For Emily (why the caged bird sings). I hope you enjoy this!
"Hey Lils," he says, crushing you in a hug, and you find yourself hoping that he can't feel how fast your heart is fluttering in your chest.
This is madness, silly girl, he'll never love you, and deep in your heart you know it. It's just one more reason you hate yourself, one more reason you don't smile anymore, one more reason you run away, as though putting miles and miles between you and the people who hurt you will somehow make the pain go away. Wake up, Lily darling – this is no fairy tale, the gods are not smiling down on you.
Fairy tales are for children, gods are for people with faith, and you lost yours a long time ago.
You're nothing to him, remember? Compared to precious, perfect Veela Victoire, you're plain and polite and so very useless. You're like an inferno, wild as your hair and perpetually out of control. She's like ice, cool and collected and with her life all put together and you can't ever forget that she's older than you, more mature than you, mature enough for him in all the ways you're not. For as long as you can remember, it's always been Teddy-and-Victiore, and when you're feeling cynical you think maybe they're a match made in Heaven.
You've been in love with him for years, since you were fifteen and he was twenty-four and the age gap seemed both magnified and miniscule, because he made you feel like you mattered. "You're my angel," he'd say to you, and you believed it.
He still starts his letters to you that way – how's my angel doing? Lighting up London? And it hurts like a million needle pricks to read those words, and to try to give them the meaning you so desperately wish they'd have.
He and Victoire are on-again-off-again, they're apart and then they're together and it gives you a headache hoping that one day he'll forget her and remember you, faithfully answering every letter, listening to every frustrated phone call, right in front of him all along.
You're not an angel, you don't have wings and you sure as Hell don't have a halo. You're bathed in darkness instead of light, you're bitter instead of holy and you wouldn't know grace if it stared you in the face. You're no divine being, you're a human being and that means you're cracked and damaged and everything angels aren't.
You're a Slytherin for Merlin's sake, silver and green and secretive, and if you believed in anything, it'd be the devil, the master of the hate in your heart, so much more real than your childish dreams of love and hope and the deception of happy endings.
Somewhere in Heaven or wherever they are, you like to think that if there were angels, they'd weep for you, for the way your stomach knots in anticipation when he visits, for the crushing disappointment when you see Victoire in tow, and most of all, for the way your secret sits in heavy in your heart, and how Teddy has left you wasting away a little more every day.
Written for:
The Hugs and Happiness Challenge – why the caged bird sings
Comedies and Tragedies Competition - Tragedy
The Greenhouses Competition - Bleeding Heart