Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
A/N: This is going to be a series of unrelated one-shots, mostly to stop myself from starting another multi-chaptered fic. If you want to see a particular pairing, gen fic, or character study, send me a PM, a message on Tumblr, or leave your request in a review. (I'm dying for inspiration these days; if you want to include prompts or songs, feel free to!)
This one is for Tat (Tat1312), who requested Dennis/Gabrielle, and she also suggested the (utterly brilliant) photography idea. I hope you like it, love!
we won't ever come home
Gabrielle likes Paris best in the soggy month of February. Not for any aesthetic reason—February is quite possibly the ugliest month of the year, save perhaps November—but because the post-Christmas tourists have dropped to a trickle and the pre-summer tourists have not yet packed their bags. Of course, tourists still swarm the sights; she usually avoids the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame and the Louvre no matter the month.
Unfortunately, Martine—her co-worker and occasional best friend—owls her on the last Tuesday in February with an inappropriately vague message: There's something going on at the Eiffel Tower this morning. Check it out on the way to work, will you? The boss might want an article on it.
Had Martine sent her the message the night before, Gab would have Flooed to her friend's flat and begged for further explanation, or maybe snatched Martine's wand and forced her to the Eiffel Tower in the morning. As it was, the owl floats through the open door to Gabrielle's balcony at nine in the morning, so she is already late for her job at Le Monde magique, and if the "something" at the Eiffel Tower offers her an excuse, then she supposes she ought to accept it. Even if it requires mingling with the tourists.
She loops a violet scarf around her neck and shrugs into her grey wool coat, buttoning it as she hurries down the stairs and out through the door to her building. Gab ducks her head as she rounds the corner at the far end of the street, feeling strangers' eyes snag onto the blonde braid hanging down her back, taking in the small hand holding her bag, searching for the shape of her figure beneath her coat. When she's around her friends, the other reporters at the newspaper, Gabrielle barely remembers her Veela blood, aside from when one of the blokes begins flirting with her, but when she's out on the streets, on her own among strangers, it once again becomes almost all she is.
She turns onto the Champ de Mars and crosses the street without checking for cars; the tourists begin here, the clumps of Americans in track shoes and the Brits in their wool hats, all with cameras out, snapping photograph after photograph of the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against the grey sky, blurred by the raindrops.
A flash bursts to Gabrielle's right and she flinches away from the middle-aged woman holding the camera, jerking left into another confused group of tourists—Romanian, all speaking over each other as they reach into their purses and rucksacks for more cameras.
Gabrielle jumps away from them, apologising as she begins running toward the Tower. The sooner she sorts out whatever the "something" is, the sooner she can escape these crowds and their flashes and their absurd obsession with freezing moments, catching time, building images from light.
The crowds increase as she reaches the high arching base of the Tower, and she ducks out of another photographer's way as his camera swings in her direction. She doesn't notice anything out of the ordinary, though: there are camera-carrying tourists; several men standing by blankets, trying to sell miniature Eiffel Towers and light-up dogs and creepy dolls; there are police and a few food carts. It is the Eiffel Tower as it usually is on an early morning in February—not as crowded as it will be in June, but still overwhelming to Gabrielle.
She turns on her heel and glances around one last time, about to give up the whole thing as some elaborate ruse of Martine's to keep her out of the office until at least eleven, when a man bumps hard enough against her shoulder to send her tumbling to the ground, her bag spilling quills and notebooks and shit, her wand, as she lands on her knees, her hands meeting the concrete.
Jeans kneel down into her line of vision as she scrambles to snatch her wand from where it's rolled, about two feet away, and whoever it is reaches the wand first. He picks it up from the ground, balances it in his hand, and mutters, "Rowan, thirteen inches, Veela hair?" in English.
She grabs the wand from his hand, her fingernails scratching against his palm in her hurry, and he winces, glancing at her from beneath a close-fitting black wool cap. He has gold-flecked brown eyes and dark eyebrows and a questioning smile that sets Gabrielle's nerves on edge. She reaches for her notebooks and quills without responding, and gets to her feet, zipping her bag as she starts to walk away from him, taking a right to get to the Dupleix metro stop.
