Title : Repeat In Various Forms

Author: The Best Name On The Site

Pairing: Hermione/Fleur

Summary: Was this what it felt like to be in love? As if the world began and ended with her and nothing else mattered? Was this what it felt like to have my heart broken? - Hermione/Fleur

Rating: T

Disclaimer: I don't own the Harry Potter series or anything else.

A/N:

And, it's done! Don't expect updates like this often. To tell the truth, I had the first three chapters written, but they didn't come out like I wanted so I deleted half of this one and the third one. Maybe by next week the third one will be written but I don't count on it. AP World History is kicking my ass; anyone know how to write a DBQ?

Chapter 2: I'm Affected

"Constant vigilance, Granger!" Moody shouted at me on my first lesson. I leaned back from the flying spittle and wondered exactly how long I would be with him. It was the Monday after the decision that I needed to take duelling, and it was going to be easy to tell that this was going to be trying. I found it unusual to be with a teacher in a class with just the two of us and for it not to be late. Detention, at least, I understood. His magical eye whizzed around the room, occasionally looking at me. "Do you know what that means?"

The room was empty of people except me, him, and Mrs Norris. The dust-ball sat in the corner, staring at me with lamp yellow eyes. From what I understood, she was to go get Professor McGonagall or Snape if he seemed a little to hex or jinx happy because no one trusted him farther than Ron could count. He seemed the type to hex first and ask questions when everyone was dead. There was a desk and a chair for him and a desk and a chair for me, but besides that it was empty of furniture.

I looked at him nervously, "Never to let my guard down, sir?"

He nodded, "Exactly! Any one can be an enemy! Your best friend might stab you between the ribs one day, if you don't watch him. Do you know why I pried one of my eyes out?"

He'd what? I licked my lips nervously, "No, sir."

His wand was drawn and he used it to gesture at the blue orb. "It was the last war with old Voldie. I was a great supporter of Dumbledore and everyone knew it. Someone managed to hex it into a tracker and Death-Eaters were after me. It was either pry it out or get an AK to the back."

Moody paced around the room and gestured to it again, "Want to know who did it?"

"Who?" I asked him, morbidly curious.

He frowned darkly, "My mistress. Did it in the middle of an orgasm; everything is white at that point." He added for my benefit.

He sighed, "Ah, Bellatrix. How I miss you." He raised his flask and drank, "Crazy bitch that you were, you could hex damn well."

I attempted to edge away in an unnoticeable way before his blue eye fixed on him.

"Now what have we learned?" He suddenly asked.

"Always watch my back, not to have orgasms in front of people, and not to shack up with a crazy woman that can hex well?" I asked, hopefully. That was all I had gathered from his tale.

He nodded, "Most people normally miss the second and last one. You're bright, Granger."

The teacher suddenly aimed a jinx, and I cast a shield, dodging in case it broke.

He grinned, "Good reflexes. Never mind it was a jelly-legs." He gestured for me to sit but I stood, wand in hand. "Good, good. Your learning already. Now, your first lesson. The little spells can kill, too." He did a transfiguration spell and the chair turned into a likeness of Lucius Malfoy.

Moody muttered, just loud enough to understand him, "I hate the Malfoy's. Bunch of arrogant shits."

I was beginning to like him.

"Now, you know how to cast an enlarging hex?" He asked me. I nodded at him. "Do it on Malfoy's head and don't stop until I say so."

I pointed my wand and said, "Engorgio." Malfoy's smirking face grew and grew until it popped.

"Stop!" He told me.

I frowned at him, "But his head already popped off."

He smiled at me, showing yellow and brown teeth, "Exactly."

So there was a method to his madness. He transfigured the chair back and sent it to my desk.

"Sit!" He barked at me. I sat automatically, ready to spring up if it proved a trap. It wasn't, but I didn't settle in it comfortably.

"Now, traditionally, duelling was a magical version of fencing. French wizards started it, and soon the English found and adapted it. We beat them with it in the first war," He said with pride. "Someone would charm the swords and before a war could break out, representatives would fight and whoever won would declare whether war was necessary or not. Eventually, it just became about killing your opponent and it lacked most of the style found previously."

He scoffed, "Style gets you killed, Granger. Get rid of the unnecessary flourishes and the flicks that take to long. By the time your done, your lying in a pool of blood. The French say it's 'barbaric.' We call it, 'practical.'"

He grabbed his chair and smashed it against the stone floor. Moody then took one leg and threw the other to me. I caught it with my left hand.

"Put your wand in your dominant hand and your sword in the other," He told me. I didn't move them; I was ambidextrous and there was no difference in the strength of my hands. "Sometimes, don't. Trip your opponents up by using the other hand."

