11th March 1995, the path back to the castle, 3:47 PM
The afternoon had turned colder as the four of them walked. The Hogsmeade snow had begun, in the precise way of March in the Highlands, to crust at its surface where the early thaw had worked at it and then refrozen overnight, and the path back to the castle was now the dark wet ribbon of trampled ice that ran between two crusted white banks. The sky above had lowered to a flat gun-metal grey that promised, by every visible signal, more snow before evening.
Harry walked beside Draco at the front of the small party.
Hermione and Ron, behind them, had fallen into the familiar quiet bickering rhythm of two friends who had been disagreeing about precisely the same debate since they were eleven, over whether Ron's reading of Sirius's intelligence-pattern needed a Crouch-axis or a Karkaroff-axis as its principal lens. Hermione was, by the composed steel of her cross-examining voice, winning. Ron was, by his grateful resigned tone, content to lose.
Harry, in the cold settling afternoon, was not listening to them.
He was, in the inward absorbed quiet of a boy whose mind had been turning a complicated thing over since lunch, trying to hold all the pieces together at once.
Bertha Jorkins in Albania. The Quidditch World Cup attack. The Goblet. The Dark Mark in the sky over the campsite. The Tournament. His name in the Goblet. Karkaroff's burning Mark. Crouch's absence. Snape's stolen potion materials. Bagman with the goblins. Skeeter's impossible private-conversation sources...
And, somewhere—threaded through all of it—the hand that had put his name in the Goblet, still unknown.
'It's too much for coincidence,' he thought. 'It's too much for separate threads. Something is being assembled.'
The shape of the assembly would not, at his fourteen-year-old level of available evidence, resolve. But the fact of it was settling on him with the cold steady weight of a thing that he could feel approaching without being able to see.
His right hand, in the deep inner pocket of his satchel, found the long smooth wood of the Re'em wand.
He had carried it, since the incident with that big bad snake, in the small enchanted compartment of the satchel that no one could access but himself, against the precise possibility of moments when his holly wand was insufficient. He had used it only sparingly in his summer training—Ethan had been emphatic about that. The Re'em wand was, by Ethan's careful explanation, a wand that resonated rather than commanded; its magic gave strength to any spell, making even weaker spells stronger than usual, this and the fact that the spells grow with the wielder's proficiency made this core highly desirable. Using out in the open might caught unwanted attention that... very dangerous.
Harry could feel the connection still, in a low pulse of the wand against his fingertips. The wand recognised him. The wand was with him.
He did not know, in his thinking, why he was touching it now.
He registered that this was, possibly, the small honest answer: because he could feel the storm.
Beside him, Draco was walking in his own absorbed quiet. The Healer-apprentice mode had relaxed, in the smooth way of a boy off-duty for the afternoon, and Draco's grey eyes were resting on the snow ahead with the look of someone who was elsewhere mentally.
"Draco."
"Mm?"
"You all right?"
Draco's grey eyes registered Harry. The look composed itself.
"Yes. A letter from Mother yesterday."
"News?"
"Father has been—" Draco selected the word carefully, "—absent from the Manor a great deal lately. More than is usual for his ordinary business engagements. Mother said it had been three weeks of evenings out, two day-trips to the Continent without explanation, and one full overnight at a location he declined to specify when she asked."
Harry's brow lifted.
"And on father's day off yesterday, mother said—" Draco paused, "—Mother said he went out early in the morning and did not return until past midnight. She does not know where he was. She did not ask. She wrote it to me because she thought I should know."
There was a silence between them, only the sound of the cold snow crunched under their boots.
They walked on. The castle's silhouette rose ahead of them in the gathering grey.
12th March 1995, the Great Hall, 7:48 AM
The post arrived at breakfast in the precise vast wheeling cloud of owls that the Great Hall received every morning, and Hermione's small section of the Gryffindor table received its precise share. She was, by the precise unhappy small set of her mouth as the first letter landed in her porridge, expecting what the post would bring.
By the third letter—a small magenta envelope—her face had begun to turn grim.
By the seventh, her hands were shaking.
Harry, beside her, had been watching with the protective interior alarm of a boy whose closest friend was being attacked publicly. He reached for the next envelope as it descended.
It was a small puce-coloured envelope with a small charmed wax seal that had begun to glow a thin sickly green at its edge as the envelope approached Hermione's hand.
