The Veela's Claim: Chapter 9 (Patreon)

Classes had let out an hour ago, but the corridors were still busy with the usual after-hours drift, students heading back to their common rooms or ducking into the library before dinner. Gabrielle walked through it alone, her bag slung over one shoulder, her pace even and calm. She’d learned a long time ago that rushing only made people look at you harder.

She heard them before she saw them. A cluster of fifth years by the tapestry, their voices dropping the second she came into view, then picking back up the moment they thought she was out of earshot. They weren’t wrong that she couldn’t hear them from that distance. They were wrong that it mattered. Veela hearing didn’t work like human hearing.

“...I heard she screamed at him in front of the whole compartment...”

“...stuck up cow, always has been, ever since she came here...”

“...my cousin’s in Hufflepuff with Charlie, says she barely touched her wand and he just went down...”

Gabrielle kept walking. Her face didn’t move. She’d had years of practice keeping it that way, and this was nothing new, not really. Just more of it, packed closer together than usual.

A pair of sixth year boys leaning against the wall outside the Charms corridor didn’t even bother lowering their voices. “Bet she thinks it’s funny,” one of them said, loud enough that a couple of passing Ravenclaws turned their heads. “Delacour’s like that. All of them are. Something wrong with that family.”

She passed within three feet of him. He didn’t stop talking. She didn’t stop walking.

It was the whispering that got to her more than the shouting ever could have. Shouting she could argue with, could shut down with a look or a word. Whispering just sat there, spreading, and there was nothing to grab onto, nothing to fight. You couldn’t hex a rumour. She’d tried, in a manner of speaking, and look where that had gotten her.

Two girls from her own year, Ravenclaws she’d shared a Potions bench with more than once, fell into step a little way behind her, clearly not caring, or not realizing, that she’d hear every word.

“...and on the train, apparently, before we’d even got here. Ethan Pruitt asked her something perfectly normal and she tore into him.”

“I heard it wasn’t even a question. He just said hello.”

“Well, whatever it was, he came out of that compartment white as a sheet. And now this, with Charlie. What is wrong with her this year?”

Gabrielle’s jaw tightened, just slightly, just enough that if either of them had been looking at her face instead of the back of her head, they might have noticed. She kept her eyes forward. There was a portrait of The Fat Friar up ahead, snoring loudly in his frame, and she fixed her gaze on him like he was the only thing in the corridor worth looking at.

“Honestly, I don’t know why the teachers haven’t done more. If it was anyone else, they’d have been suspended by now.”

“You know why.”

The first girl gave a short laugh, and this was the part where it usually turned, where it stopped being about her and started being about him.

“Oh, come off it. You really think that’s not part of it? Her sister’s basically married to the Man Who Conquered. Everyone knows it. That’s probably why her detentions are always so cushy, isn’t it? Assisting Madam Pomfrey in the Hospital Wing, whoop-de-do. Meanwhile the rest of us are scrubbing cauldrons in the dungeons for being five minutes late to class.”

“I heard Flitwick nearly gave her the Trophy Room instead and then changed his mind.”

“Exactly. Because who’s going to actually punish her properly when Harry Potter might hear about it? She struts around like she’s untouchable. Like none of the rules apply to her because of who her sister’s shagging.”

Something in Gabrielle’s chest went very cold, colder than the corridor, colder than the draught coming off the windows to her left. She kept walking. She made herself keep walking. Her hand, the one not holding the strap of her bag, curled slightly at her side, fingers pressing into her palm, and she felt the first faint prickle under her skin that told her exactly what was starting, exactly what she needed to not let happen here, in the middle of a crowded corridor, in front of two Ravenclaws who had no idea how close they were standing to something they wouldn’t want to be standing close to.

She didn’t look back at them. She didn’t say anything. She turned the corner toward the staircase that led down to the infirmary and let their voices fade behind her, though fading wasn’t the same as gone. She could still hear the tail end of it, a little laugh, something about Fleur’s name that she didn’t let herself fully process.

Up ahead, coming the other way, was a knot of Gryffindors she recognized without wanting to. Ethan Pruitt was in the middle of them, his sleeve still bandaged from where she’d caught him with something sharp and involuntary back when it had happened, and the two boys flanking him she knew by sight if not by name, friends of Charlie’s, all three of them going quiet as she approached.

Ethan’s eyes found hers across the corridor. There was nothing friendly in them. There hadn’t been anything friendly in them since the train, and she supposed she’d earned that, but the boy beside him, the taller one, curled his lip like she was something he’d stepped in.

