Quartet- Tonks/Fleur
Author: Bitterfig
Title: Quartet
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairings: Starts out Fleur Delacour Weasley/Bill Weasley, Nymphadora Tonks/Remus Lupin then moves on to Remus/Bill and Fleur/Tonks with a little Remus/Bill/Fleur along the way though all this makes the story sound much more swinging than it is.
Summary: After the Death Eaters take the village of Hogsmeade, Bill, Fleur, Tonks and Lupin hold the strategically located Shrieking Shack. As circumstances worsen from without, the needs and desires of the small group threaten to destroy it from within.
Beta Reader: Nzomniac
Word Count: 3973
Rating: R
Warnings: Mature content, femmeslash, implied slash.
Author’s Note: Strange dear but true dear this is actually the second female centered, bisexual Harry Potter story I’ve written inspired by Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.
This story is being used for prompt #039-Conceal for the 100_women challenge (to see my 100_women progress chart click here.)
Quartet
There were three members of the Order of the Phoenix-Bill Weasley, Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks-in Hogsmeade when the Death Eaters descended on the village. Three members of the Order and the odd girl out-Fleur Delacour Weasley-Bill’s wife of six months.
Despite the growing troubles in London and relentless attacks on the Ministry of Magic, the four had lingered in Hogsmeade based on Lupin’s hunch that Voldemort would be drawn first and foremost to Hogwarts.
The werewolf’s intuition proved correct. Unfortunately, their presence in the village did not seem as if it could make a difference. Voldemort had brought dozens of Death Eaters to Hogsmeade, and there were only the four of them. Logic dictated that they flee. Lupin suggested they stay.
If they could hold the Shrieking Shack till the others could come, it would not only be a stronghold within the Death Eater held village, but it would also give access to the grounds of Hogwarts where Voldemort was setting up his headquarters.
“That works,” Tonks said with an Auror’s authority. At moments like this, Fleur was extremely impressed by the woman, by her strength and presence of mind.
She knew she ought to have been focused solely on the struggle ahead-on the Death Eaters, Voldemort, the war-but as they planned, Fleur found herself nursing the hope that she and Nymphadora Tonks could be friends. Since coming to England, she had very much missed the companionship of other girls.
In the lush and sheltered world that was the Beauxbatons Academy, girls had swirled around her in an endless dance, friends and rivals, lovers and enemies. Closest to her heart, her dearest and truest love was her younger sister, her little angel, Gabrielle. All this had changed when she came to England. In England, it was the men who clamored for her attention and the women who were largely distant and cold.
“I have no girlfriends here,” she had confided in Bill when they first started seeing each other. “All the women, they hate me.” She had mentioned it before to other men she had dated. Most of them had laughed and assured her the women were jealous because she was so beautiful. Bill did not do this.
“The English Wizarding world is tradition bound and very wary of outsiders,” he told her. “There are the old family names, and those mean a great deal to most people. We understand each other based on who their parents are, who their cousins are. You’re an outsider, yet you speak your mind. You don’t pretend to be what you aren’t, and you don’t apologize for it. I don’t think most people know what to make of you so they focus on how pretty you are instead of how bold. They put you in a box labeled ‘beautiful’ and they know what to do with you. Men can treat you as a conquest, women as a rival. It makes them comfortable.”
“And what about you, Monsieur Weasley?” she had asked.
“I like your spirit,” he had told her, grinning wickedly. “And I like that my mother’s going to like you almost as much as she liked my earring.”
He was spot on about his mother not liking her. Not just his mother, but his baby sister and all her girlfriends. They had become more tolerant of her when she’d stayed by Bill after he was maimed by the Death Eater werewolf, but were scarcely warm.
Tonks, though, seemed like an unconventional woman. Bright, strong and brave, and she could hardly fault Fleur’s forwardness the way she had so ferociously claimed Lupin. The two women had moved in each other’s orbit for most of a year without really connecting for good or ill. Now that they were being thrown together, Fleur hoped they would be friends. She had to hope for something, after all, holed up in the tiny shack.
*
Nothing went as planned.
Only days after they had set up residence in the Shrieking Shack, the problems began. The Death Eaters took hold of Hogsmeade with remarkable ease, and their numbers seemed to increase hourly. Worse of all, communication with the rest of the Order abruptly broke off. The two-way mirror that Bill checked almost hourly yielded nothing. It rapidly became clear that they were not so much holding the Shack as hiding there. The area around the village was both heavily guarded and warded against Apparition and use of the Floo Network. Leaving was no longer an option.
Tonks, who could alter her form at will, was able to leave the place, go into the village for news and provisions; however, maintaining secrecy would require that Lupin, Fleur and Bill be confined to the Shrieking Shack indefinitely.
