Word count: 2333
Chapter 7: the story of Gabrielle (part one)
France, the Delacours' Estate, 3 years ago
Gabrielle can tell that her sister is hiding something from her almost immediately. Even though Fleur is almost eight years older than her, they've always been very close, and there is nothing—well, nothing age appropriate anyway—that Gabrielle doesn't know about her older sister. Nothing.
So, yeah, when soon after her twenty-first birthday, Fleur starts to withdraw on herself, Gabrielle notices.
Fleur doesn't even try to be subtle about it, too. She looks scared all the time, and she wears long sleeves even though it's summer and she hates the heat. She also refuses to go to the beach with them, or when she doesn't, she stays out of the water when Gabrielle knows that her sister loves swimming more than anything else.
Their parents are concerned too, Gabrielle can see it, but whenever Gabrielle tries to talk to them about it, they just say that it's probably Fleur having to adjust to being an adult, now. As if Fleur wasn't already the most adult person Gabrielle knows—parents not included.
But nevermind them—Gabrielle can figure out the mystery of what's up with her sister on her own. She's always had a knack for that kind of thing, it can't be that difficult to solve this one.
.x.
It's lucky it's still summer for a good month and a half—summer holidays, that is—because otherwise, Gabrielle would never manage to find the find to spy on her sister half as efficiently.
And Fleur doesn't even have the decency to keep a diary anymore—she stopped when Gabrielle was seven, and okay, that might have been because Gabrielle kept looking into it, but still, that's no excuse for making their lives so much more difficult.
Gabrielle lasts a week, following her sister around and trying to figure out what bothers her so much—she's not being threatened or anything, which, given the level of stress Fleur seems to show, was Gabrielle's first and second guesses—but when nothing gives, she decides that asking her sister might be the best option.
Or well, the only option that might give her some results, since, at this point, she's decided any hint of an answer is better than the nothing she has now.
Because Fleur isn't getting better. In fact, if anything, she's getting worse: she's not sleeping (those bags under her eyes may be cleverly concealed but the makeup she uses is not) and she's barely eating too, pushing her food around on her plate like no one will notice if she spreads her food out enough.
Well, Gabrielle notices, and she worries.
She finds her sister on the beach, sitting cross-legged and bare-footed on the sand. She's wearing jean shorts and a thin white shirt, and it has long sleeves. She's tracing some kind of symbols in the sand with her index fingers, looking almost wistful, but when Gabrielle approaches, she wipes them away, turning to face her sister with a grin that is too wide to be true.
"What are you doing here, Gabrielle? Shouldn't you be helping Mum with the garden?"
Gabrielle snorts as she plops down next to her sister. "She told me to get out of there, because apparently I would eat all the berries instead of picking them if I stayed," she replies, pouting.
Fleur laughs. "Well, she's not wrong—didn't you get sick last year from doing that?"
Gabrielle crosses her arms, pout more pronounced now. "I would have been fine this time, I know when I should stop, now."
"I bet you do," Fleur says, laughing. "But really, why are you here? I can't imagine anything Mum said would have been enough to keep you away from these berries if you wanted them," she jokes.
"I… I was worried about you," Gabrielle confesses, staring straight into her sister's dark blue eyes. "I know that something's happened to you, and I can see that you have a secret and that you're worried too, but you know you can tell me anything. I'm your sister, Fleur—you can trust me with anything, you know that, right?"
Fleur sighs, flinching a little as she looks away. "I do know that, Gabrielle, but this isn't some harmless little thing—this isn't me trying out Mum's makeup when I was fifteen, or me sneaking out to a party after dark. This is important, and dangerous." Her eyes soften. "I just—it wouldn't be safe for you to be involved in this."
Gabrielle fights back a shiver as she looks at her sister more closely. There's something wild and scared in those eyes, something Gabrielle's only ever seen once before—in a wild cat she had found one summer, hurt and alone. She had wanted to bring it back home to help it, but when she had approached it, it had hissed at her and slashed thin, red lines of fire on her hand.
She had thought it had been mean, but her mother had explained, as she cleaned the cuts, that the cat had just been scared.
"He probably thought you were going to hurt it," she had said.
"Me?" Gabrielle had replied, drawing back in surprise. "Why would it think that?"
"I don't know," her mother had shrugged sadly. "But it's probably best we leave it alone," she had said, tugging on Gabrielle's hand until she followed.
"But I wanted to help it," Gabrielle had whined as they left, looking up at her mother with tearful eyes.
"I know, sweetie. But there are some things you can't help with," she had replied, wiping Gabrielle's tears away softly.
Fleur really does look a bit like that cat, now—like she'll run away or attack if Gabrielle pushes any harder, and so very scared, but Gabrielle may not have been able to help that cat, but nothing will keep her from helping her sister.
"If you're involved, I'm involved," she tells Fleur, staring at her with all the determination she can muster.
Fleur smiles sadly, and Gabrielle notices that she's rubbing her wrist.
Fleur's been doing a lot of that, lately—even with her wrists covered, she keeps touching the inside of her right wrist, and Gabrielle's stomach fills with dread as her mind comes up with an idea as to why.
She shies away from it, wants to pretend it can't be—and it can't, please, this is her sister, the one who always was there for her—but it fits. Oh god, does it fit.
With a lump in her throat, Gabrielle slowly reaches forward and pulled Fleur's right wrist to herself. She rolls up the sleeve slowly, her fingers trembling, and she's hit with a wave of relief when the skin appears bare.
Maybe she had been wrong, she thinks; but no. One look at Fleur's eyes is enough to tell her that she's not.
The makeup rubs away easily under her fingers, and Gabrielle uncovers a whole tattoo on her sister's skin with a heavy stomach.