Gabrielle didn’t slow down. She let her gaze pass over the three of them, cool and level, the same look she gave everyone these days, and kept moving. She heard one of them mutter something as she passed, too low even for her to catch all of it, but she caught the meaning of it well enough. Something about her being violent. Something about how she should be expelled.

She didn’t react. Not on the outside.

Further down, near the top of the staircase, a group of Hufflepuff girls were huddled around a copy of the Daily Prophet one of them had spread open on the windowsill, and Gabrielle caught her own name before she’d even drawn level with them.

“...it’s in here, look, this bit about Harry Potter’s public appearances, and it mentions Fleur Delacour right there in the same paragraph. Gabrielle’s basically famous by proxy, isn’t she. No wonder she thinks she can do whatever she wants.”

“My sister said the same thing. Says the professors go easier on her because nobody wants to be the one who upset Harry Potter’s girlfriend’s little sister.”

One of the others gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “Imagine having that and still being such a nightmare to everyone around you. You’d think she’d at least try to be pleasant about it.”

Gabrielle’s grip on her bag strap tightened further. She didn’t slow, didn’t turn her head, gave them nothing at all to react to. In no time she was on the stairs and then off them, and the voices thinned out behind her into the general noise of the corridor.

On the inside, she could feel it building the way it always did now, a low simmer just beneath her collarbones, spreading down her arms, and she knew without looking that if she rolled up her sleeve right there in the corridor she’d see the faint red beginning of it, thin as capillaries, threading up from her wrists. She didn’t look. She kept her sleeves down, her pace steady, and her face like it was carved of stone as she made it the rest of the way to the infirmary without giving a single one of them the satisfaction of watching her come apart.

The doors to the Hospital Wing were propped open, the late afternoon light slanting in through the tall windows and catching the dust in the air. Gabrielle stopped just inside, and for a second she didn’t move at all.

Madam Pomfrey was at the far bed, her back mostly to the door, leaning over a boy propped up against a stack of pillows. Gabrielle recognized the tousled brown hair even from behind. Charlie Fenwick. His arm was out on top of the blanket, wrapped from wrist to elbow in white bandaging, and even from the doorway she could see the faint discoloration creeping up past the edge of it, a mottled bluish grey that had no business being on his skin.

She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, just looking at him. He wasn’t looking back. His head was turned toward the window, his jaw tight, like he was gritting through pain and doing his best not to show it.

Madam Pomfrey glanced over her shoulder, and whatever was on Gabrielle’s face in that moment must have shown something, because the matron’s own expression tightened before smoothing back into something more businesslike.

“Miss Delacour.” Her voice wasn’t unkind, but it wasn’t warm either. Not the way it might have been once. “Go and change. Quickly, please. I want you in here in five minutes, not ten.”

Gabrielle gave a small nod, not opening her mouth, and crossed to the door at the back of the ward without another word.

The little room back there was barely more than a closet, a sink, a mirror, and a cupboard where the spare healer’s robes hung on a row of hooks. She’d changed in it a dozen times this past week already, and every time it felt smaller than the time before. She pushed the door shut behind her, heard the click of the latch, and only then let herself stop holding it together.

Her breath left her in a rush, ragged, like she’d been running. She caught herself on the edge of the sink with both hands, gripping the porcelain hard enough that her knuckles went pale, and stared at her own reflection like it belonged to someone else.

She looked wrecked. Not on the surface, not where anyone could see it, her face was still doing the same composed nothing it had been doing in the corridor, but underneath. Her eyes were too bright. There were faint hollows starting under them that no amount of concealment charm had quite managed to hide this week. She dragged in another breath and reached for the fastening of her robes, her hands not quite steady, undoing them clumsily, like she needed it off her skin immediately.

Robe. Jumper. Shirt. Skirt. Bra. Knickers. She peeled off each layer and let it fall in a heap on the floor of the little room, not bothering to fold anything, until she was standing there in nothing at all, staring at herself in the mirror above the sink.

The veins were back.

They ran up from her wrists in delicate red branches, climbing her forearms, and there were more of them across her collarbones, faint but unmistakable, a scattering that continued down over her breasts and ribs. In the low light they looked almost decorative, like something drawn on rather than something happening to her, except for the way they pulsed, faint and rhythmic, in time with something that wasn’t quite her heartbeat and wasn’t quite separate from it either.

She grimaced at the sight of them. She’d stopped being surprised weeks ago. She was only ever tired now, tired and a little sick with it, the way you get sick of a headache that never fully goes away.

