It was as the weather started thawing in the last week of February that Hermione got a—dare she say frantic—note from Viktor.
After Byzantine. 2nd floor. Important.
Bring H.
-V
Viktor was one of the most straightforward people she knew. It was one of the things she liked best about him, that he wouldn't hide his thoughts or feelings behind word games and polite obfuscation. For someone like her, who struggled to discern other people's emotions at the best of times, he was a straight-talking saint in burgundy wool. So for Viktor to not only send a rushed note, which ostensibly hid both the time (after Alchemy on Friday) and the place (his dorm) and explicitly told her to make sure Harry was there? And then to get to Alchemy and have him not even show up?
Something was wrong.
Something was very, very wrong.
She could, therefore, be forgiven for paying entirely too little attention in Alchemy. And for running in the halls. And for gripping her hair in frustration when she couldn't find Harry. By the time she'd finally corralled him away from Ron and dragged him all the way down to the second floor Champions' Dorm, she was nearly frantic with worst case scenarios, every one of which seemed to revolve around mortal peril and death.
After her growling outburst at the first set of moving stairs, Harry's eyes had gotten so big and round watching her that they matched his glasses.
Wisely, he'd said nothing.
Bursting through the doorway into the Champions' Common Room, Hermione nearly stumbled over Viktor's legs, outstretched as he sat waiting for them. With a start, he jumped up from the settee, marched over to his open door, and brusquely ushered the both of them in.
She'd never been in his dorm room before, and it felt rather illicit: a fact that was completely ruined by her agitation, Viktor's dark scowl, and Harry's mere presence. She gave herself a bare moment to notice her surroundings: cream-colored walls under a warm wooden ceiling, a striped red rug abutting a large stone fireplace, a brown and cream linen duvet on a bed she refused to contemplate for too long.
Within moments, Viktor waived the both of them into a pair of worn leather chairs before crossing quickly to the door, peaking out, and closing it with a decisive snap of the lock.
The three teenagers stared at each other for a long moment before Viktor, his brows pulled low over his eyes, finally stalked to the bed and perched on the edge of it.
"Viktor, what is going on?" Hermione finally asked.
Harry scratched awkwardly at his head, ruffling his hair so the back stood on end. Hermione squashed the urge to reach over and fix it in favor of focusing on Viktor.
He looked troubled.
Incredibly troubled.
His brow was furrowed, his eyes a little wide and manic, his mouth almost pulled open from the way his whole face was pinched in towards his nose.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he pulled a crumpled envelope from his pocket. The direction on the front was in Cyrillic and meaningless to her, but she felt immediately that there was something very wrong with it.
With a sigh, Viktor collected his thoughts and turned to her, the envelope clutched firmly in one hand, his thumb rubbing little circles on the parchment over and over and over. "Got letter. From cousin in Albania."
For a moment, Hermione said nothing. Had someone died?
And then suddenly, she remembered that conversation, so many weeks ago now, when Viktor had told her he'd reach out to some people he knew in Albania about the little problem of Bertha Jorkins.
"Oh," Hermione breathed out.
Viktor's lips thinned as he pressed them together.
"What's the problem?" Hermione asked, uncertain what terrible news his cousin could have sent that would send Viktor spiraling into something like paranoia.
It took a minute, and several false starts, before Viktor gathered his wits enough to explain properly. "You were right. Something is very bad in Albania forest. My cousin, she works with Krvoijac—eh, how you say—vampires. There is place in forest, always a bad place, but now? Now is place even vampires will not go. They say something has been…eating them. And last month, she goes to see leader for meeting. Always stays in same village. Wizard village. But now village is gone. Everyone. Just. Gone."
"Oh god," Hermione breathed out.
"But what does it mean?" Harry exclaimed, his face going pinched and his shoulders tightening up towards his ears.
Viktor sighed. "It mean something evil is in Albania. Or was."
Something about his expression suggested there was something much darker than mere murder at play, something that she just didn't understand.
"Viktor?" she asked. "What eats vampires?"
"Nothing good." He paused for a moment, his skin going grey, his eyes darting back towards the locked door. "I think is time you tell me about Bertha Jorkins. All of it. You know what is in forest, don't you?"
"Voldemort," Harry blurted out. And suddenly, like he was a pressure cooker about to blow, the truth came spilling out of him in fits and bursts.
The sad story of Bertha Jorkins came out first.
And then a frightening, chilling, disjointed recounting of The Dream.
The possession of Quirrell.
