Little Girl Lost
By Phoenixgod2000
Authors note: This little character piece is response to the scene challenge for Pottersplace3—write a scene about the first encounter between Harry and Gabrielle after the Second Task. The Art of Healing Gabrielle Delacour was a very mature teenager. This is my attempt at creating a more realistic (pain in the ass) teen veela girl just beginning to grow up.
I've known a lot of women in my life who have been down the path Gabrielle begins to tread down in this story, both friends of mine and students of mine. More than one of them has crashed around the steep turns.
I hope they know that I will always be there to pick them up when they need it.
Harry was rudely pulled from his reverie by an emerald flash from the floo.
He was annoyed. It wasn't often that the Boy Who Lived and Slayer of Voldemort managed some peace and quiet. A long Quidditch season was finally over and he was trying to enjoy some precious down-time before training resumed. It wasn't easy – people were constantly trying to pin medals on him or invite him to parties. And that was when he wasn't being dragged out on dates with very pretty, very awestruck witches—come to think of it, he did rather enjoyed that part. He was twenty years old but lately he felt older than the average OWL tester. His life was good, but tiring, and right now all he really wanted to do was violate his sports diet, settle down with Hermione's latest book of spells and listen to the Wizarding Wireless.
So naturally someone was Flooing him.
"Harry? Harry? Are you there? I need you." A soft, lilting voice called out to him from the fireplace.
Harry groaned and pulled on a tee-shirt before ambling over to see his caller. He fit his glasses over his eyes and blinked.
"Fleur?"
"Bonjour, Harry." The quarter-veela said with a weak smile.
Harry studied her face. Even in the green light Fleur didn't look well: her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail with a few strands out of place, and there was even a slight hint of bags beneath her normally radiant eyes. For Fleur, her casual and worn appearance screamed 'exhausted beyond endurance.' Harry knew that her disheveled look was mostly due to her pregnancy – Veela weren't the most fertile creatures and the nearness of her due date was having quite an effect on her.
Harry smiled warmly. He genuinely liked Fleur; regardless of the initial impression she made there was something irrepressibly joyful and fun about the girl once you got to know her. At least there usually was. "What can I do for you, Fleur?" he asked kindly.
"Eet is my sister." Fleur said worriedly. "Gabrielle. She 'as gone missing."
That jolted Harry fully awake. He hadn't seen the younger Delacour in years – she hadn't attended the wedding because, according to Fleur, she was undergoing some kind of veela maturation process and was rather… flammable. He still had fond memories of a tiny girl with a pixie smile clinging ferociously to her sister's side.
"What happened?" Harry asked tersely. "Was it slavers? An enemy of your father?"
Fleur shook her head. "I think you do not understand. She was not kidnapped. Gabby is no longer the cute little girl from ze tournament, Harry. She has gotten… wilder. I zink she ran away."
Fleur's accent got worse as she became more distressed. "Zee police… zey do nothing anymore. She 'as been gone for a month already and zey say she is just another runaway, la petite fille a perdu. Zey say there is nothing left they can do. My father 'as blustered and tried to use 'is connections, but zey have done no good. My mother and I are paralyzed with worry. Zey had such a bad fight on ze night when she left."
Harry ran his fingers through his hair. "Why are you calling me? What can I do?"
Fleur's teary eyes met Harry's from across the continent. "Gabrielle likes you Harry." She said insistently. "Loves you as only a foolish young veela child can. You're Harry Potter. Please, find her. Bring her home."
Harry could never deny anything to a crying woman. Especially a crying Fleur. Besides, Fleur was family. She was a Weasley, anyway, and that made her as close to family as Harry had. He also remembered the little girl he had pulled from beneath a lake and couldn't stand the idea of someone writing Gabrielle Delacour off as la petite fille a perdu.
Little Girl Lost.
Souhaits et Fantaisies
(Wishes and Fantasies)
The strip club was a mixture of bad muggle techno music and even worse wizarding decorations. Wishes and Fantasies had an eclectic mixture Middle Eastern décor and western artwork. It was schizophrenic, dark, and ultimately disconcerting.
But no one was there for the ambiance – they had come for the girls.
And what girls they were. There were scantily clad women of astounding variety and beauty dancing and writhing for the pleasure of the customers – male and female alike. A thousand decadent acts were witnessed by dark, faceless strangers of every description. Pairs of dancers writhed lewdly together, kissing while transfixed men watched and salivated. Other customers paid girls to stretch out on table while they snorted strange and illicit powders from their bodies. Vampire dominatrixes led customers around by black leather leashes. Magical Jinni with skin and hair in every hue of the rainbow fulfilled erotic wishes for customers who slipped golden coins to the veiled dancers. Beautiful witches wriggled on the laps of customers, offering drugs and potions to enhance the experience. Magical fog hid the floor and whirled around Harry's feet as he made his way between the tables in the dimly lit room. There was a woman to fulfill every man's fantasy, and several that catered to nothing Harry could comprehend.
