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Eight months out of the year, in the marbled corridors and grand glittering halls of the Palace of Beauxbatons, there lived a rare and most beautiful flower.
This flower, far lovelier than anything else being hosted by the Palace, had been tended to so tenderly and with such devotion by nearly everyone it came across in life. Or rather, by everyone lucky enough to stumble across it and be part of its lovely and tender and beautiful life. Because that is how everyone felt, when basking in the presence of the flower - lucky.
How fortunate they all were, how favoured! First and foremost, perhaps, were the ones who had planted and watered and nourished and tended most ardently to the growing of this beauty. Who, was it not for these two people, there would have been no flower at all to speak of.
There was tall, broad-shouldered Phillipe with his gleaming white teeth and gleaming sense of goodness, of luckiness, of how-on-earth-has-he-managed-it. Phillipe was perhaps the luckiest man that ever lived - the neighbours all agreed, all whispered and gossiped about it; their envy was palpable, because for a man to be that lucky was perceived to be positively obscene, almost unnatural. Rumours abounded about Phillipe, with his good looks and his sizeable Gringotts vault and his mansion in Lyon - not forgetting the townhouse in Paris, the villa in the Alps, and the holiday chateaux in Geneva. Some whispered about how Phillipe was a master Felix Felicis brewer, keeping numerous vats of the stuff illegally, smuggled away in coves in the mountains. How else could one be so darned lucky all the time?
Phillipe’s wife was a wonder to behold, truly. Remarkably, she was even more beautiful than the flower of Beauxbatons, but she could never be described as lovely, for to be lovely one surely had to be gentle and of a sweet disposition. To be lovely inspired a certain awe in others, a desire to protect and care for the vulnerable, the lovely, because lovely people hadn’t a violent bone in their bodies.
Phillipe’s wife, however, had a certain jaggedness about her, a somewhat sharpened cruelty about the smooth jaw, the fine cheekbones. A murky danger hid just beneath the thick, fluttering eyelashes; it played peek-a-boo in the curve of her lipsticked smile. Everyone who met Phillipe’s wife all agreed, as assuredly as Phillipe was a Felicis crook, there was something otherworldly about his wife. Something exciting. Something dangerous.
It was whispered in the streets of Paris, it was a source of gossip in the shops of Lyon and the Alps and Geneva. A hushed word. A secret word.
Veela.
Men all about the town knew not whether they should congratulate or warn Phillipe of his wife. She was beautiful, breathtakingly so - and not just the metaphor; she left men and women gasping in her wake - and the neighbours asked themselves: was he under some sort of spell? And if he was, did he really need their help?
Because Phillipe and Apolline seemed to live a charmed life for a crook and a half-monster. They had all those residences, after all, and the Gringotts bank account besides, and if he was under some sort of spell or not, was it one to be rescued from? They seemed happy - far happier than anyone, truth be told - and they wandered the towns and the cities and the holiday resorts arm-in-arm, laughing and smiling. They gave money to charity and seemed unconcerned with trivial matters such as blood purity and the rumblings of war over the channel.
Yes, they seemed lucky enough all right. And so it fitted, it made sense, it was expected even, when this bright and beautiful and ethereally dangerous couple cultivated and gave life to the loveliest flower in all of France, in all of Europe - possibly in all of the world.
The flower, from a young age, was told how lovely she was and how beautiful, and so she flourished from all the attention, always seeming to reach for the sun and even outshine it. She cast everyone else into the shade, whether intentional or not, and her parents could not have been prouder. Her genes were a blessing; she seemed to have inherited just the right amount of monster in her veins. Not too much, now - not enough to frighten the neighbours, but enough to give her a certain glow, enough to cause everyone around her to want to be better, to be more, to impress her.
Magic seemed to come easy to her. She was accepted into the hallowed halls of Beauxbatons without question, surprising no-one. There, under the tutelage of someone else not-quite human, she was favoured. Perhaps it was unsporting of the Headmistress to pick favourites, but the Headmistress had a soft spot for the not-quites, the halflings, the ones that struggled with their darker sides. It struck a chord within her big bones, and really, the other students could not fault her for favouring the flower, because oh, wasn’t she lovely!
And so, an obvious choice to be the champion of the school. When the Goblet spat the flower’s name out of its flames -
“The Beauxbatons Champion, is Fleur Delacour!”
No surprises there.
Across the water, Phillipe and Apolline applauded and uncorked the champagne when they heard the news, and really no one was the least bit worried. Why should they be? After all, the Delacours were a lucky tribe, and good fortune and fame and riches seemed to follow them through life - what did they have to fear?