"Hey," he calls. Then he tries in French, "Excusez-moi?" and his accent is so miserable that Gabrielle could easily have ignored him, but he had read her wand without even casting a spell, and so she whirls to look up at him. He's got nearly thirty centimetres on her, and she crosses her arms over her stomach, feeling uncomfortably short and out of place.
"What?" she asks in English, not anxious to hear any more mutilations of her language from his mouth.
"I'm sorry, it's just—you're a witch, right?" He lowers his voice, and Gabrielle rolls her eyes.
"Obviously." She taps her right foot against the pavement, but he either doesn't notice or doesn't care that she wants to be elsewhere.
"Awesome! I am too. I mean, I'm a wizard."
"Obviously," she repeats.
He continues undaunted, "Hey, are you okay? That bloke knocked you really hard. Do you need any sort of healing or anything?"
"No. I am fine," she tells him, even though her palms are stinging and her knees must be violet with bruises already.
"Well," he hesitates. "Okay. I just wanted to make sure you were all right."
She nods. As the silence extends long past the awkward point, she gives in and says, "Thank you."
"You're more than welcome." This stranger grins at her, and she manages the barest smile back.
"I have to get going," Gab nods her head back toward the street that leads to her metro station.
"Sure." The man shrugs, and Gab turns again, ready to leave him and this disaster of a morning behind her.
But a few minutes later, as she's taking a right at the end of Avenue de Suffren, she feels someone coming up behind her. "I'm sorry," that British voice says from above her left ear, "but do you mind if I take up just a little more of your time?"
She turns and fixes him with the grey-eyed stare that has sent tens—if not hundreds—of men running to the comfort of their mothers. But this odd wizard, with his ordinary brown eyes and his large hands and his tallness, does not even flinch.
"It's just," he begins, as if she's told him he's welcome to babble her ear off if he'd like to, "it's just that I don't know anyone here. I came because of that, I think, but it's hard to start over again."
Gabrielle blinks. He is telling her too much and she wishes he would stop. Transparency terrifies her.
"Anyway," he chuckles, finally nervous. "I guess I was just wondering if you'd get dinner with me tonight? It's been lonely, eating by myself for months."
She breaks her silence with an incredulous, "You don't even know my name. I don't even know yours."
He shrugs. "Yeah, well. For some reason I feel like I've seen you before. I'm Dennis."
That name struck something; it wasn't unusual (for the Brits); it wasn't particularly attractive, but then no British names really were; but for some reason it sounded familiar. "Don't suppose you know Harry Potter?" she asked, her voice dropping low. "Not just of him, but actually know him?"
His face closes off. "I was at school with him," he answers. "I'm a few years younger."
She nods. "You might've seen me, then. My sister is married to his brother-in-law. I was in the Triwizard Tournament." She shuts her eyes for a moment and when she opens them he is looking at her, his eyes narrowed, like he's trying to remember.
"The girl from Beauxbaton's sister?" he asks, a smile thinning his lips. "I remember you. You were...wet."
Gabrielle feels a blush begin to burn her neck, which is ridiculous, because she does not blush. Men don't affect her. She always has control of these situations.
She raises her chin so the rain drips from the brim of her hat to her cheeks, cooling the heat of her shame, and says, "Well, it was nice seeing you, Dennis."
"Oh, don't be like that." He grins. "You were cute. How old were you then? Six, seven?"
"Eight." The word falls from her lips like a curse. A long time ago. Thirteen years that changed the world.
"Eight." He shakes his head, and he may be thinking something similar because his eyes darken with some emotion she can't quite read. He shakes his head, as if that movement could eradicate the charged sadness from the air. "Okay, so dinner tonight? Yes?"
She stares at him. Dennis. He's made her blush and he's survived her glare and he has not once glanced at her chest or checked out her legs. And he's asked her on a date, which has happened countless times in the last six years. Only one man had ever been successful, and Merlin, that had been a mistake. But he is not this man.
"Dinner," she agrees. "At eight-thirty?"
"Sure. Where?"
She names a cheap Italian restaurant near her flat and they agree to meet there, and then he finally lets her go.
When Gabrielle arrives at the office, Martine is sitting cross-legged on her desk, eating some of the Swiss chocolate Fleur sent Gab for her birthday and flipping through Gab's calendar. "You have no life," Martine informs her friend when she drops her bag by her chair and falls gracefully into it. Gab tucks her knees under her chin and looks up at Martine.
