Dueling Hearts Ch. 34: Fleur Delacour, This is your life (Patreon)

This one is shorter than the usual, but I felt like the chapter would not work as well if I put other stuff around Fleur's backstory. To make up for the length, tomorrow I'll post some prequel drabbles that, when put together with this, will be about the length of a full chapter.

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A slim, ten-year old girl with silvery blonde hair laughed breathlessly as she ran into the patio. There were twigs in her hair and her knee was scraped raw from when she’d fallen off the tree. She knew her mother would fuss endlessly over her, but Fleur didn’t care. She loved to explore nature, and getting a few bumps and bruises was all a part of it.

She sniffed the air, wanting to catch a whiff of her mother’s Bouillabaisse, which she’d promised her she’d make for dinner.

She couldn’t really smell anything beyond the fresh rain and the grass. Perhaps her mother hadn’t gotten started on dinner yet. Her father had surely returned by now, and Fleur knew how her parents could get ‘distracted’.

As she approached the glass door, she couldn’t help but notice just how eerily quiet everything was. Only the howling of the wind could be heard. Usually, Gabrielle would either be crying her lungs out, giggling like a maniac or her mother would be singing a lullaby to help soothe her.

It was pitch black inside of the house.

When the door slid open, she was assaulted by a thick stench of copper. Fleur followed the smell to the kitchen, wondering if Gabrielle had thrown up something strange, when her entire body went cold.

Her father was staring at her with lifeless eyes. His green eyes were glassy as he lay in a rapidly growing pool of blood, his body was twisted up, with limbs sticking out at odd angles.

But that was not the worst of it, not by a long shot. A few feet away from him lay her mother. All colour had been drained from her beautiful face, its visage contorted in an expression of unbridled terror.

And in her arms, her innocent little face frozen in abject horror, was Fleur’s baby sister.

That same baby sister who’s first birthday was supposed to be next week. That same baby sister that Fleur constantly said she hated, but that she’d grown a soft spot for all the same. The baby sister whom she’d rocked to sleep last night.

She was dead as well.

Fleur screamed into the night, and noone heard her cry.

…

“Fleur, dear, there’s a man here to see you.”

Fleur nodded numbly, not even bothering to look up at her aunt.

Her aunt Noelle tried, she really did. But there was only so much that could be done for a child that had suffered such severe trauma. If they had been muggles, she might have sent Fleur off to a psychiatrist, who probably wouldn’t have succeeded in treating the young girl either.

But they were magical, and so all Noelle could do was feed Fleur dreamless sleep potions and try to console her as best she could, when she wasn’t weeping helplessly herself.

This man, the Headmaster of Durmstrang Academy, had contacted her months ago. At first, Noelle had ignored it, but as time went on and she became more desperate, she decided it would be worth a try.

Fleur heard the man walk in. She didn’t look up, she just stared down at the floor, wishing it could all just end.

“Wallowing in self-pity, what a pathetic display.” The man spoke in heavily accented French.

Fleur’s head snapped up as she glared hatefully at him.

He was an unpleasant looking man, with unwashed greasy hair, a hooked nose and a derisive sneer to match.

“Who the fuck are you?” Fleur hissed, the first words she’d spoken in months.

“Tell me, girl, what do you plan to do with your life? Your school year has already begun. Are you going to neglect your education entirely?”

Fleur huffed. “None of that matters.”

A smile crept up the man’s face, “Oh, I agree. What’s the use of silly little essays, or study groups, or gallivanting around with other little brats? Wasting your life away. None of it matters. But you know what does?”

“What?” Fleur snarled. She wanted this man to leave, to leave her alone, she wanted everyone to just leave her alone.

“Vengeance.”

The word rang off inside of her head. It echoed through her very being, through her body and soul, her bones. For the first time since her family’s death, Fleur felt awake, she felt like something other than a phantom.

“Vengeance?”

“Yes. Sweet, sweet vengeance.” The man turned his head sideways as he inspected her, “Do you wish to seek it? Or are you going to spend the rest of your life here, fading away into a pathetic little shell?”

“Vengeance.” Fleur whispered into the night.

…

She had managed to track him down to this seedy pub in Vladivostok. Headmaster Snape’s source had been correct.

After four years at Durmstrang, four years of having the image of her family’s killer burned into the back of her eyelids, she would finally have her vengeance.

He was a tall, skinny, deathly pale man. His dark eyes were sunken in, and his bald head was wrinkled. He was sitting alone in a booth, staring off into nothing.

Fleur approached quietly, she whipped out her yew wand and sent a deep purple curse flying towards the man.

He dived below the booth, and he rolled away from Fleur’s following volley, returning fire with his own curses, one of which clipped the fourteen year old witch on the shoulder.

Fleur hissed, but she continued firing, curse after curse, even as her arm went numb from the dark magic.

But the Pale Man didn’t engage. He escaped, and in all the chaos that sprung as the other patrons began to attack her, Fleur was forced into a retreat.

…

Fleur cried bitter tears. She wasn’t strong enough, she would never be strong enough.

She had faced the Pale Man once more. The man who had hunted her family down, all for a few quarts of veela blood.

She had failed, miserably.

Fleur cast a blasting curse at her opponent, Fyodor, a seventh year, and the top duelist in the school.

Fyodor sidestepped her curse and flicked his own wand, wrapping her up in conjured ropes before Fleur could even hope to react.

“Winner, Fyodor!”

