Hi Everyone!

So, exams are over and I'm back home from Uni, so I have a great deal more free time nowadays so chapters will return as they were before.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this - it was a difficult chapter to write.

Let me know what you though - PM's are always appreciated.

Thanks!


As Harry waited for Tonks to arrive for their day out, he held an air of anticipation.

As of late, Fleur and Gabrielle had taken more time to be together. Gabrielle was to return to her parents within the week, and so Fleur was savouring the few moments they had together. It was not a spoken thing, so much as they simply drifted away as Fleur's priorities were elsewhere. He often spent the night with her, though very little more, and she was restless as she slept, shaking Harry awake on occasion. Harry had asked Fleur about it, though she simply brushed it away.

Harry did not begrudge them such time - the opposite, in fact - though it did mean that his time was far freer than it had once been. Most of it was spent studying the Dumbledores, though he was running through their work far quicker than he had anticipated.

Tonks appeared, in fact, when Harry was most unsuspecting of her - on time. The second his watch ticked to 5 o'clock, there she was, stepping through the fire. More confusing still, despite having arrived from work, she did not wear her Auror uniform.

Instead, she wore a beautiful, white dress, the absence of bright colour bringing to fore the wonder and beauty that Tonks held in every fibre of her being, the swirling colours of her hair vibrant against the clear canvas.

Harry reddened slightly, unbeknown to him.

"Wotcher, Harry," Tonks greeted, with a smile. "You ready?"

He ran a hand through his hair. "Sure," he said. "What are we going to see?"

"Back To The Future - a classic, and the fact you haven't seen it is a travesty that we will soon rectify," Tonks said, as they began the short walk to the apparition boundary at the edge of the grounds. Tonks turned, as they left the castle, and admired the structure. "The education you are receiving with me is far more worthwhile than anything you'll get in there."

"It's quite the claim you're making there, you realise," Harry replied. "To claim that a film, however great, is better than a thousand years of collected magical knowledge."

"Three words," Tonks said, raising three fingers to the air. "Time Travelling Car."

Harry grinned. "Fair enough."

As they left the lawns outside the Hogwarts grounds and met the path that led to the apparition boundary, the sight of the Beauxbatons carriages came into view, and so too did the distant silhouette of two figures, one tall and the other small - it took no great amount of endeavour for Harry to realise that it was Fleur and Gabrielle. For a moment, Harry pondered going over there to see her, though he knew that their time together was precious, and his presence would only dilute that.

"Ready?" Tonks asked, as they crossed the boundary, though Harry's attention was still upon Fleur.

Harry jumped, just slightly, at her voice, and turned back around. "Y-yeah, of course." he said.

Tonks tilted her head as she appraised him. "Good," she said. "Because you probably ought to know that my apparation has only gotten worse since last time."

And, before Harry could even begin to worry, or shake the distant image of Fleur from his mind, Tonks took his hand and whisked them away to a new land entirely with a loud crack being the only thing left behind.

They appeared, to Harry's distaste, within absolute darkness; they were, in fact, only exempt from this when a lighter appeared in Tonks' hand.

"Tonks?"

"Yeah?"

"How badly did you apparate us this time?" Harry asked, as he inspected the darkness that surrounded the two of them.

Tonks grinned in the dim light. "For once, this was on purpose," she said, as her hand began tracing a wall.

"Well then - where, exactly, are we?" Harry asked.

The whites of Tonks teeth appeared behind her red lips. "We're in a wall." she said.

"Again, I'm finding it hard to believe this was on purpose." Harry replied.

"Patience, Harry - have a little faith," Tonks said, with a smile. "For busy places where there's not really a place for apparition, the Ministry made certain walls hollow, so that you don't have to walk for a mile to get into the centre of London."

"So we're inside an expansion charm?" Harry asked, intrigued. "They've just expanded the air between the bricks?"

"We're buggered if I know," Tonks said, as she searched in the dimness for something. "I can't say I paid attention when Flitwick told us in our NEWT class."

