pull your little ribs around me

by all these ghost towns

Tell me about the dream where we pull our bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. -TeddyVic, a nation falling.

Title: pull your little ribs around me
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Teddy/Victoire
Word count: A billion. No, really.
Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter in the slightest. Unfortunately.

A/N: The title comes from a reworked line from "Fineshrine," by Purity Ring. Don't own it. Oh, and the summary comes from "Scheherazade," by Richard Siken. I also don't own that either. Surprise.
A/N 2: What even is this? I don't know. I have no excuses, or understanding of what just happened. I wasn't even a huge fan of the epilogue, but then suddenly, I decided I shipped these two, and became weirdly protective of said ship, and alas, this happened. The pacing is stopstartscattered wild, and the accuracy may or may not hold on by the thinnest of threads, but...reasons? I also battled with the ending - back and forth - for way too long to comment on, and then finally left it as is. I really don't know how this is a thing that exists, or if I should feel shame. Also, I highly doubt this is actually an M rating, but I felt the need to pad a buffer. The end.

.

Teddy likes to think he's loved Victoire since he'd first learned to shift the color that lives and turns – bright and hollow and openly aware – in the strands of his hair. But that's not quite true, not really. His hair had changed upon birth – before Victoire had even been – and besides, the changing of his hair wasn't something he'd even been aware of; it was instinctive, involuntary, remote.

But then again, Teddy thinks, that too circles this maddening love he harvests for Victoire, deep and embedded in the roots of his thoughts. It's dense, and weighty, and entirely bereft of charge, there is no command he owns that will deter its course within him. It's strong and it pulls and turns and shifts through his wearing years like a tide: wide and dilatant and entirely too real.

.

When Victoire is born, everyone around her fusses and coos about how pretty she is. They crowd and crow, but she just watches the blurs of red and black and brown around her with eyes too old, too knowing, for such a small face.

She never cries, and Teddy makes her laugh, and wherever Fleur takes her, he always tries to follow on unsteady feet, with a child's uncertain gait.

.

They get older, because that's what children do.

Victoire walks around on her toes, and puts fraying ribbons in her hair. She hums pieces of songs cut apart from others, and mashes them together as her own.

It's mad, and sometimes Teddy thinks she may be a bit mad, but she's his best friend, and she's whole and shining and it makes him squeeze his eyes shut to account for the strange seizing in his small chest.

.

Victoire is six, and she's currently amidst a storm of being violently upset at her lack of red hair. She proclaims, in her small, quiet way, that her strange blonde hair prevents her from being a true Weasley.

Bill and Fleur smile to each other over Victoire's head, and whisper words about a "phase." Victoire then decides, in an effort to turn her unfortunate luck around, she will eat only foods that are orange.

She informs them of this solemnly and earnestly, and Teddy makes the mistake of laughing and questioning the population of such colored foods. Victoire blinks at him prettily once, and promptly unfolds a list from a pocket in her skirt.

He laughs again, softer this time, with something like admiration, and turns his hair a brilliant shade of pale, iridescent blonde; the exact color that Victoire possesses.

Her eyes widen, and she laughs faintly, airily, for him. She reaches up and touches her fingers to his fringe, but she says nothing, and Teddy wonders at her and thinks girls are strange.

Victoire, however, only has carrots and squash and pumpkin juice just once: at dinner, and then, she never mentions anything about it again.

.

"Yes, Teddy, I will marry you."

Teddy's hands freeze in the sand near the hole he'd been digging, and he turns his head to stare at Victoire with wide eyes. Her eyes, as always, remain wider still and there's a look of strange surprise in her gaze, as though she hadn't quite meant to say what she had.

"But, I didn't ask you." Teddy finally responds, sounding uncertain.

Victoire sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and lovingly pats the misshapen tower of her castle with small, eight year old hands. She looks pensive for a moment as she stuffs a shell onto the tower's side. It promptly rolls off without preamble.

"No." She concedes, and determinedly reaches for the shell again. "But you will."

Teddy doesn't reply, but he can feel the grit of the sand scrape the surface of his skin as he lets it sift through the gaps of his fingers.

He never asks her.

.

The week before Teddy's set to start Hogwarts is so full of misplaced good intentions, and clucking tongues, and overstuffed Potter-Weasley events, that it takes Teddy a good long while to remember to be sad. But when he remembers, it comes fast, right up his throat, hard and tight on the heels of his excitement.

But between the tutting, and backward reminders about owls and robes, and ohhowexcited everyone is – their boy, heading off to Hogwarts – no one stops to notice the downturned corners of Teddy's mouth that come unbidden at the tail ends of all his smiles.

Everyone's so worried about the what-ifs, and they keep their wary gazes trained on Victoire, with her doleful eyes and quiet thoughts. Everyone's so worried about her and how she'll fare, that they forget to ask about him.

Teddy doesn't quite realize that this bothers him – and besides he doesn't exactly let it show, really – until he's sitting on the back steps of his house, Gran having long since went to sleep.

He sits there on the hard, uneven wood in the fast-dark night, repeatedly, mindlessly, picking up clumps of dirt and letting them rain back down to the earth in dismal, brown streams. An angry gnome bares his teeth at Teddy when a particularly large clot lands near his foot, and Teddy narrows his eyes at him threateningly and lets them burn themselves into a dark, menacing red.

He can guess the sight he presents when the gnome quickly scurries off, hiding behind a large bush of Gran's blue roses. The color, strangely enough, reminds him of Victoire, and that in turn reminds him of her marbled silence toward him for the past week, and it makes the frown already present on his mouth deepen further.

He wonders dully if she's mad at him, and he thinks that she can't be, not really, doesn't she get he wouldn't go either if he had a choice? But he doesn't have a choice; he's Teddy Lupin, and going to Hogwarts with bravery emblazoned in his bones was decided for him before his birth.

Teddy kicks at a lump of earth and starts slightly at the sound of his Gran's voice.

"Not sure what the dirt's done to you, but I think you can work something out, don't you say?" He turns and looks up at his Gran, limned with warm yellow light that spills out from the hallway.

When Teddy shrugs mutely, Gran shuts the door behind her and Teddy scoots over to let her pass him in walking down the steps. She stands in front of him, and he can feel her eyes – full of quizzical concern – heavy on the slump of his shoulders, the line of his dropped chin. Gran sighs loudly; it's a creaking, winded thing.

"You're going to be fine, Teddy." She says, and her tone is almost admonishing.

"I know." Teddy mumbles, because he does know, but it's not the being at Hogwarts that's bothering him, it's the not being here.

Because the thing is, he's used to this: this leaving thing, it's what everyone seems to do. It seems an old, dragged out habit of ghosts that won't let go and he's tired of it; he doesn't want the responsibility to fall to him. He's afraid of what it might mean.

"Then what is it, love?" Gran asks him, a gentler tone seeping into her voice.

Teddy screws up his face in concentration, trying to fit everything he's thinking, over and over again, in hundreds of different ways, into his words. He looks up at his Gran, whose face is lined with living and whose hair is long and grey.

"What if she forgets me?" He asks, and then stops, because that's not quite what he meant to say. He really means all of them – everyone, all these people that he loves, who will carry on their lives without him – but that didn't quite manage to squeeze into his mouth.

His Gran doesn't even ask him to clarify, because she doesn't need to. She knows, of course she knows, whom he means. Her eyes soften further and she brings her worn, thin hands together to cup his face as she stoops down before him.

"Oh, Teddy, my darling boy." She pushes his (dark violet) hair off his forehead and drops a kiss to his brow. "She won't ever forget you. How could she? You're all she knows."

Teddy's shoulders sag with relief, and he lets his Gran soothe his fear, the chain of the yoke of repetitive histories losing its grip on his lungs.

There's a small, squeaky sound at their ankles, and Teddy looks down in time to see the gnome he'd earlier frightened off avenging himself: his small, meaty hands hurtling a rock at Teddy's shin. It bounces uselessly off the leg of his trousers.

"Oh sod off, you." Gran says to the gnome, pulling her wand from her dressing gown.

He yelps and flees to the roses once more, and Teddy laughs, for the blue of the flowers' petals is suddenly much more a soothing, graceful thing.

.

The morning he leaves for Hogwarts, Teddy can hardly breathe for the amount of hugging arms, and freckled faces surrounding him.

Mrs. Weasley is sniffling loudly into her husband's handkerchief, while Arthur consolingly pats her back, looking a mite watery himself. Harry and Ginny are near shining with pride, and their small boys stare up at Teddy with awe in their eyes.

His Gran watches him with a smile as he loses himself in the sea of well-wishers, and Teddy wonders that he ever had a half-moment of second guessing these people, the ones he loves.

The Express sounds its warning and he frantically searches through the mass of red and brown till he spots her: a small, pale, vibrant beacon amongst the rest. He reaches for Victoire and she lets him, squeezing herself under his chin, and tucking herself into his shoulder.

"Be great, Teddy." She tells him softly when she pulls away, blue eyes bright, small mouth trembling with a mournful smile. "Be brave, and make castles. I will, too!" She assures him, and he can already smell the ghost of the sea in her hair. "Oh, and write me always. Love, Victoire." She finishes as she would a letter, and Teddy laughs despite the strange tightness in his chest.

The engine blares again and Teddy reaches out and tugs on a strand of her long, shining hair, before releasing her and giving her a rough but thriving smile.

"Don't forget me, Vic!" He shouts over his shoulder as he hurries off toward the compartment he'd earlier secured for himself.

He catches her wide, serious eyes and the slow, certain shake of her head before he turns fully and hops on the scarlet train, his entire future – for the first time – off his shoulders and bright in front of his eyes.

.

She doesn't forget him.

She writes him letters about books and the patterns of sea spray, and various other things as she ages. She asks him questions about Hogwarts, and when he's home on holidays, it's as though he had never left at all.

It's a familiarity he can't ever lose; he swears this as fiercely as he can, and it wraps itself around him, sinking deep and thorough in the tendons of his arms, his legs, his whole being.

Two years later, when she pulls the Sorting Hat off her head after it loudly declares Ravenclaw!, the disappointment and loneliness he feels standing at the Gryffindor table is only a shadow of the pride and relief that she's here.

