Harry Potter:Diamond Heart.

Doesn't your school start today,' Vernon grumbled as Harry made his way downstairs.

'Yes,' Harry answered distantly, stealing Dudley's bacon off his plate in passing. The boy gave a squeal of outrage and looked pleadingly at his parents. They did nothing. The elder Dursley's had learnt their lesson very quickly.

Dudley was a bit slower, and would probably never realise that size wasn't everything, but Harry enjoyed tormenting him. It felt quite justified.

'That's very good bacon,' he congratulated his aunt. She pursed her lips in displeasure at his behaviour, but Aunt Petunia had been oddly uncaring of his use of magic around the house. Harry had even caught her watching him with soft eyes on occasion, just as she was now.

Perhaps I remind her of her sister more now.

Harry didn't particularly care. The Dursley's had missed their chance to earn a spot in Harry's heart or life a long time ago.

'Why are you still here then?' Dudley demanded, still upset over the loss of his bacon. It was the only remaining part of his old breakfast, and Harry knew he saved it to the end to take away the taste of the grapefruit.

'The train leaves London at eleven, it's already nearly ten.' Aunt Petunia noted very quietly.

Harry raised an eyebrow and she turned away, unwilling to explain just how she knew the time at which the train departed.

'You remember how I can apparate at will,' Harry explained to Dudley. He'd found that once he changed the way he described magic to make it seem like some kind of super-power, or an ability from one of his games, that Dudley suddenly became a surprisingly attentive audience.

Dudley nodded with a wary glance at his father, who was listening just as attentively while staring very hard at the paper.

'I can do that to get to school, the other students can't, so I don't need to get the train like them.'

'Oh,' Dudley responded, 'that makes sense.' His face was stretched into the that's-kind-of-cool expression he normally reserved for Harry's special explanations, or the TV.

He let him keep his last piece of bacon for that. It might help his cousin learn.

A reward for positive behaviour. 'So when are you leaving?' Vernon demanded, his brows crumpling suspiciously over his small eyes.

'Now,' Harry grinned, and vanished with a loud crack that made Uncle Vernon yelp. He was fairly sure he'd made Dudley drop his piece of bacon too. He smirked to himself as he listened to the sounds of argument coming from the kitchen below.

'This can't continue, Petunia,' Vernon's voice drifted up, 'he just does whatever he wants.'

'What do you think we're going to be able to do?' His aunt's reply was slightly impatient and terse. They'd had this conversation several times in the last week alone when they thought he couldn't hear. 'When I was nineteen, Lily and I came back to our parents' house to help them rearrange their garden. Our mother decided she didn't want the shed, it was empty, and nobody had the key to open it. Lily burnt the whole thing into ashes in seconds without saying a word as if it was ordinary and James,' it was the first time he had ever heard either of them say his father's name, 'he was far worse, doing things like that every time he turned around.'

There was another strangled whimper from Uncle Vernon.

'He'll leave like Lily did in a few years and then it will just be us and our son, how we always dreamed it would be.' Harry smiled slightly morbidly. Aunt Petunia might be more right than she realised, Voldemort might decide to make sure he left in the exact same fashion as his mother did.

Harry lifted up the cage he had bought for Hedwig. It was something his relatives would never touch, even if they did suddenly discover the audacity to come into his room without knocking first. 'Argent.'

He wasn't going to Hogwarts until just before the evening and the welcoming feast, which meant at least some of the day could be spent in France, with Fleur.

It was a lot brighter under the willow in France than it was in Britain. The sun lanced down through the gaps in the dome of willow branches, glimmering back of the water and the smooth, round, white pebbles of the shore.

He took a moment to breathe it in: the sound of the water, the rustling of the willow leaves, the warmth scattered in bright bars of light across his back, the smell of grass, hot stone and her.

Fleur was sitting on their branch, her legs and bare feet dangling down to kick gently over his shoulder. She'd tried to set up their portkeys so they'd arrive on the branch, but after Harry had missed it the first few times and ended up bruised and wet from falling into the river he'd persuaded her that it wasn't really necessary.

'Coming up?' Fleur asked, looking down at him from underneath her veil of hair.

Harry grinned at her and apparated up onto the branch. He had no other choice; it wasn't reachable from the ground.

'I still can't believe you're able to apparate at fifteen,' Fleur said enviously, 'even if it is illegally.'

'You're just upset I can get up here too,' Harry quipped, slipping an arm around her shoulders, and letting Fleur lean into his side.

'I'm very glad you can join me up here,' she murmured into his neck. They watched the ripples of the river and the slim shadows of fish darting underneath. This tree and it's spread of branches was part of the surroundings of Fleur's family home, but to Harry it was their place. A spot so far from Riddle, the Ministry of Magic, and his problems that he might as well have stepped into another world.

'I'm going to have to tell my parents about us soon,' she warned him, 'I never spent half so much time here before, they're suspicious.'

'I don't mind,' he told her. They would have to know eventually, he'd have to meet them. He and Fleur had been whatever this was for the whole summer now.

'Gabrielle has already guessed,' Fleur laughed quietly. 'She spends her time trying to work out how this happened. She wants to know the story.' Neither of them had ever used the words boyfriend or girlfriend. They seemed too childish, too immature, to describe what they meant to each other.

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