Where You Used To Be, Hermione/Viktor, PG
Title: Where You Used To Be
Pairing: Hermione/Viktor
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2250
Summary: He had tried desperately to be content with what she gave him, to avoid thinking about what was missing.
A/N: I decided I wanted to write something, because it feels like ages since I have, just to keep my brain working properly. This is just a couple hours' work, nothing fancy, unproofread, a plot bunny that's been bouncing around my head awhile. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy it!
Where you used to be,
there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself constantly
walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
. -Edna St. Vincent Millay
Viktor floated into consciousness in the dusky peace of early morning. The candle on the dresser was still burning, the tiny flame struggling to live in the pool of melted wax. Viktor’s eyes sought the glowing face of the clock: three in the morning. Hermione was still beside him, lying on her stomach, face burrowed into the pillow, with an arm flung across his chest. He closed his eyes and trailed his fingers through the fine hairs on her arm, gently, trying not to wake her.
She would be angry when she woke, Viktor knew. She always left by midnight, his Cinderella, running home to Grimmauld Place. To keep her happy, he should wake her, but he didn’t. He was playing a dangerous game, and he realized it, but if he let her sleep, he could pretend she would stay. He could listen to her drowsy little snores and imagine another life, a life like the one he’d envisioned them sharing. He didn’t have to think about her creeping into the old house she shared with Ron, and Harry and Ginny. He didn’t have to remember that she was half of another couple.
Thoughts of Hermione with Ron invaded his thoughts, coloring his fantasies with octopus ink. Viktor slipped out of the sheets, dragged his jeans up his legs, and padded barefoot to his drafting table. He used a ruler to make the box, then began drawing with slow, sure lines. When years of Quidditch had left him with burnout toasting his toes, Viktor had turned to an old hobby. Now he produced comic books about a boy Quidditch star who solved mysteries and defeated bad guys. He was amazed at how well the comics were doing; now eight-year-old boys knew his name, but not his statistics.
Viktor was four boxes into the Bludger Bandit when he heard Hermione gasp from the bedroom. He was halfway to the door when she called out to him. “Viktor! Why didn’t you wake me up? You know I need to leave!”
“You could stay.” He sounded surly, and he knew it. He was pouting. He leaned against the doorframe and watched her scurrying around the room, gathering up her clothes. He didn’t correct her when she tugged on his t-shirt by mistake. She’d figure it out eventually. Or Ron would.
She tossed him an exasperated look as she slipped her trainers on. “You know I don’t want Ron or Harry or Ginny to find out about us. Ron thinks I’m not seeing anyone else!”
“Vhy you do not tell him, then? You told me vhen you decided to start dating him!”
She sighed and gathered her hair into a ponytail. A curl slipped loose, dancing by her cheek, and Viktor wanted to go to her and tug it, then kiss her. He didn’t. Instead, he listened to her verbal onslaught. “I’m not getting into this again, not tonight. I need to get home; it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know why you keep bringing this up. You didn’t complain when I told you I was going to go out with Ron.”
“How I could? Is your choice, does not mean I haff to like it. You do not haff to do this, this sharing of us. You could stay.”
He felt the power of her glare from across the room. He could deal with anger: anger was heat, passion, emotion. Her anger made him feel stronger, somehow. He knew she loved him, knew he could win this argument eventually if he pushed hard enough, steadily enough. She was his girl, had always been his. Weasley was a just a friend she felt sorry for and couldn’t dump.
But…she lived with Weasley.
Hermione shrugged into her jacket and stopped in front of him. She turned her face to him and he knew that she could read his feelings etched cleanly across his features. Hermione always could. Her hand touched his face, the raspy growth of his beard, and he felt her anger subsiding. “Viktor, I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I love you. I really do.”
“Vhen you get home,” he whispered, “vhat vill you do? Lie? Or tell him vhere you haff been?” Viktor met her eyes, wading into the depths of caramel concern he saw there. Hermione’s eyes mesmerized him, but this, this pain was too much. He would explode, viciously, from the heart outward if he didn’t give her some of it to carry for him.
“If I’m lucky, he’ll be in his room asleep and I won’t even have to see him tonight,” she answered-not the answer he wanted. He raised an eyebrow and gazed at her. “Oh, come on, I’ve told you numerous times we don’t share a room, and you still won’t believe me!”