Tonks gasped then, in delight, as she found what she'd been searching for. At once, her hand disappeared through the wall she had been tracing, and with it, the rest of her arm as well.

"Follow me." she said, with a roguish tilt to her grin. And, as she grabbed his arm, Harry couldn't help but do so.

They appeared, to Harry's surprise, in the middle of a train station Harry distantly recognised as Leicester Square. Despite their emergence from nothing, they received no enormous fanfare from those that walked by - a reaction Harry realised, belatedly, was due to a muggle-repelling charm. It was a relieving sensation, for Harry, to be inescapably unnoticeable, for a time.

The streets were filled with those that had just finished work for the day; the sight, though unwelcome for Harry, was a brief one, as Tonks quickly led the two of them into a quiet building, though an unexpected one, with novelty swords and medieval regalia lining the walls, Olde English typing upon the boards behind the counter, with a full absence of electricity or modern materials. There were few patrons, though those that were there huddled in groups, their shoulders hunched over board games and hushed tones in their voices.

"It's a D&D-themed place," Tonks whispered, her tone as though she was desperate to not spoke those that occupied the area. "Wizards tend to use places like this to hang out if they're in the muggle world."

Harry nodded; they wouldn't have to alter their words to talk in such a place, and to use any evasive magics in the muggle world was dangerous, as any magic in their presence was illegal, even those that would cause misdirection or if the perpetrator was an Auror.

Tonks left then to order, returning with something not dissimilar from that which was sold in Hogsmeade; a dark, honey mead.

"So, Harry, are you prepared for the third task?" Tonks asked, as she sat, her mouth hovering around the rim of her glass.

"Not really," Harry admitted, with a shake of his head. "I've no clue what it's going to be. Dumbledore said something about bringing in landscapers, so it might be a maze or something, but that doesn't really help cos I've no idea what's going to be in there."

"If it follows the rest of the task, there's likely to be something dangerous and alive in there," Tonks said. "You ought to go see Hagrid - he could never keep his mouth shut."

Harry nodded. Care of Magical Creatures wasn't his finest subject, excluding Eikthyrnir - he rather lacked the nuance of it. Shooting lightning from the sky, while effective, was hardly intricate.

"Enough of that, though - how's work?" Harry asked.

Tonks brightened, her hair turning a shade lighter. "Great, actually!" she exclaimed. "You know my new boss, Kingsley Shacklebolt?" Harry nodded. "Well, Shack offered me a place as his apprentice. He's known for being really aggressive in his arresting, so it should be great - get to see loads of action."

"Aren't things quiet nowadays, though?" Harry asked. "Outside of that World Cup attack, there's not much going on."

Tonks shook her head, her nose wrinkling. "There's plenty going on," she said. "Every week something new comes up, it's just the Prophet covers it up 'cos people like Malfoy pay them hush money." Tonks shook her head in frustration. "It's only getting worse, too - there's something coming, I just don't know what."

Harry nodded. "At least we've got people like you protecting us, though."

"What, nineteen-year-old kids?" Tonks asked, agitated. "I'm not enough. Even Shack's not enough. We need more."

Tonks shook her head then, her hair bleeding out the colour that'd filled it as she grew agitated.

"Anyway, that's hardly a topic worthy of conversation, is it?" she asked.

"Not really," Harry agreed. "So, what's this Back to The Future about?"


On the day that Gabrielle was to leave, Harry was truly sad to see her go.

Fleur could not sleep the night before, and so, he awoke to the sound of her pacing the floor in the dim hours of the morning. Immediately, he retrieved his glasses from the bed stand, caring not for the exhaustion that his bones held, and pulled her close to him, to which she immediately melted.

His hands ran up and down her spine, a comforting rhythm that calmed the worried pounding of her gentle heart. There were no tears in her eyes, but the blue depths held a worry; sad and prolonged.

"It's going to be alright, isn't it?" Harry asked, as Fleur leaned on him.

