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Your mother put you in dancing lessons as young as two years old. At the time, you weren’t aware that this was less of an enrichment activity and more of an excuse to get you away from the house so your parents could make love the entire afternoon. At the time, you weren’t aware of very much at all. You knew your skin was soft and your eyes were blue,
everyone liked you, and your heels pressed together in first position.
It became a great pastime of yours, and your sister’s as well, and it followed you long into your teenage years, far surpassing the expectations of your parents little idea of a saving grace. You simply glided over a studio floor, each toss of your body into the air settling you back to the floor with the grace of a falling feather, each twirl effortless, each split a simple slide.
The ease with which you developed your skill was uncanny, so you struggled in other ways. The natural ability your blood lent you was the envy, the frustration of your peers and partners. They resented it in you, you who (in their eyes) did not have to work for your successes, your blue ribbons and gold medallions and applause and gasps and other fantastical reactions.
You were raised in dance, but you did not need dance to teach you that you would be villainized for your beauty, the blood in you that you would never control. That knowledge followed you early, and everywhere.
By the time you were fifteen, you were completely, unapologetically yourself. Whispers and sideways glances had always made you anxious, the never-ending feeling of constantly being assessed and discussed. Your magnetism radiated across a room, extracting a reaction, however subtle, from any unsuspecting individual- male, female, young, old, wise, silly, happy, sad. Years of this unwanted attention and anxiety, full of fear of their opinion of you, their uninformed assumptions on your luminosity and litheness. So often they fawned over you, but so quickly could dislike you once your presence passed. You were worn down to no option but one- you would be everything they expected and more. You would tell them, you would show them.
You did not walk, you paraded, and you did it everywhere you went. They could not consider you if they were given no consideration- you commanded their conclusions. You would be all that they thought you to be and without a care, so made from each measly interaction from your entire life.
Your mother lived under the guise of passive beauty being a ticket to anything, a complete fallacy that did take most diluted veelas very far, to rich men, far off places, adventures, and power. But there is no ticket to self-assurance or respect. No more assumptions- your opinion radiated farther than your beauty, at a volume greater than that of a collective gasp.
This mindset would lead you astray, far from the sweet girl that loved to dance and close to a hateful woman who respected so few and trusted so fewer. You long toed the line of becoming the traits you detested so forcefully, always on the defensive by being on the attack. But you were young, even if you thought yourself old, mature, and decided. Your adolescence was devastatingly endless, and it broke many weaker than you. Your trials and tragedies are what saved you from your bitterness, scooped you up and deposited you safely back among the warmth of being loving, thoughtful, and kind.
But it was a journey. Years of youthful priming aside, it certainly started, and would most likely end, with a Weasley.
The first night you spent at Hogwarts painted the crispest picture of the sort of person you were then. At least at Beauxbatons, there was some semblance of a distilled social presence. You were known to be Fleur Delacour, who only started grade school in her fourth year because of many young years touring with the Paris Opera Ballet, who was adored equally as much as she was feared, who excelled both in charms magic and in charming those around her, who was quick to turn on those charmed if it suited her fancy. She was as defiant as she was poised- temperamental and volatile, but tenacious and vivacious. Three years had established all this, but Hogwarts was a new beast.
You laughed out loud while their Headmaster spoke- an unabashed chortling in the face of all this British circumstance. And if that were not enough, as if more assertion of your dominance was required after such a display (displays which your teachers permitted, a meditation of deep distress while reflecting on this later as a mother), you lifted yourself from your seat and waltzed the length of their hall to who you’d selected as the most vulnerable looking young man at the table farthest from yours (could you have ever imagined he would be your brother-in-law?). You asked after the bouillabaisse, a sorry excuse for gallivanting across a room, but no one questioned it. They just stared, stammered, sagged in their seats from the sheer essence of you.
By the time your name exploded out of the Goblet of Fire, they all wanted it for you as much as you wanted it for yourself. It was a true, visceral way to assert yourself. You thought this would change your life.
You had no idea just how much.
After spending time with you, these three males developed their resistance to your inherent charms. Viktor was as coarse as rocks; he was as charmed by you as an elephant was by a scorpion. Unsure of this at first, and oddly jealous of the affection he was showing a mousy-haired girl with large teeth and a larger ego, you came to respect the way he decided where his lay, and it had nothing to do with charm (obviously, from the look of it). Cedric charmed
you, so soothingly in a way that no man had before. Not romantic, no, but he was charitable in his kindness to you in spite of the friction you doled out in your introductions. You doubted him- so blinded by anger- at a wobbly kid?
Everyone forgets that you once faced a dragon, and in front of hordes of onlookers. Everything that happened after that completely washes over it, and you never feel right even remembering it. You should have stopped the moment that Gabrielle’s blue faced emerged from the opaque murk of the Black Lake. You should have captured the relief in your chest and clung to it, run away, shielded yourself from everything else that was about to happen.
But who would have known?
The adrenaline of the entire thing was addicting. You couldn’t let these men get the better of you. Of four, you could not be fourth. You had to press onward, and into the maze you went, letting the ignited fire from exchanged gazes with a rough redhead with a fanged earring catapult you forward into bravery.
You still wake up in the middle of the night. It’s a maze you may never escape. Surely, it’s not as often…it’s much better now. There is so much that fills you- your husband, your children, your work, the sun and sky and shells. But the agony of knowing something was wrong and being unable to act, crumpling to the ground with a painful shriek, surfacing to the deliriousness of a
dead compatriot’s father simply splitting apart over his son’s cold corpse? You had never felt younger, or more naïve.
