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What do you do when one of your colleagues is abducted by Zeus? Well, it depends on the colleague. And also, technically abducted by an eagle. An eagle put up to the crime by Zeus. To be fair, it was probably Zeus himself. He loves to shapeshift into birds. Pervert.
“Abduct him back, obviously.” Growls Nikolai Alexandrovich, when asked his opinion on the matter by me. He sits on his desk, like a badass. He's also smoking, like a badass. His desk is at the back of the twin rows that form our office, behind Anna’s, who sits opposite me.
The Medvedev Twins stare when I ask them what we should do. They share a cubicle, as they share everything.
“I’ve never thought of Yuri Igorevich as a Ganymede, but I'm not gay, so what do I know?” says Mikhail Mikhailovich, while arranging his work collection of rocks. Fossils are what he calls them, but fossils don't exist.
“He's very much a Ganymede, hey, Katya?” Anna pokes me playfully in the side, for some reason.
“I'm not gay either, Anya, so I wouldn't know.”
“No! I mean, he's crazy handsome, like Ganymede.”
I feel my eyes narrowing at her. She just has to flaunt her relationship in my face.
Olga gives her wand a final polish before replacing it in its leather holster. “We abduct him back. With interest.”
Mitya presses a finger to the skin between his eyes, a frown corrugating it. “He's nice to me. We should kill Zeus.”
With an unanimous decision reached, my colleagues and I pile into the closest fireplace and floo over to St Petersburg. Being cops, we first have to interview the witnesses before we can do anything else. Sadly, reaching Petersburg is the easy part. Reaching the Durmstrang Institute is another matter. It's not that far away, allegedly, but you have to be taken there in order to find and know where it is, and it's been seven decades since Mikhail Mikhailovich attended and the ‘pass’ wears off a couple years after graduating.
“Ask Viktor Ivanovich where it is. He's only been out a year or so.”
“Great. Anyone have a spare owl?”
The Twins duly capture an owl from the local woods, only to be distracted by a bear. Luckily, Mitya takes over and returns to the rest of us, leading an owl by a piece of string, the bird flapping along above his head. When Anna and Olga provide me with the necessary writing equipment, I get comfy on the stony, marshy ground surrounding the vast field of bones known as Petersburg, and get writing. Luckily, I happen to know his address - the all important street name and door number. I'll whisper it in the owl's ear.
‘Dear Viktor Ivanovich,
Your best friend and my squad leader has been abducted by a Greek. Please tell us where your hoity-toity pureblood school (Durmstrang) is, so that we may interview the witnesses.
Thank you,
Yekaterina Igorevna, Auror for the Moscow Ministry xxx
P.S we'll be staying at the Four Seasons’
After tying my missive to the bird's leg, I throw it into the air and we watch it wing south, flapping over a wasteland of gnats and standing water. To its right rise the outskirts of the great city, classical, impressive in its interior. Still absolutely hellish to the health and safety.
Vasily Sergeyevich lights a cigarette with a match, waving it rapidly to put it out. “....How many miles are there between Petersburg and Bulgaria?”
“Three thousand miles, more or less.”
“...”
Crickets begin to sing.
“...I think Yuri Igorevich is going to have to return to therapy when we rescue him.”
Vasily begins handing out mini vodka bottles and packets of cigarettes, which people draw on, hard.
💔💝💔
Six weeks later, Viktor Krum appears in the foyer of our hotel, holding the owl’s string in one hand and his ultra mega expensive world class racing broom in the other. I know he's a super famous badass, but in my extreme anxiety he appears as just another extremely good looking guy. Anna, lounging in a pastel pink chair, gives him a Look, and for that I cannot forgive her. Not when her boyfriend is missing.
“You need to get to Durmstrang? Why didn't you ask your superiors where it is? They must know?” he asks, angrily, his thunderous brow furrowed. I notice he's wearing his quidditch uniform. Aww, he flew straight here.
“No. The last people who know where Durmstrang is, are the Department of Aurors.” I answer.
The look the seeker gives me could cut glass.
“Hey, flyboy, I never attended Durmstrang, alright? If you must look at someone like that, look at your poor abducted friend, who did attend, as he never ceases to mention. He could've said something, presumably, and didn't.”
Incomprehensibly, upon parsing my snappy remark to him, Viktor Krum's grim face and stony eyes turn soft and enraptured, and a blush fills his bristly cheeks.
