Chapter Text
There are worse things in life than working in northern Egypt, Bill Weasley told himself. He was usually an even-tempered man, but at the moment he couldn't help being disgruntled. The sun irritated the scars running down his face, the sand had breached all of his belongings and settled into every crevice of his clothes, and his skin reacted worse than usual to the anti-sunburn charm. It could've been worse, though; he could've still been at war or in Siberia or at a Celestina Warbeck concert. Instead, he would soon come home in an indeterminate time period to an exasperated Fleur Weasley—and oh how it still charmed him, even after a year of marriage, that her name was now Fleur Weasley rather than Delacour. Bill had been stuck in Egypt for a month now and was very close to getting out, if everything worked out well on the final tomb enchantment layer.
"Oi! I need help over here! Bill?" Leanne, the bane of Bill's happy marriage, yelled, and Bill reluctantly ambled over to her from under the water tent's covers. The sun's blinding heat hit him as soon as he stepped into its rays, and Bill told himself once again that his stay in Egypt was only temporary.
He had once loved the sun, loved the Nile, loved Egypt in all its glory and infamy, but that was in his late teens and early twenties. He'd been untethered and adventurous. He'd grabbed life by the wand tip and made it take him to all the wonders of the world. And then he met Fleur Delacour and his perspective shifted, narrowed, until he could only see her in his future. She'd grabbed his heart like he'd once grabbed life, and she'd never let him go. And he'd never left.
Even this journey to Egypt and to the past didn't tempt him. The pyramids with their long-forgotten legends and secrets and curses didn't call to him. Their siren's call was muted to him forever, up until his protégé had grabbed him by his now-short hair and dragged him back to Egypt to unlock what could be the greatest find in modern history: Hsekiu's tomb. Of all the magical rulers in Egyptian history, his reign had been the bloodiest and the longest. It was said that he lived for three hundred years, whether through faulty record keeping or dark magic.
Leanne was—by far, as anyone who knew her well remarked—too ambitious for a former Hufflepuff, and when she had discovered the tomb in the location Hsekiu's was rumored to be, she brushed it off to the goblins as a tomb of a king's tenth son. It was better to be mistaken than to be left on the last page of the credits pages, and if the goblins got a hold on the tomb, she would have been left only with a small promotion and a pat on her back while the goblins took control of the operation. Leanne was young, eager, and vindictive enough to grab on and not let go. Bill didn't blame her one bit, except for when she needed help breaking the enchantments and had only her former mentor to call upon for help.
"Bill! Bill!"
"I'm coming, I'm coming, just a moment," Bill grumbled and broke into the fastest jog the temperature allowed. "What is it?" he asked when he came up behind her.
"I've opened it! I need a second to watch my back."
Bill agreed and they slowly descended into the pit. He stood directly behind her, wand out, waiting for latent enchantments to fire curses at them. He was running through them in his mind—funny, how after two years of desk work at the London Gringotts he could still easily call them up—and he was ready for anything. Anything except for silence and a lack of spells.
"It couldn't have been that easy," Bill said, looking around and not dropping his guard even slightly.
"Maybe they wore out over time? It's been centuries," Leanne asked, looking hopeful.
"We study these tombs for exactly the opposite reason," Bill said, breaking into teaching mode. "The ancient Egyptians' spells never wore out, unlike ours. They never decayed, never ruined, never fell apart until the caster wished them to. They continued even after the death of the casters. We don't know why. Maybe magic was stronger back then? Maybe the people themselves were stronger? But—"
"I know, I know," Leanne said. Bill glared weakly at her, but she only smiled and opened the door leading to the tomb's main room. "And maybe, this will be the most important discovery of my life."
The room was circular and faintly lit with Leanne's light charm. Small tables surrounded the walls, on top of which were various vases and holding bottles. Bill sent sticking charms on a few of them just in case. In the very middle of the room was an elaborate sarcophagus.
"Wow," Leanne whispered. She started slowly dusting off the walls and surrounding items.
Bill stood back and let her do her work. He knew how it felt, and he knew he'd get his fame for being here with Leanne if it was the legendary tomb, but more than anything else, he wanted to go home. Back to Fleur, back to England.
That was when the earthquake began, first as small, barely noticeable shakes, then huge rumbles in the cave. "Leanne, get out!" Bill yelled, casting a bubble charm to hopefully preserve the room. "Let's go!"
"But I need to—"
"You need to live!" And so do I, he thought, thinking of Fleur. He pushed her in front of him and they ran out of the room. His whole body suddenly felt like it was on fire as something struck him from behind.
And then he felt nothing.
.
Slowly, Bill came back to consciousness. "Ow," he muttered, putting a hand to his forehead. "What the bloody hell happened?" He opened his eyes and saw a blurry room. After a few blinks, his vision came back and he realized he was in the Isis Center, the aptly-named Cairo wizarding hospital.
