Chapter 5
No Joke
In which quidditch excellence is born, and a promise made.
"So you won the tournament?" Childish cheer bolstered her words over the hiss of chopped onion being dumped in a hot pan.
"Of course he did, papa's the best quidditch player ever." Harry straightened, first throwing a dazzling smile at his eldest daughter for her complement, then a smug look at his wife who rolled her eyes.
"Don't say that little chick, if his head gets any bigger we'll have to drain it." She sipped her wine and looked at her husband with a teasing gleam in her eye, "like a boil." Peppers, mushrooms, and finally minced garlic followed the onions and he lifted the pan off the fire to toss the ingredients together as he sipped his own wine.
"But it's true!" Liliane told her little sister, "They showed me in flying class, he's the best seeker to ever live! He still holds the record for career wins and being the youngest player to win a world cup." Arianne looked up at her father like he was a god. Harry, who preened under the initial praise, was quickly bashful about it when it carried on. "They said he never lost a game, never failed to catch the snitch."
"Their memory is not so great," Fleur grumbled, "He lost twice in school."
"Once," He corrected while their youngest shouted:
"School games don't count maman!"
"I'm counting getting concussed out of the air as a loss," She told him dryly to which he simply shrugged and moved back over to her with his empty glass. She refilled it as he told their daughter.
"If you don't sit still you'll get chicken juice all over you little chick," he warned and it had the desired effect of propelling her off the counter, giving him a little more elbow room with only his wife up there now.
"So, the week of the tournament…"
-o-o-o-
Harry learned a lot about himself that first year of Quidditch. He learned that he had a nervous stomach, when it really mattered. Luckily they'd secured their spot in the finals early that year, so the second term's games were more practice than anything. He learned that Fleur's insistence that he give up the sport and flying all together was not going to dissipate, try as he might all year to get her on his broom again. He had no idea that the one flight at the end of first year was going to be such a rarity. If he'd known then, he would've spent it trying to show her the beauty of flying instead of terrifying her with a front row seat of his most extreme aerial stunts.
He learned that while the majority of the student body didn't care about quidditch, not fully, being good at something had a certain weight. It wouldn't really cement until the following year, but things around Fleur and him were shifting. Becoming more equal. He was not the little first year trailing through the crowd in the wake created by Fleur Delacour, brilliant duelist and most beautiful girl in the school. They split crowds as they moved through them, as soon-to-be-dubbed best flyer and best duelist walked hand in hand. He was hailed on the third floor balcony by the older kids, his teammates stayed on the flyers end, and he still sat with her in their corner across the building, but greetings were called when they arrived. Robst would ruffle his hair anytime they passed, smirking at Fleur who glared daggers at him for hitting that bludger at him. The teams, in bitter competition, were oddly friendly when they were not next on the roster to face each other. Robst could be giving pointers on banking one week, then jeering at his opponent Potter the next, and then back to ruffling his hair the following after their match. It gave Fleur whiplash, but Harry was surprisingly adept at fitting in with these people.
Harry didn't realize it, because popularity was a novel concept to him, but he was tipping the scales back against Fleur. She had pulled him out of ridicule, taken him under her wing, and the two of them had spent their time alone together. Now though, his teammates would say things to her even if he was not around, she shared classes with some of the older ones and they would find seats around her that were previously left empty.
It scared her, because she had decided years ago that she didn't need any of them. Her old friends that abandoned her when she started accidentally toying with their emotions didn't come back, not really, but these new quidditch people seemed content to welcome her into their little circle. They even chose to find it funny that she vocally and frequently rebuffed their attempts and decried their passions. She was not scared to get hurt by these people, she was scared that they would wedge themselves between her and her little eagle with their shared interests and kinder manners and push her to the background.
For his part, Harry did everything in his power to kill these fears, without really realizing it. He stuck to her side, the piece that she was glued to that actually fit in with these other people, and as long as he did that she allowed him to entertain these ideas he was having of pursuing Quidditch professionally.
His skill on a broom grew exponentially. She knew he'd jumped the Gate many times that year, but he never took her back up there with him and she never complained about that. But at low altitudes too, he was beginning to show just how deep the obsession with flight ran. He did not know it, but he was setting trends that would stick around in the quidditch teams till the days of his daughters and beyond. Things like bringing your broom everywhere you went, so you could sit on it with one leg hanging down and one knee bent or otherwise laid out on it like a chaise lounge on the short walk between the dormitories and the school building. He ran his fingers through his hair for the first time that year, seated on his broom one spring afternoon, he didn't even realize what he was doing but when his hand came away and his hair was all pushed back and windswept Fleur could only stare. He was developing a cocky grace on his broom that was not at all unattractive, but that she could never encourage, because it drew the eye of too many other girls around them. So she elbowed him off his broom the first time he did it and ran toward the school, forcing him to give chase and get away from all those vultures eyeing her little eagle.