"It might be," Fleur said, moving in his arms. "But it won't be the same. When we see each other next, I'll be studying and I will be busy. And then she'll be going off to Beauxbatons and we'll see each other even less. Then, I'll start working and perhaps we will only see one another twice a year. And then, she'll finish school and go off into the world and…and what if we just grow apart? What if there comes a point where our lives become separate?"

Harry took her at arms length, his eyes burning into hers. "Do you want that to happen?"

Fleur shook her head desperately. "Of course not!"

"Then it won't," Harry said. "We aren't victims to fate. We decide what we do. We decide our future, and if something is there that we don't want, we are allowed to change it."

Fleur was silent, in the face of Harry. Her demeanour stilled.

"I just don't know," Fleur said, after a moment. "I thought we'd be together forever, you see? I thought it would be us two, side-by-side, forever. Life just didn't seem to begin until she came into it, and now, with her leaving, it feels like life is just slipping away again. It feels like she's leaving me forever."

Fleur fell into his arms once more, and Harry knew then that no honeyed-words would remedy the hurt of Fleur then, and so his arms tried to offer the strength his mind could not, though he knew that they couldn't.

He felt incompetent. He just didn't know what to do.

A lone thought began to fill his mind, though.

Fleur had spent a great deal of time away from him, and he wondered then if it was because she did see in him the support she needed in times of trouble. Their relationship was based upon the summer of life; the good, the bright, the warm. To show him her winter - her struggle and her pain - was not what they had truly done with one-another before.

She just needed support. And he did not know how to be that, for her.

Harry wondered if he ever would.

For all of their talk at the beginning of their relationship on rushing and being careful with one-another, in the end it seemed they had done exactly the opposite. To think, they had spent so many days, sleeping side-by-side, and yet he could not even help her then, as she struggled.

He wondered if he deserved her care. Her attention. There was just so much care in her heart. And, all that he had to do then was to reassure her. To show her that it was all going to be okay. And he could not even do that - he could not be the person she needed him to be, then.

Fleur worried her lip, her legs unable to stop bouncing against the floor, her body threatening to vibrate itself apart with the frantic energy that filled it.

They stayed like that, for a time, until Gabrielle appeared. At once, warmth returned to Fleur as she clasped her eyes upon her sister, hugging her and holding her tight. Gabrielle appeared confused at the attention - in her youth, their time together was no more momentous than any of the other occasions they shared each other's company, but to Fleur it meant more than the world.

It was a beautiful sight to behold, to see such incredible love, but there was melancholy to the beauty. In Fleur's eyes, tears threatened against the clarity of her blue irises. She clenched her jaw, as if to draw strength from the structure of such an action, to be strong for her sister.

They whispered together, Fleur's voice thick with emotion, transforming in the air from a language of millions to a code between two sisters - Harry knew not to even attempt to understand what was being said, so private was their conversation.

Fleur held her sister for the precious seconds she had left with her, the struggle evident on her face. Harry knew that he should be by her side, a balm to the pain, but as he watched her, the rift only grew.

As the Delacours finally stood, a look of pained resignation marred Fleur's beautiful face as she turned to Harry.

"I am to take her to the apparition point." Fleur said.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Harry asked. In his heart, he knew the answer - it was not his place.

Fleur pursed her lips. "I would like the last few moments I have with Gabrielle to be alone," she said. "If that is okay?"

Harry smiled slightly. "Of course."

Gabrielle ran to Harry then, her arms outstretched and Harry bent down to embrace the younger girl. At once, an emotion filled him, a feeling of absolute care for this young girl, a need to protect this spirit. He longed, in that moment, that she would be okay. That time or age or the world could not change her.

He knelt, so that they were eye-to-eye. "Be good, Gabby," he said, before pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "And always be yourself."

Gabrielle kissed both of his cheeks, before embracing him for a final time, after which she ran to her sister, and Fleur clinged on for dear life.

He knew then that he had not been all that Fleur needed. And, perhaps, that was always going to be the case. She was older, and wiser and more experienced with life. With Fleur, he had been desperate to not the repeat the mistakes of the past - to not show her the parts of him that still needed time to heal. But real relationships were not just the safe subjects. You did not just hide truth to make things easy.

