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Chapter Text

Harry's body topples backwards into the rubble. Voldemort's scaly face twists into a hideous imitation of a smile.

"Boy Who Lived, eh?"

Voldemort turns to look at the castle.

"Collect the spares. Kill the mudbloods. Bring the body to the headmaster's quarters. I need to be sure."

Fleur's hand is in hers. She looks small beside her and Hermione can't help but worry that the rubble won't hide them both because she's tall and has her mum's thick build and Fleur's not so much shorter as sleeker. Veela seem to reach supermodel-esque heights by twenty. Those long bones are wrapped in decadent flesh, supple as whipped cream and firm as cheesecake. Hermione's an inch or two taller--and feels like a bloody troll some days--and where her limbs are toned and hard, Fleur's are soft. There's uncanny power in that lithe frame, enough to make the back of Hermione's brain shriek that Fleur isn't quite human when her grip starts to feel like a vice. She can feel the tickle of feathers growing and then shrinking from the veins in the blonde's palm, tracing her heartbeat in cords of pulsing fluff.

"Soon," Hermione whispers. "Soon. Wait for them to go up to the castle."

She's in two scary places at once: stuck in her thoughts and she's got a beautiful woman practically draped over her behind this ruined column.

It's a shit plan. But in her defense, the boys' plan was worse by far.

Harry and Ron somehow thought that being killed was the best way to win a fight. Gryffindors.

Harry's contribution neither earned nor wanted.

She brought the ability to keep two squabbling boys who crushed on her alive whilst keeping her grades up.

Ron brought courage and stubbornness that would make a rock proud and hidden under it, the good heart of a boy who'd been making peace between his siblings since he could talk. He was never the muscle or the brains of their trio. More like the backbone. He struggled against her as she forced the knockout potion into his mouth, then spat it back up. Part of her hopes she did real damage when she knocked Ron out.

Let him wake up in Calais, behind the charms that the French have woven along their coast. Let Harry and Ron hate her for the fake-out for the rest of their lives if that helps. They'll be alive, no matter what happens to her.

Hermione tilts her wrist to glance at her smartwatch. Every time a refugee reaches friendly nations, it subtracts their name from the list, and the number ticks downward. The counter is dropping faster and faster now.

She's seen precious little of magical Britain that's worth saving. Just the people. The best of them were also smart enough to know a lost fight when they saw one and were willing to flee through the network she and Fleur created to shuffle refugees and artifacts and texts into continental Europe.

No one but a Muggleborn would have been able to build it.

Magical historians don't cover the world wars, they cover Grindelwald. They don't cover the Holocaust or Stalin's purges, either. They only build a vague impression that in the past, Muggles were doing bad things so they could shake a finger and feel better than them.

No one expected the resistance to use Muggle spycraft. Dead drops of paper printouts encoded by an Enigma machine stolen from the British Museum do not set off searching spells. They cannot rip the ciphers out by torture because books cannot be broken with the Imperius or Cruciatus curse. Poisoned needles hidden in umbrellas kill just fine. So do sniper rifles and car bombs. And those tools are Muggle tools, outside what the haughty and puritanical enemy expects.

Hermione chased down every method she could for sneaking men, women, and children past genocidal lunatics. Two weeks in New York interviewing Holocaust survivors, four weeks in Israel, two in Russia. Then she visited Rwanda, Sudan, and Cambodia and learned from those survivors.

Summer holiday of her fourth year, she learned how resistance movements succeeded, summer of the fifth year designing her movement, and the sixth year's summer holiday she spent sleepless and terrified, implementing her plan along with a few members of the Order of the Phoenix humble and cagey enough to think they might need a Plan B when Plan A was 'do whatever the old man with the beard said'. Fleur arranged for agents in Continental Europe. For the first time since Grindelwald, war-witches working for the Knights of Versailles, Frigga's Society duelists from Germany and Scandinavia, and freelancers from southeastern Europe and Turkey shared watch atop the metaphorical battlements and in some places the literal ones.

In the witching world, former colonies retain a fond view of the empires of old, because when the wizards and witches of France called, scores of aurors and war-wizards joined the cause from what had once been French Polynesia and Algeria, giving them footholds on two more continents.

Babies were tucked into library carts bound for Muggle libraries, then passed off and loaded into mail trucks driven by outcast wizards who preferred punching a Muggle clock to the magical world's insanity. So began a chain of handoffs, each nestled within institutions known for defending privacy and each stoppered by at least one secret-keeper. Men left their wands behind and went to football matches only to vanish into the crowds. Girls and women went to mass or went to work at multi-faith charity events, donned habits, and snuck into the cellars of nunneries. One abbess in Wales turned out to be a lapsed witch. She ended up leading that nation's network in exchange for faerie wards Fleur placed on the convent and fertility enchantments she and Neville wove into in the vegetable garden.

The watch's entire screen flashes red to get her attention, and she glances down.

Zero.

Every refugee on the list has made it across the border, and behind them, the bridges have been burned and the tracks swept from the sand. Wizarding Britain will triumph today or fall into ruin, but either way, it suffers alone. Hermione twists the dial to switch apps, loads the mail app, and pushes send. Muggle allies and trustworthy witches have spent weeks tailing their targets as they stalk the streets. Now they're assassinating the Death Eaters by spell and blade, poison and bullet. No warning. No demand for a duel between honorable foes. Kill or be killed.

Voldemort's cheek twitches as he senses their deaths through the Dark Mark. He levitates Harry's body with a flick of the fingers and storms off towards the castle.

"Now," she whispers to Fleur, letting her hand go. "Try to transform."

"I can't," she hisses back. "You know zat. I am only one-quarter veela, belle dame."

She wants to roll her eyes at the flirting but can't bring herself to. Fleur's presence beside her is the only thing anchoring her mind into her body and preventing her from going insane.

"No," Hermione replies. "You can, I know you can. Keep trying."

Since the Triwizard Tournament, she's struggled. The simplest of charms would fail or sputter. Not often, but often enough to make her curious. Other times, they blazed when they should have flickered. Muttering a quick lumos to light her dorm room would leave her blinking, temporarily blinded by the glare. Summoning her toothbrush once knocked her out cold as the object in question flew like a cannonball towards her.

Never affected the complex spells, though.

So she dug into it. Worked it like any other problem. The breakthrough was the centaurs in the Forbidden Forest. One approached her after they ravaged Umbridge, cantering and avoiding eye contact. The grisly and perverted nature of her injuries bothered him. It was their inner beasts. Madness and lust had taken them over in a way they hadn't felt in centuries. The animal half took over the human half.

Magic wasn't broken. Something turbocharged it. The effect was spilling across Britain with each passing day. Assumptions used for centuries were now wrong and long-honed spells were lopsided like equations with a variable changed, so they no longer equaled zero. Magical beasts like the centaurs are typically more prim and genteel than humans suddenly went into rages and ruts and frenzies. She has no doubt that's how so many students have become animagi in the last three decades without killing themselves.

From there it took little sleuthing to discover that Hogwarts isn't just a symbol of Britain's wizarding culture, the crown jewel of learning--and thus indoctrination and propaganda--it's also a plug in a bathtub, sitting atop ley lines by the dozens. Old ones that snake through the United Kingdom, Ireland and stretch from Iceland in the west to Finland in the east and go as far south as Morocco. Maps show that it all tangles here like a forkful of spaghetti.

Hundreds of stone golems can be animated here with a single word from McGonagall. Apparition can be blocked on a thirty-thousand-acre campus for centuries on end. Such feats should be impossible, but the land does the heavy lifting. After seventy years of dark wizards attacking on the spells and defenses, they're weak and the water is bubbling back up past the plug.

The land is trying to tear the offending castle off and return to a wild state.

Fleur immediately mentioned it when she returned in sixth year, saying that the faerie in her could smell it like caramel just past the tip of her tongue. So tempting, yet unreachable.

Quarter-veela are typically not able to transform, but Fleur can if she tries here. Hermione's more worried Fleur will find herself unable to change back and she'll be best mates with a half-woman and half-eagle mishmash for the rest of her life.

Fleur gasps and Hermione turns from watching the bored Death Eaters finishing their third sweep of the courtyard. Voldemort already executed all the wounded.

Where her best friend had been, a strange creature stands. She's clad in silver feathers with black talons capping each finger and her sharpened face wears shiny beaklike plates so tiny that she can see every detail of her smile.

Flame gathers in both her hands and she screeches in alarm.

The patrol of Death Eaters at the other end of the courtyard turn.

"Run!" Hermione shouts, throwing a bombarda maxima between the men.

Fleur pours the fire into a long flare and takes flight before they can reply. Hermione flings a shattering spell at the stone archway over their heads.

The Boy Who Lived is dead. Losing the horcrux he put on Harry is unfortunate. Perhaps he should kill this little ginger blood-traitor to make a new one.

Bellatrix's fascination with him was girlish fantasy and base urges, but it was useful all the same. He didn't need to enjoy having her in his bed because it motivated her and that was enough. She was his best. His right hand. Lethal. Heartless. Deranged and unstable. But that could be useful.

This little whelp of a blood traitor disarmed his best killer, severed her spine with a slicing charm, and then bashed her head in with a fire poker.

"Aren't you sweet as cream," he jokes, drawing the dull edge of an envenomed claw across her cheek. "Not surprised it took your mother six tries to make something so beautiful."

He settles behind Dumbledore's desk.

"Would you like me to leave you alive long enough to attend your brothers' funerals?"

She spits across the desk, managing to catch him on the mouth. He raises the Elder Wand.

"Very well. Avada ked-"

"Accio Ginny's belt!"

The little bitch squeaks in surprise as she is yanked towards the door, doubled over at the waist by the suddenness of it. The curse sails past her head and instead strikes one of his Death Eaters who had been standing near the door.

This cannot be.

Death Eaters are strewn lifelessly around the room, bloody froth spilling from their mouths. He can't move. Whatever this poison is, it's vile. The transfiguration to keep his skin from bubbling and his lungs from coming up in bloody chunks is exhausting. The gas is invisible, making it impossible to blow away with a spell.

A woman leans in the doorway, her face obscured by some hideous helmet and her breath rasping like it was passing through sand. She holds a fat metal tube in one hand and keeps her wand trained on his head.

"Tom Riddle. We meet again."

His voice is rough and weak, but he can speak.

"Did you come to see Harry, you mudblood twat?"

"Now, now...is that any way to talk to a woman holding a canister of nerve gas?"

She twists one end of the rod until something inside cracks and tosses it onto the desk.

"I'll see you again. For dinner."

Hermione aches. Every muscle burns, and brilliant bruises from her last scuffle with a Death Eater pepper her hands, face, and no doubt her torso. It became more hands-on than she'd like when they managed to disarm each other simultaneously. McNair wasn't dangerous up close without his axe and she'd been practicing in every way she could. His knife snared on the motorcycle chains she'd hidden between her jacket and shirt and as he tried to sort it out, she broke his wrist and jammed the sacrificial dagger she carried into his brain.

These springs lay hidden under the east edge castle's foundation for fifteen centuries. She peels her shirt off, creating a sharp flare of pain and biting her lip to keep from screaming. Her legs fared better, so the jeans are easier to get off, though the sweat soaking through them means they take her knickers off too.

After a quick tracing of each rib, she satisfies herself that none are broken.

There's sand for scrubbing and cold water and a ring of trees to give her privacy. She can hardly take a bath in the pile of half-melted stone that had once been Hogwarts.

Surely leaving Voldemort's body pinned to the keystone of Hogwarts with a sword through his heart has earned her a bath?

The druidic magic she used was old. Scholars think it predated the use of iron. The spell was wicked and womanly in all the best ways. Mother's magic, in all its primal and protective ferocity. Ritual potions of moon-blood and her own skin pulled in narrow strips. Incompatible with wands. A spell of dancing fingers, a kill by tooth and nail. She finalized the sacrifice by painting herself in her victim's lifeblood and painting curse runes on Voldemort with ink made of blood and locks of hair snipped at midnight from her feminine line, from her grandmother to her youngest niece. She'd kept the bottle of binding ink in her bra for weeks until it was curdled by the emanations of her heart.