It was not an easy way to exist, day by day. Bill, taking a cue from his mother’s manner of coping with all situations, focused on the domestic, dividing all the chores of cleaning, food preparation, and laundry among them. He strongly discouraged the use of magic, and for the first few days Fleur thought he had gone mad, but soon she found she was eager for the work. Having a task to focus on passed the time and occupied her mind. It gave her a reprise from fretting over their situation.
Just thinking of staying there for unnumbered days, weeks, months made it hard for Fleur to breathe. Within the confines of the shack, she felt both isolated, cut off from everything. and as though she had no privacy. She knew she was spoiled, unaccustomed to any sort of hardship, sacrifice or compromise. She liked to have her way. She did not know if she could live without the basic freedom to come and go as she pleased.
Fleur was convinced that staying the course would be more difficult for her than for any of the rest, but she was not pleased when it became clear that Nymphadora Tonks seemed to agree.
Whatever hopes Fleur may have had of connecting with the other woman were quickly dashed. Tonks seemed to regard Fleur as a disaster waiting to happen, as much of a potential threat as the Death Eaters.
“Use your indoor voice,” Tonks would snap whenever Fleur had a flare up of temper or enthusiasm. She acted as though Fleur was a child and generally treated her as the weak link of their team, which Fleur knew she was. She was not even a part of the Order, not really. Still, she was no dilettante for all her silver blonde hair and rose-kissed cheeks, for all her dancer’s grace and Veela charms. She was embedded. She was in it, for life or death. She did not deserve the criticism she received.
One day Fleur cried. She couldn’t help it; the stress of their living situation pressed upon her, and she desperately missed her sister, their special understanding. She cried and Bill was there for her. Fleur saw nothing wrong with this, but Nymphadora Tonks apparently took exception.
“How can you be so selfish?” Tonks hissed in her ear when Bill was out of the room. “You’re crying over your sister? You know where your sister is. You know she’s safe. He doesn’t know where Ginny is; he doesn’t know if she’s hurt or captured or dead. You have no right to cry for your sister in front of him.”
There may have been some truth to what she said, but Fleur was too angry to care.
“You have no right to speak to me about such things,” she hissed back. Fleur was not one to silently endure what she considered unjust treatment of any sort. Still, Tonks showed no signs of easing up on her.
“I could hear you carrying on all last night,” the older woman coldly informed Fleur one morning. “I know this is called the Shrieking Shack but try and use some discretion. Also, please make an effort not to get knocked up while we’re stuck in here.”
“I will do what I like with my husband,” Fleur had blazed. “I think you should mind your own business.”
“Why is she like this to me?” Fleur quietly but animatedly raged to Bill after Tonks had left. “What is her problem?”
“That’s what it is-her problem. Not something wrong with you,” Bill said.
After that, Fleur paid a bit more attention to what was going on in the Shack beyond her own anxieties and concerns.
*
Whatever Tonks’ problem was, it had something to do with Remus Lupin.
Fleur had scarcely noticed Lupin, and that undoubtedly was a large part of the trouble. The man was there, but during the course of the five weeks they had spent confined to the Shrieking Shack, he had become so still and silent he hardly seemed to exist anymore. He moved slowly and quietly, disappeared into whatever part of the small building was unoccupied and, when in the presence of the others, rarely spoke.
It had to be the Wolfsbane. Since they had gone into hiding, Lupin had been brewing his own Wolfsbane potion. He admitted himself that he lacked the skill to do it perfectly, and while it had kept him in his right mind during the transformation, he was clearly suffering from its serious side effects.
Lupin had been quietly sinking for a long time, but when Fleur became aware of it, she insisted on making it an issue.
“You should stop taking the Wolfsbane, Monsieur Lupin,” she announced one evening. “It is making you disappear. You are like a ghost. You must stop taking it.”
It was Tonks, not Lupin, who answered.
“He needs to keep taking the potion,” she said sharply. “He can’t transform fully while we’re in hiding. It’s too risky.”
“Bill can help him,” Fleur said. “Bill has wolf’s blood now.”
“She’s right,” Bill said. “Back at the Burrow, right after I was attacked, I tried approaching Remus when he was in wolf form. He knew me. He didn’t attack me…”
“No!” Tonks practically yelled, her unexpected volume startling them all. “I mean, it’s too dangerous. You’ve healed since then. Who’s to say he’d still recognize you as one of his kind? You could be killed, and we’d have a raging werewolf on our hands. The Wolfsbane is working, better not to tamper with it. Remus can handle the side effects.”
Fleur didn’t believe a word she was saying. She was certain that Lupin would be better off stopping the potion. Bill was frustrated as well.
“All Nymphadora has to do is say he might hurt someone, and Remus will go along with whatever she says,” Bill told Fleur the next day when Tonks was out. “He’s always been terrified of being out of control, of hurting or killing someone, but I know I could help him. When Sirius Black was still alive, he could take Remus through the transformation, keep him under control. Black was an Animagus-he could turn into a dog-but I’m even closer to a werewolf than he was. It would work, but the last thing Tonks wants is me picking up where Sirius left off.”
