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Fic: The Shell and the Pearl
Title: The Shell and the Pearl
Author: antyureff@livejournal.com
Pairings: Gabrielle Delacour and an unknown female lover
Rating: PG
Length: 3,240
Date: 28XII07
Disclaimer: Owned by JK Rowling
Comments: Not beta’d, so please point out typos and any other issues. I’d love to know if you read it, even if you only say one word…
Summary: Gabrielle receives a special gift from her sister Fleur. The gift binds her to the sea and to love.

~o~

Gabrielle Delacour had always been small. Small hands. Small feet. Small kneecaps. Small everything.

Small everything but eyes and imagination.

As her parents’ glamorous friends watched Gabrielle grow and grow, they whispered hope that she’d grow into her eyes. Then hope was given up this would ever be done, that Gabrielle would be a true beauty like her sister Fleur. ‘Your chin is too small and your eyes are too big,’ Gabrielle’s grandmother once criticised. ‘It’s unnerving, Gabrielle; you look as though you’re about to tip over.’

Gabrielle spent long hours in front of the mirror, analysing her features. Not with the robust criticism of her grandmother, but with the analytical quality of one who imagines that she is beautiful.

Big eyes and a big imagination. It sent Grandmother into regretful, pitying shakes of her greying head. As if to say it was such a shame.

‘We had such potential for that one. And now it is too late.’

~o~

It happened that Fleur was nine years older. The absence of a sibling in Gabrielle’s life propagated the rise of her imagination. The dynamic between Gabrielle and her immediate world was incredibly vast. Her father said she was becoming obscenely precocious. And Apolline expressed concern.

‘I am not so sure she knows the difference between her imagination and reality.’

To Gabrielle, she knew that only a few select beings in the world had imagination enough for reality. It was not the other way round. One had to endure the world, make it magical, and accept the magic as it was offered.

‘It is not what you bring to the world that matters,’ Gabrielle, at the age of eight, told her nanny. ‘It is what you see in the holes of the world that really matters.’

The nanny was speechless, and merely tucked the diaphanous mite into bed. This was not the first time Gabrielle had made her wordless. She passed it off as the toxic presence of Veela blood in the child — and nothing more.

~o~

The nanny had gone from Gabrielle’s life, and Beauxbatons Academy came into it. The exquisite balance between magic and imagination soared Gabrielle above fellow students. She tasted sweet adoration from elders. And the bitter, repulsive tang of jealousy from peers.

Acquaintances were few, but none was a true friend. Consequently, Gabrielle wrote massive missives to her sister. Between siblings nothing was veiled. Only the boldest truth would do. To her parents she provided letters of quality, not quantity. Details of the school expertly painted by lies so thick that neither parent would know veracity from mendacity. Monsieur and Madam read the letters eagerly, proud in their hearts of their verbose little Gabrielle.

But for one line, which was always the last line.

‘I cannot wait to come home.’

It was ignored; it was not a lie.

~o~

The Easter holidays of her second year at Beauxbatons started simply, and ended as an epoch. She was twelve, shortly to be thirteen, and her imagination had served her well. Yet Fleur had married, was living in England, and Gabrielle was home alone with her parents. Austere parents who meant to be kind, who had raised Fleur with copious love and affection. And this wide-eyed, blue-eyed child Gabrielle puckered under love and affection. None of that for her. Nothing for her but solitude and dreams.

They visited the sea, and Gabrielle stood sombrely at the shore. She felt homesick for an absent world, a place of non-existence that would both bully her and crown her queen.

‘Gabrielle,’ her mother swept across the bar of sand, blue robes like the hue of the sea, ‘it’s nearly time for us to leave. And you have wasted your entire holiday staring into that sea.’

‘It is not wasted time,’ Gabrielle said quietly. She had her arms crossed, her delicate features turned to embrace the waves, and a whimsical glow emanated from the whole of her body. ‘There are merpeople beneath the waves. I can hear their song as the tide moves in.’

‘Merpeople! Honestly! Stop your nonsense, Gabrielle.’

Her mother took her by the hand and dragged her away. Gabrielle was mortified. Mother’s stern face collided antithetically with the melancholy magnificence of the ocean.

‘I’m sorry.’