Standing atop one of their old temples, Hermione offered a triple sacrifice in a rite used by druid priestesses a thousand years before anybody even heard the name Merlin. Strangling him, then tearing his throat out in her teeth once he finally was spilling his guts with a knife she carved of white oak.

Then she collapsed beside the altar, naked and exhausted.

Visions of some massive, antlered man sizzled in her brain, chased through brambles by a female figure in wind-whipped silk.

She came to her senses, and Pansy Parkinson was handing her clothes. Draco Malfoy shuffled brokenly behind her. It's a poor Slytherin who can't foresee betrayal from his own ranks.

They buried Neville first, after taking the disguise curse off.

Anyone who thought he was a coward surely knows better now. Only the bravest would agree to pretend to be Harry Potter in a duel with Voldemort.

That was that.

After setting the Elder Wand and the sword on a moss-covered boulder, she lowers herself into the frigid water. She doesn't dare take her eyes off them. She doubts that Gryffindor's sword can only be used for pure and virtuous things and the Elder Wand is trouble made manifest, no matter who is the current master.

She suspects Dumbledore meant for Harry to have it. He must not know that Muggle methods count and that Harry's a shit kickboxer. She loves Harry, truly. But she'd never trust him with the wand. Things that can be fun or interesting--something the first eleven years of his life never offered--are the most dangerous to him.

Some days, she can keep it in safe places and tell herself he's just a friend. Some days, she is as smitten as any other girl in Britain. More so. Because she doesn't want a scar and a last name. She doesn't want to put one over on the other girls and be popular. She knows who he really is. She wants the person.

Branches crackle behind her and she leaps up, calling the Elder Wand to her hand with a curled finger. Her limbs protest and the combination of nudity and cold water dripping off her hurts worse than the bruise.

It's Harry and Ron, followed by Luna and Ginny. Luna's cheeks go red as her lipstick and Ginny's blush fills in the gaps in her freckles.

Harry's fist catches her in the jaw, twisting her head sideways. She doesn't look in his eyes when she turns back. Ron stands gaping beside him, like he's not sure whether he's more surprised Harry hit a girl or that Hermione is alive.

"Hello to you too. You made it back faster than I thought you would."

His eyes are red, and tears have cleaned half the grime off his face.

"You could have died!"

"I didn't."

"I can't lose you," he hisses.

She works her jaw back and forth.

"I'm not surprised you're angry with me. But hit me again or hit any woman again, and you'll lose me for sure."

A gust of wind signals Fleur's return. Her taloned fist holds a half-dozen wands, and many of the feathers on her wings are bent or outright broken. Down traces a fluffy golden trail from her shoulders down her breastbone to swirl around her womb and down her legs. She is speckled with blood, soot, and mud.

"Fleur?" Harry whispers.

"'Arry Potter, I don't like seeing you hurt 'Ermoine. Never do zat again."

She drops the wands next to Hermione's feet.

"Last of them?"

"Yes, 'Ermoine."

"Any bodies?"

As the feathers recede into milky skin, pale fire licks across Fleur's fingers before winking out.

"Not anymore."

The last time she felt this lightheaded was the day she learned she was a witch.

Hermione has never seen Fleur Delacour naked before. She was a puzzle when first they met. A rival of Harry's during the tournament, the incarnated avatar of everything a fourteen-year-old girl insecure in her looks should loathe, not that Hermione could ever go so far.

And then she came back in the winter of fifth year, engaged to Bill, yet spending a curious amount of time on campus assisting Hooch with flying lessons. A perfect little songbird hovering around her friends. Watching movies on the couch. Sampling British food, dragging Hermione to hidden wizard restaurants in tiny villages every time she could sneak to the edge of the apparition wards. Touring libraries. Chasing sheep up and down the hills near Hogwarts. Summoning butterbeer foam into a fake beard and imitating Dumbledore. Anything to make Hermione laugh.

The other girls hated the Frenchwoman's presence every summer and told Hermione so. Repeatedly. Loudly. Angrily.

She thinks that's because they envied her beauty or her effect on the boys.

Until this exact moment, Hermione hadn't realized why she never once felt jealous of Fleur and never bristled at her like the other girls. The explanation is coiling in her belly like a spring of red-hot steel.

The veela smirks, tossing her hair back and grinning at the effect her thrall has on the onlookers, and then she twirls her fingers, and a robe of green and black silk forms around her shoulders. The sash pools into her hand and she ties the robe shut. She moves the sword aside and sits in its place, crossing her legs and letting the magic inside her erase the cuts, bruises, and scrapes she received.

Impossibly perfect flesh renews itself because it is also impossible for Fleur not to look perfect, even though she acts like that's nothing. She cannot help but be beautiful, so she doesn't value it, Hermione supposes.

She tears herself away from the sight.

"I'd like to finish my bath, Harry."

Ron and Harry jump back.

"You're naked," Ron mumbles.

"Well spotted. Only took you five minutes."

Harry's eyes focus on the ground at his feet.

"We will, ah, go take a walk."

Hermione smiles.

"I managed to save some of the faculty parlor's liquor."

Ron nods. Luna's eyes twinkle with more mischief than usual.

"Don't get too drunk without me!" She hollers at the retreating boys.

Luna and Ginny depart without a word, though Ginny gives Hermione a look she can't make sense of.

Once they've gone, Fleur stands and unties the robe. It flutters a perfumed breeze coming from nowhere as it slides off her body and onto the stone. She saunters towards the pool, carefully dragging a single finger across the unbruised parts of Hermione's arm as she goes.

"My, my, my. You are splendid, 'Ermoine."

As they settle into the water, Fleur sighs.

"It is over."

Hermione hasn't brought up what happened to Bill yet. She's not sure how. Fleur isn't acting like someone widowed two days ago. Since she looks no worse than anyone else and everybody here lost someone, maybe it's more like she lost a friend?

"Are you all right?"

She shrugs, reaching her foot under the water to press a toe against a not-yet-damaged spot on Hermione's belly.

"I will be soon. Bill died saving ze man he loved," Fleur explains.

Wait. Lupin?

"Will I miss him? Of course. But Remus is ze one hurting, not me. Our marriage hid ze affair, and it kept Bill from being investigated by the Morals department of ze Ministry. It also made sure my family's fortune was secure."

Her eyes catch Hermione's.

"And he didn't snore."

Hermione giggles. She can't help it.

"What?"

Fleur splashes her.

"Important in a husband!"

"Yes," Hermione teases. "That's the only important thing."

"Bill never got a chance to tell ze Weasleys. We 'oped for twins so one would take my name, one would take 'is. We thought perhaps after zat, Bill could come out and we would divorce."

"Maybe you should tell them. At least tell Arthur and Molly, and soon. They would want to remember all of him."

"True."

"But first..."

Fleur lunges, grabbing Hermione's face with both hands. Everything is Fleur. Her skin, her warmth, that sweet smell, like salted caramel and candied lemons.

"...it's important zat ze hero gets ze girl, no?"

She presses her lips to Hermione's and every awful thing that ever happened was worth it.

"Hermione?"

Hermione pauses with her own slice halfway to her mouth.

Today's funeral was in New York. There's been one every few days for a year. As per tradition, they are trying the local pizza. Blaise Zabini of all people suggested it, the implication that it was Italian food made the Florentine half-veela boy that he was with snarl.

New York pizza is thin and droopy and takes careful handling, but she likes it better than Detroit-style and it's miles better than the chain they were forced to eat at in Russia.

"Right," Ron mumbles, twirling the stray cheese from his slice of pizza.

"I'm just going to ask," Ron sighs. "How d'you do it?"

Fleur gathers sauce onto her finger and smears it on Hermione's lips. Her lips part on reflex and she licks it clean, giving her the opening she needed to slip her finger between Hermione's lips and stroke the pad along her tongue.

She's utterly shameless now. Be it veela magic or a newfound love or something, but Hermione's no better. They'll share a glance over a meal or during a morning jog and just come together like magnets. They've gotten fined twice in New York and they have not been here for two full days.

"He asked a question, darling," she teases.

Hermione swears she was smart once upon a time. But that was in the dark ages. In the grim epochs of history, before she kissed Fleur. In the after-Fleur, she can't string together a sentence to answer Ron.

"How'd you kill you-know-who? The aurors who questioned me wouldn't say."

She takes a bite out of her pizza.

"Dead simple, really. Nerve gas to paralyze him. Stabbed him with Gryffindor's sword on the old druid altar that Hogwarts was built on top of, painted runes with binding ink, strangled him, ripped his throat out with my teeth, and gutted him. Then the next night, I ate his heart raw."

The boys stare at her. She wonders if they'll ever blink again for the rest of their lives. Fleur reaches over with a fork and lifts their chins to close their mouths.

"Silly boys. You will catch flies."

"Gross," Harry sputters out after slamming his fist into his chest to sort out the diet soda he took down the wrong tube.

"It was. I think it had gone rancid. I puked up evil wizard for most of a week."

"Are you sure, Fleur?"

Her girlfriend's face is pale and the hand on Hermione's back is cold and sweaty.

"I want to," Hermione admits. "But this feels a lot like Horcrux magic."

"'Orcruxes are made from cruelty, not love. I will cut off half my soul and give it to you. You will do ze same. We say ze words and exchange our gifts."

She sighs.

"We are not telling our children we made a stupid teenage suicide pact. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

Fleur adjusts herself, pressing her naked body closer. She's in Hermione's lap. Gryffindor's sword is in her hands, the tip pressed against her spine, aimed so that it can pierce both their hearts at the same time.

"Ready?"

"Let me kiss you, first."

Hermione wanted to put the soul fragments in their wedding rings. Fleur insisted that for the blessing to work, it must be something mad. Something impulsive. The sort of thing lovers do when they're not thinking straight.

One night, Fleur's rom-com stuffed rotation on Netflix came around to Titanic.

The next week they were in Japan for yet another funeral, a fourth-year from a Japanese school who was visiting her friend when she got sucked into the war. Yua came to hang out and instead, she stood her ground as the first and third year Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws escaped. A tiny figure shadowed against the sunset, deflecting curses and replying with slicing charms that took off hands and feet, twirling and dipping past what she could not block. Her wandwork was born of martial arts and witches' style manuals in equal measure. It looked like she'd be queen of that little hill forever. Until a pack of giants threw half of the boathouse at her.

Hermione printed out a map of ocean currents and rented a boat from a white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed old man and they sail out at sunset. She's been watching her phone intently as he steers them further and further out, tapping marks as the GPS coordinates update. He keeps his dark eyes on the storm on the far horizon, barely glancing at the radar because he trusts his eyes and his gut more.

"Stop here," she tells him in the best Japanese she can muster. His scoff is followed by either 'tourist', 'crazy girl', or possibly 'turnip' but he waves his hand and cuts the engine.

"Here?" Fleur asks.

"Here."

Fleur looks around, then raises a honeyed eyebrow.

"Why?"

"Because we are above one of the deepest places in the ocean. We can put a sinking charm on it and currents will take it to the bottom."

Hermione takes the sky-blue diamond that reminds her so much of Fleur's eyes from the pouch around her neck. She taps it with her wand, presses it to her lips, then holds it out over the water and waits for Fleur to nod, then lets go. The cold water embraces the stone, and she feels cold tendrils curl around her heart when it does.

"Even under all that pressure, it won't crack. I want it to sit there forever, safe in the abyss. Sunken treasure."

Fleur rushes over, winds her right hand around Hermione's waist, and holds her own soulstone--a tiny, smoky ruby--out with her left hand before letting Hermione prepare the charm.

"Marry me, 'Ermione Granger," she whispers just as the stone tumbles from her fingers.

The scar under Fleur's left breast glows cherry red, visible in the night under her thin blouse. Hermione's scar answers with a sharp twinge of pain.

"I want nothing more, Fleur Delacour."

Chapter Text

The ministry's new rule that visitors check in their wands is a good rule. A nod to proper security after decades of using the honor system for Lucius Malfoy, Dolores Umbridge, and far worse. The senior surviving auror admitted it was the first review of security they'd done since before the Battle of Hastings.

