Ending Maker: Fate Wizardry
Chapter Intro:
This fic's premise is inspired by the webtoon titled Ending Maker/엔딩메이커 by Chwiryong and their illustrator chyan. Please check them out.
Story Starts
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Ch 7.3 - Interlude?
More like inter lewd!
(3 out of 3)
The sundress had been a tactical error.
Not the choice of garment itself—the pale yellow cotton looked lovely against her skin, and the hemline showed enough leg to remind Harry what he'd been missing during their weeks apart. No, the error lay in wearing something so short whilst sprawled across another woman's lap on a hillside where grass tickled every exposed inch of thigh.
Hermione shifted, tucking one arm beneath her head before settling back against Fleur's lap. Those elegant fingers had been working through her hair in long, unhurried strokes, and for a moment she'd considered sliding her own arm between her cheek and Fleur's thigh as a pillow—but no. No, that would be a crime. The warmth of Fleur's skin radiated through the thin cotton beneath Hermione's cheek, and Hermione had no intention of placing anything between herself and that particular heat. She nestled closer instead, pressing her cheek more firmly against the soft give of Fleur's thigh, and felt something flutter low in her belly at the contact.
'God, why couldn't she have worn a short sundress too?'
The thought drifted through Hermione's mind unbidden, tinged with equal parts frustration, longing, and a bit of admitted perversity. Fleur's dress was lovely, of course—a flowing thing in cornflower blue that pooled around her like water—but the extra fabric meant another layer between Hermione's flushed skin and hers. She could still feel the heat beneath, could still map the shape of Fleur's legs through the cotton, but it wasn't quite the same as bare skin would have been. The knowledge of what lay just beneath that thin barrier made it worse—more maddening, somehow, than if Fleur had been wearing trousers.
Each pass of those slender digits across Hermione's scalp sent warmth trailing down her spine in slow waves, pooling at the base of her skull before spreading lower. Her breath caught—just barely, just enough that she hoped Fleur hadn't noticed—as fingernails dragged lightly behind her ear.
'This is hair-stroking,' she told herself firmly. 'People stroke each other's hair all the time. This is perfectly normal and you are not going to make it strange.' But her thoughts kept sliding sideways, kept circling back to how good it felt, how each unhurried stroke sent pleasurable tingles across her body.
'This is the life.'
Above them, the Provençal sun hung fat and golden over the Delacour estate. Rolling vineyards stretched east toward lavender fields that bruised the horizon purple, whilst the château itself—a sprawling affair of honey-coloured stone and blue shutters—sat nestled in the valley behind them. The hill they occupied commanded a view of the private Quidditch pitch below, where two figures on broomsticks carved loops through the summer air.
Harry banked hard on Fleur's Nimbus 2017, the broom responding to his weight shift with fluid grace. He'd only been flying for half an hour, but structural analysis made short work of understanding the broom's composition—its grain, its flex points, the lattice of charms woven through ash wood and birch twigs. More than that, the analysis had let him feel the broom's history: Arturia's grip worn into the handle, her weight distribution mapped into every flex of the shaft.
The history of its use under Arturia—or rather Fleur—gave him the necessary skill to take the broom and fly as though he'd been born to it. An imitation of Fleur's ability, not a match for it, but convincing enough from the ground.
Hermione had watched him press his palm flat against the handle before mounting, eyes half-closed in that meditative stillness she recognised from years of watching Shirou commune with steel. The broom had practically leapt into his hand afterwards.
Gabrielle Delacour shrieked with delight as she dove after Harry on her admittedly well maintained Cleansweep Seven, the old broom juddering through the descent with all the aerodynamic elegance of a shopping trolley. The younger Delacour had wanted desperately to ride one of Fleur's retired Nimbuses—her sister received a new model every other year from their father, a habit that had produced a small fleet gathering dust in the broom shed—but Jean-Paul had forbidden it. The speed differential between a Cleansweep Seven and even a three-year-old Nimbus was significant enough to warrant caution for a girl who still wobbled on sharp turns.
Harry lobbed the quaffle in a gentle arc. Gabrielle snatched it one-handed, whooping, silver hair streaming behind her like a comet's tail.
"Écoute bien Harry, Gabrielle—on ne veut pas d'accident aujourd'hui," Fleur called from where she sat, her voice carrying a bit of exasperation. She watched Gabrielle pull out of a wobbling dive and added, more softly to Hermione: "'E is good with 'er."
Hermione tilted her head back, looking up.
