disclaimer: not mine
a/n: This was going to be 2,000 words long. It was.
I don't know what happened.
i. all the magnificence in the world found a home in this one girl
The sun set and settled on the glowing tip of her cigarette, releasing spirals of heavy smoke into the night sky and making him wish that he could trace the smoke back to the chapped lips that had kissed it into existence, that he could taste the grayness and pull her tainted tongue against his. He pressed his forehead against the cool windowpane and silently begged his hormones to stop raging like they had when he was seventeen.
He flinched as she tossed the cigarette to the rocky shore and dug her bare heel against it, sending the beach into a darkness only occasionally broken by the moonlight that rode on the ocean waves. He thought that she would come in after finishing her smoke, as she had for the last thirteen nights of her family's three week vacation to the shore, but instead she stayed perched on the steps, her feet resting on the rocks, her fingers spread in pale lines across the wooden porch behind her. She glanced back at the cottage, up at his window, and if she saw him watching she didn't make any sign of it. Actually, she couldn't have seen him, he thought, as she stood and tugged her jumper up over her red hair – she had never been an exhibitionist. She unhooked her bra and tugged her shorts from her hips without unbuttoning them, and then she was a pale streak across the rocky shore, her body curving through the air and dissecting the waves like she was born to bring light to the night.
"Fuck, Lily." He couldn't couldn't couln't want her. There were so many reasons, too many reasons, and they were all clichés and over-thought and well-analyzed. There was the fact that he and Victoire were still an item – an off-and-on item, but still. Even if they had fallen into a permanent off-streak – which he rather hoped they had – his fucking her cousin would not be okay. And then, and then, there was the age thing, which had pressed a permanent line into his forehead. In one of his more philosophical moments, he had named that crease the "Lily's-eleven-years-younger-than-you, you-wanker" line. But this wrinkle had seemed a much larger issue three years before, back when Lily was still just sixteen and still in school. Now he glanced at the indentation in his skin and thought that maybe now it ought to be the: "your-job-sucks-you're-lying-to-your-family-you're-a-bastard" line. Now that Lily's age didn't really feel that far away from his own, now that Lily's gray-blue-green eyes were heavy with experiences and her lips were curved into a continual smirk.
Her head was water-slicked-silver in the moonlight, and he wondered what would happen if he left his bedroom and went down to meet her. He wondered if she'd say anything. He wondered if it would be brave or cowardly to walk down the cottage's stairs and out the front door; he wondered if he would be a coward if he dropped his clothes in a pile beside hers and dove beneath the ice-tinged water and met her in the valley between the crests of two waves and kissed her.
It would be cowardly, he decided. And as he pushed away from the windowsill and crossed his room, he was happy that he was not afraid of being a coward.
He shed his jumper in the kitchen and his jeans and pants beside hers, his socks somewhere between the rock that caught the big toe on his left foot and the one that cut the little toe on his right. He didn't flinch when the waves broke over his shins and he didn't shiver when he slipped beneath the surface – he was beyond feeling anything but his absolute need for her.
Teddy's eyes stung with saltwater as he saw her, treading water just there, just beyond his arms, watching him with interested eyes.
"You realize I'm not wearing anything?" She asked, her voice somewhere between hostile and inviting – purely frozen seduction.
"You realize I'm not either?" He reached for her and took her and it's not like she wasn't asking him for it because she was, but when her teeth bit into his neck to stifle any noise he pulled away from her and really looked at her, at his Lily, and he asked her, "Is this okay?"
And she nodded her head, her eyelids shut, her gray-blue-green-lying eyes hidden from him, and he knew that somehow, in all of its perfection, in the way his hands felt against her skin and the way her legs felt wrapped around his waist and the taste of smoky salt on her lips, somehow between or around or within all this rightness he had done something incredibly wrong.
ii. he washed and lost himself in moonlight, and she wove herself a mysterious cage out of the stars
She answered the telephone and smiled at dusty tourists and answered their questions in practiced French - "Bonjour, Monsieur, Mademoiselle. Voudriez-vous une table pour deux?" – only switching to English if they stared at her in agonized, confused silence for too long. She used a laptop to write and only tugged her wand from beneath her pillow once in a while, to remind herself that there was something more than blood pulsing in her veins.
