Chapter Text
Hermione doesn’t so much lay down on the couch as topple forwards.
“Fleur?” she shouts into the cushions.
She doesn’t get an answer. What she gets are slender fingers curling around her hips and lifting her up long enough for Fleur to straddle Hermione’s legs and dig in for a back rub.
“Zis is a lovely neighborhood,” Fleur muses even as a skillful and sinful press of her thumbs has Hermione smearing her moans into a throw pillow. “There must be sights to see if we took a walk?”
Bloody hell. Why didn’t I think of that?
She fidgets around under Fleur to signal that she wants to get up but Fleur is a veela and her mate was reckless enough to lie face-down on a padded surface and lower her guard. Hermione can blame no one but herself.
Hermione’s not sure how long she lies there as Fleur hums a tune she doesn’t recognize in time with her thumbs pressing down at the base of her shoulder-blades and her fingers twirl against her spine.
It’s still light out when she turns her head and faces the real world.
“Why don’t I take you on a date?”
“A date?” Fleur gasps. “Unprecedented!”
Hermione huffs.
“Right. I’ve been shit at taking you on dates. I’m sorry. We’d just finished fighting a war and then…”
“…by ze time we had a night to ourselves, you were already mine, ’Ermione. I needed no dates to know zat. But I am not opposed.”
“Great. Can you hand me my phone? I need to see if this place is in business.”
Fleur straightens up, summons Hermione’s phone with a gentle wandless wave, and shimmies down and sits on Hermione’s calves rather than her butt.
“You and Crookshanks,” she grumbles.
Fuck. I miss him.
“Fleur,” she mumbles, leaning forward to push her tears into the pillow. “Do you think we could…I mean…he was like a friend.”
She chortles.
“Kneazles are clever, ’Ermione. I suspect we need to look for ze greedy beast, not ’old a funeral for ’im.”
She never did like how he would sit on my lap before she could.
Not for the first time, she wonders about that skinny orange cat in Harry’s photo album from his mum and dad. She’s got no bloody clue how long Kneazles live, or how smart they are–besides a hell of a lot smarter than a Muggle cat–so Fleur might well be right.
“It was near here, where I left him. In the woods nearby.”
“Avis dulce passer!” Fleur calls out, twirling her wand in the air like she’s stirring coffee. At least two dozen sparrows emerge from the swirl, so plump they can barely fly, glistening with sugar from beak to tail. She beckons and the entire flock alights upon her, preening and shaking their tail feathers eagerly.
Snow White wishes she was that popular with the birdies.
Fleur chirps and coos and whispers, and the conjured birds all bow their little heads like ballet troupe at curtain call. A flick of the wand unlatches the picture window, and a breeze from nowhere throws it open. The sparrows take flight, fanning out the instant they clear the windowsill.
“Your amulet, please, ’Ermione.”
She digs around in her shirt and pulls it out.
“Soron culuina,” Fleur whispers before pricking her thumb with her wand and pressing the droplet to her lips. She kisses the steel charm with bloody lips.
A blood blessing, an incantation in High Sidhean and a kiss. That’s not human magic.
The eagle in the Delacour sigil beats her tiny wings, finally lifting herself free of the confines of the amulet and hopping across to the coffee table.
“Morgana’s breath,” Hermione murmurs. “Is that…”
“She’s alive. In ’er own way,” Fleur replies.
Something like quicksilver drips from the bird’s feathers as she preens them until she sparkles like solid gold. Only the paler silver at the very tips of her flight feathers, the enormous eyes that glitter like blue diamonds and talons of cast iron reveal that she’s anything other than an expensive and magnificent sculpture.
With every instant freed from the locket, the eagle grows. And grows. And grows. What began as an etching on a coin swells to a size larger than any species of eagle Hermione can think of. As big as those Mongolian eagles that sometimes take lambs. Bigger. She wonders if it might make off with one of the brass lambs in the parish church’s sculpture garden.
“Touch her, so she knows.”
Hermione offers her palm, unsure about the idea of petting this massive automaton infused with unknown blood magic and faerie secrets. The eagle leans in, angling her beak downward and offering the top of her head and crown of feathers to Hermione’s curious fingers.
“Can you find Crookshanks?” she asks. “He looks like…well…he’s a cat. Orange cat.”
Something pierces her mind and raids her memories. An unhappy mass of ginger fur mewling next to Flourish and Blotts, crooning as she bent down to offer her ice cream. He didn’t like the anti-flea spell, but he loved the train. He purred so intensely on her lap that by the time the Hogwarts Express arrived, her thighs were numb.
“Neat trick.”
The eagle cocks her head. If a bird of prey could roll her eyes, it would look like that.
“You know what he looks like, then.”
“Go,” Fleur tells the beast, motioning to the window she opened for the sparrows. “May ze Mother of ze Winds lift your wings.”