The certainty that if Voldemort wasn't currently in Albania, he'd been there just that summer.
It shocked her, honestly, how much truth just tumbled from Harry's lips. He'd never been a particularly trusting individual, choosing to bottle things up instead of sharing them with others, and never with people other than her, Ron, and maybe Sirius.
And yet, here he was, popping off like a geyser, tripping over his own tongue. How long, Hermione thought, had Harry been needing to talk about all this again?
Was it because Viktor was older? Someone Harry looked up to? Or was it simply because he was in too deep to escape and Harry might as well tell him the whole sordid tale?
When it was over, the silence left in the wake of Harry's confession felt suffocating.
"There is story. Old story," Viktor began gravely, "about vampires. They do not start as form, you know. They are like light, or air, or gas. Spirit only. No body. Over time, gather strength, learn how to make body for themselves so they can feed." With a deep breath, he continued, his eyes glued to the wall behind them. "There is dark ritual. Very dark. That says you get vampire's power if you eat him."
"The power to make your own body," Hermione whispered.
"Da."
Oh lord.
"He's got a body," Harry choked out. "He's coming back."
Viktor nodded.
"You said, in your dream, he looked small, wrong. I don't know how, but that is important. His body is not right. Is not finished."
"But what does it mean?" Harry asked, his voice beginning to warble slightly.
"Do not know. And cannot ask."
"What? Why not?" Hermione exclaimed. "Surely your cousin knows more about the ritual if they work so closely with the vampires."
With a shrug, Viktor went back to rubbing little circles on the envelope still clutched in his hand. "Cannot ask because someone will know. Letter. When I got it, it was opened, sealed back up, but not right. Someone else has read it."
"But, how could that happen?" Hermione asked.
"Someone's got to be intercepting letters," Harry supplied. "Remus told me to be careful about what I put in writing, because people can intercept owls."
"Da."
"So, where did it get intercepted?" Harry asked, scratching the back of his neck and squinting at the floor in concentration.
Hermione sat in her thoughts for a moment, let them whiz and whirr and stew until they formed something cohesive. "Well, the easiest places to intercept something are at the source or the destination."
Harry looked up at her in alarm, his eyes wide and unblinking. Viktor made no movement: he'd likely considered this part thoroughly, she thought. As he liked to remind her, his brain wasn't just for show, and there was more than quidditch between his ears. Besides, as a celebrity used to massive amounts of fan mail, he likely knew the ins and outs of the postal system in ways Hermione never would.
"Are you saying…?" Harry's voice trailed off. She could practically hear him begging her to tell him he was wrong. To tell him that the place he thought of as home was still safe.
But all she could do was nod.
"Yes, Harry. Someone here at Hogwarts has read that letter. The question is: who?"
=/=/=
The following days felt like a fevered dream, full of hushed whispers and shadows around every corner. Without a hint of hesitation, Harry and Hermione had told Ron in a tumbled, garbled sort of mess about what they'd learned. And just like that, the three of them were on the same worried page again. In unspoken agreement, none of them were alone if they could absolutely help it, traveling in a huddle of anxious glances and grave nods.
But, like all such heightened states, the energy to sustain their vigilance eventually fizzled out. Slowly, as the days dragged on with nothing to point their anxious energy at, they began to sag under the very weight of it. The immediacy, the urgency, faded and slowly Hermione began to feel less feverish, less frantic, less constantly on edge.
After a full week of being wound tighter than a bow string, she'd practically begged Viktor over breakfast to please, please meet her in the library on Saturday.
And so he had. They'd holed themselves up at what she now thought of as their table, and pulled out books and quills and parchment and slowly, oh so slowly, Hermione felt her muscles begin to relax and her pounding head begin to ease.
It felt so wonderful to do something normal again, like a cool drink of water for a parched throat.
Finally, after several hours of catching up on work that she really should have finished earlier that week, she caught Viktor as he leaned back and stretched, rolling out his shoulders before gazing out the window.
Oh she'd missed this.
"I see you've been writing a lot of letters," she started, pointing to a neatly stacked pile of envelopes he'd completed. "Your owl is going to be very busy. Anything important?"
After a moment of hesitation, Viktor nodded. "Is time to answer job offers. Time to pick a team."
"Oh, that's so exciting! You got that many offers?!" She exclaimed. It wasn't that she didn't know Viktor was fabulous on a broom—his performance at the World Cup was apparently the stuff of legend already—but she hadn't put much thought into just how many teams might want Viktor to play for them.
