Motherhood

Motherhood

The low-hanging moon rested perfectly centered in the window, offering just enough natural light to see by. Not that Fleur was planning on racing around the room any time soon. At such a late hour at night, she was perfectly content to stay right where she was: slouched in a rocking chair with a small bundle that was much heavier than it should have been. The plaster walls had been recently charmed blue, giving the room a feel that Fleur was still trying to get used to. After two baby girls, having a son was new territory for her. Not that brave new situations had ever been a disturbance to her -- simply looking at what her life had become now from who she was as a young woman was proof enough of that.

If any of her old classmates from Beauxbatons walked into the room and saw her now, she was sure they wouldn't believe the woman there was the Fleur Delacour. While she was still in school, the girls in her classes had joked that if Fleur could pay someone to go through her pregnancies for her, she would. Even Fleur would have never believed she would have resigned herself to a life of dirty nappies, play dates, and playing 'Maman'. Even her own mother hadn't been as much of the dedicated caretaker that Fleur had molded herself into.

The baby boy in her arms began to make fussing noises, but when Fleur looked down, the infant's features were smooth and he was still soundly asleep. He must have just been dreaming.

"Fleur?"

Reflexes slowed from exhaustion, Fleur finally looked up to see her tall, redheaded husband leaning against the doorway. His hair was mussed from sleep and his eyes were so bleary, he couldn't seem to stop rubbing them.

"What are you doing up so late, love?" he asked.

Gesturing downward with her head, Fleur breathed an exhausted sigh. "Ze bebe."

"Hmm, I didn't hear him cry."

"'ee wasn't," Fleur answered, patting the bundled infant on the back.

The truth was, every night this week that Fleur had been up with her new little boy, it had never been once because he was crying. In fact, the newborn spent so much of his day asleep or completely silent, that Fleur began to worry that that was a sign that something was wrong with Louis. But after at least a dozen visits to the Healer, Fleur became convinced that she was simply not used to raising an easy baby. Still, it did nothing to stop her from waking up in the dead of night, every night just to hold her son until Bill would wake up and remind her that a person needed sleep in order to function, and that she had two other children she would need to care for in the morning.

Granted, Bill was truly a good sport about helping out with the girls while Fleur was caring for Louis, but she knew far too well that her daughters were masters of manipulation and that Bill was an easy target.

"Force of habit, I suppose," Bill chuckled as he did his best to stifle a yawn.

Fleur nodded along with her husband, though she did not find the notion so funny.

After two children, Fleur did not consider the notion she saw children as exhausting as a habit, but as scientific fact. None of Fleur's other children had allowed her an acceptable amount of sleep--nor any sort of peace whatsoever--during their first few months of life. Victoire woke up screeching every three hours until she was three months old. Even the nurses at the maternity ward at St. Mungo's seemed to have been driven insane by Bill and Fleur's firstborn. Neither of them believed they could raise a more difficult child, or at least until Dominique was born two years later.

The first few weeks of the new baby's life passed uneventfully enough, leading the young couple to believe they might be allowed some peace with this child. But Dominique proved them wrong by being stricken with three separate incidents of colic that potions could do nothing to sooth, refusing to eat most types of baby food, making her extremely thin, and the new baby in the house did wonders to turn the sweet toddler, Victoire, into a jealous, terrorizing little monster. George had even been able to say, with complete seriousness, he thought he had once seen his little niece's face flash to become that of some fierce-looking bird for a small moment in time.

Most of the Weasleys had already come to have some regrets about having Veela children in their family. She really had to give her father some credit for not breathing a word of it before her wedding. Now there was no going back.

But it wasn't just in his behavior that Louis was completely different from his older sisters. While Fleur's daughters each had heads of primarily blond hair and bright blue eyes, Louis was built in a much more sturdy design. He had barely any hair, but the small bit of fuzz that was just starting to grow was clearly going to be the bright Weasley red. He was a long baby, so it was easy to see he was going to be tall, like his father.

"Why don't I take him for a little while?" Bill offered once he made his way to the side of the rocking chair. "Let me feel like I had something to do with raising my firstborn son."

Fleur was a bit reluctant at first, but quickly realized how ridiculous she was being. Bill had more than proved himself to be an apt father, but Fleur simply couldn't help herself. Maybe it was motherly instinct telling her that no one could raise her babies better than she could, but Fleur was convinced that she had it worse than anyone else in the world. And that a lot of it was simply due to her own nature.

"Bill, did you ever imagine your life turning out like zis?"

Bill looked up from baby Louis. "I don't know. How do you mean?"

Fleur turned away from the window to better explain herself. "Ze house, all zese babies. When you were a Curse-Breaker and were working everyday in Egypt, did you ever zink your life would come to zis place: such a domestic existence?"

Confused, Bill moved to put Louis away in his crib.

"I never did," Fleur finally finished. "Never in all my years would I 'ave ever imagined I would come to lead a life like zis before I was even t'irty!"

Bill crept up closer to his wife and put his hand on her shoulder. "Fleur, what are you trying to say?"

Fleur clenched her jaw in an attempt to keep herself in the composed disposition she prided herself on, but she couldn't stop her eyes from beginning to pour.

"I do not 'ave zhe temperament needed for zis kind of life!" she burst out suddenly. "It iz not good for me or for anyone else!"

"Fleur," Bill put both hands on her shoulders, "you should go back to bed. You haven't had a proper night's sleep in days. And frankly, love, you're starting to ramble."