David, her boss, told her that she was his prize beauty, his unique-and-gorgeous-hostess, and she let him believe that his assessment mattered to her. But she didn't care whether or not he adored the way the black dress draped over her skinny-skinny body, she didn't mind if he reached across the table to change the way her silver scarf fell over her shoulders and across her chest, if he asked her to let her red hair out of its braid so it fell in waves down her back. She nodded and smiled and told him, "Bien sûr, Monsieur," following his instructions and only saying "Non" when he tried to put his hands anywhere below the neck. She was still better than that. Teddy had not broken her.
She didn't blame Teddy for anything, really. She didn't blame him and his hands and his lips and the cold waves of the ocean at night and the hot hot feeling of him inside of her. She couldn't blame him, even though she wanted to, because it had all started before that night. Maybe not before him, not before she noticed the way his hands looked as they cupped a mug of coffee, maybe not before she saw the smooth planes of his tanned back as he played quidditch in the summer sun. Maybe she could blame him for existing, for not returning her stares immediately, for not loving her first, for not loving her at all. She couldn't really blame him for staying with Victoire when she was twelve and had an irrational-butterfly-fluttering-crush on him, or when she was fifteen and her emotions all in a tangled mess that burned in the pit of her stomach whenever she saw him, or when she was seventeen and she really only knew need.
Her transformation was her own choice; the regret and soured innocence that clung to her childhood memories of the cottage on the shore was her doing, and the silence between herself and her past was her decision. Her actions, that night and on many nights and days before it, were hers. She found some comfort in the knowledge that after the fierce joy that was she-and-Teddy, she had been the one to leave first. She had been the one to grab her clothes from the beach first, to lock herself in the bathroom first, to press her wand to the love bites across her neck and shoulders and heal every one, except the one on the right side of her neck, just where her hair fell forward to hide it. She had been the one to scribble a note and leave it on the table, a simple: Something came up at work ,they needed me back early. Love you – Lily for her family and a simple action of disapparation, apparation, into the middle of Paris's crowded magic sector.
And what did it matter if he called after her, his voice caught on the waves and echoing the night cries of seagulls? What could he have said? She knew, she knew what he would have said. He was Teddy fucking Lupin and if he loved her – if he loved her – then she would have stayed in his arms until the tide pulled back and left them coated in dry salt and sand, and long, long after.
But he was Teddy fucking Lupin, and so he didn't love her. Maybe he desired her, maybe he had lusted after her, maybe the full moon caught at some of the werewolf genes woven through his DNA and forced him to insanity. And maybe Lily had been an idiot for tempting him, silently requesting a fuck, but at least she knew now. She knew that for her, with him, sex wasn't enough.
She had hoped that it would be, had hoped that the second she ran her hands across his chest, down his sides, wrapped her legs around his waist, that her emotions – her need – would disappear and she could be calm again, she could stop fighting herself so damn hard every time he was around.
But the second his hands touched her, the second she moved against him, she knew that her emotions had only burned before – that touching Teddy made them rage – and that flight was her only escape.
So she ran and shed layers of her past until she was just the ethereal Brit, the author who signed her books Violet Baker and who went by Vi at her side job of hostess. The woman with the silver seagull tattoo on the right side of her neck, the one girl that every man in every bar across Paris wanted to fuck, the one girl that not a single one of them had.
Lily loved her lies, she coated herself in them the way that some people layered sweaters and scarves and jackets, and she loved her writing because every word she set onto the screen was a lie – every single one represented some untruth that was believed for the instant that it settled in a person's mind, before they moved on to the next word, the next lie. She liked creating the worlds that people escaped to. She liked who she was as Violet Baker, and she liked forgetting about her past and all of its various segments – especially the man that had kissed her neck and left a mark the shape of a seagull beneath her ear.
"Vi, I need you to come out with me tonight," Chantal draped herself over the hostess station and clasped her silver ringed fingers together, "Please."
