Written for The Potter Complex, Round 3
Warnings: Some mild innuendoes, swearing
Word Count: 2207
Prompts:
The Potter Complex:
Transfiguration - Write a story about a huge change
The Menagerie on Discord July Bingo:
[Trope] Coming of Age Story
[Character] Fleur Delacour
AN/ Yes, this is about an accented character. No, I will not be writing her accent :)
'Home Away From Home'
Fleur stood grinning in the French Ministry of Magic's international Floo sector. On her left arm, she held an elegant leather purse; one that her Father bought her the year prior when she reached her majority. He'd winked at her when she squealed at the sight of it, and her mother had nodded, obviously thinking it was elegant enough. It was now packed with all her worldly belongings (mostly clothes and vinyls that played her beloved Chopin and Berlioz), everything she might need as she marched out into the world - supposedly ready to live by herself.
Her parents watched as her sister, Gabrielle, attached herself to Fleur's free arm and chatted excitedly in French about what Fleur might do and see once she got to see the world by herself. Her father's expression mirrored hers, with a broad smile that widened with every excited whispered exchange between the two girls. Her mother's face held no expression, but a reluctant biting of her lip, watching the two of them with mild disapproval.
She thought Fleur's plan to get a job, that too in politically tempestuous England, foolish and naive. Her mother thought she was wasting her potential by not getting further schooling, and had said so enough times out loud. "Tell me why again you choose to dally off to work at some bank, my love?"
Her voice dripped with something close to condescension, but Fleur valiantly ignored it. There was no point in starting another argument when she was only minutes away from leaving. She glanced at her father and he nodded, smile not dropping. He had always said to leave things on a good note. "Maman, I'm going to learn Engl-"
Her sister coughed next to her, "She means head–" A sharp elbow to the side stopped her from completely revealing the true reason she found herself going to England, but her father snorted, amused, all the same.
"English!" she said quickly, glad her mother hadn't noticed their exchange.
"You already know English, dear."
Her sister cackled next to her, dragging the gaze of their Mother, and Fleur forced herself to not cup a hand to the bitch's mouth. She smiled charmingly, "But, I can always know it better! There's no harm in seeking improvement!"
"Why not another country, why specifically England, love–"
Her father, the angel, saved her by calling attention to the time, "Oh no, look at the time my dear, Fleur must leave now to not miss her slot!" It was time.
She gave her sister and father one last squeeze before turning to her mother with a practiced curtsy.
Taking her family in one last time before she went away for the summer, Fleur said, "I'll miss you but I'll be fine," before turning on her heel and walking toward her designated international Floo gate.
"Bye, darling." Her mother called after her, "Be good."
After a couple of hours of waiting in a British customs line and grabbing an order of Chinese takeaway from a shop near her flat, which was just as exciting as it seemed in all the muggle films that Fleur had watched, she found herself standing at the door of what would be her flat for the next three months.
She hadn't actually seen the flat before then, having applied for it immediately after seeing the price and location in the listing she'd seen in the Daily Prophet. Honestly, it was a clean, furnished flat near her new job in Diagon Alley for nearly dirt cheap was basically a miracle. And what Fleur saw as a sign from the universe for her to pursue the handsome redhead she'd met during the tournament who said he worked at Gringotts. Who knows, maybe he'd come back here with her soon.
Sure the listing in the British newspaper didn't have any pictures, but she thought it would be a show of bad faith to ask for some. How bad could it be?
Fleur slid the small silver key she'd been handed by the sketchy-looking man downstairs into the doorknob and gently turned the sticky knob, excited to see what would be her home for the next three months– maybe more if she could convince Maman that there was a point to her being there.
She opened her new front door only to immediately wrinkle her nose at the sheer stench coming from the apartment.
A quick stench-repelling charm and Lumos later found her staring at the old, yellowing flat in horror. It was distinctly not clean or furnished, the place was gratingly empty, and the entire apartment was far worse than she'd imagined.
It was dirty, there were odd brown stains on the walls and ceiling, dust, and unidentifiable goo as far as the eye could see. The floor was comprised of large yellowing tiles that had brownish-black grit between them and large scratches that made her not want to think about the flat's past tenants. She shifted her focus to the walls, choosing, wisely, not to toe off her shoes until she'd scrubbed the place with at least two dozen Scourgifys.
The walls had several holes in them and seemed to be molding, parts of them having been taken over by black sludge-like bodies. The sight of it made her immediately cast a bubble head charm and march to inspect the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen that made up the flat.
'Well, I've got three days until work starts,' she thought, grimacing, 'now I have something to do.'
The cleaning ended up taking five hours of constant back-aching work because apparently, Scourgify can only do so much and that actually removing year-old, if not decade-old from the state of them, stains took elbow grease. Elbow grease that Fleur had never applied before.
Her family had enough to afford a couple of effective, but kind, housekeepers who never spent enough time cleaning to let her wonder whether cleaning really took that much effort. She could imagine Alice and Mervin chortling at the sight of her sweaty exhaustion. The two would work in tandem for hours at times, those times being when Maman decided to host a dinner party, and always seemed at ease.
As Fleur struggled to catch her breath after several continuous hours of scrubbing her disgusting floors and bathroom, she wasn't at ease. But she wanted to be.
She vowed to herself that she would be. Eventually. With practice.
