AN You asked for it, here it is, mostly unedited, but it's a thing.
47 Seconds
When Victoire was nine she finally got the courage to accompany her mother to the grave.
She knew it was a grave, knew that whoever was buried there was important, but she didn't fully grasp death yet. She certainly hadn't put a lot of thought into her mother's life before she was born.
She knew that every year her mother would leave for a day, she would stay with her father, and he would be no fun all day. Distant and sad. Her father was always a bit too attentive when she came home, and she was always sad. She would smile, but it wouldn't be in her eyes. They would spend the rest of the day as a family with some unknowable thing hanging over the house that Victoire, as a child, couldn't quite grasp.
She knew it was a grave because the year before she'd asked her father. Even at eight years old she knew not to talk about this day, but she wanted to understand, so with adrenaline racing through her body, she interrupted her father's turn of exploding snap with:
"Where's maman going?"
He froze, blinking at her, and she wilted a little under his gaze. Immediately she regretted asking it, and her fingers trembled as she turned her eyes down.
"She's visiting a friend," He told her, and his tone made her look up because it was soft and gentle. The shock was gone from his face, and it was the soft kind face of her father, some of the anxiety faded from her chest. He had paused, but when she looked up he found his words again.
"Someone maman loved very much, but he passed away, and she likes to go and spend time with him."
"How can she if he's gone?"
"Well, she goes to his grave, where he's buried, and she sits and talks to him."
Victoire digested this, a bit baffled. She imagined her mother sitting on the ground and talking up to the sky and she didn't understand why it made everyone so sad. Her father let the conversation drop when she didn't pursue it, but it was never forgotten. It simmered in the back of her head all year, and on the eve of the following trip, she took another leap.
This time it was as her mother tucked her in. Her long hair fell in curtains around Victoire's head as she leaned over her, it was one of her favorite places in the world. In bed, when her mother leaned over to kiss her forehead, they existed in a silver cage of down soft locks for a moment. With just as much nervous excitement as when she approached her father she took this moment to ask:
"Can I come with you tomorrow?"
Her mother paused, it was too dark to make out her face, but when she spoke she sounded as serene as ever.
"It will not be fun little chick," she pressed a second kiss to her brow and sat up, pulling away from that safe little cocoon they shared. "But you can come if you want."
Portkey's were awful.
In all her nine years, she had been apparated once that she could remember, and even that was when she was only two. The singularly traumatic experience that is apparition was the only reason she could remember it in the first place.
So when the world spun away under her feet and then twisted into a new place that rushed up to slam into her chest she flailed wildly for a second as she struggled to draw breath.
"I'm sorry little chick," she could hear the laugh in her mother's voice as she pulled her to her feet and picked grass out of her hair. She gave her her best surly look but it only made Fleur smile wider, she pulled Victoire to her side and they started walking.
She finally got a look around, it was an unremarkable graveyard, she'd never seen one though so she took it in with some wonder. The stones ranged from immaculate marble boulders in pinks and whites to the broken grey stumps of long-forgotten plots.
They stopped before a simple grave, light gray, and well maintained. There were flowers, wilted but still alive. Her mother hadn't brought flowers, she wondered why, even young as she was.
Decades later, Victoire would be able to recall in perfect detail one moment from that day.
Her fingers traced the date of death, feeling the grooves in the stone, and she was looking down at orange roses that were withering in the grass. She knew that it was one week past seven years to the day. She knew that someone had come a week ago and left these flowers, and now they were here without flowers.
She did not know why that is what stood out, but as an adult, she looked back at that moment as a sort of milestone of childhood in a hard to define way that wasn't necessarily healthy. It was something like realizing her mother wasn't a perfect person for the first time, but she didn't understand that until years later. Instead, she asked:
"Who was he?" Her tone was hostile, but she was fueled by anger she couldn't understand. Her mother just stepped forward, turned around, and sat on the ground with her back to the stone. She resisted being tugged down beside her at first, but gave in and was glad for the attention when her mother began to comb her hair with her fingers.
