Chapter Text
Viktor's aggressive flying style had much to do with Durmstrang, the school of war magic, a fact only his most intelligent interviewers and biographers picked up on. Strangely, since in his responses Viktor frequently mentioned his school and the part it played in forming him. The majority of journalists, being stupid, seemed to think that talent and style sprung from nowhere, when in reality genius is honed and not given entire from on high. Genius is a river which must have strong banks if it is to be the furious thing it is born to be. If at all possible it must have a dam, operated by the one whom it possesses. Viktor had a dam.
“Michelangelo carved David, and even Michelangelo learnt his art from someone else.” I would reply, whenever a baffled journo turned to me like I possessed the key to whatever alien language Viktor was speaking. To be fair, I did.
Of course, such a reply only baffled them, who had never heard of Michelangelo let alone David, and the articles came out the semi-coherent, illiterate mush they always did. At least they were nearly always spouting glowing praise for Viktor, calling him ‘mysterious’ and ‘difficult to know’ and possessed of frightening ability. The latter at least, was true.
But Durmstrang influencing Viktor's flying was a double edged sword, as the Institute was notorious for neglecting defence in favour of offence. Always attacking made him a force of nature in the air, but simultaneously from almost every match he came away with at least one injury or near miss, and usually more than that, treating his body like a weapon. Always refusing treatment meant I had to be on hand to either coax him to get his concussion or broken bone or damaged tendon or whatever looked at, or else tackle him to the ground so the medi wizards and or healers could deal with it. Oh, the joys of being indispensable to the indispensable.
Those who depended on him held their breaths, waiting for the big one which never came. They began to breathe a little easier. But then he wrenched his wing muscles in a vicious crash, one of the worst injuries possible for a quidditch player.
It didn't even occur during a real match, but during practice. But that is where most injuries occur, because that is where new things and tactics are introduced.
“I'm feeling good.” Viktor said, where he was performing his stretches on the field, his speckled brown and black wings slowly extending to their full extent. Long, sharply pointed, and swept back, they were shaped like the peregrine’s, a very rare shape to be born with, but one found in all elite seekers. When playing quidditch they spent most of the game being pulled in close to his body for speed and maneuverability, extending only for when he was gliding far above the field, hyper acute eyes searching for the snitch, searching for opportunities.
“You always feel good when it comes to quidditch, Vitya.” I said, the tiniest prickling of envy bothering me although I was not actively envious of him. Why would I be? My wings also allowed me to dive fast and agilely, but only at less than half the speed of his, but as a compensation I could soar for long periods effortlessly, and I was less specialised and more weighty, and therefore more dangerous. Built for a different sort of hunt. I did not, however, possess such a cool design as his speckling, my feathers were banded white and grey, which I suppose were striking in their own right. Certainly women never complained, about my wings or about my lack of fame and quidditch talent.
“True.” Viktor said, taking off to perform warm up laps.
Everything was normal, up until he began to grow annoyed with his team, which was always his weakness. The Bulgarian team simply could not rise to his level, and he had to carry them, already a burden all seekers had to endure. His good standing with the team remained because he never barked at them for their slowness or their misses or their hot tempered trouble making, leaving that to the coaches, but the tension projecting from him would grow progressively until he was his own little thunder cloud. His face would twist into a scowl of monumental proportions, that and his thinness being responsible for causing him to appear older than he was. That was still fine, but his tendency to do his own thing would also increase so that Viktor Krum and the Bulgarian Team became Viktor Krum and some Obstacles On the Field.
The snitch trembled over the canopy of grass, a little gold smear the rest of the team rarely noticed. They possessed the luxury to focus on what they were doing, but Viktor had to keep an eagle's eye view on the entire game, on the snitch, the other balls, the other players , the score, and even the audience, behaving as if he possessed many more than two eyes, breaking in and puppeting the thing if he deemed it the honourable thing to do, like he did at the world cup in ‘94. But that's the thing about genius, it always works alone, even in a team. One must adapt to it, and not the other way around.
But that day the team was training a new guy, a chaser, who hadn't got used to Viktor yet and was a bit jumpy, startling when the seeker swooped or dived too close by. I couldn't blame him because Viktor could dive at three hundred miles per hour, and he wasn't a small man. If he hit someone full on at full speed, at least the victim would die. And Viktor never warned anyone what he was about to do, he couldn't, you had to either pay attention, or, like everyone who'd worked with him for long enough - simply trust him the way a child trusts its father. Trust that he had your well-being in mind as well as his own. The new chaser had not got into that groove yet. That day Viktor was not travelling at full speed when the new guy, trying to keep one eye on the quaffle and one eye on his seeker, dodged a bludger meant for Viktor just as he was also evading it, causing them to collide in mid air.
“Oof! Vitya!” cried my girlfriend, Alina, standing beside me, one eye closing and one hand coming up to further shield her senses from the loud crack and cascade of feathers that resulted from one man crashing into another.
In one terrible slow motion moment, Viktor dived and then the chaser dodged into his path, Viktor attempting to pull out of his dive so that his chest slammed into the other guy's skull, sending the both of them spiralling towards the ground. But while the chaser, through many rapid wing beats, eventually recovered to slowly glide to the grass, Viktor continued to struggle to rise only to continue to lose altitude, his wing beats shallow and uncoordinated. Eventually he resorted to gliding down to the ground, his wings drooping. It became clear to anyone watching that the worst thing had happened - he'd compromised his ability to fly.