All of that cocky grace was gone the week of the final game. It was the one broom related event that brought out the majority of the school. The stands could be expected to fill with at least eighty percent of the students and more importantly for the sixth and seventh year players, mixed among them, and shadowed by teachers, scouts sat taking notes on the students playing. Not the scouts that watched the freshman races, a group that Harry had been a part of this year, sitting on his broom at the gate watching first years fly by him, no. These were professional scouts, looking to secure the next generation of drafts.
The third team, the Corbeaux, who had lost both their first round games, beat the Valkyries in the upset of the decade in the first game of the second term. A four hour match that ended with a lead of 200 points, then lost their second game to the Aigles by less than 50 to secure their spot in the finals. Robst could be seen with his beater's bat stalking the halls all week leading up to the finals, threatening anyone in his way with it, burning off his rage at losing on first years.
Harry was more often than not sick to his stomach. He wished he would throw up, but it never happened, just bubbled unhappily down there. Fleur, who was feigning complete disinterest in the upcoming game, forced him down into his seat at the library the morning of. He'd given up breakfast with a few bites of toast, and as it was Saturday and the game was just after noon, he had nothing to do but worry over the coming judgement day.
"I'll be glad when this silly game is done with." She was looking down at her enchanting text, lying because she was really as nervous as he was. He was studying history of magic, with equal distraction, because he responded with:
"Hmm, me too."
"Then we can focus on the dance," She said brightly, bringing it up for the first time.
"Yeah- the… dance?" He looked up at her in confusion.
-o-o-o-
"So it's papas fault that all the quidditch boys float around on their brooms like they were carved by Michelangelo himself?" It was clear by her tone that she was not the originator of this complaint, just copying it. Fleur gave her daughter an approving look even as her younger sister gave her a disgusted one.
"Completely," Fleur told Liliane "He led a generation of idiots by example." Her husband gave a bark of laughter as he dumped a generous portion of wine over his chicken and vegetables, he burned it off with a casual flick of the pan.
"Do try to forgive me, daughter, I was twelve and trying to impress the most beautiful girl in the world." Fleur seemed mollified by that, and didn't fight him on it.
"So the dance," Liliane continued, emboldened. "Is it the one you and uncle Luc went stag and got the whole orchestra drunk spiking the juice?"
Harry choked on the drink he was taking and Fleur hit him in the chest like it was his fault. "Where are you getting these stories?" She demanded of her daughter who looked unashamed, she was trying not to smile.
"Jean-Luc." Ah, Luc Bennet's youngest son.
"Non little chick, your poor papa didn't have to go stag and drown his sorrows until his fifth year, we went together that year."
-o-o-o-
The final match of the year opened a new and terrifying world for Fleur, a world where the words 'wronski feint' were not meaningless dribble. The game lasted almost two hours, a respectable runtime for a school game. The Corbeaux offensive line were arguably the better, they were trying to run the score up to the point where the seeker became irrelevant, their own seeker more often than not assisting in getting the quaffle down the field by drawing beater fire and blocking interceptions.
In response Harry engaged his opposite in a series of terrifying competitions to keep them away. The enemy seeker stopped following him after the third fake out ended with him slamming into the ground. That was to their detriment, as the fourth time he dropped into a dive from high above the game, he was not faking. They caught on too slowly, he was already pulling up just over the ground and shooting across the field faster than she'd ever seen a broom move and then he was climbing straight back up with a fist raised. The game was declared over, his teammates were colliding with him painfully in the air and she lost sight of him as they enveloped their seeker in a floating group hug. The score was 320 to 270.
It was a mark to the school's arts roots that the turn out for the end of year dance was almost as great as the quidditch finals. The student orchestra played, and the trained dancers opened with an impressively choreographed and dizzyingly fast number before the rest of the floor was opened to them.
Harry, for what it was worth, accompanied Fleur without complaint, if he didn't have an air of bemusement about the whole thing. The dances were closed to first and second years, so he was here as her guest exclusively. He went in his formal uniform, which really just swapped out the tie for a bowtie and added gloves and a half cloak. She went in a dress she transfigured from her school clothes that draped her body well enough that it brought back the furious blushes and stammering of the previous year. She knew enough about the dynamic of their relationship now and where each of them stood to be smugly content with his struggles, but their evening was otherwise innocent. Somehow it would appear that quidditch players' grace and poise in the air was nontransferable to land sport. He could not dance, so in his mind she was a wonderful dancer and he was rather embarrassed by his clumsy attempts. She had not taken dance as an elective, but she knew the waltz well enough to lead him in it, and she kept him stuck to her throughout the night. Despite numerous attempts by both sexes to cut in.