"Why?" Lily shooed her friend's hands out of the way and marked a new reservation on her list, "Isn't Eva going out?"
"But she's bringing Liam, and that means that they will leave in ten minutes to go fuck somewhere."
"Or they'll just do it on the dance floor," Lily suggested.
"So you get why I need you?" Chantal pouted pink lips and flipped some blonde hair over her shoulder and Lily noticed at least seven men in the waiting area look away from their dates to check her out. Bastards.
"Yes. And fine, I'll go out with you. But I want to get home before four in the morning this time, all right?"
Chantal squealed, "Thank you thank you thank you! And you know you like the way the Seine looks at sunrise, so you'd better stay out with me till six at least," she added as she turned to return to her tables.
But a voice just behind her made her stop and pivot, and she stared at her friend as a man broke away from his companion at the door and pushed through the waiting crowd, his dark eyes wide with shock, "Lily?"
Lily bit her tongue and shook her head and forced careful French words from between her lips, "Désolée, Monsieur, je ne connais pas ce qui vous en parlez." But he knew her, and there wasn't a moment when she really believed her lies would work on him. That was why she had run so far and so fast and hidden so completely.
"Lily," he said again, spreading those hands across the surface in front of her and leaning forward to force her to look in his eyes.
"Vi," Chantal slid next to her friend, dropped a hand on her shoulder, "Do you want me to get David, or one of the others? Do you want us to clear him out?"
Lily shook her head slowly, "We're old friends."
"But," Chantal's worried tone made Lily break eye contact with Teddy, "But you're Violet. Not Lily, Violet."
"A long time ago, I was Lily." Sometimes breaking a lie is more painful than the lie itself.
"A long time ago?" Teddy repeated, and she turned to look at him for a second, "Lily, it's been two years, not a lifetime."
Chantal stared at him, "I don't like him," she informed Lily. "Are you sure we can't kick him out?"
"If you want I'll put him and his girlfriend in your section and you can spit in his wine."
"That'd be nice." Chantal tilted her head for a moment, considering Lily's face, "I like Violet better. I'm going to get back to work. Let me know if your plans change for tonight."
She disappeared in the back and Lily turned back to Teddy, "So, how've you been?"
"How've I been?" He stared at her. "How've I been? Not so bloody great, now that you mention it. Rather torn up, actually. Right depressed for a while there."
"That's too bad." Lily nodded toward the woman who had come in with him – a small blonde who certainly wasn't Victoire, "Do you and your date need a table?"
Teddy glanced over his shoulder, "Livy and I are here for business. I'm not dating anyone." He lowered his voice a fraction, "Lily, everyone's gone crazy over you. How could you just disappear like that, without a real message, without an explanation? How could you do that to your parents, your brothers, your cousins? How could you do that to me?"
"You'll be in Seth's section. I don't want to give Chantal the opportunity to poison you. She can be like that, sometimes."
"Goddamn it, Lil, stop changing the subject," Teddy hissed, his normally controlled hair shifting slightly in color.
"I'm at work, Teddy. This job means a lot to me, so please calm down. If you really want to talk, if you really do, I'll still be here at the end of my shift at midnight. And you really shouldn't want to talk. You should walk out that door and forget about me."
He scowled, "I'll be waiting at midnight."
She shrugged, "Your choice. You and Livy can have a seat over there. Your table will be ready in fifteen."
He stared at her in silence for a second before returning to his business companion and Lily closed her eyes the moment he wasn't facing her anymore, she dug her hands into the wooden surface in front of her and tried to keep herself from falling to pieces. He wasn't allowed, her mind screamed, to make her feel like that anymore.
But of course he was, because he was the only one she had ever let in.
She opened her eyes and snatched three menus from the stack, calling out the name of the couple and their third wheel who had come in what seemed like a decade before and led them to Liam's section.
Liam grabbed her hand as he passed, "Hey, Chantal said some guy was bothering you. Do you need us to throw him out?"
"It's fine," Lily shook him off and continued back to the front, her back straight, her eyes locked on the crowd of people still waiting, determinedly not looking at him.
