---

I had honestly hoped to never seen Fleur Delacour again in my life. And despite my better judgment, here I stand, freezing my ass off on her doorstep. Despite that, I’m quite thankful for being away from the UK, if nothing more than for the beneficial use of healing magic.

My happiness evaporates immediately upon Fleur flinging her door open. She has her mouth open to shout at the person who was banging on her door at such a terrible hour, but her voice dies in her throat. For once, Fleur is silent, a fact I very much appreciate.

“Are you going to gawk or let me in?”

She moves silently out of the doorway and I hobble in, observing the interior of her relatively small home. I say relatively, because it is still much larger than the average English home, but when you live in a bank the size of Gringotts, everything looks quaint.

“…What are you doing here?” She finds her voice in about the time it takes me to seat myself on her cream-colored couch, which massages my ego concerning the power of my presence unnecessarily. Fleur was silent, no out of awe, but out of shock.

“Couldn’t it just be that I wanted to come see you?”

“Considering how I left and the last time we spoke, I highly doubt that, Potter. Now please explain to me why you felt the need to arrive at my home at this early and hour…” And this is where she notices the blood.

And here is where she glances between me and the blood literally covering me.

And here is where she faints.

The reaction is completely worth the hell I went through trying to get on a plane from England to France, covered in blood. It likely would have been easier to just remove the clothes, take the flight and then put them back on, but I wasn’t exactly at an excess of time, and planning has never exactly been my strong suit.

While she lays there, unconscious, I can’t help but recognize how beautiful Fleur is. There’s an ethereal quality to her, from her pale skin to her light hair and her penchant for light colors, that leaves her seeming relatively angelic. My personal experience shows how far that estimation is from the truth, but even that mental knowledge doesn’t take away from my ability to suspend disbelief from a moment and just see the beauty in her.

After dozing off on the couch for a while, I wake up to see Fleur sitting across from me gazing intently at a pair of scissors sat on the table in front of her, a medical kit sitting open at her side. “Not planning on stabbing me through the heart, I hope?” She jumps at my voice, and glances up, looking flustered.

“Of course not, don’t be foolish.” She stands and lifts the scissors in her hand before walking toward me. No…Fleur doesn’t walk, she saunters, even when she doesn’t realize she is. It’s an odd visual, having someone saunter toward you with what’s basically a weapon. “Now, I need to get these blood-stained clothes off of you so I can see exactly how badly you’re hurt.”

“As much as you stripping me appeals to a part of me, you can skip it. Basically none of this blood is mine.” Her look is such overwhelming disbelief, I actually laugh. “I promise, not mine. However, I do need your help with a very pressing issue.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you see…” I can’t fight back the wince as I finally remove my hand from my pocket and show her my mangled right hand. “Um…Well, you see…”

Fleur immediately starts cursing in French. It’s a sight to see, her rambling off curses and mutterings left and right, and I can only pick up some of it. But that’s more of a testament to the speed in which she is speaking, as I am quite proud of my relatively passable French. “Start from the beginning. What happened to you?”

“Narcissa Malfoy happened to me.”

“And why did you have a run in with the leader of the Defenders, exactly?” How the hell did she…Would seem for all of her dislike of England, Fleur has been keeping herself well aware of the politics of the island. Interesting.

Taking a deep breath, I go into the entire story, which eventually leads to me telling her of my fight with Fred, which ended with my revelation of where it occurred and who I left the man with. She’s not the least bit happy, considering she still has yet to forgive William Weasley, but she winces at the damage both of us suffered. Silly empathetic Veela.

“Harry, I have to say something, I really hope it doesn’t cause you to hate me. But…have you ever considered the fact that what you did by taking Ginny, was akin to walking the first steps that Fred and George walked down when they took Luna? That you took someone that they cared about from them, and they jumped to her defense? Was that really any different from what you were doing for Luna?”

“Of course it was! What are you implying?”

“Well, true. It was different. What Fred was doing when he went to Wisteria Walk was out of defense and an attempt to rescue. What you were doing was attacking out of revenge.

“As much as it would seem otherwise, vengeance is not a noble pursuit, Harry.”

“I never claimed to be noble, Fleur.”

“A long time ago, nobility guided your hand. It led to you offering to share your victory with a fellow competitor. It led to you running into Hogwarts that day…”

“You have no idea what the fuck you are talking about, woman, and don’t you fucking dare allude to! It had nothing to do with nobility. It has nothing to do with heroics. Nothing at all. It was duty, plain and simple. The same thing with Luna.

