Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or any of its characters.
Little Things
Summary: A collection of Harry Potter vignettes, telling the tale of things that never happened… Right?
She Remembers
As she walks into the leafy maze, she thinks about what will become of her. She's had dreams of this day, all with different endings but none have her holding the trophy. She still has Dumbledore's warning dancing in her head, mocking her with hidden meanings that make her cold, clammy, and afraid. Hidden meanings that remind her of her heritage and rumors whispered to her ears by the old, hollow walls of Hogwarts whenever she dared to wander through them at night.
She doesn't know those rumors about a beautiful boy with cold, cold eyes and sweetly poisoned words that used to walk through Hogwarts', taking the same paths she took, are true. She doesn't know that the boy was and still is the source of her family's, and the wizarding world's, fear. She doesn't know that the boy who has been haunting her mind ever since she'd seen his picture – she still doesn't understand why she even looked through the yearbooks at the back of the Hogwarts library – was the same person who had killed her uncle for refusing to join him.
Even as she wandered through her thoughts, not really thinking about anything but the hidden meaning of Dumbledore's warning, she knew she was lost. Everything had grown dark from lack of light but she didn't dare cast a Lumos, she didn't want her fellow champions to know where she was if they were close at all. Leaves rustled behind, causing the fine hair on the back of her neck to stick up. A chilled slide down her spine as she spun around, her wand leveled at the throat of whatever it was that was behind her.
It was a boy – more like a man, her mind hissed. He remind her of someone, but just who it was stayed at the edge of her mind. At first, she thought he reminded her of the other champions. The was a dangerous air about him, reminiscent of Krum's though stronger, beautifully disarming good looks that Diggory would never be able to match, and Potter's coloring, except for his eyes. This – this creature's eyes were an ever churning red, always twisting and dancing around his pupils like the blood flowing through her veins. Those eyes scared her more than the hidden meanings of warnings and whispered rumors ever could. Because they were actually there, watching and watching and watching, digging into her brain and making her imagine death and blood and then her family dead cover with blood, Gabrielle's empty eyes staring up at her…
Primal instincts killed in and she twisted away from this creature of death and fear, running and running. Even as she dodged around corners and threw herself through closing gaps, she still felt those eyes watching her, promising unholy things that she didn't want to think about. And later, when she woke up screaming in her own bed, hot and terrified with ghost touches that never happened and red eyes hiding of the back of her own eye lids, words that shouldn't have been – and never were – said haunted her till she went to sleep the next night only for it to happen again. And again and again and again.
And Fleur remembers the night Cedric Diggory died vividly, because those eyes still watch her from the shadows whenever she is alone, even if she can't feel them any more.
