At the Edge of All Possibilities PV Valentin Schnell

Interacting with: @Alexander Harland
Mentioning: @Percival Rainwood as Mikael Halldorson

A familiar melody came to Valentin through the fragrant spruce boughs as he approached the lake, a dark form strapped to his back. The seeker had finally succumbed to his urge to revisit the murky waters, justifying to himself that it would prove that his dear friend, Mikael, was not still there drowning, as he was in recurring nightmares. The beguiling, haunting music called to Valya as if it were indeed all a dream. The tones and patterns were was too familiar for it to seem real, speaking to him on a murky level and feeling as if he could almost understand, but he didn’t know how much was hallucination and how much was true. For Val, this music was no different from the surreal susurrations of snakes he could swear he’d begun to hear and understand around him. Ever since Valentin had been drugged with a certain potion, he hadn’t been sure how much of what he thought and felt was real anymore… but what could he do but follow the calling, after so long of suppressing such urges? Even if the potion had broken his mind forever, he still had to keep pushing forward. People were depending on him, the champion of Durmstrang, the Frost Captain, the inspirational star seeker, even if otherworldly auditory phenomena were beginning to consume him. First, he had to push through and keep his promises, making sure that Mikael was not sinking to the bottom of the black waters alone.

Arriving at the shore, Valentin did not find Mikael, of course. The other boy was safe, somewhere. Probably. Certainly he was not drowning in the lake, but there was instead another boy, one of golden hair and longing in his eyes. Valentin’s keen amethyst gaze instinctively sought a lock onto the other’s, hazy green, to peer into his depths without hesitation. The seeker needed to understand why the melody spoke to him on such a profound level, even if he had no words to explain it.

Silently acknowledging to himself how lovely was the moonlight falling over the other boy, Valentin pulled his eyes away into the black seams of lake water between reflected silver gleams. An urge inside asked to join in with the melody, to pull the night-black Turkish oud from off his back, but he surely didn’t know the melody, did he? Why should he?

If only the dark lacustrine depths could absorb and negate the power of Valya’s eyes, he thought, then maybe the world wouldn’t be so distorted around him. Yet, the seeker’s legs carried him of their own volition, and with his naturally long stride Valentin arrived at the other boy’s side within a heartbeat. Trying still not to meet the other’s gaze because he knew he would try to delve deep once again, Valentin could not summon even a breath to announce himself. If he opened his mouth, he wasn’t sure what would come out – dragonsmoke, some snake language, or the hypnosis of forgotten ancestors. Rather, Valya hoped that his approach communicated well enough that he wanted to understand the other boy, and so he stood silently, gazing off into the darkening horizon.

Abilities: Keen Eye / Charmer / Evasive Maneuvers / Fearless / Comprehend Parseltongue
Stats: STA 8 - EVA 20 - STR 3 - WIS 15 [17] - ARC 1 - ACC 15

"Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect."
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Having subtly sensed that the song's melody triggered an almost atavistic yearning inside him, Alexander unwittingly found himself in the ghastly combination of blazingly desiring to disentangle himself from its firm grasp and, at the same time, being fervently driven to chase after it. It was one of those rarest moments when one could see the world in its unveiled gloom and allure. With its serenely still waters revealing a lustrous duskiness intermingled with a dimmed gleam and rippling like a hand-woven tapestry of creased silk, the lake glided across the darkling valley of the boy's sight, and the verdant canvas of Alex's eyes suddenly brimmed with the deep blue reflection of those waters. Alas, a moment too subtle for the boy to notice, yet so splendorous that he was destined to experience once in a blue moon, passed like this. In the depths of Alexander's heart, there was a fruit resisting falling from its branch as it had not yet fully grown, a genie still hiding in his lamp as it had not yet been rubbed by destitute hands, a mechanical cuckoo patiently waiting in its wooden nest as the hour and minute hands had not yet aligned at the top of an hour. With every beat of his juvenile heart, a buried seed was trying to shoot forth. But it was too soon. It was futile for the boy to look for a sign in the mirror of the Great Lake that would miraculously bring that moment to come.

