“Good evening Miss Delacour,” Harry began, amidst the polite hush of the party he had decided that they were to attend. “I apologise for asking you to accompany me on such short notice, but I fear that I had little other choice.”
“It’s quite alright, ‘Arry,” Fleur told him, her mouth curving into the smallest of smiles. Harry watched her watch him, her eyes tracing the path that nearly-everyone he spoke with did. First the scar, then the eyes, then the hair and then back to his eyes. Some hovered over the grey that had begun to streak into his hair in recent years, though most did not. “Anything for an old friend.”
They met in a brief embrace. Familiar, unextended. Fleur kissed both of his cheeks, as she always did, and Harry’s right arm dropped to her waist comfortably. Their heights, especially with her heels, brought the pair of them to eye-level with one another.
“I must confess, however, that I do not know why it is that you invited me here,” Fleur continued, her voice even. “Stockholm is magnificent, but if you wished for us to catch up, there are more convenient places.”
Harry heard the implication in her words. Two famous divorcees, drifting away from their home countries together. The press would have a field day if the word were to get out that such a thing was happening. Harry Potter seduced by the veela Fleur Delacour, her wretched beauty darkening his pure heart, they would say.
Harry grinned for a moment; he looked ten years younger when he did. “I’m not so sure that I need a great reason to see you, beyond meeting an old friend,” he said. His hand pressed gently against her waist, guiding her to walk with him away from the foyer and into the ballroom of the Hotel of the Magi. The ballroom was neither tasteful nor refined in design, wearing its wealth like a peacock wore its plumage. “However, if you require one, my initial interest was due to a charm that you had designed.”
They walked toward the west of the ballroom, where the evening’s band played upon a small stage. The noise became irritatingly loud as they did so, and so Harry drew Fleur closer to him so that they might hear one-another when they talked. “Which one?”
“I seem to recall a dinner I had attended once, with you and Gabrielle. I remember long silences, though neither you or her seemed to be greatly bothered by them,” Harry said, amused. With the barest touch of her wand, the spell was cast over the pair of them without a word spoken by Fleur to do so. Where once passing glances lingered over the pair of them, they drifted immediately into the periphery. “A wonderfully subtle piece of magic.”
“You brought me, here, for subtlety, Monsieur?” Fleur asked, her eyebrow raised, her look catching Harry’s eye sharply. He tilted his head, and the pair moved away from the band and into the centre of the hall. There was to be no meal at the event and so where there ought to have been a banquet table, there was an empty space for the denizens to dance. There were not many there that were partaking, but the night had only just begun.
“Something like that,” Harry agreed. “How is Gabi, by the way?”
“She still only dates dark-haired Englishmen, if that is what you were curious about,” Fleur told him. The rhythm of the music was slow, though in its slowness it began to take hold of the pair of them and soon they began to sway to it. They did not dance, but they were not still, either. “Truthfully, I think you would find her company preferable to my own this evening.”
“She is too young.”
“She is twenty-nine, ‘Arry,” Fleur argued, bemused. “Surely you would grow tired of such a poor excuse by now, non?”
“If I were not me, that might be true,” Harry told her, with a note of finality in his voice. “However, I do doubt that she will ever stop being too young.”
“So you brought me here for maturity?” asked Fleur. “Because, if that were true, you find yourself among rare company. There are few people that look toward one such as myself and hope for age, rather than youth.”
Her words held truth. She was thirty-nine and she was still as youthful in her image as she had been at twenty. There were exceptions to this, however. Her skin never aged, but her eyes did, their depths holding the truth of her lifetime. She had seen just as much as Harry had, and she had done so at an age too young, just as Harry had.
He met her eyes, for a moment. They shared a look, as they had done before in the dying days of their previous relationships. They had both been set on a journey toward ruin, yet neither held the power to prevent it and so all they could hope to do was watch the doom happen and hope that no-one else was caught within it.
Their hopes were successful, in the end, though that did not help either of them. Ginny was married again, her marriage giving her two children and the wealthiest husband in Britain. Bill had formed his own curse-breaking outfit with his own new spouse, an Irishwoman from Cork.