“Its just a sprain!” called the coach, hysterically, when I approached in order to check on and bully Viktor into allowing a mediwizard to handle him. They wheeled about him, not daring to get close. Not daring to land. Little people with little beige wings, that was them. Meanwhile, no one cared about checking out the chaser sitting on the grass nearby, and the rest of the team was hovering over our heads, watching anxiously.
“You haven't even checked him out. How do you know it's just a sprain?” Alina said, while I went through the rigmarole of ordering Viktor to stop being foolish and allow himself to be treated. I had no idea what his problem was when it came to healers, but every time it was like this. In response he shot Alina an aggressive look and flapped his wings, only to grimace and bite his lip. The pain must have been tremendous for him to give hint of it.
“Stop speaking about me as if I'm not here.” he hissed, attempting to take off again. He could no longer fly though, performing only a couple wing beats before curling them close to his body, which was also bent and struggling to breathe thanks to the pain in his chest. Landing on his feet, he bent double and wheezed and hacked, wings unfurling to drag in the grass, his skin florid and slick with cold sweat.
“Oh my dear Lord. He's broken! I'm fired! It's all over! My life!” cried the coach, clutching his chest like he was having a heart attack, which he might have been. True. If Viktor was ‘broken’ he would be fired, and probably dead too. Can't lose the owner of the team hundreds of millions and suffer no consequences. Not that it was the coach’s fault, but the manager’s for bringing in the new chaser. Both of them would be axed.
“Vitya, let them see or else.” I said, my ‘or else' being that I'd take off back to Russia with Alina, leaving him all alone with no friends, only his family, who could annoy him at times.
“Grrr. Yurets, I hate you.” he said to me, still while using the friendly diminutive. Some people secretly just want to be managed and handled with tough love. People like Viktor, people who never experienced enough boundary setting and protection as a child, and subsequently feel themselves to be out of control and in danger in adulthood. People who know they occupy a very specific rung in the hierarchy in a world that no longer acknowledges or respects hierarchies. People who know themselves to possess power which makes them a threat to themselves.
Our celebrity unfurled his wings and ceased causing the mediwizards so much terror, allowing them to approach, earning me another fortune. I could whisper other problem creatures into compliance, not only Viktor, although given the chance I would only work with him and vice versa, till death do us part.
“It's a very bad chest sprain, not a wing break,” the experts eventually said, after teasing his wings open, after feeling up his chest, causing him to retreat behind his own eyes, the light in them turning off. Between them he looked less like a person, and more like a thing. A machine or other tool. “He'll be off for a month.” they finished, pronouncing doom, but not the very worst sort.
The coach fell to his knees and curled up into the foetal position on the wet ground while the newly arrived manager did the same in his flash suit, sobbing their thanks to God.
🦅🤕🦅
Problem: I had to work for my money, not to mention friendship.
“He needs to stay with you while he recovers, Yuri Igorevich. He wants to stay with you, Yuri Igorevich. You know how testy he is, and how gung ho. You are a calming influence on him. You'll keep him from making his injury worse.”
The manager and coach were being extremely formal in an attempt to convey how serious the situation was, as if I didn't already know. Of course there were substitute seekers, but in the absence of Viktor there was no Bulgarian team. At this point, in the absence of Viktor there was no Bulgaria. Most people outside of the tiny country only knew it existed in the first place because of him. If I, for some reason resisted, the Bulgarian President himself would show up at my door to grovel.
“I'm surprised you haven't locked him in a secure medical bunker.” I said, listening to the quiet noise of the tonnes of galleons falling into my vault. Galleons and an increase in true power, hidden and secret power unknown and invisible to the drooling public. I was an auror by trade, but at this point I could work independently for the quidditch industry if I wanted, using the almost supernatural charm I inherited with my flesh and bones.
“You know we can't. He won't tolerate it.” They replied, looking at me the way puppies might, their clothing crumbled from the stress of a night without sleep, their eyes recessed into purple-black craters in their heads.
“It's going to be difficult. Viktor is…prickly.” I said, thinking of our school years. And every moment since then. Yes, our school years, and after, when my father made me stay on chiefly so I could act as Viktor's handler. We might have been chicks born as part of different broods but to the same parents, so close have we been from almost the first moment we met.
Prickly. Never a truer word spoken. We all hung our heads where we stood in an office filled with photos of Viktor, photos constantly on the move so we appeared to exist within a flock of tiny Bulgarian seekers swooping, diving, raising the caught snitch, wings sharp and almost as curved as sickles.
And then they handed me a blank cheque.
Big Problem: I lived with my girlfriend, also a close friend of Viktor's.
Huge Problem: He was in love with her, and had been since we were all children together at school.
“I’m happy for him to stay over, Yura, but he's going to be a pain in the backside, more so than usual.” Alina said, where she stood in the kitchen of our apartment in Sofia, making our favourite pastries. Unlike Viktor and I, she possessed hovering wings, short, beautiful little things that made her incredibly agile, allowing her to hover, fly at high speeds and great distances, and even fly backwards. However, their rapid oscillation used a tremendous amount of energy, and of us three she spent the least time in the air, mostly staying home looking after our children. Something I was very happy about after all the hard work it took to net her.
“Lucky we're used to it.” I said, after giving her a kiss.
That was not quite true. We were not used to Viktor being so hurt. Up till then he'd escaped a grounding injury and we were about to discover that he was not a bird that could be caged.