Luna, beside Harry, registered the precise glow in approximately one second.
"Hah-ree."
"I see it."
Harry's hand came up. He caught the envelope before it reached Hermione. He held it at the precise minimum careful distance and stood up from the bench with composed efficient motion to remove the envelope from the Hall.
"Hermione. One moment. Don't open anything else."
"Harry, what—"
"In a moment."
He walked, with the envelope held away from his body, to the open hearth at the far end of the Hall, and dropped it into the flames. The puce paper caught immediately. The flame turned, briefly, the same thin sickly green, before settling back to ordinary fire. A wisp of greenish smoke that rose from the dying envelope smelt, faintly, of burnt rosemary and rotten lily.
A Bubotuber Pus curse, in its low-grade hate-mail formulation.
Harry squinted his eye seeing such nasty thing.
Hermione was staring at the heap of letters in front of her. Her face turned white.
"Hermione," he said quietly. "Don't open any more. Luna and I will sort them. The cursed ones we'll dispose of properly. The rest... you can read later or not at all."
Hermione's mouth opened.
It closed.
She drew a ragged breath.
"I will not."
The whole table looked up.
"I will not sit here. Having my breakfast in front of—" her voice rose as she could no longer held her composure, "—of cowardly anonymous strangers cursing me for being friends with you. With Viktor. With anyone!"
She stood. The bench scraped. Her hands were shaking.
"Hermione—"
"Don't."
Harry rose. Ron rose. Both of them moved, in instinct, to follow her.
A small fair hand caught Harry's sleeve. Luna's grey eyes were soft.
"Let her go, Hah-ree."
"Luna—"
"She needs to be alone. Not with us. Not yet... Trust her."
Draco, at Ron's elbow, said the same with his eyes.
Harry reluctantly let his hand drop as he watched Hermione walked out of the Hall.
She did not look back.
16th March 1995, the Hogwarts library, 4:38 PM
Four days had passed.
Hermione had not been seen at meals. She had not been at lessons. McGonagall had, by by Hermione's careful written request, granted her a week's medical leave on the grounds of acute emotional fatigue, and the morning post-screening that Harry, Luna, Ron, and Draco had been conducting on her behalf had intercepted, in the four days, eleven cursed envelopes and approximately forty merely-unpleasant ones.
Viktor had not seen her.
He had been searching the castle with the slow controlled desperation of a young man whose girlfriend had vanished and who could not, by every reasonable measure, find her.
That afternoon, in the small corridor outside Charms, Harry had found Viktor with his shoulders set in the careful steady misery of a boy who had decided not to give way to it.
"Harry. She is not—"
"She is hiding, Viktor. From all of us. It didn't take a genius to figure out she has put a Disillusionment Charm on herself."
Viktor heaved a heavy sigh as he agreed to Harry.
Harry continued. "I have seen the small flicker of it twice in the corridors so she is in the castle. She is safe. Just does not want to be found."
Viktor's dark hawk-eyes had done the small honest thing.
"By me?"
"By all of us. She needs time. She will come back when she is ready."
"Harry. I—"
"Viktor. Trust her."
Viktor had nodded. He had not, by every visible sign, believed it.
Saying goodbye to Harry, Viktor turned, and walked, in a careful way of a young man whose afternoon needed to go somewhere, toward the library.
He sat now at the small alcove table by the east window where he and Hermione had spent so many hours of the autumn term.
The window's pale grey afternoon light fell across the empty chair opposite him. He had a small open volume in his hands—Inter-School Trials, in fact, the same volume Hermione had been carrying when he had first watched her across the breakfast Hall at the Welcoming Feast.
He turned a page.
He could not read.
He listened to the small quiet sounds of the library, the soft turning of pages at the far reading-tables, the small click of Madam Pince's quill at her desk, the occasional wind whistling by the window.
And, very faintly, from a small far corner of the library where the shelves rose in tall rows— A sob.
Just one. Barely audible.
Viktor's head lifted up.
He listened.
Another small ragged breath, again from the small far corner.
He stood, with careful efficiency of a boy who did not wish to alert his target, and walked slowly toward where the sound came from— A inconspicuous table sat under a tall stack of books at the dim end of the Magical History 1600–1700 shelf.
The table appeared to be empty.
It was piled with books: Witch Weekly press-standards charters, and the Wizarding Press Standards Charter of 1893....
