A/N: I hope this will be a mulitchap. Perhaps a long-winded approach to Teddy and Lily – but I'm training myself to write longer fanfics!
the colour of blue reminds me of you – S Club 7
Teddy Lupin was mess thinking about love in his all-too-crowded permanent room at the Leaky Cauldron, Diagonalley. It's littered with various poems, letters and photographs about and containing that one redhead that he's know for far too long. Since she was born actually.
Taken just over a month ago, Lily Luna Potter and her scintillating green eyes stared from his favourite picture at the end of his bed. She's grinning at something Uncle George was doing out of the picture - probably involving Angelina and a bottle of Fire Whisky - and she's wearing that fake-dragonskin dress that Grandma Weasley made especially for the party, tightly-curled scarlet hair piled high on top of her head with just a few tempting tendrils hanging loose to bounce on her shoulders.
He knows that his own hair has gone that annoyingly feminine shade of raspberry pink that always happens when he's love sick, and his nose has got that tiny bit longer which elongates his face entirely too much. He waits for his heart to stop fluttering violently against the cage of his ribs.
If he could, Teddy would jinx himself for thinking about Lily – who by the way is eleven years his junior and entirely too young for him – when he'd just broken up with Victoire, who was meant to be the love of his life.
Twenty minutes before, she had come bouncing up to the knarled old door of Teddy's room at the old Wizarding pub, silver-blonde hair glinting in the light of a single torch hanging in the alcove a few feet away. She stands out brightly in the grubby passage, like she'd had a Luminosity charm rolled on her milky skin.
"Teddy!" she had cried, as always ecstatic too see him with her wild, slightly French-tinted accent "I have those tickets for the Weird Sisters concert at Halloween! Don't ask me how I got them because Charlie would…actually never mind. But anyway, we're going to have to go shopping because that old suit you wore to George's wedding really isn't—"
"Vic!" he began, conscious that his Lily fandom is on full show, he silently covers the offending items with a blanket before she turns around from dumping her canvas bag in a corner, still chattering excessively.
Another great thing about Lily – she doesn't talk such flannel about old suits.
And so resolve forms in his chest, and it tightens, words suddenly hard to drive out. But there was no need now, Victoire just carried on with a stream of ideas about where too meet, whether to try and get tickets for Hugo and Rose (she's always got on with her younger cousins) and what to wear, all the time pushing into the room against Teddy's chest with small, white hands. But as she pushes him towards their favourite chair, she's putting off the inevitable reality, and he can see the melancholy being trampled down by Muggle designer shoes in her eyes.
Victoire knew it was today. She knew that things hadn't been the same ever since Lily's sixteenth birthday party a month ago. That's why she had booked the tickets, most probably. To relight the spark.
She's wearing those clothes that have their own little sector of fashion, not in Witch Weekly magazine but you're accepted to wear them. She looks stunning and he can't believe what he's doing for a second. Then he thinks green-eyes-soft-hair and furious, dragon-like looks before turning back to his current girlfriend and feeling… nothing at all.
Actually, Teddy felt a little numb as she forced him into the rocking chair by the window, lips puckered for a kiss and lilac eyelids closed. He leans in instinctively, smelling the laundry-and-baking smell at her neck that he still loves that tiny bit.
She smiles her shiny lips, any doubt put off for this moment, as the sun comes out from behind a cloud and streams through a gap in the doxy-eaten curtains.
Victoire's lips are soft and loving, sweet and so gentle for a moment, before he pulls away – why even bother? – and sets her off his lap onto the floorboards. He stands up, sighing, and realising how small she really is when she knows something she doesn't like. Because she's Victoire, and everything goes her way. She opens her mouth exactly when he does;
"Teddy, I lo-"
"Vic, I'm sorry but-"
They stop and try again.
"I know every-"
"I have no excuse."
They both sigh in unison now, a perfectly harmonic note. It's the way it's always been, so in sync that they can't reach a glass of fire whisky without the other nearly knocking it over; trying to tell a joke but realising they both know it…
"I – Teddy I guessed." Victoire manages.
"Guessed what?" he plays the fool – unwisely.
"About Lily, what else? Sorry Teddy, but you're as unsubtle as…as a hippogriff."
An attempt at humour lightens the mood. A fraction.
Teddy hung his hands at his sides, acutely aware that his hair is going grass-green with confusion.
At least he had thought he hid it well. It was just this hair… raspberry pink? Oh please.
Victoire gets up from the floor, tiny feet shuffling over to her bag and taking out her wand. With one, swift motion, he's got a matching, raspberry-pink wart squashed on his nose, which Teddy can see when he crosses his eyes.
Seeming satisfied and thinking herself totally reasonable, Victoire puts the twelve-inch-unicorn-hair-rosewood (nice and supple) back into her bag, and almost struts across the room to where Teddy still stands, nose tingling with the alien lump adorning him.
Her arms constrict around him one last time, and she whispers
"I don't want to know the details." and laughs, gaily into his ear "And the wart? You don't even want to know what Roxy's going to do when she finds out…"
She leaves it at that, and then apparates with the usual resounding crack.
And that was that. He was free.