Fleur Delacour had never liked men who were too eager.
She suspected that their inexplicable infatuation with her had nothing to do with her as a person, and everything to do with her Veela blood.
So when she learned that the Triwizard champions were expected to lead the opening dance at the Yule Ball, she immediately sank into a vortex of complicated thought.
She needed a dance partner.
He had to be handsome enough to stand beside her without looking absurd; but he also could not be so shallow that her face alone sent him into a stupor and caused some embarrassing scene in public. Most importantly — if he met those first two conditions — he needed to be witty, intelligent, and capable of holding a conversation. Not an empty-headed yes-man who stood there grinning at her hair.
She was aware that her standards were unreasonable. Some of them were, she admitted, a little wilful.
But she couldn't help it. She was wilful. Perhaps that was precisely why her rosewood wand had chosen her — Ollivander himself had implied as much when he examined the champions' wands.
"Sister, lower your expectations," her beloved younger sister Gabrielle had said earnestly through the two-way mirror. "It's just a ball. You know how difficult it is for people like us to find someone."
*People like us.*
Yes. *Us.*
For Fleur, the world divided neatly into two camps: those with Veela blood, and those without.
The Veela heritage was both Merlin's blessing and the devil's curse.
It made her beloved by half the world, and resented by the other half. Men everywhere stared — few could ignore the silver waves of her waist-length hair. Women everywhere made no effort to conceal their dislike, as though she personally intended to cause a scene wherever she went.
None of it was flattery. All of it was exhausting. Because it reminded her, constantly, of the same grim truth: no one in the world loved her soul. They only cared about her face.
"How did Mother ever find Father?" Fleur said wistfully. "He was clearly the exception."
"Exceptions are exactly that — exceptional," Gabrielle said, with a gravity that sat oddly on her small face. "Don't expect one to come around the corridor and fall into your hands."
"Oh, Gabrielle, must you be so discouraging?"
"You need a dance partner, and given your standards, you probably won't find the right one," Gabrielle said with a regretful shrug. "You'll have to compromise somewhat and get through the ball. The Beauxbatons champion cannot open the dancing alone."
"Why not?" Fleur said proudly. "I refuse to settle."
"I respect that. However — consider Madame Maxime, who has placed her faith in you and values Beauxbatons' honour above nearly everything else." Gabrielle's expression was pointed. "You wouldn't want her to be embarrassed on your account, would you? Not because of something as easily avoided as this."
"Gabrielle, when did you become so terribly practical —"
"Never mind whether I'm practical. Am I right?"
Fleur wrinkled her nose. "Fine. But he has to be good-looking, at least. That way, if he does say something foolish, his face will lessen my irritation."
Gabrielle gave her a deeply unimpressed look.
Fleur was not joking.
She considered herself entirely fair. If someone was only interested in her beauty, they had better at least be beautiful themselves.
She had come to Hogwarts with a small measure of anticipation. She had imagined that perhaps among these reserved, old-fashioned British wizards, there might be a few who would not fixate so completely on her appearance.
She had been disappointed. The boys at Hogwarts were, without exception, tedious. They stared at her with glassy, slack expressions, like mindless creatures displaying their own stupidity in the hope of impressing her. A red-haired boy — one of Harry Potter's friends — had called out an invitation to her in the entrance hall in front of half the school, then bolted before she could even open her mouth.
They treated her like a dare, not a person. Whoever worked up the nerve to speak to her had apparently already won, regardless of what happened after.
Insufferable.
She was in the middle of enduring this for what felt like the thousandth time — surveying the whispering crowd around her with lofty disdain — when she noticed Sirius Black.
He was, quite simply, indifferent to her.
She walked slowly down the corridor. Almost every man she passed turned to look. Only one dark-haired man, handsome and lean, glanced in her direction with faint impatience before turning back to a pair of identical red-haired boys. His voice — which she suspected was ordinarily quite pleasing — sounded almost irritating to her just then: "I'd suggest changing the enchantment on this moving swamp..."
A moving swamp. She, Fleur Delacour, interested him less than a puddle of enchanted mud.
A flare of indignation rose in her chest. She had hoped, in the abstract, for someone to be unimpressed by her. She discovered now that actually experiencing it was rather less pleasant than she had imagined.
The first feeling was simple, mortifying disappointment — as if he'd turned his back on her without a second thought.
Sirius Black. She had heard of him, of course. A notorious former prisoner of Azkaban; then a wrongfully convicted heir of the Black family who had somehow survived and been exonerated; now a highly talked-about substitute professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts.