He sat up in bed and mentally and physically evaluated himself. He wasn't hurt. He wasn't maimed. His body was whole. But something was wrong.
The door opened and Leanne walked in. "Oh, Bill," she cried. The teacups she was holding were promptly dropped onto a table and she hugged his neck. "I'm so, so, glad you're okay."
"What happened?" he asked.
"There was the earthquake at the tomb—do you remember that?" Bill nodded and she continued. "You were hit by a falling vase when we were rushing out. Your charm faded as soon as you were knocked unconscious and I was so worried that the room would cave in, but we were fine. I dragged you out and got Slipgrip to floo you here. I'm so sorry for forcing you back to Egypt. It's all my fault."
Bill patted her hand and tried not to panic. "What was the curse on the vase?"
She looked at him in obvious confusion. "What curse? There was no curse. The Healers checked you out."
"But I feel—" Bill paused. Perhaps he felt strange because of shock or because of some kind of head injury? But his gut screamed no, and he'd learned to trust it in the curse-breaking business. "I'd like to see my medical scans. Could you call a Healer in?"
Two hours of rescanning, rechecking, and tests under wizard, goblin, and house elf (of all beings) magic cleared him of all known curses. There was no magical signature affecting him, and there hadn't been in the last twenty-four hours, except for Leanne's. He was fine. He was whole. Alone in his room, Bill closed his eyes and looked inside himself with deep concentration. He didn't feel normal, but he didn't feel like he wasn't himself, either. In fact, he knew something was very, very wrong. It felt like there was something there, like an extra limb that he couldn't see or move but was still aware of. And slowly, he was forgetting what normal was like.
Perhaps this was normal, after all, and the head injury had only skewed his perceptions.
.
The first thing he did when he got to England was check into St. Mungo's Spell Damage ward and send an owl to Fleur saying not to visit him. He couldn't say he was okay, but he did tell her it probably wasn't anything serious. According to the goblins, the sarcophagus actually belonged to a minor noble with weak blood ties to the royal family. He wouldn't have been able or knowledgeable enough to create or pay for top-notch curses on his grave.
Six hours and four irate Healers later, St. Mungo's kicked him out with the declaration that he was in perfect health and that he shouldn't waste their time with his nonexistent problems. With nothing else he could do, Bill headed home. He'd missed Shell Cottage while in Egypt more than he'd ever missed the Burrow in his life. And he'd missed the woman inside it most of all. The woman who ran into his arms and hugged him tight when she heard the sound of his apparition.
"I've missed you so much," Fleur said without letting him free. "Please, tell me you're done with Egypt."
"I am," Bill replied. The strangeness under his skin told him Egypt wasn't quite done with him, though. "I might be cursed," he said to Fleur at the dinner table after she shoved a bowl of soup into his hands. "The Healers told me I'm not, and I think I'm slowly believing them, but when I woke up, I truly felt like something was wrong with me. All the tests have come up negative."
Fleur sipped from her wineglass and stared into his eyes. "Do you believe you're cursed?"
"Yes," Bill said.
"Could it be dangerous?"
"Yes."
"Okay," Fleur said. She came to Bill's side of the table, took the spoon from Bill's hands, leaned down and kissed him. "Okay."
.
A month later, it was Fleur that went in for testing at St. Mungo's, and Bill was happier than he'd ever been when the tests came up positive. He was going to be a father.
"Oh, Fleur," he whispered, tracing her stomach.
Then he went to get tested again. The Healers kicked him out again. He tested negative again.
And finally, Bill decided that he was fine. He was normal again and he was the happiest man in the world.
.
They didn't realize it at first, but their child was conceived on the night Bill came back from Egypt. Even if they had realized it, they wouldn't have attached the needed importance to the timing. They might have even called it romantic.
.
"You don't have the best body shape or magical energy for bearing children, I'm afraid. There's also the fact that the baby's scans are coming out oddly, and your magic keeps fluctuating. It's not unheard of, but most often precedes a miscarriage," their Healer said, in a perfunctory and almost cold tone. He handed Fleur a clipboard with some kind of diagram. Bill couldn't make sense of it, but that didn't matter, because Fleur looked shocked and upset and the Healer wouldn't stop talking.
"Could you give us a minute?" Bill asked, barely looking at him. He heard rather than saw the Healer leave.
Fleur looked at him with watery blue eyes and opened her mouth to say something—I'm sorry, perhaps—then closed it again, and Bill knew it was because she couldn't apologize for it. She couldn't, shouldn't, didn't need to apologize because it wasn't her fault, and Bill silently tried to tell her he didn't blame her in the least.
"I love you," Bill said, a bit brokenly, a bit tiredly, and leaned down until his forehead touched hers. They kissed and Bill wasn't sure whose tears were on his cheeks. "It's your choice. What do you want to do?"
