The silence surrounding Hermione was uncanny. Her bare feet made no sound on the smooth stone floor. She could almost hear her own heartbeat.
The air in the Corridor seemed fresh, despite the door having reappeared behind her; magic, beyond doubt. Hermione could feel magic all around her, powerful, irresistable. It flowed through her as her own blood. She knew it was sifting her thoughts, her emotions. Just as Dumbledore said, she was being turned inside-out. She felt violated -- then she remembered that it was actually she herself who was the intruder. How oppose oneself?
Hermione stopped in her tracks. A door stood before her, gleaming dully in the candlelight. It was featureless, and, like the outer door through which she had entered, it bore neither handle nor hinge. She knew instinctively that not the most powerful spells ever devised could move that barrier.
"Herm-eye-oh-nee."
Hermione froze, her blood chilling. As she attempted to pierce the darkness between herself and the feeble light of the candle, the flame expanded, softened. It became a face. A figure stood before her: Tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with stooped shoulders and slightly awkward feet.
"Viktor?"
Viktor Krum stood before her, his midnight eyes piercing hers. His rounded shoulders seemed even more so, as if they carried a great weight.
"Herm-eye-oh-nee," he repeated in a nearly toneless bass.
Hermione gasped aloud. Though the Bulgarian accent remained thick, he was yet speaking her name as she had always imagined he might. Of course, she reasoned. This was not Viktor, merely an illusion of her own making, idealized by her own desires. But when "Viktor" spoke, whence came his words?
"Ven you told me ve could not see each uzzer again," Viktor said carefully, "I vos very hurt. I told za truth ven I said I neffer had feelings for any girl like I had for you. You are very special to me, Herm-eye-oh-nee. Can you look at me now and say you do not feel somezing for me as vell?"
"No," Hermione said softly. "I can't. I have always kept a very lovely memory of you deep in my heart, Viktor. I've never thought of you without smiling. And I'll always be grateful that we shared something beyond words, if only for a few months. Those months helped make me the woman I am today."
"It could haf been more zan a few months uf a school year," Viktor said with a sort of anguish. "It could haf been a lifetime."
"No," Hermione said, regarding him sadly, "It couldn't. I am very fond of you. You're very sweet and good. You gave me the validation I needed as a woman at a time when I was riddled with doubts. Because you saw beauty in me when I saw none, I learned what it truly meant to be beautiful. I didn't need hair potions and elegent dress robes to be beautiful. You helped me to see more than what the mirror showed. I will always love you for that.
"But I know that's not the kind of love you wanted from me. I'm sorry. If I ever led you to believe otherwise, I'm deeply ashamed. I wouldn't hurt you for the world."
"Vhy did you not tell me zen?" Viktor challenged. "Vhy did you not tell me you loved Harry?"
"I was only fourteen, Viktor. My heart was a mess of burgeoning hormones and conflicting emotions. I don't think I knew how I felt about Harry then. I suppose I always loved him on some level, but it took me a while to realize just how deep my feelings went. Maybe...maybe I thought I wasn't good enough for the Boy Who Lived."
"Zat vos foolish."
"Yes," Hermione smiled. "But I might never have realized it if not for you. If you hadn't plucked up the courage to ask me to the Yule Ball, I might not be here now, pledging myself to Harry."
"No," Viktor said firmly, his bushy black brows low, "you vood haf seen za truth. I saw it zen. I knew vot you did not. I knew you loved him. But he did not appreciate you. Ven I talked vith him outside za Forbidden Forest, I saw zat he vos a fool. A blind fool. But I knew he vood not stay a fool foreffer. Finally he saw, did he not?
"You are a good voman, Herm-eye-oh-nee. You deserf a man who vill love you vith all his heart. You deserf nuzzing less."
"I have such a man," Hermione affirmed. "He's waiting for me now, somewhere beyond that door."
"Zen go to him. Do not look back. You vere alvays honest vith me, Herm-eye-oh-nee. Now you must be honest vith yourself. If you love him, let nuzzing stand in your vay. Nuzzing, and no vun."
The brooding face of Viktor Krum faded into an aura of light. Once more the candle burned before Hermione, this time lighting an open passageway.
"I'm coming, Harry," she whispered, striding forward purposefully, her heart sure and unequivocal. "I'm coming."
Harry did not know how long he had been walking. Time seemed to have no meaning in this unnaturally silent place. More than once he had looked to his wrist, forgetting that his watch had been discarded. Nothing save one's wand was permitted within the Corridors.
Harry stopped suddenly. A door stood before him, pale in the candlelight. He checked the instinct to draw his wand. He doubted that all the Dark magic in Voldemort's twisted mind could have so much as scratched that door.