Sensible precaution. Because if she had her wand on her, Hermione could kill the man before he blinked. She hasn't practiced enough wandless combat magic to risk it. At least, not with the aurors' office two doors down.

"I'm sure you understand, Miss Granger. It is a, well, ah...a delicate time for the registry of names and bloodlines."

"Delicate?" Hermione scoffs. "Delicate? Is that what you call it when three-quarters of the pureblood families on this registry march in lockstep in an organized campaign of slaughter? Against the Muggleborn and the Muggle friendly, who were the only wizards with enough creativity and common sense to stop you? I call that butchery. In the real world, it's a war crime. Hate to see what you lot think is indelicate."

The registrar nods eagerly.

"Exactly! It's all very sensitive. People need the familiar. If word got out that two of our saviors were engaged in this..." He scowls, his mustache drooping like a waxy question mark. "...behavior, it would be bad for their spirits. This is no time for making waves. I'm sure you two understand that."

"I understand nothing!" Fleur hisses. "Zis woman saved your life! All of your lives!"

Veela thrall and unformed magical power rolls off Fleur in angry waves like summer air off a tarred road. The human side of Fleur is rapidly losing the fight for control over her veela's less seductive abilities and tendencies. This poor excuse for a man is about to get a show. Hard to say whether that means Fleur will sprout talons and gouge his eyes out or means she that she'll rip her clothes off and throw Hermione down for a shag on top of his desk.

"Surely," Fleur purrs. "You can just take 'zat remarkable quill...that is falcon feather, yes?"

"Ah, yes. It is. You have an eye for luxury."

"Marvelous volume on that," Fleur coos. "Take ze wonderful quill and scratch our names in?"

The little man coughs and runs a finger under his collar. He looks like he's about to flop-sweat the wax out of his mustache.

"The idea of marrying witch to witch is...unworkable."

"Unworkable?" Fleur scoffs.

She folds her arms and pouts at not getting her way. Morgana's left tit, she's cute. Somehow he has enough of his wits left to stick to his script despite her attempt to seduce and puppet him.

"It works. Ze parts fit together nicely, I assure you. Zis woman is truly magnificent," she jokes, catching Hermione's fingers in her own.

They've progressed to boasting about sex. Stage two in the six-stage death spiral that is a conversation with an angry veela. Hermione's done her best to be a model girlfriend--thank all that's good and holy there are books on that--so she's fairly certain she hasn't suffered through stages five and six yet.

"Oh my god," Hermione groans. "Really? Really, Fleur?"

The registrar frowns.

"No. My apologies, ladies, but I cannot ignore my oath to the laws of wizards of Britain. Not even for you."

The nail polish on Fleur's right hand is a candy red shade that is from some magical makeup shop--which are a thing, apparently--nestled in a tiny hamlet near the flock's mansion. Actual polish, not a charm or a conjuration. Pools of black are rising in it, matching the shade of the claws inside. Not long until the talons are digging trenches in the shabby wood of the desk.

It drove Hermione half mad to watch Fleur paint it on. When Fleur perched on the side of the bed in the shabby inn with her bare leg propped on the stool to paint her toenails and her skin air-drying from the shower, Hermione didn't just forget how to breathe. She forgot what air was.

"Fleur," she hisses, drawing her fingers across the back of her fiancée's hand. "Calm down."

Don't make me repeat it. Don't make me go another instant without kissing you...

Hermione shakes the fog of Fleur's presence off long enough to curl fingers around her wrist.

"Leave it, Fleur. It's all right. Let's go."

With a melodramatic sigh of biblical proportions, Fleur stands and settles her Beauxbatons cap on her head. She's worn it to several errands, well aware that she can leverage the reputation of the school and especially the significance of sapphire-encrusted compass pinned to her left breast, marking her as first in class.

The secretary in the waiting room is forty years younger than her boss. Two, perhaps three years out of Hogwarts. She picks up on their body language in all the ways her boss didn't.

"Not a good day to get an autograph, is it?" she sighs.

"Not really."

"I hope you'll mention us in the ministry interviews, miss!" The registrar calls after Hermione.

"Fuck," she hisses. "We have more of those, don't we?"

"Yes, love," Fleur teases, patting Hermione's shoulder. "More people want to pick at your miraculous brain. Today is the deputy minister for papers and practices, I believe?"

"God help us," Hermione croaks. "The bean counters. The old men who run audits and draw up processes want me to say good things about the bylaws after that homophobic little cock-up?"

I'm halfway surprised they can figure out how to take a shit.

"It seems rude to ask you to do that," the secretary agrees.

"You know...I seem to remember that you got called away. Didn't I see Rita Skeeter flitting about? Yes! You left a note," she jokes, jabbing her wand at her stenographer's pad and instantly forging Hermione's handwriting. “A note telling me you left to avoid Rita Skeeter.”

"I highly doubt the Heroines of Hogwarts would make us look good if cornered by the press this afternoon. A dressing down by two up-and-coming young witches would gut our budget. So best not risk it. Run along. Shoo. Out of the building. Have lunch. I insist."

She slides an envelope across the table and when she does so, Hermione sees the twinkle of a small jade brooch with two amorous cobras curled around it in sterling silver Hermione tips the unsealed flap open and looks inside to see a stack of Gringotts promissory notes.

It's their registration fee for a marriage decree. Their non-refundable registration fee refunded in exchange for cooling off before talking to reporters. Adam Smith and Salazar Slytherin would be proud.

She's chasing Fleur's smile into the sun before Hermione remembers that Rita Skeeter is nursing a dozen nasty curses at St. Mungo's, courtesy of Hermione and a poorly worded interview question about Fleur's attire at the Minister's swearing-in ball last week.

It's all her rivals at the Daily Prophet can write about, so everyone has heard.

She won't be interviewing anybody until the doctors get all the incandescent mushrooms out of her pores. Turned out that in fact, yes, magic was the only thing that had been holding Fleur's gown on all night.

These little puff things are delicious.

The flap on the tent Hermione is using flies open.

"Ron!" she hisses, gesturing madly for him to come inside.

"What?"

"Don't be a prat. Quit stuffing your face and get in here."

"I'm not sure..."

"Fuck's sake, Ronald Bartholemew Weasley. If Fleur thought anyone here could steal me, they'd be bleeding out in the grass."

Last night, he realized that Fleur Delacour isn't beautiful at all.

She's a bloody menace. He felt like a mouse under a lion's paw as he tried to stammer out that he and Hermione were not a couple. Before sixth year, he told her, a few months at most. The veela's blue eyes never left him, even as she paced, slashing at her tent's walls with talons that came and went with her moods. Then she drew herself up and nodded, handing him a vial. The antidote to the toxic lipstick she was wearing, she explained.

He's never going to let someone kiss him on the cheeks when they say hello. Never again.

"Ron!" Hermione hisses again, breaking the cobwebs out of his head.

"Right."

He plucks a handkerchief that his father gave him out of his breast pocket and cleans his fingers before he ducks inside the tent.

This place is so Hermione it hurts. A stack of books sits on a hastily conjured desk, beaten within an inch of their life. Probably a hundred feet of parchment. Notes, sketches, big blots of ink. She's covered the bag for her dress from Madam Malkin's in hastily painted diagrams and spell notes in a language he can't read.

She probably ripped through that miniature library overnight in a single mad dash. There are Muggle books on marriage and various treatises on being the perfect magical wife.

A book by someone named Virginia Woolf. Ron chuckles. Talk about an uncreative name for a werewolf to use.

Only Hermione would assume she could just study her way through her own wedding day.

"What's up?"

"How do I look?" she asks, her cheeks red as the Gryffindor scarf around her neck.

Like I'm the biggest idiot in the world, having not tried harder for you.

"Bloody perfect, why?"

"Ronald," Hermione begins.

Full first name, so that wasn't the answer.

"Do you have even the faintest idea what a veela is?"

"Scary good singers? Just plain scary? Flock of Frenchies that herded me around like a goat all night while I set up tables? A blonde bird that nearly made me choke on my tongue?"

"Bird?" Hermione grumbles.

"I mean...it's not the classiest thing to call a woman. But yeah. I mean, after the rest of her family followed me all night, mumbling at me. This morning I was spitting up feathers."

"Bird. Why didn't I think of that? She loves British slang. Oh, that's brilliant!"

She flings herself into a tight hug.

"You smell like veela down. Wait. Ron..." Hermione laughs, pretending to wave a stink away from her face. "...Are you hooking up with one of her cousins? Her aunts? Merlin, not that I'd blame you. GABBY?"

"Nope. Leftovers from my jailers last night. Gabrielle is going to sigh herself into an early grave if she doesn't land Harry. You know that, Herm. Last night Fleur, uh, was doing a little test of me to make sure I wouldn't do anything, and I quote, quintessentially English and moronic."

"Oh. Bet that was about as fun as the Spanish Inquisition."

"The what now? Anyway. You wanted to tell me about veela?" he reminds her.

"Right."

Hermione sighs.

"Veela is what they're called in France, but there are other names. Rusalka in Russia. Nymphs back in Ancient Greece."

"Vampires in Transylvania?" He jokes.

"What? No. Different critter."

"Josephine was a veela, Ron. At least a quarter, probably half. There's debate but Helen of Troy too, probably. Cleopatra, we have actual proof."

"Josephine?"

"Napoleon's wife. What I'm asking isn't if I looked like a woman you'd dance with, Ron. I was asking if I looked like a woman someone would start a war over."

"Don't know who this Napoleon bloke is, but I did kill someone for torturing you..."

Hermione pinches her nose.

"I swear on Magic itself, the first thing after the honeymoon, I am locking your entire family in a room with grammar school Muggle textbooks."

"I remember that fight," Hermione laughs. "God, our Hogwarts class is messed up, isn't it? We have no business graduating. Be shocked if half of us aren't in asylums in five years."

"The three golden nitwits," Ron laughs. "I mean, you blew up the school and that was the only place you were ever good at someth-OW!"

She shakes her hand out. As if his shoulder didn't take the worst of that punch.

"I could make some suggestions, I guess. But your dress is fine. We could change it but we'd need to know...what do..."

"What do veela like in a woman?" She prods. "No idea. Just because she's marrying me doesn't mean I know why she likes me."

"Not veela, Hermy. Whatsit."

"Lesbians?"

"That. I'd be an awful Muggle, wouldn't I?"

"The worst. You'd starve before Harry and I could rescue you."

She glances back at the stack of self-help books.

"No bloody clue. Those are all written for women who like blokes."

"Well, the first thing I noticed about Fleur wa-"

She taps the Elder Wand's tip into her palm.

"If you say tits, you'll be scrubbing bright green mushrooms off yourself until the next full moon."

"Third thing," he assures her. "Her lips, Hermione. From the moment she walked into the hall, it's like she was always this close to smiling. After that, her walk."

"Huh?"

"She..."

He sighs.

"She walked different, even than the other Beauxbatons girls. Apparently, they start on ballet in their second year. Fleur just..."

"Sort of flowed," Hermione remembers. "You couldn't really put your finger on how she was different. For me, it was her shoulders. I wanked myself till I was sick the day after she came to the Easter ball in that backless dress. I told myself I was thinking about a bloke, but I think I did it because of her."

"I did not know that. I'm not sure I needed to know that," he complains.

"The way her hands moved when taking notes. The way she'd play with her hair, especially when she wasn't aware anyone was looking."

"What do you think she noticed first about you?"

"Ron, my hair was a rat's nest all through fourth year. I had spots most of the time. I was not pretty."

"Fleur probably would disagree."

She lights up. Hermione with an idea. That's never good. Maybe this one time, no one will die or nearly get eaten, or attacked by a Dementor, or attacked by a basilisk, or strangled by a plant.

It'd be a nice change.

"Thanks. Better go before they run out of pastry. Save me a couple, yeah?"

