Vladlena Savitskaya was experiencing a peculiarly unusual sensation.

Complete exhaustion.

She was used to taking a double—and quite near total triple—courseload during the school year, and working long hours in the summer at her family's dragon sanctuary. If the sun was going to be up for 24 hours, her father had always reasoned, there was no reason why his children shouldn't be too. But while strenuous spellcasting and long jogs were not unusual for the girl, the emotional spectrum she'd covered the day of the First Task was entirely foreign. There was something  devastatingly unfamiliar and peculiarly draining about passion.

And so the girl found her eyelids becoming quite heavy, much to her quiet befuddlement.

She'd changed after the challenge—primarily as an excuse to shower and get the residual spider webs out of her hair, which was back in a harsh, practical braid—but as she had yet to acquire a replacement uniform for the one she had lost during the challenge, the robes she was dressed in were plain and undyed.

She had an appallingly tall stack of books beside her in the nearly empty library—most students were off celebrating somewhere—primarily focused on acromantulas, but there was one on herbology and one on advanced transfiguration tossed in the mix. A candle puddled wax around its holder, and Vlaldena found herself blinking slowly, lowering her head to rest on her arms, watching it flicker and sway. One small, pale hand released the quill it had been using to take notes to instead curled around the candle's base and the other stayed folded on top of a particularly monstrous tome open to a passage on theoretical discussions of whether or not muggles, if exposed to magical creatures, would understand their speech (presuming they didn't get eaten, which the book was skeptical of), supporting her head.

Her light eyes closed, her wand rolled off the giant book to clatter quietly to the floor with several sparks of pale blue, and Vladlena, for the first time in her life, fell asleep in a library.

As the party raged on, strong as ever and showing no signs of slowing, Tracy left it all behind him, clapping shoulders with a brisk, friendly hand and obligingly stooping for hugs and kisses as he said good-bye—for the time being. “I’ll be back, yo,” he had laughed at one point, the plaintive tone drawing a reassuring grin. If he ever thought he’d be missed, there was his answer. “I’mma jus’ step out fer a bit, git me some air an’ quiet ‘fore I go deaf. I’ll be back b’fore y’ know it!”

It was still early as far as parties went, but he’d been there since the very beginning, helping DC and the others with the preparations until the first of the guests had arrived. That was only a few hours ago, but the entire time he’d been enjoying himself—movin’ and groovin’ in particular, his limbs moving with a grace and freedom as if music was his blood. It was part of the reason why, actually, that he was heading out; by now his shirt was sticking to skin a lil’ uncomfortably, rolled up sleeves showing off a faint sheen of sweat and his collar popped open more than a button or two.

Sure, he could’ve cooled off with a spell, but where was the fun in that?

Under the flickering candlelight of the dungeons his dog tags glinted, a muted flash of silver against skin as their owner made his way through the hall. Aimlessly, he wandered; here and there he turned left and right, no specific destination in mind except for someplace spacious and quiet, where he could have a little more room t’ breathe, could hear himself do so… and think, too. Just… let everything sink in. Because they hadn’t. Even now, even when the first task was done and over with there was still giddiness, the feeling made all the more poignant by that sense of excitement he lived with every day.

And that was only the tournament. School, of course, was always forefront in his mind, a little farther upfront than Quodpot and a little behind his friends, which the boy’s whole world revolved around—and just thinking about them brought another smile to his face. It was his friends who had thrown the party, their idea, their plan, their gift, and being who they were they had opened it to everyone else. Conversation hadn’t flown on just the lines of English; he could’ve sworn he’d heard murmurs of French, German, and Russian, too…

When Tracy finally emerged from his thoughts, he was on the fourth floor, a certain pair of double doors in sight and inviting.

His smile shrank into something wry. The library. He should’ve known.

Wordlessly the boy stepped inside, the room seeming cavernous in its emptiness and the silence. As far as the eye could see were shelves and shelves and shelves of books, all of them outstripping him by feet and bearing tomes that fueled a sort of curiosity he usually saved for Herbology. And even further into the gloom... he stopped. Nearly blanketed by darkness completely, was the folded frame of a girl.

