disclaimer: i don't own anybody you recognize, my ocs are mine.
notes: for the 25 Days of Christmas competition at HPFC, with the prompt snowflakes.
love is not a victory march
teddy/victoire
maybe there's a god above
but all i've ever learned from love
was how to shoot someone who outdrew you
- hallelujah, leonard cohen
-:-
At his wedding, she wears a dress his favorite shade of blue, all silk and chiffon and just the right neckline and just the right hem. Even though she's not completely trying to outshine his bride, she can still feel his eyes on her as she walks through the room to her seat, third row, groom's side, like a fairytale all twisted up and tangled. In another life, she reflects, this seat might belong to his blushing bride.
"Victoire," he greets, standing at the altar and dressed like a prince out of her favorite childhood books. She almost resents the resemblance to the love interest of the first story she ever wrote. "How are you?"
Polite, always, eternally composed, just like he always was. She steels herself and smiles at him, not entirely genuine but he'd know the truth in her eyes anyway. "Lovely," she tells him, as if they're simply two old school acquaintances catching up. As if he didn't know every curve on her body intimately, as if she hadn't seen all his scars and kissed away all his demons. As if.
"Congratulations," she adds a bit belatedly, because she'd never found the time to say so after their screaming match on the night he'd told the family he was engaged. "Anna's a lucky girl."
His eyes are dark, nighttime-colored, deep with something too close to desire. "I'm the lucky one," he says like it's something he carries in his sleep to convince himself of the truth in his words. "Thank you."
She almost ends the conversation there, but she doesn't. "So," and his gaze snaps up from the tie he'd been absentmindedly fiddling with, "I never took you for a winter wedding kind of guy."
The remark is calculated, poised to penetrate whatever wall he'd built up in his mind to surround the memories of their years together, back when they'd sit on the beach for hours and discuss everything under the sun and moon. I want to get married in summer, he'd told her, once, when everything is warm and bright and happy.
"We thought it would be romantic to get married at Yuletide," he tells her, rehearsed, we meaning Anna, but Victoire can't begrudge the girl her dream wedding. And it is, absolutely, a dream wedding, fairy lights and sparkling cider and snowflakes and all. "Wouldn't you agree?"
He's gotten better at matching her, wit for wit, shot for shot, she notes. But he's still not the one who's spent the better part of a year steeling himself to watch the love of his life marry someone else, so she flashes him her prettiest smile and says, "I always did want a winter wedding."
Teddy's eyes turn the shade of blue that can cut a girl's heart out and outside, snowflakes fall down like a fairytale. As if this is a fairytale. As if anything really is.
-:-
One, two, three years later, and he appears on the balcony of her hotel room in New York, hair dark and blue and windblown, eyes brighter than a candle, out of breath like he's chased her across the Atlantic when all he's really done is step into a fire. All he ever does is step into fires.
"Victoire," he says, voice smoky, breathless, like a romance novel. She doesn't write romance novels anymore. "Victoire," again, when she doesn't pay attention to him. She hates how much she pays attention to him. His hands are suddenly warm on her arms, forceful as they spin her around. She frowns at him and exhales a ribbon of smoke into his face.
"Stop that," he tells her uselessly, taking the cigarette from her fingers and tossing it away. "Why aren't you coming home for Christmas, Vic?"
She laughs, a little hollowly. "I never come home for Christmas anymore," she tells him, stepping close enough for him to be uncomfortable with her proximity, with her cigarette-flavored breath on his face and her eyes too blue to be real staring up at him. He wasn't always uncomfortable with this, but she knows better than anyone how quickly things can change after graduation. "How come you're only just noticing?"
Teddy hesitates. She waits for an excuse, a reason, a Well, Anna likes to spend the holidays with her family in Ireland, but what comes instead is, "I miss you, Vic."
Snowflakes start falling on top of their heads as she struggles with a reply. New York weather has the worst timing. "No, you don't," she manages, and then she pushes herself out of his arms, as far away as she can get. He has the audacity to look at her like her words have hurt him.
"What are you doing with your life, Vic?" he asks her softly instead of retorting, and she wants to hit him for that stupid nickname that she'd been given as a child, and she's not a child anymore, she's not his anymore, so what's the point of it all? "Why are you spending Christmas alone?"
"Alone," she repeats, her high-heeled boots clicking on the floor of her balcony as she steps towards him, this time deliberately. "You think I don't have friends in New York?"
"Oh, I'm sure you have friends in New York," he says almost instantly, as if it wasn't even a question. And it wasn't. "But I know you don't have family in New York. So why are you still here for the holidays?"
"I like New York in the winter," Victoire says, shrugging, reaching for another cigarette. "Don't you have plans in Ireland, Teddy?" she adds, as casually as a remark about the weather, or a sports game, or the people they used to be.
The snowflakes around them seem reflected in his eyes. "Not this Christmas, Vic," and she doesn't want to kiss him, but maybe she does, and maybe it doesn't matter because suddenly she is, and she wishes she could stop. But she can't. And maybe she doesn't really wish it, anyway.
He kisses back, so it's least partly his fault. He tastes like ginger ale, which is stupid, because he's always tasted of ginger ale, and it's been five years since she last kissed him. His hands tangle in her curls, gentle like he always is, and for a moment, it seems like he won't stop. Like he doesn't want to stop.
