After Peter's already told Voldemort the location of the Potter's residence at Godric's Hollow, saving his own life, he escapes the Dark Lord and runs to Dumbledore. Unfortunately, the only opportunity he has comes just as Voldemort enters their residence, and Dumbledore doesn't make it in time. Peter flees when Sirius arrives, ready to kill him, but through sense of smell, he tracks him to a neighboring Muggle area.

"I didn't mean to do it," he cried, real tears streaming from his eyes. "I swear on my life, Sirius; I mean, I loved James like a brother!"

"He treated you like a brother! But you were a coward, and now he's dead, and I'll never forgive you for that--"

"I don't need your forgiveness," he muttered stubbornly, though Sirius didn't hear him. "I can never bring James back," he said louder, "but I helped stop his killer. We're even."

"Even?" Belligerently, Sirius began hurling curses. At some point, he had stopped thinking of incantations, and in his incoherence, he hadn't noticed Peter was begging for him to stop. "It won't be even until you take his place! And if I can't bring James and Lily back, at least I can STOP HIS KILLER--"

That was when the street exploded, and the innocent Aurors Apparating in saw Sirius Black with his wand out, standing next to a blaze of fire. Muggles were running in every direction, but it didn't matter; the damage had been done, and a line of Muggle bodies were decorating the pavement.

"Dark magic!" one auror said. The laughing suspect did not attempt to fight back as they maneuvered him into the fetal position before placing him in a full-body bind. When the others reared back as if to kick the supposed dark wizard, he finally regained some of his sanity, glaring at the offensive men. "You deserve worse than this for what you did--"

"Gentlemen," a booming voice said, "I suggest you take your hands off of that man at once." From the shadows, a tall, ancient-looking man appeared, every line on his face pulled taut in rage. "I will not ask twice."

Alastor Moody pulled the first auror aside, grinding his forearm with his mallot-sized fists. Albus Dumbledore ignored them and swept forward, removing Sirius' bindings with a single flick of his wand. "I will be escorting you away from here," he whispered, "and then we will decide what to do about Harry."

The word struck a nerve in the heart-broken man. For the first time since hearing of Lily's death, he had hope. "He's alive?"

"Oh, yes," Dumbledore said, some twinkle returning to his cerulean eyes. "The boy lives." Sirius realized belatedly there were tears crashing onto his Headmaster's purple robes. It wasn't until Albus wrapped a grandfatherly arm around Sirius' shoulders that he realized he was the one crying. When Sirius finally regained some form of control over his emotions, Dumbledore steered him toward Alastor, who had just finished a scathing review of his auror's behavior. The haggard master auror handed him a dusty old boot, looking like the night was beyond words.

"What are you preparing to do?"

Albus smiled, though his face seemed to reject the expression. Alastor knew he wouldn't be getting a truthful answer, but then, he never expected one. "I may take a leave of absence," he said, glancing meaningfully at Sirius. "It's been nearly four decades since I've had a vacation. I figure I'm due a 'beach day', as they call it."

Something told Alastor his old friend would be gone much longer than a day. But he didn't like talking about these things in front of the other aurors, who were a lot less loyal than the runts of his day. He bid Albus farewell, with the ancient wizard promising to present Sirius to the Ministry for questioning at the moment they were required to do so.

Something told Alastor that Albus wouldn't show. With the state of the Ministry was in, he wasn't sure he wanted him to.

Dumbledore presented Sirius with the boot, keeping his fingers wrapped around one shoe string. "Harry is going to need you."

"But Peter is still out there! James and Lily's killer and my one-time friend! You saw what he's capable of, Alb--sir. We can't just let him go on, knowing that he's serving Voldemort."

"I don't believe he was." Sirius' face spoke more than words ever could so he added, "Peter came to me to save them, but he had to get away from Voldemort first. By the time I arrived..."

"It doesn't matter," Sirius said firmly, "one day, I will have my revenge, and the world is going to know what Peter has done."

"But right now, we've got a bunch of aurors that have seen you cast an Unforgivable curse on a street full of Muggles, and even Alastor can't keep you from Crouch's clutches. Without Peter to present as evidence to the contrary, you will likely wind up with life's imprisonment in Azkaban for your actions."

Sirius initially balked at the idea, but Dumbledore was quick to persuade him that the threat was quite real. Eventually, he asked, "What do we do?"

"I hear France is nice this time of year," Albus said coyly. "I have an old colleague who has requested my assistance with a most interesting Alchemical experiment."

Sirius didn't quite believe him, but he wasn't entirely opposed to some time spent in France, especially if it was going to keep him out of Azkaban. "I'll do it, sir," he swore. "For Harry, and for Lily and James. It's the least I can do for them after..."