It wasn't unheard of to abort a struggling fetus, especially one whose magic had a high chance of harming Fleur's own. There was still enough time to do it safely and humanely. But they both wanted children and if Fleur was having problems, then this could be their only chance at having one biologically related to them both. Bill didn't want to imagine a life without children, but Fleur's safety came first, much as it hurt to think about losing this chance for a child.
"I want to try," Fleur replied, taking his hands in hers. "Whatever happens, I want to try."
.
Fleur's pregnancy went normally, as far as abnormal pregnancies went. She had no unheard of symptoms, and they had no near-misses with miscarriage. Fleur worked for the first three months until she began to feel too tired, but it was normal, if rare for her to tire so easily that early during pregnancy. She quit her Gringotts job in favor of writing the novel she'd always wanted to write, but never had time for. Bill worked standard hours and supported both of them. They continued living at Shell Cottage, where Fleur felt inspired by the air and the sea.
Fleur and Molly still argued, Harry and Ginny still wouldn't tie the knot, and Fleur and Bill still loved one another more than yesterday and less than tomorrow. Those were the best days, the halcyon days.
.
After three and a half months, they found out the sex of the child. They decided to name her Victoire, for victory, for Viktor, for conqueror. She would conquer chance, which now stood at only twenty percent on her survival, and she would emerge from the womb victorious. Fleur told Bill to stop being dramatic. Bill told her he was jealous of Fleur's best friend, after whom they were pseudo-naming their first child.
"Wouldn't it be better to name her Wilma, after William?" he teased.
Fleur pretended to puke. "We will not give her that sort of ghastliness to carry through life," she replied. "Wilma. Ugh."
"I'm terribly offended," Bill said through his laughter, but Fleur wouldn't budge.
.
One day after work, Bill bought a bouquet of flowers and made a dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant. Fleur had been feeling more energetic than usual today, and he wanted to surprise her.
Tears welled in her eyes when he presented the flowers to her, and she hugged him a bit too roughly and cried into his robes, but Bill took it in stride. He could handle emotional women after growing up with Molly Weasley as his mother.
They'd passed up their dinner reservation in favor of curling up in bed.
.
The closer Fleur came to her due date, with the magical scans coming up with better and better results, the higher baby Victoire's chances became, and the happier Bill and Fleur became in turn. At six and a half months, Fleur had a stomach the size of England, as she said, and the baby was completely healthy. The Healers were flummoxed as to why Fleur's magic was still acting oddly, but Bill barely paid attention. He didn't trust magical scans much, after his own experiences with them, anyway.
.
"Fleur," he sang as he opened the front door. "I have— Are you okay?"
Fleur was lying on the couch, covered in sweat and shaking. Bill ran to her and put a hand on her forehead. She was burning up. "Fleur," he yelled, and shook her. Her eyes slowly opened, but then they closed again.
In the next moment, Bill had already thrown half the box of floo powder into the fire and yelled for Healer Abley, their Healer for the last trimester. Fleur was seven and a half months along.
"What is it, Mr. Weasley?"
"There's something wrong with Fleur," was all Bill had to say for her to walk through the fireplace and into Bill's living room. She knelt beside Fleur and started muttering spells.
"We were afraid this would happen," she said with a grimace and Bill's heart stopped.
"What?"
"The child is altering her magic. I don't know how or why. We need to get her to St. Mungo's." She stuck her head into the fireplace. "I need an emergency team to outer Tinworth, Shell Cottage, William and Fleur Weasley residence. Pronto!"
In her state, Fleur couldn't be flooed or apparated, and she definitely couldn't be portkeyed.
"What can I do?" Bill asked uselessly.
Healer Abley looked at him, and through him, in a way. She was almost completely focused on Fleur, something Bill found both admirable and irritating.
"Floo to the hospital and wait in the maternity ward." Then, likely pitying him, she said, "I've been told praying helps, if you're religious, Mr. Weasley."
Bill nodded and waited for the team of Healers on broomsticks to come. He stared at Fleur and at little Victoire inside her, unable to think or pray or breathe. Soon he was pulled into the floo by Healer Abley and led to the maternity ward, where fathers and families greeted him warmly. Bill knew most of them, having visited St. Mungo's with Fleur many times by now.
"A little early, yeah, Bill?" Macmillan asked. His wife must have been in labor for hours by now; the flowers he was holding looked a bit sad. A bit wilted. Bill felt like a crushed flower, except so much more guilty because that was his wife in there and what if she didn't— What if she didn't make it? What if baby Victoire didn't make it? By Merlin, he hadn't met his child yet, but he'd named her and he'd felt her kick and he already loved her so much it hurt.
"A bit," Bill replied through clenched teeth, and soon the families around him stopped trying to talk with him. Eventually, each family left the waiting room as the new mothers gave birth, while Bill sat and waited and tried not to panic.