When Hermione comes out and takes Harry's arm, she's braided her hair around her head like a crown and put on pair of reading glasses. Her white dress is black now, smooth satin without a wisp of lace. Much simpler. No frills or bunched-up ruffles, just a broad red ribbon tied around her waist at a slant. There are no sleeves and no straps. An opening in the back runs from her collarbone to her bum. A brass collar holds it up and shines in the fading sunlight behind her.

She must have changed her heels, too, because she's a good two inches taller.

Fleur stops dead two steps out of her tent and just stares.

Ron never felt so smart in his entire life.

Chapter Text

Hermione is naked, freezing, and worst of all, lost. Somewhere near the former Hogwarts, she suspects. Probably in Scotland. At the very least, somewhere where it rains and there's grass. She can't see the small city worth of tents that sprang up for the wedding, or the lake, or any other landmarks. So she can't be sure.

If she was still a Muggle, she could at least count on not having sleep-teleported to another continent.

Magic has its downsides.

Her memory is a haze past the middle of the reception.

There was a rippling chant from the assembled veela when she kissed Fleur, a round of applause from everyone else. A sudden blur of gold and green, silk and skin, and then it gets fuzzy. At least until she woke up in whatever mess she got herself into.

"Mon Dieu."

Hermione turns. At least she didn't misplace her wife. That would be embarrassing, not twelve hours into their life together.

Fleur looks awful. Her dress is nothing but a handful of silver and golden scraps hanging off her arms and shoulders. Coin-sized bruises pepper her hips and that sparkling pixie-sugared lipstick she likes is smeared all over her neck. One mark is an obvious handprint like someone grabbed her and pinned her down with a hand on her shoulder. The only person she ever met with hands anywhere near that big is Hagrid, but those are too small and besides, he would never do something so vile.

Right?

"Can we do zat again at ze Muggle wedding?"

"Fleur, someone hurt you. Attacked you. Did someone ra-"

A delicate finger finds her lips before her worst fear can come tumbling out of her mouth. Fleur shakes her head. It looks ridiculous, with her hair looking like a mixture of liquid gold, mud, twigs, and clumps of grass.

Her hands must be sore, since she's flexing her other hand to clear out the stiffness.

The gap in my memory.

It comes back in fits and spurts.

She recalls human guests saying their goodbyes for the night. A drunk Ron, being chased into a tent by two members of a Chilean veela flock. A swooning Ginny being thrown over the shoulder of some golden-skinned giantess from a Middle Eastern flock and carried away as coal-black feathers sprouted up the woman's neck.

The combined Geneva-Lyon flocks crowding around their pair, chanting in Sveklani. A forest of silver skin and golden hair closing in as a laughing Fleur dragged Hermione to the altar at the center of the ruins of Dunnottar Castle. A wild place, the matriarch of the Geneva flock explained in a thick German accent. A place for beastly, unruly creatures. Like the veela of old.

A bracelet sliding onto her wrist, a gift from the matriarch from Lyon--Fleur's grandmother, beyond ravishing at two hundred and change--and a matching one on Fleur, gifted by the Geneva matron. A speech in a language that seemed like the love child of High Sídhean and some form of Breton Gaelic. She managed to catch a passage about maintaining peace through marriage.

Fleur cards her fingers through her hair, loosening the braids, guiding Hermione's hands to her hips. Blue irises vanishing into the swell of her pupils. Fleur hopping on top of the altar and plucking at the ribbon that tied her dress on. Silk and linen meeting its fate between Hermione's fingers and teeth. Panting into the cold night air. A bolt of lightning.

No matter how she pushes her brain, she can't remember more than lightning crossing above her while Fleur arched up to meet her as she sank into the kiss. Intense pain. It ends there.

"Fleur, did I...was that me?"

A lazy, slanted smile crosses Fleur's face.

"It was amazing, mon petit lionne. I knew being crowned and mated would change me, but I was not expecting ze ritual to be so intense. But I am fine 'Ermione. Veela can recover quickly and we need a great deal from our lovers. Better sore and smiling in ze morning, not 'ungry and miserable in ze night. My magic is useful in bed, no?"

"Don't joke," Hermione croaks.

The bruises are already fading, like a violet's petals sinking into a cup of milk.

"Though I liked ze dress. You should buy me another one."

No! No clothes! No escape! Chase. Take. Breed.

"God, what is wrong with me?" Hermione groans, jamming her fists into her temples and pushing as if she could make the bad thoughts pop like a balloon.

"It's like I have a lunatic split personality all of a sudden."

"Beloved," Fleur shushes. "It's all right."

She presses a kiss to Hermione's lips. Hermione tries to be unconvinced.

"If you persist in frowning, I will persist in kissing."

"Consider me warned," Hermione jokes.

"Can you tell me more?" She pleads. "Fleur, I don't think you realize how much this scares me. Not only can I not remember my own wedding night, you look like you lost a boxing match with a giant."

Fleur sighs.

"You know I am ze next in line to my flock, yes?"

"Of course."

"I will be called upon to lead. Mother will get bored and abdicate at some point, as grandmother did. Though I hope she does not take quite so many lovers as grandmother did when she retired. A whole winter, 'alf the furniture in ze manor was sticky!"

"Merlin help me," Hermione grumbles.

"As such, I have various duties. Managing ze fortune, arranging trade, leading the defense of our glades, roosts, and villages, so on. But also," Fleur sighs. "Daughters. I am to provide 'eirs to my name. To lead ze flock."

"How is that relevant? We've talked about it, Fleur, but not much. And we are not ready. I can't have a baby with so much unsure. It's soon after the war. We don't even have jobs. It wouldn't be fair to the child. I'm still waking up screaming every other night."

Fleur nods.

"I realize zat. We can wait many years. You could change your mind if you truly must. But ze ritual must be at ze mating ceremony, or it is far more painful for all."

"What is this ritual? I suspect I agreed to it, but last night was a mess. I don't remember much."

"'Ermione," Fleur sighs, taking her hand and bringing Hermione's to rest against her throat. "We spoke about it weeks ago. Remember? You would lose part of your nature? Become more animal and less woman, like I am?"

Hermione blinks. She does recall that conversation and, to be fair to Fleur; she recalls a hair-raising chat about side effects and possible complications. They swore an Unbreakable Vow. Hermione vowed that if they married, she would go through with it, and Fleur vowed to help her.

"Right. I suppose I thought it would be exchanging drops of blood, like Elise and Moheim did."

"We did not have zat option. We are both women, but I am not human."

Yes, rub it in how you look like a goddess.

"Many spells meant for an ordinary witch do not work. Do too little or too much. Including fertility spells. We 'ave secret ways among ourselves but it is 'ardly unusual for veela to marry other sorts of women and sometimes not even witches. So ze couple goes to a place of power and ze flock pools our magic. Before ze first mating, prayers are said."

"That wasn't our first time."

"We had fucked, 'Ermione. Which I enjoyed immensely. I would have done zat every morning and every night until ze day I died. If it was only zat, still a good life. But until we said ze vows? We 'ad not made love, not like zat. Certainly not as wives. May I continue?"

As if I could say no to that smirk.

"Please."

"Ze ritual changes the other partner to be more like a veela. They gave you a beast's spirit. A second nature like we have. You can pass our wards, bear or sire children with us, and tolerate our thrall more easily."

That's probably for the best. Surprised I didn't have a seizure the first time I saw her naked, let alone when I put my hands on her.

"This beast. What is it?"

She gets a hum and a slight roll of the shoulders as if it was an actual answer.

"Depends on the woman. A cat, often. Foxes. A cobra once, though cousin Clarice is odd. Likes to carry Victoria around her neck. So I think her wife jinxed ze altar to ensure it. Another bird, in a few blessed cases. I doubt you could relax long enough to let me take you in midair, my love. Your genius makes you too twitchy for such guilty pleasures."

"In your case, like a woman blended with a stag. Massive. Your fur was ze color of copper and quite thick. Like a fistful of velvet. When you were on top, it was like being pinned under a stack of blankets. So powerful! 'Uge antlers which," she grins. "Which were essential to 'old you in place so I could 'ave more of your mouth. Lustful beyond my expectations, which, after my aunts scandalized me this summer, is impressive. Rather..."

Fleur's lip twitches.

"Virile."

"Oh, my God! I cannot listen to this. I'm freaking out, Fleur. I don't want to have something, anything, inside me that can hurt you. That can make me do things I cannot remember."

Fleur yawns and stretches, arching her back and smacking her lips.

"You will remember next time, I suspect. Maman or grandmère could teach you ways to control your transformation, so zat it is partial and you can stay closer to your own shape. If you wish."

Fleur's wild eyes suggest that toning down the shape not be her preference.

"Ze fur is not optional, though. Whenever you shift, I want that. So decadent having it between my fingers!"

"It won't be every time?"

"No, silly, of course not. Too inconvenient, always having to shift to enjoy each other. It would be difficult to do what I want if you were always ze stag. Closets. Dressing rooms. Restaurants when no one is looking. Coffee tables if we dislike ze people. Your other shape would not fit in those places and not making love wherever we like would be boring."

Yes. Heaven forbid it be impossible for us to traumatize our hosts by fucking in their living room as an act of protest.

"Ze shifting varies witch to witch. Full and new moons, or only ze solstice. At will, if you practice enough. Now lay back down and cuddle me, my too-chivalrous wife. Let me enjoy being ravished and let yourself relax, yes? You have not 'urt me, 'Ermoine Granger. You could never."

Fleur sinks back into the impromptu bed of ruined fabric and rain-slicked grass. She pats a spot on her tummy, showing where she wants Hermione's hand. She complies, palming the swell of warm flesh and pulling Fleur closer against her front with a quick tug. Fleur leads her other hand to her throat and covers it with her own, squeezing gently to ask for pressure. Either a veela thing, or a kink of Fleur's, but she craves having a hand around her throat, both during sex and just to cuddle. The effect is like picking a kitten up by the scruff of the neck. Fleur just melts. Hermione likes the hot dance of blood under her fingertips. Proof that Fleur is safe and alive and real.

"You remember how," Fleur murmurs. "Good."

Her wife clearly enjoyed herself, and that's important. Her wife. There's really nothing left she can ask, and it's getting dark. Better to wait until morning to go looking for help.

She presses a kiss to Fleur's shoulder blade and lets Fleur's happiness be enough for them both, at least for today.

After receiving special dispensation at the ministry--after all, her unmailed letters to American and German friends could undo Wizarding Britain forever--the aurors allowed them to schedule the second ceremony in her hometown so long as 'security risks' and 'distasteful displays' were kept to a minimum.

Which, to the ministry, means not too many veela and fae guests and no one says the word 'lesbians'. She'll be curious to see what Fleur's grandmother thinks of the tortured, prudish wording of the permit.

The front-line teams all answer to Tonks' former partner--and longtime lover, if the gossip is true. Elle Moon is a quick-witted, deathly pale, incredibly foul-mouthed Irishwoman. As it happens, she's the eldest sister of her roommate Lily at Hogwarts.

Fleur can't stand her and Elle seems as riled by Fleur as Fleur is by her. Neither will eat a meal if the other one might have been present when it was cooked. They repeat back everything the other one says and demand to know if that is the exact meaning. They angrily avoid letting each other share tasks, or read different pages on the same copy of the Daily Prophet, or even bring things from the kitchen.

Aquiline screeching bubbles up Fleur's throat whenever Elle is so much as a millimeter closer to Hermione than she is.

Fleur to her demand for an apology and an explanation after a still-clothed Hermione climbed into the other side of the bed. To Fleur, lovers sharing a bed clothed even just for sleeping is nothing short of desecration.

Their faerie instincts are acting up.

The Moons are a leannán sídhe clan as old as the first stone arrowheads chipped in Ireland. Small in number but also powerfully gifted in their peculiar form of allure, mentalism, spatial alteration, and, of course, blood magic. Legend has it that the last outright attack on them ended when the booby-trapped chapel they were gathering in decided that it never really had existed. Without help, it's impossible to apparate out of a place that isn't operating like normal reality.