The night crawled. The wait-staff kept coming by to make sure that everything was okay, because Chantal was nothing if not a gossip, and Seth continually reported on what Teddy was eating – as if she didn't know – what he was saying – what business dealings he and Livy were getting up to – apparently, they were involved in some sort of top secret government thing that Liam couldn't understand because his English was just not that good.
And everyone cleared out eventually, except Teddy pressed a gentle kiss to Livy's cheek and disappeared in the heavy wine-scented bar and Lily cursed the day she'd ever laid eyes on Teddy fucking Lupin because he had just positively ravaged her sanctuary.
Midnight came and Chantal and Liam and Seth and Eva all crowded around the front and Lily shook her head at them, "Can't tonight, guys. I need to clear some stuff up." She nodded toward the door, where Teddy leaned against the glass, staring out into the light-starred night.
"Are you sure that's safe?" Seth asked, his hand catching at her hand, "I really think you should come with us."
"He's a friend," Lily said, "An old friend. I'll be fine."
Her newer friends all exchanged looks – the one that she recognized from early on, when she'd do stupid things when they were out, like lead a guy on until she was the bitch for turning him down, or take a guy home and kick him out just before they got to her door, or any number of other idiotic unsafe moves – and shook their heads at her.
"Are you sure, Vi?" Chantal asked, and she nodded.
"Positive. You all have fun – I'll see you tomorrow." She slipped from the center of the group and out to the sidewalk, glancing at Teddy as she hurried past him. "You coming?"
"Wait, Lil, stop a moment," he reached out for her, but she pulled easily away from his hands.
"What?"
"You're acting like I'm some kind of intruder, like I have no right to care about you, to find out what you've been doing for the last two years. Why?"
Lily rolled her eyes, "Because you are intruding, even if you don't see it. Come on and stop talking."
He shut up with a glare and followed her through the streets, down the dark stairs to the metro, and barely protested when she tapped the screen at the console to buy him a ticket.
"Why aren't we apparating?" He whispered as she pushed him on board the train after the doors had hissed open.
"I live in a Muggle building," she responded – not adding the "I live a Muggle life" that was on the tip of her tongue.
He shrugged and clung to the handrail with those hands and followed Lily wordlessly when she slipped between the doors at her usual stop and back up the stairs to the cobbled sidewalks crowded with drunken night lovers.
She kicked at the corner of the metal door to her apartment building – a technique much more effective than pressing the broken buzzer – and nodded Teddy inside. "I'm on the fourth floor and the lift is broken, so head on up the stairs."
He glanced over his shoulder in the dim light from the hazy globes attached to the walls, "You live here?"
She shrugged, "It's home."
He started up the stairs and waited by the door as she unlocked it and flicked on the light, revealing a living room-kitchen-dining area done all in white with teal accents and stacks of multicolored books falling over ever flat surface, including the floor.
"You can have a seat, if you want," Lily nodded at the turquoise sofa, but Teddy shook his head slowly, his eyes widening as he examined the room. He took in the still photographs of Lily with Chantal, Liam, Seth and Eva stuck in silver frames and attached to the walls with bits of tape, the red lipstick scrawled across the mirror – I love you Violet! Lovveeeee Seth – the white laptop covered with stickers and glowing with the faint light of a Word document open on the screen.
"Who are you?" He asked, and she didn't find this question strange at all, although anyone else might have. Teddy had known her back when her walls were plastered with moving photographs of her family, and posters of quidditch stars and rock gods, when her bed sheets were green and silver and her quidditch supplies covered the floor.
Lily smiled at him, the smile she used for press conferences and as a response to the always awkward questions about her family. "I am Violet Baker." She tugged her first novel from a stack and waved it at him; he just managed to read the title (Concrete Never Burns) before she flipped it open to the About the Author page. "I grew up in Great Britain and moved to Paris as a teenager, where I made my way by finding a job as a hostess at one of the most prestigious restaurants in the city. I live in a fourth floor walk-up with my cat, Pinocchio, and my fish, Jiminy, and this is my first novel." She tossed the book on the couch and shrugged, "I've written another one since and Pinocchio ate Jiminy, but otherwise that is who I am."
