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It's a muggy summer's day somewhere in Eastern Europe. The sky is a hazy blue, a nearby lake plays host to warring fleets of water birds, and families all across the continent enjoy picnics before being rained out in mid afternoon. Far from any Muggle interference, a pair of young men stand in the centre of a vast oval of grass, a vast oval surrounded by tall wooden stands. They are the only ones there, thanks to introversion and Type A personalities.
A sly voice interrupts the trilling of birds and the buzzing of insects, primarily mosquitoes. “Vitya, you want me to what?” asks a young man in furs of his companion. He's wearing furs not so much for the warmth as for the aesthetic. The strands shiver prettily in the breeze, like a field of silver grass in Elysium.
Opposite him, in thin maroon t-shirt and black quidditch shorts, stands Viktor Krum, epic sporting superstar and ugly-hot man. The only fur he's wearing consists of the hair attached to his forearms and legs. He repeats a statement he originally made ten seconds before. “Play quidditch with me.”
“I’m not interested in quidditch. That's your thing. I have my own hobbies.”
“But you could be interested in quidditch, Yura. You could be bitten by the quidditch bug once you climb onto a broom…”
“I could be bitten by something, yes. I could be bitten by a pain in the backside. Or else several thousand mosquitoes. Besides, me playing with you would be like you dueling with me - our incongruous levels of talent will just make at least one of us pissed off and grouchy.”
In response to this, wily Viktor tosses a beater’s club at his best friend. Flings it, actually, violence being the pair's chief love language. “What if I told you that I want you to beat the hell out of a couple of iron balls, as well as me by proxy?” he grins.
God knows that's a temptation which can't be resisted.
🧹🏐🧹
A chained chest full of balls makes its appearance. Truly, it had always been there, rattling away just behind Viktor since he was fully confident in his ability to coerce his best friend to play the part of living bludger.
“You do not actually want to play with me, Vitya. You want to train with me. You want to see if an amateur can test you in ways professionals can't.” says Yuri, when he gets a good look at the murderous items he's supposed to smack towards the highly insured body of his pal.
Touching the chains holding the psychopathic bludgers down, Viktor releases them into the air, along with the ball that concerns him, the golden snitch. “For someone so smart you are very dumb, my friend. Of course that's what I want. If I attempted to play with you, it would be like playing quidditch against a toddler.”
Yuri’s eyelids lower to half-mast. “If I were a woman I would be very insulted right now.”
“Good thing you're not a woman then.”
The bludgers immediately attempt to kill the celebrity, but his companion smacks them away, sending them flying towards the stands, obliterating hundreds of mosquitoes on the way. “If I give you brain damage, your fans and employers will hunt me down and lynch me.” says the stand-in beater, unavoidably excited by the violence he just practiced.
“You’ve learnt from the best. Just pull an Igor Karkaroff and go hide in a shack somewhere.”
From half-mast Yuri's eyelids fling themselves all the way back. “Hmpf...I see someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.”
Soon the guys are zipping around the arena at full speed, the one chasing a tiny golden ball, the other attempting to send him into sleepy-time-bye-bye-land. The whack of wood on iron over the sound of screaming wind alerts Viktor to the fact that almost seventy kilogrammes of metal is currently whizzing towards his thick but still fragile skull. In response he takes evasive measures, flipping sideways and rolling. But he has underestimated his amateur opponent.
“Ha! Missed!” Viktor shouts triumphantly when the first bludger shoots over his head, only for the second to smash an instant later into the handle of his broomstick, shattering it in a burst of splinters and sending him into a spin while tipping him forwards and down so that he begins an unwanted Wronski Feint. The bright green earth approaches far too rapidly for his liking, but even with a broken broom the Viktor Krum is not incapable of pulling victory from the jaws of defeat.
Or he would be capable of returning to the air and the game even on a deranged broom, if his friend didn't choose that moment to slam into him bodily, diving at him from the side and knocking him off his broom and onto the pitch, where he goes skidding and rolling across the grass. For good measure a still airborne Yuri transfigures him into a black bunny then swoops down and stuffs him into a pocket before flying away, leaving the snitch and bludgers to be someone else's problem.