But there wasn't a veela in sight.
Harry frowned and removed his glasses so he could rub the bridge of his nose. Gabrielle was apparently no slouch in the magic department and the normal charms a person would use to find a wayward teenager hadn't worked, so Harry had been forced to do some investigating the old-fashioned way. Veela weren't exactly a knut a dozen and Harry had discovered that someone with distinctive silver hair was working at a strip club located down a particularly seedy street in the French magic quarter.
A moment later he spotted a young girl with gleaming, waist-length silver hair. She was wearing skin-tight silver shorts that stopped slightly above the lower curve of her behind and a matching bikini top. She slithered skin-to-skin on top of a balding, middle-aged man. In the dark Harry could see her teeth gleam as she smiled seductively at her customer.
Harry growled and walked over. "You mother is worried about you, Gabby," he said, his hand wrapping around her thin arm. "You're coming with me." The girl screamed and whipped around.
"Let go of me!" The girl shrieked in an American accent. She looked around frantically. "Pierre! Pierre! Help!"
Harry blinked in surprise.
She wasn't Gabrielle Delacour.
She wasn't all that young.
She wasn't even a veela.
Up close, she appeared to a woman in her early thirties. Her face was hard, possessing none of the softness of youth. A few lines at the corner of her eyes showed the world that her days as an ingénue were long since past.
A huge mountain of a man with the florid features of an alcoholic approached and laid a meaty hand on Harry's shoulder, the wand in his other hand was almost swallowed by his ham-like fist. Harry thought that if Crabbe and Goyle ever produced a child, this is what he'd look like when he grew up.
"Sir" the man said calmly "It's time for you to leave. Now."
"I can't." Harry said quietly. "I'm sorry for scaring her," he said motioning at the woman he had initially mistaken for Gabrielle. "But I'm looking for a girl. She's underage."
The bouncer broke into a deviant smile. "Mister, most of the girls in here are underage. Pick one and go."
Harry knew that he could take the bouncer. And all the other bouncers in the room that were watching the confrontation interestedly, but he needed to find Gabrielle. He didn't have time to beat up a bunch of guys that were just doing their jobs.
So he left.
He walked outside, turned a corner and used a spell to change his hair and clothes, slipping his glasses into a coat pocket. Harry was quite adept at altering his appearance; he had discovered shortly after his Seventh Year that the only way he could appear in public without being mobbed was if he didn't look like himself. Still, he was continually amazed at the way nobody recognized him after even a couple of relatively minor changes. Transformed, he paid a second cover and went back in.
This time he was more careful. He noticed a few other girls with hair charmed to look like a veela, but no actual veela. So Harry sat down near the back of the room and ordered a drink from a passing waitress. She returned a few minutes later with a blue martini that shot sparks and Harry tipped the girl before settling into his seat to sip the drink while he thought.
He stopped thinking abruptly when a girl slipped into his personal space, straddling his lap. She was gorgeous – a gothic beauty with short, pitch-black hair and silver studs decorating her nose, eyebrow, and upper lip. Black lipstick coated her full lips and bright red eye shadow highlighted her eyelids, a startling contrast to the stark whiteness of the rest of her exposed skin. She rested a pale hand tipped by jet-black fingernails on Harry's chest and leaned back, drawing his eyes along her form. Harry couldn't help but look. Her body was thin, almost bony. She wore ridiculously high platform heels on her tiny feet, which were connected to thin legs covered by black, fishnet stockings that ended mid-thigh, which offered a tantalizing glimpse of garter belts that disappeared beneath a black vinyl skirt that was currently riding high on slender thighs and doing an altogether inadequate job of covering narrow, boyish hips leading to a flat, taut stomach which was connected to small, firm breasts that were struggling to stay concealed beneath a cropped tube-top that Harry thought might have better fit a small child.
Hi." She breathed. "How are you doing?" Harry looked, finally, into her eyes. Her eyes were blue. Impossibly, vividly blue. Like a clear sky at noon. Like a tropical sea. Inhumanly blue.
"Fine." Harry said. "Much better now, actually." he added with a smile.
"My name is Ashley." The exotic dancer said. "What's yours?"
"Ron." Harry said with a smile.
Her hands seemed to be everywhere and Harry shifted in his seat uncomfortably. "What?" she said with a pout. "You don't like me?"
"I like you just fine." Harry returned. "But I don't want to do this in the… open."
