Lakeside
For the last few days, with that hour in the depths impending, time has seemed to move as silty and sibylline as the thrumming murk of the Black Lake.
And so it’s difficult for Viktor to figure exactly how long – but it seems to take hours – from the instant they break the lake’s smoggy surface, until finally he is allowed another moment alone with Hermione.
She’d sat – less and less patiently – on a cot in the Champion’s Tent, as upwards of ten separate mediwizards had grasped her chin and tilted her head this way and that, searching her eyes for any trace haze of bewitched sleep.
Privately quite relieved by the healers’ abject disregard toward each of Hermione’s sporadic claims that she was “perfectly fine, honestly”, Viktor had only wished that they would pay more attention to where her hands were clasped together tightly in her lap, disguising the fact that some of her fingertips were still bluish with cold.
Just as he’d resolved to go trampling about the tent in search of a suitable jumping-off pair of somethings from which he could transfigure a pair of winter gloves, Viktor had lurched to his feet only to find his path momentarily blocked as another mediwizard – this one younger and palpably more nervous than Hermione’s previous visitors – had come bustling over, arms aloft.
Unperturbed by her unimpressed frown, he’d seized Hermione at the jaw so tightly that she’d let out a squeak of surprise.
“I’m really not sure that’s necess-” she’d begun, speech stymied slightly by the healer’s forcing together of her cheeks, while Viktor hadn’t been able to get a handle on his irritation quickly enough to stop himself pressing a hand against the wizard’s shoulder, chiding “please, is no need be so ungent-”
Before either of them could give full voice to their protests however, the healer had already twisted Hermione’s head to the side in a poor imitation of the more practised technique of his peers, eliciting another squeak and a sound uncomfortably akin to the crunching of bone.
“Достатъчно!” Viktor had snapped, forcing himself bodily between the mediwizard and Hermione.
Less than reassured by the healer's blanched face and hasty retreat to a far corner of the tent, he’d turned to face her - half expecting her head to be lolling listlessly past her shoulders, her small body gone entirely limp. But Hermione had been upright and unimpressed as ever before, if looking marginally more stunned.
Kneeling before her, Viktor had seized his opportunity to gather her hands in his – finding them as frigid as they had been once in the moonlight, and colder than any time he’d been so lucky to hold them since.
“Hermione, you are not hurt?”
Hermione had blinked at him, her nose scrunching as she’d frowned thoughtfully.
“It’s a miracle,” she’d pronounced finally, her face perfectly straight. “I’m entirely cured.”
Viktor hadn’t had to look around to know that the loud snort of laughter from somewhere behind him had most likely come from Potter.
He’d found himself unable to supress a smile of his own, though he hid it from most by leaning down to press his head against where his and Hermione’s hands were joined - slowly enough to mean something but quickly enough that any onlookers might simply think he was complicating the process of getting to his feet.
“Well, perhaps, now that you are saved, we might make road back to castle?”
Hermione had smiled pinkly up at him, squeezing his hands once before pulling her own away to free a few strands of her wild hair that had been pulled tight against her neck by the collar of her spell-dried robes.
He’d noted several things as he’d trailed her eager march out of the tent – Fleur and her little sister still sequestered behind a whitish curtain, Cedric’s unsubtle wink, and Hermione’s red-haired friend girding himself for some fight that never came to pass.
All of those thoughts had left him in one breathless rush as she’d suddenly spun, only a few hundred feet beyond the ghostly shape of the tent, and launched herself face-first against his chest.
And so, here he finds himself – smelling like lake, floating on air, the one he would most sorely miss breathing her soft, butterfly breaths close to his shuddering heart.
“Oof,” he says, much too late to be even a little convincing.
Hermione laughs generously and he feels the shape of it against his chest. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and they stand there for a while, entirely still save for the breeze riffling their hair.
Behind them, lapping silkily in the golden late-afternoon light the lake looks almost inviting.
“You were amazing,” Hermione says eventually, tipping her head up to smile at him. The tip of her nose has been buffed bright red by the front of his jumper.
His head droops, and he opens his mouth tell her all the ways he’d failed to measure up to the task, all the ways he’d failed her – but she must sense what’s coming because immediately she shushes him, shaking her head emphatically.
“You were,” she insists. “You were incredible, Viktor. I never knew you were so skilled in transfiguration.”
Any other day he would tease her, tell her he isn’t as dumb as he looks and watch her explain flounderingly that that wasn’t what she’d meant, not at all, Viktor – but today, with the lake beyond them and Hermione revived and resplendent in his arms, such bare, uncontrived praise from the brightest girl he’s ever met - the first to regard him as more than a famous flyer with an unfortunate nose - knocks him out flat.
Unable to withstand it all while rooted to the spot, he hoists her from the ground, spinning her around – once, twice, again, grinning as any protests she might have made are drowned out by the far merrier sound of her own laughter.
Even when he finally stops, the world continues to swirl around them - a great whir of Spring.
Hermione’s face is still pressed to his chest, and Viktor wonders if she can hear the question he’s been meaning to ask her fizzing in there where its gotten all shaken up.
Soon.