“Why?” Fleur asked. “She is his lover. Why would she not want him to be well?”
Bill turned bright crimson the way only a red-head could.
“I don’t know how much of this is true,” he said, “but Remus and Sirius might have been … more than friends.”
“I see,” Fleur said. And she did.
If Tonks had been offended by the sounds from Bill and Fleur’s room, it might have had something to do with the fact that she and Lupin seemed to slumber in a chaste silence. Lupin seemed hard pressed to look at (much less touch) Tonks. Bill, though, was a different story. Bill was the one thing that seemed to bring him back to some kind of life.
Lupin looked at Bill the way other women had looked at him before he had been scarred. Oddly, this did not upset Fleur. It made sense to her that they should be drawn together, these two men marked by Fenrir Greyback’s viciousness.
They were drawn together. She watched in the days that followed how Bill leaned close to hear Lupin’s few and barely audible words, how he steadied the mug of tea in the older man’s unsteady hands.
“You care for him,” Fleur whispered when they were alone in the night, she and her husband.
“I feel sorry for him,” Bill said.
“It is more than that. He is why we are here. You volunteered to come to Hogsmeade. It was to be near him.”
Bill was silent for a long time.
“I can’t deny that,” he finally said, “but I swear to you, there’s been nothing between Remus and me.”
“Perhaps there should be,” she said to the darkness.
“No. There can’t be. There won’t be. I’m married. I’m married to you. I love you.”
“I know that you love me,” she said, “but I can understand you wanting him. I can understand that a part of you wants someone who is like you. Part of me will always be lonely for what I had with Gabrielle. Part of me will always want a woman, a sister. I can understand you wanting a man-this man who is a wolf like you, your brother in blood.”
*
In the days that followed, she gave Bill whatever space she could to be with Lupin even if it meant she was herself alone. Bill did draw closer to the other man, tentatively closer. He let his hand rest on Lupin’s wrist. Fleur caught a glimpse of them, their foreheads pressed together as Bill whispered to him.
“I would never do anything to hurt you, Fleur,” Bill whispered to her later that day. All things were said in whispers. Fleur longed to speak loudly and boldly, but she couldn’t. Instead, she took her husband’s hand. She led him to where Lupin was, huddled on the twisted steps to the Shack’s upper level.
She kissed Bill. Kissed him as if they were alone, as if they were in bed together and all the weight of war and confinement was lifted from them. Lupin rose to leave, to fade away, but she caught a handful of his shabby robes (but weren’t all their robes shabby these days). She kissed him as well.
No man could resist her. He returned her kiss, and she lingered between them, letting the hands of the two men move over her body, their lips over her face inevitably meeting each other. Slowly, she drew herself away, inch by inch, till it was the two of them together and Fleur Delacour-Weasley the odd girl out. She left her husband in the stairwell in the embrace of the werewolf. She was alone, she was lonely, but she did not regret what she had made happen.
She would not let being trapped in a teetering ghost house squelch the pale flame of her. She would not let war make her as harsh and ugly as it was.
*
Tonks was less than pleased when Lupin told her he was going off the Wolfsbane. She raged at him for hours in a one-sided row most of which Fleur and Bill couldn’t help but overhear.
“Don’t you understand that when you transform, you are a monster?” she hissed. “If you let Bill try this, you will kill him. You will kill him, and you will have to live with that. Is that what you want? Are you willing to be a murderer, Remus?”
Bill finally stepped in.
“Stop trying to bludgeon him into submission, Nymphadora,” he said. “I know I can do this.”
She’d turned on him with eyes black yet glowing.
“You can do everything Sirius did, is that it, Bill?” she snarled, palpable hatred in her voice. “Fine, it’s your funeral.”
In the days leading up to the full moon, she refused to speak to any of them except Lupin who she continued to hammer at to no avail. As the influence of the potion waned, so did his docile passivity, and he held out against her. He would not continue the potion. If Bill was willing to attempt to see him through the transformation, he was willing to try it as well.
On the night of the full moon, the two men disappeared into the passageway that led to the Whomping Willow. It was the most secure portion of the Shack. If something did go wrong, if Bill lost control of Lupin, this way Tonks and Fleur would be safe, and the werewolf would be contained.
In the Shack, the women waited silent and distant within the close set of rooms. Bill had warned them to keep their distance. If the wolf sensed the presence of humans, he might become unmanageable. However, the moment the sun rose, Fleur, who had been sleeping fitfully, started awake and ran to the tunnel.
Bill was sitting against the wall, unhurt and asleep. Lupin’s naked form curled beside him, his head on the younger man’s lap. Bill’s hand rested in his hair as if he had been petting the wolf when he fell asleep.
Fleur left them and returned to the Shack. Nymphadora Tonks was waiting for her, eyes the tumultuous purple-black of a stormy sky and her hair beyond pink to the color of blood.