Alex kept humming the song as his golden hair fluttered in the air like the hauled-down flag of a fortress surrendered to the enemy. It was as if the wind had stolen a bit of vitality from the boy's hair with every blow it had, and whisked it away to distant lands. After all, these breezes were none other than the sharp blows of the April wind, making the skin pale and ears sore. And eventually, either the wind again, or the wicked hand of the dilemma that Alexander found himself in, snatched the words of the song from the boy's mouth. Alexander's tired voice was now only humming the melody of the song, realising that the words had already left him like beach sand flowing through his fingers.

As the words precipitously left the nest they had built between Alexander's now-dry lips, the boy, that mysterious owner of those footsteps was at his side, almost in the twinkling of an eye. Alex could sense the enigmatic presence of his unexpected visitor. With the melody still lingering in the air, Alex swivelled his entire body toward the boy with the milky white hair. The boy was strangely looking away from him, and Alex, at first, thought it was an act of compassion. A single glance from those eyes, still partially obscure and difficult to discern their exact colour, seemed to Alex striking enough to pierce his young soul. But, no. They were, Alex changed his initial thought, inherently compassionate to refrain from doing such a thing. Nevertheless, Alex was surprised to see such a colour that might be expected to burrow deeper into a hidden mine, rather than an eye socket.

Having realised that the visitor had no intention to address him, Alexander lightly leaned down from his seat on the stone and delicately picked a white dandelion. Twirling the flower between his fingers, Alexander gracefully tilted his head to meet the other boy's gaze. Then, with a warm, amiable little smile on his face, he handed the dandelion to him.

@Aida Mòrsgor-Ama Ellwood

Valentin Azat Schnell had always been a bit faster than his peers. Quicker reflexes, yes, but he also reached life milestones sooner, maturing faster to survive the speed of an existence he couldn't help but accelerate. This came naturally to the seeker because he had always been observant, forever watching those around him and thinking about what made them tick. Yet, for however many people the quidditch captain studied or befriended or led, few had the power to truly captivate him. It wasn’t just the strangely nostalgic music that captured him now, however. There was a purity, a sanctity, emanating from the golden-haired boy. What was it, though, that formed such plaintive strains in his melody, calling to Valya like nectar to a sunbird?

A static charge rippled over Valentin’s skin, standing the snowy hairs on end at the back of his neck. He could almost feel the movement of the boy to his side, stooping to pluck a dandelion from the earth. Its globe, formed by 200 seed parasols, fluttered lightly in the evening breeze. Around and around it spun between Alexander’s fingers, no dizzier than a planet, until coming to rest together with his gaze as they tilted back towards the seeker. Valentin didn’t have to be facing him to sense Alexander’s graceful movement, as Valya breathed in physical language like the air itself, thanks not only to quidditch but also the fundamentals of how he existed in the world. Feeling the boy’s hazy green eyes upon him, Valentin began to rotate as surely as responding to a magnetic pull, no longer able to avert his gaze. A jolt of warning shot through his chest, but as quickly as turning a light on, it was done.

Reducio

Valentin’s eyes met Alexander’s with a smile emerging from his recurved-bow lips. The intense amethyst and moon-halo eyes also curled at their corners with enjoyment, but a cold fire within them seemed to emanate into Alexander. The eyes’ warmth was indeed like that of bluebell flames, cool and safe to handle from the sides but setting anything above ablaze. Now, their direct focus seared with wordless passion. Let me know all of you, the eyes seemed to say. Everything.

Alexander’s outstretched dandelion glowed as if imbued with the very spirit of the moonlight cast all around, and the boy’s smile transmitted directly into Valentin’s heart through the open connection between them. No single thought crossed the seeker’s mind, but only all-encompassing awareness, as Valya’s long fingers extended to receive the flower. Tipping his head as if in ritual, the seeker’s keen gaze never broke from Alexander’s.

“Make a wish.” Valya's English words slipped out as smooth as liquid mercury, conveying great importance in their simplicity. His irises, empyreal with their shafts of light and contrasting multi-color rings, held within them the blackest point pupils that froze as if time itself had stopped. The lake lay mirror-like, perfectly still, as the silence of the woods could be felt creeping into the bones.

If Alexander responded, the champion’s eyes continued to track the other’s even when nodding again, as if to initiate the motion of the universe once more. Delicately the seed globe rose up to Valentin’s lips, and languidly he breathed into his depths, then out again in a wind steady enough to blow the dandelion apart, leaving no piece behind.

“What was your wish?”