Their first proper encounter had been peculiar.
On one of her early evenings at Hogwarts, she had slipped out of Beauxbatons' encampment under a Disillusionment Charm to explore the grounds near the Forbidden Forest. She had heard that unicorns sometimes wandered the area. She hadn't wanted to be seen trespassing.
Near the Whomping Willow, she spotted a large black dog in the distance. She had taken a few steps toward it — and watched it transform, smoothly and entirely, into a man.
He was tall and handsome, laughing freely in the moonlight, his voice carrying a roughness that years in Azkaban had left behind, though his manner was as loose-limbed and carefree as a young man's. He spoke with Harry Potter — and with a platinum-blonde boy she didn't recognise — for a few minutes, then transformed back into the dog and vanished with the two invisible boys into the darkness.
She hadn't known who he was. She had known only that she was looking at an exceptionally skilled unregistered Animagus. Potentially dangerous.
She also knew she was looking at whatever had been left behind after Harry Potter and his companions had discovered something they weren't supposed to know.
She had followed them.
She'd grown less certain as she went. The black dog didn't behave like something plotting. It spun in circles trying to catch its own tail, which made Harry — hanging invisible in the air somewhere — laugh. She found herself suppressing a smile.
And then she saw the dragons, and everything became very clear.
She turned and ran back to camp without being seen.
She did not report what she'd witnessed. She didn't even tell Madame Maxime. There was no benefit, practical or moral, in doing so — and she had no desire to explain to the judges why she'd been wandering the Forbidden Forest under a Disillusionment Charm at midnight. She simply redirected her preparation toward mastering a very powerful Stunning Spell.
The second time she saw him was in an empty classroom.
She had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the castle corridors and found herself walking toward a group of boys whose faces were already beginning to adopt that particular, vacant, starstruck expression she knew so well. She ducked into the nearest empty room — the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom on the third floor — cast a Disillusionment Charm on herself, and sat in a sunlit chair to wait them out.
She was staring at the enormous dinosaur skeleton suspended from the ceiling, thinking about the golden egg's awful screaming, when the door opened.
The man who came in looked, at first glance, exactly like the paranoid, battle-scarred Professor Moody she had heard Madame Maxime describe. He limped to the door, checked the corridor through a crack, and quietly closed it.
Then he turned around, and he was Sirius Black.
He shook an evidently empty curved flask from inside his robes, sighed with the weary irritation of someone who had forgotten to buy milk, and muttered to the empty room: "Merlin's beard, I forgot about it."
He stood there for a moment — not panicking, not remotely flustered — then smiled lazily to himself, as if he'd done nothing more serious than misplace a Knut, and walked back out.
The third time, he stepped fully into the light. He was appointed as the official substitute professor, and she finally understood who the man in the moonlight had been all along.
It explained why she hadn't recognised him from the newspapers. He was nothing like the gaunt, hollow-eyed image that had been printed and reprinted after his escape from Azkaban. In person, he was upright, vivid, and startlingly good-looking — with a restless, youthful energy that prison had damaged but not destroyed.
Every time she saw him, he was somehow different. Dangerous, then boyish, then quietly brilliant in front of a classroom. She found herself wondering how many other versions of him existed beneath the surface.
So while hordes of tedious boys continued inviting her to the ball and falling over themselves in the process, Fleur Delacour, champion of Beauxbatons, arrived at a bold conclusion.
Why not him?
He didn't appear infatuated with her. He was interesting. He was exceptionally handsome. She imagined they might actually manage a normal conversation.
She invited him herself.
He would be flattered, surely. She went in confident.
"No," he said, and looked at her properly for the first time.
His eyes were proud and tired in equal measure, and what came out of his mouth next was not at all what she had expected.
Fleur collected herself. "May I ask why?"
"I don't have time for this sort of thing." He gathered his lesson notes with a languid indifference, glancing at her briefly. "I'm quite sure someone has already asked you. Don't waste your time on me."
She was genuinely offended. Something stubborn stirred in her chest.
"I want you specifically," she said, in her most pleasant voice. "Do you have a partner?"
"No."
"Then you'll be mine."
"I'm not interested."
She let a small pause pass. "Or — I could mention to Ludo Bagman and Barty Crouch what I witnessed near the Forbidden Forest this autumn." She looked at him with perfect leisure, a faint, dangerous smile on her lips.
Sirius Black's expression shifted for the first time.
"What did you say?"