-o-o-o-
Harry was serving the chicken and white wine sauce over pasta as his wife regaled their daughters with tales of dancing the night away. One was fully absorbed, lost in the new found appreciation for her parents' romance, the other was bored, picking mushrooms out of her food.
"And then he had to go back to the muggles?" Liliane asked their mother passionately. Harry, despite everything, tried to maintain a certain amount of objective indifference when discussing his upbringing with pretty much anyone, but especially his daughters. He didn't want them growing up with a warped view of muggles. Being Veela, they had a rather insular upbringing already, and their parents' views would more often than not be copied wholesale onto them. The Delacour side of the family was never quite able to manage the careful neutrality he strived for though, and it was with the air of someone talking about the boogie man that Liliane talked about the siblings of her namesake.
"Of course not," Fleur said, sounding offended that her daughter would think it of her. "I took him home, where he belonged, and pépé informed them as such." She said, every bit the arrogant and cold teen she'd been then. When she decided he had no business being away from her and maneuvered the adults around her to see it done.
"Papa lived with me and aunty Gabby and Pépé and Mémé from his first summer after school." She told them, sure that they knew this already but they took it like new information.
-o-o-o-
The summer after his second year was a high point in his life, Harry knew this even then, really his entire third year was. The Triwizard Tournament was still a historical footnote on the world, no one this side of the channel had ever thought to put the names Bill and Weasley into a single breath, and Madeleine was still just a fellow third year that no one had kissed yet. But as is too often true the highs were hiding some pretty steep lows to come. Fleur was preparing to enter her sixth year, the year she would be taking exit level tests. After, it was just a short year of job specific elective taking and any advanced course work she wished to brush up on and then she would be out of school. He lived with them, but it still felt like once she was out of school she'd be out of his life, and he sprinted wildly toward any eventuality that prevented that.
Over the summer before his third year he really began to consider his life after school. Spurred on perhaps by Richard frequently purchasing quidditch tickets for the two of them, he had trouble imagining a future for himself that didn't involve playing the game full time. In his vague daydreams he was a professional seeker, and he bought a big house and Italian cars and came home every day to a family of silver haired girls.
He was distinctly aware of the fact that his fantasies involving his oldest and best friend were growing less and less … appropriate. He felt torn between wanting something from her and wanting everything to stay the same. To go back to when his blushes were because he was hoping he didn't stutter or slouch or embarrass himself instead of now, when he got hot because he was supremely aware of her body when he was jerked into hugs or trapped on the couch by her.
To make matters worse, Fleur seemed equally of two minds. There were times, when he was flying or just walking down the street with her and Gabby in Paris, or lounging on the couch with an afternoon coffee, when he would look up and catch her staring at him with unmistakable hunger that set his mind on fire. He would grow hot, and toy with the exhilarating idea of smirking at her and saying something witty, or just closing the distance between them and kissing her. But he didn't have the courage. He was still about a head shorter than her, and skinny if not scrawny. She seemed resolved to hold onto the little boy he had been, as long as possible, unwilling to decrease the amount of time she spent touching him but determined to force every touch into a platonic realm.
Teenage angst aside that summer was the best his short life had ever been. The Delacours spoiled him like the son they'd never had, and he in turn spoiled their daughters. He had no concept of money really, he knew he had a lot and he knew the Delacours had more. They wouldn't let him buy his own clothes and school supplies, but he managed to spend his own money on the new Firebolt that came out that summer. It was exorbitantly expensive, but he now went into the next season's quidditch on a professional broom. It was the price of this broom, which he arbitrarily defined as a lot, that he had exchanged into muggle money. And he took the stacks of the paper bills with him in secret. He went into Paris with Fleur and Gabrielle and bought them whatever they looked at through shop windows until Elise realized the brands her daughters were wearing and put a stop to it. They still came out with a plethora of shoes and handbags and clothes that no one should spend that much money on, but he didn't care.
He was starting to put Fleur to shame in studies, he never excelled in most classes, but he was eating textbooks now just trying to memorize quotes. He didn't need to do well, just finish. If he got scouted for a professional team after sixth year, he was moderately confident he could talk down Fleur and her mother's objections to him dropping the seventh year all together. It was after all really just a job preparedness year. He would retire from quidditch with no need to work for the rest of his life; he was certain of that at least. They all knew what he was trying to do, what none of them knew was he secretly harbored the desire to finish his exit exams in the summer between fifth and six years. Three years, to do four years of work, to skip two years of school.