Gabrielle spoke for the sake of the sea, but her mother thought it the faint shape of regret. And regret was an expression of functioning discipline.

~o~

On Easter Day, Fleur came, towing Bill, with kisses and stories and presents. Fleur cornered Gabrielle among the daffodils and lilies of the south garden. Gabrielle set aside her notebook, of sketches and vagaries, and made room on the bench for her sister. For a few moments they sat in silence. Birds sang high and far into the boughs. The fountain plunked daintily. Leaves caught an evanescent wind.

‘Maman said you enjoyed your visit to the sea,’ Fleur started. She crossed her legs and arranged the printed skirt across her knees.

Gabrielle kept her profile to Fleur, and knew her sister’s eyes were searching for a reaction unspoken. ‘I have always loved the water. Nothing has shaken my love for it.’

‘I thought so.’ Fleur wrapped an arm full of love around her sister’s shoulders, and squeezed companionship into her. ‘That is why I have brought you a gift. A gift from the sea.’

A small iridescent parcel, shimmering pink and blue and white, with a pearly cream bow, was extended to Gabrielle. The lithe hand accepted it. She always accepted gifts.

‘It’s very beautiful.’ Gabrielle declared it as a statement of fact, as a thing that did not yet belong to her. Items of the sea didn’t belong to her. Her collection of shells, sand dollars and smoothed pebbles were merely borrowed for a little while.

‘It’s a necklace. May I put it on for you?’

Fleur reached for the clasps on a fine gold chain, and Gabrielle moved the hair from her neck. The clasp was set. The sisters awed over the necklace. A simple twisted shell of white, speckled in dun, crowned with a tiny pearl. The jewel was so light, so masterfully crafted, that Gabrielle laid her hand over it, to be sure it had not slipped off.

‘The witch I bought it from,’ Fleur explained, playing with her sister’s hair, ‘said that it would return to the sea when its wearer had found true love. For true love is a home for your heart, just as the sea is home to the shell and the pearl.’

Gabrielle smiled, spreading warmth into the cooling spring twilight. ‘This is the loveliest present I have ever received.’

‘Even if it may one day leave you, when you find true love?’

‘I love it especially for that reason. Its time with me is temporary. It is only a transient thing, like the years I’ll be without true love.’

‘You will find it one day. I know it hasn’t been easy for you, Gabrielle. I know you haven’t very many friends at school.’

‘I have friends enough. If they were more important, I would have more. But the necklace will know. It is already a friend to me. You can’t have given me anything better if I had chosen anything else in the whole world.’

~o~

For two years, the necklace never left its cosy home at the nape of Gabrielle’s neck. She became attached to it, and feared for its safety. She removed it when she feared the most for it, and placed it in a special lacquered box to be retrieved later. At the Academy, she shoved it down inside her blue robes, for classmates leered impolitely. They thought her watery, fluid, deep and masking as the sea. She studied nautical plants and species, tucked away in dusty library corners, in empty classrooms, or at lake’s verdant edge. Among the tall ferns and wildflowers of the woods, she watched the water from a distance, watched the moon’s push and pull, and understood her life.

She’d touch the shell and pearl pendant and be calmed. But always waiting, waiting, waiting, for the day she’d reach for it and find it gone.

~o~

Throughout her years at Beauxbatons, Gabrielle wended her way through friendships. Twice she attempted a love affair. But they were like balloons: inflated, bright, but deflated over a span of weeks—or gone on the wind if she opened her fingers too far, if she was not careful.

The hope in the necklace led her towards men, boys really, until she found herself unresponsive to their churlish manners and roughly chiselled edges. She tucked away hope, at least for a little while, and stayed far from men. Jagged masculinity would not serve her; she had fondled the roundness of shells too often in her life, and had grown comfortable with the whispering of stars falling over water.

At first it was the necklace that demanded female company, and then it was Gabrielle herself, for their fluidity, their gracefulness, their soft lilts comparable to a thousand years of pebbles coaxed to the sand by the irrepressible movements of the tide. And then she became too occupied with fulfilment of the mind, expanding her education and knowledge, that every desire for companionship dwindled. She had no need for impermanent love. And the necklace always stayed.