She made herself count them once, the way she always did, like taking stock of a wound. Four branches up each wrist. A scattering across her collarbones that hadn’t been there in July. It was worse than last week. She didn’t need a Healer to tell her that, though she’d thought more than once this past month about walking into St Mungo’s and asking someone to explain it to her properly, someone who wasn’t her sister, wasn’t Harry, wasn’t Madam Pomfrey, and wasn’t someone who’d look at her with that particular mixture of guilt and helplessness that made everything so much harder to sit with. She never did it. She didn’t know what she’d even say.

Her wand was on top of the pile of discarded clothes. She bent, picked it up, and pointed it at her own chest without hesitation, the motion practiced by now, almost automatic.

“Glacius.”

The cold hit her like a slap, and she hissed through her teeth, her whole body flinching at the shock of it even as some deeper, more primal part of her sagged in relief. The veins fought it. She could feel them fighting it, a stubborn heat pushing back against the ice, and she gritted her teeth as she held the spell steady. She cast it again along her forearms, again across her collarbones and over her breasts, working methodically down her own body the way she might treat a burn, except she was the one causing it and the one healing it, over and over, every single day.

It took longer than usual this evening. Longer, she suspected, because of the corridor, because of what she’d heard and not been allowed to react to, because whatever was underneath her skin seemed to feed off things like that in ways she didn’t fully understand and definitely didn’t want to think too hard about right now. She kept casting anyway. Her arm ached from holding the wand steady. Her breath came out in short clouds in the freezing little room. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the red began to recede, the branching lines shrinking back toward her wrists, fading, fading, until finally, finally, her skin was just skin again, pale and faintly blue from the cold but hers, uncomplicated, human enough to pass.

She let out a breath that shook on the way out. Her shoulders dropped. She stood there another moment with her eyes shut, one hand braced on the sink, just breathing, before she straightened and pointed her wand at herself again, murmuring the drying charm this time, warm air chasing away the chill that clung to her skin.

The knock on the door made her jump.

“Miss Delacour.” Madam Pomfrey’s voice was brisk and faintly impatient. “How much longer are you going to be?”

“Five minutes,” Gabrielle called back, proud of how steady it came out. “I will be five minutes, Madam Pomfrey.”

“Well, hurry up about it. I don’t have all evening and neither does Mr. Fenwick.”

Her footsteps retreated, and Gabrielle sagged for exactly one more second before she made herself move, reaching for the plain grey healer’s robes hanging on the hook, the ones Madam Pomfrey made her wear whenever she was on duty in the ward. They were a size too big and smelled faintly of the same disinfectant as everything else in the infirmary. She pulled them on, did up the buttons with fingers that had finally stopped shaking, and looked at herself once more in the mirror. Composed. Presentable. Nothing at all like the girl who’d been gripping the sink two minutes ago.

She pushed the door open and walked back out into the ward.

Madam Pomfrey looked up from where she was mixing something in a small dish and beckoned her over with a tilt of her head, not a word wasted. Gabrielle crossed the room and came to stand at the foot of Charlie’s bed, and it was only then, this close, that she let herself actually look at his arm again.

The bandaging had been pulled back for treatment, and what was underneath made her stomach turn, just slightly, just enough that she had to work to keep the reaction off her face. The skin from his wrist to well past his elbow was a deep, ugly grey-blue, hardened in patches, blistered in others, the kind of damage that had nothing gentle about it at all.

“Frostbite,” Madam Pomfrey had said during the first detention session, her voice matter-of-fact, like she was naming an ingredient rather than an injury. “Severe. Functionally identical to a third degree burn, if you want to think of it that way, Miss Delacour, same principle of tissue damage, just from the opposite direction. It requires the same care. Layered warming charms, very gradual, never all at once, or you risk further damage to the tissue. Watch.”

Charlie’s eyes had flicked to Gabrielle and held there, and there was nothing hidden in his expression at all. Just anger, plain and simple, the kind that didn’t need explaining.

Gabrielle had held his gaze for exactly one second, then looked down at his arm instead, because that was easier, and because she deserved whatever was in his eyes and didn’t particularly want to keep looking at it.

“D’accord,” she’d said quietly. “I am watching.”

She got to work.

Madam Pomfrey talked her through the first pass herself, her wand moving in slow, careful arcs a few inches above the damaged skin, murmuring the incantation low and even, and Gabrielle watched the grey-blue lighten by a shade, watched Charlie’s jaw tighten further as whatever sensation came with it made itself known. Then the matron straightened and handed the working over.

“Your turn. Slowly. If you rush it you’ll do more harm than good, and believe me, you do not want to be the reason this scars worse than it has to.”

