I Learned Your Pulse

"I thought when you started crying that you'd seen the Prophet article."

Finally pulling back, his thumb brushed away one drop of water on her cheek that hadn't soaked through anything or joined a streak. He pressed his lips delicately to her forehead in a fatherly fashion.

"You know," he said, "I thought when you started crying that you'd seen the Prophet article."

"What article?"

"Don't you read the Prophet?"

"I always borrowed Ron's and he won't speak to me."

"I see." His eyes searched her face, his hand cupping her cheek gently, smoothing out all tear stains and rubbing them onto his hand. "I think you should see it."

"See what?"

David looked pointedly toward his desk and inclined his head to the Daily Prophet, which was laying face-down amidst various sketches of hills and trees and stationary and pachment and quills and ink... wait, those last four were actual things, it was so difficult to tell because his drawing were so life-like...

She ever-so-slowly untangled herself from him and glided in an almost ghost-like fashion towards the paper.

Looking back, she never could remember what she screamed, exactly, upon seeing the picture on the front page under the headline Viktor Krum  - One Famous Boy, Two Famous Witches, but she could remember it was particularly foul. Her stomach churned and her breath flew like fire from her mouth, scalding her tongue and, she wished, setting the paper aflame. There were two pictures, merged into one, with a black line between them. The first was the one was the one taken after Hermione, Brant and Simis had all passed the first task and she'd kissed Viktor in celebration, captioned Viktor Krum and Hermione Granger. The second was a picture of a bleach-blond, half-starved, scantily-clad young lady smooching Viktor in an inappropriate way, captioned Viktor Krum and Genevieve Grevantile. Hermione knew the name Grevantile. It was in a lot of later chapters in Hogwarts: A History. She remembered the passage perfectly.

Averich Grevantile was first to discover three more of these uses for dragon blood, bringing the total up to six. He was naturally gifted wizard, but not in the magical sense - many people swear he was the most charismatic person they'd ever met. They never categorized him as manipulative, but he could get what he wanted by whatever means necessary; after discovering these three uses, he boasted of and sold the rights to the information for several hundred dollars, translating losely into several billion today. He secured the hand of the woman he fancied in marriage and they had a small, tightly-woven and proud family. [For more on the Grevantile, see page 678]. Throughout the generations, more discoveries were made - several more, including the beginning of Apparition.

There had been more, but what she remembered next was flipping to page 687, which happened to be towards the end of the book and had a long, long, tiny-fonted six pages filled with the most memorable magical families. Grevantile had been among the batch on the first page. The notes next to the family 'tree' had mostly been of monetary accounts throughout the family, getting larger and larger with each new generation. A very rich, powerful, old and pure-blooded family. Whereas she had no magical connections, no discoveries, no money, and only had power because her best friend was Harry Potter.

She grew red in the face, her eyes bluged, her nostrils flared in fury.

And then she remembered she'd kissed someone else, too.

Her anger deflated and the guilt attacked again, taking advantage of her momentarily let-down defenses. Her mind wracked her with the memory of the feel of Draco's lips, how his arms had been relievingly cold when wrapped around her waist, how that one elated moment had felt when her lips had been preoccupied with his. When she'd kissed Viktor lately, it had been happy, but not like it had when she'd kissed Draco. It was a comfort, not a stimulant; it was a pleasantry, not a vivaciousness. But she did not feel that way about Draco. He was an acquaintance, and an unsteady one at that. They still lapsed into fights, into brief flashes of hatred. Viktor wasn't like that, always in control, satisfied when she said she wasn't ready to go as far as she wanted...