And when she searches him out in the crowd of cheering and excitement and newnewnew, her eyes are a blue that rattles him to his bones, and he has to dig his heel into the ground to keep from rushing over to her.

It's okay, he reminds himself with certainty, things won't ever change.

.

Hogwarts with Victoire is better than Hogwarts without her. Teddy lets this fact build and build in his chest until he feels he must pull it out. He must break it apart and store it, or it will ruin the remaining years he has left at this school; because one day, he will leave and she will not.

And then what will he do?

.

The thing is, Teddy sort of thinks he may own Victoire.

Sometimes, he thinks she must have come into this world simply for him. She must have, for he can't remember anything without her, and besides those things, those times, can't even be real.

They don't feel as though they are.

.

Teddy cracks his neck in exhaustion and runs a hand through his slick, dirtied hair. He rounds a bend of the library, and there he spots her: Victoire, tucked up neatly against one of the windows in a corner, a book cradled fondly in her palms.

The sight isn't anything new, he's been seeing her all about the castle for near two years now, and besides she's always had books on her, around her, hidden away in alcoves she'd taken as her own. She'd make her Aunt Hermione proud, really, not that she already isn't.

But there's something different about the look of Victoire before him now. She looks pure and yet somehow distant, the frost of the window sparking luminously against threads of her hair.

Teddy suddenly feels heavy, the mud and sweat from Quidditch practice weighing him down like it has never claimed him before. She looks untouchable –unapproachable – he realizes, and he curls the dirt-darkened bits of his fingernails into the flesh of his palms as he walks up to her with oddly sluggish steps.

"Wotcher, Vic." He greets her, dropping his broom on an unused table to lean against a bookshelf.

"Hello Teddy." She responds serenely, tucking down a corner of a page of her book and closing its lid. Everything she does is with purpose, Teddy thinks strangely, and there's an allure in her actions he can't quite understand.

"What are you reading?" He asks to burst his weird train of thoughts, and he's still all too aware of the wet filth clinging to his boots, the feel of dried sweat on his neck. He feels uncomfortable and bared, so he shifts his weight on his feet and crosses his arms.

"Oh, a Muggle book I found." She responds, and lifts it to show him the cover.

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Teddy reads out loud, and searches her face. "Never heard of it. Any good?" He asks, curiosity piquing despite his discomfort.

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever read." She says seriously, and tucks it reverently under her arm as she hops off the ledge. Teddy reaches out to help her, and then thinks better of it, drops his hands to his sides. He abruptly, distinctly, wants nothing more than to get back to the common room; away from Victoire and her clean hands and clear eyes; away to where he can scrub himself clean and rid himself of absurd, useless notions.

So he bids her goodnight, retrieves his broom, and walks toward Gryffindor's dormitories, feeling hot and stupid and vile.

Christmas holidays come a week later, and he spends two entire days tucked away in his room, devouring a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland he'd found in a shop whilst out buying gifts with Gran.

He reads it once, and then he reads it again. He thinks it's the saddest thing he's ever read, the saddest story he's ever heard.

.

He doesn't exactly know when Victoire had stopped following him, and he had started following her instead. He can't pinpoint a moment when the plates of habit had shifted and she'd spun on her toes and turned away.

But Victoire's silvery hair still trails out behind her like a beacon, and Teddy bends to the change that's blooming in his chest, trains his eyes to the light, and calculates the space between his steps as he traces his path in her wake.

.

Teddy scratches the back of his head with his wand as he watches Victoire through the bends of sunlight filtering in through the thick-paned glass of one Shell Cottage's many windows.

She's been sitting on the overlook for hours, the cliffs below fraternizing their shadows with the passage of time. Teddy's wanted to go out there since he first Flooed over and found her keenly missing from the familiar people littering the interior of the Cottage, but there's something hesitant and gripping that's kept him playing (losing) Wizard's Chess with Louis, and stacking up an impressive, but immobile, amount of window-laced glances.

He doesn't exactly know when he's turned into such a coward, and he hates that he can label – with certainty – whatever the mood that's holding him frozen as Cowardice.

He exhales slowly and the sun reaches its grip in and whites out his eyes, and for one strange moment, he can't see Victoire anymore, she's lost to the wholeness of the flare, and it makes him nervous, it makes him panic a bit.

So Teddy swallows all his uncertainty, pockets his wand, and heads out to where he can see her again: bright and vivid despite the sun's entirety, knees drawn into her chest. The grass bends and crunches under his feet, and when he drops to sit next to her, it's rough and warm against his palms. Teddy lets the realness of such an idle thing keep his thoughts anchored in the eye of newfound alacrity.

"Hey." He says as an introduction, but she doesn't turn toward him and for some reason it stings a bit.

"Hello." Victoire replies succinctly, eyes trained outward and steady on the tide that tugs the sea apart.

"So," Teddy drawls out, stalling for time as words clog uselessly in his throat. He's never been this awkward – this stunted – around Victoire before. Talking's always come easily to him, especially in her presence, when he'd use his voice to fill the space between them with a symphony of stories and words. For, she's always been a mite quiet. She's always been lovely and present, and quiet, sure, but larger anyway than anything he's ever known. But this silence is new, and it's heavy with some sort of meaning he can't identify yet, and it makes him feel sloppy.

"Fifth year tomorrow, can you believe it?" He continues on, just to pad the absence of sound. "When did I get so old?" He smiles for her, for the humor he's bracketed for her benefit, for old times, for all times, but she just keeps staring ahead. It's unnerving.

Teddy quickly scans through a mental list of this summer's events, wondering if and when he'd done something to upset her. He can't think of one clearly, and besides, Victoire's never been one to find anger toward him easily. That'd been proven back in her first year, when he'd accidentally caught the ends of her hair aflame due to the unintended consequence of a spell gone wrong, and she'd just laughed and proclaimed herself a Phoenix. Teddy, in an upheaval of panic, had been the one to put out the orange flares, and he'd never told her how much her delight had frightened him.

He blinks and swings his focus back toward Victoire and idly counts the few pale freckles that line her nose.

"Do you ever wish things were different?" Her voice startles him – so intent he had been on the rise of her cheekbone – and it takes a moment for him to digest her words.

Of course he wishes that, and of course she knows that; he wishes things were different almost every day of his life. Victoire knows this – she knows it – and so Teddy turns her question back in on itself and wonders if her meaning lies elsewhere entirely. The possibility hits him square in the chest, and when he answers – truthfully – it's with a wince.

"Yeah, Vic. 'Course I do." It's heavy and weighed down with things he can't quite name, isn't quite sure of, but it's honest and raw, so he lets it sit unaccompanied.

She turns her eyes to him then, and the full force of her gaze presses on him stronger than her question, and he's thankful for the grass he has his fingers wrapped in.

"Me too." She states, and it's full, too. "I mean, I just –" Victoire trails off with a breathy exhale, and fingers the sleeve of her filmy white jumper, frowning down at it.

"I get sick of it all." She says finally, still staring at her arm. Teddy's taken aback. It's weighty and a bit macabre, unfamiliar in the tones and thoughts she usually has. At least, the ones Teddy's always thought she has. It makes him feel sloppy again, and blind to something he thinks he should've seen.

"What do you mean?" He asks, and it comes out quieter than he intended, but he has a feeling, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this isn't something she shares freely.

"My bloody name. Everything; all of us. What are we? We're replicas of some history we can't repeat. Why would we even want to?" Everything she says is rushed and jumbled together in her haste, and it takes Teddy longer than he wants to pick apart her words and lay them flat before him.

"Don't you get it, Teddy?" She asks, and her eyes on his are heated, a blue so light it's near metallic, thrumming with her thoughts. "Can't you see? That's all we are to them. Blissfully golden-eyed children, blinking widely under false suns."

Teddy frowns and shakes his head, understanding her fully now. The curse of being a product of something outside themselves; a mantle spun around a surname they didn't choose. It's an old tale, and one he'd never realized haunted Victoire before. He wonders what else about her he'd missed.

"But, that's not right." Teddy starts, sounding out his thoughts in measured, intentional words. "You're not just a Weasley. I mean, sure, you are," He winces at the stupidity of his statement, but plows ahead anyway; she needs to understand this. "But you're more than that. You're not 'Victoire Weasley,'" He hooks air quotes around her name, and then shrugs sort of helplessly, suddenly feeling young and entirely, horridly foolish. He glances up at her and swallows.

"You're, y'know, Victoire…and that's pretty bloody fantastic if you ask me." He finishes and watches for her reaction, and when it comes he feels something hot light the bones in his chest.

Her smile is timid at first and then grows until it clears away all the senseless idiocy he'd felt moments before. This is the Victoire he knows; this is a smile he can categorize with conviction, and it makes him confident enough to do something – anything – to keep it living on her mouth.

So he pulls his wand from his pocket, murmurs Nixmenti under his breath and watches as the sky cracks open above them. Snowflakes, light and fat and crisp, pour out on their heads, littering the warm grass with their flight.

Teddy watches as the flakes melt on Victoire – in the spaces between the light dusting of pale freckles; in the dip of her lashes – and he stands when she does, her hand insistent in his as he clambers to his feet when she pulls.

He's laughing: soundly and near-wild when a loud Pop sounds behind him, but he doesn't even turn; he can't, not now, not in this moment.

"Teddy, what are you –" The voice is exasperated and almost strangled sounding, lost somewhere between tired and darkly humored.

"Hello, Uncle Harry." Victoire greets him, unaffected by his sudden appearance, snow glittering in her hair.

"Underage magic, Teddy, really?" Harry asks, "We got the alert and I thought…I thought –" Harry trails off and drops his head into his hands.

"You start school tomorrow." He speaks into his palms and then looks up again, directly at Teddy, an amused smile tugging on his mouth.

"This couldn't wait?" He asks, with a look Teddy can't quite place in his eyes.

Teddy looks away from Harry and focuses on Victoire as she twirls gracefully – arms outstretched and skirt catching about her knees – in the snow. He doesn't even turn back to Harry when he responds.

"No."

.

The summers shift into autumns, and Teddy's time at Hogwarts squeezes itself into a sieve: the days left a glaring number slipping through, the remainders a heavy, weighted thing left barren at the brim.