Gabrielle nodded and lifted her own wand, and made herself steady, made herself careful, in a way she hadn’t been careful about anything all week. She traced the same slow arc Madam Pomfrey had shown her, murmured the incantation, and watched a thin line of warmth chase itself along Charlie’s forearm, watched him hiss through his teeth at the change in sensation.

“Sorry,” she said, before she could stop herself.

Charlie didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the ceiling and his jaw locked, and Gabrielle swallowed whatever else she might have said and kept working.

They went in intervals, a few minutes of careful spellwork followed by a pause to let the tissue rest, Madam Pomfrey checking the colour and texture each time before allowing another pass. It was slow, unglamorous work, nothing like the flashy healing she’d read about in the books she kept hidden under her bed, the kind where a single spell fixed everything in a burst of golden light. This was patient and careful and required her to repeatedly face what she’d done, close enough to see it, for the better part of an hour.

She didn’t mind that part, honestly. Or she minded it in a way that felt correct, felt earned. It was the only piece of this entire day that made a kind of sense to her.

By the time they’d gone through several rounds, Charlie’s arm had gone from that awful grey-blue to something closer to an angry red, still swollen, still clearly painful, but healing in the ordinary, human way now instead of festering. Madam Pomfrey checked it a final time, nodded to herself, and drew the blanket back up over him.

“That’s enough for tonight. Rest, Mr. Fenwick. I’ll check on you again before curfew.” She turned to Gabrielle and tilted her head toward the desk at the far end of the ward. “Come. Sit with me a moment.”

Gabrielle followed her over and lowered herself into the chair across the desk, her hands folding themselves in her lap without her quite deciding to do it.

Madam Pomfrey studied her for a long moment before she spoke, and there was something in her face that Gabrielle didn’t want to name, something softer than the brisk professionalism from before, something closer to worry.

“You know,” the matron said slowly, “in a strange way, this detention suits you rather better than scrubbing cauldrons would. You’ve always wanted this, haven’t you? To heal people. I remember you asking me questions about it back in your fifth year that most students twice your age never think to ask.”

Gabrielle said nothing. Her eyes dropped to her hands.

“And there’s a certain justice to it too, I suppose, whether anyone intended it that way or not. You treating the boy you hurt, with your own hands, seeing exactly what you did and exactly what it takes to undo it.” Madam Pomfrey’s voice wasn’t unkind as she said it. It was just honest, and honesty from her was somehow harder to sit with than anger would have been. “Fitting, wouldn’t you say?”

Gabrielle gave a small nod. She didn’t trust her voice enough to add anything to it.

Madam Pomfrey sighed. “Gabrielle. What on earth is going on with you this year?”

Gabrielle’s fingers found a loose thread at the hem of her healer’s robes and began worrying at it.

“I’ve been at this school a great many years,” Madam Pomfrey went on, quieter now. “I’ve seen students hex each other over Quidditch, over exam marks, over silly little crushes gone wrong. A jinx, a stinging hex, the odd bat bogey when someone’s really cross. That, I expect. That’s ordinary. What you did to Mr. Fenwick was not ordinary. I think you know that better than anyone, and I cannot for the life of me work out what would make you do something like it. It isn’t like you.”

Silence.

Gabrielle kept her eyes on the thread between her fingers, watching it fray a little further.

“You’ve barely been back a week and I have heard more about you from more corners of this castle than I heard in the whole of last year. And it isn’t only what I’ve heard.” Madam Pomfrey’s voice dropped further, gentler, but not letting her off the hook for it. “I’ve felt the heat coming off you the moment you walk into this ward some days. I don’t think you realise how often. And then the sheer coldness. One of the Gryffindor prefects mentioned, in passing, that the compartment on the train was cold enough to see your breath in it, right after the confrontation happened with Mr. Pruitt. I am not a foolish woman, Gabrielle. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but something is, and it frightens me a little, if I’m honest, because I don’t recognise the girl sitting in front of me right now. I would very much like to help you. But I cannot do that if you will not talk to me.”

Gabrielle opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed it again.

Madam Pomfrey leaned forward slightly, her hands folding on the desk between them, and softened her voice further still. “You don’t have to tell me everything. I’m not asking you to. But something, Gabrielle. Anything. Is it your family? Is it something at home?”

Gabrielle felt her whole body go rigid for half a second before she caught it, before she smoothed her face back out and shook her head, too fast, too obviously false. “No,” she said. “It is nozing. I am fine, Madam Pomfrey. Truly.”

Madam Pomfrey looked at her for a long moment, the kind of look that made it perfectly clear she didn’t believe a word of it, but she didn’t push further. She sat back instead, some of the softness draining back out of her posture, replaced by resignation. She’d tried, been turned away, and had decided, for now, not to force the issue.