"You are a bitch," she tells her. "There was nothing going on at the Eiffel Tower."
"No?" Martine licks the remnants of chocolate from her fingertips. "Guess my informant was wrong then. That's irrelevant to the matter at hand, though."
"And what is the matter at hand? Aside from the fact that you are going to gain twenty pounds by tomorrow, if you've eaten all that chocolate yourself."
Martine rolls her eyes. "That is what weight-reduction spells are for, whore. Anyway, the issue, as I said, is that you have no life." She waves the calendar at Gabrielle so blank square after blank square fly before Gab's eyes. "I mean, look at this thing. You have nothing written in here, aside from shit for work."
"Because it is my work calendar. Will you leave? I need to finish an article for tomorrow."
Martine shakes her head. "No. This is a serious problem. What do you do all the time, Gabrielle? Have you even been on a date since Charles?"
Gabrielle can feel anger braiding her veins together, tensing her limbs and gripping her heart in its red-hot hands. She breathes in, out, in, out, like Fleur had always told her to do whenever she felt this way. "I have a date tonight, actually. Will you go?"
"You do?" Martine's face breaks in a smile and she tosses the empty box in the bin, slipping down from Gabrielle's desk and smacking her lips against her cheek. "Brilliant! Tell me how it goes as soon as it's over, all right. I expect an owl tonight," and then she winks, "or in the morning."
"Get out of here." Gabrielle rolls her chair forward and opens her drawer, reaching for the stack of parchment.
Martine sighs and clicks away. Once she reaches her cubicle she shouts, "You're horrible and boring, Gabrielle Delacour."
Gab rolls her eyes as Nicolas, who sits in the cubicle closest to Martine, calls, "Well, you're a heartless bitch, Martine, so I think Gab's got the better end of the deal."
The exchanging of insults could have continued the whole day, but Lucia, their boss, comes crashing out of her office at the end of the corridor of cubicles and shouts, "If you lot don't shut up I swear to Merlin I will fire you all and bring in some homeless people to take your place. At least they'd be grateful for the job."
Gabrielle hears Nicolas stifle a laugh, and she bites the inside of her lip as Lucia turns to glare at her. "And you, Gabrielle, why were you late today?"
Gab sighs. "Martine got a tip that there was something going on at the Eiffel Tower this morning, so I went to check it out. There was nothing there, though, and the metro was running slow."
"Why didn't you Apparate?"
"Too many tourists." No Parisian could ever deny that as a plausible response.
"Oh. Well, I expect you on time tomorrow."
"She won't be," Martine calls from her cubicle. "She's got a hot date tonight."
"We do not allow our personal lives to interfere with work," Lucia's voice is monotone and Gabrielle nods.
"Of course not. I'll be here. Don't worry."
As soon as Lucia disappears into her office, Nicolas approaches Gab's desk. He asks, his voice low, "Do you really have a date tonight?"
"Sort of," Gabrielle murmurs. "It's more like I'm meeting up with a...with an old family friend, I guess. He knows my sister's family, in Britain."
"Good for you, Gab." Nicolas reaches out and ruffles her hair—rather ineffectively, due to the braid—and grins at her. "I'm happy you're getting out."
"It's not like I just sit at home naming my ever-increasing collection of cats, you know."
"I know, Gab sweetie, I know." For some reason she doesn't quite believe him.
She doesn't finish her article until seven that night, and she Disapparates from the office straight to her bedroom, where she opens her wardrobe and flicks through hanger after hanger of rarely-worn-dresses. She can't imagine herself in any of them, and eventually returns to the skinny jeans piled on her bed, pairing the darkest blue with a deep green top and silver ballet flats.
She brushes her hair until it glows and coats her lashes until they're dark enough to make her eyes burn like supernovas, and she stares at herself in the mirror until she is certain that Dennis will find it difficult to discomfort her tonight. She'll make him uncomfortable immediately. Looking like that, she'll wreck all his unwitting self-confidence the way meteors smash through mountains.
He's waiting for her at the entrance to the restaurant, and he waves when he sees her coming. He doesn't blink at the darkness of her lashes or the brightness of her hair or the shine of her eyes. Dennis doesn't react to her at all, aside from that smile and that wave—like they're two normal people meeting for a normal dinner.