Fleur took an extreme offence to this critique of her state of mind. "Don't you dare try to brush dis off!" she shrieked. "I am trying to tell you ze trut'!"

Despite the fact that Louis had never been a fussy baby, his mother's loud voice was more than enough to wake the baby up and make him start bawling. Bill groaned to himself, but stepped away from Fleur as he was doing so, almost as though he was afraid of what his wife might do to him.

"I'll tend to Louis," he told her as he picked up the baby once again. "Go back to bed, please, Fleur."

As he held the fussing baby, he nodded his head towards the door, insisting Fleur to move along.

Fleur made her way down the hallway, which also was amply lit by the full moon. Full moon, Fleur thought to herself in a hazy sort of way. No wonder 'ee is so full of energy at such a late hour. This happened every month. Though Bill's side-effects from his lycanthropy were limited, his ability to stay up all through the night on the full moon. Well, that and his taste for meat that was rare, even by Fleur's standards. It had always been a secret worry of hers that her children would grow up thinking it was perfectly acceptable to eat raw meat right out of the package.

Suddenly, she was interrupted from her musings by a quick, sharp pain at the bottom of her foot. She yelped and looked down to see the brightly colored blocks that had been one of the new baby gifts for Louis (although how anyone expected Louis to play with them, Fleur had no idea). For now, though, the older girls were the ones who were getting the most pleasure out of them. The wobbly, toppled remains of a tower lay across the floor trimming, against the wall.

Merlin, I am rambling, Fleur thought to herself, holding her hand up against her forehead. I probably should be getting to bed.

Those plans, however, were soon brought to a screeching halt as soon as Fleur heard a scream coming from the girls' room. "Mummy, I need you!"

At the end of the hall, just behind the banister, stood a door covered in childish drawings and sloppy attempts at spelling that Fleur could only imagine were Victoire's attempts to co notate some rather nasty things about her new roommate, Dominique.

With the new baby, the two sisters had only just recently begun sharing a room, a concept that neither girl was accepting quietly. There was not one day that passed where three-year-old Victoire did not continue her dramatic complaints about the smell of her younger sister's nappies or torment Dominique whenever the one-year-old was trapped behind the bars of her crib. In turn, Dominique would find her way into anything that wasn't charmed shut and always end up making a horrid mess, and then there were the constant tantrums: wanting to get out of her crib, and then wanting back in. And then out again, and just about anything else she could find to cry about. Yes, the one thing the girls had taken to was making one another miserable. It was their single source of agreement.

"Mummy!" Victoire shrieked once again, and then Dominique joined in with her own wailing.

There would be no stalling to be done anymore; Fleur would have to see what was wrong. Mummy? she thought to herself. I really am raising British children.

Opening the bedroom door, Fleur first made a quick survey to look for anything that might be broken or thrown from one of the two beds. Nothing. Hopefully, whatever her firstborn wanted would be something relatively minor.

"Yez, Victoire," Fleur asked, sighing as she knelt down at her daughter's bedside. "What iz ze matter?"

The little girl parted her lips, as though about to speak, but then clapped them shut and shook her head rapidly.

"Victoire," Fleur prodded her daughter, "tell me."

Finally, she answered her mother in a quiet whisper. "Are you and Daddy going to leave?"

Of all the things Fleur might have guessed were the reasons behind her daughter's call in the night, this had most certainly not been one of them. "What do you mean?"

"My friend, Reggie, his mummy and daddy don't live together anymore, and he says that when parents fight all the time, one of them leaves. And then I had a dream that both of you left and the babies were crying, but I couldn't reach them in their cribs and no one was here to help me..."

Victoire went on a few moments longer with the details of her dream: how the house started to smell really bad, and the plants all died, and the owls stopped bringing mail because they couldn't stand visiting the Shell Cottage anymore.

"Are you going to leave?" Victoire finished finally.

Fleur was surprised by the frankness of her daughter's question. "Of course not! Why on earth would you zink zat? Eet was just a dream."

"But you and Daddy were yelling just now," Victoire explained. "I heard you."

This was true. Fleur knew that now she couldn't very well lie to her daughter and say she was mistaken.

"Love, Mummy was yelling because she was up late and she was cranky," Fleur began to explain. "You know how leetle Dominique cries and cries when she 'as not 'ad 'er nap? Grown-ups get cranky like zat too. But instead of crying, we yell really, really loud."

To illustrate this, Fleur shouted a few loud nonsense words, causing Victoire to laugh and join in. Even little Dominique began to shout and shake at the bars of her crib, thinking this was some new game.

"Alright," Fleur finally brought an end to the yell. "So everyzing is fine now? No more worries about Mummy and Daddy?"

Victoire shook her head with great sincerity.

"Wonderful, zen you can go back to bed."

Victoire pouted at this, but still allowed her mother to tuck her back in under her quilt and she eventually settled into the blankets while Fleur made to way across the room to calm the still excited Dominique. She picked the baby up and then set her down on her stomach, rubbing Dominique's back and humming softly. Eventually, even the little baby girl had nodded off and the entire room was quiet and still, the way it should have been past two in the morning.

Off to the side, the door creaked open and out of the corner of her eyes, Fleur could see Bill. No baby boy in his arms and a content expression on his face allowed her the assurance that everything was fine in the rest of the house.

"Do you still think you're a bad mother?" he asked her playfully.

"Bill, I just gave birt' and I 'ave not slept in nearly a week," she answered him as she made her way to the doorway and gripped his chin. "Don't you know that my word cannot be trusted?"