"Fifty galleons'll get you 20 minutes of all the privacy you want." she breathed into his ear.
"Done."
The gothic dancer led Harry up a short flight of stairs to a chamber with an overstuffed couch in the middle of the floor and gauzy veils for privacy. Pushing him lightly into the couch, she stood before him, adopting a seductive pose. Her body was almost startlingly thin – there was so little fat on her frame that he could easily count each of her ribs. A tattoo of something long and serpentine stretched the length of her body, the head lying temporarily covered beneath her short skirt and the tail ending near her neck.
"So" she said seductively "we're alone. What do you want? I do it all."
Harry smiled. "I want you to go back to your mother, Gabby. She's worried about you."
Harry dumped the unconscious girl on his bed. With a quick wave of his wand, he transfigured her clothing into something he wouldn't get arrested for looking at.
Walking into his kitchen he prepared a drink and waited.
"You didn't have to stun me." Gabrielle said crossly from his doorway once she had awakened. "I'd go with you anywhere." She finished with a knowing smile that was totally out of place on a teenage girl.
"That's what I'm worried about." Harry said calmly.
Gabrielle moved closer and pushed against Harry. "I know you like me." She whispered. "I felt you like me. And let me say Harry, I am very impressed."
Harry stepped nimbly away. "Don't flatter yourself. Girls aren't my type." he smiled. "Grow up a little first." With a gentle shove he guided her to the sofa where he joined her—at a safe distance.
"So what happened?" Harry asked. "Why'd you run away?"
Gabrielle snorted. "Why didn't I." she replied back mockingly. "Pick a reason. Mother's stupid etiquette lessons—as if I want to fit in with society like her precious Fleur does. Everybody's being stupid about the baby on the way. Maybe I just wanted to live a little. To be somebody other than Gabrielle Delacour: the latest arm-candy of the Delacour family."
Harry laughed. "And to think I didn't get that bitter until most of my friends were murdered by Voldemort."
Gabrielle looked away. "You don't understand." she mumbled.
"Oh, I think I do." Harry replied knowingly. "I know a little something about expectations, and wanting to rebel against them." he leaned back in his chair. "I had a magical prophecy hanging over my head for seventeen years. I know all about powers making dates you don't want to keep."
"My mother is impossible!" Gabrielle exploded. "All she wants is another Fleur. Another butterfly to flit about at parties so Papa will look good. Maybe if I get really lucky I can marry a man without a face too."
"Don't you ever say anything against Bill Weasley within my hearing again or I'll leave you without a face." The Boy Who Lived snapped. "That man has given more than you will ever probably comprehend and he deserves nothing from you but your respect."
"But…"
"But nothing. Respect."
Gabrielle nodded. A sigh sputtered past her lips. "I'm just so tired of being compared to her. Nothing I do is ever good enough. It's always: 'Your sister had better grades', 'Why couldn't you be as pleasant to the Lord of who-the-hell-cares as Fleur?' Fleur, Fleur, Fleur!"
"That's why you cut your hair." Harry said.
Gabrielle nodded. "And dyed it black. Veela loose a lot of their power if their hair is cut or darkened. Even with it like this, I'm still pretty enough to get work at Souhaits et Fantaisies, though."
"Why there?
"Because everybody thinks veela are just decorations. Why not use my beauty and make a silly amount of money? Being pretty is the only thing anyone expects from me, anyway."
"And it would horrify your mother."
"That too." Gabby admitted.
"She's worried about you."
"She's probably worried about what my running away is going to do to Daddy's reelection." Gabrielle said bitterly.
Harry shook his head. "If you say so. Fleur's worried about you, too. When I saw her last she didn't look very good."
"Is… is the baby alright?" Gabrielle asked hesitantly.
Harry shrugged. "I hope so." He said blandly. "Fleur is definitely worried about you, though, and it can't be healthy for either her or the baby."
Gabrielle sat back. Harry noticed a slight twitch in her hands. "What's that?" he asked.
She quickly hid the tremble. "Nothing. Just some… nothing." she said again.
"Stripping wasn't exactly the smartest thing you could have done." Harry pointed out. "It's a dark and dangerous world. No place for a sixteen year old."
"I can handle it." She said. "Even without my veela powers."
"You're sixteen." Harry said. "What do you know about what you can handle? Here's what I know—and trust me I know users. I know them well." This time Harry was the one who spoke bitterly. "The people you dance for, they're taking advantage of you, Gabby. They're using you up while you're young and pretty. When you hit twenty five and look about forty from the drugs—skeletal isn't a good look for you by the way—nobody is going to want you anymore. Then what will you do?"
"It wasn't going to be forever." Gabrielle said. "Just till I got some galleons saved and I found something else."