But they are not normal, she thinks. She follows him inside the restaurant, and she knows that they are both broken.
After they've been seated by the window he tugs the hat from his head, sending his brown hair frizzing up into a halo. Gab hides a smirk as he smoothes it down and asks, "So, did you have a good day?"
"I've had better," she answers. She sips at the red wine they've been served and tries to remember the last time she felt this out of place.
"Me, too." He carries on as if she's not treating him like nothing, no one. "I mean, it started off all right, with meeting you and everything, but then I went to the Patisserie and I don't know if you noticed but my French is rather atrocious and the woman at the till didn't understand when I asked for a croissant and so I had to spell it out for her, and then after that I got back to my apartment and found that all of my cat's food had somehow spoiled, so I had to go out and get more for her, and then I got a note from Harry because he had a question for me about some French tradition which I clearly knew nothing about because I am not French and then I got lost going to Berthillon to get some ice cream and then I got lost coming here, so...all in all, not a perfect day."
Gabrielle stares at him. He has used as many words as she uses in a day in a single sentence. He is silent now, though, and she feels the pressure on her tongue that tells her she should speak. "How long have you been in Paris?"
"Two months. I know, I know, I should be able to find my way around by now. But I'd forgotten my map this morning and I thought that I was fine. Apparently I was not."
Gabrielle shrugs. "I still get lost sometimes," she confesses. "Paris is a beautiful labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth. When you forget that, it can catch you in its streets."
He smiles. "Thanks. That actually makes me feel better."
"Although you really should work on your accent, if you're planning on staying here," she continues. "I mean, I could barely understand you this morning when you tried speaking French."
He groans. "It's just so difficult. All those throaty noises. It's a very...involved...language. English is easier."
"You're just lazy." She grins at him and finds herself offering, "Tell you what. I'll help you out with your French if you promise to buy me a croissant at the end of it."
He looks surprised, and she can't blame him, because she is surprised and the words have fallen inexplicably from her own mouth. But he likes to talk, and he likes to talk to her, and those two preferences have not combined in a single person since her first few years at school.
"Are you sure?"
It would be easy to tell him that she was joking, but it would also be sad, and so she says, "Of course I'm sure. We can meet in a café by my work at lunch, if you can make it there."
And he says okay and she says okay and they make arrangements to meet every day that week for an hour.
They do; they meet that week and the next, but Dennis doesn't ask Gabrielle out to dinner again, or out for breakfast, or to anything other than the daily coffee where she—and the waiters—grill him on pronunciation.
"Merlin, this is agonizing," he tells her at their seventeenth meeting.
"French is not agonizing," she says. "It is lovely. Prettier than English, with your harsh noises and angry consonants."
"But, Gab," his voice is inching dangerously close to a whine, "it is so difficult."
"So is life. Somehow you're still doing that." The words have slipped out before Gab can think about how they'll sound, and she only realises their morbidity when Dennis raises his eyebrows at her.
"Are you feeling okay, Gabrielle?" he asks. "Do you need to talk about something?"
"I'm fine. I'm just saying, it is a generally accepted fact that life sort of sucks. And since you're still living, you can learn French. I have faith in you." She sips from her coffee, ignoring the incredulous look on his face. "You have come a long way."
"You have," one of the waiters says as he drops the bill off at a table near them. "I can almost understand you sometimes."
Dennis drops his face into his hands and groans. "Gabrielle," he whines. "Please, help me."
"I have been." She sighs, then reaches for his hands and pulls them away from his eyes. "Maybe a change of location will help. Why don't you come to my flat tomorrow night? We'll order in food and practise your French after dinner." She feels bold suggesting it; she hasn't had anyone into her flat since Charles's disastrous last night, when he told her she was cold and beautiful and he loved her hair and her skin but he'd never loved her.
Dennis nods. There is something bright in his eyes when he says, "That sounds good."
"Great. Do you have your map on you?" Gabrielle shows him which metro lines to take to get to her flat and leaves him sitting alone at the table, mouthing the word "oiseau" over and over into his coffee cup.
He arrives early the next night, and she hasn't quite finished moving her piles of scarves and jeans from the couch to her bedroom. She lets him in and he collapses among the tangles of coloured cloth. "Gab," he begins, picking up a scarf and winding it around his hands like it's the most natural thing in the world, "do you think we can take tonight off from French?"
