Forevermore

**

They weren't talking to her. Why weren't they talking to her?

Fleur stood in the center of the entrance hall of Grimmauld Place and screamed, screamed until her throat was hoarse and her voice cracked painfully, and no one even looked her way.

The Order members passed by her, walked through her without a second glance, hollow-eyed and silent. No one had been normal since things had gone so terribly wrong, but now Fleur was left alone and Fleur ached with a cancerous sickness of the heart and no one cared enough to see.

She tried speaking politely to her mother-in-law, tried yelling at Aurors and pleaded with criminals, but no one acknowledged her.

She tried beating on walls and knocking things over, but her hands were insubstantial and her spirit too weak.

Fleur Delacour felt helpless and hopeless as she had watching that green flash steal her sister. Fleur felt as broken as she had when her lover had turned from her, feral and violent, into the embrace of a sharp-toothed monster.

Fleur had thought that the hardest part of dying had come with a green flash and a fierce grin, but now, insubstantial and ineffectual, she realized that had been the easy part.

She could see herself reflected in mirrors and windows, a glowing, ethereal spirit that looked more angel than ghost. She couldn't understand why she was trapped thusly, trapped between the earthly world and the heavens that she had believed in so deeply. Still believed in fully, from the glimpse of the sun floating through the dusty windows and sending warmth and love through her core.

She hoped Gabrielle was safe, wasn't trapped in a half-death of frustration and emptiness.

She haunted the uppermost floors of Grimmauld Place, most often, because it hurt less to be alone. She couldn't bear standing a hair's breath away from one of the hopeful, living remnants of her own life and not see a reaction. The young boys who had always adored her didn't even know when she was in the same room, whispering to them of their beauty and appeal, trying to fulfill their fantasy so they might imagine her into visibility.

As the days crept into weeks and weeks transformed into months, Fleur grew more desperate. She screamed and pounded on doors and walls and floors, hoping to somehow make a sound and affect the world she was existing in. She tried to rip out her long, flowing locks and clawed at her face, trying to mar the serene beauty of her figure.

She thrust her fists through witches and wizards that made their way through the house, stepped through their warm bodies hoping they'd feel the iciness of her despair. She spent days trying to slide a book, trace a letter on a fogged window, extinguish a candle's flame but to no avail.

Fleur was incapable of doing anything to her environment. She couldn't venture past the doors of this gloomy, terrible home she'd died in, could do nothing to break through the invisible layers to somehow touch or feel or experience anything.

She thought that she would lose her mind, sometimes, before realizing that she had nothing left but a mind. She had no form, nothing to make her real. Her body had long since turned to a rotten, messy pulp of flesh and bone and hair, the things she had cared for so much in her life and longed for so badly in her death.

She was nothing but a memory in the minds of the people who passed beneath her, a fading memory of inhuman beauty and haughty splendor, a memory that would fade to only the impression of blonde hair and a conceited air. The only one who had truly seen her for the frightened, insecure girl she had been was lost, even more lost than she.

Bill was now as feral as the man who had infected him, mind diseased by blood and gore and primal urges to rip through tender throats and rut flesh willing and unwilling alike. She saw nightmare images of him doing monstrous deeds in Pensieve illusions and heartbroken expressions, and remembered that she once had been the monster. Once, she had been the one with the sharp eye and predatory stalk, inherited reminders that she wasn't as human as she acted.

Now, she was less and more human than ever, no longer of the flesh, but freed from the urges her flesh had once given her. Now she felt only horror and despair at the thought of her amicable lover turned ravaging beast, now she scarcely mourned her own forgotten flesh and wished only that she could save him.

But Fleur was unable to save herself from her soul-fettered prison. She couldn't free herself from her own insubstantial nature, couldn't move past the place of her death. Fleur couldn't help her lover because Fleur was as lost as he was.

Fleur walked dust-carpeted halls and tried to weep, but was unable.