𝐃𝐔𝐋𝐂𝐄𝐓 𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 - Viktor Krum

41

A girl I had known for six years of my life, an irrevocably flawed yet vigorous girl, who had reduced me to the brink of collapse in most moments in my life, catching my hate and fury by its throat and challenging me with her seemingly adverse views on life and friendship. When all along it were my views that had been adverse. When you held unmoving confidence in your own, everything else that people around you said or did was adverse to you.

Bridgette hadn't known a life like mine. She had come from a privileged background, with a wealthy family and elder sisters who were Aurors working for the French government of magic.

And it was that, coupled with her tendency to only spot the brighter areas of life that had kept me from confiding to her about my own true background for years. I had made our friendship battered. I had broken its legs and she had forced it to crawl.

Until she couldn't any longer, until she was a corpse askew on the castle ruin floor in a foreign country, all because I had finally confided and brought her into the mess of my life.

Lien du sauveur, I thought about the bond. She had died, and now according to the bond forged of magic, I would be cursed to remember Bridgette Monet until my own dying breath. And it wouldn't feel like a curse, it would never be a curse.

My ears caught onto Elias Dupont's sobs, and the pieces my heart was in shattered further like glass as though there was still something in them left to be broken. Elias never cried. He was the smart posh boy, the sophisticated charmer who made girls at Beauxbatons devour pages of boring things on specific topics like machinery and politics just so that they could not be caught off guard if they tried to have a conversation with him—just so that they could impress him.

He was the selfishly intelligent boy, forcing himself to educate himself on matters that mattered only to him—he was the bane of many Beauxbatons' professors' existences. Elias Dupont never cried.

I didn't look at his form, hunched over Bridgette Monet's cadaver behind me. I had laid Harry Potter's unconscious body beside her—an act I had done without any thinking involved for I needed only to put Harry away for a moment, and give my rage the center stage. No one else made a single sound as they stood around my dead best friend, and I couldn't bring myself to join in their mourning. How did it help anyone, to bring a tortured burning heart near other similarly hurt ones?

This wasn't the medieval times, where one act of confiding vulnerability can have you thrust in collective hysteria, forming you into a cult of frenzied solace where nobody felt any different than you did. Once you got roped in, you couldn't be roped out. And somebody needed to be on the outside, even if others gave in.

But who really was there to give in? Only Elias, Gabriel and I. Gabriel had only ever been annoyed with Bridgette's presence, it was only Elias who I could share my sentiments with. We had no one else, our other friends from Beauxbatons—Louis, Raphael—they were lives and times away.

It was only Viktor who I could sense in my periphery, though I refused to look beside me and acknowledge his presence. I wanted to turn to look if Dimitrova was crouched beside Elias, I wanted to see if the Bulgarian national Quidditch team beater was as taken with mourning. He had loved her for days compared to the six years I had spent battling my feelings towards my best friend. But did any of that matter anymore?

Viktor Krum shifted beside me, his sword had long shifted to his left hand while he now sported his thick wand in his right—pointed up at the only standing death eater as though my blinding anger needed the Durmstrang support in finishing this last piece off.

"You are monstrous," Lucius Malfoy spat, his voice slightly shaking in his fear now that his army lay dead at our feet.

His fear was the result of only me, the man didn't seem to care for Krum's aim or his presence, and that fact alone led a wave of satisfaction surge through me.