As Fleur sat, with pain in her heart, showing him the difficult parts of her - the parts she had not already rationalised, the parts she needed help with - he realised that they, both, had sanitised themselves. And, the moment things got difficult and dirty, they did not know who they were, together, anymore.

But that's not what relationships were.

They found one-another beautiful. They had fun together. But that was shallow.

The sound of Fleur returning drew a flinch from Harry. He looked up to see her in the doorway, the tracks of her tears still on her cheeks, her eyes bloodshot, but dry. She appeared smaller then, the absence of her sister seemingly taking away a section of herself. She folded in upon herself as she stood there, forcing herself to be as small as possible.

"I think I might need to be alone, for a while." Fleur said, her voice hoarse.

In that moment, Harry felt more helpless than ever before.

"Are you sure?" Harry asked, with a swallow. "I am here if you need me to be."

Fleur shook her head jerkily. "I think, perhaps, this is something that I need to understand by myself."

Harry stood, taking her hand in his. "If you ever need anything from me, I'll be there in a heartbeat."

"I know, 'Arry," Fleur said. "I know."


Over the days that passed, Harry tried to understand what it was that he needed to do, but he felt rudderless.

He had no idea of what to do. To know that Fleur was in pain, struggling and worried for the future, and he could not help, was awful. He just wished for circumstances to be different, to be the person that she could trust with what was going on, to be the person that could say or do the thing that would ease her worried soul.

Eikthyrnir was help, then, the wild soul that he was. It was his nature to lean into the instincts within him, his mind a beautiful calm set by the insistence he felt to hold his own course. It was assuring, that his thoughts had purpose, that his conflict could resolve into something useful, but after a time he felt guilty of filling his friend's mind with such worries, so empathetic was he.

And so, for want of anything better to do, he allowed other aspects of his life to consume him.

As Harry discovered, it was more difficult than he had first envisioned to learn whether or not the Helian magics could accommodate the Earth.

Firstly, despite his own human view of the truly ancient Hogwarts, the stones laid there by man's own hand did not hold the age to be of much use. In comparison to the stones laid by the Gods, they were children. Truly, despite the ubiquity of magic that filled the halls, the tiles on the ground ran only to the foundations, and no further. When his hands pressed against the stones, their strength was repressed by the wave of magic that the air held, the ever-changing residents of the castle making any connection to the archaic power he longed for impossible.

It felt, for all of his efforts, like trying to access the power of flames by standing a mile away from a fire. It was distant and so very out of his reach. The Earth was so vast, so impossibly vast, that direct connection was required to even begin to hope to fathom its potential.

He needed a place that living being's hand had not touched - a place that no man had altered. He could not ask Eikthyrnir for such a place; despite his talent for finding such places, as to find a place for an element other than his own was antithetical. He could not return to the peak from which he truly learned fire for the same reason - the scorched earth having burned away the knowledge that the soil could bring.

His efforts in learning the physical aspects prior to the spiritual had been unsuccessful. Earth was unyielding, so more reluctant to change than water could even begin to be. Water flowed, but the Earth remained stiff and unchanging, only growing, requiring great power to even begin to become ductile and bend.

With the Helian magics, they were so personal, so very idiosyncratic, that one could not rely on the knowledge of others to truly work - one had to understand. Harry had to know the power of water, its healing and its rhythm, before he could ever truly harness its formidable strength. Just so, he had to experience the birth and change of the ground below, before he could ever bring such a thing to life for himself.

He knew of similar feats to that which he was attempting. In the times before society began, there were early scriptures of man carving a path through a mountain range so as to get to the other side. Stories, of drying the Earth so that one could pass through a sea without resistance. But to know, and to understand, were eons away in the world of the Northern Magics.

And, with the more he pondered the issue at hand, he realised with growing certainty that he too was eons away from truly understanding the power of the Earth.


In a blind hope to solve the issue of the Earth magics, Harry found himself in the library.