“It worked,” Fleur said, unable to keep a note a triumph from her voice.
“Why are you so happy about it, Madame?” Tonks demanded. “When it means your much lauded Veela charms aren’t enough to keep your husband away from a broken-down wreck like Remus?”
“You are welcome to see it however you wish,” Fleur said coldly. “I know my husband loves me. I do not need to own him.”
“Are you trying to show me up again?” Tonks snarled. “Like you did the night Dumbledore was killed? To show that not only are you beautiful but also that you’re somehow superior to me because you don’t have to fight to be loved?
“You made this happen. I’ve known Bill for years. I know his family, and they’re decent, normal people. He wouldn’t have done this on his own. This is all your fault, you libertine French bitch. Everyday, I risk my life trying to keep us alive, to find out when and if we can get out of this, while you languish here playing games and turning everything into a tawdry boudoir farce. Why are you even here? You’re not in the Order. You don’t belong here. Why do you have to be here?”
“Do you think I have a choice?” Fleur asked. “That I could go, but I stay here to toy with you? I have no choice. I have not had a choice for months and months. I am trapped here like you, and like you I am trying as hard as I can to keep us all alive. I have done all I could to keep your lover from fading into nothingness, even if it meant sharing the one comfort I have. I saw need, and I gave what was needed. Do you think this is easy for me? It is a fight every day for me, against fear and loneliness. You have made it harder.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes, but she kept control of herself. She would not give Nymphadora Tonks the satisfaction of making her cry.
“When we came here, I respected you a great deal,” Fleur said. “I thought you were independent, that you had a mind of your own. I thought you were strong and brave and unconventional. I had hoped with all my heart that we might help each other, be of comfort to one another. I had hoped that we would be close, but you have been hateful towards me from the start.”
Tonks’ anger seemed to wilt. The violent colors of her eyes and hair faded slowly back to their normal shade.
“I… I assumed you looked down on me,” she finally said, dumbfounded. “It never occurred to me that you would see me as anything but a deficient specimen … a dull, fat cow. It never occurred to me that you might need or want anything I could offer. It never occurred to me not to hate you.
“I’m sorry,” Tonks finally said, and she took Fleur’s hand. “Is it too late?”
“No,” Fleur said. “It is not too late.”
*
Really, nothing changed after the night of the full moon. They were still confined to the Shack. Tonks alone could leave the place, venture out to find food and news, though there was rarely enough of either. The threat of discovery continued to hang over them, as did uncertainty. Days then weeks passed. Nothing had changed, yet it had become easier.
The four of them were still captive, beset with anxieties, in mortal danger each moment, yet they were less alone. They had come to an understanding amongst themselves. They were no longer disparate and clashing elements; they now moved as a quartet. They were kind to each other. When they saw need, they answered it.
“When I offered myself to him, Remus had nothing,” Tonks told Fleur. “His partner was dead; he was sick and poor and utterly defeated. I thought he would be grateful to have me, but even he didn’t want me. I had to make him take me. I had to prove I was at least good enough for a wreck like him.”
“Those are horrible things to think,” Fleur said. “About him and about yourself. And they are not true. You do not need to fight to be loved or to force men to love you. You would be an adventure for anyone.”
“May I kiss you?” Tonks asked.
“Please.”
She was lying beside Tonks, and the woman leaned down to kiss her, enveloping her in a veil of hair the color of lilacs and roses. It was the only color Fleur had seen that day, the only true brightness. She half closed her eyes so it all blurred, and she thought of weddings and dances and holidays as Nymphadora Tonks’ lips opened to her. Their kisses were warmth and color and everything they had to offer each other.
*
Fleur Delacour Weasley looked at herself in the mirror. She would always be a bit vain. She was still beautiful but was too thin-thinner than she had ever been. The silver white sheen of her hair was rather dull. She was pale, but her eyes were still alive. At least her eyes were still alive.
Her face faded, replaced by the disheveled countenance of Arthur Weasley, her father-in-law.
“Fleur,” he said. “Thank goodness we’ve finally gotten through.”
“Bill,” she cried. “It is your father.” Bill ran to her side, took the mirror.
“Dad, what’s happening? Where are you?” he asked.
They gathered around the mirror, Bill and Fleur, Lupin and Tonks. The Ministry of Magic and the Order were both nearby, just outside the perimeters of the Death Eater controlled village.
“They don’t know we’re here,” Bill told his father. “We can strike from inside. We’ll make an opening for you to come in.” He turned to the others. “Get your wands.”
And Fleur knew that whatever had been was ending. They would not die in the Shrieking Shack after all, though they might die outside it soon enough. They would never be as they had been, and for a moment she felt a stab of nostalgia for this place that had made her a prisoner and forced her to make herself free.
A hand pressed hers. Bill? Tonks? Lupin? She did not know, but she was not afraid. She took up her wand and walked out the door of the Shrieking Shack.