I nodded at him, stood, and he suddenly charged. He was fast for only having one leg and I brought my 'sword' up to block him. I then aimed my wand at his bad leg and willed it to break. The sound of splintering wood sounded, and he was on his back.

He cursed violently but he was smiling, "Good, Granger. Always exploit your opponents weak spots." Moody healed his leg and then hobbled up, "That's good, too. If you can help it, say your spells wordlessly. It saves time and your opponent won't know what to do." He then added, "Practice wand-less magic and occlumency as well; even better."

I was then told to look the last two subjects up, that we would meet every weekday from four-thirty to six-thirty and if I was late, I would train by myself for an extra half hour every night, on Saturday's and Sunday's my arse was his for hand-to-hand combat or whatever he pleased, to wear comfortable clothes and trainers, and if my grades slipped he'd ride me twice as hard. This left absolutely no time for a life and my tutoring days were over, if not shot to death with a machine gun.

He lectured me on useful jinxes and hexes that could save my life and occasionally used his 'sword' to get a point across about a sliding move, or a twisting return. By the time my two hours were up I knew more about his ex-women, and how paranoia would save my life than anyone deserved to know. I also had more bruises than a few and I was starting to feel dizzy.

Moody nodded at me, "You did good today, Granger. See you at dinner after you get cleaned up." He then hobbled away.

I felt like limping, too, but instead I hurried up the stairs to the tower, washed up, put salve on my bruises, got dressed in Muggle clothes and nearly led the entire tower to dinner so he wouldn't mess with me later on. I wouldn't have touched anything but Winky showed up with a plate of fruits, veggies, and steak and refused to leave by threat of bashing her skull against the marble floor. For once I wasn't going to argue, and when I finished I left the Great Hall to head to the library. There was no doubt in my mind that Moody's blue eye was watching me.

If Madam Pince was surprised to see me after so long she didn't let on. Instead she directed me towards the occlumency and wand-less magic sections where I scanned the books hurriedly, checked them out, and headed upstairs. I found out that occlumency was the art of blocking the mind from invaders and in order to do it, one had to clear their mind of all things. There were few people that could master it, but I was about to become one.

Wand-less magic was just that; wand-less magic. It was almost impossible for a human witch, however, because you channelled magic directly from around your body instead of through the wand or other artefact. Humanoid magical creatures were made of magic, not just a funnel for it, so they didn't have a use for wands and the like. Amulets and the like, however, they seemed to love, even having them placed in certain chakra points as infants.

When I'd first found out I was a witch I'd found that witches and wizards aren't truly magical; the things we used were and you had the ability to use those things to force others to happen, but your body wasn't a true instrument for magic. Your 'core' was the ability to channel magic from other places to be used by you, not any magic you might hold inside. Only one human wizard had ever been seen doing wand-less magic after receiving their wand and that was Salazar Slytherin. He was considered human, but there was a vampire clan less than ten generations from him.

Moody wanted me to do the impossible. Well, I would make it possible.

For the next week, I struggled to do all my homework, pay attention in class, and go through Moody's training regimen without a word of complaint. Winky helped me go through the physical exercises as told by him; fifty push-ups, fifty crunches, three laps in the Black Lake no matter the temperature, and two hours of sword play against an enchanted knight.

Harry helped, anytime he could between struggling with homework, and Ron had come back as he always did, depressed without his best mates. You could always count on Ron for that; coming back when he realized what he'd done wrong.

On Saturday and Sunday we did t'ai chi chuan, more for him than for me, but he needed a partner in case his leg messed him up, and taekwondo, a Korean martial art that involved sharp kicks and punches to pressure points in the opponents body. Moody watched and occasionally corrected my stance or the like. Sometimes, however, we had tea in Hogsmeade at Madam Puddifoot's and he talked about his days as an Auror.

He would lean back in his chair, prop his bad leg up, and talk for hours about the criminals he'd apprehended and what was wrong with society today. It was rather like talking with Grandpa Jack, who lived in America and spat tobacco in an urn. Moody looked at me with his brown eye, "I bet you've never even had a class on the proper techniques to take care of your wand or where to put it when your not using it. From what I hear, it was cancelled when your parents went to this school."

I frowned at him, taking a sip of my tea, "I'm a Muggle-born, sir. My parents didn't even think that magic was real until I was accepted and Professor Flitwick came to visit."

He looked me over and shook his head, "Believe what you want, Granger, but I distinctly remember your father. You have his eyes." He grinned, "And those teeth made an appearance too, so I hear."

