Muse/Harry Potter Fanfiction, Part 2
In Robert’s latest attempt to mingle Muses and magic, Feather takes a hike with Fleur Delacour.
If you’ve read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, you’ll know that most of the action is piled up at the end. Harry and friends spend the rest of the book studying and snogging. Meanwhile, Dumbledore and (presumably) other rightminded wizards disappear on secret missions to track down Voldemort. Obviously, the author isn’t telling the whole story–which leaves plenty of room for volunteers to fill in the gaps.
In installment one, the Muses crashed the Prime Minister’s meeting with the new Minister of Magic. Afterwards they set out to intercept Dumbledore when he dropped Harry off at the Weasleys’ house. Unfortunately, they arrived too early and had to camp out for a couple of days (disguised as a traveling circus) while they waited. Ron’s father, of course, was delighted to have a chance to pump Chad for information about Muggle technology–but I haven’t actually written any of those scenes, and there’s no room to go into them here.
Instead, I’ve decided to describe Feather’s meeting with Fleur Delacour. I’ve never thought that Ms. Rowling was quite fair to Fleur. As a former exchange student who speaks other languages the way Fleur speaks English, I think it’s a cheap shot to make fun of her accent. She tries, poor girl–give her a break. I’ve also suspected that she had a lot more going on upstairs than JKR gives her credit for. (On the other hand, I would think that, wouldn’t I? Men have trouble seeing Fleur clearly, as the books make plain.)
Anyway, here is my revised Fleur, as seen through the hyperspecialized eyes of the Muse of Plants. Needless to say, neither Larry Gonick nor J. K. Rowling has approved any of this. Heaven knows what will happen if they ever find out. The time is daybreak… –R. C.
Early the next morning, while the other Muses were still sleeping, Feather left his tent and strolled out behind the Burrow to inspect the Weasleys’ garden. What he saw met with his approval. The bean pods were swelling nicely, and dahlias, zinnias, and asters were in full bloom. There was still work to be done. That bare spot near the verge would be a fine place for a pretty Lilium candidum, but they’d have to plant it soon. Some flowering bulbs for autumn would be nice, too. The roses needed deadheading, and the tomatoes could use water–it had been a dry summer, evidently. Still, all in all, an admirable job.
Lost in thoughts of roots and leaves, lime and manure and soil moisture, Feather barely noticed the sound of the Weasleys’ back door slamming. Nor could he see the young woman who had slammed it, as she dashed down the kitchen steps and strode across the lawn, fists clenched, chin high, fine-stranded silver-gold hair gleaming in the early light. As she rounded the boxwood hedge that framed the entrance to the garden, she plowed head-on into the Muse and knocked him off his feet.
“Oh, Monsieur Feath-air,” she said, flustered. “Please forgeeve me. I deed not look where I was going. I was in such a ‘urree. I–I just ‘ad to get out of zat house. Eet was so stupid of me…”
“Not at all, not at all,” Feather replied, as the young woman helped him up off the ground. He brushed off his shirt and inspected his wings, right then left. “Please don’t be upset, Miss–Fleur, did they say your name was?” A happy thought ballooned inside him. “That’s the French word for flower, isn’t it?”
“Mais oui,” Fleur said, brightening. “Est-ce que vous parlez français?”
“Bien sûr,” Feather replied. “Je peux parler n’importe quelle langue qui est nécessaire, si…” He stopped. “Are we speaking French?”
“Yes. Do you not weesh to? Eez eet deefeecult for you?”
“I wasn’t sure. Do you want to? Would it help you?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, please. Eet would help me very much.”
“Then I can,” Feather said. “To help people,” he went on in French, “Muses can do a lot of things–when we need to, for as long as we need to. We wouldn’t be much use if we could give advice in only one language.”
“Oh, thank heavens,” Fleur exclaimed, smiling with genuine relief. “It is so, so marvelous to have someone here who speaks French! France is not so far away, but I hardly ever go there. And whenever I speak English, I always feel that I am making myself ridiculous.”