Fleur's face filled her vision—inverted, haloed by sunlight that turned her hair into molten platinum. Her sundress, a deep cornflower blue that matched her eyes, pooled around her folded legs in soft folds. She watched both flyers with that quiet softness she saved for people she considered hers.
The sunlight caught the fine architecture of Fleur's jaw, the sweep of her cheekbones, the impossible length of silver-blonde lashes. Her lips curved as Harry performed an exaggerated barrel roll that sent Gabrielle into peals of laughter.
Jeanne d'Arc.
Hermione snorted before she could stop herself.
Oh, that was a dangerous thought—but now it was loose and there was no putting it back. She remembered the story too well: one of those long winter evenings in the Emiya household, Arturia cross-legged on the tatami with a tokkuri of heated sake—long since gone jouon—recounting the Fourth Holy Grail War with the stiff dignity of someone narrating their own humiliation. Caster—that deranged wretch Gilles de Rais—had taken one look at Saber's golden hair and noble bearing and dropped to his knees weeping, utterly convinced his beloved Jeanne had returned to him.
Arturia's face telling that story had been exactly the face Fleur was wearing now. The resemblance was uncanny. Dignified irritation barely papering over genuine discomfort, as if the universe had personally inconvenienced her.
The laugh that ripped out of Hermione was not dignified.
Fleur's fingers stilled in her hair. The warmth in her expression curdled into something distinctly less charitable. Her brow pinched, lips pressing flat.
"Quoi?"
Which only made it worse, because the memory tumbled straight into yesterday—into that receiving room at the château, where the fireplace had barely stopped spinning before Avalon's resonance hit Harry like a freight train and Fleur had burst through the double doors with all the restraint of a cavalry charge.
Hermione had stood there, travel-worn and thoroughly shagged, staring at the King of Knights reborn as a six-foot French Veela in a cornflower dress, and her brain had just—Loss of her marbles, really. No higher function. Just one word:
"Sex."
That was what she'd said. Out loud. To everyone in the room.
All sense of reasoning and propriety had left Hermione's mind at that point. She'd taken one look at the absolute bombshell of a woman Arturia had reincarnated into—all long legs, bountiful breasts, and Veela cheekbones and that ridiculous curtain of silver-blonde hair—and her thoughts had nosedived straight into plans for debauched nights that would make the Hôtel Félicien look like a warm-up.
Then something else clicked, and the next thing that came out of her mouth was gut-holding laughter.
Fleur had puffed her cheeks.
That was what had broken Hermione completely. The Once and Future King, the Wielder of the Holy Sword, the Lion of Britain—puffing her cheeks like a sulking child because she'd worked out exactly why Hermione was keeled over laughing. Arturia had always been sharp. The moment she detected the sheathe nestled inside Harry—one look at Hermione standing there in something Rin Tohsaka would have worn, twin-tails and all, and that laugh, that laugh, the unmistakable "Ohohoho" followed by "Ahahaha" that no amount of reincarnation could sand the edges off. The final nail in the coffin.
Hermione had wheezed so hard her ribs ached.
Of course, Harry had wanted to know what was so funny. His tone carried that particular blend of irritation and exasperation, the kind that said she knew full well her laughter had ruined their long-awaited reunion. But before Hermione could answer, Gabrielle Delacour had taken one look at Harry Potter standing in her family's receiving room, turned scarlet to the roots of her silver hair, and fled upstairs so quickly she'd left a slipper behind on the staircase.
Hermione had barely registered the girl's retreat. She'd managed, between wheezing breaths, to gasp out two words:
"Jeanne d'Arc."
Harry had snorted. Then a chuckle escaped—low and reluctant, the laugh of a man who knew he shouldn't encourage this but couldn't help himself.
Fleur's consternation had deepened into something approaching genuine offence.
The image was so catastrophically adorable that Hermione had doubled over again, wheezing, whilst Andromeda stood in the background wearing the expression of a woman who had wandered into the wrong conversation entirely and couldn't find the exit.
Sirius, as it turned out, was still at the Hôpital Sainte-Geneviève and wouldn't be back until the following day. Which meant the three of them had the evening to themselves.
They'd spent it in Fleur's private sitting room, the years between lives collapsing like origami unfolding in reverse—all those careful creases flattening until the paper was blank again. Rin and Shirou and Arturia, wearing new faces and speaking with new voices, but underneath—underneath it was the same. It had always been the same.
Hermione's laughter subsided into a grin. She looked up at Fleur's narrowed eyes.
"Are you still zinking of Jeanne d'Arc?"
The bop came swift and precise—two fingers rapping her forehead with just enough force to sting.