With an uncomfortable smile, Viktor nodded. "Lots of offers. Twelve."
"Oh that's wonderful! I'm so proud of you!" Without a second thought, Hermione launched herself forward and wrapped her arms tight around his shoulders, squeezing with all her might.
His returning embrace was warm and genuine and the smile he graced her with was a little less uncertain. And yet, Hermione couldn't help but feel like she'd missed something. Something important. But for the life of her, she couldn't figure out what it was. So, she did what she always did when she knew subtext had flown a solid mile over her head: she barreled forward anyways.
"Have you accepted one? Where is it?"
The wrong thing to say, apparently; the uncertain look was back in full force.
With a small shrug and a duck of his head, Viktor finally answered: "Bulgaria. With Vratsa Vultures. Have not known how to tell you."
Why could he possibly look worried about that? "But that's wonderful! They're your favorite team!" She may not know much about Quidditch, but she knew how important it was to Viktor, and he wore that ratty old Vratsa jersey often enough that she knew full well how attached he was to them.
"You are not mad?" he asked, seemingly incredulous.
"What? Why would I be upset?"
Viktor shrugged and looked out the window. "That I am playing in Bulgaria. That I am not staying here."
Oh.
Oh, that was right, wasn't it?
Vratsa was his favorite team. And it was thousands of miles away.
"Viktor," she said, peering at him until his gaze slid back over to her. "I'm going to miss you. So much. But your career is important. I know how much that team means to you, and I want you to be happy."
"You make me happy," he murmured, his lips barely moving.
"Oh Viktor," she whispered, launching herself back at him to wrap her arms around him again. "You make me happy, too."
It took a bit of effort, but they both returned to their tasks, a little lighter and a little heavier all at once. It was hard, Hermione decided, to want the best for someone and to want someone to be with you and to know that those two desires weren't the same: that you could have one or the other and never both. She wanted to be selfish, to stamp a foot and demand that he stay in England where she could see him on Hogsmead weekends and write letters that didn't take days and days to arrive. And even more to be answered. But then she'd think about that Vratsa jersey and the giant smile Viktor had given her months ago when she'd finally asked him why he kept wearing it when it was full of holes (it was lucky apparently, in the way that Ron's favorite quill was lucky or in the way Lavender crossed her fingers three times before an exam), and she'd deflate again. She had years of schooling left and Viktor was moving on with his life in the way one had to—in a way she couldn't follow, at least not yet.
So she turned back to her school work and, after another hour of staring at equations, wishing she could unlearn the reality that Viktor was off to another country in a few short months, she finally decided she was done.
"Thank you so much for spending today with me," she said, placing her quill on the table and shutting her Arithmancy text with a thud.
Viktor smiled at her, a little tired around the eyes, but more relaxed than she'd seen him in days.
"Of course. It has been," he paused, searching for the right word. "A long week," he finished.
"Very. I feel like I've been looking around every corner like someone's about to jump out and get me. It's the basilisk all over again."
"The what?"
And so, with a bit of dramatic flair, Hermione distracted them both with the tale of her crowning achievement: discovering the identity of Slytherin's monster and how it had been traveling through the school's pipes. She recounted all the clues everyone else had missed: Hagrid's dead roosters, the strange voice that only Harry the parselmouth kept hearing, the way the creature could appear and disappear seemingly at will. It occurred to her, halfway through the retelling, that Viktor probably wouldn't be too keen on the ending of her tale: a petrified damsel in distress in the Hospital Wing. So she'd played up her trick with her pocket mirror, which had him duly impressed. And done her best to gloss over the fact that she had, in fact, saved her own life with that little trick.
He was having none of it.
He'd had a few choice words in more than one language to describe their headmaster. Idiotic was the kindest. The worst were in languages she didn't understand. In fact, Viktor had been so worked up he hadn't even blushed as he swore.
When he'd finally calmed himself down, he drew her into a tight hug, whispering against her hair "you are so brave, and so smart, and so stupid."
"Hey!" She drew back as far as his arms would let her, staring him full in the face. "I am not!"
Viktor gave her a wry smile. "Are not smart? Agreed."
"I am not stupid," Hermione protested. Only Viktor's fond expression and crinkled eyes kept her from fully pulling back and shouting at him.
"Oh?" he asked, bringing up one calloused hand to cup her cheek, his thumb rubbing across her cheekbone. "You did not decide to tell no one about your idea? Did not decide to do it all yourself?" That soothing thumb came to an abrupt stop before gently booping her nose. His eyes crinkled further as his smile broadened.