.

She's beautiful and she's lovely and she's Victoire, so of course all the boys – and a few girls – love her. They chase after her like maddened flies, and Teddy laughs and finds it funny until he doesn't.

And then he groans and grinds the palms of his hands into his eyes and feels like such a fucking cliché.

.

Victoire has a small handful of blokes that she actually dates – that can actually convince her to – and they're all irritating and awful enough that Teddy feels no shame in his constant barrage of facts against them, and in poking fun at them till the hot, frazzled emotion in his vision starts to fade, and he can see clearly again.

Victoire chastises him each and every time, although hollowly, and once they fall into an actual real, teeth-shaking argument, which leaves Teddy panicked and nostalgic, and a bunch of other emotions he can't quite label, but knows they're all bad.

He apologizes to her profusely, after a week of her skirting around his presence and him trying not to trip while chasing after her like a ghost. When he finally corners her, the remorse comes off his lips easily, and Teddy realizes it's honest and true. But Victoire just shrugs and turns it absent; says there's nothing to be upset over, not when Bryce isn't around to be bothered by it anymore.

The relief that comes to Teddy's throat then is just as fast and real and honest as his apology. He pulls Victoire into a sudden embrace: messy and probably too tight, and her hands get caught between them in his speed; he can feel their heat bleeding into his chest through the cotton of his shirt.

It's not quite enough.

And that's how it goes: this routine of dating and cross-checking, and Teddy finds comfort in the discomfort; lets it soak over him like a balm. Plus, it's not like he's exactly unaccompanied, his successive string of dates is quite lengthier than Victoire's, and some of them, he really, actually properly fancies; some he well and truly likes, and he thinks – has thought, erroneously as it were – that some of them might last.

But they don't and they haven't, so Teddy dusts off his concentration and folds it out anew, the monotony of the process a soothing thing.

Or at least, it's soothing until his seventh year, when Mathias Darville starts taking a keen interest in Victoire.

It's different this time, Teddy knows Mathias, he likes the bloke; hell, he's spent seven years in the same house with him, and has never once quite found issue with Mat. He's smart, and rather decent, and never speaks ill of anyone or anything. Plus, the five years with Mathias as Keeper have kept Gryffindor in high standings, and that's something Teddy would never bat off as useless.

At least, not quite.

Teddy notices it first when, as per habit, Victoire comes to his Quidditch game, dressed as usual – and entirely inappropriately – in a Gryffindor scarf and Ravenclaw mittens, bright and vibrant in the stands.

They're playing Hufflepuff, and it's not quite an easy match, but he catches the Snitch and they win, even if it's sloppy, so Teddy can't exactly find it in himself to care.

He lands on the pitch, tired but happy, and his eyes search her out before his feet are even steady on the ground. He finds her easily, because of course he does – he always does – and he puts quickness into his steps as he pushes through a sea of loud voices and grasping hands.

By the time he gets there, he's laughing without knowing exactly why, and her face is pink with cold or excitement (he chooses the latter), and he lets himself selfishly drink in the way her face lights up when she spots him. It's like a candle's been sparked behind the blue in her eyes, and Teddy feels he could get drunk off this look, if it were solidly and entirely meant only for him.

"Teddy! That was wicked!" She says, her voice clear despite the raucous commotion surrounding them.

"Cheers Vic." He says, and steps in closer. The crowd crushes in around them, so he lets his body bracket hers and feels peculiarly like they are the only people here, even though someone's elbow is digging into his ribs, and he can distinctly hear Dominique's triumphant yells somewhere behind his left shoulder.

Teddy brings his fingers up to the loose, threaded knot at her neck, and rubs the material with his thumb and forefinger.

"I think this may be against some sort of student conduct, y'know." He tells her, and it's quiet, but it doesn't matter. He's close enough he can count her eyelashes, and the smile on her face lets him know she's heard him.

"Disparate loyalty and all that," Teddy continues, the scarlet and gold vivid against the pale skin of her throat. "I may have to deduct points, Miss Weasley."

"Well now, we couldn't have that." She says after a pause, looking luminous and open, an uncommon smirk pulling at her full bottom lip. "I feel we may be able to work something out, don't you think?" Her mouth tilts a bit more, and Teddy's lost to the movement, lost to her words, and it takes him a moment to gather a response.

Before he can, a voice breaks into their sphere, and Teddy looks over to where Mathias Darville stands, a wide grin plastered on his face.

"Alright Victoire?" He asks, and then tacks on "Ted?" as though he'd only just noticed he was there.

Teddy blinks and looks down again at Victoire, who's now smiling at Mathias, and it's so lovely it makes Teddy's stomach pull strangely. He looks around and notices for the first time that the crowd has dissipated some, and he steps back from Victoire with the thought.

"Hi Mathias." Victoire says, her cheeks flushing for an entirely new reason. It grates at Teddy, and he can't watch this – he won't watch this – so he turns and leaves the pitch; she doesn't even notice.

And so it starts and it stings more than he'll say.

.

Teddy takes his N.E.W.T.s and Victoire dates Mathias. Teddy graduates, and there's Victoire, because there's also Mathias: proud and grinning and graduating too.

Mat's smile is one that bites at Teddy's toes – so full of satisfaction and complacency – and he doesn't get how such a thing can seem so unfair.

Teddy's graduation party at the Burrow arrives, and here's the kicker, so does Mat, happy and present at Victoire's side; and she's damn near glowing, and it fucking hurts because he could make her glow, too. Teddy could make her so happy she'd be full to the brim; she'd be sick with it.

But he can't, she won't let him, so when George offers him Firewhiskey, he accepts – bottle after bottle – twirls little Rosie around, and he laughs like nothing in the world is better than these moments, while his vision blurs around the edges, and he can't quite see Victoire anymore.

Harry's eyes are heavy on his back, but Teddy can't feel it, and can't really bring himself to care anyway; not when he's lost the edge of the daggered night, and not when everything sort of slushes strangely but softly around him, so there's that, at least.

.

Auror training comes and it sucks up his life, and he's busy and intent and so focused, he almost loses sight of anything but what he needs to see, certain and burning in front of his eyes.

He makes friends, and dates girls, and he finds Claire at a teashop, and she's short and brunette and cute, so he lets himself lose everything that's eating at him in her for a while.

But it doesn't last, it never does.

Victoire writes him, and he responds when he can, and six months pass, and then a year. Holidays at The Burrow and The Potters' come and go, and Mathias is still there and then the next thing Teddy knows, it's Christmas again, and he's been out of school for almost two years.

When Teddy Apparates to the Burrow, dusting snow off his festive bright gold hair, he plasters on a smile to cover his exhaustion, and the noise that greets him washes away any traces of falsity he feels otherwise. There are people everywhere, and it smells of ham and baking and home, and Teddy releases a breath he's been holding for what feels like years.

When he spots Victoire – wrapped up prettily in a dark blue dress – he's startled to find her playing Exploding Snap with Albus, but otherwise alone. His eyes skirt around the premises, searching out any sign of Mathias, and he tries to snuff out the flare of hope in his chest when he finds neither hide nor hair.

He spots Dominique holding hands with a small, pretty blonde girl he learns is named Heather, and when Dom informs him merrily of Gryffindor's Quidditch standings with her as captain instead of him, he laughs loudly, and everything feels bright and sharp and clear.

He's suddenly so fucking glad to be here, to be home.

After dinner his eyes are distinctly drawn to the absence of Victoire, so he helps Molly clear the table while he counts out the moments he uses to separate simple curiosity from pointed desperation, and then he goes to find her.

When locates her, she's standing in an abnormally quiet, abandoned room, staring intently at the window before her. There's sketching of veined snow pressed all against the glass, and he lets himself lean against the doorway and watch it for a moment so that he won't watch her.

"I've always loved the snow." She says suddenly, her voice bent soft and low.

Teddy didn't realize she even knew he was here, but it's Victoire, and she's always been a bit preternatural, so he pushes off the doorjamb and walks over.

"I know." He says, feet slow and silent on the rug as he pads toward her.

"It's like watching the world fall asleep." Victoire continues, her shoulders bunching and dropping once before she turns toward him. "Hello, by the way. Don't think I've properly said that yet tonight."

Teddy smiles a bit and comes up next to her, letting his eyes find hers.

"Hey Vic. Happy Christmas."

"Happy Christmas, Teddy."

She turns back to watch the night, and he struggles with aligning and ordering all the questions pulsing on his tongue.

"So, how have you been then? Your last year, yeah?" He knows it is, but it seems something simple to feed the conversation, so he keeps tugging it along.

"I've been rather well. You know that." She says, eyeing him with something like confusion.

Teddy scratches the back of his neck awkwardly and curses himself. This is his best friend; well, she still is, isn't she? His brain is full-tilt chaotic in the midst of their proximity and the quiet of the room.

"You're beautiful." His mouth supplies jarringly, apropos of absolutely nothing, and it is the exact opposite of anything he'd ever actually want to say out loud to her, ever. But she is beautiful, and it has been swimming at the forefront of his thoughts all night, every night – for years, as it were.

Victoire swings her eyes up to him, her brows rising with surprise, bottom lip dropping open a bit.

"Er, I mean –" Teddy stutters, tangling himself in his words. "No. No. I mean you are. Just, you're – I meant –" he trails off, feeling stupider than he thinks he ever has.

Victoire smiles and his stomach aches and he lets himself gloat in the look he's put on her face.

"Thank you, Teddy." She says with a wisp of sound and stares, dove-like, at a lock of (now) blue hair that falls by his ear. "You're lovely." She states it as she says nearly everything: factual and blunt, with a gossamer, serious undertone gracing the words.

A grin breaks on his face, and Teddy bites his lip to split it in half. This is officially the strangest and, simultaneously, possibly the best conversation he's ever had with Victoire.

"Erm, thanks." He responds, dropping his eyes to his feet sheepishly like a shy little boy.

"So," he continues, and shoves his hands in his pockets to present her a picture of nonchalance that he doesn't quite feel. "Was Mathias busy tonight?" He spits it out quickly before he loses his nerve, and he feels on tenterhooks as he waits her response, which, thank fuck, doesn't take long.