It was a pleasant place; far more pleasant than it was ever truly given credit for. This is was no-more true than in the early spring, the weather just pleasant enough for the great majority of the school to evacuate the indoors and seek refuge outside, leaving only the dedicated and the solitary.

Despite the warmth the air finally held, the fire of the library still burned brightly, and adjacent to it, there sat Hermione. She herself was not impervious to the weather, her huge hair evidently holding a somewhat insulatory property, causing her to sweat heavily and divulge herself of her heavy jumper, though it did not detract from the concentration she held for her studies.

Harry's appearance, however, did distract her, her bushy-haired head poking up from her book the moment he entered the room, the sight of another living soul within the library a rarity in of itself. A warm smile came to Hermione's face as she saw Harry, immediately gesturing so that he may join her, just as they once did.

Harry did so, joining her, though not before a quick perusal of the Transfiguration section of the library, Madam Pince's eye never leaving him, her constant presence unaffected by the changing of the seasons. He wondered, briefly, on what was more oppressive; the warmth indoors, or her stare.

The sight of Hermione was a welcome one. Perhaps it was their extended separation, but to spend time with her, simply studying as he would often do by himself, was a far more pleasant thought than it might once have been. Though she was inquisitive, Hermione did not question the notes before him, written in Old Norse, and conversely, the thought of listening to her latest gripe with the wizarding world was not so arduous.

"How's things?" Harry asked, after a moment's ponderance over his notes.

"Good, good," she said, quickly. "I've been terribly busy with work and such, though I doubt that compares to the preparation you're doing with the Tournament."

"I wouldn't go that far," Harry said. "I imagine I'd have a harder time writing an essay about Dragons than fighting one these days."

Hermione gave him a harried smile. "Plus, with teaching Viktor English, I've had my hands full recently," she said. "I haven't managed to read much at all, so it's nice when I get the chance."

"How are things with you and Viktor?" Harry asked, absently correcting his notes.

Hermione grinned, brightly. "Wonderful," she said, her eyes a glow. "I'm going to meet his parents in a few weeks."

"Wow," Harry replied. "That's quite serious."

"Viktor is a 'quite serious' person," Hermione said. "We've actually exchanged a few letters - his father is a barrister in Bulgaria, so it was very interesting, talking about legislation and how the law differs in the different worlds."

"Sounds like you've found your place." Harry said, with a smile.

"It does, doesn't it?" Hermione smiled. "I'm hopefully going to spend a month or so with him over the summer, before the Quidditch season starts."

"And your parents are okay with that?"

Hermione's face fell. "I told them it was going to a camp for excelling students," she said. "They wouldn't understand."

"Do they not like that you're a witch, then?" Harry asked, quietly.

"It's not that they don't like it, per se, it's that they just don't really get our world, or even try to," Hermione explained. "We've been growing apart for a year or so, now. I suppose this is just another symptom of that."

"Are you okay with that?" Harry asked, as he watched his friend's face.

"I can't really change it, so I've just gotten used to it - obviously I'd like it if they tried a little more, but I can't force them," Hermione said. "It just taught me that you have to change things in your life that you can, and live with the things you can't. Viktor was very good to me, too - it's odd, really, how just being with him can make things feel so much lighter."

"Really?"

"Before, if I was worried about something, I'd just let the thought of it roll around in my head until it broke me," Hermione told Harry, his book off the desk then. "But Viktor just knows how to stop me doing that."

"He just knows?"

Hermione shook her head. "Not at all," she said. "At first, he didn't have a clue, but after watching me worrying myself stiff, he managed to get me to talk about what was bothering me and after we started talking, everything became easier."

"He makes you happy, then?" Harry asked, his voice soft.

Hermione sighed, almost-dreamily. "Very," she said, before righting herself. "But that's not everything he does. When I'm just not happy, say when I'm worried or stressed or anxious, he does everything he can to make it so that I'm not."

The thought was a painful one, and so Harry buried his eyes into his textbook, the words in Old Norse thankfully so very different to the ones that held his mind.

"I must say, I'm glad you've moved on from that Auror you liked." Hermione said, after a moment's silence.