"You're an author?" He stared, "A Muggle author?"
"I'm just a woman in love, Teddy." She felt clichéd saying it, and wished that she could take the words back the second they slipped from her lips, but was almost glad she had said them when Teddy's hands balled into fists and his hair dipped to a dangerously dark color.
He scowled, "With this Seth?" His eyes had drifted back to the lipstick smeared mirror, remnants of a night when Lily and her friends had been a bit too free with the liquor.
"With writing. With language, with the way words look when they're spread on a page." Her hand wasn't shaking, but she did spill a few drops of wine on the kitchen counter as she poured the Merlot into her favorite glasses. "But what would give you the right to care if I had fallen in love with Seth, or anyone else?"
"Christ, Lily, I'd have every right." His finger almost brushed hers when she handed him the wineglass, but she jerked her hand back soon enough to prevent it. Because if he touched her, if he even let one cell of his skin brush one cell of hers, she'd have to have him. "If it was just writing, why couldn't you be this Violet Baker in the Muggle world and stay Lily Potter for us? Why'd you run away?"
Occasionally, the truth hurts a lot more than lies, and occasionally Lily appreciates the pain that this type of truth can bring – an honest, burning sort of pain, just below the collar bone. "Why do you think? Of course it was because of you. Not because we had sex, but because of everything before the sex."
"What do you mean?" He had sunk down onto the couch and placed his wineglass on a stack of books, "I don't get what you're saying. You left your family – your parents, your brothers, your cousins – hid yourself from us completely because of…me? And not because of that night…but why?"
"Christ, Teddy," Lily sighed, "My life had been so uncomplicated until you showed up. So perfectly uncomplicated."
And she couldn't help herself anymore – his eyes were too earnest and his multicolored hair too endearing and two years of absolute celibacy had never done anyone any good and eight years of pining had destroyed her self control and so she left her wine on the counter and her scarf on the floor and fell into his lap like a flame falls on paper.
His hands gripped at her shoulders. "Lily, we can't," he begged, his fingers belying his words as he pushed at the black fabric of her dress, revealing her shoulders and her arms in one quick movement as she undid the buttons on his shirt.
"Lily," he repeated, "I won't."
"Are you married?" She slipped her hands beneath his shirt and tugged it from his shoulders.
"No."
"Have a girlfriend?"
"No." His hands had slid to her waist, mirroring hers on his, except she was unzipping his trousers and he had almost managed to push her off.
"Then why won't you? Why can't we?" She kissed his cheek lightly and he shook his head.
"Last time you left me. Last time you ran."
"Where would I go?" She asked, her fingers determined on the elastic waistband of his boxer shorts, decorated with jumping dolphins. "Who would I run to?"
"You'll stay?"
She answered him with a kiss and his hands stopped resisting.
After that they moved to her bed and they didn't talk at first, using the silence to learn each other again. Until Teddy found the gull on her neck, until his fingers grazed its outstretched wings and its rounded belly. "When'd you get this?"
She laughed, "When do you think?"
"What does it mean?"
"A part of me wanted to erase every memory of that night, so of course I couldn't let myself forget any of it. I didn't want the memories to last, so I dyed my skin to remind me of them. Not some sort of self-harm thing, or anything; just – I wanted to remember my stupidity, my biggest mistake."
He was silent again, his fingers still tracing the tattoo, "Did you think I didn't want you?"
"You had everything you needed," she told him.
"You thought I didn't need you?" He shook his head, "Oh, Lily. Lily, nothing could be further from the truth. I've needed you forever."
"Since before that night on the beach?"
"Since long before that night on the beach."
"Do you think we could make this work?"
There was so much they were leaving unsaid, so many words that maybe should have been woven into the hopeful air surrounding them, and so many words that they both refused to say. But all Lily really needed was a "Yes," and Teddy gave her more.
"I know we will make this work."
His lips found the seagull then, and he kissed her memories whole again.
a/n: I am the queen of turning angst into sap. gag.
If you'd like to, please review. I love knowing what people think of my writing.
xoxo