Abilities: Keen Eye / Charmer / Evasive Maneuvers / Fearless / Comprehend Parseltongue
Stats: STA 8 - EVA 20 - STR 3 - WIS 15 [17] - ARC 1 - ACC 15

Often, but never without feeling slightly alienated and unfamiliar, had Alexander met a few people during his days, which seemed as long and short as the life of a snowdrop disappearing with the sudden arrival of spring or a shelterless butterfly breathing on it through its spiracles on a winter day. He usually observed a shallowness overshadow his relations with them, passing through the sieve of his bitterness on its way out of his life. Maybe that was precisely why the puppet master residing somewhere deep in the landscape of his mind, aware of Alexander's thirst for depth, pulled the golden-haired boy to the edge of this lake every now and then. These waters, after all, ran so deep, deep enough that one could easily drown in them. Was not that exactly what the tiniest and shiniest blotch in Alexander's heart yearned for? To be enveloped by the depths like an old photograph trapped by a frame; and to get lost in the vastness like the moon whose reflection wandered aimlessly amidst the gathering water in a broken well bucket.

And Valentin's eyes, since the prophecies were all meant to be self-fulfilling, and each one was destined to manifest itself abruptly, were there. Within these blazing eyes, Alex foresaw without a hitch that the very depth that he was accustomed to trying to reach in an obstinate manner, waving his shadowy arms in his blurry dreams, lay. When eventually Valentin's cypress-tree body completely turned to him and their gazes locked onto each other's eyes, Alex sensed that he had never been surer of anything before. Just like an elderly peasant who unfeignedly believed in old train schedules, rain, and God without a shred of doubt, Alexander believed that the answer to the question whose creaking sounds emanating from somewhere in his mind, though he could not articulate it, was in these eyes.

Now, blurring the fluid line between the original one and its counterpart, Alexander and the Durmstrang boy moved like mirrored reflections of one another, like the dance of the nightingale never weakening his will to perch on a thorny rose, ignoring the bleeding of her delicate wrists. If cliffs were to appear on the road these eyes promised him, he thought for a second after sensing the scorching nature of these glances, Alexander would not hesitate to leap from them, despite the obvious fact that courage was not and had actually never been his principal virtue. His hazy green eyes, arrowed by Valentin's unsoiled amethyst gaze, bore a resemblance to those of a simple desert-dweller who had once requested to witness a miracle but found himself dazzled and stunned when eventually his wish was granted. Like a river deliriously and blisteringly rushing to its streambed, something inside the badger boy was flowing towards Valentin and his gaze. "Let me tell you everything," Alexander wished to exclaim before he softly whispered "I am tired of being an enigma."

The white dandelion whose parasols would be invisible between Valentin's snowy eyelashes, like an heirloom, and almost ceremonially, had now passed from one boy to another. With his enraptured mien, Alexander watched the champion's lithesome moves. Having heard the voice of Valentin at last, the lush green forest of Alexander's eyes scorched by amethyst flames seemed to revert to its original colour. He had to make a wish now, oh but, the young boy had an abundance and scarcity of them. What a pity it was difficult to choose one in either case.

Closing the eyes while making a wish must have been a tradition from the first time people considered a stone sacred, Alexander thought. Yet, under these circumstances, he was completely unable to follow that custom. Bathing in the brilliance of these amethyst light beams, Alexander's eyes could not allow to be shielded by eyelids. Therefore, for the first time, with his eyes broad open and defenceless through and through, he thought of the strongest of his heartfelt dreams.

Valentin's breath blew over the flower like a tempest, and given the size of it, that was not surprising to see that it was enough to propel it completely into the air. Alexander longed to follow the flower fragments flying through the air, like a kitten's eye caught on a piece of light. But he couldn't, not right now. Instead, he began to speak, appealing to the sui generis eyes he had been staring at long enough to memorise some of their curves. "You know what my wish was," Alexander said, almost rousingly, harbouring a belief in it for no obvious reason. But Valentin understood, Alex was certain, as he should have.

"I wished to be known," the boy revealed his most intimate desire to the stranger who was not a stranger at all, the words sailing clandestinely from the port of his lips. Having said that, Alexander descended leisurely from the boulderstone he had been sitting for a while. Then "What about you," he inquired, now on his feet, "do you want to be known?"

