I know, I know, it's a day late AGAIN. It is starting to become a bit of a habit with me, isn't it? I'm super sorry. I want to make sure you all know that I AM doing my best to get these up on Friday and that me being a bit late doesn't mean I'm going to stop writing them. It just means that sometimes life can get in the way. BUT IT IS HERE NOW! YAY! I hope you all enjoy it :). Special thanks this week go to two people: LittleLionGirl once again for her word request and bloodyhell-ronald for requesting a Bill and Fleur drabble. Originally I was going to do this drabble from Fleur's POV but I found I didn't have enough of a handle on her childhood to know who she really was. So it's a Bill POV. I had to look up his bio on the HP wiki to write this one- if you haven't checked out that site before I really encourage it! I learned so much I never knew about the HP series. Anyways, enough babbling. Onto the drabble!

**Word: Discovery** Set post-series. Bill thinks about what he had thought his life would be like vs what he actually got.

It was an average Saturday morning in my life.

Completely ordinary. And yet at the same time, extraordinary.

I sat in my recliner in the den and gazed around the room slowly, drinking in the scene.

Never in a million years had I imagined I'd end up with this life.

Ever since I could remember, I had dreamed of a life of adventure. I wanted to pillage tombs and battle dangerous creatures. So from the moment I picked up a Gringotts brochure advertising their curse breakers at the ripe age of nine, I knew that that was what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I still remember that day clearly. Mum had taken me to Diagon Alley with her to pick up some potion ingredients for a brew to lower fever or stop infection or something else useful for her house of children. But first we stopped at Gringotts so that she could drop a few extra galleons into the vault to save. I was wandering as she argued with the goblin at the desk about whether or not it was worth a trip through the tunnels just to drop off three galleons. I tuned them out and found a round table pushed into a corner, a fine coat of dust showing that it wasn't a hot commodity with the customers. On it were stacks of papers, all related to the bank in some way. I flipped through pamphlets on goblin history, tips on saving, and posters for investment seminars. None of it interested me in the slightest. And then I found the brochure on curse breaking.

Looking back on it now, it wasn't all that nice of a brochure. It had a moving drawing on the front showing a cartoon wizard piling heaps of jewels from a treasure chest into a cloth sack with the words 'CURSE BREAKING: WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?' flashing in neon colors above. All in all, probably not the best advertisement I'd ever seen. But for some reason, that brochure stuck with me. Maybe it was the idea of adventure and riches. Or maybe it was just that the bright colors and drawings appealed to my nine-year old curiosity. Either way, I took it with me and was so hooked that I missed with my mouth and pressed half my face into the ice cream Mum bought me afterwards because I was so busy reading the advertisement.

And with that, my future was set.

I knew that if I wanted to get into a job that had so few positions I couldn't be second best. So, even though school wasn't really my thing, I buckled down and worked my ass off. Sure, I was a fun, adventure-loving type of guy who always liked a good laugh, but I knew how to be serious when I needed to be. I made sure to make time for my friends and family and enjoy myself while I was at Hogwarts, but I studied too. I was somewhere between the twins and Percy. I got a time turner in third year to take extra courses. In my fifth year I became a prefect and got twelve O.W.L.s. In my seventh year I was made Head Boy. To balance this work out, I got my ear pierced and dangled a fang from it. I grew my hair long. I dressed to fit in at a muggle rock concert. I knew what I needed to do to obtain my goal, but I made sure to never lose my personality along the way.

It seemed like I had every aspect of my life planned out from before I even got to Hogwarts. But there was one thing that I never desired. Never even considered. And that was having a family of my own.

It wasn't that I was opposed to the idea exactly, but it just never crossed my mind. I was happy with my parents and siblings. I never felt like I needed more. And it was never one of those things that I had on my list of goals: fall in love, get married, have kids. For me, life was all about the adventure.

For a long time, it seemed like my life was going to be just that, all adventure and no settling down. And for a long time, I was totally happy with that. I couldn't have asked for more perfect years after Hogwarts when I nabbed that long desired job as a Gringotts curse breaker.

I discovered rubies and diamonds and sapphires. Swords and armor and crowns. Gold and silver and copper. And then there were the accidental discoveries. Mummies and zombies and assassins. Traps and caves and tombs. Poisons and hexes and curses. Accidental discoveries, yes, but still full of adventure and therefore a total blast. I was loving life.

But there was one discovery I still hadn't made. One that would knock me off my feet and send my life spiraling off down an unimaginable path.

That discovery came in the form of a gorgeous part-Veela.

I had just returned to Hogwarts with Mum to support Harry in the final Triwizard task. We were waiting in a room off the Great Hall with the other champions and their families when I first noticed her. Attuned as I was always was after years of curse breaking to people watching me, I could feel somebody's eyes following me. I glanced over my shoulder, a confident joke on my lips, but the words died as soon as I caught sight of her. She was beautiful, of course, but having both taken Care of Magical Creatures in school and travelled to Bulgaria on several expeditions, I could recognize that she was part-Veela. And trust me, once you've seen a Veela get angry they just don't have the same pull for you anymore. So it wasn't actually her beauty that stopped me in my tracks.