“My duty to her was to avenge her memory. Bring justice down on the heads of those who felt the need to attack her for no reason whatsoever. Because she was innocent and helpless, and unable to defend herself. And they came in and took her from…from all of us! Where is the nobility in their actions?”

“I never said it was noble. Just that you were no different when you walked in and took Ginny out of the care of the hospital.”

“I was taking her to see her brother!”

“Fred was using Luna to return his brother.”

I can’t fucking believe this. “You’re…you’re defending them?” The disgust rises slowly in my throat and I can’t help but find myself with the deep need to break something. “You are defending murderers?”

“Are you not a murderer yourself, Harry? And have I not defended you until the ends of the Earth? Do not mistake me. I am not defending them to you. I am not defending what they did to Luna. But as someone who was once one of your best friends, I feel it is necessary that I don’t defend you to yourself.

“You were wrong to do what it is that you have done, but you already know that, somewhere inside of you. And you also know that what has been done to you as a result, was for all intents and purposes, karmic.” Getting morally dressed down like this has sucked all of the air out of the room, and left it very silent.

“Will you heal me, Fleur?”

“Of course I will, Harry. But you need to realize, this will be more than a physical healing. I aim to heal your mind as well. It won’t be easy, it won’t often be fun, and if it means I have to break you down completely to rebuild you as a complete person where before, you were not one, I shall.”

Nodding, I can’t help but realize how similar what she just said to me was to what Narcissa had threatened me with before.

---

Healing is an interesting discipline. One that I never learned much of anything about, considering I was always much better at destroying things than repairing them. Fleur did well at it…there was something about her that naturally put people at ease when they were in her care. She wasn’t a technical genius when it came to healing, but what could only be described as her bedside manner put her leaps and bounds ahead of the others in her class, in terms of interacting with patients.

And then Gabrielle got hurt. Something in Fleur snapped when her sister was so badly injured.

I’m told Fleur went from a studying healer with a calming presence and good-but-not-great skill, to a fucking whirlwind of magic. Fleur herself routinely refers to it as a form of adult-onset accidental magic, but I’ve always just considered such things as a magical form of adaptation.

However it manifested itself, Fleur has a way with curative magic that few people I know of can match. And considering the fact that I can’t simply slap on a bone-knitting charm and traipse back to England, coming to France to have her treat me was far and away the best option for me.

“Harry?” Her voice knocks me out of my musings unexpectedly, and I find her sat in front of me, staring at me with such a piercing gaze that it sort of shocks me.

“Yes?”

“Will you…do something for me,” Her eyes seem to soften from a penetrating stare into a gentle, almost searching look. It’s…entrancing. “Please?”

“What can I do for you, Fleur?” Something about that look makes me worry that she would ask me to sign my soul over to her, and I would be willing to do it. Here’s hoping that’s not the case.

“Tell me about Luna?”

“No.” I’m shocked by how quickly all of the willingness to do anything she wanted drained out of me once she asked that of me. She looks shocked as well, almost as if I’d slapped her in the face. She stares at me for a long moment, before she nodded and looked down at my hand again.

“Alright Harry.”

---

Fleur has gotten herself a nice place on the northern coast of France. She has me sat out in her back garden on a lounge, stretched out, while she doctors away at my knee. Her home is magically warded and charms are layered heavily enough as to allow it to be nice year-round. The grass is green, the flowers bloom, and for the most part, it’s the kind of place you could imagine animals flocking to by the group, longing to graze and live calmly.

It looks like a fucking deer habitat, and being on the grounds both helps me clear my head, and makes me feel sick at the same time. It’s too peaceful. Too calm. It makes me more edgy than knowing someone’s going to leap out of the shadows to attack me. Because nothing that beautiful lasts forever.

The fact that I could say the same thing about Fleur worries me.

As I sit, a lot of thoughts run through my mind. The most prevalent of them being my healing progression. Not for the first time, I wonder if coming here was a good idea. I questioned myself the entire plane ride, and I still have yet to come up with a concrete decision. A lot could be said for the merits of flying on over, casting some healing spells, and going back. But there are a lot of problems with traditional, magical healing.