"You are not as amusing as you believe, Rin."
"I'm exactly as amusing as I believe. That's the problem."
Fleur's jaw tightened. Her fingers resumed their path through Hermione's hair, though the strokes carried a punitive edge now, tugging slightly at the roots. Hermione bore it with the magnanimity of a woman who knew she deserved worse.
On the pitch below, Gabrielle hurled the quaffle at Harry's head. He caught it without looking, one hand rising on pure instinct, and lobbed it back whilst upside down. Gabrielle squealed.
Hermione's gaze drifted from the flyers back to Fleur's face. Then lower. The sundress's neckline was modest by any reasonable standard, but from this angle—lying in Fleur's lap, looking straight up—the fabric gathered in ways that emphasised certain realities of Fleur's new incarnation.
Hermione's hands moved with the practised efficiency of a woman who had long ago stopped asking permission for stupid decisions.
She squeezed.
Both hands. Full grip. No hesitation.
Fleur's spine went rigid. Her eyes flew wide—those enormous blue irises swallowing the light—and for one crystalline instant, the King of Knights and the Second Owner of Fuyuki occupied the same frozen tableau.
The second bop landed considerably harder than the first.
Hermione rubbed the reddening spot above her eyebrows, propping herself on one elbow. The grass was cool against her bare legs—a pleasant contrast to the warmth still buzzing through her palms from where she'd committed her crimes. She squinted up at Fleur, who sat with regal posture and murderous composure, smoothing her dress back into place with the deliberate precision of someone resisting the urge to commit violence.
"You know, at least—" Hermione said, gesturing vaguely at Fleur's chest, "—Harry's never going to compare our breasts to my circuit quality. Or your magic resistance."
The joke hung in the air for a beat. Fleur's lips twitched—once, barely perceptible. She pressed them together, jaw tight, clearly determined not to reward Hermione's behaviour with so much as a smile. But the corners betrayed her, curling upward by increments, and the harder she fought it the more obvious it became. The smile crept through anyway—small and reluctant and warm in a way that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun.
Hermione's chest did something complicated at the sight of it.
"You 'it 'im too often."
"He deserves it too often."
Fleur shook her head, silver hair catching the light in ripples. The smile lingered as she leaned forward—unhurried, as though she had all the time that had ever been denied to them—and captured Hermione's lips in a chaste kiss. Brief. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that promised more but refused to rush.
As they separated, Hermione reached up. Her fingers found Fleur's cheek—warm, impossibly smooth, suffused with the faint thrum of Veela heritage that prickled against Hermione's magical circuits like static.
Fleur leaned into her palm, eyes half-closing, the tension in her shoulders unwinding by degrees. A small sound escaped her—not quite a sigh, not quite a word. Something in between that Hermione filed away as precious and mine.
The quaffle arced high above the pitch. Gabrielle's laughter rang thin and bright across the valley. A breeze carried the scent of lavender up the hillside.
"I can't believe we're all 'ere again."
Fleur's hand rose to cover Hermione's, pressing it more firmly against her cheek. Her thumb traced a slow circle over Hermione's knuckles.
"Indeed."
The word carried the weight of lifetimes. Of a king who had wished upon a hill of swords and been answered with silence. Of the boy who had inherited that wish and hammered it into something the world couldn't break. Of the girl who had bound herself to both of them and refused—across death, across worlds, across the absurd cosmic joke of reincarnation dropping them into a magical Britain with a Dark Lord problem—to let go.
Hermione's throat tightened. She swallowed it down because Rin Tohsaka did not get misty-eyed on hillsides, and Hermione Granger had inherited that particular stubbornness along with the circuits and the crest.
"Also," she said, her voice carefully light, "I still can't believe you and your father argued like that—who knew you 'ad such a tempair?"
The colour hit Fleur's cheeks before the words had fully landed. A flush—vivid, damning—spreading from her jaw to her hairline, turning that porcelain skin the shade of pink champagne.
"I do not know what you are referring to."
"You suddenly demanded to be enrolled at Hogwarts instead of Beauxbatons. Mid-meal. Without any warning, between bites of ratatouille. I think your father almost choked on his wine."
"Zat is—it was a perfectly reasonable request—"
"Your father's face went through six distinct colours. I counted."
"You did not count."
"Harry counted as well. We compared notes afterwards."
Fleur's hand withdrew from Hermione's. She folded both hands in her lap with the precise, controlled grace of a woman constructing fortifications from body language alone.