@Aida Mòrsgor-Ama Ellwood

As the pair moved in mirror image, Valentin’s invisible chains fell away at last. To call it inexplicable would be lazy, and to try forcing words to describe it, profane, but what Valya found in the murky green depths of Alexander’s eyes could never be forgotten from that day hence. Like a whispered hallelujah back into the gale of Stribog’s embrace, the seeker sighed. His breath remixed with the air’s scents of rowan and pine as he felt himself becoming clean inside once more. How could it be that, in simply looking into a boy’s eyes, so many years of burdens fell cleaved away? Would the trappings of the past so simply sink to the bottom of the lake’s darkness to become as inert as clay? If one just had to put it down in ink, then say that in this moment Alexander’s devout gaze into Valya’s amethyst vortices was a profound act of healing. I pray that I may never take you for granted, Valentin’s eyes returned. I do not even pretend to understand this blessing.

Were the pitch-black points of Valya’s eyes a danger to the newly emboldened Hufflepuff boy? No hesitation slowed the moment, allowing their connection a speed like light’s, but nothing within the pearl-skinned seeker resisted the flight of the long-restrained dragon inside. Valya may as well have been a comet, a flow-star, gleaming through the void of space but reflected in complementary form off a lunar sea at the same speed. Starlight-haired head bowing in unspoken gravity, Valentin took a step closer to the golden-haired boy. What would it take to know, to experience, everything about him?

Then, taking the dandelion into his right hand, Valentin’s lengthy gust eroded the minutiae of its seed globe until even its stalk departed into the night, and with its sacrifice closed their ritual. A silky white glimmer of scar tissue ran down his hand, visible to the other boy for a brief window in time. The words spoken afterwards, but a confirmation of truths they knew in their hearts, put to rest whatever doubts would have stirred in later contemplation. With all the verdant forest tones of Alexander’s gaze rooted firmly despite the intensity of Valentin’s diamond-sharp aurora stare, the captain felt devotion moving through the other boy’s wish. Although younger, Alexander did not shrink away from the champion even at such a vulnerable moment. Indeed Valya knew what the other’s wish was already — his eyes had told him — and never had the seeker seen another give themselves so fully to their moment. This was how the captain learned that they were fundamentally the same in this hallowed way. Although it felt like he had been waiting his whole life, for this sliver of time Valentin ceased from feeling alone.

"What about you," returned the young badger, slipping down from the stone. "Do you want to be known?"

“But you know the answer already,” reflected the horntail. “I wish to know and be known so fully that there ceases to be any barrier in between. My deepest wish is such unity.”

Then, triggered like curtains of autumn leaves by the arrival of their season, Valentin’s body began to move. His slender arms, cut lean with the touch of countless hours in motion, reached behind one shoulder to release the dark-wooded Turkish oud from his back.

Reducio

Settling down onto the shore silt as softly as a falling petal, Valya’s pale features glowed with silver tones. Once his pick met the first string, a cascade of emotion flowed into a gift of music. Singing in harmony and counterpoint with his instrument, synaesthetic sensations flooded Valentin until he felt they were on the surface of a moon rather than anywhere on Earth and, at last, together.

Abilities: Keen Eye / Charmer / Evasive Maneuvers / Fearless / Comprehend Parseltongue
Stats: STA 8 - EVA 20 - STR 3 - WIS 15 [17] - ARC 1 - ACC 15

Those who were in the habit of likening man to the universe had a fundamental mistake that could not escape the attention of a trained mind. Since the long-forgotten ages, believing that man encapsulated every single thing in the universe, they had characterised man as a microcosm. But no – this dialectic was flawed from its inception. It was, on quite the contrary, the universe itself that functioned as the junior partner of this dialectical dance macabre, for it contained a part of every phenomenon relevant to mankind; and the macrocosm was none other than man himself, with all his dreams and disappointments, his longings lost in the very depths of his weary heart, and his passions suddenly rekindled by the sweet breeze of a spring morning when it blew through his hair one day at dusk. This ever-expanding enigma called the universe, plain as a pikestaff yet hermetically shrouded from man’s awareness, was indeed small enough to envelop the recesses of Alexander’s heart. But to claim otherwise? It would only be madness, a sheer one. Because in that blest instant when Valentin’s amethyst gaze penetrated his soul, the young badger had his first taste of the feeling that his heart was truly large enough, maybe even larger than enough, to contain every particle of the universe. With his heart now utterly enlarged, Alexander was convinced that no one else but Valentin was the sole possessor of the key to the door where the unity lay behind – a unity so profound that makes all words destined to be defeated by a recondite and absolute silence. ‘Perhaps’, thought the boy, ‘it was nothing but his presence that stole the words of the song from my mouth’, feeling his heart throbbing as if a hoopoe were pecking at it.