Viktor reached out, pulled her close, still trying to smother the ache growing inside of him, that ever-present pain that threatened to pull him under. “Is because I know how you make loff, full of fire and need and…and desperation.”
He almost didn’t hear the words she whispered against his chest. “But I only make love like that with you.”
He let her go. “Tell him truth this time, then. Or do you not loff me enough?”
She stood there, staring at him, and in the light from that one dying candle, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Hermione just kissed him, a quick brush of lips. As he heard the door close behind her, Viktor watched the dark waxy sea swallow that last bit of light.
The next day, Viktor sat at the drafting table, drawing freckles on his villain and thinking about Hermione, and how the hell their relationship turned into this. They’d been pen pals, seeing each other on and off. Then, he’d been coming to England to see her at least twice a month. Ron had asked her out, and she’d told Viktor about it. She hadn’t wanted to say no, because, she said, his ego was already fragile enough, and besides, he was her friend and she did care about him. Viktor wasn’t thrilled, naturally, but he couldn’t make the choice for her.
He’d kept coming to England to see her. She’d even spent a weekend in Bulgaria with him. When he retired from Quidditch, he moved to London to work on the comics and be near her. Their heat had flared, until she was coming to his apartment ever afternoon after work. Most Saturdays she spent with him, too, and often Friday nights.
Ron thought she worked later than she did, managing Flourish and Blotts. He thought she worked Saturdays and Friday nights. Viktor thought him incredibly stupid.
But, stupid or not, Ron was the one who took Hermione out, while she ate takeaway at the coffee table with Viktor. He wanted to romance her, take her somewhere with linen napkins and roses in a vase on the table. He wanted to watch her dressing up for an evening out, to see her roll silk stockings up her pretty legs. He wanted to tug the zipper up the back of a little black dress and press a kiss against the nape of her neck.
Viktor wanted to wake up in the morning with Hermione sprawled out beside him. He wanted to scramble eggs while she buttered toast in a ratty bathrobe with her hair sticking out all over her head. He wanted so much more than this secret relationship.
Viktor wasn’t an expressive man, but he felt deeply. He had never discussed his feelings with anyone except Hermione; when he first met her, she had a way of opening him up that he’d never seen before. Now, he was hurting inside, and she was the one causing it. Viktor had decided that perhaps living without her would be better than sharing her. He had tried desperately to be content with what she gave him, to avoid thinking about what was missing. When she was with him, he could usually walk around those thoughts, but when she left, thoughts of what-could-be consumed Viktor. He was sinking, almost drowning, like last night’s candle flame.
They needed to talk.
When Hermione swirled in the door after work, steaming cartons of takeaway food in her arms, she was chattering to him cheerfully. He wanted to toss his unhappiness aside and bask in the warmth of her happiness, to forget everything until she left in two hours, ripping his heart out again.
When she cuddled up against him on the sofa, he noticed a tension around her eyes and knew that she hadn’t forgotten last night’s fight. When her one-sided conversation lulled, he said, voice gravelly, “Vhat did you tell him?”
“I-“ she stopped. “He asked me this morning what time I came in. I told him not to worry about it. Then he asked where I was, and I said the same thing.” Viktor held a fat chip up and she bit the end off of it, chewed, swallowed. Her solemn gaze met his, and her voice trembled. “I didn’t lie. I didn’t tell the truth, either, but I didn’t lie to him.”
Viktor crumbled his paper napkin in his hand and dropped it on the floor. “Is a start, I guess.”
“I do love you.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I love you, Viktor,” she said. “I don’t love Ron, not like I love you. He’s a friend, a dear friend, but he’s not a man to me. I just…I just didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“I am hurting!” he burst, knowing he didn’t want to yell at her, but unable to help himself. “I vant you for myself. I vant to be the only special man for you. You say I am, but instead of saying, proof it! Used to be, it vas us, you and me together. Now is an empty place vhere ‘us’ vas. Is an empty place vhere you used to be! How can ve be us vith half empty? Vhat are ve now? Nothing!” He looked down and rubbed his hands across his face, trying to hide from her, from the woman he’d never hidden anything from. “Vhere you vere there is emptiness, bleakness. I vant you to loff me as much as I loff you.”
“Viktor…”
“You say you do not vant hurt anyvone. You are hurting me, and if he knew, you vould be hurting him as vell. You are running back and forth. Does it hurt you, or do you enjoy haffing two men who vant you?”
“I’m torn into pieces,” she answered, her voice weak and small. Viktor knew he should stop talking, but he couldn’t-just couldn’t.