Title: Quartet
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairings: Starts out Fleur Delacour Weasley/Bill Weasley, Nymphadora Tonks/Remus Lupin then moves on to Remus/Bill and Fleur/Tonks with a little Remus/Bill/Fleur along the way though all this makes the story sound much more swinging than it is.
Summary: After the Death Eaters take the village of Hogsmeade, Bill, Fleur, Tonks and Lupin hold the strategically located Shrieking Shack. As circumstances worsen from without, the needs and desires of the small group threaten to destroy it from within.
Beta Reader: Nzomniac
Word Count: 3973
Rating: R
Warnings: Mature content, femmeslash, implied slash.
Author’s Note: Strange dear but true dear this is actually the second female centered, bisexual Harry Potter story I’ve written inspired by Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.
This story is being used for prompt #039-Conceal for the 100_women challenge (to see my 100_women progress chart click here.)
Quartet
There were three members of the Order of the Phoenix-Bill Weasley, Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks-in Hogsmeade when the Death Eaters descended on the village. Three members of the Order and the odd girl out-Fleur Delacour Weasley-Bill’s wife of six months.
Despite the growing troubles in London and relentless attacks on the Ministry of Magic, the four had lingered in Hogsmeade based on Lupin’s hunch that Voldemort would be drawn first and foremost to Hogwarts.
The werewolf’s intuition proved correct. Unfortunately, their presence in the village did not seem as if it could make a difference. Voldemort had brought dozens of Death Eaters to Hogsmeade, and there were only the four of them. Logic dictated that they flee. Lupin suggested they stay.
If they could hold the Shrieking Shack till the others could come, it would not only be a stronghold within the Death Eater held village, but it would also give access to the grounds of Hogwarts where Voldemort was setting up his headquarters.
“That works,” Tonks said with an Auror’s authority. At moments like this, Fleur was extremely impressed by the woman, by her strength and presence of mind.
She knew she ought to have been focused solely on the struggle ahead-on the Death Eaters, Voldemort, the war-but as they planned, Fleur found herself nursing the hope that she and Nymphadora Tonks could be friends. Since coming to England, she had very much missed the companionship of other girls.
In the lush and sheltered world that was the Beauxbatons Academy, girls had swirled around her in an endless dance, friends and rivals, lovers and enemies. Closest to her heart, her dearest and truest love was her younger sister, her little angel, Gabrielle. All this had changed when she came to England. In England, it was the men who clamored for her attention and the women who were largely distant and cold.
“I have no girlfriends here,” she had confided in Bill when they first started seeing each other. “All the women, they hate me.” She had mentioned it before to other men she had dated. Most of them had laughed and assured her the women were jealous because she was so beautiful. Bill did not do this.
“The English Wizarding world is tradition bound and very wary of outsiders,” he told her. “There are the old family names, and those mean a great deal to most people. We understand each other based on who their parents are, who their cousins are. You’re an outsider, yet you speak your mind. You don’t pretend to be what you aren’t, and you don’t apologize for it. I don’t think most people know what to make of you so they focus on how pretty you are instead of how bold. They put you in a box labeled ‘beautiful’ and they know what to do with you. Men can treat you as a conquest, women as a rival. It makes them comfortable.”
“And what about you, Monsieur Weasley?” she had asked.
“I like your spirit,” he had told her, grinning wickedly. “And I like that my mother’s going to like you almost as much as she liked my earring.”
He was spot on about his mother not liking her. Not just his mother, but his baby sister and all her girlfriends. They had become more tolerant of her when she’d stayed by Bill after he was maimed by the Death Eater werewolf, but were scarcely warm.
Tonks, though, seemed like an unconventional woman. Bright, strong and brave, and she could hardly fault Fleur’s forwardness the way she had so ferociously claimed Lupin. The two women had moved in each other’s orbit for most of a year without really connecting for good or ill. Now that they were being thrown together, Fleur hoped they would be friends. She had to hope for something, after all, holed up in the tiny shack.
*
Nothing went as planned.
Only days after they had set up residence in the Shrieking Shack, the problems began. The Death Eaters took hold of Hogsmeade with remarkable ease, and their numbers seemed to increase hourly. Worse of all, communication with the rest of the Order abruptly broke off. The two-way mirror that Bill checked almost hourly yielded nothing. It rapidly became clear that they were not so much holding the Shack as hiding there. The area around the village was both heavily guarded and warded against Apparition and use of the Floo Network. Leaving was no longer an option.
Tonks, who could alter her form at will, was able to leave the place, go into the village for news and provisions; however, maintaining secrecy would require that Lupin, Fleur and Bill be confined to the Shrieking Shack indefinitely.