Alexander’s narrow shoulders, which he did not believe would ever broaden, swayed with sudden relief, like a mould of butter melting in the heat, a snowdrift thawing in the warm embrace of the sun’s rays. With an imperceptible shake, he cast off the defensive posture that seemed to cling to him despite his previous rigorous attempts. Curious, the boy wondered. Because until now, in order for Alexander to break free from that posture with his hands in front and his back slightly bent, there was one unchangeable requirement: to get closer to home. But now, what was happening now? The boy’s mind, luckily, did not have to undertake a long and perturbing pilgrimage of deep ponderings to find the answer. When Durmstrang boy was near to him, his eyes were not fixed on the finger pointing to the moon, as they often were. Instead, his gaze, now leafy and eager, was poised to lock onto the porous face of the moon. Therefore, Alex intuitively and quickly grasped the fact that getting know the milky-white-haired boy would be a journey no different from embarking home, with no need to hide behind the curtains as heavy as death, and free from the need to carry his self-sacrificial urge to being crushed by the burdens as rooted as mouldy habitudes. Contemplating on these initial two images that entered his mind, the key and the home, Alexander felt that an unfeigned smile was hammered across the half-radiant face of his, which had been a caravanserai of moonlight since the day he was born.

As Valentin sealed Alexander’s deepest wish with his breath in the pappus of the dandelion, Alexander sensed that the waves carrying nothing but a strong feeling consisting of admiration towards the seeker surged like ebbs and flows along the shoreline of his soul, hungry to be known –but only by him– and thirst to know –but solely him–. Did he stand a chance, though? The poor boy was not arrogant enough to consider himself worthy of such an unattainable chance, which was nothing less than a complete blessing. What he wanted was like having the luck of the prostitute whose feet were washed by Jesus – alas, a seat reserved for only one person, and thousands of years ago.

It was only when Valentin’s unsoiled lips, which had hitherto been sealed, turned with skilful gentleness into a waterfall through which the words so elegantly flow, the faint and snow-battered bud of hope inside the young badger seemed to sprout again. Having heard the older boy’s answer, Alexander’s heart, so accustomed to dovishness, was armed with the agility one would only expect from a riot-breaker cavalryman tasked with breaking down the barricades and barriers, his horse’s manes racing with the wind. ‘I will make every effort,’ Alex thought in a decisive manner, ‘no matter how desperate, to fulfil your wish.’ As he was volitionally unguarded in front of those amethyst sparkles, though that would normally take guts to express it so openly, Alexander did not hesitate to declare his willingness to let Valentin explore any path he could envision in pursuit of that barrierless unity. If the Seeker really aspires to know the boy, Alexander mused, he was ready to open himself like an oyster before his eyes, secretly hoping that the Durmstrang boy might turn whatever he discovers within those shells into a precious pearl.

But something else unfolded before that oyster’s shell: an instrument dark enough to make the blackness of the night envious. Alexander stood still, fascinated to such an extent that any other reaction was impossible and the riveting colour of indescribable admiration flooded his face. When Valya placed her jet-black oud, in sharp contrast to the incandescent whiteness of his hair, in his lap and began to touch the strings, a wave of eager excitement spread from Alexander's knees to his heels. Like those not blessed with the luck of being photogenic who feel uncertain where to place their hands upon hearing the terrifying shutter sound, Alexander, in awe and reverence, began to watch the postcard-like scenery in front of him.

Alexander, every corner of his soul conquered by the musical cascade created by the melodies rising from Valya’s oud mingling the sweet timbre of his voice, crouched down just opposite the Durmstrang boy. With eyes widened to the size of the moon, he gazed at the boy whose appearance was akin to a masterpiece formed from numerous fragments of beauty. These words, sounded to Alexander’s ears as if they were exactly the ones that needed to be uttered at this very moment, in the sacredness of this instant, were sinking into his heart. Within the golden-haired boy’s heart, like a surging sea, a yearning longed to rest his head in the Seeker’s palms.