I fumed silently. My front teeth were larger than my others and I'd been called every name in the book. If I were to go home now, almost everyone would call me "Beaver," after a class on naming animals that started with 'b' and what traits they exhibited. All of my uncles called me Mickey after Mickey Mouse from Disney and because my father was Irish. It was affectionately said, but it still hurt to know that they were calling me a slur.

The only reason I wasn't teased was that the majority of wizard's had never heard of toothbrushes or braces. Even Malfoy, who probably would have solid golden braces if they weren't made by Muggles, had horribly crooked teeth. Their nursing bottles were covered with honey or sugar to get them to drink as babies which made them crooked, and the charms eroded the enamel and eventually ruined the core of the tooth, which led to many of them being toothless in their old age. By comparison, my teeth were the best things to ever be seen from a native Brit, if you looked at the pure-bloods and the half-bloods. The difference was, though, that the foreign witches and wizards had missed out on the inbreeding so the trait wasn't in them, or the Muggle-borns.

Moody though, was convinced that he knew my father. "And that hair!" He hooted, "Thicker than a bramble patch! I never did figure out how he could get a comb through it."

You don't, I thought. You brush it with the hardest thing you can find and even if the ball of hair's six inches thick, you can't tell it was brushed but it feels better.

Luckily, Parvati had taken to brushing my hair and the ball had receded to roughly two and a half inches. She was very gentle with it, and I sometimes fell asleep with her going through my hair until it didn't snag on anything, and then she'd continue. Lavender seemed to think she was missing something and would sometimes curl up on my lap and snuggle against my stomach. We would end up in a pile of tangled limbs and sleep like that. I wondered if that was what it was like to have siblings.

All seven of my cousins were only children, like me, or there was a large age gap, from ten to fifteen years, and none of us liked each other. The only one I could stand was Tudor and that was because he couldn't talk or walk yet. I figured once he got older I would hate them all equally. Somehow, I got the feeling that wasn't what a family was supposed to be like.

Moody looked at the blue sky, with fat lazy clouds. His face seemed to clear of whatever always troubled him.

"Sharp as a cat-o'-nine-tails though. Nothing could get past him, and from what I hear he was well on his way to being a cryptologist. Your mother was nice, too," He added. "Very sweet, very impassioned about everything she believed in. It seems you got most of their good traits."

I raised an eyebrow, "And their bad traits?" If he was going to insist that he knew my parents, I would play along. Besides, my real parents rarely talked about their school years between constant arguments, worrying about me, and who the dentistry would go to. The idea of splitting it fifty-fifty didn't seem to have occurred to them and when I mentioned it they argued more about whether the dentistry was on a less important scale than I was, since I was never home for the most part.

He said, "You can't hold a tune in a bucket, if your anything like either of them, and your sense of justice is probably horribly skewed. You can't save people that don't want to be, and you shouldn't try, Granger. You may think I'm being cold, but it'll save you some heartache. Never take people at face-value. If I'm being nice to you, what do you thinks in it for me? Why do you think I'm doing this?"

I looked at him and thought before I said, "Loneliness. Being an Auror all your adult like has made you grow old early and paranoid beyond measure. You don't have a wife, children, or a job any more. I'm the closest thing you'll ever get to having a family, aren't I, Moody?"

Moody put his tea down and stood up.

"Said you were sharp, didn't I?" He called over his shoulder as he left. I finished my tea and left the table, knowing it would be cleaned up. We left the shop at the same time but in different directions. He headed to the Hog's Head as I left town. There were to many people, there was to much noise and the beginning of a headache was forming.

It was starting to get cool, and the leaves were falling everywhere but the Forbidden Forest. The red, yellow, and brown leaves scattered across the well-worn trail, and I kicked a pile of them. They made crisp, crunching sounds as I walked over them and shoved my hands into my pockets. I'd forgotten my scarf against the brisk wind and I wanted it.

I wanted it the same way I wanted to be hugged by my Mum, to snuggle into one of the squishy couches with hot cocoa and a book on a winter night, to listen to Neville and Seamus debate the properties of monk's hood playfully, hands touching. I wanted it the way I'd wanted to sleep on clouds as a child, to lay in Grandad's fields and play with the rabbits. I wanted simplicity and happiness, the way a simple wrapping of cloth could bring back my favourite scent, to make me smile because my friend had made it.

But most of all, I wanted it as I wanted to go back to France where it seemed my life had gone from average to extraordinary and then to mediocre with the appearance and disappearance of the girl in the market.

