The first thing Fleur remembers from her childhood is her aunt saying: "Oh, she will be beautiful". And it sounds like a curse.
When she was a child, she had no idea what being beautiful meant. She supposed it must have meant wearing aquamarine blue dresses with lace sleeves and withstanding long hours of her mother running a comb through her hair, grandmothers exclaiming: "Oh, she will turn into a right belle!" and all the things she would gladly swap for dirty fingers and scraped knees from playing in the streets until the sun went down.
Her childhood was blessed, her childhood was happiness and the smell of lavender in the fields of Provence. She would not be that happy for years.
When she turned thirteen, her cousins began shying away from her and often she would have to be alone, sitting in her room, confined to the walls she never wanted around herself. She wanted to fly so bad and yet no one would take her hand.
"Why are they all leaving me?" she asked her mother through tears, only to hear her saying: "Because your beauty burns them."
That was the first time she wanted to cut away the long, blonde hair and tear her dresses apart. She did not want this.
At fifteen, every boy wanted to put his hand on her knee and they smiled like she was the lottery prize. If she wanted to count the times she came back to her dorm with tears welling in her eyes from the burning sensation of not being understood, she couldn't. Her friends couldn't understand why she talked about the boys' hunger she could see in their eyes, the savage desire to rip her apart and eat whatever heart she managed to keep.
At fifteen, all she was was 'beautiful'. It was all they cared about. Her aunts kept whispering "Look at little Fleur", "Oh, not so little anymore", "She'll break hearts" over and over again. She did smile, learning how to take compliments (the ones she never asked for) while wanting to scream on top of her lungs that she didn't want to break hearts, that she wanted to mend them and that she wanted her own to be touched.
"Oh, Fleur is beautiful."
"Isn't the absolutely gorgeous?"
"It's the Veela blood."
"You are lucky for getting the chance to be with her."
She was a prize, she was a fucking wish come true for many, she was the object of the hunger no one could contain.
At sixteen, she hardly ever spoke to anyone. The boys who tried to corner her in dark classrooms she hit with all she had got, curses, screams, cuts and bruises. The girls who snickered behind her back saw her deadly glares. The cousins who proclaimed her to be a home wrecker had wine thrown in their faces.
Sixteen was the year Fleur Delacour came up with sixteen different ways to proclaim she had more to give than they could see.
At seventeen, she joined the Triwizard Tournament in Hogwarts and she was chosen to participate by forces which did not see her beauty, but the power of her magic. The headlines still said "Beauty and the beasts" and again, people were more preoccupied with her looks than with her magical prowess. They made her wand produce blooming flowers instead of fire and sparks, they laughed at her burns in the first task, ridiculed her for giving up in the second task and knowingly whispered "We knew she wouldn't win" in the third.
The only one who ever told her that she could do it was Gabrielle. For everyone else, she had no place in the competition.
At eighteen, she packed her bags and moved away to London, determined to pursue that flighty temptress – adventure. She started working in Gringotts, a bank packing with goblins who had no use for her beauty but did have use for her brains.
At nineteen, she met a man whose jaw didn't drop when he laid his eyes on her but instead filled her arms with paperwork and sent her to fill it. Bill Weasley was a curse breaker for the bank and she wanted to become one, too. They spent long hours in his office, curled over books and texts they had to go through before leaving for whatever destination was ahead. They spent months together and not once did he lay his hand on her knee.
At nineteen, she saved his life and they were trapped in a tomb they couldn't get out of. So they started laughing, laughing like they've gone completely mad and laughing like they aren't in a millennia old tomb which might become their final resting place. It was the first time he ever even laid a finger on her, and it was only to bring her closer when she had finally kissed him, in the dirt, in the sand, amongst the corpses of dead scarabs. And it was the only time she had ever kissed someone she wanted to kiss, the only time that someone wanted to kiss her because he saw more than what meets the eye.
At twenty, she once again heard her soon to be sister-in-law saying that she was thick and annoying, while her soon to be mother-in-law repeated that Bill shouldn't have gotten engaged to her. Everyone saw her beauty again and once more, she felt like screaming that they were completely wrong. Bill was there, Bill who never took her for granted, Bill who loved her for what she was, and he held her while she cried, whispering "fuck them".
At twenty, Bill nearly died. Whatever beauty the world could see was gone, his face was covered in scars and a part of him turned werewolf. His mother told Fleur to leave him, she tried hard to chase her away and for the first time in her life, Fleur shouted. Fleur shouted and told her just exactly how she loved Bill and how it had nothing to do with the way he looked. His heart touched hers and she would be willing to die for him if that was what it took.
At twenty one, she was almost called to keep her promise. But at twenty two, she held their daughter in her arms, a child as beautiful and as radiant as their love was. And she named her 'Victoire' because victories, both big and small, were victories. And the greatest of them all was to love and be loved in return.