After a couple hours, when his initial panic had quieted into a blanket of despair, he paid two knuts to floo call his parents. Arthur and Molly joined him in the waiting room, sitting on either side of Bill and holding his hands like they had when he was a young boy. Bill had never felt so young or so scared in his adult life.
Finally, Healer Abley came into the room. Bill didn't know how long it had been since he saw her last—an hour ago? an eternity?—and only heard what she said with one ear.
"Are they okay?" he pleaded.
Healer Abley paused before speaking. "They're both alive. I'll take you to your wife's room. She's sleeping right now, and we won't wake her for another few hours. She needs her rest."
She led them to a small room down the hall, and Bill felt half the weight on his shoulders lift when he saw Fleur alive. Fleur looked terrible, worse than he'd ever seen her, but she was alive and safe. Bill collapsed into a chair by her side and took one of her hands into his own.
"What aren't you telling us?" his father asked.
Healer Abley's expression darkened. "I wish I didn't have to tell you this, but the child took Mrs. Weasley's—excuse me, Mrs. Fleur Weasley's—magic during the birth. She somehow absorbed it into her own. Mrs. Fleur Weasley effectively a squib now. There was nothing we could do."
"What about Victoire? The child?" Molly asked.
"Physically, she's healthy and normal for a premature birth. But for reasons that aren't clear to us yet, she absorbs magic through skin to skin contact. We were able to ascertain her condition before she was able to permanently harm the Healers and she doesn't seem to be able to pull magic without touch, but we still need to run tests to make sure. I'm sorry, but you can't hold her or see her just yet."
"When can we?" Bill asked.
"I don't know," Healer Abley said. "This is an undocumented phenomenon. I've never heard of something like this happening. I'm sorry. I'll need to report this to my superiors," Healer Abley said after Bill had already heard too much. "It needs to be documented. If something like this happens again we might be able to cure it in time."
"It won't," Bill said, not even needing to think about what had happened. The itch beneath his skin, almost unnoticeable for the past couple of months, had disappeared. Whatever it had been, whatever it had tried to do to him, it had found a much better target.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, it won't. This is the only time. It's my fault. When I came back from Egypt, I came back with a curse."
"Your scans—"
"They were wrong," Bill said resolutely.
Healer Abley nodded and Bill wondered if she was just humoring him, like numerous Healers already had. It didn't matter either way; the damage was done. "Can she be cured?"
"Perhaps with the Department of Mysteries? Otherwise I don't believe so."
Despite knowing there were four other people in the room, Bill felt utterly alone.
.
They were allowed to keep the baby, Healer Abley told Bill a few days later. Allowed, like the hospital or the ministry had any say in their child's future. Allowed, like he and Fleur had the option of disagreeing, like they could turn in the baby and make a new one. Allowed, like there was something wrong with any other verb. After functioning on an average three hours of sleep per night, Bill didn't see fit to argue over her phrasing, but it was a near thing.
He couldn't ask Fleur's opinion on what to do with their child. Fleur was still in shock; she sat in her hospital bed, ate a few spoonfuls each day, and clutched her wand to her chest as though it would help her magic come back. Every Healer agreed that her symptoms were normal and understandable; despite the recent advances in medicine, there was a chance Fleur would never again function normally.
And despite everything, there was no way she would ever use magic again. Her magical core, something every witch and wizard considered sacred, had been burned and blackened until it was rendered unhealable.
.
"She can't be allowed near people," Healer Abley said as she handed Victoire Emily Weasley to Bill for the very first time. The baby was clothed in only a sheet made of dragon skin; the Healers were worried about her touch with anything thinner, but dragon skin baby's clothes were out of the skill set of most people. Besides, she would soon grow out of any clothes sewn for her. "You must not let her into crowded places, or any place where she may touch someone. There aren't any legal frameworks in place for what will happen if she ever takes someone's magic and they press charges."
"She won't," Bill promised. He wouldn't let that happen. He couldn't let that happen.
Because when he looked down at the child in his arms, trying not to shake from the weight of responsibility, he loved her instantly. The same eyes, the same face, the same little body that had taken his wife's magic stared up at him with blue eyes, blonde hair, and the most perfect array of features. She was as much a part of him as his heart. He couldn't let the big bad world have her. It was his duty as a father to protect her, but Bill didn't need duty when he had love.
"We've asked for a team of Unspeakables to examine her condition," the Healer told him.
"Do they need my Floo address?"
"They already know," Healer Abley replied.
Bill swallowed. "It's good to know my privacy is safe."
"Your privacy meant very little when we first thought your child's disease was the beginning of an epidemic," Healer Abley said, her gentle voice softening the words. "It didn't turn out to be infectious. But it could have."
There was nothing he could say.