The main part being that it, like every other fucking thing in England of value, seemed to also run off of ambient magic. The average bone repairing spells would strengthen injured, splintered or broken bones by wrapping them in weaves of magic that would keep then strong and able to be moved around on, while the bones would heal themselves mostly naturally. It was like, the equivalent of a magical cast, only, the cast was inside the body and attached to the bone itself. The magic sustaining the weave actually came from the magic around the patient, and not from inside of them. Someone a long time ago had the desire to not be weakened by being injured and on the mend, so they saw fit to take from the air around them instead of giving of themselves.

This decision, in retrospect, was decidedly greedy. And stupid. It allowed those people who got themselves deeply wounded in some unsanctioned duel, to continue on the circuit, unhindered by their injuries in any way. No recovery time, no need to go light on the magic because your own was actually doing its part to make you better. Why, when you can simply leech from around you?

What it means for me is, none of the mending spells would hold up if I cast them and then turned around and went back to England. Which leads me here, to Fleur, where I have to hope that her skill is enough to get me better and turned back around to England as quickly as possible. Narcissa will have her hands full with Susan for a while, but there’s only so long I can expect them to keep her in check before she’s able to get some people out there, and possibly after Pansy, or Daphne, or anyone else ever seen with me.

Narcissa…That woman, I swear.

Something in her broke, at some point. Possibly when her husband was found out to be little more than Voldemort’s money font. Or maybe when his death made the papers. In a world at crisis, those refusing to change and those actively standing in the way of progress never last long. Lucius stood resolute on his belief that the Wizarding World was superior to the non-magical one, and they should remain separate until the “lesser” people agreed to submit themselves to magical rule. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but it’s hard to maintain a belief of superiority when it’s the non-magical people who have to rush in to save the dying magical people they are supposedly inferior to.

Lucius’ final breath was drawing his wand on his own wife when she decided it was better to go with the flow of the world, instead of fighting it. She struck him down with a ferocity still spoken of with reverence to this day, and the lore of Narcissa been growing ever since. People fear her, for good reason I can say, but even the people who claim to love her, the people who follow her, fear her. She inspires a level of fear near equivalent to the level of love in those people, something that even I have to look at with no small amount of awe.

To this day, the people who fear me don’t care about me, and the people who care about me don’t fear me. I comment on this to Fleur, and she looks at me as if I am a confused child. “Garnering fear in those who care about you is not something to envy, Harry. It is something to pity, to look on in disdain.”

“And why is that?”

“Because either their love of her is built on fear, Harry. And you of all people should know that the mystique of fear is easily removed by the presence of someone more worthy of that fear. Most of them willingly submit themselves to her out of the belief that they have no choice, that they can’t do anything else. But all it takes is something to knock her off of that pedestal, and all of those people will be out of the door.

“However, love built upon more…worthwhile things, lasts longer.” She notices my silence through her speech, and reaches down and lifts my chin up. Her touching me so brings back a rush of memories I would have rather left buried, and I am quick to turn my head out of her reach. I see her pause out of the corner of my eye, before moving her hand back. “What’s wrong, Harry?”

“I don’t like all of this ‘love’ talk.” Her eyes narrow just slightly, and I know she’s going to snap at me, so I figure, I might as well earn it. “You know damned well that I don’t believe in any of it.”

She is silent for a long moment, and all I can think of during the silence is that I may have done the wrong thing, in voicing my beliefs on the subject. That is all confirmed as Fleur opens her mouth and tentatively begins to speak. “You know Harry, when I first met you, I didn’t think much of you. The person I saw was a little boy who was very much out of place in the world around him. A victim of his circumstances. But the person I came to know during that tournament was someone who faced what he could not change, and shaped it to suit him. You made ways out of nothing, and forced things to go your way. You acted as an agent of change, an…emissary of good,” She stops as I scoff at her wording, but soldiers on in spite of my attempts to derail her with my disbelief. “Like it or not, Harry, you were…are, a good person.”

“Easy to be a good person in a fucked up world.”

“I’m not saying that’s not the case. But I am saying this: the person you are today, the man who walked through my door asking for help, is not terribly far removed from the - then false - estimation of a boy I met years ago. You have allowed yourself to become a victim of your circumstances. You’ve let the world you are in, change the person you are. And if there is one thing I will always be sure of about you since that First Task we faced, it is that you were not a weak person. Prove to me that my faith in you is warranted, and stop letting the broken world break you.”

It was low and she knows it. She had built up to this through her whole little speech, so I wouldn’t see the inevitable attack on my pride coming. I have no defense for it, and am instead, left staring at her smug face as she continues to run her wand along my knee. Swallowing the lump that forms in my throat as she looks at me through her eyelashes with that sickeningly self-satisfied smile on her face, I force the words out, dreading the answer. “So what would you have me do, Fleur?”