"Really?" Harry questioned, surprised. "Why's that?"

Hermione grimaced. "It's just not fun to watch someone you are friends with hurt themselves," she said. "I know you adored her, but it wasn't fun watching someone love someone who doesn't love them back."

Her words jolted Harry. "What do you mean?" he asked.

Hermione's eyes were soft as they turned to Harry. "When I would see you at the Ball, your eyes would fall on her and you looked at her like she was the world - and she didn't look at you the same way," she said. "I'm - I'm just glad you're happier, now."

"I just wish you'd have told me earlier," Harry muttered, slightly bitterly. "It would've saved a fair bit of pain."

"As I said before; some things you can't change. I don't think my words would've changed much, really." she said.

"I suppose there's just some things you have to learn for yourself," Harry said, his voice unsure. "In any case, I'm glad it's in the past."

In his head, though, his mind was reeling. Of conversations with Fleur, of her assurances, her assuredness.


For a time, Harry did little else but retreat into his own room, for the presence of strangers would serve him ill. His mind was no clearer through time spent thinking alone, though.

Why on earth would Fleur lead him so wrongly? Why was she so insistent that he tell Tonks how he felt? She knew that he would just get hurt. Did she want him to get hurt?

He did not know, and he could not bring himself to talk to her - she was in pain, then, and to bring more tension into her life was just unkind. He knew her to be good, and kind - he trusted that she had his best interest in hand - he was no doubt being overly-anxious.

The problem with anxiety, however, was that it did not matter if the cause was good or not. Logic played very little part in it - it was how you felt, not how you thought. And so, he could not shake the worry.

In his room, the once-calming flame flickered wildly, its warmth inconsistent and ill-tempered, some times painfully hot and others irritatingly mild. His magic was no help in finding the calm that he sought, either. There was no cohesion to his mind, not as it had been at the peak, where anger was a blanket to his mind's thoughts. His thoughts were jumbled, and therefore so too was his magic.

In his frustration, he gave up the effort and instead let the fire sit as it wished, bouncing around in front of his eyes. He wanted to do something, anything, to occupy his thoughts, but he could not free himself from them. He opened the Dumbledore's book, though his mind could hardly intake anything of value. The Occulemency book, a gift from Dumbledore months ago, was no use either. The study asked for a clear mind, and he was eons from that then.

He picked his wand from where it laid beside him, holding it in his hands, the warmth he felt from its touch immediate, the sensation wonderful though fleeting. He called forth sparks, yet they too were irritating - a dizzying array of primary colours.

Harry was a hair's breadth from launching his greatest treasure across the room and lodging it within the gaps of the brickwork when blessedly the flames in front of him stilled, the warmth they gave levelling, the return of normalcy offering peace.

"What troubles you, Harry?" Dumbledore asked, from the doorway. Harry shook his head - for a moment, he'd thought he himself would calm the magic.

"Nothing," Harry said, allowing the fire's heat to swell over him. "Well, that fire to begin with, but not anymore."

Dumbledore entered the room, his approach bringing a wave of unease in Harry. "I do doubt that, son," he said, leaning against his bedpost. "Hogwarts herself rarely calls me, yet she did here."

Harry shook his head. "The tournament," he lied. "It's all rather a lot."

"Really?" Dumbledore asked, surprised. "I had not thought that it weighed heavily upon you. It hasn't in the past."

Harry paused for a moment, the calmed air of his room filling his lungs. "It feels like it's building to something - something big," he said, rather truthfully. "The previous tasks all felt so preliminary, as though they were building to something extraordinary, the scope of which I cannot hope to comprehend."

Dumbledore's head tilted, his great beard falling to the side with it. "That is the agony of the chase, I suspect," he said. "You've worked a long while at this. To see its end would be disorientating to anyone."

Harry shook his, furiously. "It's not that at all," he said. "The actual nuts and bolts of it all feel rather meaningless now. I'm afraid there's something greater than that entirely."

"Such as?"

"I don't know," Harry answered, flat. "That's the worry."