The treaty between them and the Delacour has expired. No life debts. No secret lovers to legitimize. No favors to be exchanged for non-aggression. Because of the war, the veela and other clans, tribes, and peoples in the fae world hunkered down and avoided socializing. They could not keep emissaries safe, and to lose an emissary under their protection guarantees a war rather than risking one like a lapsed treaty would.

A labyrinthine web of unbreakable promises that has held the peace between groups of fae and fae-blooded humans for twelve centuries is fraying, strands broken with each new moon as more treaties expire.

Nothing enforces a peace between Moon and Delacour and, absent that, the struggle to prove one's strength is the sole imperative between unrelated faeries. Deep as their bones. The only thing stopping a duel or a blood feud or a declaration of war is the ability of the two stressed-out women to ignore everything their bodies are telling them.

Fleur's mind is struggling to reconcile being mated but having a second wedding coming up as well and to top it off, a stranger of fae blood stands on bodyguard duty for her mate, ringing every alarm bell she has.

The disconnect is clearly burning her up and Hermione hates seeing it, but Fleur is determined to push through. Hermione's not been able to talk her into canceling.

Hermione is trying to manage fifteen odd half-blood and pure-blood friends who don't have a clue how to open a tin of soup or set an air conditioner while also worrying about her wife getting into a clawing, spitting, rabid weasel type fight with magical law enforcement.

Now she has to factor in that the law enforcement in question is technically a vampire, albeit one inclined to snacking on perhaps half a pint during a hookup, late-night harp, and flute solos, melancholy ramblings, and florid love letters from beyond-heartbroken old flames. The leannán sídhe are more like Jane Eyre than Dracula from what little she's been able to lay her hands on about the breed.

Here she stands between one painfully gorgeous monster and another, thirty miles from home and waiting for the bus like any other girl about to come out to her parents. The pair of crocodile teeth in her pocket seem to weigh more every minute as she debates bringing them back or not.

The war is over, but there's no doubt that Death Eaters remain on the loose.

Her parents don't remember her, but she remembers them.

They taught her not to fight, cheat, or lie. They're only alive because she's exceptionally good at that and far worse.

It's not a matter of whether she should--by any logic, she absolutely should not--or of whether they would be proud. In their minds, she's gone. Can't be ashamed or proud of that which does not exist.

It's her ego. The first woman to be inducted into the Order of Morgana since before the end of the first millennium. with commendations from the Secretary of the Arcane in America and the Société de Sorcellerie in France. Honored by the families of exchange students from Chile to Russia and the magical governments.

Around fireplaces and campfires, dark wizards and would-be tyrants will always trade hushed tales of the Mongoose. Scrawny. Quiet. Merciless. Fond of knives, poisons and traps. She couldn't stop her legend as a fighter if she tried. The fact that she plans to go into either teaching or medicine and not auroring or curse-breaking means she will probably remain undefeated in duels and for the first time, the Elder Wand will pass down a bloodline via a peaceful death.

She doesn't care about the honors or the begging by owl post from investors and journalists and ambassadors.

What she wants is her mum and dad to know she is safe so she can tell them she is so glad to be their daughter and maybe, just maybe, they'll say they are proud of her.

For them to meet Fleur.

She could crush these teeth and live a life feted with praise. Grow old waking up beside the most beautiful creature ever to walk the Earth and all without risking her parents. She could remove her own memory of them, and the Fidelius charm would seal them away from magic forever. Dumbledore told her that if the keeper of the secret can no longer share it, the spell folds in on itself. The paradox consumes the magic in the surrounding area, leaving a null void where spells fizzle, magical senses are overwhelmed with noise, scrying fail and magic sensitive people or creatures become confused and disoriented.

Wizards never use it that way among themselves for fear of ruining the lives the spell protects. They fear the loss of their magic more than anything but death itself, and some fear it even more.

For a Muggleborn desperate to save her non-magical parents, that fail-safe in the spell was ideal.

"You all right, dear?" Molly asks.

Hermione gasps.

They're still at the bus station. Down the road, she sees the bus cough up two young men at the fence of the McConnell farm.

"It's hard," she admits.

"Course it is, deary. I look at you and your courage and your smarts and I think you're what Ginny would be like if I raised her, rather than leaving her brothers and the school to do half of it."

The bus hisses to a stop, its windows and cherry red paint dewy with the low fog on the fields.

Busses and Muggle-ignorant wizards. Great fun.

"Everyone remember how this works?" Hermione grits out.

A chorus of 'oui' and 'yes' bubbles up around her.

"Right, Weasleys first. So many of you, we should just do that half anyway," she teases.

Molly tuts and herds her children onto the bus, Ginny first. After nearly dying, Ginny isn't going to be allowed more than twenty feet away from her mother for a few decades.

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" Arthur asks the driver.

"Aye. Put in your ticket."

Arthur Weasley interacting with Muggles is always a delight. He's always so close to right and so far, far, far away from it all at once. He's cheery and over-eager, which helps make up for it.

"Slide," she whispers, pointing at the ticket-slot.

"Ah, yes. It's just so springy!" he gushes.

He'd been frantically tapping the perforated ticket into the ashtray where smokers put their cigarettes out.

As the bus trundles along, she figures out why Arthur did that. Because the ashtray was yellow and so was the smartphone scanner on the London Underground. Two pieces of yellow plastic. Both are round. Both are related to getting on board Muggle public transport.

The ride itself is torture. Her gut flops each time she passes a cafe, or a park, or anything at all between the outskirts of the city and Hampstead.

She comes up short at the edge of the driveway.

She can pass the wards, but that's useless because no one else here could. She needs to unfurl and rebuild them and she created them in a sleepless, angry sprint. So she's short on details but long on ways she can hurt herself if she sets them off.

The version of herself that cast these three years ago might as well be a different species in terms of magical skill, anger issues, and trauma. All three play into the mindset for making a properly dangerous ward for one's home.

Sixteen-year-old Hermione wasn't broken like today Hermione is. She forgot which runes, riddles, and puzzles she used.

"Stand back, please."

Fleur tugs on the crimson ribbon tied to her blouse's sleeve and her wand slides into her hand.

"Together, 'Ermione."

They get through the puzzles easily enough. Fleur has to pull her back once when the answer that seems right to her leads to a powerful blast of flame that shatters her shield.

"You were sad, love. Remember?"

She tries again, using the more obviously angst-laden choice. The one picked by a teenager who has to go away forever because people don't understand her.

The wards finally surrender.

"May I, Fleur?"

"Of course. Quite ze scandal if I could not set foot in ze in-law's 'ouse, no?"

It's a matter of another hour before she has the wards disassembled and two before she can rework them to accept non-humans.

She just can't figure out how to reprogram them.

British wizarding education is wizard and pureblood supremacist in a thousand subtle ways. Her classwork is useless to make these sorts of subtle distinctions.

Humans good, everything else bad is all the formulas she knows can manage. Fleur says that Beauxbatons curriculum is little better because it's individual. The ward-happy veelas are always binding their homes and businesses to the land under their feet. But they use names. They lean on their meticulous family trees, business letters, thank-you notes for gifts received, and so on to compile names of the allowed and disallowed.

Pull apart the intricate wards around a country estate after Sunday Mass every week to insert or subtract a single name among thousands, and it becomes something effortless. Even if the mind-buggering complexity of the manor's enchantment would make the best goblin curse-smiths ears dry up.

She doesn't have that kind of practice, and Fleur is a rebel in that regard. She has far more practice breaking curses and sneaking around than she does building or remaking wards and charming home offices and workshops to ensure the success of her family's work and hobbies.

Unless Hermione sits here and brainstorms the name and description of every creature that's like a veela but not quite, she can't teach it to tell Fleur apart from a mermaid or a pixie. Unless she can put in all the names of every single veela who can't enter when Fleur can, it's open to any of them.

Fleur's leaning against an oak up the street, talking to someone back home on her phone, pulling it away from her ear now and again to tap on pictures they're sending her.

"Blood," Hermione whispers. "We just teach it with a drop of her blood. God, I'm stupid. Fleur!"

It will never get old watching Fleur Delacour hear Hermione say her name, look up and smile.

Chapter Text

The spinning stopped, and the whistling sound stopped.

He was at home with his wife and now...it's blurry, but he could swear this is their old house. Didn't they sell that years ago? When they moved to Australia?

He wants to look around, but can't move. Whoever they are, they have tied him up. He can't speak either, even though he can breathe and move his mouth.

*"Finite incantato."*

The blurriness is gone now, and he can move his hands too.

Who are these people? He counts eight redheads. A family, from the look of it, mother, father, three brothers, and a daughter. A ginger woman the size of a battleship with an Irish flag tattooed on her forearm and a nasty look on her face. She looks like a fighter, and not only because of the brass knuckles dangling on a chain looped around her belt. Something in her eyes. They're a lovely shade of green but the way she stares straight through him and the way she sweeps her gaze across the room like she expects the carpet to grow teeth and bite makes him nervous.

Then there's the matter of at least three dozen blondes, all of them women and all of them unreasonably attractive. The family resemblance isn't just strong. It's blinding. Finely cut jaws, high cheekbones, and full lips. Face after face. Every eye in the crowd is a brilliant blue, somewhere between teal and violet. One rises out from the pack, taller than the others. Standing proud like a general reviewing troops in a black camelhair coat over a satin grey blouse, tight leather trousers of cherry-red that slither into tall boots of oiled calfskin.

It's too scandalous for the office by far. But her bearing, the bracelet on her wrist, and the expensive cut and cloth of her blouse all make her seem like a businesswoman, more than anything. An up-and-comer trying to push through the pack of old boys by any means necessary. She reminds him of the overdressed shark of a woman who runs that ghastly chain of low-quality dental clinics in Melbourne. Except that her smile doesn't make him cringe.

"Jean, dear?"

Who's Jean?

Why on Earth would he call for Jean? His wife's name is Monica, isn't it?

No. Jean. His wife's name is Jean. Now he remembers. If they ever had a daughter, her middle name would be Jean. It's traditional in her family.

All terribly confusing. Maybe that hygienist his wife fired because she kept trying to flirt with him broke in and left the gas on? If so, they don't have long. This is far too confusing of a hallucination to die in.

"Just a minute, dad. She hasn't woken up yet."

Dad?

He turns to his left. A young woman in a ponytail is cradling his wife's face. Muttering to herself, this strange--and yet so familiar!--woman checks Jean's pupils and starts dabbing some sort of glowing lipstick off both their lips.

"Hermione?" she whispers.

"Yeah," the young woman chokes. "Yeah. It's me, mum."

Mother and daughter crash into each other's arms.

That woman is his daughter. His daughter.

Hermione Jean Granger.

The best thing that ever happened--that could ever happen--to him and his wife. He knows that yesterday he didn't have a daughter. He also somehow knows that they have had a daughter for probably nineteen years if they count all the time they spent talking to and telling stories to Jean's belly when she was pregnant.

There is before the lie, during the lie, and after the lie.

The lie fit the world yesterday and in his memory; the lie is still there. Yesterday it was real. But now the truth is there too. There's no comparison. The truth is sturdy and the truth has Hermione in it.

All these new gingers, blondes, and surprise daughters make him dizzy. Everything seems like it's a little true and a little false, all at once.

This is why he disliked philosophy class in college.

"I'm so sorry," she croaks, burying herself in her mother's arms. Her body shakes and clenches as she cries. Jean cradles this almost-grown baby of hers like she never once let go. Feminine intuition, perhaps, or she's got the courage to postpone the panic about this baffling situation. Courage he knows full well he lacks.

The strange blonde kneels beside her, pressing a kiss to her hair and rubbing the parts of Hermione's back that her mother isn't busy clinging to.

"Thanks, Fleur."

"Toujours, mon amour," the stranger murmurs.

Jean is cradling a pint of ice cream to her forehead.

Everyone is tired, even though Hermione and Fleur can hide it better--oh, to be young again!--but neither of the elder Grangers wants to risk falling asleep. It's too precious to have her baby back. If she closes her eyes, what if Hermione was just a dream?

"You're a wizard."

"Witch."

"What's the difference?"

"Wizards are men. I'm a woman."

