Hey! So this is written for a combination of two challenges at my beloved HPFC (Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges Forum). The first is the "Your Favorite Couple Competition" by a-trip-to-honeydukes - the event I had to write was a first kiss, and the prompt was fireworks. The second was the "Maybe in another life, I could have loved you Challenge" by Aries Diamonds, and the prompt was "Maybe in another life, I could have loved you" - go figure, huh? Lol. Anyways, here is my Teddy/Lily Luna fic - they are my Harry Potter OTP! :D Enjoy!

The first time they kissed was also the last.

The entire clan was on vacation to America, and they were celebrating a bizarre American Muggle holiday – the Fourth of July. Lily didn't understand exactly what they were celebrating – why an average day like this was a cause for so much fanfare and frolicking – but she knew that she loved the fireworks.

Muggle fireworks were the only thing Lily had ever seen where the Muggle version was better than the wizarding one. There were more colors, more shapes, more sounds…all of it was more.

And Lily's always been one who's wanted more. At first it was more candy but then it became more clothes, more jewelry, more friends, more boyfriends…she became notorious for taking more, no matter how much she had.

Perhaps this was because really there was no such thing as 'enough', or maybe it was because she just felt so empty inside.

But either way, she couldn't stop taking.

And there was one thing she desperately wanted to take.

Teddy Lupin. Oh Merlin, it was shameful, but Lily was desperately, irrevocably, entirely, obsessively in love with Teddy. Teddy – 11 years older than her.

Some of the fireworks reminded her of him. The ones that changed color. Like his hair used to before he started dating Victoire – since then it had always been brown. Two years of brown.

Lily shuddered.

Nondescript, average, brown – there weren't any brown fireworks – brown that had existed since Victoire said she had a weakness for brown hair.

It wasn't even an enticing brown. It was ordinary brown, almost devoid of pigment.

Lily sat underneath a tree, all on her own, watching Teddy and Victoire sit on the picnic blanket at the edge of the lake, watching the fireworks.

Then Victoire got up and Lily stood too. She walked over to the blanket where Teddy now sat alone and she joined him.

What are you doing, Lily, he asked.

What I've always wanted to do, she said.

And then she lets her lips gently brush across his – it's a chaste, simple kiss – almost childlike, really.

No, Lily, he said, Not here, not now.

Where, then? When?

Nowhere, he said gently, Never. I'm sorry, Lily, truly I am. Maybe in another life I could have loved you. But not here. Not in this one.

But…

But nothing. You're a child. Only seventeen. You've got your life ahead of you, and I have no place in it.

That wasn't right. She was the one who had no place in his life, in his world, and they both knew it. They both knew she had constructed her world around him and that was that. He was the one who had a world too full of perfect part-Veela to have a place for her in it.

So she left him behind like it was easy, and as far as the world was concerned she moved on.

She told everyone that the boy she kissed for the first time underneath the fireworks was just somewhere she'd been and she'd never go back to.

But in her heart, she mourned for a boy who was almost her love. A boy – a man, really – who had the sweetest, most precious sadness in his eyes.

She couldn't go to lakes – she couldn't look at fireworks. No, it all made him overpower her mind.

But maybe, maybe…

Maybe in another life I could have loved you. But not here. Not in this one.

So what did you think? Pleeeeeeaaaaaaaaase read and review! :D

Love always,

Lily