vratsababe

I’m not going to think about her, Viktor Krum thought as he paced the halls of Durmstrang School. She’s like all the others. She isn’t interested in you; she’s going after your fame and your fortune.

This was a daily thing for him. He wanted to be a regular teenager and have girlfriends. He wanted to be able to kiss a girl, for crying out loud, without worrying about her intentions and motives. Oh, what he would give to have what Sergei Poliakoff and Anton Romanov had. Anton and his girlfriend had been going out for two years! Two years! Had he ever had a girlfriend? No. Not unless you counted Svetlana, the girl who he played with at daycare when he was four.

The bell announcing the beginning of class rung and Viktor snapped out of his sulky reverie. He wasn’t anywhere near his first class, so he quickened his pace slightly, walking into the door several minutes later. The potions mistress shot him a harsh glare and rapped her wand against the chalkboard. Her overly neat handwriting scrawled an ingredient list on one chalkboard and the directions on another.

“A love potion. You all know that these are very difficult and very dangerous potions, no?” She began in her low, husky voice. Her talent for intimidation came into play with her trademark looking down her nose. “I trust that you all are intelligent enough to not mess around, seeing as how you all are in my most advanced class and that some of you will be continuing on in the field. You will make this potion and you will check your progress at every step in your book. If any of your potion is missing, I will suspend you by your ankles while I search your backpack for it and you will be removed from this class. This is not something to fool around with, got it?”

The class was silent. If there was something that could be heralded about from Durmstrang, it would be the fact that it had the best disciplined students from any of the magical schools. The potions class was mostly male, only a couple females wanting to take the class for medical careers or for general education. A lot of families coming from traditional backgrounds demanded that their daughters or granddaughters remain homemakers, so it wasn’t necessary for all. Some even dropped out to start a family while the husband was already graduated.

Professor Berezovsky turned back to her desk while the students began to accumulate the ingredients for their potions. He passed Renata on his way to the ingredient closet and she gave him a wink. She was so beautiful with her platinum blonde hair and her blue eyes, but he could see through her. She would show him off like he was some sort of a prize that she had won. He didn’t need that. He did his best to focus on his collecting and he had to admit that he was rather pleased with himself on that.

He slipped on a pair of reading glasses as he opened his textbook. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see well when he was playing Quidditch. It was just that the tiny lettering in the book was a little harder to see than a glimmering golden ball flying around at incredible speed. He read about the potion and how it was supposed to smell like the things which you enjoy most. Could Quidditch be bottled? There was the smell of the grass, or broom polish, or… body odor. Hopefully that wouldn’t be it.

Renata Chenova took a seat at the table next to his and set up her cauldron. She sneakily passed a note onto his table and he pocketed it, not really wanting to know the contents that it could hold. He had to focus. He had to make it through the class without being distracted. They would be leaving for Hogwarts in four days and he did want to go. It would be a reason to skive off monotonous team meetings with Vratsa and let him do his training regimen on his own. He was skating on thin ice with the charms teacher and it wouldn’t do him good to have disapproval from Madam Berezovsky as well. It was a lucky thing for once that Karkaroff wanted him on Durmstrang’s team so badly.

Luckily, once again, that Professor Berezovsky was mere feet away and didn’t much appreciate any talking in her class or Viktor was sure that Renata would try to talk to him. He mixed the ingredients at the appropriate heats with the appropriate portions for the appropriate length of time and he completed the potion well before the bell rang. It had the strongest aroma of cedar, evergreen, spiced cider, and his mother’s rose garden. It smelled just like his home in the mountains outside of Sofia and he wished that he could keep it just for the familiarity of it. He hadn’t gotten much opportunity to be home that summer because of the World Cup and all that it had aroused. He filled up the large glass bottle and brought it up to the table behind Professor Berezovsky’s desk.

“Wonderful job, as should be expected, Krum,” She said as she looked at him over her glasses. “I know that you will do Durmstrang honor if you are chosen as school champion. I am really rooting for you.”

“Thank you, Professor,” He gave her a curt bow and returned to his seat. The classroom was still silent so everyone heard the compliment she had given him. Everyone knew that she favored him greatly because he did so well in her class. Then again, he did well in every class. Some of his teachers didn’t like him so well because of their Quidditch team biases (some of them fans of the Russian or Latvian teams) and his former English teacher made it known that she thought he was a showoff. He ended up not getting very good marks in that class for what she said was a “lack of effort”. He refused to talk in that class.

So, for the rest of the class period, Viktor took out a book and read. It was a pastime that didn’t require people to burrow into his personal life and plaster lies all over the pages of a newspaper. He could escape for hours sometimes and read about secret agents who pose as murder victims or knights in shining armor finding out that the princess’s handmaiden was a much better catch than the rich broad. No one hounded him for his charms essay being a day late or the fact that he denied their marriage proposal or the mishap of getting hit in the face with a bludger. The only problem with his reading is that he didn’t get much time to do it. Five minutes at the end of Potions class was a real luxury.

He was just getting into his book (Life and Times of the Corrupt Czar of Russia) when lo and behold, the bell rang to signal the passing of classes. He passed a still simmering cauldron and caught a whiff of someone’s potion. He couldn’t help feeling a bit homesick.

A small shred of light is the most difficult thing to find in this artificial world. One can take a mirror and reflect light from others onto their own darkened flesh, but a cycle of reflections makes the shadowing more intense. War ravages our souls, blackens our minds, overpowers us completely… and we can’t arrange our priorities to show truth in our reflections.

A glance, a whisper, a touch of lips, and a short embrace… Will I see her again? Will she cry tonight if I don’t return? Will she sit alone, thinking of what used to be while they literally rip me to shreds? Will I be able to protect her? Uncertainties. Uncertainties. Uncertainties. I scream and I yell for I cannot tell her whether or not she should arrange a funeral or prepare a celebration. The life of an auror is far away from my days of cutting the grass with the edge of my whipping cloak.

I wish I had time for fantasies. I wish I had courage for fantasies. It’s absolutely impossible to trick myself into thinking that it is the last moonlight scrimmage, the last fallen comrade, or the last wife crying herself to sleep, clutching onto her children for dear life. Too many tears have been shed over too long. Something’s got to give.

Why do I keep fighting? Why don’t I whip my love off to a far away land, snap my wand, and live with the penguins? A light cannot shine behind musty glass. It flickers, it wavers, and it eventually dies. I must persist and I must prevail. There is a woman who has always been by my side and she is all I have in the world. My parents killed, her parents killed, our friends, our families, and our very ways of life have interwoven and ruined faster than we can keep up with. How badly I want to close my eyes and drown out the universe, but although roses have thorns… thorns also have roses.

My sacrifice is a woman with chestnut curls woven with beauty, mahogany eyes drowning in wisdom, and the desire to live although many may not see exactly why. For the child behind the mountain of books, for the girl denied her fantasy wedding… for the woman whose light dissolves the mirrors of the opposition I carry a broadsword of valiance into a field of blood and tears.