"He was a good man," she began, "that did not deserve the hardships he was given."
"Did you love him?" She cut her off, asking questions she didn't know the weight of. Fleur remained placid and serene in the wake of her tone.
"I did-"
"What about papa?"
"What about him?" Victoire could only gape at that, Fleur stilled her preening and sighed.
"I love your father, with all my heart, little chick. He is the strongest, kindest man I know and he has been an amazing father to you. I loved them both, they were both great wizards, and they both loved you."
Fleur should not have said that last part, as well-intentioned as it was, it stuck around and fueled a lot of the fights they would get into in Victoire's teens. As a nine-year-old, she took it mostly in stride, still focused mostly on this ghost of a man now identified as the shadow over her family.
She couldn't understand how her mother could love them both, love was what she saw her parents do every day, how could she have two people, two houses, two lives.
"One day-" Her mother told her when she tried to vocalize this, "When you're older-" She hushed Victoire, who hated being told she was too young and was already protesting.
"Not even that long little chick, be calm, listen. Love is hard, and some may think being Veela makes it easier but it doesn't, it makes it much harder. When you are in love you will understand, then I will explain."
It would take almost ten years for Victoire to reach that point.
She never went back to the grave with her mother, and her mother stopped going a few years later. They didn't talk about it again, and in retrospect, Victoire wished her parents had. It might've helped her understand better.
Puberty was hell, uniquely amplified by the difficulties Veela faced, and tainted by a growing resentment for her mother. She was mad at her mother for loving this other man still, for going to his grave and hurting her father in doing so. She was angry at her father, for not being hurt enough by her mother's infidelity, for being so accepting. She couldn't feel that anger righteously though, so she just hated her mother for making her pity her father. She hated this other man most of all. It didn't take her long to deduce that he was her father, only a few short years after that fateful trip to his grave, and she hated him for existing and ruining her family.
It was not a happy time, that was at least mitigated by the fact that she reached school age and began spending most of her time away.
School changed things.
She made friends, finally, she had people that weren't related to her in some way. Boys were tolerable at best, but there were over fifty other girls in her year, and Beauxbatons was amazing.
Then she started to develop the empathetic aura colloquially known as Allure, and most of those girls turned away.
It would be easy to say that a young Veela can not fully control the ebb and flow of their emotional control, and often Veela did to outsiders. In truth, it is intoxicating, and most young girls can not avoid the temptation. Victoire was no exception, and she drove away a lot of her peers before she grew out of her manipulative stage.
It became harder to hate her mother as the years went by because she was the only person in her life that understood the struggles she went through. When her few friends began to resent the way their boyfriends acted around her, her mother was there with advice. When she fell in love and began to doubt whether he really loved her back or was simply enthralled, her mother knew what to say.
One day, not long after graduation, Victoire visited her parent's house.
She had been dating a boy, Sebastian, since the end of her sixth year. It was the longest she'd ever kept a boy, and this one was different. That was why she was there, to talk to her mother because an uncomfortable memory had been rearing its head in the last few months. A memory of a promise to explain.
"Are you and papa…" Fleur sat on the couch, the corner of her mouth curving up slightly, and it ground Victoire's question to a halt. A flush crept up her cheeks and she glared at her mother who did her best to school her features. She couldn't finish the question now, only glare but her mother carried on effortlessly.
"Bonded?" She asked lightly, enjoying her daughter's embarrassment. "Yes little chick, we are."
Victoire just sat in surly silence, not looking at her mother.
"You can feel the bond forming?" She clarified, and Victoire heaved a great sigh. She teetered on the precipice of having this conversation with her mother or simply fleeing.
"Yeah, sometimes," she said quietly, then she plowed on, biting the bullet. "I always cut it off though."
Fleur didn't answer for a long while, and Victoire sat there letting her blush recede.