She gained a habit of talking to the necklace when she was alone. It dangled innocently from her neck as an inanimate person without arms or legs but with an enormous heart. It cared for nothing else but her. She held it to her lips for a kiss whenever bursting with gladness, when Fleur’s children were born, when she graduated from the Academy, when she received the job she had always wanted, and when she arrived at the coast to begin her work.

~o~

‘You’re alone here,’ Maman said, arriving at the little cottage in a nondescript coastal town.

Gabrielle cast a silent plea at her father. But he lifted his shoulders. In a race against smearing fingertips, Gabrielle took the crystal jar of precious shells from her mother. She replaced it with affection. With so few objects, her mother thought, every artefact must hold a note of importance.

‘I am not alone, Maman.’ Gabrielle held the whine and resentment from her tone. She was older now, twenty years, and Maman grew ever older, ever more stubborn.

‘But where are your friends?’

‘Apolline,’ Gabrielle’s father started, statistically unable to get further than the name. Tradition rang true.

‘You have no post lying about. No unanswered letters—’

‘I only write to Fleur—’ The excuse was dutifully ignored.

‘You are very isolated in this one-shop hamlet, Gabrielle. I wish that you would visit us more often. If you will not do that, perhaps you should visit your sister. She has offered to have you live with them time and time again, and yet you continue to say no.’

‘I cannot do that, Maman. My work is here.’

‘Work!’ Now Apolline scoffed, and Gabrielle felt the burn of shame as tears in her eyes. ‘My darling daughter, you count seashells by the seashore! You are not a labourer, my dear, you are merely the object of an English tongue twister!’

Gabrielle’s head hung, the position of defeat. She fidgeted with the necklace. ‘Yes, Maman, I am. But there is nothing else I would rather do. Nowhere else I would rather be.’

‘But you need people, Gabrielle! People!’

Gabrielle shook her head, brushing away nuisance tears. It was not true that she needed people, or that people needed her. She had the sea, she had the salty breeze, she had the sunsets, the sunrises, the storms, the surf.

‘I need nothing,’ was all she could say.

‘Gabrielle,’ her father understood her better, ‘you stay where you are happiest. That is all that matters. And you,’ he took Apolline by the elbow as a dapper escort would, ‘have better leave her to it. There is no man in all of France that will suit Gabrielle. She has the sea. And that is a mighty being, a god, with whom no mortal can possibly compete.’

‘The sea!’ Maman had one final word. ‘The sea is fickle, and you cannot trust it!’

‘I trust it,’ Gabrielle lifted her eyes as she uttered the phrase. ‘It is fickle and untrustworthy to most, yes. But so am I. So are most of us.’

The only man of the house had a private chuckle till he shared the thought. ‘So are all women.’

And Gabrielle laughed with him, hollow and wide and seemingly unending, to hide the blush that had risen at his insight.

~o~

A warm summer day came when Gabrielle failed to remove the necklace before entering the ocean. She waded these days, admiring the horizon best with a familiar void. Her overskirts were not longer than her shins, sheer or gauzy, pastel patterns or fair solids, hiding her bathing suit beneath, on the slim chance she should slip and find herself beneath the water. But her arms dived, reaching for shells. The purple and the blue were best for their rarity. She catalogue them carefully. One here, one there, and total them for a certain sector of the coastline. And then she let them slide, still damp, from her fingers. Soon enough the coarse sand swallowed them. It was as though she’d never touched and held them.

The wind suddenly whipped. Gabrielle rose, already rolling parchment and tiny quill to shove inside her canvas supply bag. The wind puffed that she had to correct her balance. The sea was roughening, preparing for a long night of heavy squalls.

‘That is all right,’ Gabrielle said to the sea, ‘the two of you have not seen each other for a long while. It is time you gossiped.’

She gave it a kiss from her palm before Apparating back to her cottage.

~o~

The lightning blinded and the thunder ravaged. Gabrielle threw a hand into her hair to pull it back. She whimpered plaintively yet was savage. She eyed the mess at her bare feet for some sign of it. The necklace was gone. There was no use in searching for it, she knew that. It was gone.

But she collapsed to her knees and hunted through the debris for a last, desperate attempt. It had to be here. She must’ve taken it off before— But, no, she hadn’t— But where—? Unless—

Gabrielle shot up her head, gasping. Her blue eyes widened.

