so give me all your poison..
and give me all your pills..
and give me all your hopeless hearts and make me ill…
you're runnin' after somethin' that you'll never kill..
if this is what you want, then…
fire at will..
~Thank You for the Venom by My Chemical Romance
iv. thank you for the venom
Arctic, curious, studious eyes observed, worried, prayed – the blonde fringes over her eyes masked the concern in her eyes with her usual cold indifference. Her face was sore from scowling so much. Torrents of unknown emotions flew past her eyes while she stared into the dark empty vessels just underneath her.
Fleur stood at Hermione's bedside in the empty room; it was well past midnight, but the blonde couldn't sleep. An incessant worry nagged at her, and she grew tired of fighting it. Hermione wasn't supposed to be petrified…
The look Fleur was giving her was one filled of a silent, indifferent wonder. It wasn't until she held Hermione's cold hand in both of her own that she relaxed her face and eyes. Fleur sapped the coldness from Hermione's skin, shooting shivers through her hands and arms. The current flowing through the Slytherin, that of Hermione; it felt foreboding. But Fleur kept holding Hermione's hand anyway. Only the sound of Fleur's breathing reverberated throughout the chilly room, and her eyes upon Hermione were colder still.
More shivers attacked her while she observed Hermione's eyes more closely. Another premonition came upon her; she was too close to Hermione. How would the girl react if she suddenly became normal again and found Fleur holding her hand? Fleur's eyes narrowed while she immediately envisioned a wrath of fury from Hermione. The girl was so presumptuous...
A very long time passed between them that night in complete silence. Fleur continued to observe, Hermione continued to be observed, and not once were they disturbed. Both of their minds were blank slates, neither had control over themselves. Thumbs just underneath ridiculously long manicured nails continued to caress, familiarise, and ponder on their own. Information was not being sent to Fleur's mind; she only continued to stare, stare, and stare some more at Hermione's literal statuesque figure.
Silence burned Fleur's ears, laser-like. The empty, still fear in Hermione's eyes kept her from registering the ache in her limbs from standing for so long. Fleur kept studying Hermione; studying her almost as if she were a picture of something she couldn't and wouldn't ever want to look away from for a very long time. Strings were tugging the Veela's heart and mind around, jostling her thoughts and only letting them linger on Hermione. Hermione, the fascinating creature… An enigma. A specimen. An experiment.
A curiosity.
Fleur dipped her head down and snaked her back along with it while she inched closer to Hermione's visage. A vestige of Hermione's fury, confusing behaviours, her mannerisms; they lingered in her eyes and pulled Fleur closer still. The silence in both of their ears turned into a subtle melody, for Fleur at least, and it continued to evolve into a mysterious hymn, growing louder and fonder the closer Fleur became to Hermione's face.
A taut line of aloof inquisitiveness reeled Fleur in more and more, even drawing the French girl's nose up into a decisive, but ever so subtle and gentle sneer. The nails along Hermione's hand dug into her stone skin bit by bit, little by little the closer and closer Fleur went…
A pause. A beat; Fleur stopped. Their eyes, noses, and lips were perfectly aligned. Fleur's body was curled about to achieve the perfect dimensions, the perfect, curious view of Hermione unaware and helpless underneath the moonlight and the blizzard of Fleur's gaze. The sculpted, mature features of Fleur's face contrasted starkly with the young, developing ones of Hermione's. Warm breaths bounced back on Fleur's face, tickling her skin, only pulling her concentration on Hermione's eyes tighter and harder around her mind.
Fleur kept her small sneer and licked her lips, her warm, soft tongue just centimetres away from licking Hermione's as she did. Every detail of Hermione's eyes was in clear view. Swirls, tics, pigments, colour blending, lighting, emotion…but not truth. Fleur memorised what she could and could not see there in her dark eyes. An unknown smirk came upon Fleur's visage; a smirk of defiance, of power, of confusion… One or all three; it was, again, unknown. But, like all things visible and clear, it was there. It was there, possibly mocking or taunting either one of them.
And it wasn't until Fleur curled herself a little more to move this smirk right in the centre of Hermione's eyes did it change. A metamorphosis of something innate, something difficult to pinpoint happened. The smirk was gone, but Fleur's lips were still full, smooth, there… And Fleur's face and lips became unreadable; passive as she placed her soft, heart-shaped wonders over both of Hermione's eyes.
But the curiosity was finally captured, and it lingered upon her lips while she kept them over Hermione's eye. An incision nearly occurred while Fleur willed her second heart to stay upon the fire, the lava, the burning sensation… It was not cold like the rest of Hermione's body. It was…her. It was unexpected.