It was not an easy way to exist, day by day. Bill, taking a cue from his mother’s manner of coping with all situations, focused on the domestic, dividing all the chores of cleaning, food preparation, and laundry among them. He strongly discouraged the use of magic, and for the first few days Fleur thought he had gone mad, but soon she found she was eager for the work. Having a task to focus on passed the time and occupied her mind. It gave her a reprise from fretting over their situation.
Just thinking of staying there for unnumbered days, weeks, months made it hard for Fleur to breathe. Within the confines of the shack, she felt both isolated, cut off from everything. and as though she had no privacy. She knew she was spoiled, unaccustomed to any sort of hardship, sacrifice or compromise. She liked to have her way. She did not know if she could live without the basic freedom to come and go as she pleased.
Fleur was convinced that staying the course would be more difficult for her than for any of the rest, but she was not pleased when it became clear that Nymphadora Tonks seemed to agree.
Whatever hopes Fleur may have had of connecting with the other woman were quickly dashed. Tonks seemed to regard Fleur as a disaster waiting to happen, as much of a potential threat as the Death Eaters.
“Use your indoor voice,” Tonks would snap whenever Fleur had a flare up of temper or enthusiasm. She acted as though Fleur was a child and generally treated her as the weak link of their team, which Fleur knew she was. She was not even a part of the Order, not really. Still, she was no dilettante for all her silver blonde hair and rose-kissed cheeks, for all her dancer’s grace and Veela charms. She was embedded. She was in it, for life or death. She did not deserve the criticism she received.
One day Fleur cried. She couldn’t help it; the stress of their living situation pressed upon her, and she desperately missed her sister, their special understanding. She cried and Bill was there for her. Fleur saw nothing wrong with this, but Nymphadora Tonks apparently took exception.
“How can you be so selfish?” Tonks hissed in her ear when Bill was out of the room. “You’re crying over your sister? You know where your sister is. You know she’s safe. He doesn’t know where Ginny is; he doesn’t know if she’s hurt or captured or dead. You have no right to cry for your sister in front of him.”
There may have been some truth to what she said, but Fleur was too angry to care.
“You have no right to speak to me about such things,” she hissed back. Fleur was not one to silently endure what she considered unjust treatment of any sort. Still, Tonks showed no signs of easing up on her.
“I could hear you carrying on all last night,” the older woman coldly informed Fleur one morning. “I know this is called the Shrieking Shack but try and use some discretion. Also, please make an effort not to get knocked up while we’re stuck in here.”
“I will do what I like with my husband,” Fleur had blazed. “I think you should mind your own business.”
“Why is she like this to me?” Fleur quietly but animatedly raged to Bill after Tonks had left. “What is her problem?”
“That’s what it is-her problem. Not something wrong with you,” Bill said.
After that, Fleur paid a bit more attention to what was going on in the Shack beyond her own anxieties and concerns.
*
Whatever Tonks’ problem was, it had something to do with Remus Lupin.
Fleur had scarcely noticed Lupin, and that undoubtedly was a large part of the trouble. The man was there, but during the course of the five weeks they had spent confined to the Shrieking Shack, he had become so still and silent he hardly seemed to exist anymore. He moved slowly and quietly, disappeared into whatever part of the small building was unoccupied and, when in the presence of the others, rarely spoke.
It had to be the Wolfsbane. Since they had gone into hiding, Lupin had been brewing his own Wolfsbane potion. He admitted himself that he lacked the skill to do it perfectly, and while it had kept him in his right mind during the transformation, he was clearly suffering from its serious side effects.
Lupin had been quietly sinking for a long time, but when Fleur became aware of it, she insisted on making it an issue.
“You should stop taking the Wolfsbane, Monsieur Lupin,” she announced one evening. “It is making you disappear. You are like a ghost. You must stop taking it.”
It was Tonks, not Lupin, who answered.
“He needs to keep taking the potion,” she said sharply. “He can’t transform fully while we’re in hiding. It’s too risky.”
“Bill can help him,” Fleur said. “Bill has wolf’s blood now.”
“She’s right,” Bill said. “Back at the Burrow, right after I was attacked, I tried approaching Remus when he was in wolf form. He knew me. He didn’t attack me…”
“No!” Tonks practically yelled, her unexpected volume startling them all. “I mean, it’s too dangerous. You’ve healed since then. Who’s to say he’d still recognize you as one of his kind? You could be killed, and we’d have a raging werewolf on our hands. The Wolfsbane is working, better not to tamper with it. Remus can handle the side effects.”
Fleur didn’t believe a word she was saying. She was certain that Lupin would be better off stopping the potion. Bill was frustrated as well.
“All Nymphadora has to do is say he might hurt someone, and Remus will go along with whatever she says,” Bill told Fleur the next day when Tonks was out. “He’s always been terrified of being out of control, of hurting or killing someone, but I know I could help him. When Sirius Black was still alive, he could take Remus through the transformation, keep him under control. Black was an Animagus-he could turn into a dog-but I’m even closer to a werewolf than he was. It would work, but the last thing Tonks wants is me picking up where Sirius left off.”