Dumbledore nodded, understanding. The Headmaster took a seat upon Harry's unmade bed. "Then, I fear I must give you some rather trite advice," he said. "If you are worried about something, and you cannot control the very thing you worry over, then to worry over it would serve you ill."

Harry smiled, sharing a look with the Headmaster.

"Your brother talked to me recently." Harry said.

Dumbledore's grey eyebrows shot up. "Really?" He queried. "It's rather rare for him to talk something without horns."

"He said that you were an idiot."

Dumbledore laughed, his body rendered eternally youthful as he did. "It's not a new thing for him to say, actually. He's been saying that for about a hundred years; I suppose it's my fault for not listening."

Harry laughed.

"It was about this, actually," Harry said, after a moment, brandishing the Elder Wand. "It was more of a warning than a conversation, in truth."

Dumbledore frowned. "Ah," he said. "I had feared something like this."

"What?"

"It is a rather private family matter," Dumbledore said, taking Harry by surprise. The man had given him his family's most revered heirloom, and yet this was just too much? It was odd. "To put it mildly, he would sooner place that wand in the ground and wait for a tree to grow than see it ever again."

"He said as much."

"Indeed," Dumbledore agreed, before standing suddenly. "Anyway, I must be off - I now realise something has come up."

"Oh, okay." Harry replied, fully discombobulated.

"Yes," Dumbledore said, nodding to himself. "Oh, and by the way; with whatever's really troubling you - I would seek it out. You are your father's son - you gain nothing from hiding in this room."

Dumbledore fled the room in a hurry, leaving Harry to nod to himself as he watched the Headmaster leave.


Harry allowed a few days to pass before he acted on the Headmaster's words. If he were deluded enough, he would've said it was to allow the dust to settle in his mind, so as to approach the situation logically and calmly. He was not deluded, however, and so he knew that the cause of his waiting was just his own anxiety.

He'd taken to observing the Marauder's Map in his free moments, though very sparingly. Most often he found Fleur within her chambers, occasionally pacing the floor, his watch just to check that she still was alive and okay. His eyes rarely lingered, though; it felt as though he was intruding upon someone if he stayed too long.

Just the thought of approaching Fleur had filled him with an odd contrast of feeling. In one sense, he felt like he was floating, though not in a good way. He felt like at any point, he'd lose connection with the ground and float away, never returning to the ground. But equally, he felt as though he weighed half a tonne, and movement was an agony that his body could not handle.

But, after a while, he knew that this feeling would only be ended by Fleur, and so he brought himself to her carriage.

Fleur answered the door before he could even knock twice, the door flashing open to reveal her. In an instant, her arms were around him, dragging him into the carriage and onto her bed, so that the pair of them laid side by side, her head in the crook of his neck.

Peace flooded Harry, then. To feel the touch of Fleur's skin after days apart was glorious.

"I'm sorry, 'Arry," she said, her arms tight around him. "I should not have asked for distance. It didn't help at all."

"It's okay." Harry said, leaning into her embrace.

"It is not, I know it isn't," she said. "I pushed you away, and I really needed you then."

He squeezed her tightly.

"So, why did you do it?" Harry asked, his voice soft against her ear.

Fleur pulled away, her lips frowning as she peered up at him, abashed. "I - I just, I did want to be helped, I now realise," she said. "I've been alone a long time, and when you're alone, no-one else protects you but you. I didn't want anyone else to help me; it just took me a while to realise that I'm not alone anymore - not if I don't want to be."

Harry held her close, the weight leaving his stomach, his feet feeling as though they had returned to more sure footing. "I'm here," he said. "If you want me to be."

Fleur pressed her lips to his cheek. "I do," she said. "In fact there's something I wanted to tell you," Fleur paused, trying to force the words through her mouth. "I-I-I," she shook her head. "Never mind."

"Are you sure?" Harry asked. "It seems important."

Fleur shook her head once more, an exasperated smile upon her face. "No, do not worry about it," she said. "There are occasions when words ought to be uttered, and I do not think this is the time for that."