When Valentin finished his song, Alex, even though he was amazed that he had made it through such a storm unscathed and despite feeling totally speechless, somehow managed to murmur "May we?”, locking his gaze back into those eyes. "May we find harmony?" he completed the sentence, repeating the words of the song Valya had just bestowed upon his mortal ears. Like wind and tree, but as Alexander and…

The boy’s green eyes flashed with excitement, “Alexander…” he said as the first confirmation of his wish to be known. He hoped that their white dandelion, which he guessed now well away, must have already fulfilled its mission by now. Suddenly a torch that had not been lit for a long time ignited inside him, filling every iota of Alexander with tenderness and warmth. The boy felt tears of happiness, their origin still a mystery, begin to fill his eyes slightly. “Alexander…” he repeated his name, and this time a smile widened on his face that could not be interpreted in any other way than as an expression of pure joy.

This marked the first step towards being known – the dandelion had done his job.

This was also the first step towards knowing – the dandelion had done a remarkable job.

Alex wished with a burning longing that it had accomplished something even greater. “I wonder if the dandelion granted the oud player’s wish for unity?” he asked himself, despite being already confident in the potency of its snowy parasols.

As the oud’s last hum blurred into silence, its pitch-black pear body slipped out of Valentin’s embrace and onto the silt with a quarter-turn spin.

"May we?”, echoed Alexander, lifting Valentin’s gaze up into locking. "May we find harmony?"

Void of thoughts, Valya moved with the same instinct that positioned him and his team in shifting constellations across the sky of the quidditch pitch. The captain squatted down so that their faces were only inches apart, so close that their breath stirred the fringes of one another’s hair in waves of gold and silver. The amaranthine firmament of the seeker’s eyes held only welcome as their black depths beckoned. The gaze lingered, and notes of Alex’s earlier melody resurfaced in Valya’s mind while its patterns etched into memory as representations of the viridian and olive and linden green plumes of his eyes.

“Alexander…” said the Hufflepuff, tears welling up in his eyes. “Alexander…” Joy poured from him into the wide-open skies of Valya’s heart, exploding like turquoise summer fireworks. Then, the seeker lifted both lithe hands to cradle the other boy’s face.

“Valentin.” Moonstone-colored palms, supportive enough to bear weight, felt warm in the chill of evening’s descent. A silver scar in one hand ran down Valya’s arm down into the white folds of his sleeve, tucked up at the elbow. “I know your song, although I don’t know why. It feels like I’ve known it for the longest time despite forgetting.” With time, Valya’s hands departed from Alexander’s face and he stood to turn away. Head tilting to look upon the dark curves of the oud against the moonlit shore, a rattling sigh escaped the champion’s chest, like pain leaving the body. I wonder…

Sitting back down and cleaning off the oud with his sleeve, Valentin reached an arm out to welcome Alexander to sit down as well, within the shelter of his curving body. If the boy came along, he would lean him up against his chest and put the oud in front of them both, resting the instrument on the boy’s lap and wrapping his arms around him to still be able to play it. Valya went on to play a new song, and if Alexander were there holding the oud, its vibrations would permeate his body. Mother of pearl sound holes glistened in rainbow colors in the dimming light, and Valya’s voice reverberated from Alexander’s opposite side, completing the circle.

Reducio

When the song concluded, Valentin fell quiet for but a moment before his breath blew down the back of Alexander’s neck.

“Now, this time… Let us find harmony.”

Again the seeker’s pick began to strum the oud, but now in an attempt to recreate the song he’d heard from Alexander moments ago.

Abilities: Keen Eye / Charmer / Evasive Maneuvers / Fearless / Comprehend Parseltongue
Stats: STA 8 - EVA 20 - STR 3 - WIS 15 [17] - ARC 1 - ACC 15

Alexander was not one of those who needed to glance at his watch to discern whether it was evening or not. Just as he did not need to talk to the boy standing there like a meticulously chiselled statue, like a dried rose within the pages of Alex’s yearnings, to find the answer to the question of whether he was the embodiment of a recurring leitmotiv that had echoed through all of the young badger’s dreams.