“Why?” Fleur asked. “She is his lover. Why would she not want him to be well?”
Bill turned bright crimson the way only a red-head could.
“I don’t know how much of this is true,” he said, “but Remus and Sirius might have been … more than friends.”
“I see,” Fleur said. And she did.
If Tonks had been offended by the sounds from Bill and Fleur’s room, it might have had something to do with the fact that she and Lupin seemed to slumber in a chaste silence. Lupin seemed hard pressed to look at (much less touch) Tonks. Bill, though, was a different story. Bill was the one thing that seemed to bring him back to some kind of life.
Lupin looked at Bill the way other women had looked at him before he had been scarred. Oddly, this did not upset Fleur. It made sense to her that they should be drawn together, these two men marked by Fenrir Greyback’s viciousness.
They were drawn together. She watched in the days that followed how Bill leaned close to hear Lupin’s few and barely audible words, how he steadied the mug of tea in the older man’s unsteady hands.
“You care for him,” Fleur whispered when they were alone in the night, she and her husband.
“I feel sorry for him,” Bill said.
“It is more than that. He is why we are here. You volunteered to come to Hogsmeade. It was to be near him.”
Bill was silent for a long time.
“I can’t deny that,” he finally said, “but I swear to you, there’s been nothing between Remus and me.”
“Perhaps there should be,” she said to the darkness.
“No. There can’t be. There won’t be. I’m married. I’m married to you. I love you.”
“I know that you love me,” she said, “but I can understand you wanting him. I can understand that a part of you wants someone who is like you. Part of me will always be lonely for what I had with Gabrielle. Part of me will always want a woman, a sister. I can understand you wanting a man-this man who is a wolf like you, your brother in blood.”
*
In the days that followed, she gave Bill whatever space she could to be with Lupin even if it meant she was herself alone. Bill did draw closer to the other man, tentatively closer. He let his hand rest on Lupin’s wrist. Fleur caught a glimpse of them, their foreheads pressed together as Bill whispered to him.
“I would never do anything to hurt you, Fleur,” Bill whispered to her later that day. All things were said in whispers. Fleur longed to speak loudly and boldly, but she couldn’t. Instead, she took her husband’s hand. She led him to where Lupin was, huddled on the twisted steps to the Shack’s upper level.
She kissed Bill. Kissed him as if they were alone, as if they were in bed together and all the weight of war and confinement was lifted from them. Lupin rose to leave, to fade away, but she caught a handful of his shabby robes (but weren’t all their robes shabby these days). She kissed him as well.
No man could resist her. He returned her kiss, and she lingered between them, letting the hands of the two men move over her body, their lips over her face inevitably meeting each other. Slowly, she drew herself away, inch by inch, till it was the two of them together and Fleur Delacour-Weasley the odd girl out. She left her husband in the stairwell in the embrace of the werewolf. She was alone, she was lonely, but she did not regret what she had made happen.
She would not let being trapped in a teetering ghost house squelch the pale flame of her. She would not let war make her as harsh and ugly as it was.
*
Tonks was less than pleased when Lupin told her he was going off the Wolfsbane. She raged at him for hours in a one-sided row most of which Fleur and Bill couldn’t help but overhear.
“Don’t you understand that when you transform, you are a monster?” she hissed. “If you let Bill try this, you will kill him. You will kill him, and you will have to live with that. Is that what you want? Are you willing to be a murderer, Remus?”
Bill finally stepped in.
“Stop trying to bludgeon him into submission, Nymphadora,” he said. “I know I can do this.”
She’d turned on him with eyes black yet glowing.
“You can do everything Sirius did, is that it, Bill?” she snarled, palpable hatred in her voice. “Fine, it’s your funeral.”
In the days leading up to the full moon, she refused to speak to any of them except Lupin who she continued to hammer at to no avail. As the influence of the potion waned, so did his docile passivity, and he held out against her. He would not continue the potion. If Bill was willing to attempt to see him through the transformation, he was willing to try it as well.
On the night of the full moon, the two men disappeared into the passageway that led to the Whomping Willow. It was the most secure portion of the Shack. If something did go wrong, if Bill lost control of Lupin, this way Tonks and Fleur would be safe, and the werewolf would be contained.
In the Shack, the women waited silent and distant within the close set of rooms. Bill had warned them to keep their distance. If the wolf sensed the presence of humans, he might become unmanageable. However, the moment the sun rose, Fleur, who had been sleeping fitfully, started awake and ran to the tunnel.
Bill was sitting against the wall, unhurt and asleep. Lupin’s naked form curled beside him, his head on the younger man’s lap. Bill’s hand rested in his hair as if he had been petting the wolf when he fell asleep.
Fleur left them and returned to the Shack. Nymphadora Tonks was waiting for her, eyes the tumultuous purple-black of a stormy sky and her hair beyond pink to the color of blood.