….Oh no. Oh yes? No. Oh no.
Anyway, onwards, we hire brooms and attempt to keep up with a professional, flying through the muggy clouds, wonky as drunken geese when compared to that peregrine falcon.
We know we have reached the vicinity of the ancient school for wizardry and warcraft, when an invisible wall smashes half of us off our brooms and breaks the implements of the rest, resulting in all of us falling thousands of feet through icy clouds to the sodden earth below, sans Krum, who is allowed through. However, he forgoes sailing on through the barrier in order to show off, diving suicidally like he does in his matches and snatching me, Anna, and Olga out of the air, leaving the guys to save themselves.
“Oh wow, I've never been this close to a celebrity,” sighs Olga, her cheek pressed to his. “You smell very manly, Viktor Ivanovich.”
Krum's eyes blaze with affection for a second time in as many hours.
Like she wants the world to end, Anna kisses his other cheek, leaving a mark in black lipstick. A Dark Mark of a different sort. “My hero.”
“Hmpf. Say that again, buttercup.”
Oh noooooo-
Some time later, when broken bones are all mended and a workaround is come up with (make like a child on its way to Hogwarts and run face first through the wall) we get on our way, still following Krum as he flies by, smug and strangely attractive despite his gangly frame and glowering looks. It's a painful hike to the school, over higgledy piggledy, rocky ground which surges into mountains and hills and dives into forests.
And then there's the lake. An enormous square of water, two hundred and nineteen kilometres long and one hundred and twenty five kilometres wide, and we have to make it from the south to the even more contentious north shore.
Taking a break because my butt is sore, and collapsing to the ground, I ask myself if Yuri is worth it.
“He doesn't even like me. Why am I suffering trying to rescue him from some pederast?”
Seven (because Mitya is riding with Vasily, and the Twins are also together) long, narrow shadows jut into my sun.
Viktor scratches his close cropped scalp, adding to the cacophony formed by insects buzzing around and holidaymakers squawking down by the shore and amongst the woods and mountains. “Huh? Yura likes you,” he looks askance at the Medvedev Twins. “He doesn't like these two.”
They stare back.
Something like happy lightning fills my veins, springing me to my feet in an apotheosis and curing my sore behind. “Yuri Igorevich likes me?? No-” Sadly, I then trip into my broom and snap it in two.
💔💝💔
“Hold on tight.”
“I am holding tight.”
“Hold on tighter.”
I know three quarters of the world's population would kill to be in my position, but it is very awkward to be flying with Viktor Krum. I feel like I'm cheating on his friend and our imaginary relationship just by touching him. Terminally in want of a girlfriend as he is, a great terror arises in my heart, a terror of him asking for my number. The number of my door and or post box, that is. I will have to go on a date with him, because I can't not, you know?
Ahead of us, like it's some sort of object in a shitty muggle video game, the sinister wine coloured castle which corresponds to the name ‘Durmstrang’ leaps out of air that previously housed nothing but mist and a view of Finland. Gasps and shrieks and snorts of envy go round the group.
“Hmpf. I suppose it's alright for some. Too posh for me.”
"I want to go back in time and get a pureblood transfusion, just so I can attend."
The bereaved father, when we track him down, is sitting forlornly on the backstep of the castle, looking one to one like Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. I'm about to scream, till I realise he isn't the Mad Monk. Nearby stand a pair of divine horses, but I'm not here for them.
“Have you come to rescue my son from that wretched Greek?!” he asks, blazing eyes making me reconsider whether or not this is in fact Rasputin. He gestures towards a relatively rock-free field, where a pack of dogs have howled themselves to death in grief for a stolen master.
“Yes.” We all chirp, facing him in a decapitated V-Formation. Dear Lord, I cannot wait till Yuri is returned to us so we can look badass again when we show up on villain's doorsteps.
“Good. I suppose you want to know what happened. He was minding the sheep-”
“Why?” asks Mikhail Mikhailovich.
“What do you mean, why? I have sheep, and they require minding. Regardless, my poor boy was innocently minding the sheep when this giant eagle, who I noticed had been watching him from the opposite tree-”
Five minutes into the headmaster's rant about sus birds and how angry he is, Nikolai Alexandrovich spazzs out and whips his wand out, proceeding to speak English in an upper class English accent.
“En garde, villain! It's better late than never, what?”
Igor (?) Karkaroff blinks, his luxurious mouth slightly open. “Pardon me?”