It was so lovely. He was lovely. So incredibly lovely.
And she should have banished all her thoughts and just leaned forward and kissed him and let that be the end of it.
But Hermione's thoughts refused to be ignored. And her big fat mouth just had to blurt out what she was thinking before she could shut her lips and tell herself to stop ruining things.
"Just like we're doing right now with Bertha?"
And just like that, she'd ruined it. Viktor's teasing smile shuttered, his playful expression turned haunted. With a sigh, he dropped his forehead to hers.
"Ok," he whispered. "We are both stupid."
=/=/=
"Whazzat?" Ron asked the following Saturday morning, before taking a giant swig of pumpkin juice.
Hermione glanced up from her letter and ran her fingers across the tiny trinket within.
'For protection' the note said in Viktor's strong, straight letters. The bracelet inside was simple: red and white threads braided together in fine twists, a tiny metal clasp at each end to secure it on. She'd seen a similar one attached to a leather strap on his bag, although his had had a tiny yarn doll at each end. It was for luck, he'd told her. This one, apparently, was for protection.
She must have really spooked him with that story about the basilisk, she thought.
"It's from Viktor," she answered, slipping on the bracelet and securing the clasp.
Ron looked over at the Slytherin table, his eyes searching up and down. "Where is he, anyway?" he asked.
"He's out. Signing his contract for the season."
Harry looked up from his potatoes. "Who's he signed with, then, do you know?"
Hermione pursed her lips. "I'm not supposed to tell anyone."
"Oh, come on Mione. You can tell us. I heard the Cannons offered for him."
Ginny scoffed and leaned her elbows against the table. "Oh come off it. Like Viktor Krum would ever play for the Cannons."
"Oi!" Ron shouted. "And why wouldn't he want to play for them?"
With a laugh, Ginny tossed her hair back over her shoulder. "Because he wants to win."
Hermione shared a look with Harry across the table, the both of them smiling as the two siblings began the well-worn argument about which local team was the best. It brought back memories of sitting to breakfast at the Burrow, sun streaming in the windows, the smell of bacon, the sound of familial bickering.
It gave her a warm, fluttering feeling deep in her chest.
It gave her a bloody headache.
With a last look at her half-finished tea, Hermione began to gather her things.
"Hermione?" Harry asked. "We've finally got a sunny day, and we were all going to head out for some pick up Quidditch later. You in?"
"Oh, I don't know. I was going to revise my Charms essay."
"Come on, Mione. You can always reread it outside. You've not joined us for ages." Ron wheedled.
Oh yes, and who's fault was that?
Mine, was the traitorous whisper in her mind.
She scrunched her nose. "Well, I suppose I could spare an hour or two."
Ginny clapped her on the back and grinned. "I know old Krum's been taking you flying. You going to finally join us? You can be on my team." When Hermione's glare began to take hold in earnest, Ginny continued. "How about for warm ups? Just to toss the quaffel around before we start?"
Hermione sighed, rubbing her temple. "I suppose."
After all, what was the worst that could happen?
=/=/=
Impromptu flying with Viktor aside, Hermione would always hate flying. And today, she especially hated it. The sun shone, but it was still bitterly cold and she could barely feel her nose, let alone her fingers. Her ears had become casualties ages ago, and she didn't look forward to thawing them out once she got back inside.
All things considered, it had started on a high note. Everyone had been teasing—but not too teasing—about her actually getting on a broom. Voluntarily. She'd even caught the quaffel a few times, and her throws hadn't gone wildly off target. And she'd been having fun.
She'd laughed and smiled and crowed the first time she got the broom to do exactly what she wanted without even thinking.
And then it hadn't been fun anymore. She'd looked down and it was as if the ground was rising up to meet her. Her head felt heavy with worry and nausea, and her brain sloshed with every movement of the broom. The more she thought about it, the more she felt sick. Everything moved too fast and she moved too slow, like her limbs had to travel through syrup. Her head pounded inside her skull when she turned too fast.
"Mione?" someone asked.
It was like an old-fashioned radio, staticky and jumpy and from seemingly miles away.
"Mione?"
Who was saying that?
She had somewhere to be, hadn't she? Something she was supposed to be doing.
Something…important.
Right?
"Hermione?"
Was she still flying?
The ground was so far away.
She was
So
Far
Away
"Hermione!"