 

Hmmm, I had something very similar in mind. I also like the after CoS idea.
Don't really know what to try. I have 5000 words of a GOF divergence written, and have some of the political plot planned.

 

Fleur the outcast is certainly doable...
(Everything is made up as I go along, so likely won't fit canon exactly without further tweaking)

You think Magical England is bad? Where mudblood is a common enough word that nearly everyone with at least one wizarding parent knows what it means, and is acceptable to throw around in school corridors with nothing more than a slap on the wrist?

Where an outed werewolf would rather quit his job and flee the country than face the angry mob that he knew would be coming for him, once they found out a flea-ridden creature had been in the same room as their darling children?

Where entire species of talking, reasoning beings are classified as 'creatures', rather than beings. Forces to leave in the edges of human civilization, and at risk of being put down like a wild fox?

The continent is worse. Britain's downright progressive when it comes to the rights of the non-purebloods.

Whilst Grindlewald was cast down from his seat of power, nothing was done to stop his seconds. Germany, Austria, Poland, and Switzerland are all under the thrall of the über Zauberer. Life is fine, if you can prove that your last three generations all had magic, walked on two legs, and graduated from Die Reinen Akadamie. Newly birthed Schlammboren are kidnapped, and given to the spawling villages of commoners, who have hope that maybe the grandchildren's grandchildren might be taken as a third concubine by a local lord.

Of course, things are slightly better in the BGT Coaliation, a free trade state between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. Home to the prestigious Durmstrang, all wizards and witches are taught their superiority, graced by the magic that runs through their veins. Certainly, there is a rigid caste system, with no hope of rising above one's station, but it is a complete (and functional) meritocracy. And with the extreme advantages given to those who dwell in their ancestral manors, having tuition from the time they were old enough to raise a wand, not many muggle born ever get the chance to rise to even the middle.

France, to be fair, is not as bad as it could be:
Muggle baiting is illegal (if it kills, or permanently maims the muggle).
Non-humans have rights (to own property. And that's about it. Courts won't accept their testimony, and no case has ever been brought against a human by anything... Lesser.).
And whilst the more progressive can point to Madame Maxime, and show how a non-human can rise to a position of power, you have to remember she's in charge of a school. One of the three main schools of Europe (or, possible, one of the three schools that has a similar enough outlook to Hogwarts, if you need the plot point), but still just a school teacher. She never duelled a dark lord to defeat, and was never in charge of her countries Judicial body (although her father had to step down from his position as a member, after the truth about his predilections came out), and she certainly wasn't a representative for her country on the World Stage.




Fleur isn't shunned because she's beautiful.

She's shunned because she's an animal. Barely human. Why does she even deserve a wand?

Oh, the classmates can certainly play nice whilst in Britain, they know what a country of bleeding hearts it is, but there's no hope for her to EVER get a job back in France, not now after showing her country up so much that SHE would be picked above everyone else.

 

New pet peeve: Wizarding Britain is not quite cool, Continent is hell.

 

I think a fundamental part of Fleur's character is the fact she is next to unattainable. You might want to portray her as an outcast and even do it successfully but it needs to be tempered by the fact that despite their revulsion they can't resist her.
This will lead to a lot of angsty situation with potential to go grimdark.
It all depends on how it is handled frankly speaking. Balance is the name of the game and this is a razor's edge.

 

Why wouldn't they be able to resist her? She's not full Veela, in fact, she's a quarter. An attraction to her seems to be mostly natural beauty, and what you see in Ron asking her and stuttering all over himself is a natural reaction of a 14 year old asking a beautiful 17 year old to a dance—one that he knows is way out of his league.

And as far as "hard to get" is concerned, it doesn't seem so. She went to the ball with a 7th year, made out with him. Later was attracted to the oldest Weasley, and married him. In fact, she seems like a typical teenager.

Now, from Harry's or Ron's perspective, sure, she's well-nigh impossible to land as a date, let alone a girlfriend. But that's why, IMO, it's so much fun writing that pairing.

 

I don't really think this is important to point out again, but Roger was a sixth year. He was still at Hogwarts the following year. Remember all that drama with Cho?

 

Actually Ron asking her to the ball was a result of her Veela magic. That is canon. But that's not what I was trying to say. My point being that if you're gonna write her as an outcast you can't write her as a regular one where everyone hates her, avoids her or is indifferent to her. You can't have people being oblivious or unaffected by her beauty.

 

I've got scraps and snippets scattered around, and a bit of an outline buried somewhere in my Dropbox, but I'm having RL troubles atm.

 

While I'm not a fan of the 'everyone instantly turns into a sleaze' characterization of Veela allure, it's probably the valid one.