She rolls her eyes. Typical Dennis. "No," she tells him. "Tonight is about French."
"I thought tonight was about getting to know me better," he says, sticking his lower lip out in a mock pout.
She doesn't respond. He's been trying this sort of thing out on her—this teasing, this friendship-maybe-something-more thing—and she refuses to give in. Because if they are friends (and maybe they are) it's happened accidentally, and she doesn't want him to coerce her into anything else, anything closer.
They eat crêpes seated on the floor, while she quizzes him on the words he has the most difficulty with, mostly involving "r"s, because those hurt to hear.
After two hours, he collapses back on her carpet and says to the ceiling, "Gabrielle Delacour will you please stop?"
She had been reading to him from Le Petit prince, so that he can repeat the page after her, but she cuts off midsentence. "Stop what?"
"Teaching me French. For tonight. I appreciate you helping me, I do." He sits up. "I really really do. But just tonight, can't we do something else?"
She looks at him. He doesn't ask for much, she realises, and he hasn't ever made her wish that she had never spoken to him that day by the Eiffel Tower.
"Okay," she says, setting Le Petit prince beside her. "What do you want to do?"
"You mean it?"
"Yes, Dennis. We can stop practising French tonight."
He jumps to his feet and says, "You are brilliant, Gabrielle."
She ignores this. "What do you want to do?" she asks again.
"Let's go out on the town."
"To a bar?"
"Sure, if you want to. Or we could just go out and see where the city takes us."
She shrugs and disappears in her kitchen, returning with a barely-begun bottle of wine. The city will take them to the Seine, it always does, and wine tastes best on its banks.
Gabrielle doesn't say anything as they wander through the streets, but her silence is always okay with Dennis. He fills the air with news of Britain and the gossip from his building and her quietness doesn't feel abnormal.
They find a spot by the dark water and Gab hands him the bottle of wine. As they pass it between each other even Dennis falls silent. They sit there for hours, breathing visible clouds into the air, not speaking. The wine sends Gabrielle into a peaceful lethargy, and she lets her head fall against Dennis's shoulder. He doesn't touch her, but he doesn't push her away, either.
He finally nudges her and whispers, "Gabrielle? We should probably get going."
"Okay," she murmurs sleepily, pressing her palms down on the cold concrete until she manages to get to her feet. She reaches for Dennis's arm as soon as he's standing beside her and says, "Lead on, Denny."
If she were sober she would be horrified at the fondness in his eyes as he starts leading her home. But she is not, and so she doesn't notice that he keeps looking at her like he could love her, someday.
He leaves her in her kitchen with a glass of water and Floos from her fireplace to his own flat. She falls asleep at her table, her face pressed against the polished wood. She feels peaceful, sleeping like that, caught somewhere between drunk and really happy—caught somewhere in her past or maybe her future.
After three more days of French lessons at the café, Dennis once again begins complaining. "Gab, can't we go somewhere else?"
She shakes her head. "You didn't learn much when we went to my place," she tells him.
He mutters, "I did. Just not about fucking French."
"Come on, Dennis, you're doing so well."
"Good. So reward me by coming over to mine tomorrow night."
She hesitates. For some reason this feels dangerous. She knows him and she likes him and it shouldn't, but it does.
"Why?" she asks.
"Because friends hang out at each other's places. And I've been to yours, so why shouldn't you come to mine?"
"Fine. Where do you live?"
The next night she brings him a bottle of wine, and he answers the door with a platter of oven-warmed chips as an appetiser.
"Sorry it's not fancier," he tells her as they sit down at his table, and she laughs.
"At least you cooked; I just ordered in, remember?"
She feels something in the air as they eat. Dennis is talking just as much as normal, and she is not-talking just as much as normal, but for some reason tonight feels different.
Gabrielle interrupts him, for the first time. "Do you ever think about going home?" she asks.
"Home to England?"
Where else would she mean? She nods.
"I did. A lot. Not recently, though."
"What's changed?" Gabrielle knows that she shouldn't ask. She knows that the answer will be the one she's both dreading and hoping for—she likes Dennis the way she liked Charles, except that he doesn't scare her, he doesn't push her out of herself, and so she likes him more.