But he must, because he's married, and of course he pulls back first. He has always pulled back first. Sorry, Vic, I want to go travel the world without you and Vic, I'm back and I have a girlfriend and Vic, I'm getting married and shut up, she wants to scream, but she doesn't. Because he isn't talking.
His eyes are grey, their original color. His breath is coming heavy and hard, and she wants to take it away again, but she stops herself in time. Twenty-five heartbeats pass before he opens his mouth.
The only thing that comes out is her name. And then he kisses her again.
-:-
She meets a boy from California somewhere inside Columbia's campus on a warm spring day, and he's all dark hair, hazel eyes, a smile like a story and Los Angles charm. His name is Max, he's a muggle, he's studying astronomy, and he takes her out for coffee on their first date, which is a nice change from endless fancy restaurants and movies.
Her mother knows about him, naturally, through her periodic letters, and she's sure her father has been filled in, but when she brings home two years after they've started dating for her first Christmas back in England in several years, his existence is a surprise to the rest of her family.
"Which one is Teddy?" he murmurs to her during a break in the relentless conversation and questions about the muggle world he's endured for half an hour. "You said he had rainbow hair?"
She casts a glance around the living room of the Burrow, finds no hint of Teddy anywhere in the mass of Weasleys and Potters and Longbottoms and, if she's identifying that blond head correctly, Malfoys. With a shrug, she says, "I guess he didn't make it," like it doesn't bother her more than it should, and leans up to kiss him because he's here, and he isn't running away.
Teddy chooses that moment to step through the front door.
-:-
He hasn't said anything in the entire hour he's been at the Burrow, and Anna is nowhere to be found, so she tracks him down outside in the back garden where he's standing by the pond, skipping rocks aimlessly into the water as snow falls down around him and dots his ink-black hair with spots of white.
"Aren't you going to say hi?" she demands of him, all fire, all the time, just like she's always been. If there's one thing she's refused to let him break all these years, it's her spirit. "I haven't seen you in two years."
"Whose fault is that?" he snorts, and his voice sounds slightly slurred with alcohol. There's an empty beer can abandoned at his feet. "You could have visited. I wasn't going to keep running after you."
She frowns, because he still hasn't turned around. "I didn't expect you to," she mutters. "I just thought you might want to meet – "
"Your new boyfriend?" he finishes, and when he finally looks at her, his eyes are as dark as his hair. He doesn't like to match, normally, she remembers this much. "Yeah, no thanks, Vic. As if I need another reason to regret everything."
"You're drunk," she tells him, like the words don't sting. "You certainly didn't seem to regret it the night it actually happened. You would have stopped it if you did."
His laugh is bitter when it comes. "You're right," he says, and throws another rock into the pond. "I would have stopped it. I should have stopped it. And I could have, if I'd known you were going to go out and grab the first guy to give you any attention – "
"Max proposed to me," she blurts out, the still-secret tumbling off her tongue without any sort of reason, and he goes dead silent. She would add more – it was last week, he took me to Times Square, I said yes, of course I said yes – but she wants to wait for his reply, if it ever comes.
"Oh," he says, the word heavy when he breathes. "Congratulations."
It's a weak echo of their conversation five years ago at his wedding. She smiles and curls a fist inside her coat pocket, where she's been keeping the ring hidden until they tell her family. The diamond is cold but comforting against her palm.
"Thank you," she says, and that's it. That's all. This is their happily ever after.
-:-
She gets married in the winter, like she's always dreamed, in a glittering golden hall with wall-to-wall windows to watch the snowflakes dance outside, and a boy out of her fairytales standing at the altar, watching her glide down the aisle in her pretty white dress on her father's arm.
Teddy's there, all dressed in black and white and a tie as blue as her dress from forever ago, eyes golden and trained on her. She offers him a smile as she passes, and maybe it's a truce or maybe it's – maybe it's nothing, she tells herself. Everything between them always seems to fade to nothing.
Anna's still there, pretty and delicate, just as fair-haired and wide-eyed and hopelessly in love as ever, even though Victoire knows that he's confessed about the night he'd spent with her in New York so many years ago. Maybe Anna truly loves him, or maybe she just doesn't want to leave the boy she's had a crush on since she was eleven, and Victoire can sympathize a little, but mostly, she just thinks it's sad.
In another life, if they were other people, it might have been Teddy waiting for her at the aisle, but it's not. And there was a time when she didn't think she could have been happy with any other choice, but she is. And maybe the look in his eyes as he watches her means something more than she's willing to make of it, but maybe it doesn't.
The thing about life is that you never end up where you're supposed to, and when she kisses Max, she thinks that maybe there's no such thing as supposed to in the first place. Maybe it's just boys and girls, falling in and out of love with no rhyme or reason to anything.
Life isn't a movie, but it sure tastes like one when she kisses her husband. She tells him at the altar, "Let's move to California," and he smiles and kisses her again, and he's not Teddy, but it's all right. She hasn't written a happy ending to her stories in years, but there are snowflakes outside. It's all right. She's happy. Life's funny that way.
a/n: if you read this far, please drop me a review to let me know what you thought, it would mean the world!
and please DON'T favorite without reviewing, thank you.