Beach Weather
Hermione watched as Polina exited the witches’ change area and strutted down the beach in a bright green bikini with high cut bottoms. Hermione could still see the rapidly fading traces of her burn scar and marvelled at the speed and power of magical healing – Tsveta had ordered Polina to “avoid burning in the sun”, “not swim too vigorously”, “stay on the ground, no flying today”, and handed her a cream to apply twice a day ... that was about it.
Hermione had to think that Madam Pomfrey would have had Polina on bedrest for days, magical healing or not.
Hermione forced her mind away from thinking about what Polina had looked like just that morning. She could still see Polina’s fresh burns in her mind when she closed her eyes, and hear her shriek, and that was reaffirming her decision NOT to pursue healing as a career.
Hermione was wearing a red, one piece, scoop-necked swimsuit that she’d flooed back to Iskra’s house to grab from her trunk. She’d fallen in love with it in the store before her trip, but now, faced with a beach full of international athletes and Bulgarian aurors, she felt pale and spindly and far too loudly dressed – the stereotype of a pasty British girl felt unfortunately accurate.
Daskalov had floo-called the auror’s office, and by noon, the stadium had been flooded with aurors. Apparently the Bulgarian ministry took threats to its Quidditch team seriously. They had floo-d from the stadium to a restaurant and from there, walked down to the beach, on Galata Cape.
She eyed her (too pale!), quickly-charmed hair-free legs critically and rubbed them together appreciatively. Polina had seen Hermione inspecting her razored legs with dissatisfaction (and charming a few accidental cuts away) and quickly taught her a leg hair charm. Scotland in the winter was too cold for Hermione to normally worry about leg hair, but truly, magic was amazing. She’d never quite figured out the angles needed to shave her legs the Muggle way.
At least Hogwart’s had something going for it – although she’d often privately wished the founders had enchanted the staircases into a magical escalators (7 floors plus towers! Really!) instead of making them randomly rearrange themselves, the many staircases certainly did good things for her legs.
She’d mentioned her desire for escalators once to Neville back in first year, and received such a blank stare (even after her very thorough 10 minute explanation, with diagrams!) that she’d privately resolved to never mention the idea ever again. By the time she’d reached trying to explain lifts, and how they differed from escalators, his eyes were glazed over. Some “normal” things, she’d found, wizards just couldn’t grasp.
She was grateful for the wizarding world’s lack of escalators now, as she looked at her pale-but-toned legs in a bathing suit.
And... she was procrastinating on leaving the changing area. Was she a Gryffindor, or not?
Throwing back her shoulders, Hermione exited the change area and walked onto the beach. The beach was absolutely glorious – pale sand, a section of larger boulders and cobbles, bordered by green forest and an endless deep blue sea, crashing with small, white capped waves. She could see a big Muggle cargo ship in the distance.
Hermione watched with a suppressed grin as Emil fussed over Polina, conjuring a big blanket for her to sit on, and an enormous beach umbrella, transfiguring a rock into a water glass and filling it with water.
“I burnt my face, not my wand hand, Emil!” Polina protested when he transfigured another rock into an enormous, fluffy pillow and attempted to stuff it behind her back. She grabbed her wand and sent a stinging hex at his bare stomach, causing him to leap backwards and rub it.
“Ouch, witch!” he complained.
Hermione left them to their bickering, feeling very much like a third wheel, and continued down the beach.
Radimir, Stoyan, and Viktor were by the edge of the water, right where the waves hit the beach and retreated, dressed in swim shorts and shoving each other into the surf, laughing and chasing each other. Hermione watched them out of the corner of her eye, surreptitiously enjoying the view. Kosta and Asen and their kids were playing with a quaffle further up the beach – someone had obviously charmed it to float in the water.
Hermione wandered over to the edge of the beach. There was a line drawn in the sand and symbols drawn in it, too, and she could see runes carved into the ancient wooden posts that dotted the sand. The Aurors had put up an additional line of wards, drawn in the sand and were standing guard, looking rather odd in flowing full length robes, holding a parasol in one hand, wand in another.
She felt awkward just standing there, in her bright red bathing suit - Merlin, why had she chosen red of all colours!- and at least looking at the wards would give her something to do so she wasn’t just awkwardly standing there, alone.
She knelt down to look at them– oh, that was clever! They’d tied a notice-me-not charm into something similar to the muggle repellant wards she’d seen carved around the Hogwarts gates, instead of the glamour charm that Hogwarts used...
She wondered if she borrowed that muggle-avoidance set of runes, and carved them into her school trunk, would she have an easier time when she took the Tube to and from Kings Cross Station?
She’d been playing with the warding on her personal trunk since October of her first year, when she’d come into her room to find that one of her roommates, or perhaps both, or perhaps an upper year girl, had broken into her trunk, and her Muggle shampoo, conditioner and favourite wide-toothed comb had disappeared.
She thought it had been a cruel joke. She’d told Professor McGonnagall, who’d done a dormitory search, and nothing had been found, but obviously, someone had TRIED them, because she still kept catching the smell of her L’Oreal conditioner on a few of the upper year girls. And no, that wasn’t proof of anything either, because anyone could purchase Muggle hair products – never mind that the girls in question were purebloods who had likely never even set foot in a Muggle establishment.
She’d owled her parents, and her mum had sent replacement bottles, but they were gone again within a day. She’d given up, using the free soap provided by the school, that turned her normally curly and ungovernable hair into an even awful-er frizzy mess.