“Then hurt him, loff, or else leaf me. I cannot do this any longer. I am…am ripped, am shredded, am haffing death inside of me.” Viktor met her eyes; she was crying, slow tears sliding in rivulets down her cheeks. When he saw her tears, Viktor finally felt his own. “Sveetheart…I am not afraid of losing you anymore. You are already gone.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, folding in upon himself, and listened to her leave. When she was gone, he picked up the container of chips and flung them against the wall.
At the drafting table, all of his villains had red hair.
It was three days before he heard from Hermione. Viktor didn’t know what he expected, really, after him flinging all of his emotions at her, throwing all of the cards on the table and forcing her into a choice. Perhaps he didn’t expect anything.
He certainly wasn’t expecting an owl with an invitation to the park.
Viktor showered, put on clean jeans, and shaved off his three-day’ growth of beard. He met his eyes in the mirror, dark, filled with agonizing wonder and aching relief. Viktor, he told himself, you are a tougher man than this. Whatever happens, you can survive it.
But he wondered.
Hermione was sitting on the edge of the merry-go-round of the deserted park; he wouldn’t put it past her to have charmed the park for privacy. He sat beside her and pushed with his feet, slowly turning them in a circle.
Finally, after several revolutions, she spoke to him. Gaze trained on the ground, he almost didn’t hear her soft voice. “He was crushed.”
“Vhat?”
“Ron. He was planning to propose to me. I told him I’d been with you that night, that I’d been with you all along.” She looked up at Viktor. “I told him everything.”
Viktor swallowed the heavy knot of emotion that had formed in his throat. “I thought…thought you vould choose him.”
She reached for his hand, rubbed her little thumb across his knuckles. “How could I do that? We’re so strong, Viktor, so strong together. It feels like it’s always been us, until I agreed to see Ron. You were right; ‘us’ got lost. I got lost. I’m so sorry I did that to us.”
Bubbles were dancing through Viktor’s blood, little bubbles of joy. He would forgive her anything, just because she had chosen him.
She smiled. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore.” She lifted her feet off the ground, folded them underneath her on the merry-go-round. “Now spin us.”
He pushed them off, and together they twirled into forever joy.
Pairing: Hermione/Viktor
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2250
Summary: He had tried desperately to be content with what she gave him, to avoid thinking about what was missing.
A/N: I decided I wanted to write something, because it feels like ages since I have, just to keep my brain working properly. This is just a couple hours' work, nothing fancy, unproofread, a plot bunny that's been bouncing around my head awhile. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy it!
Where you used to be,
there is a hole in the world,
which I find myself constantly
walking around in the daytime,
and falling in at night.
. -Edna St. Vincent Millay
Viktor floated into consciousness in the dusky peace of early morning. The candle on the dresser was still burning, the tiny flame struggling to live in the pool of melted wax. Viktor’s eyes sought the glowing face of the clock: three in the morning. Hermione was still beside him, lying on her stomach, face burrowed into the pillow, with an arm flung across his chest. He closed his eyes and trailed his fingers through the fine hairs on her arm, gently, trying not to wake her.
She would be angry when she woke, Viktor knew. She always left by midnight, his Cinderella, running home to Grimmauld Place. To keep her happy, he should wake her, but he didn’t. He was playing a dangerous game, and he realized it, but if he let her sleep, he could pretend she would stay. He could listen to her drowsy little snores and imagine another life, a life like the one he’d envisioned them sharing. He didn’t have to think about her creeping into the old house she shared with Ron, and Harry and Ginny. He didn’t have to remember that she was half of another couple.
Thoughts of Hermione with Ron invaded his thoughts, coloring his fantasies with octopus ink. Viktor slipped out of the sheets, dragged his jeans up his legs, and padded barefoot to his drafting table. He used a ruler to make the box, then began drawing with slow, sure lines. When years of Quidditch had left him with burnout toasting his toes, Viktor had turned to an old hobby. Now he produced comic books about a boy Quidditch star who solved mysteries and defeated bad guys. He was amazed at how well the comics were doing; now eight-year-old boys knew his name, but not his statistics.
Viktor was four boxes into the Bludger Bandit when he heard Hermione gasp from the bedroom. He was halfway to the door when she called out to him. “Viktor! Why didn’t you wake me up? You know I need to leave!”