The other students clapped politely as Fleur lay there. She was facing the Headmaster, and Snape looked at her in clear disapprovaldissaproval. She was a failure, She would never be strong enough to avenge her family.

It didn’t matter to Fleur that she was only fifteen, facing off against a much more experienced student. She had thrown herself into this, her entire life was consumed with revenge, and yet she was still unable to defeat schoolchildren.

She needed to do more. She had to do more.

…

“I see, so you’ve finally seen reason, girl.”

That was all Snape had told her. Then, he’d handed her off to one of his servants, Dmitri, who had escorted her back to France.

She had vehemently opposed doing this. It had felt wrong, felt sinister. But now, after all this failure, things like right or wrong no longer mattered to her. All that mattered was vengeance.

Anything was justifiable in the pursuit of that ultimate end.

Dmitri stood back as Fleur gouged out the graves.

Her mother and her sister, their bodies perfectly preserved by the Veela funeral rites.

Desecrating such pristine bodies… it would make her worse than an outcast among her people, it would make her a monster, a thing to be hated and despised. Not even her aunt would be able to look at her as anything but an abomination.

None of it mattered. Only vengeance mattered.

She cast a severing charm first, cutting a single strand of her baby sister’s silvery blonde hair. The first virgin hair of a baby veela.

The wand Snape had given her, the bone-white yew wand, was powerful, but it was not fully hers. The phoenix core would never truly answer to her, it knew she wasn’t its master.

But with her baby sister’s hair at the core, she knew the wand would heel.

Her hand trembled as she proceeded onward. She flinched, but she dared not look away as the bodies of her mother and sister were compressed, their beautiful, peaceful visages forever contorted into grotesque mockeries of the human form.

Then, they turned to dust as Fleur’s spell did its job, pulverizing their bodies into a fine powder.

She could feel the ancient veela magics screeching in agony, the song of her ancestors rattling through her very bones, telling her of the wrongness, the vileness of what she was doing.

Fleur did not stop, even when she felt a lump in her throat as the contents of her stomach violently lurched outward.

Finally, she had done it. She had destroyed any possibility of returning to the land of the living, she had made herself an enemy of her very own people. She had cut the final thread that bound her to the world.

…

“Stand still!” The burly man scolded as the tattoo needle hovered over Fleur's arm.

She had been in this damp, dirty dungeon for over a day now, an entire day of non-stop agony as the tattooist did his work.

They had decided to start from the bottom up. Fleur's legs were raw and red, the healing salve doing little to assuage her pain.

The tattooist took breaks, and that was the only respite Fleur got from the constant pain of having the needle dig into her skin, her mother and sister’s ashes covering her form.

They still had so long to go. It would take two more days of round the clock work before her tattoos were finished.

Snape had sent several potions to ensure she remained awake, since the magic would not take if she lost consciousness.

At many points, Fleur found herself wishing for death, wishing for release from this thresher. But she held on, her will made of iron.

It would all be worth it.

It would all be worth it when the Pale Man lay dying at her feet.

…

The Pale Man was twitching on the floor, gurgling as blood pooled by his face.

Fleur stood over him.

It had been easy. Anticlimactic. She had unleashed her fury on him, and he had broken like a twig.

“You’re not going to die just yet, I’m going to make you suffer, you bastard.” she spat as she kicked him in the face.

The Pale Man stared up at her. Not in fear or hatred, but in acceptance.

“Do what you must,” He said.

“What? That’s all you have to say?” Fleur growled as she kicked him in the side.

“What do you expect from me, girl? Have your vengeance. I knew my line of business, I knew the consequences, now I will face them.”

“My mother, my father, my baby sister… They were just business to you?!” Fleur felt her rage boiling over, her hands trembling as she looked over this monster of a man, who never once even flinched as he bled out on the floor.

“The client asked for veela blood, I sourced it.” He said, “Now come, torture me, let my screams soothe your aching sou-”

Fleur’s cruciatus curse struck him dead in the chest, and the man did scream, as much as his rapidly dying body allowed him to.

But Fleur was numb, and his screams sounded like distant thunder to her.

She didn’t bother to close his wounds.

He bled out in mere moments, turning still.

…

“I exacted my revenge, I fulfilled my purpose, but I feel emptier now than ever. I felt no pleasure when the man died, no righteous fury. Now, I find myself aimless, what am I to do?”

Snape’s head snapped up from where he’d been scouring financial reports. He fixed Fleur with his trademark sneer.

“Tell me, Delacour, what am I?”

“W-What are you?”

“What am I?”

“The Headmaster?”

“And where exactly in my job description does it say that I have to listen to your sniveling little cries of despair?”

Fleur didn’t think she still had a heart left to shatter, but it did just that upon hearing her headmaster’s words. She had never liked Snape, but he was all she had. He was the only adult figure that she’d felt she could come to, that she could talk to about this.

“B-Bu-”

“You’ve had your vengeance, Delacour, I’ve upheld my end of our bargain.” He eyed her tattoos, “And I've turned you into quite the weapon, if I do say so myself. If you are unhappy with your revenge, then perhaps you should have exacted it better.”

Fleur’s lip quivered for a moment before she schooled her features. She bowed her head, taking deep breaths as she cleared her mind.

“Is there anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Then leave me. And I suggest you don’t show such weakness amongst your peers. At Durmstrang, steel sharpens steel.”

“Yes, sir.”