The Houses Competition
House: Ravenclaw
Class: Herbology
Category: Drabble
Prompt chosen: purple
Word Count: 995 (wordcounter)
Disclaimers/triggers: none. Characters are all appropriately aged up throughout all events.
xXx
Viktor Krum has never really understood love, despite how easily he falls into it.
He comes from a family of lovers, first. There is as much passion in his house as there is magic.
His mother and father were older when they had him, and still, they hold hands on walks and smile across the dinner table. His father buys his mother beautiful things at every opportunity: jewelry, hairsticks, furs, robes of deep dark purple to signify that he thinks she is a queen, to tell her that he's still passionate. His mother drafts sonnets dedicated to her love for her husband, writes poems in the middle of the night, hums love songs as she adjusts her husband's belts. Viktor grows up in a home with music in the air and wedding photographs on the wall and a hundred purple dresses, and he knows that he will be like them.
One by one, his cousins bring dates to family functions, his older siblings kiss their partners at the door to say goodbye, and by the time he is old enough to notice others, he realises that for all the love he has seen, he has absolutely no idea how to go about it.
He doesn't feel like everyone else says they do. His crushes feel more like friendships than anything, usually, and they are constant. He likes everyone, and he grows quickly out of it with each one, too. He doesn't have a type. He thinks women are pretty, but he still has no desire to touch them.
Maybe everyone is lying. Maybe their attraction is just made up.
Or maybe he is different.
When he first sees Hermione Granger, he starts to like her because he thinks that maybe she is different too.
It's something in the way she reads, he thinks. She absorbs knowledge like a dry sponge, book after book after book, and she barely pays attention to the people around her.
She doesn't notice boys or girls at all.
Something about that makes him wonder if she's ever read romance. If she's ever fallen in love through words instead of touches. If she knows she reads like she is the protagonist of a love story.
He wonders that, and continues to watch her before he finally works up the nerve to ask her to the dance.
It still feels a little bit like a friendship. But this time, there is a little bit more.
Hermione Granger does not work out. But in many ways, she forms him. Viktor falls in love with unkempt curls and bright intelligence, in long conversations and periwinkle dresses.
Ginny Weasley is brief. But he sees her at a party, and she is pretty in a way completely unlike Hermione. Maybe it is good he never tries to say hello.
Because he meets Luna Lovegood at the same party though they will not truly talk yet, not for years.
He finds out later that the man he tried to duel is her father. He is very embarrassed by this.
He meets her again at an art show. She has purple, black, and grey splashes onto white canvases, photographs of hovering, spinning fruit, and a pride flag over her shoulders in her amazingly detailed self-portrait. She's wearing it in person, too, violet over one shoulder and black over the other, and she has earrings shaped like silver broomsticks, and scrappy dirt blonde curls, and a periwinkle dress with stars embroidered up the chest like a meteor shower.
He guesses, based on a display of similar jewelry, that she must have crafted her earrings herself.
She did, out of silver she got from some creature he's never heard of, but he has no doubt they must be real where she comes from. And he asks some more questions, too, about the black, grey, white, and purple flag on her back.
He always thought purple was the colour of his parents' love. He never knew it could fit the way he loves, too.
He eats cheese and lavender fudge, and buys a pin with yellow, spinning fruit on it. He learns a new word to describe himself. There is a stack of address cards in a handwoven basket shaped like a dragon, and he takes one so he can send her a letter later.
When he eventually does, it's mostly formalities. He says he liked her art, and that he thinks he's met her before. He asks if she is going to have another show. He wants to ask her if she remembers him from school, if she falls in love like him, if she'd like to meet again and drink something hot and maybe have a long conversation.
The most he manages is to ask if she likes Quidditch.
Her response comes with a tiny white, red, and green flag folded into the parchment.
This is more than friendship again, he realises.
It takes him months to ask her on a date. He's always been bad at that. But when he finally does and she says the nargles like him, which he interprets as a yes, he thinks he's starting to understand love again.
He thinks he looks silly in purple, it makes him look like some fancy iridescent bird, but he wears it nonetheless for their first date, mostly covered by his black robe. He wears a black ring on his finger.
He wonders if Luna will be okay with goodbye kisses even as he's still ringing her rabbit shaped doorbell to say hello.
She opens the door in red, black, and gold, and he decides it doesn't matter. Kisses and gifts and dances and all the things he grew up thinking were love are irrelevant, because he will do anything to be with her, however they figure out will work.
Viktor Krum has never really understood love, despite how easily he falls into it. But he thinks Luna Lovegood will be an amazing person to learn with.