Just as I thought it, another set of footsteps hurried behind me. I turned around, half-way in a defensive position, when I relaxed. Cho Chang, the Ravenclaw seeker, was behind me, a blue and bronze scarf tucking away most of her features. I waited for her to catch up and she smiled at me. At least I assumed it was a smile, since the corners of her eyes crinkled and I flashed her a slight grin. She was abnormally pretty, even to me, and it was hard to maintain a calm persona around her. I could ignore Lavender, Sally-Anne Perkins, and Daphne Greengrass, the prettiest girls in our year, I could ignore Ginny, who was almost as developed as I was, I could ignore Katie, and Alicia, who were everyone's straight girl crushes.

What I couldn't ignore were the exotic and rarities.

And Cho Chang was a rarity and an exotic beauty here at Hogwarts. There were two Asian students, Cho and Fredrick Ng in Ravenclaw, and Cho was definitely prettier than Fredrick.

"Hey," I said to her as we started to walk. She said something back but it was horribly muffled against the thick scarf. I tugged it from her mouth, my fingers brushing the edges of her cheeks and mouth, making them burn. She gave me a lopsided smile and said, "Thanks, I can speak again. Your going back already?"

I nodded, "Yeah, it's kind of crowded there. Probably can't even get a decent butterbeer with the crowd in The Three Broomsticks."

Cho nodded sympathetically, "I tried. They ran out; they act like it's freezing the way they grabbed as many as they could."

I raised an eyebrow at her own getup. She had on gloves, a hat, a scarf, a jacket, and thick boots, and she was talking about them? She flushed gently and pushed me, "Don't look at me like that; it was cold when I left this morning. I bet you didn't even wander out of the castle before noon."

I shrugged, looking away so she wouldn't see my pink cheeks, "Moody sure wasn't getting up any time soon. I had to ask a Prefect to find him."

She laughed at me, "Laziness. You've been infected by Harry and Ron."

I stuck my tongue out at her and she grinned cheekily before swinging an arm over my shoulders. Her mouth was dreadfully close to my ear and her words and breaths puffed against the shell of my sensitive ear, making goosebumps rise on my forearms. "You excited about the Triwizard Tournament?"

I scoffed, momentarily forgetting how close she was, "Everyone in that is going to get hurt and at least one person is going to die."

Cho raised an eyebrow, "You sound pretty sure about that." I could see the freckles on the bridge of her nose; they were so close that I could count them. The rest of me chose that moment to figure out how close we were and something painfully hot and tugging slid behind my stomach. I cleared my throat and said, my throat slightly itchy, "It's a statistic. In the last Tournament everyone died because a troll was the last obstacle."

She whistled lowly. Her mouth was very pink and slightly chapped, probably from the cold, but pleasantly full, even when pursed so I could see the slight lines in them, and I watched her tongue come out and lick her lips. It seemed to happen in slow motion. The way her tongue slipped out to the corner, raised to touch her upper-lip, and pulled across before it reached the other end and then a down stroke to feel her bottom lip.

They then moved to form words, but I was stuck by how bloody perfect her teeth were. Perfectly sized, white, and even. I have a thing for teeth, so sue me. You would too if your earliest memory is sitting next to your parents looking at x-ray's of mouths and which one was better than the other. Blood pounded in my ears as I looked past her mouth to her cheeks, the skin perfectly smooth except for a slight scar on her left cheek, probably from Quidditch.

Her neck was smooth and I could see the slight lines on it from where it joined her torso and evened out to her shoulders, which I could tell were slim with her being a Seeker. I knew enough about the sport to understand that her being in her position meant that she had to be small and slender. Within the next year, I'd probably be taller than her, even with her being a year older.

I shook my head, in real life and in my mind, and said, "Sorry, what'd you say?"

She rolled her eyes at me, "I was saying, didn't you, Harry, and Ron survive a full-grown troll in your first year?"

I looked at her, away, and back before I replied seriously, "We survived. We didn't have to kill it, we had it outnumbered and confused." I stepped from under her arm and stared at her hard. She was confused, I think, by my vehement reactions, and she looked as if she was seeing me for the very first time. Or rather, like a scientist looking at a new type of animal.

I didn't let that stop my tirade, "We were fucking lucky, Cho. There is no other word for it, besides the fact that we have loads of good luck stored somewhere in our equally messy heads. Now just because you survive doesn't make you a hero, so I don't want to hear anything else about that shitty tournament. People don't win or lose in it; people survive and lose or die and lose."

"How do you lose either way?" She asked, curiously. Damned Ravenclaws; never interested in what they needed to be.

I continued walking, and she hurried after me. I no longer found her attractive; something in me had decided after that display of single-minded ineptitude, that she was no longer physically attractive either. "Do you think that you win when you survive and others die through what you feel are your own actions that let you live?"

I hurried up the castle steps, away from her and the coolness of the outside world. Maybe Moody was onto something with his 'don't trust anyone as far as you can throw them without magic' philosophy.