"You're all grown up now," she chanced a glance up and saw her mother smiling sadly at her, "I can't make this decision for you."
"Is it…" Victoire struggled to find the words for the way she felt about this new and troubling Veela trait. "Inevitable?" She finally managed.
"No," Fleur said softly, and it was that one word more than anything else that broke through years of anger and betrayal.
Years later, after Victoire had children of her own, they would fully clear the air between them in a tear-filled night of wine-soaked reconciliation, but it all started here.
"If you continue to deny the bond, it will stop attempting to form in time."
"Forever?"
"No, you can initiate it, as long as the correct conditions are met, the unintentional attempts are something that you only experience once usually. When you are young and love is new."
Victoire thought about that for a while, and her mother didn't feel the need to fill the silence, but she did move over to press into her side and she let herself be hugged.
"My advice," Fleur began, and somehow Victoire knew that this was important. "Let it pass, you can bond with him later if you want, but it will be because it's what you want, not because you were tempted in the moment."
"Is that what happened to you?" Not too long ago that question would have been barbed and hurled at her mother viciously. Now it was sincere.
"No, your father and I bonded without realizing, it is uncommon but not unheard of. We were bonded for almost two years before I found out."
Victoire was trying to make sense of half-remembered moments, between her and her mother, between her parents. Some of that old anger bubbled up, but it was a gentle thing compared to what it once was.
"That man, he was my father, wasn't he?" She asked the question that had hung over her family her whole life.
"No little chick, your father is your own…" she paused and Victoire held her breath, silently begging her mother to continue. "Bill Weasley was my husband, we married during the war, and we were happy for a time. We were young and the war was hard, and afterward- none of us handled things very well."
"Papa … was the other man?" Victoire's world was tilting slightly on its axis as she took in this information. Fleur just laughed.
"I'm afraid that if I tell you this story, it will confirm the worst, most hateful things you think of me." Victoire sat back to look at her mother, she sounded choked up, and that was sure to get her crying too. Her mother did look scared, and sad, and suddenly so young and small.
"I don't hate you maman," She said, and it hadn't been so true in years, the knowledge that the mysterious Bill Weasley was not her father wiped so much of the slate clean. She would have to address how this changed things with her father, who truly was her father again, but her mother was speaking again.
"Your father was not well after the war, you know he played a big part in it, and he lost more than most to end it…"
-o-o-o-
Bill came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, trapping her against the sink.
She tensed, for a heartbeat, but he felt it. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head and moved away, with a well-concealed sigh. She was raising her wand to dry the dishes when something happened.
Deep down, buried away as best it could be, the little ball of pain and sadness she carried around exploded. It roared forth, taking on a life of its own, a separate well of grief that suddenly tried to swallow her. It took less than a second for this assault to rise and fall and in its wake iron bands wrapped around her throat and squeezed.
She jerked, her wand flicked out, and shattered a glass in a shower of crystal dust. Bill shouted out, but she couldn't make sense of the words, and for a wild panicked moment she was sure he had wrapped his hands around her neck and was throttling her.
She turned though, unimpeded, and he was still across the room. He looked horrified, she was wide-eyed and tugging at invisible bonds, nails drawing blood against her throat as she tried to lessen the pressure. Now that she was turned away she could feel whatever it was pulling her back toward the window. She half-turned, Bill made to move across the kitchen, and she apparated away.
She did not need to fix a destination in her mind, she let whatever had a hold of her pull her through and the next thing she knew she was slamming into an iron wall at speed. She bounced off the ward and landed hard on the cobblestones of a familiar alley.
She realized distantly, as she groaned and struggled to her feet, that she could breathe. It only felt as if her throat was closed, but the realization did nothing to help her hyperventilation as she bounded up the stairs.
She blew the door off its hinges wordlessly, unable to speak. Her wand made a vicious arch through the air, putting off some purple spellfire that she could not identify to this day.
He fell to the ground and the noose loosened.
She took her first real breath in forty-seven seconds.