The eagle takes flight with a single mighty flap that scatters her mother’s magazines and half a dozen doilies across the room.
Hermione turns back to her phone and taps around. She stashed her old phone upstairs before she fled, locked with both a PIN code and a no-heal slicing charm only she could disarm. Told herself she’d thought of everything. Everything except the advancement of technology. None of them couldn’t get the contacts to export to the new model. She’s the ‘most muggle’ person here in terms of technology, between Harry ever having access to gadgets, most of the other guests being purebloods, and her mum and dad tending to drag their feet on using that sort of thing.
In the past, she always asked Colin Creevy about technology.
Too many pureblood wizards think electric lighting is innovative stuff.
it seems even corner delis run by kooky old men have websites now.
“Why don’t I show you where I would eat lunch after school, er, Muggle school?”
Fleur lands a slap on Hermione’s ass and dismounts, holding herself en pointe before doing a Merlin-fucked backflip over the couch and landing without the floorboards giving the tiniest creak.
“Sounds perfect, ’Ermione.”
Hermione fiddles a hair-tie off her wrist and crams as many of her curls into it as she can.
“You don’t need to change.”
With a huff that displaces her glimmering mane and a disdainful lift of the chin, Fleur turns and stalks away. She’ll probably be back in a designer evening gown.
“It’s a sandwich shop with plastic tables!” she calls after her.
Wood slams into wood. Hermione lunges away from the couch, cramming herself tight against the living room wall beside the fireplace. In memory sharp as a crystal knife, a dead man’s voice barks out orders, his kilt whipping in a Northumberland sea breeze, his peg-leg sinking into the sand and his glass eye glinting in the sun as it breaks the clouds. Block. Control the Field. Assess. Destroy. Constant Vigilance!
The big ones are line of sight, she reminds herself. Solid objects that would block an arrow or a knife thrust block Avada Kedavra and Crucio requires looking into the victim’s eyes, and Imperio doesn’t take hold fast enough if the angle is wrong. If it’s Fiendfyre, she’s well and truly fucked.
She waves her fingers towards the front window in a loose protego charm followed by a scleris to harden the glass. Not much, but enough to shatter rather than passing a killing curse straight through. Enough to buy her time to find cover.
“Hermione!” her mum calls out. “Everything all right?”
Fuck.
There’s no threat but her feet and her hands don’t believe that, just her head.
Her mum pokes her head around the corner, wiping sweat onto the leather of her garden gloves as she peers around. It doesn’t take her long to spot Hermione.
“Babygirl?”
She meant to say she’s fine, but she managed less than a squeak. Her mum peels off her other glove and tosses them towards the doormat.
“Oh, honey…”
Jean gathers her up into her arms and her body reboots, sucking in a hurried lungful after forgetting to breathe. She hums a lullaby that triggers hazy, warm memories of Hermione. She must have been young, too young to remember sights, but she remembers sounds, and her mother’s shushing, and the scent of her perfume.
“I am sorry you had to go through that, babygirl. I’m sorry it hurt you. No matter what, you are my daughter, and I love you, and I will protect you, and I will help you.”
She pulls back a little and beams at Hermione.
“And I think you’ve found someone else who will always love and help you, eh?”
“Yeah,” she croaks. “Yeah, I did, mum.”
Fleur’s joke about her outfit dies at the base of her throat when she sees her mother-in-law stroking Hermione’s arms and the Elder Wand gripped in Hermione’s shaking hands.
Despite her beloved’s protestations to the contrary and stammering demands to hurry up and get lunch, Fleur refuses. She can’t take her out into the world just yet. Anything might trigger her. She makes Hermione sit beside her, tilts her sideways into her lap and strokes her hair. A flick of her wand and a whispered accio summons a satin duvet stuffed with Fleur’s own down, scented with lavender, and weighed with tiny bits of polished jade. She pulls it up to Hermione’s chin before sliding her hand inside to rub the back of her little lion’s neck.
“Forget ze date. Nothing matters more to me, ’Ermione. Nothing in ze world matters more zan you feeling safe.”
Jean scoops up Hermione’s phone and taps in a PIN.
“Ha!”
“Mum…” Hermione moans.
“It’s the room number for your maths classroom the year before Hogwarts, ’Mione. Not hard to guess.”
“It’s a hard guess in a school where no one even takes maths and the floors aren’t even numbered, let alone the bloody rooms,” she grumbles.
Jean hands the phone to Fleur and drops a kiss on her head.
“Never thought I’d be so rich in daughters,” she muses. “Buy her lunch, if you would?”
“A pleasure.”
Fleur holds the phone out and lets Hermione tap in her order.
“Zis one never remembers to eat until she’s faint,” Fleur teases. “Seems I will be in charge of keeping us fed…”
“You always take such good care of me,” Hermione sniffs, pressing her face into Fleur’s thighs and wetting her jeans with tears.