You fought it, this deep sadness, the only way you knew how. You doubled down on your grit. There was nothing and no one that could split you open. You were perfectly impenetrable, stubbornly so.
It felt trivial to seek work in France. Everywhere you went, you were greeted with batting eyelashes and someone who ‘wasn’t technically hiring’ but for
her, they could probably ‘figure something out’. You enjoyed teaching dance, but there was no full-time work there. Even veelas couldn’t dance forever- youth was currency. You sought the satisfaction of succeeding on your own merits, and this desire proved to be every bit as gratifying as you imagined it to be.
Not only were goblins resistant to veela charm, they nearly despised it, which made the offer for part-time desk work in Gringotts’ Cursebreaker Division altogether more lucrative, and your acceptance of it one of permanent pride (despite your mother’s less-than-pleased reactions to her talented daughter, prima ballerina and triwizard champion, choosing to work at two less-than-profitable part-time positions).
You were drawn to him unwittingly, although you recognized the feeling straightaway. It was the essence of kinship you’d felt with Cedric, the warmth of a kind soul descending upon you genuinely, instead of impulsively. He was an adventurer tucked behind a desk, which puzzled you exceedingly in the early stages of your friendship. It was the way his voice lingered on your mind, how you felt compelled to forget your quills in his office after mealtimes, a tradition you quickly began to share, so you had an excuse to go back again later.
English lessons dissolved into frank discussions, over lunch, or walks, or cups of tea, and it wasn’t long at all before you found herself actively seeking his attention in all ways, the same kind of attention you had so long tried to quell or eliminate entirely. You could feel yourself being propelled by each positive rendezvous, whether at work or outside of it, and then you found that
every rendezvous was positive, and you were positively filled with adoration, your contempt no longer lying in tragedies experience but in the tragedy of each time you shut his door behind you.
He was so faultlessly lovely, the development of it all so comfortably light and laissez faire. It was easy to fall in love with Bill Weasley, and equally easy to decidedly instruct him to take you on a true date, a real beginning to something exceptional.
You would have married him then, if he’d asked.
You knew about what he did after dark, why there were so many evenings of his unavailable to you, from either his honesty, your keen perception, or a mixture of both. It was awful, of course, not because of the nature of the entire organization, but because you couldn’t sleep when he was out. Not even a dragon could inspire the mind-numbing insomnia you learned to temper. It was always defeated by the sound of the door and the familiar shuffle of feet at the front of the flat. The relief was a quick wash- you were asleep before he made it up the stairs.
It was Alastor, who you’d always preferred above the rest, who had there wherewithal to tell you. Your rage at everyone else, his friends, his parents, dissipated the moment you laid eyes on him. All your energy was required to claw your way through the thicket of faceless individuals to launch yourself towards him, no distance between you small enough and therefore acceptable. Who knew your hysterics and tears, the result of your adrenaline, fear, and year’s worth of family frustration, would win his mother’s heart?
You would not allow him to do this without you. That was final.
He proposed straightaway.
The next year was terrible.
Alastor was murdered before your eyes.
Your wedding was stormed by Death Eaters. You were interrogated in your white dress.
You miscarried a few months after moving into Shell Cottage.
George fell in the Battle of Hogwarts. So many, many more fell beside him.
When it was all over, there was still a remarkable feeling of emptiness in your life. The spitfire of your youth was now almost unrecognizable- it felt as though you’d been melted down to a fraction of your former self. There was nothing to be combative about. You hadn’t cared about the opinions of others since you’d met Bill. You no longer had the macro-sized irritations with his family to contend with. You were no longer compelled by worry toward action within the Order.
It was all so eerily quiet. An uncomfortable sort of calm.
Your pregnancy punctuated the silence like a shout, and the relief it brought everyone was the sort of relief you might experience when surfacing for a gasp of air from a long stint underwater. For this, you were
allowed to be happy. There was no worrying whether or not you were being insensitive. A return to normalcy was necessary, welcome, celebrated. And celebrate you did, so fascinatingly on the anniversary of the deaths of so many you loved so dearly, the birthday of your first child, and the beginning of your new life.
Few mothers could differentiate between their children if asked their true opinions. It is certainly difficult for you think about, you who love your children indiscriminately. No favorite could ever be chosen, because Victoire was your first and your saving grace, a definitively smart girl to whom love comes naturally…but Dominique is a robust example of your fiery French blood, a warrior among men, a champion of her chosen causes and strong opinions…but Louis is everything so preciously wonderful rolled up in one, the living embodiment of the sound of an airhorn and the spirit of a smile.
No, Louis is not your favorite, you tell yourself sometimes when you think about them collectively. He is not your favorite, but you
are easier on him. Moreso than Victoire,
certainly more than Dominique. It is an unquestionable fact that you adore them all, but you are generous with your criticism and hearty with your expectations. You were once not a mother, but you blinked- you embody your own, with terrifying accuracy. Realizing this,
embracing it, was the best thing that happened to the relationship between the pair of you. A full circle experience, no longer impressed by your once-youthful willingness toward aggression, instead impressed by the patience you (attempt) to exercise as much as possible. No longer willing to waltz the length of a great hall to supplement your reputation, instead pleased with aside observation, as your family continues to grow.
You are still devastatingly
French, convinced that you will always know better than them, and that you will always demand the best
for and
of them, instincts monitored only by your husband’s effortless ability to just
parent without much thought or fanfare. Were you not so enchanted by this quality in him, so proud to see it and show it off, you might resent him for it. But you do not, not all the time, hardly even at all.
You squabble about the dog, sure, how you just
need him to be trained to paw off at the door before tracking sand through the house. The only battle you still haven’t won. In the grand scheme of things, that’s perfectly alright.
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