Later, after her breaths had calmed and her sweat dried, she wandered back into her bedroom and took a couple more hours to sort out her closet. The closet that was built into the room's wall was nice (at least there was something in her furnished apartment) but not nearly large enough to fit her entire, rather extensive wardrobe. As luck would have it, she was rather good at extension charms and was able to get everything in without much more effort.
Fleur emerged from the bedroom, having sorted out all the cleaning and unpacking by then, tired and famished. She looked far from the put-together princess she'd looked like when she'd arrived at the flat hours ago but refused to rectify that until she no longer had a dizzying hunger headache.
Fleur made quick work of marching to the kitchen and toward her fridge. It looked remarkably similar to the ones that she'd seen in her precious muggle movies and somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered how muggle technology could possibly work in the presence of magic but in the haze of her hunger, she chose not to question it.
She opened the fridge door with a sharp deft swing, the thought of food bringing her sudden energy, only to find nothing in it. It wasn't by any regard clean, but it was completely empty of anything but a half-empty water bottle that she immediately floated toward her trash can and a sad soy sauce packet that lay alone on the empty expense of a clear shelf.
"Okay, no food in the fridge," she said to herself, trying to soothe the ever-increasing urge to scream in frustration. "No worries. There's probably something in one of these cabinets, something shelf-stable. Maybe something nutritious, even!" With the new hope, she turned toward the brown wooden cabinets above her marble countertop, choosing to open each one and inspect it thoroughly for anything she might be able to eat.
After five cabinets that were as empty as the fridge, she turned to the last one with a kind of desperation that she couldn't say she'd ever felt before. "There has to be something in you…right?"
She opened the last cabinet slowly, almost as if under the impression that if she opened it as slowly as possible food might appear inside by itself.
A squeak came from within it and she found herself face to face with a small brown mouse. It was holding a cracker from a small packet that he must have found. It paused in eating its cracker and stared at her.
Fleur screamed. The mouse went back to its food, unsurprised.
It wasn't that she was scared of mice because she wasn't, but the shock of seeing another living being in a place you thought empty is enough to make anyone scream.
The mouse continued to watch her, unperturbed, and seeing the calmness of the little creature helped Fleur calm her heart down. After a minute of watching the mouse eat, and breathing, she approached the cabinet to greet it. "Hello." It squeaked at her in turn.
She silently cast a sanitizing charm on the little creature, not that it cared. "I think I will call you Hector, after the great Berlioz! May I adopt you?" The mouse squeaked again, Fleur took it as consent and smiled, gently patting it.
Later, over a floo call.
"Maman, Papa, I have adopted a child!"
Her father snorted, "You sure work fast, child mine."
Her mother gasped, "You've only just moved in, how will you be able to handle a child? Especially in England as a single–"
Fleur breathed out a laugh and held up the little brown mouse in her hands, "This is Hector!" Hector squeaked at them in greeting.
"...Hello Hector."
Her father squealed, "I love my grandchild already."
Fleur stood in the foyer of the French Ministry of Magic's international Floo sector. Around her, crowds of witches and wizards were bustling toward the fireplaces, eager to not miss their allotted time slots, but she couldn't focus on anything but the teary-eyed look on her mother's face.
"Fleur!"
"Hello, Maman!" She couldn't hold back her smile.
Her mother was a strong woman who made a point of always making the best impression. Maman had always seemed like the picture of perfection: never straying from her elegant chignon and too-perfect makeup, never standing quietly in the face of injustice, never letting anyone think less of her. Her father often exclaimed that magic's greatest gift to him was being able to be with her and Fleur would always agree. Her mother would then throw her head back in tinkling laughter.
When she was little, Fleur had hoped to become as strong as her mother, as perfect.
But as she watched the inky mascara drip down her mother's smooth cheeks with the current of tears that seemed to not end, as she watched her always perfect mother break, the image that she had built of Maman broke rather suddenly. And she found herself shifting that image of perfection.
Mother had never cried before, at least never so uglily. Choked sobs broke her out of reverie and she chose to take the moment to look. In front of her stood Mother, still her Mother, but a version of her Maman that she'd never seen before, much less interacted with. There stood a version of her mother that she hadn't realized even existed.
She reached forward almost absently and pulled the elder woman into a hug. "It's alright," she soothed unsurely. "I wasn't so far away."
Her mother fixed her head in the space between her shoulders and neck. "I know." She said, "I'm just coming to realize that you're not a little girl anymore, my love."
Fleur almost felt affronted. "I haven't been one for a while, Maman."
"No, it's more so now. You've grown, my Flower, in more than age."
Her sister moved from where she was standing with their grinning father and toward where their mother and Fleur stood embracing. Gabrielle's eyebrows furrowed together as she inspected her older sister that she hadn't seen in many months. "She isn't much taller than she was when she left?"
Their mother laughed wetly, so unlike her usual tinkling. It didn't take away from her beauty, from her strength. "It's more than that, my darling, she's grown more mature since I last saw her."
"You've seen me every other day through the fireplace."
"But, how much can one really see through a fire?" Her mother looked up at her, face lit up with a crooked smile and Fleur found herself smiling back.
Gabrielle looked at the two of them as if they'd gone mad, but Fleur felt like she understood and seeing her Mother smile up at her, she knew she understood.
And wasn't that special.