I mean, I've seen it plenty of times around normal hot girls, in different forms depending on the social setting, from the insistent ignoring of signals to outright instructions to fuck off, all the way to some of those cat-calling videos making the rounds on the Internet. And that's just in a regular public setting, like a coffee shop or sidewalk. Take it to somewhere a little less polite or formal, like a party, or somewhere with anonymity in numbers?

It's not that there weren't certain wizards screaming they wanted to whip out their manhood and Engorgio them so they could piss on the cheerleaders tits all the way from the box seats at the Quidditch World Cup. Rowling just chose not to write about them in her book which was aimed at children.

 

Now that's an interesting angle to explore.

Especially if you factor in Harry and his "Boy-Who-Lived" thing.

While Grindelwald might have been a great broadsword that was openly sweeping across Europe like the knights of old, (a competent) Voldemort is/was seen as being a poisonous snake that struck from and retreated into the shadows.

Aka, a whole different can of nightmarish worms than what they were used to, and they were kind of dreading when he began to look towards Europe as Britain began to crumble, as they didn't know how to even conceive of a way on how to combat him effectively.

And then Harry Potter, a child from two magic users, seemingly vanquished him. Either way, he basically saved them from a gigantic headache and a nightmare that they were ill-equipped to fight, let alone stop, thus being a sort of hero in their eyes.

He earns a different sort of reputation amongst Europe's "elite" and the more "in-the-know" magical communities than the one he has in the UK, though from the same source (Voldemort's death).

And then, during an international event, he's shown to be trying to court what is essentially a sub-human in their eyes: a quarter-breed veela.

And he saved another from what might have been a watery grave.

You can imagine the waves this would cause, especially amongst the Durmstrang students.

 

Lamora the issue at doubt isn't really so much the effect Veela have; it's more the mechanism by which it works.

There are two possibilities:

1. Indirect action. The powers of the Veela alter the Veela themselves, making them supernaturally attractive. Men act stupid around naturally attractive women; they act proportionally more stupid around supernaturally attractive women. But this is just the natural reaction of men to supernatural beauty, there's no direct mental manipulation of the men involved.

2. Direct action. The Veela don't increase their own beauty, but rather increase the perception of their beauty in the minds of those around them via direct mental manipulation, making men react unnaturally.

Fanon normally exclusively takes the second route.

My personal interpretation is a mix of the two, but mostly #1. Veela are in general supernaturally beautiful, and the natural reaction of men to this is to act stupid. But when they sing or dance, it casts a spell on those around them to heighten their natural desire to unnatural levels.

Fleur, being only descended from a Veela, would mostly be just the first: she's unnaturally beautiful, and people react strongly to that. But there's a hint that she has a magical voice too, in the way she put her dragon to sleep in the first task.

 

So, recently I've been fascinated by the idea of Felix Felicis and how that could go horribly wrong. The basic premise is that if you use the potion too much things still seem to go right for you, but eventually you start having massive negative effects to counteract something that seems positive.

Harry, in the wake of Dumbledore's death, steals quite a large amount of it from Slughorn and begins to use it. At first things seem to be going great. He gets the strange urge to go to the room of requirement before leaving to go home. Once there he finds Ravenclaw's diadem and gets the strange urge to visit Dumbledore's office one last time where he decides to take the sword of Gryffindor and a few books from his shelves including the Tales of Beedle the Bard. Things seem to be going great all thanks to his magical little potion so he continues to use it.

The first sign of fallout occurs when he escapes from number 4. He makes it as do several others, but the journey is far from perfect and people die as a result of some of the actions he feels compelled to make. He rationalizes this to himself by saying it would have ended up worse if he hadn't taken it. He takes it again while at the Weasley's to learn some of the spells in the books he took from Dumbledore's office, and ends up waking up from his potion induced haze in bed next to a very naked Fleur Delacour on the day she is meant to be married. The last thing he remembers is getting drunk and telling her the prophecy.

Like any addict, he thinks there is time to fix this if he can just get a little more potion. As he is opening the door to go to his room and get the potion, Ginny sees him, and all hell breaks loose at the Burrow. Ron confronts him, but Harry has had time to get more of the potion now. It's telling him to cast the memory charm. He knows too much and if he isn't with him he is too big of a risk. Luckily, Hermione intervenes before he fries the poor boys brain and does the job herself. Harry, Fleur, and Hermione flee the burrow.

