Fleur/Bill for
lessien, who requested post-HBP. 505 words.
Homecoming.
Ginny
Weasley fancied herself funny, and Fleur hardly knew which was more
pathetic—that she considered calling her “Phlegm” to be a sign of her
scathing wit, or that she honestly believed she was clever enough to
keep Fleur from finding out. Bill had routinely told Fleur while they
were dating that she would love his family, and it was purely and
solely for his sake that she had duly refrained from smacking his
little sister and telling his mother just what she thought of her
manners.
It was funny how quickly and irrevocably people you
hated could become people you loved. When she had seen Molly after the
battle, after they had gotten the call about Bill, all they had wanted
to do was hold each other. And whatever Ginny’s opinion of her might
have been, Fleur found she could no longer feel anything but gratitude
for her in the days of his recovery.
He had recovered enough
to be removed to the Burrow, which at one point had seemed to her the
most stifling place on earth. She had started to think of it as home.
She
lay beside him in bed, stretched out on top of the covers, tracing the
curvature of his face with delicate fingers. Occasionally he reached up
and kissed them. His scars had grown less jarring, less abrupt
underneath her touch. She found that kissing him still felt the same,
though—with her eyes closed and his mouth against hers he was familiar
and warm, and it was easier to forget the horror, forget the war,
forget the nervousness that was always in the back of Bill’s eyes now.
“Hey,” he said after a moment, fingers closing around hers. “You look like you’re imagining how hairy our kids will be.”
“Oh,
you,” she chided, swatting him, her voice deliberately light to make up
for the hollow note in his. This wasn’t easy, she thought, but under
the circumstances she was grateful. If he had not survived; if there
were no Wolfsbane potion; if every moonlit night spent with him were to
be veiled behind a cloud of distrust…
“I was thinking of all there is to look forward to,” she said, sinking down and pillowing her head against his shoulder
He wound his fingers in her hair, and she knew that she was soft and warm, comforting against his body.
Ginny
found them, sometime later, bearing a plate of cookies. “I brought you
some—oh,” she said, stopping abruptly in the doorway at the sight of
the two of them curled together, resting quietly. For a long moment she
looked at them without saying anything, and Fleur thought of what they
must look like: half under covers, sunlight falling through the grayed
filter of old curtains; her blond hair fanning over his chest, his
beard brushing her forehead, strokes of auburn and alabaster. How
still, how pale.
She wondered if it was charming. She wondered if it was sad.
She wondered if it was just what it was.