"More than likely." Victoire responds, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. There are small, bizarre blinking owl earrings hanging from her lobes, and Teddy finds he wants to touch one, so he keeps his greedy hands tucked safely away.

"I'm not quite sure though, Mathias and I are not in love, you see." She states it in that same reverent yet truthful tone, not sounding sad or upset or anything really. "We never were though, actually."

"Oh." He pauses, dumbfounded. "Oh Vic, I'm sorry?" Teddy responds, voice hinging up at the end with the question he's not sure how to impose.

She's quiet for a minute and Teddy swears he can hear her heart turning and turning, busily working to keep her alive. She hums quietly in the back of her throat.

"No reason to be sorry though, Teddy." She says, and Teddy can see a crease between the skin of her eyebrows, as though she's fully concentrating on her words. She frowns briefly and then opens her mouth as her brows smooth back out.

"Isn't that's how it always goes? We leave our hearts behind in the mouths of the ones we don't notice, and then we pretend they're really with the ones that do." Victoire traces abstract shapes onto the condensation of the window as she speaks. She draws a circle, runs a line through it. "It's all sharp teeth and bitter tongues."

She punctuates her thought with a curled shape that looks vaguely like a bird in flight, then turns her whole body to face Teddy, who's gaping at her uselessly, trying to process her meaning.

He wonders that she never mentioned this one glaringly large fact, this absence of love. He wonders why she never told him she wasn't with Mathias anymore; she's his best friend, and he feels like that's something not intended for omission. He just wonders entirely; gets stuck on her words again.

"What do you –" He's cut off by the shrieking intrusion of Roxanne, come to retrieve Victoire for a round of dancing in the living room.

Victoire lets herself be pulled away, back to the festivity, and Teddy watches the swing of her blue dress as she goes, and absently wonders why his mouth tastes bitter.

.

After Christmas, his life teeters on assumptions, and what-ifs, and work. Always work.

He gets pulled back into the maze of his career, and time passes quickly as if thrust into an hourglass charmed to read backward and too fast.

He keeps up with Victoire's life, and she graduates – and he stands proud-eyed and tall in the crowd – and she's older and he's older but time continues to pass as though it doesn't quite care. She gets accepted to train in the Department of International Magical Cooperation, within the subsector of Preserving Continued Social Justice, and everyone – this whole lot of them – is so unerringly proud.

He sees her as often as he can (it's never often enough), and another summer comes and goes, and holidays are brought along with it. Time keeps unwrapping itself along the horizon, and before he knows it, yet another summer rears its head.

Teddy gets into scuffles with vengeful wizards in France; which reminds him so much of her, he drinks wine and just aches with it. He and his colleague Eric get caught in an underground information ring in Thailand, and he spends an inordinate – and wistfully grand – amount of time in the States, haunting New York in particular.

He misses his first Christmas back home, and in his disappointment – which is in fierce competition with the loneliness – he owls each and every member of the family with his apology; Victoire's is the hardest to write.

When he sends them off, he makes sure they're Untraceable, drops his head to the table for a moment of spite, and then, then he delves back into work.

.

His twenty-first birthday comes, and with it, a letter from Victoire.

Teddy –

Do you ever wonder if you're forgetting something? Large and towering, and something that would entirely change everything that could and would ever be? If so, you're right. If not, you're missing it. Don't grow old without romancing a few new thoughts. Happy Birthday.

Love, Victoire

It's bizarre and sparse and so very Victoire it fills him with a longing he can't suppress, and it plagues him in every waking and nocturnal thought that he has.

He tries to see her on her birthday the following month – Merlin, he tries – but there's an outbreak of wizard-derived, near-fatal Spattergroit that's reared up in Bosnia that requires his time. So they go and they sort it out, and the entire time he promises himself he'll make it up to her; hell, he'll make it up to himself.

Her birthday passes, and she's already nineteen, and he's tired and getting older than he feels he must actually be.

When he finally gets any time to himself – any time to spend how he chooses – it's yet another summer. The humidity sinks solidly into the air, and Teddy has to breathe twice as hard to feel clean.

.

Teddy slumps down in a chair next to Victoire, out on the Potters' porch, and away from all the noise of the house: where they've all gathered for Harry's birthday. He's tired and spent, and he's been looking for her ever since she'd disappeared from the living room – where he'd been sat entertaining the clan for more time than he can tell.

"Nice night." He says, glancing over to where she has her legs propped up on the porch's railing. He frowns because that's not what he'd meant to tell her, not what he wants to ask her. But there's something about the mixture of his fatigue and the long, unending line of the smooth skin of her legs that's gone and messed up the conversational agenda he'd had planned.

"It is." She responds and turns her neck on the back of her chair to look up at him through her lashes; it's an annoyingly attractive habit she has.

Teddy dutifully ignores the flash of blue beneath black and retrains his mind to the task at hand. He's wondering, has been wondering if he's being honest, why she didn't – doesn't – ask him to morph his features for her pleasure; not once, not a single time, never has she asked him to. And he admits, in between the constant barrage of requests from the younger Weasleys and Potters, the solace Teddy finds in Victoire's non-inquiries almost outweighs the confusion he finds in it otherwise. Almost.

But tonight, after a dizzying array of creatures and people put on for a yelping, delighted audience, Teddy – with exhausted muscles and a foggy mind – knows he needs to ask Victoire, who had sat smiling but distant as he dazzled the kids, why she never voices her own Metamorphmagus-related entreaties.

And so he does.

She looks at him for a long, unbroken moment, and Teddy can feel the weight of her gaze as she winds it past his chin, his mouth, the slope of his nose, the rise of his cheekbones. She glances up at his hair briefly – tiredly settled back into its usual turquoise – before she settles fully on his eyes, which are back to the natural brown they'd been the day he was born.

For some slick, hot reason, he almost feels the need to blush, but he holds her gaze steady, and when he swallows, it's thick in his throat.

"Why would I ask you to change anything when I like this best?" She asks, and cups her hand around his jaw, fingertips light on the bone under his eye.

Teddy inhales sharply and roughly and his mouth falls open slightly as his mind chases down a response.

But before he can even voice a single indistinct, maddening thought, Victoire's removed her hand and is already standing up, smiling down at him once, before she turns and laughingly follows the searching call of Lily.

Teddy doesn't move for a wide length of time that earns him a curious stare from Dominique, who finds him a bit later while in search of an extra player for a pickup game of Quidditch.

He distantly notes moments after, when he's following Dominique with his broom on his shoulder, and his brain has finally managed to clear, that his eyes and hair have remained stagnant and proud the entire time since Victoire had left.

He laughs hollowly as a blur of morbid understanding assaults him, and Dominique eyes him with an almost smug look and an arched brow.

Everything inside him feels strangely clear, and Teddy feels relieved.

.

The thing is, Teddy feels like his heart's a chest of drawers, and between himself and Victoire – lying haphazardly and unfolded – are all these possibilities; untouched and unkempt, with potential woven into their very fabric of being.

He thinks he'd like to take them all out to air. He thinks he'd like to dismantle himself, pull her apart, and look at all these what-ifs, these could-be's, and know.

He thinks he'd like to take her in the ocean. He'd like to kiss her ankle and taste the salt on his teeth. He thinks he'd like to taste the sound of his name on her tongue; understand what it means to cause laughter in her throat that's meant only for him. He'd trace its origins to her bones, and let her expand – alive and bright-eyed – beneath his hands.

He thinks so much – too much – but that's all these things remain: voiceless thoughts with singed tips, and they burn his tongue as they sit there too long unspoken.

.

He trains harder, works harder, as an Auror, getting deeper and deeper into it all, because it's what he's always wanted – needed – to do.

The hours are still shit, and he can barely keep his location straight as he Apparates and flies in and out of the places they have him going, but there's something like satisfaction that builds in his stomach, and he thinks it fills in the voids and holes that hunger has split open.

One night in late March, Teddy drops to the sofa of the dingy flat they've him stored in – in some remote town, in some remote country – and brings a hand to his eyes. There's a crust of dried blood under his fingernails as he scrapes across the skin of his brow, and he registers the healing charm he'd meant to cast went unspoken.

Teddy almost laughs at the irony of damage in regards to words left to wither behind teeth, but it makes him feel a bit ragged, so he exhales around the sound before it has the chance to build.

He hasn't been home – to England, to his real home – in nearly a year yet again, another missed holiday season under his belt. He hasn't spoken to Harry in at least three months, and his identity switches so often, he has to grit his teeth to anchor himself down to the reality of his bones.

But he's doing this – this job, this life – because this time, he swears, he will make a difference. This time he will be what was needed before, when everything fell to ruins at the altar of the world's antipathy. It may be far-fetched and wide-eyed and naïve, but Teddy doesn't quite care. It's a mantra he keeps pasted to the backsides of his eyelids, and it helps him sleep whenever he finds moments in which he actually can.

So there's that at least.

.

It's late November, and Teddy knows the blistering cold is trying to bite at his skin, but he ignores it, he can't even feel it; he's so horrifyingly focused on everything that's erupting with nightmarish clarity around him.

He can hear Harry and Eric feverishly casting defensive spells, trying with all of their combined, impressive power to deflect the attacks of the man who – for sick pleasure – lets himself, at will, turn into a wolf.

Teddy winces as he thinks the word, and feels immediately weak; this is not the time to let the past burr in his ribs. He breathes heavily and presses his hands to the gaping holes in the girl's chest, but the blood gurgles up around his fingers and leaks defiantly against the healing spells he's throwing out madly.

Her eyes are wide and scared, but he doesn't let himself look away from her, not even when her bones start to shift under his palms and her muscles pull inhumanly taut; not even when his charms fall useless around them. He won't leave her alone in this.

She can't be more than twelve, he thinks absently as he forgoes the futile magic he's exerting, and uses one hand to rip a piece from his shirt to tie a knot above the hole in her leg. Teddy swallows roughly. He can barely get it around, her bones are quaking so: breaking and bending and trying to rewrite themselves into the form of the wolf that's eating her from the inside out.

But it won't work – the transformation, his tourniquet, anything – she's already losing, and Teddy grits his teeth as he starts viciously yelling commands at her.

