I'm not really interested in the next generation of Harry Potter, but like How could I not, this ambushed me and wouldn't let go. While most of the kids' names are kind of uninteresting and I really find the recycling of names tiresome (not to mention a way to give the kids severe self-esteem issues), the symbolism behind this one hit me two days ago and I had to write it up.
She grows up knowing exactly what her name means, and unlike others, she is not restricted by it but revels in it.
She is British and she is French, but she does not need to speak the language to understand.
She doesn't remember anyone ever telling her what the word meant, ever explaining it to her. But long before she starts reading or writing, long before she writes calligrams and acrostics and hangs them on the walls of her room, she knows what she is, what her name is and that both are the same thing.
She is Victoire.
Victory.
Teddy is the child of the war, but she is not the child of peace. That will be her cousins, years later, her young cousins who will never remember Hogwarts still half in ruins and the battered shop windows of Diagon Alley.
Victoire is as she named, the child of victory. Of sacrifice and courage. The last child of war.
Perhaps it should be difficult, but her family is rife with living symbols, of heroes, of men and women both great and humble – Harry bears the weight with practiced ease, as does Neville, as do Ron and Hermione, as Teddy is learning to.
But to her it is easy as breathing, because it is who she is.
She knows she is the victory of life after death, of a new dawn after the long night, of the calm that breaks across the silent battlefield.
She knows she is the victory over the cold gravestones, over the empty space besides George, over the scars raking across Dad's face and those on Hermione's body, over the missing places at the table, over the invisible weight on Harry's heart.
Victoire is the first child born to the clan – to the Order, to the warriors of the Battle of Hogwarts, to the fighters of the resistance – after the war, and she knows she is the symbol of their victory.
Of the victory of everything they believed in; of everything they fought to protect.
It is a legacy she will bear with pride.