Last night's dinner had been a spectacle. Hermione, Harry, Andromeda, Apolline, and Gabrielle had all borne witness as Fleur calmly set down her fork, dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin, and informed Jean-Paul Delacour that she would be attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this September instead of returning to Beauxbatons. The silence that followed had lasted approximately three seconds before Jean-Paul's voice filled every corner of the dining room. Harry had risen from his chair—some Shirou-coded instinct to intervene in any conflict within arm's reach—but Apolline had laid a hand on his arm without even looking at him, the practised calm of a woman who had weathered twenty years of Delacour father-daughter negotiations.
"Zey are always like zis," she'd said, sipping her wine as crockery rattled from Jean-Paul's emphatic gesturing. "Eet will pass."
It had not helped when Gabrielle, eyes bright with the opportunism of a youngest child, piped up that she also wanted to attend Hogwarts.
"Papa is... traditional," Fleur said now, each word chosen with the deliberation of a diplomat navigating a minefield. "'E 'as certain expectations regarding ze education of 'is daughters. Beauxbatons is ze finest institution on ze continent, and ze Delacour family 'as attended for—"
"Seven generations. Yes, he mentioned that. Several times. At increasing volume."
The flush deepened. Fleur's jaw set in a way Hermione recognised from battlefields.
"It was not zat dramatic."
"Fleur." Hermione's voice softened, though the amusement didn't leave her eyes. "Not only did you announce your intention to transfer to Hogwarts, but you also told your father—at the dinner table, in front of everyone—that you loved both of us. From his perspective, you only met us yesterday."
Silence stretched between them. The breeze carried Gabrielle's distant laughter up the hill.
"You didn't see the panicked look on Harry when your father turned to him after that declaration," Hermione added, grinning. "He's already two for two on angry fathers. Father wanted to put him through a wall, and now Jean-Paul. The boy collects paternal wrath like other people collect stamps."
"Didn't you say zat your fazzer and mozzer caught you in a compromising position?"
Hermione chuckled at that.
"Yes. I think my father almost shattered his kneecaps when he dropped to a kneel from the scene of me snogging the lights out of Harry on the kitchen island." She grinned at the memory. "He then spent the entire day trying to immolate Harry with his glare. I think your father tried that as well."
She tapped her lips with one finger, mock-thoughtful. "Actually—why didn't I get the death glare of doom from your father?"
"Well, eet 'as been difficult for me to 'ave friends of ze same sex since my Veela maturity came in." Fleur's voice carried something quieter beneath the words—not self-pity, but the particular weariness of someone stating a fact she'd long since accepted. "Even wiz my broom racing league and ze Quidditch league I joined—I was eizer 'arassed by ze boys or got jealous glares from ze girls. So when Papa saw zat you were... unaffected..."
She trailed off, but the implication was clear enough.
Hermione's grin widened. "So I got the father's approval?"
Fleur's silence was confirmation enough.
Hermione pumped her fist. "Take that, Harry Potter!"
Down on the pitch, Harry gave her a quizzical look as he absentmindedly caught the quaffle one-handed. Hermione waved him off with the magnanimity of a woman who had just won a competition he didn't know he was in.
It was one of the quieter revelations of their visit—that Fleur's Veela aura simply didn't register for either of them. Their circuits cycled the allure automatically, the way a body metabolised a mild toxin before it ever reached the brain. They hadn't even noticed until Apolline pointed it out, her eyes narrowing with sharp interest over the rim of her wine glass as Harry failed to so much as glance at Fleur's hair catching the candlelight. Jean-Paul had warmed to them considerably after that. Well—that was before Fleur dropped the Hogwarts bombshell and the goodwill evaporated like morning dew in a heatwave.
"At least Papa eventually acquiesced to my request," Fleur said, with the tone of someone declaring a hard-won armistice.
"I think it was less acquiescence and more shock," Hermione said. "You promised him your future daughters would attend Beauxbatons—seven generations unbroken, crisis averted—and your father's brain got stuck on the part where his little girl was already talking about having babies with a boy she'd met earlier the same day." She glanced toward the pitch, where Harry was letting Gabrielle score on him with theatrical incompetence. "It was quite tense at breakfast this morning. Especially for Harry."
"At least Mozzer took a liking to 'Arry."
"God, your accent is sexy. Can you call me 'Ermione as well?" Hermione grinned. "And it was more like they fell in love with Harry's cooking. I think even my father couldn't find fault with that—not that he'd ever admit it. The man had caught Harry snogging his daughter senseless an hour earlier, and he still finished three bowls of fried rice. Glaring the entire time, mind you. Never broke eye contact. Just furious chewing."