As the candle hovered between Harry and the silvery barrier, its flame began to spread outwards. The walls of the Corridor retreated before that magical radiance. A vast space appeared before Harry's astonished gaze. He perceived that his bare feet no longer stood on the stone floor of the Corridor. He looked down.
Grass.
He was on a Quidditch pitch. He looked in all directions, saw the stands, the goal posts, all under a high, blue sky. Against that sky banners waved: Yellow...green...scarlet...
"Hogwarts," Harry said aloud.
His Snitch-seeking instincts not having deserted him, Harry's peripheral vision detected movement above his head. He looked up, saw a figure on a broomstick descending slowly. As the flier neared, Harry made out an oval face, tranquil, lovely, with short raven hair framing dark, hypnotic almond eyes.
"Cho," Harry said in a dry rasp.
Cho smiled, nodded to Harry's side. His Firebolt hovered at his right hand like a faithful steed, waiting for him to mount. He did so without a thought, kicking off as Cho zoomed up alongside. They exhanged no word, only the merest glance. The sky was no place for the mundanity of speech. They sped across the field like twin comets. They darted in every direction, doing loops and rolls, chasing each other one moment, flying side-by-side the next. Harry's heart sang a song of freedom, of joy unrestrained and indescribable. Merlin, but how he loved to fly!
At length the two fliers hovered, face to face, a hundred feet above the ground, their broom handles nearly touching. Their eyes met, both pairs shining with a joyous light.
"I always feel so alive when I fly," Cho said somewhat breathlessly, panting slightly from their acrobatics. "But I don't have to tell you, do I?"
Indeed, Harry thought as he strove to catch his own breath, she did not. Though reason told him this was all a hallucination sprung from his memory and given substance by the Corridor's enchantments, yet was the exhilaration no less tangible to his senses -- nor its message less profound.
"It could be like this for us, Harry," Cho said, her onyx eyes piercing his soul.
Harry sat gripping the handle of his Firebolt, the wind in his face, the sun warming him deliciously under an endless sky. This was ecstasy beyond description for Harry. There were times when the sky called to him as with an audible voice -- a lover's voice -- and, heeding that siren call, he would fly and fly, totally free, wanting and wishing never to land.
This was a part of Harry his friends could never approach. Ron flew at every opportunity, but it was all a lark to him, as with most witches and wizards. There was nothing profound or spiritual about it.
And Hermione? Hermione had not flown since First Year, and that in the confines of the Chamber of Keys under Hogwarts. She was earthbound, in spirit as much as in body -- moreso, in fact. Her reason and clinical intelligence permitted no frivolous distractions to her ordered existence. She did not, could never, understand.
Not so Cho. She was a Seeker, like Harry -- a designation, he realized, that held more than a superficial significance.
What was Harry truly seeking when he took to the air? Or, more precisely, what was it he had once sought, but no more?
For Harry was no longer the Gryffindor Seeker of his early youth, the boy who ached to escape the clawing grasp of a world that threatened to crush him under its pitiless weight. He had grown. He had evolved. The boy was gone, to be replaced by the man.
When I became a man, I put away childish things.
And what of Cho?
Harry looked at her now, and a wave of sadness rippled through him. He saw her now not as when last he had laid eyes on her, during the graduation ceremony following Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts. She was as he rememberd her at the end of Fourth Year, her heart torn from her by the death of Cedric Diggory. Like Harry before her, Cho reveled in the freedom of flight, in the escape it provided from a cruel, heartless world. Below lay pain and loss and heartbreak. Up here, in the clean, clear sky, all that was swept away like ashes from a hearth. It was no more than a bad dream. It was not real.
But it was.
Soaring above the world did not separate one from its tribulations. Rather, it set one at a vantage point, provided a new perspective by which life's trials might be appraised and weighed, the better to be addressed. And they had to be addressed. Escape was not an option. For one could not fly forever. Sooner or later came the time to land and face those trials and strive to overcome them.
And Harry had made that choice. The sky was a friend whose embrace he would always relish -- but it was no longer his lover. She waited for him below, her feet firmly planted on solid earth. She was his anchor, the firm rock to which his soul was forever tethered, lest it be swept away on the winds of caprice and lost, perhaps beyond recovery.
Harry blinked a tear as Cho's pleading eyes fell away. He had nothing to give her, nor she, him. They were two spirits who shared a wind of chance, yet who, in the end, were blown by different winds into disparate realms. He could only pray that, some day, she would find her own reason to land. He had found his, and he thanked God every day, looking up into the sky whose siren call was evaporated to a shadow of a whisper.
Harry became aware that he was no longer in the air. He was standing on smooth stone. The candle hovered before him,
its light illuminating narrow stone walls which stretched ahead to be lost in darkness. Wiping a last tear from his
eye, Harry strode forward toward whatever perils awaited him with sure step and purpose of heart.