of magical energy. As Vladimir gripped the pen, the rumbling in the building seemed to have halted, leaving an unfamiliar sense of stillness in Vladimir. Keeping the pen tight in his palm, Vladimir looked at his wand, pondering what to do.

Trying out foreign and new spells might worsen the case, he thought. But conventional spells might no work. He was in a dilemma. He knew there was something needed to be done, but there were simply no answers as to what that action could be.

"Finite," he cast the spell after he'd decided that there was nothing else he could do. Much to his dismay, nothing happened, except for a small nudge from the pen.

"Finite Maxima?" he tried again, but again, nothing, except for a nudge, larger in magnitude than the last one.

"Okay," Vladimir muttered. "Something stronger. Modum Extinctus!"

The pen dropped from his hand, but nothing else happened. Fortunately, the rumbling did not start anew. Vladimir picked up the pen again, scrutinising it as though that would help him.

"Even stronger?" he pondered. He tried to remember the strongest general counter-spell he'd ever learned.

"Incantamentum cesso!" he said finally. The pen ripped itself from his hand, spun around in the air, emitting a light purple glow, until it decided on a direction. When it stopped, everything stood still for a moment.

But then, the pen disappeared from view, and a grand explosion knocked Vladimir to the floor. In the moments before he lost consciousness, he thought, "What the hell have I done?"

Vladimir woke up in the Infirmary. Interestingly enough, his joints weren't aching, and he was clear-minded as usual, save for the drowsiness that usually accompanied his longer sleeps.

He turned his head to the right. In the bed adjacent to his, Andrei sat, eating what looked to be some sort of hot soup. Maybe borscht. He wanted to eat borscht, too, if he thought about it. Especially the kind his mother would always make when he was home.

"Andrei?" he spoke in a raspy voice.

"Vlad? You're awake," Andrei noted, taking another sip of his soup.

"I'm sorry," Vlad said, looking at his hands. "Although I'm not sure what it was that I did, I probably shouldn't have done it."

"Hmm," Andrei responded. "Well, you're right about that."

"And about that light magic thing I said," Vlad continued, "I still think you're a goody-two-shoes and you're not appreciating how vast the boundaries of magic are, but I probably shouldn't have said that. At least not at the time. Maybe sometime later, after the whole thing died down."

"I suppose you're also right about that," Andrei said as he looked out the window across the two of them.

"Anyway, I just kind of realised while trying to do something about the whole situation that I probably should have asked the professor about this project before starting on it. Besides, it should have been telling that the purple smoke coming out my wand went through the ceiling." Vlad stopped for a while. "Right, what happened with my wand anyway?"

"Oh, I think it broke sometime after you went up. I'm not sure how, 'cause I wasn't really there, but yeah. You'll probably need another," Andrei replied.

"Oh," was all Vlad could say. "Well, anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it might have been me in the wrong this time. This doesn't mean I'm generally in the wrong, but this was an exception of sorts. You know?"

"Glad to see you haven't changed," Andrei said with a roll of his eyes. "You should be more worried about being expelled after this, though."

"I'll worry about that when I recover." Vlad shook his head. "Have you heard anything about what happened?"

"Not much, but I overheard some teaching assistants talking about it while we were supposed to sleep. I think there was something about a hole being blown in the Durmstrang wards because of a stray curse that was apparently combined with some exceptionally strong warding magic, and a bunch of nemagicheskiy being obliviated."

"Blyat," Vlad cursed.

"Yeah, and the explosions and the rumbling in the dorm was about a powerful cursed ward being set off by a third year. He had some serious injuries when they brought him in apparently," Andrei continued. "Though, I wouldn't know for sure. I was out for three days."

"Then how long have I been here?" Vlad asked, suddenly horrified.

"About a week, maybe?" Andrei said.

"That's a long time," Vlad noted. "Okay, I guess I'm not doing this again. At least not in the foreseeable future."

"Good idea, mate," answered Andrei, gulping down the last of his soup.

A/N: Hope you enjoyed! Honestly, looking up words to do stuff almost took longer than writing. Foreign words and spells used:

Starshiy – senior (Russian)

Mladshiy – junior (Russian)

Nachalnaya – literally, 'primary' in primary school in Russian. Here, I intended this to be the name of another wizarding school for children aged 6-12, as a preparatory school for Durmstrang.

Blyat – fuck (Russian)

Sanguis Stupor – literally means something like 'stop blood.' Here, a spell used to stop bleeding. (Latin)

Modum Extinctus – literally 'extinguish effect.' Here, a strong counter-spell that stops the effect of a previous curse. (Latin)

Incantamentum cesso – 'cease incantation.' An even stronger counter-spell for removing curses from an object (can be a living object as well). (Latin)

Nemagicheskiy – literally, 'not magical.' Here, means Muggles. (Russian)