Fleur D'Épines

But he who fears the thorn, should never lust for roses. Fleur Delacour-Weasley

[ofcbooks-blog]

    “ Two actually. And a lot of other books in French…well, those just helped me to put everything into place.” she confessed with a small smile resting on her lips . “ I mean, since I couldn’t take a French class I had decided to learn it on my own. And I somehow suceeded. Why? Is reading dictionaries a bad way of learning?” 

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“It’s not one I considered.” How she learned was experiences, being prepared to come to Hogwarts, dating Roger, being prepped for the tournament, working in the bank and being with Bill. She still doesn’t speak it fluently but she can hold a lengthy conversation which was progress. 

[madtowergirl]

“Maybe I could teach you some, or attempt to, in exchange for you giving me some basics in French,” he suggested with a grin. “You never know where the next dragon reservation will be established.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“Of course, frère.” Fleur said with affection. “In French there are two ways to say dragon. The first, is dragon.” She chuckled. “But the second, tracteur blindé means armored truck or tractor in English.” And that they were, Fleur could still remember the smell of her dress being burned off her body. 

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

It is one swift and graceful movement, grabbing the man but the collar of his shirt and flattening him onto his back between bites of her cream cheese bagel. Fleur glanced up at the person who’d been shouting after him with a long exhale. “I believe he took something from you, yes?” 

[m-rphy]

magical girls aesthetic: beauxbatons  

[legacyreigned]

Harry doesn’t answer for a long moment. He doesn’t want to lie to Fleur – he respects her too much. And the answer he can give her isn’t one she’ll want to hear.

     “I don’t know,” he says finally. On a whim, he reaches forward and covers her hand with his, squeezing lightly before sitting back again. “But I’m going to make sure you’re okay. All of you.” The Weasleys are his family, as good as his blood. And even if she wasn’t a Weasley, Harry would walk barefoot on glass before he’d let anything touch her. “Do you – do you want a security team? We can do that. I can get that set up for you.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“No, no. I don’t want to scare Bill. He’s already got a lot on his plate.” Fleur dismissed, her concern genuine for both Harry and Bill. She doesn’t want to worry either of them, and Fleur’s sure that her shoulders are big enough to carry this on her own if she needs too. “I can handle this.” 

[ofcbooks-blog]

   “ No, actually she said that her father isn’t as mannered as a goat …or something like that.” Hermione took her shot in understanding French as she shrugged her shoulders. “ But, I reckon your guess it’s right. I just read loads of dictionaries…you speak it as I speak English…so I should probably let my opinions to myself.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

Fleur paused, wondering what Hermione meant by mannered. From Fleur’s understanding, manners were saying please and she hadn’t heard it used in the way Hermione just had before. She made a note to ask Bill or Harry when she saw him next. “You’re guess was as good as mine on this one.” Fleur paused again. “Did you really read a whole dictionary?” 

[madtowergirl]

“That’s good,” he smiled. No matter what the others said, Charlie has always liked Fleur and wanted her to feel welcomed in the family. “Soon our family is gonna speak all kinds of languages,” he laughed. “Except my rusty Romanian is good maybe for the dragons, not much else.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“I doubt it’s as horrible as you think.” Fleur playfully bumped her shoulder against his feeling happy that she could be so comfortable around Bill’s brothers. “I’d love to hear some.”

[madtowergirl]

“I can understand that. Both those reasons, actually,” he laughed, shaking his head. “But that’s better now, isn’t it? I mean, mum can be pretty overwhelming, but she tones it down once she gets used to having someone around.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“It’s better.” Not perfect by any means, but better than it was before. “The french doesn’t sound as out of place as it used to.” Now that Bill’s picked up a few words as well, it was funny actually. Both of them speaking in a language that wasn’t quite English and definitely wasn’t quite French. 

[madtowergirl]

“I’ve been doing this for over 10 years now, flying and apparating back and forth, and still - every now and then - there’s this queasy feeling that knocks me down for the rest of the day. It’s not the greatest.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“I used to get the same thing when I visited my mother.” 

“Even more so when I visited yours.” Fleur joked playfully. 

[fandomfatale]

[bluesartgent]

[deathturned-deactivated20210504]

Truth be told, there is something outright intoxicating at the sound of a woman like Fleur Delacour complimenting her, and Astoria turns bright pink at the words and grins down at her shoes for a moment, every inch a bashful girl, rather than the battle-scarred woman she’s grown accustomed to being. “I’m pretty sure you could pull anything off,” she says honestly. “Though I don’t know if you’d bring Ophelia and her grave to mind – you’re not quite gloomy enough for that. The sea come to life, maybe.” Beautiful and dangerous and capricious and consuming – seems a good description. “Aphrodite at her birth, if you want to continue that connection.”

