[Sick of all these people talking, sick of all this noise / Tired of all these cameras flashing, sick of being poised]
.
.
The old man - the Dumbledore - stood and welcomed them to the enormous, hideous, freezing castle. It was exciting to see him in person, the draw of seeing the man who'd defeated Grindlewald, a man they learned about in endless lessons, only increasing the hype about spending a year at Hogwarts for the tournament.
Still, he didn't appear so terribly impressive, she thought, gazing in some disappointment around the old-fashioned hall. It was a magical castle, was it not? Was this some strange British sense of humour to keep it so cold and unwelcoming?
A dark-haired girl hissed at her, eyes flashing ferociously, and Fleur's interest was piqued.
She was still wearing the muffler that hid her Veela hair, so few people were affected but still… it was rather refreshing to be hissed at.
She watched the girl, studying her delicate features on the brink of blossoming… terrible hair and rather large teeth. She wasn't pretty, exactly, and yet behind the hair and the overbearing way she was talking to her friends there was something that held Fleur's gaze.
She pulled the muffler off (might as well get it over with, they'd get used to her eventually) and walked over to the girl's table.
"Excuse me, are you wanting ze bouillabaise?"
The girl's eyes snapped up and Fleur's breath hitched for a second. The dark eyes were even finer up close, thick dark lashes clustered around, sweeping the sharp curve of her cheekbone, but more amazingly they were clear, unglazed, unblinded - and yet a soft rose blush crept along those cheekbones, cheekbones just pushing up through the roundness of her youthful cheeks, her skin clear, the last hints of a sun-kissed glow still warming it.
She was perhaps fifteen, she thought, younger than she'd seemed from across the hall and Fleur… Fleur felt caught in that dark gaze, eyes older than her face and tremblingly, soul achingly innocent at the same time.
"Yeah you can have it," one of her companions said and the other girl dropped her eyes, staring in horror at her purple-faced, gurgling friend.
"You 'ave finished wiz it?" she asked the girl, hoping to hear her voice again, but it was the other boy, the black-haired one who could speak, who answered and she gave up and returned to her table.
/
She didn't see the girl again for weeks, but she saw her black-haired friend. He'd somehow snuck his way in to the tournament - just a child! He was shorter than his friend, the dark haired girl, and younger looking too. He looked around twelve, but they said he was fourteen. It was a disgrace.
("'E cannot compete. 'E is too young," she'd told the idiotic Ministry employee whose eyes had swept her body in that crawling, sickening way that men had).
She'd been furious initially, first because he'd looked so young next to Cedric and Viktor and then as the adults fought, furious because her own chance was made more distant with his addition. She - she who had so much more to prove, the only witch, written off all her life because she was blonde and she was beautiful, by men and women alike. Even her own mother had threatened to cut her off when Fleur had confessed her terrible secret.
She needed that thousand galleons to set up her own life if her family did choose not to stand by her. Veelas had rules her mother had said. And even if they did not… it was a great deal of money and her family was not rich. The glory alone would be worth it, though.
Fleur sighed in irritation. She would show them all that she was more than a pretty Veela girl. She was more witch than any member of her family before her, far far more powerful and clever than she'd ever been credited for. Je vais le faire, she whispered as she left the awful wand-weighing ceremony. Je suis Fleur Delacour, je peux tout faire.
/
When she did see the girl, not just across the dining hall, it was in the Library. Fleur had gone to explore - the Hogwarts library was even more famous than its Headmaster - and she'd seen the girl tucked away in a corner, wild dark hair spilling down her back as she bowed her head over a parchment so long it almost touched the floor. As she watched, a drop of ink spilled across the paper and the girl vanished it without seeming to notice her own magic. Powerful, then.
Fleur sniffed derisively; you wouldn't catch anyone at Beauxbatons dead using anything as inconvenient as a quill and parchment. They used fountain pens, like sensible creatures, and tidy books with thick creamy paper.
She was the boy's, though, the paper said.