“I had hoped, for once, to spend an evening with another and be able to look into their eyes and not feel ancient,” Harry told her, amidst their locked gaze. “I cannot talk to someone of my own country without feeling like Albus Dumbledore, and I cannot talk to one outside of it without feeling as though I’m talking to a child.”
“Your country is not the only one that has faced war as of late,” Fleur commented. Despite the presence the pair of them offered, they were left well alone amongst those that attended. “I’m sure the people of Poland would not take kindly to your viewing of their conflict being child’s play.”
“I can’t imagine they would,” Harry agreed. “But, given that Poland is currently locked down, I do doubt I would find a great number of their people to spend an evening with.”
“And if it were not?” Fleur probed further. “If it were not locked down?”
“If it were not locked down, I still would’ve chosen you,” Harry told her, bringing about a brief smile from her. “If you wanted me to compliment you for an evening, you need only say the word.”
Fleur shook her head. “I am curious, is all,” she defended. “You cannot expect me to be invited to an event such as this, by a man such as you at a place such as this and accept it without question.”
“Then, instead of you asking me a thousand questions, I would ask one of you, as currently we seem to be getting nowhere?” Harry asked. Fleur’s hand slid up an inch or so up his back, before she pushed against his spine, bringing the pair together so that her jaw almost rested upon his shoulder. When Fleur nodded for Harry to continue, her cheekbone met his for a moment. “Why is it that you accepted my invitation here?”
“As I said; curiosity.”
“Then allow me, if you would, to appeal to your curiosity,” Harry said. “I will offer you three reasons as to why it is you are here tonight. They are all true. After I do so, I’ll allow you to choose which one that you most believe, and that will decide the course that the evening will take.”
A hum left Fleur. “I will admit that I am curious,” she told Harry. “And given that I am already here, I feel I ought to make the most of it,” Fleur sighed, her body settling against his. “Continue.”
“The first reason is perhaps the most straight forward,” Harry began. “I want to sleep with you.”
Fleur stilled in his arms. “I did not take you to be so forward, ‘Arry,” she said, quietly. He could hear the slight disappointment in her words. “Though it seems a great deal of effort, and money, for that reason alone. At least it would be for a man such as you.”
“You underestimate yourself, Fleur.”
“I do not think I do,” she insisted, the rhythm of the music returning to their dancing. “When you left Ginny, you did not take another lover for some time, even as every woman that you came across, single or otherwise, offered themselves to you.”
“Had you been one of them, I might well have said yes,” Harry replied. Fleur laughed quietly. “I am ruled by my own base instincts, just as everyone else.”
Fleur laughed again. Harry preferred the sound to the orchestra. “That is not true at all,” she told him. “If you were driven by lust or fear or greed then you would not be the man that you are. You are more selfless than any other man alive, that I promise.”
“And you are more tempting than any other woman,” Harry asserted. “A woman most beautiful with a mind most brilliant. Surely, if there were anyone in the world that I might forego my character for, it would be you.”
“I am not the woman you paint me as, ‘Arry. If I were as irresistible as you claim, I would not be available for you to court.”
“You’re suggesting that it is your fault that your marriage failed?” Harry asked, smiling. “I seem to recall that you left Bill and not the other way around.”
Fleur’s hand travelled further up his back, until her hand rested upon the nape of his neck. Her nails dug into his skin painlessly, the action alerting more than threatening. “It is hard to remain in a marriage that neither party wishes to be in, especially without a reason to stay in it.”
“It’s hard to remain in a marriage that you begin at twenty in the shadow of a war,” furthered Harry. “However, none of my reasons for inviting you here are for the two of us to complain about our failures at marriage.”
“I do not truly believe that one of your reasons is to take me to bed, either.”
Harry pulled back slightly, to allow himself to look at Fleur properly. “You don’t think I want to?”
Fleur met his eyes. A moment passed between them.
“I know you want to,” Fleur told him, her eyes startling. For a moment, her beauty overwhelmed her charm, and eyes began to pass over her, their gaze hungry and base, before she remembered herself. “But you have never allowed yourself to have me before; I do not see how tonight will be any different.”
“I was not aware that you had any interest.”