And the action of moving down from Hermione's eyes to her cheeks, not nearly as cold now, was autonomous. A swift plant of a red kiss from the French flower went here, and the lips glossed to the other side of Hermione's face, just between her nose and lips, leaving an imaginary, red line of uncharted expanses, emotions, motives… It was warm, curious, different Hermione's face was. And another kiss on the other cheek happened; slowly, deliberately. A sense of naturalness enveloped the Veela's lips as she pressed them into the warm mounds; a haze darkened her eyes while she retracted her face just a little.
Curling her neck about to move her lips down diagonally was immediate. Immaculate lips of red probed further down the Gryffindor's face, closer to the curls of a mouth that was not scowling for once. Heart-shaped lips upon the younger girl's face nearly burned the petrified state away… Or was it the Mandrake antidotes finally working?
Whichever it was…lips continued to move closer and closer still to an automatic, unknown destination. There was seemingly no friction between the full lips and the ever warming young, smooth, colouring flesh underneath. Ice skating with warmth underneath and a blizzard of natural sex wonderments overhead; that is what happened.
But the skating simply brushed over the lips of the youth; there was no perfect spin or dipping upon the enigmas of Hermione's lips. A pulse was starting underneath the French girl's thumbs; a pulse and rapidly increasing warmth was accumulating faster still in between their lips. A flash cut across the Slytherin's eyes before she carefully retracted her body in a svelte manner away from Hermione's. As she did, Hermione's body started to relax more and more while Fleur watched with a silent, cold indifference. It wasn't until she finally righted herself and straightened up did she see that familiar ember spark in Hermione's eyes…
And in that second, Fleur regained her usual posture of her head held high and her fringes covering most of her eye before she whipped her blonde locks about while she turned on her high heel and made her way out. Fleur walked with assured jerks of her shoulders, her hips, her thighs; she threw her heels out right in front of the other while she walked with her natural confidence; her grace.
A haze simmered inside of her, and she merely exuded it all out while she walked out, still feeling Hermione's eyes on her; eyes that she had the pleasure of learning, of memorising, of feeling. A primal need for such knowledge overtook her, perhaps. The reasons for her actions were about as clear and bright as Hermione's eyes that had captured the Slytherin's attentions… To taste her only perfection, to further memorise the source of the Veela's captivation, to be effeminate; it was, like all things Fleur, very much unknown…
The stinging sound of silence; the horrible awareness of silence enveloped Fleur's mind, and her eyelids felt a little less heavy. She felt a little less blissful and pain-free, but now the silence was spinning and threading a pain in between her ears. The quilt it slowly made for her helped to blanket the pain, like the duvet over her body from the waist down, but failing to blanket her from the cold on her face and chest. The familiar hug of her cream, buttoned nightshirt around her body calmed her. But awareness nearly stabbed her while she tried to read her senses with eyes closed; it felt like her room… But something was off.
A warmth was around her hand. Two warmths. Five slender digits on each and a trembling thumb traversing circles on her warming skin gave Fleur the sensation that her entire body felt the strange circle sensations. Her dream-like state was leaving her but she still felt like she was falling, possibly slipping into some expanse… Her body jerked about automatically as if her feet really betrayed her and she lost her grace and slipped; the sudden movement shot arrows in her head but the warmths over her hand kept her in reality.
The hands kept her from falling, but they made her want to fall again anyway, just to get away…
Fleur opened her eyes slowly, taking in her surroundings as one blur of stone, posters, lists, a person… She was aware that she was awake but had difficulty registering anything at all except for what she could feel. The familiar feeling of her pillow on the back of her head kept her stable while her eyes involuntarily curled a path to the one sitting at her bedside with an unreadable expression upon her wet, glistening face.
Only one candle was lit on the opposite side of her, and Fleur watched the ember flicker in her eyes to make up for what she could no longer feel from the usual intensity the girl's eyes gave her. Fleur tilted her head to the side ever so slightly in a masked curiosity; Hermione was only wearing her white shirt, skirt, and her tie was actually tied loosely around her neck. Interesting…
Watching the manufactured warmth and feeling the real one over her hand helped to melt more feeling into her body. The circles stopped just as the girl's thumb did. Fleur's face felt stony, aloof…almost petrified from a lack of compassion and warmth. She watched an inexplicable something swirl in the girl's eyes; it reeked of guilt and shame and vulnerability.
Fleur scowled at her.