Vladlena.

Without thinking, Tracy took a step—and then stopped again. They were classmates, fellow seniors, champions and… figures of authority, he’d concluded from their first meeting, but beyond that, they weren’t friends. Since that day he hadn’t been able to say more than two words to her, whether because either or both of them had been busy, or with friends, or just hadn’t been around at all. And, well… even he thought just asking around, jus’ random-like, was a little weird.

Hesitantly, reluctantly, he took a step back... and spotted the wand on the floor.

His brow furrowed slightly, he stared at it for a moment... and made up his mind. As silently as any cat, Tracy made his way to the table. Long, dark fingers wrapped themselves around the wand’s shaft; with a soft hup, he straightened.

“Hey,” he said softly, leaning in just close enough for the whisper to carry but not, he hoped, to considered all up in her grill. Lightly he touched her shoulder, his hand dwarfing it briefly before he let it fall to his side. “Vla… dlena?”

The word left his mouth rolling and hesitant, unfamiliar. When pale, green eyes finally opened, he smiled gently. “Bit late fer readin’, isn’t it?”

   

It was odd. Vladlena didn't usually dream—the sheer number of stimulant potions she downed through an average day meant her sleep was somewhat concentrated and too deep to allow them. But whatever strange fantasies her exhausted mind had been spinning fled abruptly at the sound of her name in deep, hesitantly warm voice.

Unfortunately for Tracy, any physical contact with Lena was sufficient enough to be deemed 'in grill'.

She awoke entirely at once, alarmed and silent, recoiling automatically from the unfamiliar, gentle sensation of a warm hand in contact with her person. The movement was abrupt and alarmed, but even in her haste Lena had enough grace to avoid toppling the candle.

For a moment she felt a sweeping wave of not-quite-homesickness (that sort of thing required affection for a place, and Lena felt none for either her home or school) but certainly a sort of nostalgic yearning. Where was the structure here? People talked to each other willy-nilly—Lena had no concerns about 'class', but she was comfortable in  the sort of frigid isolation being an Oberteil allowed in the halls of Durmstrang—and she had been called by her given name, and touched, familiarly even, more in the past few months than in her entire prior seventeen-odd years, with the possible exception of the summer Gaubert had spent at the reserve, but Vladlena had determined him to be, most affectionately, a bit of an aberration and therefore hardly representative of the greater data as a whole.

It was unsettling. 

This entire experience was disorienting. Ordinarily, Vladlena would consider it occasion for a sociological study, but the very nature of the constant, casual invasions of her solitude made it increasingly difficult to remain scientifically aloof about it.

It seemed to be especially so in the case of President Jones, who she found herself facing, and that queer, fluttery and unfamiliar something was making her pulse misbehave. She really ought to see a Healer. Something was distinctly amiss.  So acutely aware of that, and still unsettled, it did not occur to her to be embarrassed he had caught her sleeping. She had no idea what to do, and that, to a girl who was defined by her ability to respond correctly to anything, terrified her. 

So she reverted to the only defense she knew—the stiff, cold formality that was mainstay of her home and school life. "Gaspazha[1]—" she paused for a mere half a second to correct for language, since the Russian courtesy title was not likely to fall easily from foreign lips, "—Ms. Savitskaya." She corrected. Her voice and expression were cool and precise, but there was a breathlessness to her smoky tone that gave away the hint of unease she felt, startled and still caught between sleep and wakefulness in a way that was making it difficult to sustain her usual iron control. It was odd to use her surname instead of patronymic, but she was aware the Americans and English did not do things as they did in Russia, and was attempting to conform to their standards of address.

Her expression slipped, just a bit, when she noticed he had her wand—Vladlena noticed everything, whether she wanted to or not—and some of her bewildered disorientation slid into her eyes before quickly being swept clean as automatically as a blink.

She was somewhat puzzled by his question, and the faintest of frowns changed her otherwise once again impassive expression. "Is it? Are you in habit of relegating reading to certain hours only, Gaspodin[2] Jones?"

1.	Miss/Ms/Mrs
2.	Mister