They travelled to Britain, to dark and tempestuous Scotland and into the chilly stone halls of Hogwarts. They wore their best and warmest fur-lined cloaks, for Fleur had warned them of the climate, and they settled down with a hundred others to watch their daughter do battle with a dragon.
“Maman!” little Gabrielle exclaimed, clutching her muffler to her face in fright. “Maman, c’est un monstre! Un monstre terrible!”
Apolline merely lifted her chin in indifference; Phillipe shifted in his seat to get a better view. They were not worried. As the crowd ooh-ed and aah-ed, gasped and screamed, the Delacour’s remained their composure, kept their calm even when Fleur’s skirts went up in flames. People surrounding them nudged their neighbours, pointed at these foreigner’s lack of concern for their oldest child, but Phillipe and Apolline had long ago disregarded other’s opinions of themselves. They were not like these people in this frozen, unglamorous land; they had no need to be concerned, because of course their flower would rise to the challenge and would emerge unscathed. That was simply how things were meant to be when your life was lucky and charmed and beautiful.
“See, ma chérie,” Apolline said, when at last Fleur had the golden egg tucked securely under her arm. She nudged Gabrielle gently, who was covering her eyes with trembling fingers, and pointed into the arena where Fleur stood, shaking slightly but smiling up at the applauding crowds. “See, ma petite bichette, she is all right. Everything is all right.”
“Ah, Gabrielle,” Fleur said later on, when her little sister flung herself around Fleur’s waist in a vice-tight hug. “You were not worried, were you?”
“Non,” Gabrielle lied. “I knew you’d do it.”
“Of course she would do it!” Philippe boomed imperiously, a chuckle in his voice. “She is a Delacour, a champion of Beauxbatons!”
“The winner of the Triwizard Tournament, naturally,” Madame Maxime said, nodding regally, because she didn’t question that her protege would place first in this competition.
It came as something of a horrid blow, then, when - quite unexpectedly - Fleur Delacour, flower of her family, golden girl of the Palace of Beauxbatons, did not win the Triwizard Cup. Apolline and Phillipe were left speechless, the feeling of placing last in something completely alien to them. Madame Maxime was white with fury, and they all blamed everything from the corrupt British government to the heavy Hogwarts food taking an unusual and detrimental effect on young Fleur. They did not blame Fleur herself, of course.
“Oh, ma petite chou, it was not your fault,” they cried, as they cleaned her up after the awful business in the maze. “Everyone knows Durmstrang and Hogwarts are cheaters to the end.”
Fleur did not speak much about what happened in the maze, not even to her little sister. Privately, Gabrielle was glad that her sister had not reached the Cup first, and had nightmares for months about what would have happened if she did. She woke up every other night drenched and shaking, imagining her sister alone in a graveyard, and a cold high voice, and a blast of green light.
Their parents were of the opinion that that Harry Potter boy had had too many blows to the head. Too many injuries sustained in the Tournament had made him quite loopy. The business with that Diggory boy was a most unfortunate accident, and obviously the Potter child was now mentally disturbed in some way. All in all, the Delacours were left with a rather sour taste in their mouths at the mere thought of Britain, and they spirited their children away as soon as was decently possibly, back to the grandness and luckiness and beauty of their lives in France.
“There, my darling,” Apolline said to Fleur when they were safely home, in the townhouse in Paris. “You are gone from that nasty place now, away from it all.”
Fleur may have been away from Britain, but Britain was never truly away from her. It was as if some cloak of luck had slipped from her shoulders, and now she was exposed to all the harsh realities of life. She had never really been troubled by thoughts of war in another country; death and Dark Lords did not haunt her dreams; the thought of other people’s suffering did not keep her awake at night.
But that was all before.
Because Fleur, despite what the judges scored her, was not stupid. She felt, deep down, she was good for more than being pretty and charming people into doing things for her. She was worth more than her smile, more than her silvery blonde hair and perfectly positioned features.
And Harry - despite what her parents said, and despite what the papers both in Britain and in France reported - she quite liked. He must have been quite a decent person, a good person, a fair person. He saved Gabrielle from those awful merpeople, after all, and he wanted to share the Cup with Cedric - of course that didn’t turn out quite how either boy had wanted, but that was hardly Harry’s fault. The good intention had been there.
Fleur rather thought that being good and fair and decent was perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, better than being beautiful and lucky and charmed.