“Oh, no, no,” Feather protested. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“You’re very kind, Monsieur Feather–Monsieur la Plume,” she said, laughing at her own wordplay. “But it is true, I know. I speak English quickly enough, but I can’t express myself very well. I run out of words whenever I try to say anything even a little bit complicated or interesting. And my accent is awful. People are always making fun of it, especially Bill’s sister and her friends. They may think I don’t notice their jokes, but they don’t try very hard to hide them. They call me ugly names behind my back.” She glanced nervously back at the house. “Would you mind if we left the garden? I came out here because I needed to take a walk and cool off for a while. We can walk together, if you like.”
They left by the back gate and found themselves on a country lane. The fence, Feather saw, was a tangle of honeysuckle vines and hawthorn and blackberry bushes: chèvrefeuille, aubépine, mûres. The blackberries might just be ripening–yes, a few were temptingly dark and plump. He looked up to see Fleur a dozen strides down the road and hurried to catch up.
“Why would anyone make fun of you?” Feather asked.
“Oh, I can’t blame them, really. When I first came here from France to compete in the Tri-Wizard Tournament, I made a bad impression. I was determined to win the tournament, and I’m sure that made me seem hard and cold and unfriendly. I was not…nice,” she said, using the English word. “And I was unhappy at Hogwarts and complained about it a little more than I should have done–well, a lot more.” She smiled ruefully at the memory.
“But you must understand, monsieur, I was homesick. Hogwarts was so different from what I was used to. All my life I have loved beautiful things–art, poetry, music. At Beauxbatons, my school in France, they taught us all those things. It was heaven. They cultivated us. We learned how to conduct ourselves as sorcerers. We studied moral philosophy and ethics–the greatest thinkers, both wizards and Muggles.” She used the French word for Muggle, moldu.
“Hogwarts wasn’t like that. All we learned there was how to do things–how to get what you want, how to keep people from hurting you, how to hurt them first. Fighting, always fighting! Children fighting the children of people their parents fought when they were at school. Even moldus outgrow that, but wizards there don’t. Sometimes I think it’s no accident that the Dark Lord is English–even if he did give himself a French name.”
Fleur led Feather onto a small trackway that veered off to the right toward a patch of woods atop a broad, low hill, its slopes purple with heather. In the meadow, the white flowers of late spring had given way to the pinks and reds of summer. Feather had not understood much of what Fleur had just told him, but here he was back on familiar territory. Underfoot he noted vetch, primroses, golden saxifrage. He was starting to get hungry and wondered, vaguely, whether Beauxbatons students learned to make beignets.
“Magic should be more than that,” Fleur said, “and there is more to life than magic. Words, for example. Not spells–words in French, words in foreign languages. I love the sound of them, how they feel in my mouth, how they taste. I love studying Latin, watching French words evolve backwards in time for thousands of years, changing letters, changing sounds, turning into something different and ancient and strange. I love thinking about all the people who spoke those words, reading their books and their poetry and learning their songs. What were they like, those people? What made them laugh? What did they dream?”
Images passed through Feather’s mind–the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, long-gone groves and fields and vineyards that had flourished along the roads to Casah and Nineveh, Khorsabad and Arbela. In his memory, every tree, vine, and flower was still as fresh and sharp as the first time it opened in the sun, but the people who had walked among them were shadows. What had they been like? And what songs had he hummed as he sowed and pruned and weeded, so long ago? He couldn’t remember.
They came to a stile. Fleur climbed over first and helped Feather to follow, awkwardly. On the other side, they left the track and began climbing the hill. Their legs brushed against wild garlic, silky-leaved mulleins, ox-eyed daisies.
“I love so many things,” Fleur said. “I love things that are sharp and fast and intense. I get that from my grandmother, the veela. Do you know the veela, Monsieur Feather? They are like birds, too, though not quite in the same way you are. They can fly without brooms, higher and farther and faster than any witch. They sleep in forests or at the bottoms of lakes, down, down in the cold. They feel the cold as much as we do, but they don’t care. It is what they have chosen. Men see them in wild places and try to follow them. When the men die, people say the veela lured them to their deaths.” Fleur tossed her head and sniffed. “That’s right, blame the woman. Not that the veela aren’t worth dying for. They are the most beautiful beings on earth, and they never grow old and ugly. They stay young for a long, long time, and then one morning they just walk into the sunlight and dissolve into air.