Hermione continued to sit and stare at Fleur, already wondering if her weakness was what brought that powerful scowl upon her regal visage. Her weakness was what got Fleur into this mess to begin with… But try as she might, the tears wouldn't stop.
Her first attempt at entering the Slytherin Common Room was simply disastrous – everyone barricaded the door and refused her entry, yelling completely true accusations at the top of their lungs that Hermione had something to do with Fleur's illness…
Well…some were truer than others…
"Fucking Mudblood! You did this to her, didn't you?"
"All part of your damn scheme to get her bloody title, eh! Be gone with you, filth!"
"So what if Fleur's better than you? ACCEPT IT and move on! Don't give us that rubbish about you tending to her! What a load of shit!"
"Fuck you, Granger!"
"You see this middle finger? Take your own and shove it up your pathetic arse, Mudblood! If you even know how, that is!"
"You jealous tramp! How dare you show your face here after what you did! It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're responsible for this mess!"
"You'll never be better than her! Get over yourself, Granger!"
"Don't you DARE taint this dungeon! Don't even think about it! Fleur hates you, alright! SCRAM!"
…and this was how Hermione found herself in her own Common Room, a crying mess while she sat with Harry and Ron. She explained the entire situation to them and they understood completely. Ron looked a little off for reasons unbeknownst to Hermione, but she soon forgot all about him. Harry immediately offered Hermione his Invisibility Cloak, and she nearly kissed him when he gave it to her.
As soon as she thanked him, she left and went straight to the kitchens to regrettably ask the House Elves for extra food. Fleur was bound to be hungry when she woke up, though Hermione herself couldn't stomach anything; the onslaught she received was still fresh in her mind.
Sneaking in the Common Room with the Cloak on was simple, as was getting in Fleur's chambers unnoticed. The hard part was actually figuring out what to do with herself once she was inside.
Hermione remembered marvelling at how spick and span Fleur's room is. A feeling of power swam throughout the ambiance, and Hermione remembered all too well being drawn to how homey Fleur's room felt, despite the power within. While she waited for Fleur to wake, she managed to finish her homework, though her eyes wandered to Fleur's form on the bed multiple times.
It wasn't until she finished with her work and pulled up a chair to Fleur's bed to monitor her more closely did she start to feel the ache once more. Questions ran through her mind, running triathlons but still finding no answers. The sweat of their toils ran down her face with excruciating stubbornness; holding Fleur's hand was all she could do to keep her heart from screaming the answers to her questions that she did not want to hear or say or even think about yet…
But now that Fleur was awake and looking at her with such an expression…she couldn't ignore anything anymore. The power she felt from Fleur's room alone could not compare to the sheer command Fleur held now. And again, being in a bed and unable to move this way or that without pain and dizziness didn't seem to faze her. Nothing ever did. Nothing ever could.
Fleur was the embodiment, to Hermione, of something that she could never touch, never be, never quite understand. But her mind and heart was screaming from the very depths of her that she wanted this knowledge. Hermione needed something…she wasn't sure what it was she needed, but she felt secure even if Fleur was staring her down while Hermione was technically the one above her.
Also, technically, they were friends… So, they needed to start somewhere. Staring and crying wasn't getting her anywhere. Hermione sniffled one last time and calmed her silent tears, at least for the moment, before she searched her throat and heart for the right tone of voice, a soft but certain tone, to hand to Fleur, to show her…something.
That something…that inexplicable something kept tugging at her vocal chords, but she swallowed and endured the sting before willing herself to speak…
"It's nice to see you awake again… I'm sure you're wondering what happened…" Hermione licked her lips expectantly, noticing a strange flash behind Fleur's eyes as she did so. But Fleur said nothing. Hermione chewed her tongue a bit before deciding to go with just a soft tone with which to speak with… "I'm so sorry… This is all my fault… I… Well… You see—"
"Out with it."
"S-sorry…" Hermione flushed considerably and nearly kicked herself to not flinch at the spite in Fleur's commandeering and still rather hushed tone of voice. Still, the softness in her own tone prevailed while she tried as she spoke to find the right words, no matter how impossible it seemed. "Well… I assume you remember that I found you behind one of the greenhouses…?"
"Vertigo. I have it. I know."
"What…? How?"
Again, Fleur chose not to respond. Hermione winced; Fleur must have known what the dangers of the flowers were if she was trying to get rid of them… Fleur seemed to see the understanding swim through Hermione's eyes and merely continued to stare, to observe. Hermione blinked stupidly for a moment, completely thrown by the intensity in Fleur's eyes, despite how surreptitiously warm they might have been under the surface.