"Lots of jobs out there for half-trained witches with drug problems?"
"I'm better than half of the Seventh Years at Beauxbatons—even if my grades don't show it," Gabrielle snorted. "And I don't have a problem. It just took the edge off."
Harry shrugged. "If you say so. But you definitely will have one if you keep up the way you are." The Boy Who Lived threw up his hands. "What the hell happened to you, Gabrielle? What happened to the little girl who smiled at me and jabbered in French after I rescued her from the merfolk? Where did she go?"
Gabrielle started crying. "I wish I knew." She whispered brokenly through her heaving sobs. Harry leaned over and wrapped an arm around her thin shoulders. He drew her close and let the shaking girl exhaust her emotions. Eventually her tears ceased. "What are you going to do with me" she asked.
"I dunno. Are you going to run away again?" Harry asked.
"I just want things to be different. For my mother to be different. I'm tired of her holding me back." Gabrielle said.
"Holding you back from what?" Harry asked in a curious tone.
"You're going to laugh." Gabrielle said.
"No I won't."
"A muggle friend of mine. He took me to a muggle movie theater once and we saw a movie about this woman who was an explorer. She discovered places no one else went and found out what was there. She had all sorts of adventures. Laura Craft or some such. I want to do that. I want to go places no one has been. I want to see everything. Go everywhere." Twin roses of color filled her pallid cheeks. "Stupid, I know. Who ever heard of someone getting career advice from a movie?"
"No it's not silly. Not if it means something to you." Harry said. "Anyway, I think it sounds fun." He scraped a little at his nails. "Of course, you're never going to do that if you don't stay in school."
"What does it even matter?" She said bitterly. "My mother would never allow it. Not appropriate for a girl. Especially a society girl."
Harry leaned back. "You talk so badly of your family Gabrielle, and you do it for so little reason. Your mother, your father, Fleur, Bill. Right now they're all worried sick about you. They've been looking for you since the moment you left. You have no idea how lucky you are." He said softly. "My family was a lot different from yours. My Aunt used to hit me with a frying pan when I didn't finish the cooking fast enough. My Uncle, he liked to take a belt to the back of my thighs if things weren't clean enough or he'd had a bad day at work, or sometimes for no reason at all. My cousin thought it was a jolly fun game to hunt me down with his friends, corner me, and beat me up. You are so fortunate, Gabby. There are a lot of orphans in this world who would kill to have your life. To have a mother who cared—even if she cared too much, a father who provided for them, and a sister who worried about them. I know I would have. There's nothing more important than family, so don't push yours away. "
Gabrielle looked ashamed. "I'm so stupid." She whispered. She tried to hide behind her hair but it was too short and she couldn't pull it off. "I've screwed up so bad."
"Maybe a little" Harry admitted "but that's fine. You should have seen some of the mistakes I made when I was sixteen. And seventeen. And fifteen. And twenty. Yesterday. Probably tomorrow. None of us are perfect. We live. We learn. We get a little smarter."
Gabrielle smiled shyly. "Even Gryffindors?"
Harry snorted. "Especially Gryffindors."
"Harry… would you…" Gabrielle fingered her dark hair embarrassed. "My hair... do you know how to charm it clean?"
Harry nodded. "Yeah." He said softly. "I think I can do that."
An hour later Gabrielle had a short bob of silver-blond hair and had removed the piercings from her face—and a few other places she had to visit the bathroom to reach. Harry thought it best not to dwell on it.
Finally, they stood in front of Harry's fireplace. Gabrielle seemed to be looking everywhere except for Harry's face. He gently reached out and grasped her chin, guiding her gaze to his. "Hey, one more year and you'll be of age. You can go back to stripping if that's what you really want. Or you can do what your mother says. Or you can chase after your other dreams."
"I don't know…"
"Talk to Bill about what it takes to be curse breaker." Harry advised. "You have the power if not the grades and it sounds like what you want to do, anyway."
"Depends" She said, smiling. "You gonna come with me when I discover Atlantis?"
"You find Atlantis and I'll fund the expedition. Maybe even go with you if I've gone stir-crazy enough." Harry said. "But focus on getting through Potions first." he added dryly.
Gabrielle hugged Harry. "Deal," she said emotionally. Pulling back, she smiled at Harry. "I'm ready to go home now."
Harry nodded and threw a handful of powder into the fire. It flashed green and Gabrielle took a deep breath, tossed one last grateful look at Harry and disappeared. Harry breathed a sigh of relief. He thought he had gotten through to her. Hopefully she'd stay out of trouble.
La petite fille a trouvé
Little girl found.
read and review. this is a very personal story for me and I am eager to know what you (the readers) think about it.