That morning, Harry had woken before most of them in the château and slipped into the kitchen to help Apolline and the house-elves with breakfast. The Delacour elves, at least, didn't object to the assistance—a marked improvement over the Tonks's house-elf, who had treated Harry's presence in the kitchen as a personal affront for the better part of a week before grudgingly conceding that the boy could cook. Apolline had been delighted. And even through Jean-Paul's glare—sustained, unwavering, the kind of glare that could curdle milk across a room—the man couldn't stop himself reaching for a second tartine slathered in jam Harry had prepared from scratch.
Hermione had watched Jean-Paul's internal war play out across his face when Apolline brightly informed him, mid-bite, that Harry had made the pastry and the jam. Paternal outrage wrestling with the undeniable fact that it was exquisite. The pastry won. He'd taken a third piece without a word.
"Oh—is my godson not only a good flyer but also a good cook?"
The voice came from behind them—calm, collected, yet carrying the rasp of someone whose throat hadn't fully remembered how to work at full capacity. English-accented. Familiar in a way that made Hermione's chest tighten unexpectedly.
She and Fleur turned.
Andromeda stood at the crest of the hill, pushing a wheelchair that glided over the uneven grass with suspiciously little effort—enchanted, almost certainly, though knowing Andromeda she'd have insisted on pushing it herself regardless. Beside her walked Apolline and Jean-Paul, whose eyes had already found Harry on the pitch below and resumed their dedicated glaring.
The man in the wheelchair barely resembled the gaunt spectre they'd pulled from Azkaban.
Sirius Black had gained weight—not much, but enough that his cheekbones no longer looked like they might puncture through his skin. His hair, once matted and wild, had been cut to his jaw and fell in dark waves that caught the Provençal light. He was dressed in linen trousers and a loose white shirt that made him look almost continental. His hands rested on the arms of the wheelchair, thin but steady, and his grey eyes—sharp, bright, alive in a way they hadn't been in that frozen cell—were fixed on the figure swooping above the Quidditch pitch.
He was watching Harry fly, and his expression was doing something it clearly hadn't done in seventeen years.
He was smiling.
"Oi—Harry, they're here!" Hermione shouted, waving both arms.
Harry pulled up mid-dive and called something to Gabrielle, pointing toward the hill. The pair flew up together, Gabrielle trailing slightly on her juddering Cleansweep, before both dismounted on the grass near the group.
Gabrielle made a beeline for her father, latching onto his arm and babbling in rapid-fire French. Hermione caught enough to know the girl was recounting every detail of her afternoon with Harry—every catch, every dive, every time he'd let her score. Jean-Paul's face twisted into something she could only describe as a man at war with himself: half his expression trying to smile at his youngest daughter's breathless joy, the other half curdling because that joy revolved entirely around Harry Potter.
Harry, meanwhile, handed Fleur's Nimbus to her with a small nod of thanks before turning toward the wheelchair. He walked with that deceptive calm Hermione knew too well—the one that looked relaxed from the outside but masked every wire pulled taut underneath. His hand drifted up to ruffle the back of his already hopeless hair. Twice.
He stopped in front of the wheelchair.
Sirius looked up at him.
For a long moment, neither spoke. Sirius's eyes traced Harry's face, searching for something.
Then Sirius's smile cracked wider, and his voice came out rough and warm and broken at the edges.
"You look just like your father. Except the eyes—you've got Lily's eyes." His hand lifted from the armrest, trembling slightly, and gripped Harry's forearm with surprising strength. His voice dropped, quieter now, as though the next words were the ones he'd been rehearsing in that cell for seventeen years. "I've waited a long time to finally meet you properly, Harry."
Harry's gaze dropped. His jaw worked once, twice—and then his eyes slid sideways, unable to hold Sirius's, fixing on some indeterminate point near the wheelchair's armrest.
"Um—err..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm sorry I had to shoot you with an arrow."
The bark of laughter that erupted from Sirius Black startled a flock of birds from the nearest vineyard row. It was raw and ragged and too loud for a man in a wheelchair, and it kept going—shoulders shaking, eyes crinkling, one hand pressed to his ribs as though the laughter physically hurt.
Hermione grinned. Fleur's lips curved. Andromeda closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose in the manner of a woman who had long since accepted that the men in her family were fundamentally impossible.
And on a sun-drenched hillside in Provence, surrounded by lavender and laughter and the people who had dragged him out of the dark, Sirius Black met his godson for the first time.
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End