Memo to me: If Yuri is lost forever, his dad is single.
“En garde! I am done looking askance as fiends wearing the faces of friends stab me in the back!”
The professor grins heinously. “I can assure you, my good man, that I have never been anyone's friend.”
“...Oh. Really? Well, mistaken identity, I suppose. Sorry about that, old boy.” The ugliest man alive puts away his wand.
Spazzing out is a regular occurrence amongst aurors, so no one holds it against him.
Regardless, we have done our due diligence and interviewed the witness. Now to apprehend the criminal and rescue the hostage.
“Isn't Mount Olympus on Cyprus or some shit? Not Greece?” Krum asks, still floating on his broom, as we confer. He wanted to shoot straight up into the sky, until he was reminded that the Greek gods live on earth.
“Cyprus is part of Greece.”
“...But it's an island.”
“Half of Greece is islands. Also, no it's not on Cyprus. That's some Cypriot madness. The latest of many such cases.”
Luckily, some of us, unlike most Russians, have left the country and even been to Greece, and we can simply apparate there, with or without freshly acquired PTSD from the Durmstrang Wall Incident.
“I've been to Olympus, actually. For work.” Krum declares, as he holds out one hand for me to take, leaving its brother for the men, my fellow females clinging to his muscly arms and back instead.
I had better receive a smile from the abducted after all this.
💔💝💔
“You shouldn't be here.”
Is the ungrateful answer received when we fight our way into the cafeteria of the gods and reunite with our stolen colleague. He almost gets us killed too, by being naked. Thankfully, a marble table is in the way of the really dangerous parts, but I still collapse into a corner for a time, petrified by beauty. Also, I shouldn't victim blame, because nudity for sure wasn't his idea, but that of the lecherous old villain seated beside him, enjoying a constant supply of wine from the crystal pitcher in his hands. ‘Loves him for his mind' my ass!
Lightning flashes across the airy room, kindly blinding us, while its roar mercifully prevents Yuri's complaints from reaching our ears while we fight for our lives and his modesty.
“Maybe we're just here to talk?!” Shouts someone, Vasily, I think.
“I don't think Zeus knows Russian.” Answers Mitya.
My girl colleagues giggle. And giggle. And giggle. I don't see what's so funny.
“Yura! Put some clothes on, man!” Hisses Krum, the blood of outrage flushing his skin brick red. He's pretty good in a fight, though no auror.
“I shall also require therapy after this.” Mutters Nikolai Alexandrovich, one hand covering his eyes.
The Medvedev Twins stare.
Our fight lasts ten years in the mortal realm, and ten minutes in the Olympian. It ends with Zeus dead on the floor, and presumably in Tartarus, where he belongs.
“Put some clothes on!!” Krum, like some sort of mother hen or stuffy Victorian governess, leans over the young man lounging in the dead king's throne.
“I would, if I knew where they were.”
“Any will do!!” The Face of Quidditch conjures some from out of nowhere. It's good to know he did complete at least his first year at school.
“I'm not going anywhere without my clothes and my coat.” Yuri is being very himself, I must say.
“I hate you! You're impossible!”
Oh oh, victim shaming. With my eyes masked by a godly napkin, I blunder over and almost fall into Yuri's lap. “Just use accio.” I say.
The ‘hmpf’ that expels itself from the new King of Olympus’ lips makes me suspect he was well on his way to developing Stockholm Syndrome.
“So how does being immortal work? Zeus was immortal, and now he's dead.” One of the guys asks when later all of us are enjoying a nice leisurely taxi ride home.
From where he's squashed in the middle of the group, thankfully with clothes on, Yuri sighs divinely and casually enters a pose that would make some ancient Greek run to the sculpture studio at full speed. The radiant halo around him makes it extremely difficult for the driver to see. “The basic package means you stay young and pretty forever. The premium package means you stay young and pretty forever, and no one can kill you.” He smiles at me, but it's not a very nice smile, so it doesn't count.
We all exchange meaningful glances but no one actually dares ask which package he was handed, in case it's a touchy subject. But at the end of the day, it's a moot point, because the first thing he does upon returning to the office is demand a raise for being the Department's only unkillable auror. Great, now I super definitely stand no chance.
“Oh, and my squad deserve bonuses for saving me from an eternity of sexual exploitation working undercover as some pervert’s wine slave.”
…Oh…Oh well. The suspect is dead, and at the end of the day, that's all that matters.