"If you're sure?"

Fleur nodded against his skin. "I'm sure."

Harry settled into her embrace, the warmth of her enthralling, though an itch formed at her words. If it was not the right time for her words, perhaps it was the right time for his.

"Fleur?" Harry asked, his voice soft, almost tentative. "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course, ma cherie," she said, warm. "Anything."

Harry swallowed.

"Why did you tell me to tell Tonks how I felt?"

Fleur stilled, as though ice water was dropped on her head.

"B-because I could see that hiding away your feelings was only causing you pain, and I cared about you," she said. "I wanted you to be okay in the end, even if that meant pain in the meantime."

"Oh," Harry said. "But don't you think that's my choice? To decide who and what I care about?"

Fleur removed herself from his touch. "It is not in my power to force you to agree with me - even I am not that pretty," she said. "I gave you a map - you were the one that took the journey."

"But you knew, didn't you?" Harry asked, insistent. "You knew that she didn't return my feelings? You were lying before, right, when I came back from the peak?"

Fleur huffed a breath in frustration. "I did not lie, 'Arry," she said. "I said that I would not manipulate you with love, and that is true. You did not love this Tonks woman - you were infatuated with her. It was unhealthy, and the sooner the grew away from it, the better you would be."

Anger flashed in Harry's green eyes for a moment. "Who are you to decide what and what isn't love?"

"Because I am a person with eyes!" Fleur exclaimed, at once. "You were obsessed with this woman. You could see nothing but her - you were blind to reality!" Fleur ran a hand through her hair. "It was plain for all to see that you were too far gone for your own good, and it would've been impossible for her to return what you felt."

"So you were just happy to manipulate me, to toy with me, so that I'd end up with you?" Harry asked, irritate, standing from the bed and up on his feet. "How is this any better?"

"Because this is healthy," Fleur said, her hand reaching to touch the skin above his hip. "This is reciprocated. This is love."

Harry shook his head, brushing away her hand, a hand running wildly through his hair. "So, love is one manipulating one-another so that they are we would like them to be?" he asked. "Well, forgive me if I don't hold this love so highly."

"It does not matter how we end up with one-another," Fleur asserted. "Only that we are."

"So, this is something I would have to worry about all the time," Harry began. "Every time you asked me to do something, or told me something, I would have to consider that you're just altering the facts so that the world becomes more favourable to you?" Harry's jaw clenched. "How am I supposed to trust you?"

"Because you know that I would be doing it for your best interests," Fleur said, trying to lean into him. "Because I care about you."

"Well, you've an interesting way of showing that."

Fleur, then, threw her hands to the sky. "What brought this on?" she asked, her voice loud and abrasive. "I imagine Tonks is trying to turn you against me - I bet she'd rather you return to her, back to being the lovesick fool you were."

"No, I managed this thought all on my own," Harry replied. "And it seems you don't trust me either, if you think I can't be out of your sight for more than minutes before I start trying to hurt you."

Fleur laughed humourlessly. "It is not that you will try to hurt me, you're a good person," she said. "It's that you're still infatuated with Tonks, and you'd do anything to get her back, even though you're supposed to be mine."

"I am not 'infatuated' with her any more," Harry said. "I'm sure of that."

"Really?" Fleur asked, her tone almost condescending. "So, she breaks your heart, fractures all that you know, forces you to go live in the wild, destroys you," Fleur shook her head. "And you still want to be close to her, to be 'friends' with her? If that is not infatuation, I do not know what is."

"Well, after today I know it wasn't her that hurt me," Harry replied, his voice spiteful, his words acid. "It was you, trying to help me."

Fleur collected her jacket, put it on and opened the door.

"It seems I was wrong about you," Fleur said. "You are still a boy, unable to understand the world - I had thought you were more."

"It seems I was wrong too," Harry said. "I thought you cared."

Fleur ran out the room, slamming the door, shaking the carriage with the force of it, leaving Harry, alone once more.


There it is!

I hope you enjoyed that - let me know what you thought.

Until next time!