Somewhere behind them, the old clock above the ward door began to chime the hour, and Gabrielle looked up at the sound of it like she’d been waiting for exactly that excuse. Madam Pomfrey was still watching her, still waiting, and Gabrielle held her gaze for a second before dropping it.

“The hour is over,” she said quietly. “May I be excused, Madam Pomfrey?”

Something flickered across the matron’s face, disappointment maybe, or just tiredness, and she let out a breath through her nose and nodded once.

“Go on, then.”

Gabrielle stood, gave a stiff little nod of her own, and turned toward the back room without another word, aware the whole time of Madam Pomfrey’s eyes following her across the ward.

Inside, she shut the door behind her and started undoing the buttons of the healer’s robes, her movements gone mechanical now, the same way her legs had carried her here without much input from the rest of her. She hung the robes back on their hook and reached for her own clothes, piled where she’d left them on the floor, and dressed in the same flat, automatic way, bra, knickers, shirt, skirt, jumper, robe, each motion happening because the one before it had happened and not because she was particularly present for any of it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, without her quite noticing the moment it started, she was crying.

Not dramatically. Just a steady stream of tears sliding down and dropping off her jaw while her hands kept doing up buttons like nothing was wrong at all. She wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, impatient with herself, and kept dressing.

She could still see Charlie’s arm if she closed her eyes. That grey-blue colour, the way it had looked before they’d started working on it. She hadn’t meant to do that. That was the part nobody outside her own head would ever quite believe, that she hadn’t meant to, that she hadn’t even known what spell she was casting until it was already leaving her wand and hitting him square in the arm.

He’d cornered her the morning after they arrived, the day after the whole business with Ethan on the train, furious on his friend’s behalf, and fair enough, she supposed, looking back on it now with her hands stilled and cold. He’d said things. Ugly things, about her, about her family, about what everyone already thought of her, and none of it had been undeserved exactly, given how she’d treated Ethan the day before, given how she’d been treating half the school, but she hadn’t been able to hold onto that thought in the moment. She’d been so full of her own mess already, the ache under her skin, the constant low burn of wanting something she’d promised herself she’d never take, that his words had landed somewhere raw and something in her had simply snapped without asking permission.

She hadn’t even registered the spell. One second he was shouting at her in the corridor outside the Great Hall, and the next he was on the ground clutching his arm and screaming. She was just standing there with her wand still raised, staring at what she’d done like it belonged to a stranger.

The Gryffindors had been furious, understandably. Word had gotten to Flitwick within minutes, and she’d been summoned to his office that same afternoon, sat across from him while he explained, in that soft, disappointed voice of his, exactly how serious this was, exactly what kind of damage her spell had caused, and exactly what her detention would be. Assisting Madam Pomfrey. Treating the injury herself, under close supervision, for as many sessions as it took for Charlie Fenwick to fully heal.

She’d nodded along to all of it, small and mechanical, the way she’d nodded at Madam Pomfrey just now, agreeing to terms she hadn’t really had the energy to argue with even if she’d wanted to. Flitwick’s face had been stern the whole time, and behind him she remembered catching sight of Headmistress McGonagall in the doorway for a moment, her arms crossed, watching her with an expression Gabrielle hadn’t wanted to examine too closely at the time and didn’t want to examine now either.

She thought of Charlie’s arm again, the grey of it, and then, unhelpfully, unstoppably, she thought of Harry. Of Fleur. Of the two of them curled together somewhere back at the flat right now, easy and warm with each other in a way that had nothing to do with her and never would, no matter what her own blood seemed to think it was owed.

The tears came harder for a second, and she pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes, furious with herself, furious at the whole shape of this year already, one week in and already such a mess. She made herself breathe. In, slow, out, slower. She wasn’t going to walk back out through that ward with her face blotchy. She had a small amount of dignity left and she intended to keep it, whatever else this evening had cost her.

She pulled her school robe on over her shoulders, did up the front, and looked at herself in the mirror one last time. Passable. Tired around the eyes, but passable.

She opened the door and walked back out into the ward.

Madam Pomfrey glanced up from the desk as she crossed the room, and Gabrielle felt her gaze on her, felt the concern in it without needing to meet it head on. She didn’t look over. She kept her eyes forward, on the doors, on the corridor beyond them, and walked at a brisk, even pace that dared anyone to stop her.

Nobody did.

She pushed through the doors and out into the corridor, letting them swing shut behind her, and didn’t look back to see whether Madam Pomfrey had followed her with her eyes the whole way. She already knew the answer to that.

To be continued…