"Zis is true," Fleur chortles, making the spoon dance between her lips.

Fleur seems to have decided to lay the charm on Tim, working him up to the point she'll ask for his permission to marry Hermione.

Not that either woman has admitted that's why they're here, yet.

Her baby hasn't told her she fancies girls. She doesn't think much of her own mother's brains or her eyesight. Hermione has tried to avoid staring at Fleur every spare minute and had some success but Fleur hasn't bothered. When they sit close, their hands dangle as if they tilted gravity for each other. Like they slanted the world to bring them close.

Whenever Hermione looks away, Fleur steals a glance. Smiles, or twirls a spring of golden hair, or chews her lip. Seems like every time Hermione laughs, Fleur buzzes in her chair. That girl isn't fooling anybody. She seems like quite a nice young lady. She's not sure what frightens Hermione about this, only that it is frightening. So she owes it to Hermione to act surprised. She's up to the challenge. She did meet Tom in drama class, after all.

The energy that powered Hermione through her day is gone. She's sputtering along like she used to do at the football club when the game went too far over time.

"You need some decaf tea," Jean tells her daughter, nudging with her foot. "So you can sleep."

They set everything in the kitchen up exactly the same, right down the silverware being in the drawer under the sink, which her friends would tease her about during book club. Hermione clearly had kept the property up and kept for her and Tim, because that silly melted lump of clay that Hermione made as a 'pot' in preschool is on the shelf over the sink with just a whisper of dust on it.

Jean suspects that a feather duster leaps out of the cupboard on its own accord, like clockwork, once a week.

Not an heirloom. That lump means something to them but wouldn't interest a prowler. It would get thrown away if the place was being shown but that sentimental flotsam makes a building a house. There are dishes and spoons, and a kettle from the department store. Freshly rinsed. It's all tidy and matching. She has this funny hunch that if she asks, the clones that seem to have accompanied her future daughter-in-law would have their house in Melbourne empty and move them in here by noon tomorrow without one drop of sweat on one golden hair.

"'Mione?" she whispers.

Her daughter is face down, asleep on the kitchen table and her neck will hurt in the morning, teenage vigor or not. She has more questions than she can ask in a lifetime, but Hermione needs the sleep.

She looks towards the stack of shopping bags in the corner. Soft-spoken, affectionate blonde women have been flowing through the house like fall leaves, hugging her, kissing her cheeks, and every single time, they thank her.

When she asks why, they just say 'Hermione'.

"I'll get her," Fleur whispers. "May we?"

"May you what?"

"Well..."

Jean cocks an eyebrow.

"Go on?"

Fleur has blue eyes so pale and bright as a bolt of lightning slicing across the night sky. She looks like the illegitimate daughter of a shampoo commercial and a skin commercial that got taken in by a High Street socialite for a wardrobe upgrade.

The fact that she caught Hermione's eye suggests that she's brilliant and ambitious, whatever that means out in the magic world.

No doubt she could turn Jean and her husband into newts with a blink. Or painted ceramic figurines. Or painted ceramic newts.

If it's possible to be scary good-looking, Fleur is. The ghostly shade of her skin, delicateness of her face, the stillness of her posture and half a dozen little things add an uneasy patina on top of her good looks.

But ask one friendly question and all that unease evaporates. Fleur flinches because she thinks there's a wrong answer to it and wants to save face, like anyone meeting the family. Jean will have to have her husband corner them tomorrow and make Fleur ask for Hermione's hand.

It might kill Fleur to dance around the topic much longer.

"She takes after you in so many ways. It's like I'm seeing into my future. Lucky for me. Ze nightmares...she sleeps better if..."

"I'm not cross," Jean assures Fleur. "I'm teasing. Do they not have teasing in France? Does Hermione usually sleep alone, at home?"

"Well, no."

"I thought not," Jean chuckles. "Twenty-first century and all that."

"Take the master bedroom," she tells Fleur.

Fleur takes a hasty step back, nearly going well-dressed arse over well-coiffed head in the process. "I would never!" she hisses. "I'd never disrespect a matron in her nest. Chased out of ze flock if I did and I would deserve it."

Jean makes a note to ask about all this bird-related slang of Fleur's in the morning. Maybe it's linked to the uncanny beauty that each of the women possesses and their oddly uniform appearance. Birdwatcher's social club, maybe? Or a magical sorority. Sorority makes sense, given that they all wear a silver brooch with a dove made of inlaid rubies carrying a telescope and a saber in its grip.

Fleur looks back towards the living room and raises two fingers, tracing a pattern in midair and then crooking her fingers.

A half dozen fuzzy blankets float out of the linen closet. All the couch cushions fly off and arrange themselves in a low half-circle. They fold and tuck themselves and layer after layer of gauzy sheeting lands on top, anchored by seemingly nothing at all. The glow of fairy lights pulses softly within, despite the absence of any actual lightbulbs.

"Cozy."

Fleur chuckles.

"Summons a blanket fort. Our friend Luna taught us."

Tom watches Fleur putter around the kitchen that Jean finally finished unpacking like she wants to learn the space to understand the woman.

"Fleur! No! Wait!"

Hermione vaults over the couch and sprints towards the bookshelf by the patio. Her friend is tiptoeing through Jean's favorite books. Ironically enough for the skeptic mother of a witch, fantasy is her secret love. Lord of the Rings is her favorite.

"'Zis is very charming."

Before Hermione can reach her friend, she sees it.

Hermione hates that picture. Loathes it. Has tried on multiple occasions to destroy it. They got their first inkling of her genius came age six when she tried to get rid of the picture.

She got it shipped off through the mail. She didn't need postage thanks to a mail order toaster that they were returning, a spare box and a fault buried sixty pages into the rules regarding postage free mailing of refunds in the Royal Mail. She even included chocolates as a 'tip' for destroying it, nestled in a chilled sample bag she nicked from the clinic so they wouldn't melt. Made it all the way to a glass-recycling factory's shipping dock before someone noted that even though the penmanship was good, it was still a child's and mailed it back. Proud as could be, Tom kept the original and brought home a replica. Every year since, they await Hermione's latest bit of spycraft in her ongoing war with a photo of herself and their skiing trip to Colorado.

Every teacher and psychologist since has given the same message in between the lines. Jean and he are smart. Doctors. Gifted in their fields. They're not frighteningly, world-changing brilliant, like their little Mione. If she hadn't ended up being just literally as magical as they always felt she was, he shudders to think how boring school would have been for her.

"So charming!" Fleur chortles. "Your smile! Your little skis! Ooh. And ze bird you're holding! An eagle chick? Have you had a fascination with petting things with feathers your entire life, then?"

"I was four," Hermione practically snarls. "It was hurt. Fell out of a tree."

Hermione snatches at the picture but her friend pirouettes out of the way before grabbing Hermione around the hip and pulling her in against her side, where she fidgets and keeps trying to get a grip on the picture. Strange friendship, these two have. Lots of hugs and touching. Rather like Jean and himself at university in the early days. But they were a couple and not just friends. Must be something that's changed since he went to school.

"I was afraid you'd find that. It looks even worse now that I know you."

"Ze entire war," Fleur sighs, shaking her head. She nods at Hermione.

"Ze entire war, zis woman fears nothing. Nothing at all. Zis is quite a shock, knowing my wife does not want me to see her mothering feathered creatures. My veela is heartbroken, 'Ermione."

"Fleur!" Hermione hisses.

"You can 'ave it back," she chortles, handing the photo over.

A popping sound like a champagne cork bounces off the windows and a young man with messy brown hair and glasses appears in the back garden with a small suitcase. Maybe the grass decided that it had been long enough with no impossible things happening there, so it was time to catch up. Shortly after he arrives, a svelte ginger woman with a thick coat of freckles pops in beside him and tucks her arm in his. They're followed an instant later by a small blonde woman with skin so pale she probably belongs in a hospital. Harry and Ginny, his restored memories tell him. He doesn't know the name of the girl wearing a crown woven from dried dandelions, complete with pristine puffballs.

"'Arry! Ginny! Luna!" Fleur calls out, abandoning a sputtering Hermione to greet them.

"Blimey," mumbles a man behind him. "Thought I was the only one who could piss you off like that with one sentence, Hermy."

"Shut it, Ron."

Jean sets down the pan she was rinsing. She leans on the counter, looks out the back window and smiles.

"Already married, then."

Tom just stares at his wife. Surely she didn't go mad when her memories were restored?

"Who?"

"Hermione, of course. To Fleur."

"Really? What makes you think that?"

Rather than a reply, he gets a soapy, dripping sponge tossed in his face.

"Well, Fleur admitted it and even if she hadn't, I have eyes, Thomas Granger."

"I thought she was with Ron?"

"Nah," the burly ginger laughs, sitting down at the table beside Tom. "That was ages ago. She said I was a beard. Must be some Muggle term I don't know."

Hermione sinks to her knees and groans. Jean leans over the breakfast counter to smirk at her.

"Now, now, dear. I saw you two. You were miles cozier than I've ever been with a friend. I saw how you couldn't stop touching her or looking at her. You've never been like that with anyone in your entire life. I've only ever acted like that around your father."

"At least you fooled your dad, Hermy, that's something."

Tom's gotten used to being ganged up on by women smarter and more accomplished than he. He suspects he'd go mad if it ever stopped.

"Though I'm still mad about the whole memory-wiping nonsense," Jean huffs. "And I definitely need explanations, young lady. Like this war business and what in God's name a veela is."

Jean tosses another sponge, this time a dry one. It bounces off Hermione's head.

"Well, that's easy," Ron scoffs. "Veela's a fit French bird with murder eyes, innit?"

"Fuck off, Ron."

Hermione sighs.

"Bugger me sideways. Right. Let's clear the table and make some coffee and I guess I'll tell you everything about the last eighteen months."

She winces.

"And about half of everything since I went to Hogwarts, if I'm honest."

Harry hugs Hermione soon as he's in the door and she ruffles his hair like a misbehaving pup.

"Hi, Harry. Remember how I taught you that cake recipe?"

"Raspberry outside, fudge inside cake? Sure."

"Exactly. ROFIC. Your lucky day, Harry. I need you to make about..." Hermione counts on her fingers, leans out into the doorway to glance at a knot of nieces in the living room, and mumbles some arithmetic under her breath. "...Five of them. I'll need the chocolate before long."

Jean scoffs.

"They're the best addition to the family recipes in ages, dear. But they take about twelve hours to bake."

"Oh, I know. It gets rough a third of the way in."

Chapter Text

Jean stares at her daughter.

Her daughter, who has been a child soldier since age fourteen. Her daughter, who the other wizarding types here look at like she's a savior, a warrior heaven-sent. Her daughter, who organized a relocation campaign that sent four hundred thousand Britons to safer places so quietly that the BBC radio joked about 'some great new spot for a holiday' this morning. Her daughter, who took up the role of general to allied armies. Her daughter, who met with terrorists and corrupt Russian generals to get her hands on non-magical weapons and poisons that even that megalomaniac couldn't survive. Her daughter, who got an exception for dissecting a fetal pig at age nine but tore a man's throat open and ate a raw human heart because 'the ritual demanded it' and sacrifices had to be made.

Her daughter, who had to turn herself into something between a stone-age war chieftain and General Eisenhower just to finish school.

Her daughter, who didn't cry at any part of the story until she talked about blocking off their memories of her and sending them away out of reach of magical hunters and on a strictly Muggle paper trail.

Her daughter, who orphaned herself rather than think about them being hurt.

Jean lunge for the trashcan just in time to vomit her coffee and toast into it. Two powerful hands land on her back and rub big circles.

"There, there," Ron says. "My mum handled it way worse."

"I've met Molly," Jean croaks. "I doubt that."

"Nah! She really did. After fifth year, she enchanted a spoon to take a swing at me if I tried to leave the house."

Hermione kneels beside her.

"Oral purification charm?"

Jean shrugs her assent.

"Dentrificus abluti," Hermione says, tapping her wand to Jean's chin.

At least a cup of minty, sugary liquid forms in her mouth, swirling against every surface. Before she can spit it out in surprise, it just vanishes.