“The moldus have a ballet about a young human woman named Giselle, who becomes a veela. She saves her sweetheart’s life but has to leave him forever. It’s full of mistakes about the veela, of course, but it is still lovely and very moving. I saw Pietragalla dance it at the Paris Opera before I left France. When it ended, tears were streaming down my face so hard that I couldn’t walk. My sister Gabrielle had to lead me out of the theatre. Do you think anyone at Hogwarts has ever left a theatre blinded by tears? I never met one who had. After a while, I stopped looking. They had their world; I had mine.
“And then,” Fleur went on, “there is the problem of my beauty. You’ve noticed that, of course, and you can imagine the sort of trouble it causes.”
Feather looked at Fleur carefully. What was he supposed to have noticed about her? She looked Human. What else? He started ticking off her distinguishing characteristics. Habit of growth, Human normal. Symmetry, pronounced–much higher than normal. Her…exocarp…was smooth, unblemished, and, as far as he could tell, evenly pigmented. Feather frowned. “You look healthy and well cared for,” he said at last. “More than that–I’m sorry. I’m really not qualified to say.”
“Really!” Fleur’s eyes widened. “But that’s just– Really! Well, trust me, Monsieur la Plume, I am beautiful, and it does make life complicated. With men, for example. They take me seriously when they shouldn’t, or don’t take me seriously when they should. And other women, witches, don’t like me at all. I make them feel like moldues. It really is a sort of magic, being desirable. It makes people…help me with things, and gives me power over them. Even Dumbledore, I suspect, wouldn’t ignore me if I asked him for something, some special favor. He might not do anything really stupid for me, the way the others would, but I think I could make him think about it–maybe for just a few seconds, before he said no…
“But none of that really matters now, does it?” she said. “Not with the Dark Lord pounding on the door. Lord Vous-Savez-Qui. Celui-Dont-On-Ne-Doit-Pas-Prononcer-le-Nom.” Fleur’s eyes flashed. “Everybody else hates him because he is evil. Not me. I hate him because he is ugly, and because he wants to make everything else ugly, too. All the beauty in the world is in danger because of him. Everything I care about could vanish overnight, forever. I would give my life to save it.” She stopped in mid-stride and turned to face Feather. “Or would I?” she wondered. “Maybe even now, chère Muse, I’m not being entirely honest. I could be saying all these things just to make an impression on you. I do that sometimes.
“Well, we’ll see when the time comes what I am made of and what I really want, how honest I am and how…strong. It won’t be long now, I think. No. It’s very near. The veela part of me feels it coming. The veela are never wrong about things like that.
“One thing that will be true, whatever happens: I love Bill Weasley. I love him as much as I can imagine ever loving anyone–as much as any person can love another person, I think. And he loves me. He’s a good man, monsieur, good through and through. Very kind, very steady–not like me. I think we will be good for each other. I’m not sure his family understands that. Maybe they will, before it is all over.”
They had climbed most of the way up the gentle hill and reached the edge of its wooded crown. Feather’s eyes picked out ash and maple trees, age-old partners in this part of the world. Then he saw something unexpected. Just a few steps in front of them a young plum tree, 10 or 12 feet tall, stood alone on the outskirts of the crowd. Its fruits were ripening early; they would be ready in a week or two, Feather calculated. Prunus domestica, he thought. Nobody would have planted that here. Had some bird carried a fruit from another tree up the hill? It would have to have been a fairly large bird–bigger than Crraw, maybe–and he didn’t see any other plum trees growing nearby.
Fleur walked up to the tree, locked her fingers around its trunk, and leaned back, gazing up through the slender branches. “In Japan,” she told him, “the plum blossom is a symbol of courage. Do you know why? Because it blooms in the snow.” She looked at Feather and smiled. “And so,” she said, switching back to English, “eet seems Fleur has taught ze Muse of Plants something new about flow-airs.” She laughed, pulled herself back onto her feet, and unclasped her hands from the tree. Then she turned away, still laughing, as the sun began to burn away the mist from the meadow below them.
To Be Continued
Date: October 20, 2005
Categories: Fiction, poetry, and fanfiction
mwahahahaha…