"No. No. You aren't going to do this. Do you hear me?" Her eyes flutter and she cries out while her neck twists with pain.

"You're not going to die, okay?" He says, softer this time, and he doesn't even stop to wonder how when he adds, "I'm not going to let that happen."

His trousers are heavy with blood from where she's laid over his legs, and he uses a hand to press her sweaty hair from her forehead, dark red smearing into the strands with the motion. She whimpers weakly and her fingers clench on his arm once and Teddy starts shouting again, words and pleas and promises mingled in with the renewed effort of spells.

But it doesn't matter, he could shout himself hoarse, and she won't respond. He can see the life leave her, brown eyes dimming, small body going limp and blood spilling from her mouth. But he doesn't care. She's not going to do this; she doesn't get to.

Teddy shakes her once and then shakes her again and he's frozen with a horror he can't even begin to name.

"She's gone, Ted." Harry's voice is quiet and tired and gentle and Teddy hates it.

"No." He says simply, firmly, and jostles her narrow form again.

Harry's hand is on his shoulder and he's trying to pull Teddy back and away, but how can he do that? How can he leave her here? He doesn't even know her name. Harry's other hand comes to Teddy's other shoulder and he squeezes once and gives an insistent tug.

Teddy exhales tightly and uses his fingers to gently close her eyes, before he shifts her light body to the grass and stands shakily. He can't look at Harry, he doesn't want to; he doesn't want to see the carcass of the werewolf, he doesn't want see anything, to face anything, he just wants to be far, far away.

He emptily registers Harry mutter Scourgify, and he feels the gored weight lift from his clothes, his skin, but he still feels entirely too heavy.

"Ted –" Harry starts again, but that's all that Teddy hears before he shudders and Disapparates from Romania, from the rain, from its woods and the horror.

He doesn't close his eyes though, he can't; he's afraid of what he might see.

.

Victoire opens the door of her flat after a hesitant knock he half hopes she doesn't hear.

She stares at him for a brief moment with wide eyes, and then steps aside and lets him in wordlessly. Teddy thinks it pricks at him: her understanding. It files away at his skin while he remains still and motionless inside this trapping fear, with shaky hands and burnt-edged thoughts.

He stands in her living room, hands clenched into messy fists, his hair slipping to an inky, morbid black that licks at the water coating the strands. He stares at an uneven board in her floor, while she stares at him, and her gaze burns a hole in his skull, so he looks up and then wishes he hadn't, because the breath in his chest is suddenly stunted and it rasps unevenly in his lungs.

"What is it?" She asks very quietly, a near pleading tone encroaching on the words. "Teddy, what's wrong?"

She doesn't ask him where he's been for so long – or even tonight; she doesn't ask why he's been gone; she doesn't accuse him; she doesn't eye him with anything like the darkness that lives in the nerves behind his vision, so he opens his mouth and the words flip uselessly on his teeth.

"I couldn't –" Teddy stops and swallows, lets it coat his dry throat with something to combat the helplessness he feels. He shuts his eyes once and is horrified to find them wet, so he opens them again and lets them shift into whatever distracting shade he can manage.

"I didn't fix her, Vic. I couldn't stop it." He says thickly, and focuses resolutely on the sofa behind her.

Victoire steps toward him and encloses a hand around his wrist. She uses the fingers of her other hand to unwrap the fist he's made; Teddy turns his gaze down and watches the motion with wonder.

"You tried." She says softly, slowly, and yet it's determined, and she states it as a fact; there is no uncertainty in her tone.

It hurts.

"But I didn't stop –" He tries, but she cuts him off and tightens her grip on his wrist.

"You tried." Victoire repeats, firmer this time, and without even knowing what he hadn't been able to stop. "Sometimes, Teddy –" she pauses and searches his gaze out with her own. "Sometimes it's all we can do."

Teddy raises his free hand up to drag it across his eyes, and he's so damn tired. He's exhausted with himself, with his choices, with all that he can taste but can't achieve, with all the static that's swimming in his head with a mind-dulling infinite ring.

"This is what you chose." Victoire continues after a prolonged moment of silence in which Teddy can hear all the words he means to say digging in their heels at him mockingly. Her statement doesn't sound patronizing; there is no accusation in her intent. "This is what you do. People are dark and they are void, and you fill it."

He lets his eyes stray to hers again, his brows drawn in toward one another, and she opens and closes her mouth a few times while she measures the next words in her mouth.

"Teddy, things get wretched and they break, and when you can stop it, you do. You are…balance. I can't pretend to understand it, but yet, I know it. You do this because you have to. You're too good to do anything otherwise."

He knows she's wrong, and yet, looking at her, he finds he can't quite lay down his conviction with good conscience. He decides instead to count her eyelashes as they dip and sweep over her blueblue gaze.

And Merlin, it's been so long; how did he let it get so long? How did he think he could do this – this rough attempt at living – without her? He's such a bloody fool. He's always been a fool.

Teddy exhales slowly and lets her words – as comforting a lie as there ever may be – wash away everything that's been eating at him with rough, blistering teeth for days, months, years, he doesn't know. He can feel her, all of her – her beating heart, her blinking years, her shaking bones, her ghost-laden words – living in every pore of his being. He can't shake her out.

Teddy refocuses on Victoire, and watches as her lashes flutter ever slightly as the corners of her mouth bow in and lift in a replica of a smile.

Merlin, she's beautiful.

She's beautiful and he's weak, and so he lets air fill his lungs and filter out through his teeth in heavy, word-shaped sounds.

"I just – I need to – I'm sorry, Vic, I'm so sorry, I have to."

Teddy tugs the arm she has in her hold, gently but surely, and Victoire steps into him with the motion. He brings his other hand to the back of her neck, letting her hair fall into the spaces between his fingers as he angles her and anchors her and leans down: his mouth hot on hers before he can convince himself not to.

He feels her tense and freeze. He feels her drop the hold she'd had on his wrist. He feels the error – the blaring, shaking error – in his action and pulls away quickly, mouth fumbling over the desperation in his apology.

"Fuck, Vic, I'm sorry. God, I'm so –" He trails off and steps back and away from her and the temptation of her wide eyes and soft, wet mouth.

Everything slams around inside of him at alarming speeds. He sounds out thousands of apologies in his mind in a matter of seconds; lets the repulsion toward his inability to deny himself fester in his chest.

She remains quiet, motionless, and Teddy steels himself with his decision to just leave: leave her, leave this mistake, leave and run; but Victoire steps toward him, rather hesitantly, and his shoulders tense in waiting.

She brings her hand up toward him and for one hot, horrifying second Teddy thinks she's going to slap him, and he swallows down all the fracturing and regret in his throat. But instead, Victoire sets her fingers to his jaw, her thumb pressed almost reverently to his bottom lip.

He looks down at her, and lets everything he's feeling – all the fear, all the hurt, all the awe – fill his eyes with an honesty that worries him like an unturned stone in a current of salt.

"Victoire," he starts so quietly he's not quite sure he's even spoken out loud. "We can't." He tells her.

Her thumb traces the movement of his mouth and he hates himself.

"But," she says in turn, just as softly, her eyebrows pulled in a tight line of wonder, eyes round and wide; "we can."

Teddy tugs in a rough breath sharply and when she steps closer still, he drops his forehead to hers helplessly and fists the material at the back of her dress.

"No, Vic, we –"

"Shh." She speaks into his mouth, and he swallows the sound.

Victoire drops her hand to his neck, trailing her fingers down his throat.

"Teddy," she says, and her mouth brushes his with the sound. "I want to feel you."

He exhales in a decidedly shaky manner against her, and shudders with her next word.

"Please."

It's so quiet, and the whimper she carries with it is lost in his mouth.

He crushes her to him, his lips on hers heady and hungry and desperate, and he's already lifted her into his hold – her legs wrapping around his waist – before he can remember how gently he's always wanted to treat this, treat her. But Victoire's head just tilts back as he trails kisses down the elegant line of her jaw, and she's pointing him in the direction of her room between the sounds his mouth is coaxing from her throat.

Teddy fumbles them to her room, and after a jarring stumble into the door, he presses her aloft against the wall, one arm braced above her, his other hand grasping at the small of her back, pressing her closer and closer still.

He needs to feel something tangible; he needs this to be real.

Victoire tips her head back to lean against the plaster, and the smooth, cool expanse of her throat is too tempting to deny, so Teddy's mouth blazes a trail down her heated skin and the taste in his mouth isn't enough, yet it's entirely too much.

When he nips at her collarbone – so lovely and graceful and inviting – she makes a soft noise in the back of her throat and her legs tighten at his waist as her hand threads into his hair.

"Teddy." It's pulled from her mouth, half-broken by a gasp, and the sound shudders along the rise of Teddy's spine so intensely he pauses and drops his forehead to nuzzle along the curving dip of her neck.

"Again." He speaks against her, his tongue licking the punctuation. "Say it again." It's rough and pleading and when Victoire leans forward and presses her mouth to the sweat at his temple, his hands shake.

"Teddy." She whispers into his hair, the sound curling around his ear, and something inside of him shivers and snaps.

Teddy pulls her mouth to his again, and lifts her back fully into his grasp, turning and only half-gently setting her on her bed; his teeth biting softly at her lower lip.

Victoire uses her legs to pull him along with her as she arches back and over her bed, and Teddy thinks the soft fabric of her sheets is lovely but it's nothing – nothing – compared to the feel of her. He brings his hands to cup her face, thumbs at the hinge of her jaw, and slows his mouth in turn.

Teddy pulls back a whisper of space and tries to get a word in edgewise, but Victoire – candescent, beautiful, insistent Victoire – tugs on the hem of his shirt and he lets her pull it over his head; his mind still trying to fold itself around the fact that this is Victoire – candescent, beautiful, insistent Victoire – that is pressing feverish kisses to the newly exposed skin of his chest.

He groans as she closes her teeth around his pulse point and lowers himself – all of his weight, all of the weight of these movements, these actions – pressing fully along the line of her body.

She drops her knees open and cradles his hips between them, and Teddy reaches blindly for the zip at the back of her dress. He finds it and tugs, letting his hands roam across the meadow of her skin as it is revealed by the split of material hiding her from him.