"Neat trick," she mutters. "Put us dentists out of business."

"Hardly," her baby girl laughs. "Magic is aces at putting the left side of a person's torso back on after a dragon bite or knitting a spine. Absolute rubbish at basic preventatives."

"Really?"

"Zis is true," Fleur replies from her perch on the window seat where she's picking apart a croissant.

The visitors have transformed her kitchen into a beehive of chuckling, whispered gossip in fast French just past Jean's rusty grasp, blonde bodies dancing around each other effortlessly despite the cramped space, and delicious things being levitated from counter to plates.

"I 'ave a mastery as a mediwitch, but until 'Ermione told me about germ theory, I knew nothing of it."

"You're kidding."

Hermione shakes her head.

"Mediwitches like Fleur can point their wands and say some words and tell if someone's infected and often with what, since so many magical diseases have a specific signature. They take the patient, put them in a room with a fresh air potion, a replicating plate, an apple and a hunk of bread. Raise a stasis charm around them. They're fully isolated. Indefinitely. Air tight, hermetically sealed, you name it."

Jean takes a bite of a sinful chocolate croissant that someone--ninety percent odds they were blonde--pressed into her hand when she wasn't looking.

"So why develop germ theory?" she asks herself. "They've reached the goal of treating disease and there's perfect quarantine, so why go through all the boring experimental stuff science we did?"

"Exactly, mum."

"Alchemists do experiments," one of Ron's brothers pipes up. She's got Ron and Ginny down pat--partially because she's had to scold Ginny for straddling Harry for a snog twice--but she's not got the names of all the other gingers down.

"Good point. Alchemists and arithmancers and, to a limited degree, spell engineers. Curse-breakers...but that's not research."

"More like self-preservation," he chuckles.

"Alchemists keep their notes and show their work. Things like what the potion ingredient didn't react to and what magical factors don't equal balance. Those details are useful for the next guy. The rest of the time, it's find a result, write it down, sell the book rights and forget which room you left your notes in," Hermione explains.

She chuckles.

"It's funny. For people who can use magic, we're not a curious bunch. Not like Muggle scientists. There are amazing craftsmen who can make everything from bottomless bags to wands to hats that keep the rain from getting within a foot of you, to cauldrons that can take a dragon's breath. Duelists and warriors and enchanters. But few researchers. The entire ministry has ten or maybe fifteen. One Unspeakable each per top-secret field of study and an assistant. And plenty of schools of magic are what we call complete. Nutritomancy, for instance. It tastes like soggy cardboard, but conjured porridge will keep you alive and aguamenti evocations will keep you hydrated."

She twirls her wand idly.

"There's a subset of transfiguration that's for working with fibers, joining scraps of cloth, and so on. I coud make good clothes from the rags I've worn out. Cleaning charms for hygiene if I'm out of water. Fire's a cinch. Any animal I can see, I can kill with a slicing charm. I know enough healing and I keep enough potions in reserve to get myself out of any scrape where I'm conscious. This little piece of wood is the only tool I need for the rest of my life as long as I'm okay living in a cottage made of woven sticks in the woods, at least."

"Harry, Ron and I lived in a tent for over a year to evade the Death Eaters. Moved every other day. The only uncomfortable thing was the isolation."

Jean runs her fingers around the rim, trying to imagine her daughter who hated camping with her as a little girl thriving in the woods because now she had magic and there was nothing to be afraid of and nothing she couldn't do.

"Everyone can prevent themselves from going hungry, or getting sick, and just make shelter? You're talking about a post-scarcity society, baby girl. Like science fiction."

Hermione laughs.

"We're not, but now that you say that, it's maybe only because we're stupid. I had to look up all those survival charms. They should be taught by third year. Harry..."

Hermione leans over the back of her chair and looks into the other room. One of Fleur's family brought in a Xbox and a Wii as part of refurnishing. Both are seeing lots of use. Hermione and Fleur have taken a shine to the latter. There's something sweet watching her daughter pretend to wave a tennis racket while her intended does the same and an inevitably victorious Fleur wraps her arms around a pouting Hermione and kisses her breathless.

Harry's in there with Ginny and Gabrielle right now, playing some game that involves lots of zap! and zing! sounds.

"Harry!"

"Yeah?"

"How many Muggleborn in our class, you figure?"

He clicks his tongue.

"Hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty? Toss in Muggle-raised like me, orphans and half-bloods and it's at least two-thirds of the school."

Hermione chews her lip.

"Wonder how many of those had parents that were doctors and architects and engineers and lawyers. Our Muggle processes are miles ahead, even if our results aren't."

Ron lets out a long whistle.

"I think all of the arseholes in the Wizengamot and the Department of Mysteries just clenched. Simultaneously," he jokes.

"About bloody time. We're the second generation to live through a war in thirty years because no one set up proper anti-bullying standards at school in the 1940s."

Fleur breezes through. The woman seems to glide, pad, tiptoe, swish, traipse and late at night, she waltzes with her head tucked into Hermione's shoulder. She never does something so boring as walking. She has her phone pressed to her ear, and she's hissing angrily at someone at the other end of the line.

She jabs her finger on the end call button and gathers a bunch of the tablecloth in a tight fist.

"No on the church, love?" Hermione asks.

Fleur nods.

"Our fourth turn-down," Hermione mutters. "You'd think we were asking to burn it down, not get married."

"Not everyone's as smart as you, Hermione. They might not understand why the woman marrying my little girl is the luckiest creature on Earth."

Fleur stiffens at the word 'creature' and her irises flash from blue to a strange shade of gold that's like staring straight into the brightest part of a bonfire.

Something to ask about.

"Looking for venues early? Smart."

Hermione's cheeks turn red as the filling on the cake she's been pecking at.

"From a wizarding perspective, the ceremony was a year ago Thursday. The veela bonding ritual was...three days before that, love?"

Fleur's smile is like the sun breaking through the end of a rainstorm. Jean waves her fork in her daughter's direction.

"You came back here to get married again for our benefit, didn't you?"

"'Course I did. I meant to come restore your memories earlier. But when a civil war breaks out and the largest battle is at a school, the funerals take a while."

"'Ermione, can I have your hand?" Fleur coos.

Shrugging, Hermione gives it. Fleur wiggles a ring off Hermione's finger. The wide silver band is unadorned but swoops out to a broad circle inset with curling gold vines and a symbol outlined in tiny sapphires.

"Do I 'ave your blessing?" she asks Jean.

"I'm..." she stammers. "Yes. Of course. Her father's too, least if I could find him."

Fleur shakes her head.

"Ze veela are matriarchal. All veela are women whether born or married, like 'Ermione is. Our 'usbands are not considered veela....just ours."

Jean nods.

"Hermione Jean Granger," Fleur asks, lifting Hermione's hand in her palm. "Will you marry me?"

"You could ask me a thousand times," Hermione whispers, wiping a tear onto her finger. "It'll always be yes."

Fleur reaches out to pat Jean's shoulder.

"Zis is a lot. Take some time."

Jean looks up without taking her head off the tablecloth.

"You're some kind of winged sex faeries or cupids or something. Your bodies can detect a soul mate. Rather than blushing, when looking at Hermione makes you randy, you break out in feathers. Some of your nieces went for a fly around the city like I'd go for a jog. From a human perspective? It's terrifying."

"I would not say sex faeries. Our allure, ze magic zat draws partners to us? It works on any lover except ze mate. When I met 'er, everyone in ze room wanted a kiss. I can tell what others lust for. I could taste that most wanted to bed me. But 'Ermione was a mystery. She said I was blocking ze light, but when our eyes met, she blushed. Zat very moment, I knew. Veela allure can get me a warm body. But Love? Love, I must earn."

"Sex faeries until you turn into romantic comedies, then."

Fleur smiles over the rim of her coffee cup.

"Precisely."

They soon decide that their best hope for a venue is a nearby nature reserve and then coming back into town for the reception. A hybrid ceremony, with symbols and music and ritual burnings and brewed draughts of ancient druidesses along with Fleur's Catholic heritage, shot through with splashes of her and Tom's faint but not-yet-gone Methodism. Fleur decides she wants to find the perfect tree and so she strips down to a plain T-shirt and black jeans before spreading her wings and taking to the air with a single powerful beat of her gleaming wings.

She left with a small mirror clenched tight in one hand. Hermione holds a similar mirror in hers and soon it becomes clear they're using them like the magical version of mobile phones. They talk about ashes, and majestic old oaks, and then Fleur drops closer to the ground and circles a massive yew that's quite possibly older than the Roman Empire. It looks half-dead, but its trunk must be ten or fifteen meters across. It could swallow up a two-story cottage.

Jean watches over her child's shoulder as they talk about various trees.

"That one!" Hermione exclaims. "We'll do some reinforcing runes, transfigure a door, expand the interior. Just make a little chapel. We will need to find either a wizard or squib minister and photographer, though."

"A what now?"

"Squibs are members of magical families who can't do magic, but they know about our world. Won't be surprised walking into a tree that's three times larger on the inside. Wizarding photographer, that's a must. Dennis Creevy from school, maybe. Major shutterbug."

"What do you need from me, 'Mione?"

"Huh?"

"The mother of the bride helps with the ceremony, don't you think?"

"Right. Sorry. Been living off the land for too long. Let's see. Transportation to the edge of town for the magical guests? Bunch of people apparating into thin air from the garden will look suspicious. Maybe we carpool in the Muggle guests?"

"We can have those?"

"Sure. I can check for anyone who's allowed to know and for the rest, there's a suggestibility potion, I guess you'd call it. We'll hand everyone a mint or something. They can remember the ceremony, but it's hazy. Like a daydream. They won't realize that the strange stuff was actually real, because it will all seem fanciful. So they won't report it."

Hermione's shoulders droop.

"Do you still have a way to get in touch with Maggie? Or my maths teacher?"

Jean nods.

Hermione's long-lost friend and a teacher almost as dear to her as her mother are alive and well. Both write back immediately, excited about the wedding. But they're also busy. Ms. Devlin is out of the country on a well-deserved long holiday, meaning the date slides back a full three weeks.

Jean gets twitchy because her Muggle upbringing keeps jabbing her with the nagging sensation that something that needs doing and time is short to get it done.

Because in her world, flowers are purchased from flower shops, not summoned with various types of floris charms. A reservation is needed. Dresses are from dressmakers, not from a twirl of the lady's wand over a bolt of fabric. Appointments, again. Reservations, again. Hotels need reservations even farther out.

Ever clever and ever kind, her mate concocts a scheme to raise eight cozy cabins on public land near the forest with the venue. Problem solved. Paperwork obscures their origin and Hermione makes 'reservations' and expectations are met. The government will buy them from Hermione as 'improvements to campgrounds' after they're relocated a half-mile. That can be their nest egg. Hermione is adamant that they need Muggle savings.

The pattern repeats. Jean worries. Hermione reminds her mother that all these things are easy for witches to provide and that the hard part of weddings is the people and Jean smiles, almost sadly, and shakes her head.

Fleur can't help. She can't take the weight from her mother-in-law's shoulders or her mate's. This need for things keeps interrupting her mother-in-law's good mood and Fleur wonders if they might forgive her for torching every inanimate object on the face planet.

She has never been to a fully Muggle wedding. No cause for it, being a veela. A dozen of her cousins and nieces have married Muggles, but no one stays a Muggle upon falling for a veela. The magical world is forced upon them by their wife's every blush and breath and laugh and moan. Spend more than a few weeks in intimate quarters with a veela--let alone as a lover--and uncanny becomes everyday.

The wedding will always drip with magic, and the guest lists tend more magical than Muggle. To ensure their access to church ceremony no matter the personality disorders that might afflict the muggle Pope, Fleur's flock has always placed at least two of their terribly rare, terribly precious sons in the Muggle priesthood.

Fleur notes that some expectations seem to be the same between a fully Muggle wedding and a magical or mixed wedding. Food, rich and sweet and so over-abundant that the excess overflows guests willing to be saddled with leftovers and becomes a sacrifice of sorts. The family cooks age-old favorites, but the overflowing joy means overdoing it. Recipes of generations past transformed into an embarrassment of riches in celebration of a union, a future and the generations to come.