She's not sure why her sister is letting her do this, letting her see when she had obviously been trying so hard to hide it, but from this close, the dark bags under Fleur's eyes are unmistakable, and no amount of foundation can quite hide how tired she is. Perhaps Fleur is too tired to keep on hiding, then.
"Hermione Granger," Gabrielle reads out loud, fingers tracing the tiny black letters. "Doesn't sound very French to me," she adds, twisting her lips into a smile.
"Yeah, it doesn't, does it?" Fleur snorts, and Gabrielle is happy to see some amusement sparkling in her sister's eyes.
Gabrielle lets go of Fleur's wrist. "So, you have a soulmate, then."
It's not really a question—the proof is there, after all—but Fleur acts like it is anyway. "Seems so," she replies, with a dead smile.
They shiver, almost in synch. They both know the stories, after all: people with soulmates are dangerous. Being bound so closely to someone else makes you do crazy things, and history tells them that almost every notable incident can be traced back to a pair of soulmates who thought they knew better than the rest of the world, and ended up making everyone miserable as a result.
"It won't happen to you," Gabrielle swears, stomach twisting painfully as she looks at her sister pleadingly. "We won't let it—you're good, Fleur, alright? We'll just, we'll hide it, and no one will ever have to know, and if you don't, if you don't meet them, meet her, then you'll be just fine, okay?"
Fleur smiles softly, wrist drawn to herself. She's rubbing it again, Gabrielle notices, and she really, really wants her to stop. She simply swallows instead of saying anything about it.
"Yeah," Fleur replies, "I'll be fine."
She's lying and they both know it, but for now, that lie is the only thing they can do.
They should report Fleur to the authorities, but then they'll take her away. It's what they do, when someone has a soulmate—and yes, it's for the best, and for everyone's protections, but Gabrielle doesn't want to say goodbye to her sister if she doesn't have to.
They sit in silence after that, and despite the sun, Gabrielle feels cold inside.
How long, she wonders, do they have until someone finds out? How long can they keep this a secret?
.x.
They only get a handful of months, in the end. It's rather stupid, what unveils Fleur's status, but after what felt like so long, they had gotten complacent.
One moment they're laughing, walking in the streets of Nice and enjoying the late autumn sun if not the people surrounding them, and the next Fleur's right sleeve snags on something and rips with a loud noise that sounds deafening to Gabrielle's ears.
Fleur freezes right where she stands, skin paling rapidly. Her hand flies to cover her wrist, but it's too late. Somehow, some way, people have seen them, have seen the mark on Fleur's wrist where her makeup had run, and already they're starting to make calls, backing away from the two blonde sisters like they're contagious.
"You'll tell them you didn't know, right?" Fleur whispers to her urgently.
"Huh?" Gabrielle asks confusedly, heart pounding in her chest as she starts to panic.
"If they ask you—when they ask you, you'll tell them you didn't know I had a soulmark, alright?" Fleur repeats, blue eyes burning with a desperation that almost makes them black.
"I- No, Fleur, I can't lie—I'll tell them you're good, please, you know you are, they can't just take you away, please."
Fleur smiles sadly. "I love you, Gabrielle," she mouths, before she straightens up, her face turning cold as ice. She pushes Gabrielle into the crowd, lips pulling into a kind of mean smirk that looks utterly out of place on her face.
"Bet you never saw that coming, now, did you?" she asks, and Gabrielle would laugh if she didn't feel like crying—Fleur is reenacting every bad villainy soulmate cliché in the books, and the people are eating it up.
"Fleur, please," Gabrielle starts to beg, before she realizes that no matter what she says now, she'll play into her sister's game.
I'm sorry, Fleur's blue eyes seem to say, and Gabrielle mouths it back quickly.
This is her sister's last gift, she realizes, and despite how much she hates it, Gabrielle can't bear to take it away from her. Not when she doesn't have a good alternative—or any alternative, for that matter.
Fleur continues ranting, but Gabrielle's ears are filled with white noise, and she doesn't hear a word of it. The crowd closes in on her, pulling her away from her sister and toward what they believe is safety—as if she needs protection from her sister—and someone is crooning in her ears that it's going to be alright.
"You couldn't have known," the voice says, and it sounds too kind for the things it's implying.
It's getting hard to breathe, and Gabrielle is thankful when she finds herself being pushed toward a free seat, a glass of fresh water in her hands that she can pretend to sip from as she watches her sister being taken away.
Her hands shake so much that she spills more than half the glass on herself, but she barely notices. She keeps staring at the place her sister stood even once the crowd disperses, and she's also barely aware that someone's asking her questions about her sister. She doesn't even know what she replies, but it must be satisfying enough, because someone pats her on the shoulder, and then tells her that she's free to go.
She stumbles back home in a daze.
Her parents are there, waiting for her, and somehow, that's when it hits her—Fleur is gone, and Gabrielle had been entirely helpless to stop it. Fleur, who had helped her so much, who had always been there for Gabrielle when she had had even the slightest hint of a problem, was gone, and Gabrielle hadn't done anything to stop it from happening.
She had just gone along with it.
"Oh, sweetie, it's going to be okay," her mother whispers into her hair as she draws Gabrielle into a hug. "It's all going to be okay."
Her father moves closer, pulling them both into a hug that makes Gabrielle feel so safe she can't stop her tears from falling.
"It's going to be okay," her father echoes, and Gabrielle doesn't reply, just hugs them tighter.
It's not, she knows. They've lost Fleur, lost part of their family, but maybe—just maybe—they can still get her back.
There has to be a way. After all, her sister isn't bad, and she's certainly not evil—surely whoever took her will see that, and then they'll bring her back.
They just have to wait.