What if she lost it on the beach?

Never mind the gale, the weapon of rain, the whips of lightning. She would find her necklace.

~o~

Her wand protected her very little from the rain. And if the lightning struck her it could take her, if it ached so to have a pathetic woman. The yellow windows of her cottage looked inviting, and the sea looked foreign, but Gabrielle combed the sand. She used her wand for a source of light until a cascade of wind and rain forced her to use it as a shield.

Shells she found, and mounds of wet sand clung to her ankles and legs as she dived for every shell that resembled hers. And none was it. No shell crowned with a delicate pearl. As the rain continued but the thunder dimmed, laced with more frequent streaks of purple-rimmed lightning out to sea, an exhausted Gabrielle, emotionally and physically spent, could search no more. She tucked her forehead in, wrapped her arms around her legs, and cried with the howls of the storm.

It couldn’t be lost. Not yet. Not when no one had come to love her, that she could love, better than she loved the sea.

~o~

Rain lessened as she reached the winding staircase up the hillside to her cottage. Gabrielle folded her arms, fending off the cold bite in the new, abrasive wind. She thought of nothing but the necklace. It had been lost. Lost before its time. She caressed the hollow at her throat, hoping to feel it there, but only the stitch of her cotton shirt met damp fingertips.

Pausing outside the cottage door, Gabrielle uttered a vow. She’d rummage through her belongings, turn the cottage inside out room by room if she had to, only to be absolutely sure the necklace had irrevocably vanished.

Resolved, live or die the tie she had to the object, Gabrielle nodded with a shiver, and let herself inside.

Someone was waiting for her.

~o~

Immediately, Gabrielle swept her eleven-inch wand to the intruder’s throat. But her willpower faded. It was not a time for anger, for the intruder was a willowy woman, and Gabrielle knew they were alike in disposition. Like Gabrielle, she was wet through, her mass of black tendrils still dripping at the ends, rivulets as rivers down her bare arms. And every third second she shuddered from coral lips.

‘Who are you?’ Gabrielle gave the obvious demand. The wand was heavy, it felt heavy, pointing it at the throat of a person in need.

‘I was lost.’

The woman looked up, and Gabrielle lowered the wand. The eyes she held were miniature seas: teal, then blue, then silver, and never seemed one colour from one moment to the next.

‘Lost,’ repeated Gabrielle. ‘And you came to my cottage. When no one was here, you let yourself in.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ll go.’

Gabrielle waved a hand. ‘You’ll stay. This storm will last the night, off and on, and you will certainly not find your way home in it. I am glad to offer my cottage to you.’ She tried to hide the wand, lest the woman know nothing of magic. But that seemed impossible. The woman was made of magic. Unabashed, Gabrielle pointed the wand at the fireplace and the tongues of flames erupted from charred logs. She warmed the kettle, brought tea round, and set the tray on the low table between chair and chair.

The woman snuggled into a blanket and held the tea between her nimble hands. ‘And what were you doing out in the rain?’

‘Looking for something.’

‘Did you find it?’

‘I don’t think I will find it anymore. It is gone forever.’ But Gabrielle simpered into the words. Her imagination told her the truth, and for the first time she did not have to soften the brutality of truth with her imagination.

‘When something we love leaves us, it seems that something comes along and helps us deal with the loss.’

Gabrielle agreed only by raising her thin brows and sipping tea. She observed the lady keenly over the rim of the cup. ‘You didn’t tell me your name.’

‘You didn’t tell me yours.’

‘Gabrielle.’

‘Maris.’

Gabrielle swallowed. Her necklace had been called home. Absolute divinity. In its stead, the magic had brought her Maris. A new gift from the sea. ‘That is a beautiful name. Do you know its meaning?’

Maris gave a coy, negative turn of her head. Gabrielle’s solid regard of fascination brought more warmth to her than the tea.

Gabrielle tilted forward and reached for the soft hand. Her fingers found it and enclosed. A new hand to touch, a new person to know, and the mages of the sea had conjured and controlled it all, from as far into her history as Gabrielle could recall. The fingers replied with gentle pressure, friendliness and serenity and the promise of a lifetime.

‘Of the sea. You are like me. A woman of the sea.’