But…now was not the time for that. Later…
"Well, Fleur… I suppose you can guess that I volunteered to, ah…care for you… I-it's the least I can do… After all, I hope that we're still…still friends. I'm so…terribly, terribly sorry…"
"You amuse me." Fleur's tone was ebbing with a cryptic edge but Hermione tried to let it go over her head.
"What do you mean…?"
"You've never said a word to me in seven years. Look at you now. You're—"
"Pathetic… I know."
Hermione hung her head slightly, though unable to tear her eyes from Fleur's. The frozen gaze turned into a mock amusement, the trademark Slytherin sneer upon her face… Hermione bit her lip and chewed the thin layer of skin while she watched the shadows on Fleur's face flicker with the candlelight. Her eyes were too dark with something, a mysterious kind of something to see the fire in her eyes at all…
"Actually, no," Fleur mused, raising her right eyebrow as she spoke. Hermione widened her eyes momentarily, managing to catch a small bit of playfulness, however small or illusory it may have been.
"Then what am I to you…?"
"You are…" Fleur thought for a moment, still studying Hermione's eyes. Slowly. Ambitiously… "You are… ignorant. I have other words… But I'd rather save them for later."
"Later as in when…? Does this mean we can still be friends?"
"Friends, enemies, rivals – whatever. I don't care, really. Your motives are shady."
"I… I know… I mean… I've just been so…so… frustrated… all these years."
"All…these years… Years… All of these years without me…"
"What…?"
Hermione blanched; Fleur's eyes slowly went out of focus, but her gaze never left hers. Hermione finally remembered the feeling in her hands and held on to Fleur's tenderly, patiently… She wasn't expecting this so soon. Madam Pomfrey did warn Hermione that a hallucination might occur when Fleur's memory is jogged in some way, but it would pass. No matter what, Hermione simply had to keep talking to her.
She just had to be there for her…
"Gabrielle… You've grown…so much. I've missed you…" Fleur's voice was hollow and yet still so mellow. Hermione swallowed the prickles in her throat and tried to smile while she nodded.
"I've missed you too…"
"I knew you weren't gone… I've had hope all these years. Hope…it overcomes everything. It always prevails…"
"You're right…"
"Of course… of course. You're my little sister; you'll believe anything I say… well… you're not so little anymore. How old would you be now…? Thirteen…"
"Yes… I… would be…" Hermione felt a strange sting in her eyes from Fleur's choice of words…
"Mmm… That's wonderful, Gabby… I hope you're not angry with me. I did what I could but I just wasn't…brave enough. I never did tell you that I'm sorry…"
"There's no need to apologise, Fleur… You…you did what you could, just like you said. I'm not angry…"
"You're too nice…" Fleur sighed contentedly and gripped one of Hermione's hands a little while she smiled sadly. Hermione fought a torrent of emotions within; mainly confusion and guilt rip more tears from her eyes… "I'm angry, though… at…myself… Maybe… I don't know."
"Why…?"
"Gabrielle, don't you see…? You… you're crying… No, no… Don't cry… See…? That's why… I don't…know… I don't… Come here… Come here… Let me hold you again… It's been…too long…"
Fleur smiled once more while she let go of Hermione's hands to move the duvet. Hermione didn't risk hesitating before she crawled underneath the emerald warmth and let her head be guided to the crook of Fleur's neck. Surprisingly warm arms enveloped her sobbing form while she sunk in the incredibly comfortable mattress with her; shivers attacked her while Fleur replaced the duvet over the both of them, singing French lullabies while they familiarised themselves with the others' body so close to their own…
Hermione shut her eyes, the ritual of crying now all too familiar now. Fleur's nails gently scratched random patterns on her trembling back underneath her white blouse, her voice surprisingly soothing and water-smooth. Their legs were entwined, both smooth to the touch to the other… Hermione felt herself nearly clinging to Fleur to keep herself from falling into an abyss. An abyss of reality that Fleur was really holding her sister, and not her… An abyss that Fleur probably didn't care for Hermione at all… But she kept holding her.
The feeling of Fleur's hair just over the pillow upon her tear-stained face was surprisingly…homey. Just like Fleur's room; an expected feeling of desolateness came with Fleur, but she was so gentle. She was subdued again, warm to the touch and warm with her soft, wondrous singing drifting through Hermione's ears.
The sweetest sadness in Fleur's voice helped Hermione to drift off to sleep, feeling somewhat more subdued herself that Fleur didn't seem to hate her… Fear that Fleur would be angry and start thrashing around upon waking and finding Hermione in her arms didn't even cross her mind.