“It worked,” Fleur said, unable to keep a note a triumph from her voice.
“Why are you so happy about it, Madame?” Tonks demanded. “When it means your much lauded Veela charms aren’t enough to keep your husband away from a broken-down wreck like Remus?”
“You are welcome to see it however you wish,” Fleur said coldly. “I know my husband loves me. I do not need to own him.”
“Are you trying to show me up again?” Tonks snarled. “Like you did the night Dumbledore was killed? To show that not only are you beautiful but also that you’re somehow superior to me because you don’t have to fight to be loved?
“You made this happen. I’ve known Bill for years. I know his family, and they’re decent, normal people. He wouldn’t have done this on his own. This is all your fault, you libertine French bitch. Everyday, I risk my life trying to keep us alive, to find out when and if we can get out of this, while you languish here playing games and turning everything into a tawdry boudoir farce. Why are you even here? You’re not in the Order. You don’t belong here. Why do you have to be here?”
“Do you think I have a choice?” Fleur asked. “That I could go, but I stay here to toy with you? I have no choice. I have not had a choice for months and months. I am trapped here like you, and like you I am trying as hard as I can to keep us all alive. I have done all I could to keep your lover from fading into nothingness, even if it meant sharing the one comfort I have. I saw need, and I gave what was needed. Do you think this is easy for me? It is a fight every day for me, against fear and loneliness. You have made it harder.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes, but she kept control of herself. She would not give Nymphadora Tonks the satisfaction of making her cry.
“When we came here, I respected you a great deal,” Fleur said. “I thought you were independent, that you had a mind of your own. I thought you were strong and brave and unconventional. I had hoped with all my heart that we might help each other, be of comfort to one another. I had hoped that we would be close, but you have been hateful towards me from the start.”
Tonks’ anger seemed to wilt. The violent colors of her eyes and hair faded slowly back to their normal shade.
“I… I assumed you looked down on me,” she finally said, dumbfounded. “It never occurred to me that you would see me as anything but a deficient specimen … a dull, fat cow. It never occurred to me that you might need or want anything I could offer. It never occurred to me not to hate you.
“I’m sorry,” Tonks finally said, and she took Fleur’s hand. “Is it too late?”
“No,” Fleur said. “It is not too late.”
*
Really, nothing changed after the night of the full moon. They were still confined to the Shack. Tonks alone could leave the place, venture out to find food and news, though there was rarely enough of either. The threat of discovery continued to hang over them, as did uncertainty. Days then weeks passed. Nothing had changed, yet it had become easier.
The four of them were still captive, beset with anxieties, in mortal danger each moment, yet they were less alone. They had come to an understanding amongst themselves. They were no longer disparate and clashing elements; they now moved as a quartet. They were kind to each other. When they saw need, they answered it.
“When I offered myself to him, Remus had nothing,” Tonks told Fleur. “His partner was dead; he was sick and poor and utterly defeated. I thought he would be grateful to have me, but even he didn’t want me. I had to make him take me. I had to prove I was at least good enough for a wreck like him.”
“Those are horrible things to think,” Fleur said. “About him and about yourself. And they are not true. You do not need to fight to be loved or to force men to love you. You would be an adventure for anyone.”
“May I kiss you?” Tonks asked.
“Please.”
She was lying beside Tonks, and the woman leaned down to kiss her, enveloping her in a veil of hair the color of lilacs and roses. It was the only color Fleur had seen that day, the only true brightness. She half closed her eyes so it all blurred, and she thought of weddings and dances and holidays as Nymphadora Tonks’ lips opened to her. Their kisses were warmth and color and everything they had to offer each other.
*
Fleur Delacour Weasley looked at herself in the mirror. She would always be a bit vain. She was still beautiful but was too thin-thinner than she had ever been. The silver white sheen of her hair was rather dull. She was pale, but her eyes were still alive. At least her eyes were still alive.
Her face faded, replaced by the disheveled countenance of Arthur Weasley, her father-in-law.
“Fleur,” he said. “Thank goodness we’ve finally gotten through.”
“Bill,” she cried. “It is your father.” Bill ran to her side, took the mirror.
“Dad, what’s happening? Where are you?” he asked.
They gathered around the mirror, Bill and Fleur, Lupin and Tonks. The Ministry of Magic and the Order were both nearby, just outside the perimeters of the Death Eater controlled village.
“They don’t know we’re here,” Bill told his father. “We can strike from inside. We’ll make an opening for you to come in.” He turned to the others. “Get your wands.”
And Fleur knew that whatever had been was ending. They would not die in the Shrieking Shack after all, though they might die outside it soon enough. They would never be as they had been, and for a moment she felt a stab of nostalgia for this place that had made her a prisoner and forced her to make herself free.
A hand pressed hers. Bill? Tonks? Lupin? She did not know, but she was not afraid. She took up her wand and walked out the door of the Shrieking Shack.