"I believe you heard me." She tilted her head, all innocent blue eyes.
He stared at her. His jaw tightened. "Fine," he said at last, exhaling. "But first you'll tell me how you found out."
"After the opening dance," she said pleasantly, tossing her silver hair over her shoulder. "That seems fair."
"...Agreed." He studied her with open bewilderment, clearly at a loss as to how he had ended up in this situation.
Fleur walked away feeling thoroughly satisfied.
She had not chosen wrong. On the night of the Yule Ball, they were undeniably the most striking pair on the floor. His dancing was elegant and assured — a genuine match for hers, she thought, though she would not have said so to his face.
"Now," Sirius said, after the third dance, his patience evidently exhausted. He steered her out of the Great Hall and into the quieter entrance hall. "Tell me how you found out."
"It's very ungentlemanly to drag a lady off the dance floor when she's enjoying herself," Fleur informed him.
"I've kept my half of the agreement." He looked at her steadily. "Give me a satisfactory answer, and I might consider dancing with you again afterward."
"Oh, how gracious." She raised her eyebrows. "Do you know how many invitations I turned down tonight?"
"I've been told it was considerable." He had, in fact, been paying attention — nearly half the boys in the school had apparently tried their luck, and the other half had probably only restrained themselves out of cowardice.
Fleur glanced around, then pointed to an archway at the far end of the entrance hall, through which warm, shimmering light was visible. Dumbledore had transformed the castle grounds into a grotto of sorts for the occasion — fairy lights among rosebushes, stone paths wound between low hedges, frost-kissed and magical. "Shall we?"
"Cautious," Sirius said, with something like approval, and fell into step beside her.
They walked out into the moonlit grounds, the faint sound of the Weird Sisters drifting through the castle walls behind them. Sirius waited.
"It's actually very simple," Fleur said at last, glancing sidelong at him. "I guessed."
"Don't be absurd. I've seen plenty of people making guesses. You were certain."
Inside the grotto, small fairies perched among the rosebushes, swinging their lanterns. Fleur paused to watch one.
"I'm rather talented at the Disillusionment Charm," she said lightly. "I use it frequently to avoid unwanted attention. One evening, near the Forbidden Forest, I happened to see a large black dog — and Harry Potter — and I was curious."
Sirius went very still. "You followed us."
"I would prefer the word *observed*." The sound of the fountain covered her voice. "I was quite far away. I couldn't hear what was said."
"But you saw what happened afterward."
She met his gaze, entirely unabashed. "I did. So — *merci*. You were of great help to me."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, to her surprise, he laughed — a short, genuine laugh.
"*De rien.*"
She blinked. "You speak French?"
"Only a little," he said, with an easy shrug.
The crisis, apparently, had passed. She could see him recalibrate — realising that the moment she admitted what she'd seen, she had made herself equally complicit. She had no grounds to report anything, and no reason to do so. They were, in a sense, even.
He seemed to reach the same conclusion, because his expression settled back into the loose, indifferent ease she was beginning to recognise as his natural state.
"Shall we go back in?" he said, after a while. "It would be a shame to waste the rest of the night."
"Why not?" She smiled, turned, and walked back toward the castle at a brisk pace.
Sirius followed, chuckling quietly. As they passed back through the grotto, he caught a glimpse of a dark figure moving through the rose bushes — angular, black-robed, keeping to the shadows with the particular intensity of someone who would rather not be seen.
Snape.
*What is he doing out here?*
Sirius considered this for approximately half a second before arriving at the obvious conclusion. Not a date — the man was constitutionally incapable. He was probably skulking around other people's private moments again, then planning to deduct house points from whoever he caught and retreat to his dungeons to brood. The love-starved old bat genuinely could not bear to see other people having a good evening.
Sirius grinned and followed Fleur inside.
In the entrance hall, a few couples stood apart from the noise of the ball, talking quietly. Sirius noticed his godson's adopted cousin — Draco Malfoy — leading Hermione Granger, Gryffindor's most diligent student, down the corridor toward the Great Hall doors. Something about the way they were moving together — and the state of both of their hair — suggested they had not spent the last half hour dancing.
Sirius whistled.
Neither of them looked back. They turned scarlet and hurried through the doors without a word.
Interesting.
He had assumed they were ordinary dance partners, the same as he and Fleur. Now he was reconsidering.
Slytherin and Gryffindor. Malfoy and Granger.
Sirius smiled slowly, following Fleur back into the warmth and noise of the Great Hall.
He was already looking forward to the day Narcissa found out.