Her parents were, naturally, troubled by this new and unexpected change in their daughter.
She is becoming too radical, they thought. She has started to get Ideas. She is questioning things. Reading papers from Britain, keeping abreast of their news - why, it’s not the way things are done! Who cares about over there, when we are over here? We are safe, after all.
Madame Maxime, on the other hand, saw this little spark in Fleur and fanned it, fed it, let it grow into a flame. As her parent’s had once tended to Fleur as if she were a real flower, the Headmistress now nurtured the fire in Fleur’s heart to do something about it all.
The Headmistress vanished one day, and the Deputy Head took up the mantle at Beauxbatons. Students speculated about what had happened, what had caused Madame Maxime to simply leave them all, but Fleur had a suspicion she knew. Madame Maxime had gone to do something. To help.
Fleur saw out her last few months at the Palace, and then packed a bag and travelled back to Britain. Back to the cold and the wet and the war. Her parents cried, they despaired - this was not how things were supposed to go! Not their daughter, their prized flower, off to that awful country with its problems and its Dark Lord intent on destroying the place! That is not the Delacour way at all!
Gabrielle, through her tears, was awfully proud.
Fleur went to Britain to fight in a war and she ended up doing the most mundane things like getting a job and falling in love. Gringotts helped her to become reliant upon herself, for never before had she had to earn her way and pay her way and make a path for herself that was not simply carved out for her already on the basis of her name and her looks. The war toughened her up; it stripped away the last of her round-eyed innocence and made the monster in her veins flare closer to the surface with every curse she aimed at those mask-wearing fools.
::
Bill Weasley came from a different sort of family. Different from the Delacours, with all their luck, and different from many other magical families, because the Weasleys were pure in the blood - they too could be favoured and fortunate, except they really didn’t hold with that sort of nonsense, thank you very much.
The Weasleys of Ottery St Catchpole were not what you would call lucky. Bad luck seemed to be passed down in the lineage, along with big hands and feet, freckles and hand-me-down robes.
Bill’s father was the seventh son of a seventh son; Septimus Weasley had been the cause of much uproar when he’d married the middle Black sister. The other two, Callidora and Charis, had made respectable marriages to respectable men - a Longbottom and a Crouch, respectively (naturally before both families had gone to the dogs) - but Cedrella had obviously been bewitched somehow in order to have run off with that Weasley scoundrel.
They made ends meet, with the last of Cedrella’s money she kept in a drying up vault in Gringotts, and Septimus’ paltry job in the Ministry. He never seemed to advance much in his position; the seniors all seemed to sneer down at him in his tattered robes and the bare-faced cheek in the way he did not seem to care one jot what they all thought of him. How impertinent, that Weasley fellow! they would cry. Is he not ashamed?
But no. Septimus Weasley was perfectly cheerful, all things considered. He was a perpetual optimist; he believed things had to get better (because certainly they could not get worse); he thought that life would be brighter for his sons. Perhaps if he had known differently, he would have had the grace to appear a bit sorrowful for his actions.
And so Arthur Weasley was born to a disgraced family, a blood-traitor family, and he was marked as such from the very day of his birth. History seemed to repeat itself in young Arthur’s life. He was a Gryffindor, like his dad, and he was poor, like his dad. He got a low-paying job in the Ministry, like his dad, and he was mocked and ridiculed and sneered at by the elitists, just like his dad. And like his dad, Arthur Weasley married a once-respectable Pureblood daughter of an old and impressive lineage, and ruined her life too.
The Prewetts were always considered a good sort of people. Robust, healthy people. They had good, strong links with good, strong families. Cyprian and Mafalda moved in the right sort of circles. Their daughter Molly was pretty enough in a homely sort of way, and oh, the boys! Fabian and Gideon, both so likeable and so charming. They were sure to make something of themselves, those two! They would leave their mark in history!
(In the end, they left a battered old watch and a grieving older sister. Their names were not mentioned in any history books and no monuments were built for them. Sometimes they would be glimpsed in the faces of two other boys, another set of twins, but that was really the only lasting historical record of the Prewett brothers, and that wasn’t exactly a very stable one either, in the end).
After Gideon and Fabian died, Molly and Arthur retreated further and further into their country life in Devon. They lost themselves in the domesticity of chunky handmade jumpers, roaring fires and homemade fudge. They kept chickens and gnomes in their back garden and told themselves that they were safe. They didn’t fight in the first rise of the war, and instead of raising an army they raised children instead.