If he graduated and began working two years early, that was only one year behind Fleur, and that felt important for some reason. Like the longer it took him to achieve his vision of quidditch stardom, the emptier his grand palatial house became. He couldn't wait till he was eighteen and done with school, he couldn't even wait till seventeen and done with tests. He had a destiny to achieve, and a happy ending he worked hard for and deserved for it.
Looking now, at his wife flipping through a peer review journal for Transfiguration innovations, eating her third bowl of ice cream absently. Their children put to bed with tales of maman and papa's school exploits, and a glass of really nice scotch in his hand, he realized how hard he'd been gripping the reins back then. His entire childhood was like an out of control sleigh ride, it stressed him out just remembering how high strung he'd been then, trying to jerk out of the way of trees and avoid steering clear off a cliff. Secretly trying to ditch school and follow the girl he loved into The-Great-Unknown of adulthood. He'd had no idea what it was he was committing to, and no idea what that vague image of a big house and a wife and kids would actually feel like. He hadn't thought about the odds of getting on a professional team at sixteen, because it didn't feel like an option not to, the arrogance was lost on him in the frenzy.
But I did it
He was holding up his glass and staring into the amber and caramel liquid by candle light.
"Did what mon coeur?"
"Hmm?" He turned to look at her and saw her staring up at him, he realized he must've spoken aloud.
She had all her hair pulled back in a bun that had once been relatively neat but became messy over the course of the night. Now strands hung around her face and hair stuck up behind her head at odd angles. She might as well have been twenty again, still curse-breaking for Gringotts, puzzling over some elaborate trap of hieroglyphs in the living room of their Paris apartment. He would be doing pushups, or some ridiculous form of broom training he was sure would be the next big thing that won championships, really just any form of exercise between games that he could do in the apartment. Capitalizing on their time together between their respective jobs.
"Everything, I suppose," He smiled at her and set the glass down, he held out a hand and she crawled across the couch to sit in his lap and he wrapped his arms around her. "I've gotten everything I've ever asked for, most of it more than I deserve, through sheer ignorance and arrogance." She laughed and squished his face between her palms.
"Exactly what I've been saying for years." She gave his face a little shake, and then released it to kiss him. It was deep and full of love. "The little English boy who doesn't know how to act. Look at him now." Her voice was full of pride, full of love, and the certainty of him in her life. She had always seemed so in control, he had resented her for it when he thought everything was falling apart. She seemed to know where his mind had gone, and perhaps she did, he couldn't really feel her allure anymore, not unless she was really trying to push something through to him. She kept a steady and constant tether to him these days, like a firm hand on the shoulder of his mind, and through it they could feel each other's emotions like a tele in the back of the mind that could only flash colors.
"I always knew we would be together," She informed him. "You did too, but you doubted it after I graduated, but I always knew that rough patch was only temporary."
He gave her a wry smile, "Yes, and it was my fault the whole time, and I should be nicer to you."
She nodded sagely, "Yes, I agree." Her detached contemplation split into a grin and she swooped in to kiss him again, and this one was much shorter and sweeter. "I'm glad you remember." She slid back down to be under his chin again, curled up on him, squeezing him.
"We don't deserve you," she corrected him. "You've given me everything I could ask for, for our daughters, for me, you've given everything."
"Not everything," he countered.
"Oh? What in the world could I possibly ask of you?" She purred, leaning back to look at him, she played with the halo of hair around his head while she waited for an answer.
"I've not yet given you a son." She froze. Her eyes came down from his hair to look at his face, and she gasped when she saw sincerity and seriousness there, not a joking smile and twinkling eye.
"Don't mess with me Potter," She said slowly, inching toward his lips, "If this is a joke, I'm going to be very upset with you mon coeur." He could feel her breath on his lips, she was hovering there waiting for him to say something.
"It's not mon coeur."
She kissed him.
AN So! Let's talk money. I looked up the cost of a tour de France bike, to arbitrarily define the value of a recreational vehicle used by top professionals. It said 12k USD, not bad, I saw somewhere somebody said that JKR said a galleon was worth 8USD in the 90s, didn't verify that but the math is pretty so: firebolt = $12,000 = 1,500 galleons. Little Harry pulled out 12k and blew it on designer French fashion for the Delacour kids lol.
You can see here the pattern forming for how this story will go for a while, each chapter is roughly a semester, in this case the summer was tacked on to the end, in future ones the summer will get its own chapter, just depends on how much I have to say about it. Next time we do a deep dive into one of my favorite OCs that will I think be present in any flowerpot I write: Luc Bennet!