Fleur is a wreck. She betrayed the man she loved and was going to be married to for a kid she barely knows. Hermione is in a similar state in regards to Ron, but she rationalizes that it was for the best just like with her parents. She finds out about Harry's little problem. Hermione confiscates Harry's stash of potions and burns them. Now, he is nothing more than an addict coming down from his high. The false sense of happiness and infallibility is gone. To make matters worse, he sees it at night. The vision of Voldemort ripping through Hermione's memory charms on Ron. He knows what they are looking for now. Ron is left as a vegetable when Voldemort is done, and Harry knows it is his fault now that the potion is no longer clouding his vision.

That's really where the story picks up. The other stuff was just setup to shove the main character down a deep dark hole. You see the internal conflict among the group, how their relationships have changed, and the increased challenge of the hunt due to Harry's folly. This will be far from a happy Harry/Fleur story. In my head, they eventually do end up together during the hunt, but there is much to overcome before that point as the three of them seek redemption and learn to live with what they've done.

 

Wait, why does Fleur have sex with Harry the first time, and on her day of marriage no less?

 

The potion essentially. For every success, you start suffering massive failures which in this case is ripping away what is essentially his family from him. It's also starting to take back some of the things that it gave him to start with such as resulting in dating Ginny or at least that's what was implied in HBP when he took the potion iirc. That's also how Voldemort finds out about what Harry knows. He used the potion to get the information from Slughorn. At least, that's the idea.

 

Huh? At best the potion will engineer a situation with the best odds for Harry to sleep with Fleur -- it cannot make Fleur do anything. The potion helped Harry in HBP because Dean and Ginny were already having troubles in their relationship and the potion didn't have to do any more than give a slight nudge for their breakup.

So there still has to be some motivation for Fleur to sleep with Harry in the first place for Felix Felicis to do its job. You would have to do a very good job of convincing me that Fleur would have any reason whatsoever to sleep with Harry on her wedding day, because that sounds extremely OOC behavior to me.

 

She catches Bill en flagrant délit during his stag night and Harry happens to cross her path while she isn't thinking straight.

 

If it gives you the best possible chance, what are the odds that you are going to fail with anyone? I mean really. Do you think that if you had the best possible chance with creating a situation that would lead to sex with someone that it would likely end in failure especially with magic involved? Plus, we've already seen the tension between Fleur and the Weasley family. They belittle her, write off her relationship with Bill, say down right insulting things to her, and even have a horrible nickname for her. She can be just as hostile right back at his family.

I don't remember Bill ever doing much of anything about it either, and I don't think he would be that blind to how she is received or what she is doing in return. You have one of the scariest dark lords in recent memory getting ready to take over, a fight waiting to happen between Fleur and the Weasley family, a magic potion capable of setting very unlikely events into motion, and alcohol thrown into the mix. I can think of far less reasons for people to do things that they regret.

Even if you still think it is out of character, do you think it was in character for Slughorn to give Harry that memory in HBP? I certainly don't. I'm not entirely sure we view what that potion can do the same way though.

 

Um, no, it's not.

The passage your talking about is this one:

First, notice that Harry is simply consoling Ron. He doesn't speak with the narrator's voice, so we cannot take what he says as fact, only as his opinion.

Second, early on, Ron is speechless by her, but Harry isn't. Bad fanfics aside, there's no reason to believe Ron is weaker than Harry. They both reacted the same way to the Veela at the tournament earlier in the book, so why doesn't Harry do it now?

Third, look at how Ron acts around Viktor Krum that year. He's just as giddy to see him. What it look like is exactly what we know about Ron, he's a 14 year old boy who's even more controlled by his emotions than Harry.

On top of all that, Cedric simply ignores her. He does it while he's standing at the fireplace, hands behind his back and staring into the fire after the Goblet chose him. He does it at the wand weighing when she smiles at him, and he does basically does it again when Ron walks up to her, since he ends up going with Cho, anyway. When it comes to "Veela magic" that we do know about explicitly in canon, no one just ignores it, especially if they're that close to it.

The one thing that might go in your favor here is that when she walks across the Hall after getting the Bouillabaisse, heads turn. However, heads would turn for any beautiful 17 year old young woman in a school. There's nothing spectacularly different about that.

So you can consider it head-canon, but in the strictest sense, there's no reason to believe she actually had Veela magic that could make others acted out of their mind like Ron did. It was simply his infatuation with a beautiful blond French woman.

 

When Ron asked Fleur to the ball he really had no intention of doing so. He just got too close to her when she was using that charm of hers to snag Diggory. He wasn't in his right mind when he did it. If he had intended to ask her he would have done it somewhere where he wouldn't be likely to make a fool of himself. Its not as if Fleur was more beautiful at that moment than any other.
As for Harry... well he just sort of develops an immunity to veelas after the first time and Cedric had already asked Cho. And lets face it 17 year old Cedric probably has greater strength of character than 14 years old Ron.