She remembers when they first met by the Eiffel Tower and he made her blush. She knows that at that moment she wanted to make him turn a brighter red, but she hasn't succeeded in making him flush until now. And now his skin is lobster-red, and she feels guilty for pushing.
"Well," he says, drawing the word out, "I've got you, now. As a friend, I mean. I've got a friend. Who speaks French. And that has made a big difference."
She wants to ask him more questions. Gabrielle wants to know him, and that is terrifying. She can't help herself as she says, "You've made it better for me, too. Even though you can't speak French."
He laughs, and they both relax a little. "I thought you said I was getting better?"
"Better does not mean that you're comprehensible."
Dennis rolls his eyes. "Enough about French. Do you want ice cream?"
"Is Berthillon open?"
"No." He shakes his head. "But I have some here. We could eat some and play cards or read or shout obscenities out the window, whatever you want."
"Let's not do that last one." She stands and clears their dinner dishes while Dennis scoops ice cream for the both of them, and they sit on his couch. They end up talking—Dennis ends up talking—and Gabrielle falls asleep, her head pillowed on the end of the couch, her feet in Dennis's lap.
She wakes a few hours later to a flash of light.
"What?" Gabrielle rolls over and finds Dennis at the window, a camera hanging loosely from his hand.
"Oh, shit, sorry Gab." He holds up the camera as an explanation, "I forgot to turn the flash off—I was trying to get a photo of the city." He shrugs. "My mum sent me an owl asking for a picture of it at night, you know, and I just remembered."
Gab can feel all the tenseness from the before bursting back into her body. "You have a camera."
"Doesn't everyone?" he sets the clunky device on the counter and comes over to her. "You can go back to sleep, I didn't mean to wake you."
"But that's a nice camera." She is staring at it like something from a nightmare.
He nods. "Yeah. It's not...It belonged to someone else before me."
She doesn't say anything.
"Do you want to see it?" He reaches to take it from the counter and holds it out to her, dangling it by the strap.
"No," she snaps. "Sorry, Dennis, I've got to go."
She reaches for where her coat has fallen to the floor, but Dennis grabs it before she can. "What's wrong, Gabby? I can't fix it unless you tell me."
"You can't fix it," she grinds out. "It is unfixable."
"Well, tell me then. Tell me what's so horrible that you run away whenever things start going well."
"How do you know I do that?" She has her arms crossed tight over her stomach and she's looking up at him and she wishes she were anywhere, anywhere else. "I've never done that with you, have I?"
"You're always pulling away, Gabrielle. It's like a constant state for you. Merlin, all I want is to know why. Why can't you just tell me?"
"Because I didn't hurt the way everyone else did," she says. She is looking at her feet, flat on his floor, and at his feet, less than eight centimetres away from hers.
"What do you mean?" He kneels down so that his body has joined his feet, so that his face is there. So that he can see her eyes. He wants to know her, and it is stupid that she still can't get away from him.
"I mean that all I had of the War was one night, and it ruined me." She bites her lip. He was there for it, at Hogwarts for it, he probably has scars that cut so deeply that sometimes he can barely breathe. And she..."I was at my sister's wedding and I was taking pictures. I'd never seen Fleur so happy. And Bill and my parents—they were all laughing and crying and smiling. And Fleur had given me a camera the night before and she asked me to take pictures of everything. And so I was, and then...and then...they came, and there were screams, and Harry and Ron and Hermione were gone, and somehow I just kept taking pictures, more pictures, even though I didn't want to. And afterwards, when I was home, and Fleur was still there, fighting...I looked through them." She raises her eyes to find that he is looking at her but he is not judging her. Not visibly. "And everyone was terrified." She shakes her head. "And I cowered in France and that was okay because I was young, but everyone over there fought and fought and I knew that they were scared—I had proof of it—but they kept fighting." She raises one hand hesitantly to Dennis's cheek and brushes her fingertips against his skin. "You kept fighting."
He sighs. "Gabrielle, we had no choice. Some of us were stupid about it. My older brother," his voice cracks but she refuses to look away. "He had been safe, but he went back for the final battle. Colin had that reckless idiocy to him. He was always more outgoing and stupider than I was. But I wish I had gone with him that night. It's awful, but if I had been there, I'd have been the slowest one—I'd have gotten killed first, and maybe it would have given him time." Dennis is blurry in front of her. She wishes that she were strong enough to hear these words without thanking all the forces in the universe that he did not accompany his brother on his suicide mission. Dennis coughs before continuing, "That camera was his. He always had it with him; he loved photography."