“Simple, Harry. Have more of an impact on the world, than it has on you. As long as you stay ahead, you win.” Her ice-blue eyes danced in the daylight streaming obnoxiously though the large windows in her front room. I wanted to hit her with something. Badly.

“Fuck off, Fleur. Your optimism is all great and wonderful, but some of us don’t live in a world where everything works out for the best, and all we have to do is hope hard enough and things turn out alright. You got to save Gabrielle, for all the good that does you now. What did I get…”

“Who gives a shit about what you got, Potter? Don’t you see, this whole thing is bigger than you! Hell, your life is not even your own, and you don’t see it! You are an icon. A beacon! Like it or not, people gravitate toward you because you give them hope.”

“Fuck their hope!” I’m panting heavily and I don’t know why. The pounding in my chest feels so thunderous I wonder if Fleur can hear it. For her part, she looks equal parts disappointed, shocked, and…something I can’t place, that almost appears to be joyous. “I don’t want to be a beacon of hope. I don’t want to be a beacon for anything. I don’t want to draw people toward me, because people who come toward me end up being one of two things. Either they have their own agendas that they, for some reason, think little-stupid-Harry-Potter is dumb enough to not be able to see easily, or they end up getting themselves killed trying to follow heroic-Harry-Potter toward a salvation that doesn’t exist and that I’m not leading them to.

“I’m bloody toxic, Fleur, and I will not fix this world. Partly because I can’t, but mostly because I don’t fucking want to.” Her head tilts to the side and she stares at me, giving no indication that she intends to talk. Her wand is continuing its sweeping motion over my knee, while her eyes do their best to burn a hole into me. “The world’s not broken, Fleur. The world doesn’t break. People do. It’s not magic that needs to be fixed in England, it’s the fucking people.”

“And what about you, Harry? Do you need to be fixed?”

“Obviously. It’s sure not your effervescent company and light, witty repartee that brought me here.” She pinches my calf at this and her chest bounces in repressed giggles. There is silence for some times, and my mind appreciates it. Instead of attempting to process every criticism Fleur has given, while attempting to read the volumes of subtext and masked meaning in the things she has said, I am just letting it sit in my mind, remembering the words, but also her face as she said them. Her movements and the tone of her voice. How she says things has always been vastly more important than what she says.

“Harry?”

“Hmm?”

“Look at me please.” The softness in her voice stabs at me, arousing this panging feeling of regret at how I had shouted at her. I don’t deny anything I said to her, but Fleur inspires a need for…gentle-handling. She projects this aura of delicacy, and she’s not delicate in the sense that people would assume upon meeting her. But the people she knows, the ones closest to her, become amazingly aware of how fragile she is, where they are concerned. “Please.” The hurt in her voice is almost too much to bear for me, and her pleading seals my determination to not look at her.

Her hand reaches out toward me again, I can feel it. She takes my chin and turns my head toward her, and the moment her eyes lock on mine, I turn my head away from her, much harsher than I intended, but apologies don’t fit the current situation enough for me to offer her mine for yanking out of her reach.

I’ve just mustered up enough courage to attempt to turn and face her slightly when my head is pulled quite harshly to the side. I find myself staring into Fleur’s eyes, which are much, much closer than they had been before. There is a fire in her eyes that I would flinch away from, were she not holding my face so tightly with her hands that I’m sure I’ll have small bruises from her fingertips come tomorrow. She locks eyes with me, and when I try and look away, she moves her head to follow my eyes. And time seems to slip, as I try and avoid her eyes, just to constantly lose. Finally, when I give in, dredge up my unhappiness with the situation and turn my eyes to meet hers, she stares at me for a moment - a long beat - and she diverts her eyes.

Before I can feel…anything, any amount of small victory, any hope that she would release me, she kisses me. Fleur’s kisses are, by definition, difficult to define. But her kiss right now is…desperate. Demanding. Pleading. Possessive. Hot.

And so wrong.

That fact seems to hit her at the same time as it hits me, and she climbs off of me in a rush, barely missing banging her knee into mine and sending me into fits of pain. It is still close enough that I can’t prevent myself from wincing, which I doubt she notices as she already has her back to me. She is silent for a long moment, just standing in front of me with her back turned. As I think she is about to say something, she instead flees the room, and I’m left to my thoughts and the consideration of what has just happened. I have my suspicions, and even as my conscience tells me how wrong it was, I can’t help but recognize that it was nice.

