A Date With Viktor

Title: Beautiful People
Author: ExcentrykeMuse
WordCount: 1.5k
Rating: PG
Fandom: Harry Potter Series
Pairing: Harry/Viktor
Prompt: For Girlizzimo – “Oh!! Im always ready for a good old Viktor/Harry or Fenrir/Harry!! No matter the plot…”

Warning(s): Underage Romance (18/14), Beautiful People, Memory Loss, Magic at Work, Being Purposefully Naïve, Ron Bashing (at Least Harry Sees it That Way)

November, 1994

Harry—despite not being Hogwarts Champion—was used to gaggles of girls coming up to him and asking him (together or individually) to the Yule Ball with them.  He found it rather daunting, and when he found no sympathy from either Ron or Hermione, skulked to the library of all places.

There, he was somewhat safe, and he only had Hermione’s long glances to contend with and the gaggle of girls that followed Viktor Krum.

Until, of course, the day that Viktor Krum sat at his table.

Harry was staring at a rather impressive Encyclopedia of Winged Horses (upside down) and hadn’t bother to lower it in case someone spotted him, not that Krum seemed to mind.

“You are being very elusive,” he commented, as he sat a chair away from Harry—close enough to speak but, in retrospect, far enough away not to spook Harry away.

“No one’s figured out I’m hiding in here,” Harry admitted after a moment, tilting the encyclopedia to the side. “How do you do it?”

“Do it?” Krum asked, leaning forward with a small curl of a smile on his lip.

“Say ‘no’ without sounding like a complete idiot!”

“I do not care what I sound like,” Krum responded with a shrug.  “I know vot is being important, and they are not.”

Harry blinked—once, twice—then looked at Krum hard.  Krum looked back.  Then Harry reluctantly returned to his encyclopedia, which he flipped over right-side up.

Krum inhaled once, long and yet rushed so Harry could hear, and it made him center his attention back on the foreign student.

“You are not being having a date to the ball then?”

Slouching, Harry asked, “Is it that obvious?”

Breathing in again—which Harry found distracting—Krum asked, “There is no von you be vishing to take?”

“Ron—my friend—is getting pretty desperate.  I think he has an idea I should go with his sister, but that’s pretty rum.  She’s a third year—and his sister.”

“That is being the vorst plan!” Krum agreed enthusiastically, though he never raised his voice.  “Vot vould you have in common vith little girl?”

“Yeah,” Harry moped.  “She’d probably want to dance all evening.”  He discarded his encyclopedia morosely.  “Girls are strange creatures.”

Krum looked over at him, his dark eyes softening.  “You do not like to dance?”

“It’s alright,” Harry admitted after a moment, looking over at Krum and wondering at the intensity of his gaze.  “We had lessons.  I can do it if I have to.  But more than once?  I’d rather not.”

Krum nodded.  “As Champion I must dance vonce, but I can promise you vill have to not dance rest of night.”

Harry looked at him strangely, confused.  “O-kay.”

“I am most experienced conversationalist,” Krum continued, “in Quidditch and foreign politics.  My father has his own breeding stables of pegasi—” he motioned to the book Harry had put down and, when Harry looked at it, his eyes widened as he looked back at Krum—

“Are you,” his voice squeaked and he tried again, “Me?”

At this, he smiled and sat back with a simple, “Yes.”  Then: “You understand.”

Harry just blinked.

Understanding, Krum motioned to the gaggle of girls who were littered about the library, catching glances at the two of them and whispering to each other.  “Do any of your friends truly know vot it is being like?  Do they truly haff understanding?””

“No,” Harry admitted.  “Ron is jealous and Hermione,” he shrugged.  “No.”

“I vish to be spending time vith someone who is being knowing,” Viktor told him succinctly.  “I have more in common with you than anyone in this entire castle.”  His dark eyes looked at Harry.  “You’re also cute vhen you blush.”

Harry hadn’t quite realized he was blushing, but this (naturally) made him only blush more.  “Yeah, okay.  If this isn’t some prank.”

“No prank,” Viktor promised, crossing his heart, in the sign of a wizard’s pledge.

It was sealed, and a warmth spread through Harry.

Summer, 1995

The Dursleys hadn’t been that difficult to convince, surprisingly.  Harry suspected some sort of magic was at work.  When Viktor had asked him if he should like to go to Bulgaria that summer and Harry and answered with a kiss, he thought it was only just a fairytale, but here he was boarding a plane at Heathrow with his one trunk, set to meet his boyfriend on the other side.