When his face was surrounded by Val’s warm hands, Alex marvelled at the gentleness of the boy’s touch. The golden-haired boy wished that the smooth fingers that had very generously landed on his skin to trace its roughness would not be hurt. He gently took Val’s right hand, hoping this would seal a silent agreement between them. Their current physical closeness, however, did not meet the demands of the deep attachment Alex had felt for the boy from the very first moment he vaguely heard Val’s footsteps. Alex felt himself like a drop and longed to blend into that amethystine ocean. Before the scorching sun turned this insignificant droplet back into a vapour imprisoned in the niveous clouds shaped like human faces, Alex had to find a way to pour himself into these vast waters, allowing him to dissolve within the gargantuan waves of unity.

A soul-stirring melody danced within Alex’s hearing, a tune that only the night-black oud resting in the distance could truly honour. “Valentin.” As if remembering his past lives aeons ago, as if waking up from a centuries-long hibernation, Alex grasped the soft hand in his palm more firmly, his eyes sparkling with the joy of being reunited. As Valentin continued his words, Alex’s eyes, appearing as if they had only recently escaped from a verdant forest, became fixated on his lips. Alex would not be able to comprehend Val’s words if he took his eyes even for a moment from the source from which these sacred tunes gently seeped.

He suddenly felt that the years he had lived, and they were indeed very few, had flown by without leaving a trace on him, like a piece of oakum on which he once wiped his hands. The yearning to have the salt from Val's lips meet his own dry ones endowed the boy with a solicitous expression, very akin to that of the actors he had so often seen in films on Muggle telly, sitting on a bar stool with their three-day stubble beards. Even the mere implications of these thoughts frightened Alex to the core. Knowing, the act itself, even without a certain object, made the boy's heart tremble like a bird of passage perched on the eaves of a pauper’s house on a rainy afternoon. To be able to look at this boy who had stormed after the golden snitches for so long before he started to storm in the depths of Alex's heart, which up to this moment had not been engaged very much in any activity other than pumping blood, was a blessing that could not be weighed on any scale. None of the addresses that Alexander had kept in the tired compartments of his mind in case they were needed one day was no longer important. The fair-haired boy had found his way home. Now he could start reading the book anew, which he had once completed by skipping many pages of it. "Fly me to the Moon, my Pecos Bill," Alex wanted to say.

Not moving from the spot where he slowly sat up, Alexander gazed at Val as he retained the warmth of the boy’s hands on his cheeks. Then, not even knowing how to be grateful for the invitingly outstretched arms, he slowly started pacing towards their owner. Alexander did not even think of giving a name, let alone a pseudonym, to the storm of emotion that was blowing inside him, considering the fact that even his own name was given by others. Gently, not wanting to hurt his single fuzz, Alex leaned against the comet’s chest. A pure tranquillity made itself felt in the boy’s whole being, looking like a tree that had toppled over and eventually met the soil that had nourished its roots for so long. Val’s hand wrapped around Alexander’s waist like a vine to grasp the handle of his oud, causing Alex to snuggle deeper into the white-haired boy’s body.

As Val’s fingers moved over the strings and handle of his instrument to find just the right sound, his arms inevitably caressed Alex’s body, filling the young badger with a sense of reliance. Alex, his head resting on Val’s upper chest and his cheek buried in his collarbone, wrapped one hand around the Durmstrang champion’s waist while with his other hand, he encircled Val's midsection, thus creating a circle of affectionate embrace around him.

“Let us find harmony…” Alexander’s heart rejoiced like a sparrow with a broken wing finding solace in a newfound shelter. There was confidence in the boy that they did not have to make even the slightest effort to find harmony between them. Alex had, of course, borrowed some of his feelings from the books he read, just as he had stolen moments of fun from illustrated books in his carefree years when his mind was unburdened by the various concerns of his inland empire. But what about this? How could these two boys, who from anyone else’s point of view should have been nothing more than strangers to each other, have managed to partake in this ethereal moment together? Could it be that Alexander’s mind lifted this scene from a fairy tale he had read long ago? But no, Val was neither an intangible shadow looming before Alexander’s eyes, nor a ghost whose presence made even walls lost their solidity, nor a chariot destined to turn back into a pumpkin come morning.