“You could stay.” He sounded surly, and he knew it. He was pouting. He leaned against the doorframe and watched her scurrying around the room, gathering up her clothes. He didn’t correct her when she tugged on his t-shirt by mistake. She’d figure it out eventually. Or Ron would.
She tossed him an exasperated look as she slipped her trainers on. “You know I don’t want Ron or Harry or Ginny to find out about us. Ron thinks I’m not seeing anyone else!”
“Vhy you do not tell him, then? You told me vhen you decided to start dating him!”
She sighed and gathered her hair into a ponytail. A curl slipped loose, dancing by her cheek, and Viktor wanted to go to her and tug it, then kiss her. He didn’t. Instead, he listened to her verbal onslaught. “I’m not getting into this again, not tonight. I need to get home; it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know why you keep bringing this up. You didn’t complain when I told you I was going to go out with Ron.”
“How I could? Is your choice, does not mean I haff to like it. You do not haff to do this, this sharing of us. You could stay.”
He felt the power of her glare from across the room. He could deal with anger: anger was heat, passion, emotion. Her anger made him feel stronger, somehow. He knew she loved him, knew he could win this argument eventually if he pushed hard enough, steadily enough. She was his girl, had always been his. Weasley was a just a friend she felt sorry for and couldn’t dump.
But…she lived with Weasley.
Hermione shrugged into her jacket and stopped in front of him. She turned her face to him and he knew that she could read his feelings etched cleanly across his features. Hermione always could. Her hand touched his face, the raspy growth of his beard, and he felt her anger subsiding. “Viktor, I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I love you. I really do.”
“Vhen you get home,” he whispered, “vhat vill you do? Lie? Or tell him vhere you haff been?” Viktor met her eyes, wading into the depths of caramel concern he saw there. Hermione’s eyes mesmerized him, but this, this pain was too much. He would explode, viciously, from the heart outward if he didn’t give her some of it to carry for him.
“If I’m lucky, he’ll be in his room asleep and I won’t even have to see him tonight,” she answered-not the answer he wanted. He raised an eyebrow and gazed at her. “Oh, come on, I’ve told you numerous times we don’t share a room, and you still won’t believe me!”
Viktor reached out, pulled her close, still trying to smother the ache growing inside of him, that ever-present pain that threatened to pull him under. “Is because I know how you make loff, full of fire and need and…and desperation.”
He almost didn’t hear the words she whispered against his chest. “But I only make love like that with you.”
He let her go. “Tell him truth this time, then. Or do you not loff me enough?”
She stood there, staring at him, and in the light from that one dying candle, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Hermione just kissed him, a quick brush of lips. As he heard the door close behind her, Viktor watched the dark waxy sea swallow that last bit of light.
The next day, Viktor sat at the drafting table, drawing freckles on his villain and thinking about Hermione, and how the hell their relationship turned into this. They’d been pen pals, seeing each other on and off. Then, he’d been coming to England to see her at least twice a month. Ron had asked her out, and she’d told Viktor about it. She hadn’t wanted to say no, because, she said, his ego was already fragile enough, and besides, he was her friend and she did care about him. Viktor wasn’t thrilled, naturally, but he couldn’t make the choice for her.
He’d kept coming to England to see her. She’d even spent a weekend in Bulgaria with him. When he retired from Quidditch, he moved to London to work on the comics and be near her. Their heat had flared, until she was coming to his apartment ever afternoon after work. Most Saturdays she spent with him, too, and often Friday nights.
Ron thought she worked later than she did, managing Flourish and Blotts. He thought she worked Saturdays and Friday nights. Viktor thought him incredibly stupid.
But, stupid or not, Ron was the one who took Hermione out, while she ate takeaway at the coffee table with Viktor. He wanted to romance her, take her somewhere with linen napkins and roses in a vase on the table. He wanted to watch her dressing up for an evening out, to see her roll silk stockings up her pretty legs. He wanted to tug the zipper up the back of a little black dress and press a kiss against the nape of her neck.
Viktor wanted to wake up in the morning with Hermione sprawled out beside him. He wanted to scramble eggs while she buttered toast in a ratty bathrobe with her hair sticking out all over her head. He wanted so much more than this secret relationship.
Viktor wasn’t an expressive man, but he felt deeply. He had never discussed his feelings with anyone except Hermione; when he first met her, she had a way of opening him up that he’d never seen before. Now, he was hurting inside, and she was the one causing it. Viktor had decided that perhaps living without her would be better than sharing her. He had tried desperately to be content with what she gave him, to avoid thinking about what was missing. When she was with him, he could usually walk around those thoughts, but when she left, thoughts of what-could-be consumed Viktor. He was sinking, almost drowning, like last night’s candle flame.