Viktor walked past it slowly. He paused, in the slow careful way of a man stretching his back. He continued. He turned at the next shelf. His footstep echoed.
...
Hermione, under the charm, exhaled, believed she was alone and had allowed her composure to drop.
She dispelled the Charm.
Her face was, in the late-afternoon library light, red-eyed, swollen-cheeked, and beautiful in the way only Hermione could be beautiful—the fierce composed sorrow of a girl who had been holding everything together for too long and had finally, in the hidden corner of her preferred library, let go.
She was wiping her face with the back of her sleeve.
She looked up.
Viktor was directly in front of her, perhaps eighteen inches away.
She froze.
"V-Viktor."
"Hermin-ee-nee."
Her face did the attempting to compose itself thing.
"How—how did you find me—"
"Boyfriend's intuition."
"..."
Hermione's mouth managed to cured into a genuine smile.
"That is not a real thing, Viktor."
"It is in Bulgaria."
"It is not in Bulgaria, Viktor."
"Then I have invented it for tonight."
Her smile broke into an honest, broken laugh of a girl whose composure had cracked again, in a different way.
Viktor sat down opposite her. He took her hands across the table. His were considerably larger than hers, and warm against her cold ones.
"Hermin-ee-nee. Why have you been hiding from me?"
Her mouth opened. It closed. It opened again.
"The letters—the curses—I did not want you to—"
"That is not the reason."
"Viktor—"
"It is not all of the reason. Tell me."
She looked down.
Her composure gave way at last.
"I saw," she said quietly, "on Tuesday morning. In the corridor outside the Great Hall. I saw one of your fans—the Durmstrang fifth-year girl, the precise blonde one—I saw her hand you the Witch Weekly article. I saw your face. You read it. And then you—" her voice caught, "—you crumpled it... with both hands and threw it in the brazier. And you walked away with your face like... thunder."
"..."
"I thought," Hermione said softly, "that you had read what Rita Skeeter said about me, and that you—" she could not quite say it, "—that you had believed it. Or believed part of it. Or that even if you didn't believe it, you were angry at being made part of it. You were so angry, Viktor. And I—I thought—"
"Hermin-ee-nee."
"I thought you hated me."
She raised her eyes to his.
Viktor's dark face, in the still afternoon light of the library, settled into a look of 'seriously?'.
He drew a long careful breath, drew his wand and pointed it at the small private alcove around them. A small bubble of careful soundproofing settled around their corner.
"Silencio."
"Hermin-ee-nee. Listen to me. The article Skeeter wrote is the small dirty work of a small dirty woman. I crumpled it because I was angry that anyone had spoken of you that way. Not because I believed any of it. Not for one second. Not for half of one second. Do you understand?"
Hermione was, by the wet shine of her eyes, registering it. She nodded. She could not speak.
"And on top of that. Do you think I really let a piece of paper full of bollocks to decide how I feel about you?"
For the first time, Viktor's English training with Hermione proved its worth. "Hermione, since the first time we met, I got this uncertain feeling, like... like butterflies in my stomach and it only got worse the day I met you here at this Library. The more I spent time with you the more I know what that feeling was... I love you Hermione."
Hermione's jaw dropped.
"I love how your eyes light up every time you came across something new while you read, I love that you always explained in detail things that get you called a Know-It-All, I love how you knit your eyebrows every time I spell an English word incorrectly. I love that after I spent a day with you I can still smell your fragrance on my clothes and It not because I'm lonely, not because I'm 'take an interest in you' and I invited you to the Yule Ball because I wanted to be with you... it had to be you."
Then Viktor stood. He came around the table to her side as he gently took her into his arms.
Hermione, in the warm shelter of his shoulder, finally, fully, unguardedly, cried.
Viktor held her.
The library, in its careful quiet outside the Silencio, continued. Madam Pince marked her ledger. The pale grey afternoon light shifted, by perhaps two degrees, toward the early March evening.
"Though..." Viktor suddenly proclaimed. " Even, even if you were like what that article said, I mean, I'd gladly kick Harry's arse and prove to you that I'm the one you should be with."
"Viktor!" Hermione chuckled as she look up to Viktor's eyes.
For moment, time stand still as they stare into each other eyes, seeing their truest feeling for the other... And with the lightest touch of the lips, they kissed. It was just a brush but it was more than enough.