He knew the melody Val sought to evoke. “It was a sad song, Valentin,” he remarked, “haunting, but sad.” With that, Alex loosened his embrace around the Durmstrang boy and gently turned the boy’s face towards his own. The fragments of melodies that had been floating in the air to recreate the song were thus interrupted. As he looked at Val’s face, “There is a pain there,” Alex pondered. Having never had the fortune to encounter Valentin before, Alexander had not been able to attract that pain towards himself like a lightning rod. “There is no need to sorrow in your eyes,” he said, “spare me all the pain dwelling there.”

@Aida Mòrsgor-Ama Ellwood

Blanket godmod perms over Alex given to Valentin's writer.

As Alexander’s hand slipped into Valentin’s, pressing into the scar where his palm once caught a bolt of lightning, Val could almost feel current flowing in through it again. The Hufflepuff boy’s hair shone under the moonlight in the same tones as the golden snitch, but at long last, Valya knew that he was the one who’d been caught.

It was simple. It was so unbelievably simple. The niffler, who had dashed about nabbing the shine in countless peoples’ eyes only to never be earnestly pursued, now had nothing, nothing at all when Alexander’s tender grasp took him for his own. Inexplicably, someone had finally gone faster than the white lightning himself, short-cutting right past entanglements of doubt, confusion, and misplaced guilt. There was simply no way the colddrake could have hypnotized the young badger fast enough to be blamed this time. Before even those first moments of averting his amethyst gaze, Valentin had already felt it – Alexander’s song summoning him. Indeed it was a sad, haunting melody, but it called to him on a deeper level than anything ever had before. Far more powerful than any attention-seeking habit or even his most fervent longings, conviction ignited Valentin’s eyes with the imperative to serve, to kneel, to kiss the feet of this viridian-eyed phenomenon.

The champion, acclaimed by some as the “immortal king” and renowned Frost Captain of Durmstrang, bowed his head as a silent resonance humbled him to his very foundations. A deeper purity beckoned him beyond the limitations of humanity’s constructs of hierarchy, accomplishment, and manipulation. All the social structures and power plays that had sickened Valya whenever he came into contract with the many toxic tars so common in human interaction – gone. Even civilization itself felt as childish as castles made of blocks in the face of such a sacred calling as now permeated Valya’s being. It couldn’t even be called a thrill or peak experience, for to objectify the harmony buzzing through his every nerve could never do this moment justice. Beyond logic and convention, Valentin knew only ethereal union in Alexander’s presence.

Only later would it occur to the seeker that it was only natural for the norms of Valentin’s life to be inverting now with an overwhelming shift in gravity. “Masochist” Valentin, the unrelenting giver, had endured years of asking for no more than necessary and receiving little else, only to now feel awash in a universe of blessings. Inside Alexander’s kind eyes, Valya found an infinity beckoning where equal reciprocation and matching wills might complete the broken circuits throwing sparks from their lives. Might.

Valentin welcomed the Hufflepuff boy into his embrace as he and the oud echoed the strains of music Alexander had summoned him with. Through its lilting melody, Valya’s heart explained that it, too, had been longing for its truest home for years of thrashing against its mortal tide. At the song’s conclusion, Alexander loosened his grip and turned Valya’s face towards his own. Amethyst eyes froze, his entire attention suspended as he took in the expression on Alexander’s face. Dandelion seeds wafted up into high air currents above, disappearing into pin pricks indistinguishable from the stars, as the golden-haired boy’s words soaked into Valentin’s mind like a healing salve into an open wound.

“There is no need for sorrow in your eyes. Spare me all the pain dwelling there.”

The slick-backed oud slid from Valentin’s grip out onto the shore once more as his eyes widened in shock and wonderment. When had any boy ever tried to heal those wounds, even as they grew like cracks in black ice from year to year? How was it that Valya’s soul was so easily read and considered by this one, when it was almost always Valentin studying the needs of others? Breathless, Valentin could no more resist the summons than a sea would deny the sway of the moon. The tall captain’s muscles slackened and he sank as gently as snow melting into the boy’s arms. Just like spring warmth drawing out rivers from the frost, tears began streaming from Valya’s eyes as their white eyebrows raised, baffled and in awe. Soon the salty tears swelled with passionate sobbing into Alex’s neck as Valentin’s heart opened up, utterly defenseless.