She’d kept trying, and her trunk wards kept getting better. In second year, two upper year girls had gone bald after stealing her shampoo. The next time she recieved some in the mail, she’d put a potion in them again, and they had still disappeared, but no one showed up bald. They’d obviously just stolen and immediately tossed it.
And a few days after last Christmas she’d been thrilled to see the angry boils that Lavender had been hiding on her hands from her improved trunk wards, which had finally actually CAUGHT someone, though her hair products were still missing two days later. Professor McGonnagall hadn’t accepted Lavender’s hands as proof of culpability, and had advised Hermione to stop bringing high value items to school, and taken 10 points from Gryffindor for using unapproved spells against her housemates. Hermione was still bitter about that.
Ugh. She was going to cry again over the unfairness of it all, which was stupid. Enough wallowing.
There was a set of runes freshly scratched in the sand, excluding those not already in the ward boundary from approaching. Brilliant. She peered closer. Could she use those? Could she alter them for her school trunk to keep the other girls in the tower from even WANTING to get into her trunk? But how to form the aversion so that she still had access?
“Ioana!”
There was no point in warding her trunk if she couldn’t get into it herself. Maybe if she altered the rune sequence that Iskra had been using and -
“Ioana!” she heard behind her. “Ioana!!!”
Hermione turned back to see Viktor loping over to her,
“Welcome to Galata Beach! Come enjoy the water – you can’t visit Bulgaria in the summer without going in the ocean. No need to stand back, the water’s warm, your toes won’t go blue like in England.”
“England’s not THAT cold,” Hermione protested. “We always go to Chalkwell beach in the summer, and it’s hardly cold at all -”
Hermione wasn’t quite sure what else she babbled, because Viktor’s hand had settled on her bare shoulder as he turned her and guided her back towards the team. Hermione almost shivered, despite the hot weather. His hand is hot, and a bit rough against her back, and she can feel the scrape of his calluses against her suddenly overly sensitive skin.
He drops his hand from her back – it’s a friendly gesture, nothing more- but Hermione swears she can still feel it burning as they walked along the water’s edge.
Hermione shrieked as suddenly Viktor grabbed his wand from the pocket of his swim trunks, and flicked it, sending a wave of water crashing into her.
“Viktor!!” she protested, grabbing her own wand, from where she’d stored it, twisted into her hair, and sending a bigger wave back which he mostly dodged out of the way of as he retaliated with his own huge wave of water, and this time, it swamped her enough to hit her hair, now loose without her wand keeping it in place, and she could practically feel it deflating with the salt water.
“Glacius!” she cast, and aimed her wand at him, freezing the water still dripping from him, and Viktor yelped. Hermione bolted, giggling and Viktor chased after her, catching her around the waist in less than a dozen steps, hoisting her up and running with her her– Hermione felt, briefly, rather like a rugby ball. “Viktor, put me down!” she laughed.
“Soon!” he agreed, running into the ocean. He forced himself through the crashing surf until he was waist deep while Hermione laughed and struggled, and then – he dropped her.
“Viktor Krumov!” Hermione screeched, sputtering as she stood and pushing her hair back from her face, wand still held in one hand. Incensed, she sent another big wave of water at him, and he was standing so close it thoroughly drenched him.
Oh. He was close, so close.
The water dripping from his hair, the grin tugging at his often scowling face, the beads of water dripping off his chest... Hermione stared, unblinking.
Both of their grins faded as Hermione met his eyes. Viktor reached out and tucked Hermione’s hair behind her ear, opening his mouth as if to speak – and he lunged and snatched the Quaffle from the air, right before it hit Hermione in the side of the face.
“Careful, Todor!” he scolded, tossing the Quaffle back at the children, but the moment was broken. The boy – Todor, Asen’s son – caught it, and tossed it back, and suddenly Hermione and Viktor were playing catch with Asen, Kosta, and their kids, and then Radimir, and Stoyan too. Viktor dived at the water with implausibly exaggerated catches that made the kids giggle, particularly when they aimed the Quaffle at Hermione and she missed – she thought the kids were deliberately sending horrible throws her way, just to watch Viktor contort himself to catch them.
“This is why you’d never make it as a Chaser or a Keeper” Asen said after Viktor made a predictably hilarious dive that ended up with him bellyflopping in the water. “Good thing it doesn’t matter if the seeker stays on his broom, you just need to catch the thing once.”
“No points for elegance in Quidditch,” Viktor replied, scowling.
“My friend’s first Quidditch game, he caught the snitch in his mouth,” Hermione said, grinning. “We all thought he’d fallen off his broom and was throwing up!” The kids giggled, with Todor miming harking up a snitch and raising it above his head, and most of the team laughed at his antics.
“Your friend?” Stoyan asked, shooting an indecipherable look at Viktor.
“Just a friend, not “my friend”,” Hermione clarified, blushinga bit. Annoyingly, the word for a “friend, who is a boy” and “boyfriend” was the same in Bulgarian, and she’d already been mercilessly teased by Polina for making that mistake, talking about Ron, of all people.
“I wouldn’t advise that as a strategy, but if he won, that’s what matters,” Viktor said, smoothly, and his team members shook their head in agreement (Merlin, that was taking Hermione a long time to remember!). Someone tossed the Quaffle, and the game was on again.