It was her confidence.

One look at her, and I just knew that she was just like me. Confident. Adventurous. And not particularly looking to settle down just yet. Of course, since she was a Triwizard champion I knew she must have been brave and willing to take risks for what she wanted, but there was something more to it. In that one moment, I just felt like I knew her, even though she was a total stranger.

I put the name I'd read in the papers to the face it must belong to.

Fleur Delacour.

She flipped her silver sheet of hair over her shoulder and turned her face half away, fluttering her eyelashes in my direction with a small seductive smile on her face. This was a girl who was clearly used to getting whatever guy she wanted.

I smirked. Did she really think that technique would work on me? Sure, I appreciated beautiful women as much as the next guy, but I had picked up too many booby trapped treasures in my time to make any judgment on just looks. Besides, I had no time to make any sort of move at that moment. Harry was on his way and if ever there was a kid who needed a family, it was him at that time. I was needed elsewhere.

And if she was really the type of girl I thought she was she would appreciate the challenge anyways.

So I turned my back on her.

It was months before I had any contact with her again, but I never doubted that the assumptions I had made about her personality were correct. I truly believed, and still do, that she was annoyed that I hadn't fallen at her feet and was trying to teach me a lesson while simultaneously convincing herself that she hadn't really wanted me anyways.

As a result, there was no anger or doubt in my mind when I saw her again at Gringotts. But I saw her glare towards me and decided to cut her a break (though I did chuckle under my breath at her reaction). I introduced myself to her and offered to help her with her English when I realized that was why she had taken the job.

One thing that I don't think any member of my family realized was that she originally declined my offer. Rather vehemently, to be honest. She swished her hair angrily and stormed away making some snarky comment towards me over her shoulder that for the life of me I can't remember because I was too busy checking out her ass. Hey, no one said curse breakers weren't allowed to check the treasure out from a safe distance, after all.

Her decline only made me more determined. It became a little mission for me, and it gave me the same adrenaline rush that I got from any tomb raid.

And that was definitely something no girl had ever made me feel before.

For a few weeks I sought her out every day at work. She never lessened her disinterest, which only made me more interested.

Finally she gave in (although rather grudgingly, I might add) and it felt like finally breaking a curse you'd spent weeks trying to undo. There were still a few traps of course before I was going to be allowed to reach the treasure, but it still gave me a thrill of victory.

To my surprise more than anyone's, that thrill never lessened as we began to spend more time together and on more friendly terms. If anything, it only grew.

I already knew this girl was different. I already knew she held a large appeal for me. But I guess I just didn't really realize how large. Pretty soon my gimmicks and lines were gone and I was just being me. And it felt so damn right that I knew I'd never find another girl quite as perfect for me as this one.

So I followed the only next logical course of action I could think of. I proposed.

It didn't matter to me that she was several years younger than me, or that a couple members of my family couldn't stand her (I'm looking at you Mum and Ginny…), or that we had been together for such a short amount of time, or that we were in the middle of a goddamn war. I had always known who I was and what I wanted. And I'd always been the type of person who went for what I wanted full throttle. I knew that I would always love Fleur. So married I would be.

Despite my Mum and sister's ominous predictions, the relationship lasted. And it worked. She was by my side through Greyback's attack. We both stuck it out through our disaster of a wedding that ended in a battle. Eventually, my female relatives learned to love her. We got our own little house and shared our entire lives. She grieved with me through Fred's death. And I never left through her pregnancies with any of our three beautiful children, not even to go break a few curses or raid a few pyramids.

Besides the pregnancies and the first few months of each of the kids' lives, though, I kept my job. And that meant travelling. It meant long absences. It meant that Fleur would never be able to have a full time career of her own because someone needed to be able to look after the kids. But she never complained. To be totally honest, I don't think it ever even occurred to her to complain. She'd always known who I was and what she was getting herself into. She knew that curse breaking was enormously important to me and that if she married me, she'd be marrying my job, too. She was okay with that. Which was something I could never thank her for enough.

So now here I was, a Gringotts curse breaker like I'd always imagined. My life's dream fulfilled. But not quite in the way I'd foreseen as a nine year old, or even as a seventeen year old. That was why there were still moments like this one, on those precious weeks when I was able to work frome home or had some time off, where I would sit in our den and stare around me and see my wife and daughters and son, laughing and playing and living, and be unable to believe that it was my life.

I thought of what my nine year old self would have thought of how I was living now and felt certain he wouldn't have been impressed.

I watched my wife carrying my son in her arms as she entered the kitchen, my daughters trailing after her babbling away. Fleur turned to me and flipped her slightly shorter sheet of hair over her shoulder, fluttering her eyelids at me just like so many years ago, but now her smile was playful and loving.

And I decided that I really couldn't care less what my nine year old self would have thought.

AN: I hope you all liked it! Please leave me a review and let me know what you thought :). And, once again, I am taking any and all requests. Talk to you all next week my lovely readers!