Sweet, life giving air rushed back into her lungs without warning as she collapsed to the cold, stone floor. Distantly, she recognized that the man who had cast both curses on her must be dead. Oh, Harry, she thought morosely as a wave of anguish that had nothing to do with her soon-to-be-dead captors passed through her. It hadn’t been long ago that he had been all too unwilling to slay Voldemort’s followers, much like Dumbledore before him.
“There’s a line in a war like this,” he had told her. “It’s a line between what’s right, and what’s easy. If we lose that, what do we have left?”
She wondered if it had truly been her fault that he crossed that imaginary line in the sand; if it had been solely her influence, her lies, and her betrayal that had made him so unflinchingly ruthless in his pursuit of Voldemort and his followers. Had it been her? Or had the war and the weight of all the expectations piled on his young shoulders finally proved too much of a burden for him to shoulder?
The vocal, passionate, convincing piece of her that always moved to absolve her of guilt – the part that turned the other way when Order members began to go missing – said it was the second one. That the pressures of war had, in the end, forced Harry to give up the moral high ground that he had clung to so desperately after his mentor’s death.
The quiet part of her that ached to have some, any, small influence over Harry, regardless of how she had betrayed him, claimed that it was her fault. Her mission had been simple: get close to Harry Potter and report on his doings to her contact. Nothing more, nothing less. Falling in love with him hadn’t been a part of the plan.
Silent tears began to leak from her eyes at the thought, beginning their trek down her face as she raised it to the sounds of battle.
Spellfire had reduced much of the once resplendent hall to rubble, and a kaleidoscope of color greeted Fleur’s eyes as she watched the five men still standing duel for their lives. Four wore the mask and robes of Voldemort’s Death Eaters. One wore jeans and a black jumper.
It wasn’t a fair fight.
One of the masked men twirled his wand, causing a piece of rubble to morph into a vicious looking grim that leapt for the man in jeans almost before it was fully formed. Harry’s blasting curse obliterated it before it made it five feet before his wand transitioned into a flawless parry that sent a lethal looking spell through a window. A horizontal sweep of his wand sent forth a wave of power that knocked two of his foes off their feet and sent them careering away.
Ducking out of the way of a red spell that had been aimed at his chest, Harry conjured a slab of stone to block the sickly green light of a killing curse. His wand moving faster than Fleur’s eyes could track in their watery state, he banished the resulting shrapnel back at the Death Eater. The stone fragments caught the unsuspecting man in the chest and neck, and he dropped limply to the floor.
His feet moving so that he would face the two Death Eaters he had banished when they rejoined the fray, Harry swished his wand upward, a golden shield springing to life to absorb a barrage of curses his fourth opponent sent his way. Wordlessly, Harry twirled his wand in a complex pattern, and a torrent of twisting, golden flame erupted. The flames covered the distance between him and the Death Eater in the blink of an eye, and the masked man could only scream as his body was consumed.
To Fleur’s eyes, in the middle of a warzone, surrounded by strife, and his golden flames banishing the darkness of night with the strength of the sun, Harry Potter had never looked so magnificent.
That same illumination disappeared a moment later, and the hall seemed to be in total darkness in its absence for a moment.
It passed as the green light of twin killing curses lit the room, the telltale rush of death only ending when they met two thick, stone tiles Harry had raised from the floor. The shrapnel turned into a flock of butterflies before it could touch him, and Harry parried a red spell with the tip of his wand before a corkscrew motion turned the floor beneath the feet of a Death Eater into quicksand. The man was powerless to stop himself from being dragged down, and his struggles were halted when he took a white spell that had leapt from Harry’s wand with a bang like a gunshot to the face.
All but stupefied at the deaths of all his allies, the final Death Eater stood trembling. Suddenly, he turned to Fleur and raised his wand, a curse on his lips. The French witch felt a singular spike of fear that lasted only an instant, until the pale blue light of a lancing curse tore through the final man’s skull.
Her blue eyes shifted to Harry, who stood with his wand still outstretched from delivering the killing blow. Slowly, he lowered it, his eyes moving to survey the now ruined hall before finally settling on her.
To her astonishment, Fleur felt no fear as she met Harry’s green irises. She felt only that same anguish from earlier at the thought of having betrayed this man so completely; anguish at her own foolishness, for falling prey to Voldemort’s machinations, at being responsible for the deaths of five members of the Order of the Phoenix by passing information to her contact, and for believing for a second that there was any hope that Bill would be returned to her after being disappearing.
From her prone position on the floor, Fleur managed to push herself into a sitting position by bracing herself up against a chair, one of the few untouched parts of the hall. Blue eyes met green once more as her head came to rest upon the armrest, tears now freely cascading down her pale cheeks.
“Are you going to kill me, ‘Arry?”