Prompt #28: Spitting Image
AN: this is for the "If You Dare" challenge, which I am taking up for when I can't concentrate on my longer story.
The first time he saw her, he didn't think anything of her. She was just a little girl, a first year. With her brown hair and brown eyes, she was the kind of girl that was extremely forgettable, but he found that he couldn't forget about her.
He saw her over and over again over the next few years after that. It wasn't that he was trying to see her, oh no he wasn't. But he wasn't trying to see her, either. There was six years of age difference between them. And yet, they saw each other almost constantly.
She spent all of her time with her girlfriends – a bunch of other first years that were a lot like her. They had the same points of view on everything, she and her friends.
And he spent all of his time on the Quidditch pitch, training. She would come down to the Quidditch pitch with her friends, and they would watch the boys train, cheering for them despite it not being a game.
When he left school, he thought that he wouldn't keep seeing her everywhere. But he did. He knew that he would have to deal with seeing her outside of school, but not this often, or frequently.
With the return of Voldemort, he saw her more and more frequently. Her family or his family was constantly visiting each other, and she was almost always there. Their families had discussions about what should be done.
During the first war, the families had both been neutral. They had not fought, and they had been able to get away without it. But now they were worried. They had children, now. Children that would be more exposed to this war than the previous war. Especially him, now that he was an adult.
The day that he was asked to join Lord Voldemort was the worst day of his life. He refused, trying to say that he would prefer to remain neutral. It was the wrong thing to say to Antonin Dolohov, and he had known it at the time. The day ended with him in St. Mungo's, with broken bones and a concussion. After, once he was released from the hospital, he left the country, ran off to France, where the Death Eaters couldn't possibly follow him.
She had it easier, he figured. She was in school, didn't have to deal with all that was going on in the outside world. She was still underage, and therefore Voldemort couldn't possibly go after her (plus, she was pureblooded, and Voldemort hated to waste pure blood). He only hoped that the war would end soon.
On the day after the Final Battle, he received word from home of Hogwarts attack. They asked him to come home; they told him it was all over. And he agreed, and went home, leaving France behind.
He met her again, and she had changed a lot. No longer was she the little girl that he had left behind (not that she had been little then, oh no, she wasn't the kind of girl that you would call little). She had matured a lot over the two years he had been in France.
He finally decided that he liked her.
14 years later, he found himself at King's Cross, with her, of course. Saying good-bye to their eldest as she got onto the train, and telling the next eldest that he would be going there in a couple of years, too.
He hated this, and wondered if all the others had felt this way, when sending their eldest off to Hogwarts. He knew that she'd be okay at Hogwarts, though.
After all, while Teresa was the spitting image of her mother, she was the same as her father, personality wise.
And, after all, everyone had better know that you don't mess with the child of Adrian Pucey and Millicent Bulstrode. Not unless you want to know what it's like to have broken bones.