They aren't moving. Gabrielle's hands are in her lap and Dennis's are pressed against the floor, keeping his balance.
"But doesn't that make you hate photography? I hate it, and it's only from one night. Not a whole lifetime of memories."
Dennis shrugs. "He loved it. I can't hate something he loved, although sometimes I wish I could."
"Do you think it's unhealthy?"
"What?" The space between them feels bigger now, even though neither of them have moved.
"The way I am. The way I can't get past that night. You lost someone, you lost a lot of people, but you're mostly okay. Why am I not okay?"
"Gab, I'm not even moderately okay. I put up a better front than you, maybe, but Merlin, look at me. I moved to France to get away from all the memories, to get away from my poor parents, who aren't even magic, who can't even understand. I left a good job to come here and wander around a city I don't love trying to speak a language I don't understand. And then I run into you—and Gabrielle, you are beautiful, but you are visibly broken—and I think that maybe you'll be good for me, a distraction, but all I'm doing is reaching for you and all you're doing is pulling away and none of this is healthy." He shakes his head. "We don't even really know each other."
"You know me," she tells him. "You know me better than anyone else."
He chuckles, a heartbreaking sound. "I'm sorry, Gabby, but that doesn't mean much."
"But," she pleads, "what are you saying? That we can't—do whatever anymore?"
"I don't know, Gabrielle." He lifts his hands from the floor and runs them through his hair, sending it up from his head. "I didn't even know we were doing anything."
"We were friends," she speaks softly, like she's confessing to him.
"Were we? Is that what it's like to be your friend? To always make the first move?"
"I invited you over first," she says, even though now that feels inadequate.
"After I practically begged."
He looks at her again, and this time his eyes are hard—she's never seen him this upset before. And she realises with a sick feeling to her stomach that she has been hurting him—slowly digging razor sharp beneath his skin—every time she acts as if he means nothing to her.
She wants to touch him again, but the air between them is thick with his hurt and hers, so she grips her hands together and begins, "I am awful at this. At feeling, I mean. I have reasons, but they're all stupid, and it's mostly because I'm scared." He is still looking at her, his face a little more giving now, his eyes a little less harsh. "But you're the first person I've met in a long time to make me feel like the fear is worth it."
"I cannot do this, Gabby. I can't speak in riddles the way you do; I can't figure you out. I need you to tell me something real."
She's still making a mess of things. "I'm trying. I told you I'm bad at this. Look, Dennis, I haven't even kissed anyone in three years. You've noticed that I am quite good at pushing people away. But you've stayed and you're still here," although it occurs to her that that might be because they are in his flat, "and you amaze me. Every day, you astonish me a little more, about something new. I'm not going to tell you that I love you, because I don't know if I do, but I know that I do like you and that sometimes I think about kissing you and touching you and everything and the thought of you touching me doesn't make me feel like a thing, like something pretty to be tossed around, and I do like you. I like you a lot." She inhales because he has not looked away from her but he has not spoken, either. "And that is rare, Dennis. If you like me at all, in any way, even though I am horrid and selfish and cold, if you like me despite all that, then I cannot just let you go—I can't make you go away this time."
"You know that I'm pushy and lazy and boring, right?" he asks. "I am twenty-five and I've done nothing with my life. I can't even speak French properly, despite your extraordinary efforts."
"What are you doing?" Gabrielle asks.
"I am telling you that I have flaws; that we are having this conversation not just because of you and your neuroses, but because of me and mine."
Gabrielle laughs. "Of course I know that you have flaws. I saw your flaws before I knew you."
"Oh, good, well that's comforting."
She can breathe again, now that he doesn't seem to want her gone. Her eyes flick from his eyes to his lips and then she slides from the couch to the floor in front of him and she leans forward tentatively. He follows the angle of her head and brings his lips to hers, and the kiss is nothing like dreams—there are no fireworks, and they both taste rather like tomato sauce—but they'll get better, with practise.
A/N: I hope that I didn't destroy Paris or France or the French language in this, and that it was worthy of your Dennis and Gabrielle, Tat!