That she will gladly help with. Gleefully, even. She has always feigned uselessness in the kitchen when Hermione is around, even stealing bakery and restaurant containers to 'explain' the meals she cooks.

That is a task for the night before and the day before, not nine days out.

She finds herself out of place and useless. It inflames her veela that she cannot fully bond with her new flockmates because of all the stress and any form of uselessness wounds her pride as a witch. She watches from outside while her beloved navigates various rituals and rites regarding invitations, and the picking of bridesmaids--despite the selection of exactly one Muggle--and something lunacy called a 'rehearsal'.

Ludicrous! Do they think Fleur will walk into the church, look around, and forget who to marry? Forget which woman her heart beats for? Forget which woman she split her soul for?

"It's confusing, isn't it?"

She startles from her irritated daze. Hermione's father has joined her on the couch, unnoticed in the fog inside Fleur's head. He has two bottles in his hand.

"What is? Ze wedding?"

He shrugs.

"The wedding, a whole family you've never met, a whole family I've never met. Where in God's name the other thirty women in your family are sleeping. I swear you just show up at breakfast. Don't tell me you applicated or wh-"

"Apparate. The reverse of Disapparte. The man who first invented the spell was a drunk fleeing the aurors. He forgot how to spell disappear."

"Right!" Tom exclaims, rubbing his hands on his jeans. "Because using a teleportation spell created under the influence makes good sense."

Fleur cocks her head.

"It would explain why so little finesse is involved. Brute force of will. We used an expansion charm and a notice-me-not," Fleur mumbles, picking at nail polish that needs redoing. "'Ermione's old treehouse, I believe."

"You're joking."

"We crave open air and sunlight. Ze staleness of the air in 'Ogwarts bothered me as much as anything else. My feathers are part of a 'eritage, father-in-law."

"Hah! Just Tom."

"Tom."

He holds out a bottle.

"Been a long time since I vacationed in France. Can't remember if offering you a beer is an insult."

The label is a painting of a man who looks like a beggar, roasting hops and fruit on a spit over a fire in a trash barrel. Trashy Ted's Low Bar Lager! his ratty T-Shirt proudly proclaims.

She quirks an eyebrow.

"England and France 'ave warred enough. I'll allow it," she teases, taking the bottle and calling on her veela for her talons. She hooks the point in the cap and punctures it with a whisper of pressure before vaporizing the steel cap with faerie-fire from her other hand.

"Neat trick," he mutters, retrieving some peculiar metal contraption from his pocket which he uses to pry off his own bottle's cap.

"May I?" she asks, gesturing to it.

"Sure."

The contraption is a flat bar of metal with a triangular gap in it. The displaced metal forms a tooth of sorts. She suspects they could make a crude version of this with scrap and two hammer blows, but this one is decorated and enameled.

"Cheers."

"Santé."

The bottles clink together, and he slumps back onto the sofa, looking quite exhausted. Lacking another frame of reference, Tom has treated Fleur as the man his daughter brought home, or something approximating it. It will do for the time being. She did take on those qualities to please one of her first female lovers.

"London Marathon, 2002?" she asks after handing the device back.

"Yeah," Tom sighs, smacking his lips. "Not my brightest idea. Somehow convinced myself six months of training was enough for a forty-one-year-old. Felt like I was dying for the last five miles."

"But you finished," she points out. "Every option to stop without penalty. And you kept at it, 'owever unpleasant."

"True enough."

"Like father, like daughter. 'Ermione never said ze world was not hers to save, or zat she'd saved her people and now it was someone else's turn. She didn't. She kept going."

He takes a quick draw of his beer, staring straight ahead as if there was something past the fireplace.

"Hermione said you were married before. You lost him in the war. But you picked up Hermione a few weeks after."

Fleur stiffens at the implication, and he sighs.

"I'm a father. I worry."

Fleur shrugs.

"We each had something to 'ide, I suppose. Bill was in love with a man. Which is a cruel burden for a pureblood wizard, especially one from the Families. He was ze oldest of ze Weasley children, who are royalty. I was next in line to my flock but unmarried and unmated not only past ze age where most veela meet a mate, I was past an age where most unmated veela survive. Whispers of moving me out of succession were becoming shouts."

Fleur chuckles.

"I found my mate, of course. But real love takes time. I spent every moment I could with her but I was not keen on disclosing 'Ermione's identity to my family. Bill and I worked together at ze bank and liked each other's company as friends, so we married. It was ze simplest solution, at ze time. One of ze Sacred Twenty-Eight families gained a wife for the 'eir apparent and the worst of my cousins and aunts backed off. If Bill was not killed in ze war, we would 'ave made up a story and gotten a divorce."

"How were you at risk of dying? You're..."

"Twenty-three now, twenty at ze time."

"Marry by twenty or die?"

Fleur sighs.

"Meeting and courting can carry us for a long time. I lived for years on stolen glances and flirting zat Hermione did not detect," Fleur sighs.

"But yes. We are ze reason for ze stories of sirens and seductive elves in myth. It is zee truth in ze latter case. Our birthrights are beauty, magical prowess, and good 'ealth. But ze talons are part of a monster. Part of an animal, at ze very least. A predator zat seduced, used and abandoned men for centuries."

"We gave rise to ze myth of beautiful spirits murdering men in ze woods. So we struck a bargain with our goddess many centuries ago. What we call ze Oath of ze Heart was sworn by my ancestors to free us from our worst instincts, binding ze priestesses who swore it, and all ze veela to come. Our need to love is our leash. We meet our mate and loving..."

She stalls on how to explain it. How can she explain that air isn't enough if it doesn't carry the scent of Hermione or the sound of her voice?

"Imagine a small apartment. You 'ave food, water, and a clean place to sleep. Enough space to exercise. Perhaps some books. But there is no door. You see no sunlight except out a window. No changes of scenery. No changes of routine beyond cooking a new recipe."

"Sounds miserable."

"Zat is how we feel once we are of age but haven't met our mate, or if we've met but it is unrequited, or if our mate is angry at us."

Fleur smiles.

"Ze bond incentivizes making up with our lover, pulling us back to a better place. True rejection means spending a lifetime like zat. It's little more than shuffling towards ze grave. So our instincts and ze Mother of the Winds' wisdom guides us towards happiness with our mate. Domesticates us."

"Huh."

"FLEUR!" Hermione calls.

She blows into the room like a whirlwind, shaking her head and scowling.

"What is it?"

"I..." she huffs. "...cannot...deal...with...her."

Tom laughs. His hand clasps Fleur's knee and taps the neck of his beer bottle to hers before pushing himself off the couch.

"Seems we both have a wife to distract."

Fleur hums.

"Clash of ze titans, otherwise."

"Count yourself lucky you've never seen the Granger women having a row."

Hermione replaces him, all but crumpling into the couch.

"Talk to me, mon petit lionne."

"It's stupid."

Fleur throws an arm around Hermione's shoulder and pulls her in.

"I doubt zat. Ze two of you are so smart you couldn't put together enough stupid to 'ave a stupid argument."

Hermione sniffs.

"Do you know the tradition about something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue?"

"No."

"It's..."

Hermione groans.

"A bride needs to wear something blue, like a garter, something old, like an heirloom, something borrowed, and something new. Old and new should be clothing. According to the tradition, the old and the blue protect against the Evil Eye. So I'm supposed to wear clothing from a woman who's already had children to protect myself from becoming barren. The evil forces will be tricked because I'm wearing the knickers of someone who's already a mother or some rubbish like that."

A Muggle tradition, probably to protect themselves from us.

"Zis protection...it is important to you both?"

Hermione scoffs.

"My mother is still bothered that magic exists because she's a rationalist. But she wants me to wear a...I'm not even sure what it's called. Some sort of old-fashioned lingerie. Been in the family for generations. If I was under a curse, I could tell and I'm not crazy about doing this because it..."

Hermione groans.

"...it's ze sort of tradition Muggles came up with because zey suspected magic existed. Because zey were afraid of us," Fleur fills in.

"She pulled it out, and I yelled at her. Is that weird? Am I overreacting?" Hermione asks. "It's weird. I'm overreacting."

Fleur clamps her hand on her lover's thigh and pulls her back down so Hermione can't walk away and babble out an apology she would later resent.

"Perhaps we can explain it to your mother so she would better understand?" Fleur suggests. "Or if you'd rather, we could find items of our own."

"Like what?"

"Talisman at the Delacour manor. Butterfly trapped in amber."

"Well, that's old," Hermione chuckles.

"...and borrowed."

"For something new, let's see..."

Fleur spots the abandoned bottle cap and draws her wand. She stretches the steel and flattens it. She melts and reconstitutes the foil and the paint. She etches a rose and a sword into the metal, with a crimson droplet running down the blade to stain the petals red. On the back, she traces a rune for 'brilliance' in Sveklani, one she found in an ancient veela manuscript, then speaks a prayer over it in the language.

Satisfied, she conjures a leather cord.

"Fleur," Hermione whispers. "That's..."

"Ze coat of arms of ze Delacour flock, yes. "

Fleur lifts Hermione's hair off her neck and ties the cord, stealing a kiss of the collarbone as she pulls back.

"I should 'ave given it long ago, Lady Delacour."

Jean does not know how long she's stood here, unable to reply as her daughter's words echo around in her brain.

And if it was a tradition to protect against lesbians, mom? Would it still be harmless and silly? It's all right to protect against this part of me, but not that one?

She decides that she's an idiot. Of all the reasons she had thought up for Hermione's rejection the slip, she wouldn't have gotten this if she guessed non-stop the rest of her life.

"I hadn't thought of it like that, poppet."

Hermione's smile deflates halfway like an overdone souffle.

"Why would you have?" she sighs before opening her arms for a hug.

Hermione must be losing her mind.

"You want what?"

"Zis is where you're from. Your world. If I'm to marry a Muggleborn," she teases, flicking a crumpled up chocolate wrapper at her with deadly accuracy. "I want to see what 'er world is like. Zis place made you. I want to know more."

"Well, uh..."

Hampstead, she wants to say, is not that exciting. Just a bunch of overpriced homes and businesses in north London. The sort of place where oral surgeons are the poorer folks on the block.

Only to Fleur, it's not a hometown. It's not one of a hundred places wealthier people live in and around the actual city of London. To Fleur, she supposes, a place where people count their lives in BMWs and stocks and brag about the expensive hobbies of their overstressed children might as well be Hogwarts on the first night of the first year.

"What if we drive around a bit?" she suggests. "I could show you some places that I remember."

"Please."

That was practically a moan, and Hermione wonders if Fleur realizes that she did it or if she was just treated to the emotional equivalent of the feral lust of a needy veela.

She snags the keys for her mother's car off the peg by the door and scratches out a note before leading Fleur out into the cloudy, just-rained and might-rain-again afternoon. When she married a faerie warrior-princess--or close enough, anyway--Hermione was not expecting to find her stalled cold by the chirp of a car's key fob.

"Fleur?"

"I'm fine," she babbles, too fast and too squeaky to be believable.

"Right..."

Hermione clicks the fob again to lock the car. She's noticed this pattern a few times before, with other pureblood friends. Cars terrify them, like some sort of wizarding-specific phobia.

"Fleur, darling? What about the car bothers you? I've noticed other witches are spooked by them, and I never figured out why."

Fleur licks across her parched lips, like she's building up the courage to answer. Hermione will have to moisturize them. As soon as she can find a surface to throw Fleur up against and snog her.

"Small. Small places where we can't use expansion charms to make ourselves comfortable. We get so used to being able to make a chair bigger, or softer, or stretch a room. But..."

"But the lanes are a fixed size and engine would fail if it was manipulated."

Fleur nods.

Hermione twirls the keyring around her finger, trying to think of something else to do. The idea of getting out of the crowded house and having Fleur all to herself and showing off her world to a woman so far out of her league it's ridiculous isn't something she's going to give up without a fight.

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.