“And who’s to say that I do?” Fleur asked, her eyes flicking down to the ground for the briefest of seconds, before they looked to him again. “However, we are not discussing my own interests, but yours,” her thumb passed over the nape of neck. “Now, as it is clear you have no desire to indulge in pleasures of the flesh, which pleasures do you intend to indulge in?”
“You are rushing, Fleur,” Harry smiled. “Don’t allow your curiosity to make you dull.”
“Spoken by a man who begins by announcing his intention to bed me. You are casting stones inside a very boorish glass house, mon chéri,” mocked Fleur, settling into his arms again. “Very well, if you wish to tease me, I shall allow you to.”
“With pleasure,” said Harry, his words smooth, before his voice returned to its familiar passing. “The second reason is perhaps the most interesting.”
“That speaks volumes either to the quality of your reason, or the quality of yourself, given the first reason.”
“I hope the latter,” Harry’s words were light, though the gaze of his eyes hardened. He left Fleur for the first moment in many, scanning the crowd until they fixated suddenly. “Do you recall an Antonin Dolohov?”
“He was a follower of Voldemort, non?” Harry nodded. “I recall that Professor Flitwick defeated him in the war.”
“By all accounts, he charmed the plates and pans of Hogwarts to bury the man alive, then severed his right leg at the knee and his right arm at the elbow. He was a vicious man, Professor Flitwick,” Harry told her, his eyes still distant. “However, after the fighting ended, he was trialled and sent to Azkaban, however he managed to escape in part due to his own mastery of defensive enchantments and wards.”
To be more specific, he had escaped due to a philosophical fault of Azkaban. The prison was first a home for the dementors, and then it was a prison for the evil and the damned. There had been little need for other forces to contain its prisoners when it was assumed that the dementors would always remain at their home. After their dismissal, the ministry had of course placed their own restrictions upon the prison, but there had been the briefest of windows where the lack of said restriction was to be exploitable.
Of course, Antonin Dolohov passed through that window.
“In the chaos that was Britain after the war, Dolohov managed to flee the country entirely. He returned to the country of his birth; Bulgaria, under a new name,” Fleur had stilled in his arms at the mention of ‘Bulgaria’. “The ministry there were more forgiving of his beliefs and put him to use, designing their wards.”
“Was it your intention to remind me of the vile magic that my grandmother’s country is doing to my people?” Fleur asked, her voice quiet, though they carried with them the edge of a distant storm. “The poison their wards inflict on my blood?”
“My intention was to offer you the chance at vengeance, for your people,” Harry explained. “If I were to offer you an hour with the man responsible for that evil, how would you spend it?”
“He would not last an hour,” Fleur hissed. “He would not be a man after an hour, either.”
“It is a good thing that Dolohov has taken such great efforts to make himself not exist, then,” Harry’s eyes glinted sharply behind his glasses. “By the records of our ministry, and thus the records of the ICW, Antonin Dolohov is dead. To all but the few who know the truth, he was killed in his attempt to escape Azkaban. And there are no laws to protect dead men from violence, least of all evil, dead men.”
“And you would offer me the choice, to do as I wish?” Fleur asked. “To take back what was taken?”
What was taken, by Dolohov and his enchantments, was life itself. For every Veela that passed through his ward, they would lose their fertility. An entire generation of Veela had been lost in Bulgaria; not a single one born in over a decade.
“His fate is in your hands, his life yours to end,” Harry assured. “You could allow me to take him to England where he would be re-imprisoned or you could take him to the Queen of your people for her to punish however she sees fit. It is your choice.”
Fleur stopped still, on the tiles of the ballroom.
“You would give me this freely?” Harry nodded. “You know what this would do for my family?”
“Your grandmother would be allowed to return to the kingdom of her home,” Harry voiced. “Perhaps, in time, you might be able to, too, though I cannot promise that.”
There was a reason that partial-veela were so rare, after all, and it had little to do with a limited desire for their creation. Veela were, by culture, insular. Untrustworthy of those that did not share their blood and aware of what might happen to beings as beautiful as they were, their allure a defence, rather than a skill.
Such was their aversion to others that, for some of their tribes, to produce an offspring with a human was tantamount to treason against their people. And, unfortunately, Fleur’s grandmother belonged to one such tribe. After the birth of Fleur’s mother, she had been forced to leave her family and never return.