He gets it bunched down around her hips before Victoire pulls away – quickly enough that Teddy can only mourn the loss for a sliver of a moment – and lifts it off over her head, her hair falling and tangling around her shoulders, her ribs.

Teddy's hands are already back on her skin before he even registers the movement, and he wraps an arm around her to tug at the clasp of her bra as his nose nudges at one of the fine straps at her shoulder.

He frees the hooks with surprising ease and speed, and then slows everything entirely as he leans back to pull it off of her: steadily down her arms, to her wrists, fingertips. Teddy lets it fall to the floor, uncaring, absentminded, his entire focus – his every thought, every frantic beat of his blood – centered on Victoire.

He swallows once, thickly, and it sticks in his throat. Victoire's cheeks are stained pink, her breathing is heavy, and her eyes are completely, utterly alive.

Teddy reaches forward and uses both hands to push her hair off her shoulders, tracing a thumb up the nape of her neck, and he watches her shudder with the movement.

He lets his eyes wander slowly, drinking in every inch of exposed skin.

"Merlin, Victoire." He pauses and meets her eyes. "You're so beautiful." It's heavy and rough and he feels like even he should blush with his tone, its truth, how thick it is in his mouth.

She lunges at him suddenly and everything's frenzied and uncontrollable and wild again. It's too fast; it's not fast enough.

Teddy pulls back and stands quickly, hands reaching for the button on his trousers. Before he can undo it, Victoire's hands are on his, gently batting them away.

"Please." She says, looking up at him from where she sits at the edge of bed, eyes blazing from under her lashes, lip pulled into her mouth. Teddy instantly obeys, and moves his hands away obligingly. He uses their freedom to draw the backs of his knuckles down her cheek, tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear.

He doesn't get why she keeps giving him words of supplication. Doesn't she get that he's breaking apart? Doesn't she know that he'd fall to his knees before her? She needs to understand that, she needs to see; so when his trousers and boxers pool at his feet, he steps out of them, and does just that.

Teddy leans over Victoire and she folds under him like a wave, fluid and liquid and pure. He hooks his forefingers in her knickers and eases them down her legs, drops them, and places a soft kiss on her ankle. Victoire's fingers slide into his hair, and she fists her hand; Teddy doesn't even bother to morph away the goosebumps that form along his skin.

He inhales once, a futile effort to steady himself, and then kisses a trail up her shin, to the inside of her knee, her thigh. He moves by leisurely, measured inches, and his fingers tremble when they wrap around her hipbones.

Teddy uses one hand to secure her, anchor her – anchor himself, he doesn't know – fingers splaying and laying flat on the rise of her bone, her skin, while he uses the other to gently coax her knees to fall apart. He drops an open mouthed kiss on the smooth strip of skin under her hip, and raises his eyes to watch her as he turns his teeth to the bone.

Victoire's leaned up on her elbows, eyes shut, lashes shivering against the pearled sheen of her skin, brows furrowed, lips wet and red.

Teddy keeps his gaze on her as he moves his path down again, mouth opening and closing on her skin like a prayer. Victoire's eyes flutter open with wonder and when they meet Teddy's, she gasps and whimpers his name.

Teddy groans at the sound and curls his fingers against her skin as he sucks at the crease of her thigh. He needs to hear it again: his name from her mouth. He needs to hear it again – voiced just like that – one more time, a hundred more, a thousand, endlessly.

He could die of the sound, the way his skin reacts, the way his lungs pulse.

He could die of her.

.

Minutes, hours, lifetimes later – Teddy doesn't know the truth in the time, he doesn't care – Victoire is light in his lap and he can feel the muscles of her thighs contract as he paints meaningless patterns on the skin of her knee that's pressed tight to his waist.

He looks up at her and his hips still for the sight. There is a lock of long, pale hair stuck to the sweat-slickened hollow of her throat. She is flushed and glorious, lower lip pulled raggedly between blunt teeth. Her lashes flash darkly on the crest of her cheek and Teddy wonders briefly what they would feel like against the indented skin of his thumb.

He picks up his slackened movement, and lets it absorb him fully and entirely as she slides toward him and pulls back away. Teddy reaches a hand around to press to the skin – damp and heated – of her lower back, and reaches his other hand up to sink into her hair, so that he can tilt her head back and use his mouth to convince her throat of his honor that's went missing.

Victoire moans and Teddy can feel it licking at the expanse of his spine. He drags his hand around to her stomach and lets it slide down to where they are joined, thumb moving gracefully in slow, measured arcs.

He can feel Victoire's legs shiver, and there are tremors dancing along the sinews of her thighs. She reaches up and winds her arms around his neck, bringing herself closer still, and Teddy wants to laugh because she doesn't need to be any closer; she's already living in his veins.

Victoire's breathing splits and corrodes and the sounds from her mouth are wreaking havoc on his thoughts. All of his barricades are slipping down without check, and there's a subversive composure in the act.

Victoire fists her hand in his hair – turquoise and defiantly vibrant against the darkened light of the room – and Teddy drops his head and shies his face in the bend of her elbow. His mouth opens against the salt beading in the crook he finds there, and he mouths words, small and abundant and traitorous, over and over. Teddy traces them helplessly and wordlessly against her flesh, and he thinks that maybe they are less poisoned, less destructive, when hidden away in the nook of her bones.

"Teddy," she whimpers, long and quiet and helplessly pulled from her lungs, and he looks up at the disarming sound.

Her head arches back, long hair wild and bright. Her mouth falls open the slightest bit, and Teddy thinks he'd like to press his tongue to the flush of teeth that she's exposed. He's never seen a more beautiful sight, a more haunting sight, and it reaches and reaches and burdens him anew.

He drops his mouth to her skin, licks at her forearm, and Victoire shudders and breaks. She falls apart above him, around him, and it's all he can do to watch her and lose himself too.

.

Teddy wakes up and everything's shifted: the axis of the entire world's tilted, and he's afraid he won't be able to stand up straight. He's afraid if he tries, the earth will betray him, and he'll tip over, and everything he's been keeping safe and secure inside him will slip loose and fall to the floor in vicious shards.

He exhales slowly, presses the thoughts, the memories, the remnants of feelings – pulsing along the pathways of his synapses – to the back of his mind and assesses the best he can.

Victoire's curled around him, her mouth pressed to the curve of his neck, and her slow, even breaths are beating a rhythm softly into his skin. Her legs are tangled in his, and Teddy allows himself a moment – one singular, concise unit of time – before he lets the panic fully take hold.

He turns his face, from where it's buried in the hair at Victoire's temple, up to the ceiling, and stares at the white paint: mocking with its purity and idleness.

He lets his eyes slip closed, and splayed out on his lids, like a picture to a canvas, is the entirety of this friendship, shattered and irreparable, in the aftermath of a moment's decision he took too far. It makes everything in him ache with a regret he can't cap, can't contain, and he knows without question the only thing he can do.

He turns and rolls over as soundlessly as he can, even though the effort feels futile: he feels like every protest of every cell of his being is screaming more than enough to be heard. Teddy curls over Victoire, arms braced around her like a bird in a cage, and bends down to pluck his wand from the pocket of his discarded trousers.

He straightens and presses all of his weight into his palms as he lets himself look down upon her. She is so lovely, so resplendent, so fucking alive, and whole and real beneath his gaze, it cuts at his lungs.

Teddy doesn't even let himself consider anything other than what he's going to do, what he has to do; he doesn't allow himself one more moment of selfishness, because he can't, not now, not when his like-titled dance card's already too full. He doesn't get to regret, to be wistful, so he just focuses his energy on this girl, this woman, and all the things he wants to save.

Teddy lightly drops his forehead to her shoulder, and drags the tip of his nose along her collarbone. He nuzzles into the crook of her neck, and lets his mouth linger there, steadfast and soft, as he brings his wand to her temple, gently, like a kiss.

When he brings to the forefront of his mind all the motions and actions and the dizzying blur of the night before; when he concentrates solely on their never having existed – of emptiness, of Victoire's solitary night spent quiet, happy, and at peace; when he inhales jaggedly around a crack in his breathing and murmurs "Obliviate" soundlessly into her skin, Teddy swears his fingers aren't shaking.

He swears he can shoulder this – he has to, so he promises himself that he can.

(Teddy thinks he may have to add Liar to his steadily growing list of aliases; for his knees shake like hinges, and his throat's already too dry.)

.

Teddy walks down the sidewalk, dismal morning light blinking against his chin that's turned in to his chest. The collar of his coat is pulled high to bolster the sag of his shoulders, to cement his faltering, blinded steps. The crisp November wind bites at his eyes, but he lets them water unattended.

He figures he could use the distraction, he figures he might deserve the pain.

Teddy ducks into a shadowed alcove, forces his concentration onto the task, and Apparates away from the block of buildings that surrounds his regret.

He sucks in a breath as the familiar pull behind his navel shakes his bones, and when he opens them, the dingy interior of The Hog's Head greets him. He takes a moment to assess the lonesome crowd; mercifully, there's only one other patron at the bar, and the singular barkeep scowls at him from under heavily lidded eyes as he approaches a stool.

Teddy sits and orders Firewhiskey, winces around the first swallow, and lets the burn that swelters in his gut replace the cliché of what he's doing, the staggering guilt that he feels, the gaping hole he's just gone and sliced into himself.

The mass of tangled wrongs gathers heavily at the backs of his teeth, and he screws his eyes shut and lets the sour liquid wash it away as best as it can.

.

"A bit early to be getting pissed."

Teddy's head lifts from where it's dropped onto his arms, and his vision sways angrily for a moment before Harry's pale, questioning face swims into view.

Teddy blinks stupidly for a minute, unsure if what he's seeing is actually real; he's long since lost the ability to differentiate. He squints and swivels his head around in confusion for a moment, tracing down the pub's offerings to try and calculate a reason for his godfather's being here.

"I was tipped off." Harry says, answering the unvoiced question clearly stamped on Teddy's face.

Teddy lifts a shoulder in vague acknowledgment, and his search abruptly stops on his fellow bar mate, eyes widening slightly in recognition as Seamus Finnigan tips a glass in his direction.

Hell's goblins.