The girl rolled her shoulders and bit her lip as though in pain. Her posture was as bad as her hair; as though she was somehow uninterested in her own physicality. She could be quite stunningly pretty, as the newspapers had said, and yet she chose not to be.
A starry-eyed boy dazedly tried to speak to her, and Fleur retreated to a dark corner, wishing she'd brought her muffler to hide her silvery blonde hair.
/
A few days later, Fleur was back in the Library, desperately ransacking books on dragons. To her surprise, the girl turned up in the same section not long after she had arrived. Hermione flushed, eyeing her and Fleur pretended to concentrate very hard on Defending Againste Dragons, which was proving as unhelpful as Willefull Wormes had been.
"Er, excuse me. Sorry. Are you done with that?" the English girl asked, pointing at the other book.
Her voice was haughty and slightly embarrassed, as though she'd been caught in a wrong-doing and was trying to brazen it out. She must be helping her attention-seeking little boyfriend then. Fleur scowled.
"Yes, but eet iz useless. 'Ere."
She looked as pale and worried as Fleur herself felt, and the scowl faded.
"Zey 'ave taken all the useful information away I theenk," she added softly.
After all, he was so very young. Perhaps some help would keep him alive. Fleur was rewarded with a worried smile.
"I thought that too. This competition is mad."
They were speaking in whispers, but Fleur still scanned the aisle. Apparently all the champions knew about the dragons, but she still didn't want to be disqualified for cheating.
To her embarrassment, the troop of boys that had started to trail her around the castle slouched in and sent longing looks over. Hermione's face darkened and she walked off without another word.
/
The following day, Fleur was treated to a scornful look from the brunette girl as she hurried out of the Library shortly after Fleur's own fan club, noisy and uncouth as they were, walked in. She sighed, desolate. It wasn't her fault that idiot men lurked around, waiting for her to send them an inviting look or smile or whatever it was they expected. It wasn't even for her, really, just her ridiculous Veela heritage; heritage that, yes, she was largely proud of but that had the cruellest side. She wished she explain to someone how lonely it was to be liked only for the magic in your hair and in your blood and never for yourself.
/
Every time the stupid boys followed her into the Library the dark-haired girl left and Fleur began to wonder if she'd ever get another chance to talk to her. But the worry of the looming first task took over. She couldn't sleep, couldn't eat and she wondered over and over again if it was worth it.
She caught sight of her after the task, but dizzy with relief and exhaustion - she'd made it, they'd all made it - she hardly noticed her other than to note the other girl's unhidden concern and exhaustion as she hurried into the tent to see her friend; she'd got the Potter boy through, Fleur supposed. It was… admirable.
She was clear headed enough, though, to see that the girl was no more romantically interested in Harry Potter than she herself was. Hermione had run away crying happily when the ugly red-haired boy had been nice to the other child and Fleur had realised, with a shock of happiness she could feel even over the exaltation of surviving the dragonfire, that Hermione and Harry were just friends after all that the papers had said.
/
Men were easy to deal with. It was clear when they wanted you, they were relatively straight-forward and she'd been dealing with them since an uncomfortably young age when her Veela inheritance had sparked into being around the same time as the hair had sprung up on her legs and underarms and zizzi. She'd been eleven.
Women, though, women were harder. She'd never actually had to ask one out before, or ask anyone out in fact. The only girl she'd ever kissed, after many ultimately unsatisfying attempts to enjoy male company, had seduced her.
It didn't help that Hermione found her fan club so irritating that she often left the Library in frustration. Fleur sat, gazing longingly at the girl night after night, hidden away in a corner of the Library, trying to work up the courage to ask her to the Yule Ball. It was, on top of the possibility of rejection, a terrifying declaration to take a girl with her.
She'd been asked and asked by men from all three schools, of course. Accosted in the endless draughty corridors of the hideous castle, with its lack of comfort and elegance, disregard for its own students safety… Fleur hadn't missed that Dumbledore had been the only Head not to warn his students of the first task. It had been a servant. She'd made tentative friends with Cedric Diggory, who'd recovered rather more quickly from her creature heritage than most men of seventeen. Reading some of his lesson notes had made Fleur more sure than ever that this was a terrible school… and yet it held Hermione.