     It’s all too easy to flirt and to tease – and really, nobody could blame Astoria for it, flirting with a childhood hero. Fleur Delacour, the only woman in the Tournament, her skill constantly downplayed in favor of her beauty. She’d been twelve and positively mad about her, enough so that her hero-worship of Viktor Krum had fallen by the wayside. “You should be called a goddess everywhere you go,” Astoria says, perhaps a bit too honestly. “Can I get you a drink?”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

          “All I need is a shell.” She’s flattered, genuinely. Fleur is called beautiful more often than not, but the compliment normally ends there. You’re beautiful, and that’s it. Just beautiful, the word is powerful but it’s not an entire person. It never has been. 

         But the comparison to the sea is something deeper to her, maybe even more so than intended. After the tournament, it took years to step foot back into the water. Luxurious baths that she used to love now maybe her skittish and uneasy. Gabrielle should have died, and it would have been her fault if it weren’t for Harry. 

         In recent years however, she can see the water as something she came out of. Something she has an understanding with now. In some ways, in was the birth of something. And Fleur felt the full weight of the compliment.                                           “I would love one.”

[legacyreigned]

His hand’s a bit shaky when he reaches out to take the letter from Fleur’s hands. It might be anger, he thinks vaguely. Anger that someone would dare target Fleur – she’s strong and she’s every inch a fighter, just like any of the rest of them who survived the war, but she’s also kind, and that, Harry thinks, is rare. Too rare to be threatened and mistreated.

     Beyond that, Fleur is family. Harry’s family has always, always been of the chosen variety. As far as Harry’s concerned, that just makes his link to them stronger – blood is chance, but choice is deliberate. And the thought of anyone, anyone going after his family fills him with an entirely different kind of anchor. Hermione once accused him of having a hero complex, and maybe she was right… but he’ll take having a hero complex and a safe family any day.

     “If you need me to, I can keep a secret.” His eyes are on Fleur’s as he opens the envelope, and he doesn’t look down at the letter, not yet. “Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

         For a moment, she’s frightened in a way she wasn’t when she read the letter herself. Maybe it’s the reaction, how worried he seemed when she took the letter out of her bag. Maybe it’s something she hasn’t felt since she was eleven, something she thought she’d got over: the fear of being judged. Maybe it danced well with the fear of failing. 

   “You tell me.” She nods to the letter, lips pursed with the uneasy feeling in her stomach. “I don’t want to tell anyone about this, but between us. Do think my family is safe?”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“I’m fairly sure you just called his father a goat, but the words were so jumbled even I’m not sure.” Fleur said with her tea in hand, milk already turning it a lovely shade of beige as she dropped in her second sugar cube. Internally she was embracing the small victory of using jumbled correctly in a sentence. Externally, she might have been judging just a little bit. 

[legacyreigned]

“No, I’m – that’s not – ” Fleur’s smile brings the stuttering to a halt, though it’s not entirely wrong. Fleur looks beautiful as ever; Harry’s grown desensitized to it, and it merely registers to him the same way that the weather does. But there’s something that’s just not there, a light or a sparkle that’s not present anymore and that used to be.

     “Are you okay?” Harry asks, voice soft, concern evident. “You’re alone a lot. I worry.”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“I’m okay, Harry.” Fleur mirrored his soft tone, touched by his concern. She reaches forward to take his hand, giving it a small squeeze of encouragement before repeating her previous statement. “Like I said, William is busy. I have faced scarer beasts than the one’s in this room on my own, and even worst ones with you near by. Go, have fun.” She let her hand fall to her side with a smile. “They may call it a peace gala, but we all know whose party it really is.” 

[cestlaviegabby-blog]

“Why not? I’m nineteen, you know. Hardly an age where somebody can tell me what to do with my life…” She said with a small pout, devising a way in which she could, in fact, dye her hair. “And I believe you. I lived with you when you were going to school, remember? And for the stuff I either can’t or chose not to remember, there are pictures… Godawful, embarrassing pictures…” Smirking, she plucked a hat from the shelf and placed it on her head, posing with it.  

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

You’re blonde hair connects you to me, to mama. And you’re still a child, Fleur thought to herself. It’s unfair, she knows, to compare the two of them and the experiences they had. They had lived very different lives, in the years since the tournament.  And when Fleur thinks about herself at Gabrielle’s age she sees a very different picture than the one her sister has. “Even at my worst, I carried myself better than most.” 

[rcgerdavies-blog]

“Your propensity for food-related violence has always been my favorite thing about you,” Roger says, with an easy grin tugging at his lips, though he looks somewhat chastised at her next words. “I really am sorry about that,” he says, and he even means it. “The last few months have been–well, chaotic is a good way to describe it, I suppose. Good kind of chaotic, though, I think. What about you, then? What’s it like to be a married woman?”

[thcrnedflowers-blog]

“Good kind of chaotic?” Fleur tilted her head with a grin. “Who is she?” She’s curious, of course but more than that she’s happy for him. Roger being one the only exes that didn’t come to a brutal and dramatic end. He was one of the only one’s she could still call a friend after everything, and shamelessly she’s really happy she didn’t have to rip up her Yule ball pictures. 

“It is,” She paused, a crinkle in her nose appearing as she looked for a word in either large to describe the feeling and failing to do so. “Different than I expected.”