Harry lets out a long, tired sigh behind him, and Teddy tries to make some fired, chafing comment to get Harry to leave him to himself, but things are fluttering and dipping around him again, and he can't swallow very easily, so he says nothing and just stares at his collection of empty bottles with menacing ire.

"Come on, let's get you home." Harry says, and it's gentle. Teddy sort of loves it and hates it equally.

He nods absently and reaches for his money, but the clang of coins on the beaten wood counter stops his movement. Harry's fist retreats and his mouth tugs at the corner slightly in a sad, only sort-of smile. Teddy opens his mouth to protest before he's cut off.

"I looked for you last night. Couldn't find you exactly, so I figured you'd turn up sooner or later in the likes..." Harry's hand sort of waves in a blanketing gesture and then he drops it onto Teddy's back.

"You deserve one then." He says, and it's the same tone as before. "I wish I could say it will get easier, but I'm still trying to sort that out myself."

Teddy wants to tell Harry that he knows it won't ever get easier, not really, do things ever? And besides, Harry's only half correct on the reason for Teddy's rather uncharacteristic turn at the pub.

But he keeps silent and lifts himself on unsteady feet. The ground and walls lurch again so he squeezes his eyes shut to blot out the unsettling movement.

Harry's hand lifts to Teddy's shoulder, and with one nauseating pull of his gut, he finds himself back in the empty confines of his flat, Harry's hand falling away from him as he turns away to let Teddy wilt in this moment undisturbed.

Teddy loves him for it, loves the father he never quite had for too many reasons to track, but he's never felt more alone.

He grinds his palms into his eyes and shrugs out of his coat sloppily. It falls to the floor with a slap of brass buttons, and the noise brings a sharp pinch to his eyes.

Everything rushes up at once: the leftover trace of inadequacy, the tang of failure, the bright, undimmed taste of Victoire on his tongue, the warm, luring arc of Victoire's ribcage under the reaching press of his hands, the guilt, the sense that everything faulted and snapped in a singular, blood-warring moment; everything.

He barely makes it to the loo in time before he drops and lets it all wrack his body.

He vomits until his lungs seize and there's blood in his mouth. He squeezes his stinging eyes shut and thinks of a shore as the saltwater burns.

He wonders if he's drowning.

.

The salve of time falls useless against Teddy's skin.

It keeps moving and turning – changing and changing – and the nick in his breathing, the wound in his chest, go unaltered.

It almost makes Teddy laugh.

.

The first thing he does is throw himself into work with such ferocity that the months lose track of themselves at a near distressing pace.

The next thing he does is move. It's no different than before, and besides, why shouldn't he? The meager years he'd spent unaccompanied at a single address didn't mean anything other than a situational location on a map of constants that his life couldn't possess. He had ducked in and out of the place so often, he never got a feel for the carpeting, or learned the color of the walls, so there's no sense of loss as he relocates the same repetitive process to a new site.

There's a tide of work that keeps him in and out of countries, places, identities, so thoroughly, he doesn't have time to worry about the bags under his eyes, or be bothered by the sleep-thieving dreams of long, pale hair, and longer pale legs tight at his waist.

Really, he doesn't.

Victoire writes him, because of course she does. She writes with almost unusual regularity at first, and he responds with unusual scarcity at first, his words both concise and vague.

He feels the quill in his fingers will bite at his skin the longer he keeps it in his hand, so he concludes his rare responses to her before the traitorous thing tears him open and everything comes spilling out.

Victoire's words claw at all the concrete separation he's constructed around himself and his decisions, but he steels his resolve, and fists his calloused hands against the need to touch her, feel her, assure himself she's still real.

Teddy, she writes,

you forgot Christmas, but that's alright. The snow felt heavier this year, I think you'd have liked it. I think you should miss it.

Teddy, she continues, as time carries forward,

I travel now. There are flowers in New Zealand that grow nowhere else. I tried to send them home to keep, but it broke my heart.

Teddy,

there is a sting in the weather. I think the sun is aiming to burn off my skin. I think I should let it; maybe then it will be new. Does it rain where you are?

Teddy,

I miss you.

Teddy, Teddy, Teddy...

She writes consistently at first, and then she only sometimes writes, and he only ever sometimes responds, until he's missed two Christmases and more events then he can count; he just lets them stack up higher and higher in a pile labeled Guilt.

Finally, early into the third year without seeing Victoire – without seeing anyone really, save Harry and a few short, scattered visits to Gran – she tapers off and then stops.

He thinks it should feel like relief.

He thinks it swells around him like grieving.

.

He buries himself in things around him, things that distract him, things that trick him into a false sense of knowing what comes next.

He buries himself in things, and sure, there are women too, but their hair against his fingers in the dark is never light enough, and their eyes are too brown, too green, to flat a blue.

He laughs morbidly, and lets his mouth fall to the neck of a girl with blonde hair that's too golden, and when he closes his eyes against the off-colored shade, the threads of silvery light that flash against his lids brings bile to his throat.

The taste of hating yourself, Teddy finds, is a curdled, venomous thing.

.

"Vic?" He asks her, thousands upon thousands of times in his mind. "Victoire, do you know how I love you?" The words are painted loud and bright on the soundless canvas of his thoughts.

"I love you and it burns me. It's heavy in my blood and it weighs down my bones. I love you, and I'm dying with it."

.

Teddy startles as a loud Pop cuts into the quiet of his flat. He sits up from where he's slouched over the mess of notes scattered on the coffee table in front of him, and sees Harry standing in his kitchen, body pulled taut and eyes uneasy.

"What's going on?" Teddy starts bluntly – uncertainly – fear and apprehension sinking into his gut.

"Uh, hello Teddy." Harry says, walking into the living room and shoving his hands in his pockets awkwardly; Teddy's instantly on guard. "Gin sent me." Harry states suddenly, as if needing a reason to be in his godson's flat unannounced.

Maybe he does now? Teddy doesn't know.

"Look, er, I dunno. This is – I mean, we tried to –" Harry trails off in clear distress, brings a hand to crumple the back of his hair nervously, and shifts his weight on his feet.

The air in Teddy's lungs feels stale and leaden, but he forces his voice out anyway.

"Okay?" He asks, extending the word past its syllables, and willing Harry to continue despite the sawing sense of foreboding.

"Um, you see, the thing is, Victoire's getting married." Harry pushes it out in one cramped, rushed sentence and then drops into the armchair at Teddy's left, a heavy, stilted sigh accompanying the movement.

Everything stills.

Teddy says nothing, doesn't think he could even if he wanted to. The room bares teeth at him, and the fire leers at him from the hearth, licking viciously at his toes. Teddy drops his eyes unsteadily to the floorboards and he thinks he can see the colors his eyes turn – and then turn again and again – reflecting off the mocking wood.

The entirety of the cells in his body shift and numb themselves, and he slams his jaw against the flesh of his cheek until he draws blood. He doesn't even know what color his hair's turned, doesn't even know if it can change at all.

He doesn't quite remember what it's like to have a heart that pumps without reminder, or skin that doesn't snap against his bones.

"Sorry." Harry finally mumbles after a long, thick moment. "It's just, er, it's been three years, Teddy." He says, the old nickname coming to his mouth as a form of comfort around the stark words that Harry sounds uncomfortable delivering.

It sounds more like pity and Teddy can't quite blame him, but he hates it nonetheless.

"We didn't know how to –" Harry pauses again and inhales deeply, and Teddy feels envious of Harry's ability to continue to breathe. "She was so – It just - There was so much...I'm sorry." He finally finishes, and he really does sound sorry, and Teddy vaguely wonders why he's giving him an apology, a sympathy, a pity, he doesn't deserve.

He wonders how Harry even knows; and then he remembers that it's Harry, and that he's Teddy Lupin, and he'd ran like the ghost in his name, and Harry gets it.

Teddy exhales a vicious, rickety thing and a muscle in his jaw pulses.

"Okay." He finally responds, the noise barely a sound at all, but he can't lift his eyes, they feel so heavy.

Harry stands to leave suddenly, seemingly trying to give Teddy something like privacy. He clasps a hand quickly to Teddy's shoulder and Disapparates with another Pop.

Teddy wonders if he will ever remember how to properly exist. He wonders and wonders and then drags himself to his feet with shaking hands to try and will himself to ease the rattle in his bones.

He clenches his shaking hands, shuts his eyes, and Disapparates from the angry walls and greedy fire; Disapparates from the scent of molding ideas, wasted love.

.

When Teddy Apparates to his Gran's house there's a loud shattering crash that greets him.

He looks up to see his Gran, surprise writ cleanly on her face, her wand readied and pointed directly at his throat. Her mug of tea lies broken in ceramic tatters at their feet, the brown liquid seeping quickly into the rug.

The surprise and shock on her face melts into surprise and happiness and Teddy lets the time since he'd last seen her press in on him from all sides, and he feels more selfish and horrid than he ever has before.

"Teddy!" She says, pocketing her wand and rushing over to embrace him.

He leans down and presses into her and lets the smell of candle smoke and baking bread wash over him; the breath he pulls in is still quaking, sparse and barely a breath at all.

"Hey Gran." He says into her tufts of long silver hair.

"Merlin, Teddy, where have you been?" She asks immediately, her voice sounding both sad and angry.

He pulls away from her to drag a hand through his hair while he tries to collect himself. It's for naught.

"I just – God, Gran, I'm so sorry. I just –" Teddy pauses and gulps in air greedily, manically elated that he can once more: his knocking lungs feel parched. "Gran, I – She –" He drops off suddenly, weakly, and he can feel his face crack and crumble; he can feel his eyes fill.

It's a horrible moment.

He tries to turn away from Gran so that she won't be subjected to this vulnerability. He tries to bring a hand up to cover his face, but Gran catches his wrist and uses it to pull him to her again.

"Oh Teddy, I know." She speaks, and tightens her hold on him when his shoulders tremble. "Oh, my boy. My darling boy."

Everything rushes out of him with a speed that blinds him, and he lets himself fall to its pull. The current is crippling,and he's exhausted, so he stands there helplessly, letting it all sound off the walls and drop to the floor.