One day, sick of waiting, she dropped as elegantly as she could into the seat opposite Hermione. It was late and the Library was almost deserted; she'd never have a better moment.
"I don't know what the egg does," the other girl said, not looking up. "Harry won't talk about it."
Fleur sniffed with annoyance.
"Zat is not why I 'ave come," she said, wishing the girl would look up and grateful that she hadn't.
The dragon seemed less terrifying, compared to this moment.
Hermione's long lashes fluttered against the warm, fawn coloured skin. Up close, Fleur could see the slight circles beneath her eyes, the lightest dusting of freckles that crept over her straight nose, the way her face had sharpened in just the last month, her cheekbones jutting up beneath that soft soft soft looking skin. She looked up.
"I er - I wanted to ask eef you," she huffed, "Sorry I am - zis is so 'ard. We 'ave not been introduced. I am Fleur."
The girl's face brightened and Fleur was rewarded with a sweet smile. She had fixed her teeth and in doing so and transformed her whole face; what had been eye-catching before had blossomed somehow into beauty.
"Hermione. Je parle française, Fleur. C'est plus facile?"
"Oui, mais… je veux poser un question dans ta langue. Would you come to ze ball wiz me?"
"Me?" Hermione asked, flabbergasted. Her cheeks turned that dusky rose pink, though, and her eyes sparkled.
"Why do you sink I 'ave been coming all the time to the bibliotheque? I wanted to speak to you before but… 'eet is so 'ard. I 'ad to find ze courgage."
The other girl looked simply astounded, but quite pleased and she bit her pretty pink lip with those perfect teeth and nodded.
"How did you know?" she asked, redder than ever. "That I was… you know."
"I deed not, but I 'oped. Zat first night, I came across because I wanted to speak to you - do you remember?"
"You noticed me then?"
"Oh, yes," Fleur teased, her confidence returned. "'Ow could I not? You scolded me. Eet was very… charming. And zen you blushed when I came over but you deed not… 'Ow do you say? You were not in ze trance. I 'ave a little bit of Veela but you do not sense eet."
"No, I didn't believe you were at first. How does it work?"
They sat and talked until the strange and terrifying Librarian (who, Hermione said, closed the Library on whim each night when she chose) threw them out.
Fleur floated back to the ship. Hermione hadn't even hesitated… to be seen with another girl.
/
Fleur talking to Cedric outside of the Great Hall a few days later as Hermione and her friends walked in. The girl's smile lit up her face and Fleur couldn't control the burst of joy that, unfortunately, translated into a waft of Veela magic that turned every man in the vicinity's head.
"Willyoutotheballwithme?" Hermione's red-headed friend stuttered, as the door closed behind Hermione and Harry.
Fleur looked at him in disgust. It's just the magic, she wanted to scream. It isn't me you all want.
She walked away without replying.
/
"And then he said, 'Neville's right - you are a girl.' Can you believe that? And he didn't believe that someone had asked - I mean it's not as if I'd go with him anyway, or maybe as friends but, still."
They were huddled away in the most secret corner of the Library, Hermione's dark eyes flashing with indignation.
"I was going to tell them, but now I won't bother, not after a reaction like that. Honestly."
"'E is just very young and a little stupid I theenk. Tell me about the charm you wanted to learn, though."
"Oh, yes - they don't teach them here, but I read somewhere that you learn to weave charms? It sounds absolutely fascinating."
She was earnest and fiercely intelligent, and picked up the first simple knots of a protection charm even faster than Fleur had. It was a perfect evening, just spending time getting to know each other, hidden away from prying and inconvenient eyes.
.
.
.
(lyrics are Halsey's and there's loads of actual JK Rowling owned book dialogue etc. - don't own, all credit to etc.)
I've wanted to write this for a very long time. Next chapter: the Yule Ball. It'll probably just be two but we'll see!
I've never written this paring before, so I'm very nervous about it. Do let me know what you thought.