When William Arthur Weasley was born, Molly and Arthur were sure that their luck was about to change. Bill was a bright, quick-witted boy, with a natural flare for magic. It appeared in him early, far earlier than it did for any of the other Weasley brood, when Bill was two and levitated baby Charlie into a tree for stealing his toy soldiers. After rescuing their second eldest from the highest branches, Molly and Arthur had celebrated and never been prouder. After all, it had been a remarkably controlled piece of magic for a toddler to perform.
Bill had a habit of making his parents proud. It seemed to come as naturally to him as breathing. At school, after a brief debate between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, the Hat decided it was another one for the lions. Bill charmed his Professors, he got top marks in almost every subject and was a general all-round model student. Kind and courteous to everyone, and able to keep a cool head and civil tongue whenever anyone made any digs about his family, Bill became very popular indeed among the other students. Captain of the chess club, Prefect, Head Boy, never without a date to Hogsmeade weekends. Perfect Bill Weasley.
If Charlie had a bad-natured bone in his body, it would have probably made him sick with envy; it certainly made impressionable Percy want to emulate his older brother in his achievements (although without the earring and sense of daring that was so exquisitely Bill); Fred and George joked and poked fun, but had a sense of deep down admiration for their oldest brother; little Ron was left feeling he had no hope at all of living up to him; and Ginny simply adored him, plain and simple.
The only fault his family could find with Bill was the fact that he was so eager to leave the country all the time. Charlie copied him and abandoned ship as well, but Percy was left adrift without his eldest brother’s guidance, and we all know where this lack of moral compass left him. Fred and George had no one to keep them in check (Percy had never quite managed to garner their respect) and were left to their own devices. To Ron and Ginny, the youngest, Bill was some sort of abstract concept of The Perfect Child. They loved him, but they never really knew him, although they - along with everyone else left behind in the Burrow - were reminded of Bill’s accomplishments almost daily.
As much as he loved his family- and really he did - Bill never felt any desire to be tethered to one place, and everything about the Burrow smacked of the stifling sense of permanence. Nothing had really changed since his parent’s first moved in: the copper pans gleaming on the stone walls in the kitchen were the same, charmed to be indestructible; the chickens and the gnomes were all from the same original batch; the only thing that ever really changed was that whenever Mum and Dad had another child, an extra storey would be tacked on to the top of the original structure.
Bill wanted to travel. He wanted danger and excitement. He wanted a job to match his dragonhide boots and fang-shaped earring. Being a Curse-Breaker let him achieve all of this, and make more money than his parents had probably ever even seen. He was never tied down to one particular place, although he did grow to have an affinity for the sun and the desert and the history of Egypt.
Bill Weasley would have probably been happy to live the life of a rich, glamorous nomad for his entire life, had his youngest brother not gone and befriended the saviour of the wizarding world.
He would have to admit, he never thought the friendship would last as long as it did. When his mum first wrote to him to tell him that Ron had started Hogwarts and was in the same class as Harry Potter - the Harry Potter, Bill, honestly; the poor soul, he was all on his own but do you know he was ever so well-mannered - Bill honestly didn’t think much of it. But Harry Potter kept on creeping in around the edges of Bill Weasley’s life; he was mentioned in nearly every other letter he received from home, whether it be from his mum or Ron or Ginny or even the twins. And then he learned that Harry Potter saved his little sister from a piece of Voldemort’s soul encased in a diary and, well, it’s rather hard not to like someone after that. Even somebody you’ve never met before.
And so, after their brief meeting for the Quidditch World Cup, Bill decided to take his parents up on their offer of sticking around Britain for a while, to watch the Triwizard Tournament and to cheer Harry on. Which is another thing Bill really should thank Harry for, because if he hadn’t, then he would never have met Fleur. She caught his attention when really he should have been supporting Hogwarts and Harry, but somehow found himself cheering her on. He worried for her after the maze. And when he ran into her again, months later, in Gringotts of all places, he already had that sense of knowing her, of familiarity. He felt no hesitation or embarrassment about offering to help her with her English, and she took him up on the offer.
A great deal of things happened after that. There was a war and a bite and a wedding crashed by Death Eaters. They had a home and didn’t complain when Ron turned up with Harry and Hermione, that dreamy-eyed girl and another boy, a wand-maker and a goblin to boot.
No, throughout it all, Bill and Fleur managed to remind each other that, if you found the right person - the person who loved you despite the scars and despite what your family say - life could still be beautiful and lucky and charmed.