Gran says nothing, just makes senseless, comforting sounds in his ear and he feels young and pitiful and small, even though his shoulders ache from bending so far down to her.

But he stands there and he lets her love him, because right now, it feels like all he might have.

.

Victoire is marrying a Muggle named Luke.

Teddy learns this from Gran, and he also learns that he has brown hair and plays piano, and Teddy thinks it's all so fucking fitting, because it's not really fitting at all.

He thinks it's all so fucking lovely. It's just so perfect it cores out his lungs. It makes him almost laugh, really, but he keeps it all to himself in the three months he has to prepare.

Everything swirls in color-less patterns around him and he lets the days filter through; for what else can he do?

Teddy's twenty-five and he's lost track of all the poltergeist thoughts that raid his brain.

.

"That's a filthy habit." Teddy looks up at the sound of Dominique's voice from where he's sitting against the brick wall.

"Yeah." He replies and exhales the smoke from the cigarette in a cloud pulled between his lips.

He's got a lot of filthy habits.

Dominique drops down unceremoniously next to him, pulls the cigarette from his mouth and takes a drag herself.

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye and then drops his head back, letting it rest on the abrasive block behind him.

It's an egregious feeling: the bricks, the mortar, the Muggle church in itself. It makes him feel cross and fraudulent, for Victoire isn't meant to be married in a church. It's not right, it's not honest; it doesn't even make sense. Victoire – glowing, magnificent Victoire – trapped inside a hollow box. No, Teddy thinks fiercely, she should have the sea. She should be married on a beach somewhere, with sand sticking to her toes, her dress, her hair, everything. But the thievish sand wouldn't even matter, nothing would matter, because Victoire would just laugh and she would be radiant, and barefoot, and everything would just – She'd just –

Teddy violently shakes his head to free himself of his thoughts, groans loudly and drops his head into his hands.

"Ted," Dominique starts, sounding uncertain. "Teddy, look. This is – I just –" She trails off with a frustrated, sighed-out "Fuck," and Teddy lifts his head to look over at her. She's pressing the life out of the cigarette flush against the pavement and she looks determined and sort of-almost sad, and Teddy swallows once, roughly, and prepares.

Dominique looks at him, squarely in the eye, and sighs again.

"This all –" She throws out an arm in a sweeping, encompassing gesture, "Fuck, she was so –" Dominique stops suddenly and frowns down at her legs; picks at a fleck of invisible dust on the hem of her dress.

When she lets her eyes find his again, they're actually sad this time. Sad, and pitying and full of things Teddy doesn't want to be the recipient of, but knows he is anyway.

"Just...don't." She says, and it sounds so sympathetic it makes Teddy feel sick. "Okay?"

He sits there dully as his mind supplies him endlessly with answers. Don't what? Don't do anything stupid? And I can't. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I have to. And I don't know how. Please help. I love her, I love her, I love her.

But Teddy just exhales without words, mumbles Scourgify – the scent of stale smoke and stale love lifting from his clothing – and drags a hand through his hair tiredly before standing.

Dominique follows suit, and places a hand on his shoulder that's heavy with sorrow. It makes him want to laugh, or cry, or something else entirely that he can't exactly put into thought enough to understand.

So instead he lets the procession of his replies fall broken to his throat and he doesn't meet her eye when he responds.

"Okay."

It's quiet and heavy and it will never be enough.

But when Dominique turns and heads back into the (strange, suffocating, wrongwrongwrong) building, Teddy follows her, and sure, his world may be splintering around him, and his lungs may have forgotten their obligation, but he goes anyway.

Because he's Teddy and she's Victoire, and fuck, he loves her, has always loved her, will always love her, even if his heart's been sucked clean, and laid barren and dry and bloodless at his feet.

.

This is it, he thinks brokenly.

This is the moment when his life quits making sense. And yet it seems suddenly to Teddy that's all it's ever been: semantics and bruises and hesitation piled up on a precipice, just waiting for one wrong move, one misstep.

He thinks suddenly and oddly back to Christmas of his fourth year, and how he'd read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and thought it the saddest story he'd ever heard of. He watches Victoire, standing there – looking so beautiful that it punctures holes in his lungs – with her eyes trained on her Muggle bloke, while Teddy stands here, his eyes trained on her.

And all at once, he feels every moment too quickly; every regret, every wasted sentence too slowly. It stretches over his skin like an uprooted notion of time: everything dull and sharp and inconsequential pitted against the void in his chest. His bones feel a cage, and he has never – never – in his life, wanted to run – to disappear fully and completely – more than he has in this hot, severed, tragic moment.

Teddy thinks of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland again and watches his as hands shake. He curls them into fists as his chest hitches, and thinks he may need to reconsider the saddest thing he's ever heard of.

He's gone mad and no one's noticed.

It claws at his skin.

.

The October night is fresh, and the cool air carries with it the sound of all the laughter tucked inside the Burrow. There's a pumpkin, charmed to dance, that's teetering dangerously close to the edge of the stairs, and Teddy wonders idly if he should bother stopping it, should it careen off the porch.

He decides against it, and instead watches as it successfully clambers back onto safe ground and tries to coax another squat pumpkin into joining its dance. It seems futile; the other pumpkin is a silent, unresponsive thing, and Teddy almost pities the larger, animated gourd, until he realizes that's a shade too near pathetic; a shade that hits too close to home.

He takes a swig of butterbeer and looks back out on the night.

"There you are." Teddy starts a bit and swivels his head around to see Victoire walking toward him, one hand wrapped around a mug of something he suspects might be pumpkin juice.

In the spirit of the holiday, she has a pair of opaline wings on her back, and fairy lights charmed to shimmer in her hair. She looks so ethereal, so utterly beautiful, that it literally takes his breath away.

Teddy looks away and curses in the back of his throat, because it's been two months now, and he still can't quite convince his heart it's still beating.

"Here I am." He responds as she tucks in on herself, and gracefully joins him. He tries not to flinch as she does; it's a knee-jerk reaction to her nearness.

"I feel like I've been looking for you for ages." She says breathlessly and then grins at him. He stomach clenches uncomfortably, so he tips his bottle to his mouth to take another pull and distract himself.

"Then again," she continues brightly, "I could be wrong. Uncle George's been fizzing up my pumpkin juice a bit, I'm afraid." She tilts her cup toward him conspiratorially and laughs, a tinkling, melodic sound.

Teddy openly stares.

He's never seen Victoire anything even close to drunk, and he lets himself smile as he takes in her luminous eyes and flushed cheeks. The lights in her hair glint off of her skin, and she blinks and looks over at him, and everything around them sort of settles in quietly as it blanks out.

"Having fun then?" Teddy asks as he raises his hand and gently taps a fingertip against one of the glowing orbs in her hair. It sparks and glitters against the strands and he's caught in the glow.

"It's wonderful." She says quickly, and laughs again as she wraps a hand around Teddy's wrist that's still poised in her hair. She peeks up at him from under her lashes, bites her lip, and Teddy forgets how to breathe for the second time in much too small a time. "Don't tell Luke though. He's trapped in there with the children."

Teddy drops his hand immediately, as everything that had been suspended snaps back around them with the sound of reality crashing down. He sighs, half with frustration, half with misery, and looks away, clenching and unclenching his hand to rid of the feel of her hair against his skin.

"D'you want to know a secret, Teddy?" She asks suddenly in a near whisper. It's an inviting question, and she's an inviting sight, so he allows himself to look back at her and lets the corners of his mouth turn up a little.

"From you? Always, Vic." He says and she lights up, putting the brilliance of her costume to shame.

Victoire inhales very deeply and pauses for so long that Teddy wonders if – in her adorably, yet bizarrely drunken state – she's forgotten what she's asked him, but her brows furrow and then she smiles down at her toes as they dangle over the edge of the porch, and she opens her mouth.

"I used to be so in love with you." She says and laughs airily at the end of her words, as if she's just stated an empty observation regarding the weather.

Teddy feels as though someone's taken a pickaxe to his throat. There is no air he can pull in, it seeps through the gashes in his skin, and besides the world's gone void anyhow; there's nothing left for him to breathe. He blinks at her, and blinks at her again, but she keeps her chin ducked low, hair pooling on her shoulders and half-concealing her face.

"What?" He finally asks, clipped and deep, when his voice filters back into his throat, around all of the blood that's welling from chipping at his tongue.

"I used to try and think of all the things that put my little soul at ease, and," she pauses again and shrugs a bit. "They were always shaped like you." She finishes, kicking her feet out and laughing softly again.

Teddy can't remember what anything is, he can't recall the assignment he was on earlier in the day; he can't bring to mind what they had for dinner, he's not even sure if there's blood left in his veins, because nothing – nothing – in the world makes sense, and nothing has value besides the sound of her words, the meaning that sits in their curves.

She turns and looks up at him while he staggers his thoughts around, and the smile on her face is almost shy; it's a look he's never seen on her before. It tears him down.

"Vic. Victoire, I –" He stutters and stops, drops his bottle to the porch, where it rolls off and drops to the grass and leaves below. He doesn't care. He doesn't fucking care about anything but this girl in front of him, with her too blue eyes and this…this look she's giving him.

He turns his body toward her and her eyes widen for a moment before she shakes her head gently and brings her teeth to her bottom lip.

"It's okay, Teddy." She says and waves a hand dismissively. "You don't have to say anything, of course. I just had to tell you; only I've forgotten why." She stops and smiles and it's almost melancholy. His heart beats too heavily in his wrists.

"You see, it's almost funny now." She says and leans toward him. Her eyelashes flutter against his skin for a breath before she presses a kiss to his temple, and Teddy feels something inside of him break loudly and helplessly: like a city falling to its knees.

She stands and looks down at him, and the light around her shivers through the wings at her back; her hair is a beacon again. Teddy files the image away, and swallows heavily as she brushes her fingers through his (black, orange, green, he doesn't know) hair once.

"Humor is a strange language." She says as she turns on her heel a bit. "I feel I've never quite been fluent." With that she disappears into the Burrow, squealing voices parting in her return, and Teddy drops his head into his hands and lets his world shatter.

He wonders if the fragments will catch the light and bend it enough to make him feel anything near alive again. He wonders if it will blind him; he thinks it may already have.

.