Though that doesn’t make the dirty feeling I have pulsing through my body any easier to handle.

---

Fleur is tentative when she returns. She has my wand in her hand, which she had taken away from me after the first few days I spent here were filled with her attempting to stop me from casting mending or limb-numbing charms on myself. Such things undermine the healing process, but I had been fundamentally more concerned with not being an invalid. She holds it out to me in what can only be a peace offering, before she sits down across from me.

“Harry, I…”

“It’s alright.” And it is. I know Fleur, and my knowledge of her explains away what happened with her more easily than she could attempt to explain it herself.

Fleur is attracted to…fixer-uppers. She is someone who can see potential in someone. She can see the power someone is capable of, buried beneath everything that covers it. In my case, the mountains of bullshit and apathy that had basically covered up everything worthwhile about me when I had stumbled through her door years ago. And she sees it as a challenge. To take someone with great power in them, and drag it out of them, kicking and screaming.

Bill had been someone like that. He had been a Curse Breaker at Gringotts, who knew his shit, but didn’t care enough about it to take it seriously. He flew by on his relatively good knowledge, and a fairly good instinct.

Fleur has this…way about her. For most people, her mere presence inspires in them a desire to be the best that they can be, just to attempt to impress her. Someone closer to her is confronted with both that, and the honest desire to be the object of her pride. Bill went from a naturally talented, technically lazy slacker Curse Breaker, to someone the bank contracted out to others. Goblins never fucked around with their money, and if they contracted you out, that meant that they had faith in you to make them the best return possible. Fleur does that to people.

Fleur doesn’t, however, have that effect on me.

Not anymore.

Funny the difference time can make.

“Fleur, you can’t fix me like that. You can’t be the muse to my artistic recreation of myself. I didn’t come here because I was mentally broken, falling apart in front of your eyes, and covered in Luna’s blood. This isn’t that person anymore. I came here because I am physically broken, very, very pissed off with a certain Defenders’ Head, and…I was covered in Cho’s blood.

“A part of me appreciates what you tried to do. But another part of me is mostly just disturbed at what happened the last time you did that. The mental damage fixed by it is, in hindsight, probably vastly outweighed by the mental damage caused by it.” She moves toward me, and I motion toward the chair she had previously sat in. I lift my leg and place it in her lap, and she continues her sweeping wand motions, smiling slightly at me while attempting to look anywhere but near me. It seems she’s dissected what happened in these years as well, and has come to terms with how amazingly fucked up it all was.

“I trudged in here, days after burying Luna, still in the clothes I had been in when I found her. You tried to get me back on my feet, and by the end of it all, I end up sleeping with you. Do you know that all I can remember about our night together was how my mind kept comparing and categorizing everything about you? How your hair just wasn’t the right color? How your eyes could look at me with that look that just ate at me? I picked apart everything about you, but it wasn’t until the morning after that I realized just how fucked up it all was.

“I come to you, my blond-haired, blue-eyed friend, after Luna dies, and what do I do? I use you to try and feel better, and just make myself feel worse.” I can’t help the small chuckle that escapes my throat. “I mean, who the fuck does that? Sleep with a beautiful woman and wake up feeling sickened with themselves for having done it? Fucking shameful, that is.” She laughs with me, lightly, though I can see it is wholly for my benefit and not because she actually finds any comedy in my musings.

“Harry…you came to me, your friend, after Luna died. And what did I do?” Her voice is small…quaking. “I still have the same bed, which I’m sure hasn’t helped me get passed it all. But I still think about it, some nights when I’m in bed and I can’t sleep. ‘What if I hadn’t been so self-obsessed? What if I had been a friend, instead of folding to my desires?’ The fact that, years removed, I still can’t shut those desires up makes me sick.”

The news that Fleur desired me was something I suspected but was never confirmed. The fact that that feeling persists is new. And sort of hot.

“I want to help you, Harry.  And if that means fixing you up and sending you on your way, to do the Harry Potter thing and fight the good fight, as it were, then so be it. But if it means keeping you here, where no one can find you, until you feel ready to go back, then my home is yours for as long as you want it.” There’s more in that sentence than she’s said, and her eyes have finally met mine and they are trying to push those unspoken words into my head. But I don’t need those words right now, not from her.