Viktor Krum had been the undisputed champion of the tournament, Cedric representing Hogwarts who trailed at second, Beauxbatons and the lovely Fleur Delacour coming in third. 

Colin Creevey had captured a photograph of the three champions and their dates the day before the Tournament ended.  Viktor with Harry’s head lying in his lap.  Fleur, resplendent in silks, Roger Davies beside her.  Cedric Diggory strong and laughing, holding Cho Chang in his arms.  Colin had developed six copies in the middle of the night, and Viktor had his framed and above the family mantle when Harry walked in not a fortnight later, causing Harry to smile.

He was beginning to wonder if he was really home.

Christmas, 1995

The letters coming from Hogwarts were strange.  It was as if bits and pieces were breaking off and Harry knew that there was a new High Inquisitor.  He didn’t know what piece of law allowed Fudge to pass that through—Sirius has some choice comments in his letters—but everyone agreed it was best that Harry was out of the country, even if he was in a school previously run by Death Eaters.

Then there was the mass breakout of Azkaban.

In the cold Bulgarian night, Viktor held him close by the fire and they drank their mead.  “They are only being interested in their little island,” he promised.  “You are gone.”

“I’m their savior.  The papers are calling me that,” Harry refuted.

Viktor sighed.  “You are a boy who lived,” he refuted.  “And I am being very glad that you did live.”  The two were wrapped in darkness, and there are some secrets that the night never told.

July, 1996

Harry was greeted like a long, forgotten friend when he visited the Weasleys after his first year at Durmstrang.  Ron had grown taller, if that was possible.  Ginny had grown lovelier and more boyish, if that were possible.  She fluttered her eyelashes at him and then ignored him, which Harry found strange.

“So, what?” Ron asked when he finally got Harry alone in the room that used to belong to the twins.  “The adoption went through and Ivan Krum is now your legal guardian?”

Harry shrugged.  “Father, technically.  I still call him ‘Ivan.’  He knows James Potter will always be my dad.”

“This is madness, you’re just going to go live happily ever with the Krums?”

Harry looked at him and gave him a half-shrug.  “I think I deserve it.”

“Of course you deserve it,” Ron began.  “But what about us?”

Harry blinked, confused.  “I’m visiting—”

“What about England,” Ron began.  “Dumbledore’s not getting any younger.  They say Voldemort’s somehow risen again and is taking over the Ministry from the inside out—”

Sighing, Harry sat down on the bed that didn’t look like an orange pastry puff.  “You sound like Sirius.”

“He isn’t wrong.”

“If you say so,” Harry agreed, the fight going out of him.  He’d had this argument over letters the past several months and wasn’t quite prepared to have it in person, although he should have been expecting it.  “Look, why don’t I unpack?”

But Ron wasn’t finished.  “You’re just going to brush it under the rug?  You’ve got blinders on and you’re just going to brush it under the goddamn rug!”  He sputtered.  “What gives you the right?”

“There’s nothing to brush,” he muttered, as he got up and tried to make his way to the door.

However, Ron hauled him back in.  “Nothing to brush?  While you’ve been playing house, some of us have been living in the trenches!”

Harry reared back as if slapped. “Playing house?  Is that what I’ve been doing?”  His magic pushed back Ron in a whirl of wind that swept through the room and flattened everything (furniture included) to the walls.  “My being loved and accepted for who I am was playing house?  How convenient for you and your compatriots to just dismiss my entire life as meaningless compared to your delusions?”

The lights flickered off—on—off.  There was a bang of a door.

Then Harry was gone.

When Ron made his way to dinner, Harry wasn’t there.  No one recalled that they were even to have a house guest.

The extra bed was removed from his room when he went up to bed and all of Harry’s things were gone.

When he went searching through photographs, he couldn’t find a single one of Harry Potter.  It was as if Harry had never been his friend.

June, 1997

“Who’s that with Viktor Krum?”

“I don’t know, he certainly is handsome.”

Ginny elbowed Hermione and pointed over at the pair, both tall, both dark haired, but one with emerald green eyes.  “Don’t we know him?” Ginny asked.

Hermione rolled her eyes.  “That’s just Harry.”

“Harry who?” Ginny asked.

The End.