They needed to talk.
When Hermione swirled in the door after work, steaming cartons of takeaway food in her arms, she was chattering to him cheerfully. He wanted to toss his unhappiness aside and bask in the warmth of her happiness, to forget everything until she left in two hours, ripping his heart out again.
When she cuddled up against him on the sofa, he noticed a tension around her eyes and knew that she hadn’t forgotten last night’s fight. When her one-sided conversation lulled, he said, voice gravelly, “Vhat did you tell him?”
“I-“ she stopped. “He asked me this morning what time I came in. I told him not to worry about it. Then he asked where I was, and I said the same thing.” Viktor held a fat chip up and she bit the end off of it, chewed, swallowed. Her solemn gaze met his, and her voice trembled. “I didn’t lie. I didn’t tell the truth, either, but I didn’t lie to him.”
Viktor crumbled his paper napkin in his hand and dropped it on the floor. “Is a start, I guess.”
“I do love you.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I love you, Viktor,” she said. “I don’t love Ron, not like I love you. He’s a friend, a dear friend, but he’s not a man to me. I just…I just didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“I am hurting!” he burst, knowing he didn’t want to yell at her, but unable to help himself. “I vant you for myself. I vant to be the only special man for you. You say I am, but instead of saying, proof it! Used to be, it vas us, you and me together. Now is an empty place vhere ‘us’ vas. Is an empty place vhere you used to be! How can ve be us vith half empty? Vhat are ve now? Nothing!” He looked down and rubbed his hands across his face, trying to hide from her, from the woman he’d never hidden anything from. “Vhere you vere there is emptiness, bleakness. I vant you to loff me as much as I loff you.”
“Viktor…”
“You say you do not vant hurt anyvone. You are hurting me, and if he knew, you vould be hurting him as vell. You are running back and forth. Does it hurt you, or do you enjoy haffing two men who vant you?”
“I’m torn into pieces,” she answered, her voice weak and small. Viktor knew he should stop talking, but he couldn’t-just couldn’t.
“Then hurt him, loff, or else leaf me. I cannot do this any longer. I am…am ripped, am shredded, am haffing death inside of me.” Viktor met her eyes; she was crying, slow tears sliding in rivulets down her cheeks. When he saw her tears, Viktor finally felt his own. “Sveetheart…I am not afraid of losing you anymore. You are already gone.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, folding in upon himself, and listened to her leave. When she was gone, he picked up the container of chips and flung them against the wall.
At the drafting table, all of his villains had red hair.
It was three days before he heard from Hermione. Viktor didn’t know what he expected, really, after him flinging all of his emotions at her, throwing all of the cards on the table and forcing her into a choice. Perhaps he didn’t expect anything.
He certainly wasn’t expecting an owl with an invitation to the park.
Viktor showered, put on clean jeans, and shaved off his three-day’ growth of beard. He met his eyes in the mirror, dark, filled with agonizing wonder and aching relief. Viktor, he told himself, you are a tougher man than this. Whatever happens, you can survive it.
But he wondered.
Hermione was sitting on the edge of the merry-go-round of the deserted park; he wouldn’t put it past her to have charmed the park for privacy. He sat beside her and pushed with his feet, slowly turning them in a circle.
Finally, after several revolutions, she spoke to him. Gaze trained on the ground, he almost didn’t hear her soft voice. “He was crushed.”
“Vhat?”
“Ron. He was planning to propose to me. I told him I’d been with you that night, that I’d been with you all along.” She looked up at Viktor. “I told him everything.”
Viktor swallowed the heavy knot of emotion that had formed in his throat. “I thought…thought you vould choose him.”
She reached for his hand, rubbed her little thumb across his knuckles. “How could I do that? We’re so strong, Viktor, so strong together. It feels like it’s always been us, until I agreed to see Ron. You were right; ‘us’ got lost. I got lost. I’m so sorry I did that to us.”
Bubbles were dancing through Viktor’s blood, little bubbles of joy. He would forgive her anything, just because she had chosen him.
She smiled. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore.” She lifted her feet off the ground, folded them underneath her on the merry-go-round. “Now spin us.”
He pushed them off, and together they twirled into forever joy.