“Thank you, Fleur. Right now, the help I need is for you to repair this messed up body of mine, and maybe for me to be able to use that brain of yours to supplement my plans of bringing Narcissa to justice.” She smirks somewhat while shaking her head.

“Tsk tsk, Harry. Justice? Narcissa is not a woman who will kowtow to justice. As far as her mind has led her to believe, she defines what is and what isn’t just. How about, just this once Harry, do something for me.” I quirk my eyebrow and she stares at me, this…light in her eyes that seemed downright mischievous. “Fuck justice. Get revenge.”

I do admit, I like the sound of this.

---

Being able to walk properly again is a blessing. Fleur wakes up to breakfast already prepared for her the day after I am fully healed, and she smiles at me while she eats. In between light discussion, I am left racking my brain trying to figure out ways to get to Narcissa. I find myself somewhat annoyed at having left her Inner Guard in relatively good shape considering the fact that I will, no doubt, have to go through them again. Admittedly, they will be at least one short, given Romilda’s killing of Cho.

I wait until Fleur finishes eating before I tell her that story, which I had skipped over in my retelling of events to her when I first arrived. As I do, she looks more and more enthralled by the story. “So you break out of the Defenders’ Headquarters with the help of a crazy woman who has been obsessed with you, and she basically goes on a murder-spree through the building, and you still manage to get out? Wow. Some fan you’ve got there, Harry.”

Her phrasing makes me suddenly aware of something I hadn’t wondered before. How is it that we were able to run roughshod through the building, with Romilda going through and killing or maiming anyone who looked at her funny, and not meet the majority of the forces I personally know the Defenders have access to? It was a skeleton crew in that building at best, and it couldn’t have been coincidence. My opinion of Romilda shifted, as her timing and execution of my breakout belied the somewhat…apparent insanity she displayed during the process of getting me out. “Yeah…yeah she is.”

After breakfast, Fleur begins work on double-checking my hand. Since she finished work on my leg, she’s been hard-pressed to keep me sitting down for her to do work on my hand. As such, we spent most of the time walking around the grounds as she repaired my hand. Sometimes we would even wander into the more populated areas, and I can only imagine how it looked, with her holding my hand and making a show of caressing it to cover for her wand movement as it hid up her sleeve.

Wholly unnecessary, given the current…state of magic in the world, but the appearance of it was still fairly intimate.

I have come to terms with the realization that my capture by Narcissa has done more than left me injured and deeply pissed off.  Being immobile and feeling trapped on that couch was messing with my head a lot more than Fleur’s attempts to psychoanalyze my feelings on the women in my life.

And did she ever attempt to do that.

Even now, as I finally sit so she can make her last checks of my hand, she attempts to ask more questions. For the most part, I ignore everything she says as soon as she begins this tired relapse of conversation. However, something strikes a chord in my mind. “You know, Harry, I’m surprised you’re being anywhere near Daphne Greengrass, all things considered.” My eyes move toward her and she has this somewhat confused look on her face. “I mean, I don’t mean to doubt your choices and your plans, but I have to wonder if you think that’s a good idea, planning or not.”

Daphne never struck me as someone Fleur would know about. So the fact that she knows about the girl, and apparently has information I don’t, unnerves me. “…What do you mean?”

“Well, I never struck you for that reckless and cocksure. I mean…considering everything I heard she got into immediately after Hogwarts can only be mostly legend. But even still, she can’t be the most wholesome character to have around you.”

I have no idea what the fuck Fleur is talking about. And that worries me. “What did she do? And what in the hell are you talking about?”

Fleur looks at me warily, and then down at my hand. “You’re hand’s fine. You’re done, Harry.” She pats my hand in an almost dismissive way, before locking eyes with me. “I can’t tell you much more than I have, Harry. I don’t know the truth, and if any of what I’ve heard are lies, I’d be doing the girl a disservice. I’m sure you know someone who was there at the time who can give you more information. All I can tell you is that, my understanding of it was that it was meant to be kept quiet. And…”

“…And what, Fleur.” I grip her hand tightly and look at her, pleadingly. I’m out of the look on something, and it sounds bad.

“Let’s just put it this way, Harry. For whatever reason, whatever she did…” She takes a deep breath and turns and looks at me. “She was on a ‘No Heal’ list, Harry. She was on a very, very small list of people that healers are told to not fix, should they come under our care. They are the grey area to our oath. Whatever it was that she’s done, or been accused of doing, was bad enough to make her ineligible for magical medical treatment. Anywhere.”

Holy mother of fuck.

---