Photos - A Teddy Lupin Oneshot
Teddy wasn't supposed to be there, in the attic. In his first summer before going to Hogwarts, he and Victoire were playing hide and seek, him hiding first.
He had dashed into his bedroom with a grin, opened the wooden door in the ceiling and climbed up, before closing up the hatch behind him, clambering to almost stand in the small storage space.
He lit a lamp, coughing slightly in the murky dust that told him it was ages since gran - or anyone - had been up here. The warm light glowed softly, illuminating old furniture and neat boxes, when he spied a label on the aged cardboard: photos.
Unsure of what had made him curious, he edged towards the box, bending his head to avoid crashing into the ceiling, thinking that it was inheriting his father's height that gave him this liability, along with his mother's clumsiness, of course.
That was what his gran told him, at least.
He opened the box, fingers fumbling in innocent curiosity, and looked down, picking up the black album.
It was matt, and dusty, and he opened the first page slowly.
A pale faced man with a few telling scars was there, dancing with a woman with bubblegum pink hair and dark, twinkling eyes. Teddy watched, captivated as he saw his parents twirl and stumble on each other's feet, gazing into each other's eyes in a way that told him not a soul in that room could have made them care about anything but each other.
He moved on to another page, with a photo of his dad and another man, along with his mum, laughing, drinking amber liquid over a game of wizard chess that had been abandoned for conversation.
Another showed his mum, with an older lady he knew to be Granny Weasley, peeling potatoes together and laughing over the mess his mother was making.
Teddy made similar mess when he entered the kitchen, but he noted that it rarely had such humourous outcomes.
There was more: his father stood with his arm around his godfather Harry, both grinning at the camera. Teddy longed for the smell of his father's old cardigans, that looked grey and worn and dull on the surface, but they seemed so comforting and warm to Teddy.
The next, them exchanging vows at a wedding. His mother glowing happily, hair more vibrant than the photos could show while his father's smile outweighed the heavy scarring on his face.
Again, he turned the page. It was a portrait this time, a woman with the same glittering eyes gazed at a tiny rattle that looked like a black dog in her hands, standing in a soft firelight that showed a silhouette with a soft curve of a stomach that was expecting a child.
Feeling a little sick, his fingers trembled as he turned the page once more. There were the three of them, the two holding a baby Teddy didn't doubt was him, though his memories refused to grant him the sensation of his mother's arms, or his father's jumpers.
Fingers acting in place of his conscious brain, the page turned again, but there was nothing but a blank space. Desperation kicked in, and he searched, finding only spaces for future photos they had never been able to take. His addiction to the snapshots of his parent's lives fell unquenched, and he slammed the book shut, running downstairs to end the game.
He was fed up of chasing memories he would never have, fed up of imagining a universe with photos of him held by them as a toddler, memories of sunny picnics and bikes and scraped knees when they always held a cynical haze of ambiguity, never quite in focus.
Because, in truth, although Teddy had never been alone, and always had a family, he had a hole in his heart the size of a wolf and a nymph.
A hole which, no matter how much he tried, photos could never hope to fill.