Warnings for: smoking, alcohol, drugs, and mention of underage sex between a teenager and an adult (this is not depicted, only referred to).
too many war wounds (and not enough wars)
"Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good." - Richard Siken
Teddy knows, deep down inside, that he's really fucked things up this time. Like, properly.
"Anyway," he says to the room at large, sounding unconvinced even to his own ears, "It wasn't completely my fault."
Across the table from him, Harry gives this little sigh and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. They've been at this for so long. Even Dominique, who loves watching other people—and especially Teddy—get dressed down, looks bored. She's started rummaging through the drawer beside her, idly picking up various utensils and then dropping them while everybody else tries not to wince at the crash of metalware.
Teddy splays his hands helplessly on the table. "I mean, how was I to know? I didn't, like, realise they were that closely related, or that they would be ballsy enough to make a play for it. Nan said I should have known better, since they're purebloods, but I thought was stereotyping and frankly rude. And, anyway, I feel like they sort of have the right?"
Ginny sucks in a cross breath from behind Harry, and Dominique pauses with a spatula in one hand and an expression of utter delight on her face. Teddy hunches his shoulders in the chair. He's twenty four years old, damnit, and he will not be bullied by a room full of Weasleys.
"I'm just saying," he continues in what is supposed to be a firm voice but that comes out sort of strangled, mostly because Ginny has started to slowly and threateningly lower herself into a chair, "I know Sirius left you Grimmauld Place, Uncle Harry, but—I mean, you don't even use it, you know? And you've not got Black blood. Not that that's a bad thing, obviously. In fact it's a good thing, because James and Al and Lily with Black blood would probably be even scarier than they are now. In a good way," he adds so quickly he nearly falls over the words, because Ginny's and Harry's brows have drawn down and Victoire has kicked him quite sharply in the side of the leg, which hurts a lot, "But I mean the Blacks have handed that down for, like, generations. So it was kind of a dick move for Sirius to give it to you?"
There are too many people in this kitchen. It would be bad enough with just Ginny and Harry, but to have members of practically every branch of Weasleys seems overkill. Like Teddy said, it wasn't even his fault. And, anyway, what investment does Angelina have? She's not even married to a Weasley anymore. No reason at all for her to be sat in the corner giving him the fish-eye.
Feeling very ganged up on, Teddy turns his hair a sorrowful shade of midnight blue, and grows his eyes so he can cast one of those huge puppy-dog looks up from beneath his lashes at his godfather.
"Stop it," says Harry, frowning, "C'mon, Teddy, that's not fair—"
Dominique throws her spatula back into the drawer with a crash. Momentarily distracted, all eyes in the room fly to her. She pushes one hand through her sleek hair and gives them all a great shrug. Next to Teddy, Victoire makes this little French tch noise, like she knew the whole time her sister wouldn't be able to resist getting involved.
"Okay, if you'd had something in your family since, like, the dawn of time, you'd be pissed off if somebody gave it away, wouldn't you? Especially if that person got kicked out of the family yonks ago. And Teddy's Nan clearly doesn't want it, so, like, the Malfoys are the next in line, right?"
"You can't just arbitrarily challenge the laws of inheritance, young lady," Ginny retorts. Dominique raises one cool red brow. Teddy feels a little bit in love with her for a second. She's the only person he knows who can stand up to the adults in her family without ending up backing down.
"Um," she says, leaning back against the Potter's kitchen counter, "I mean, if you've got the money, you can. And we've heard enough times about how the Malfoys definitely do."
Beside Dominique, Young Molly has started nodding. "Yeah! Dad's, like, always moaning about it. They've got, like, offshore accounts, or something?"
"Precisely, Young Moll," replies Dominique with a sage inclination of her head. Together they stand and stare at the rest of the room, Dominique full of frowns and Molly hopeful as a puppy. Teddy feels the first faint flickering of hope.
"So your argument is that just because they can, they should?" inquires Hermione icily from her place next to Harry.
Dominique and Young Molly exchange a look, and then offer up a shrug each. Dominique's is grand and French and careless; Young Molly's is small and sort of helpless.
"Like," the latter begins, prompting a quiet hiss of despair to emanate from Hermione, "not that they should. But they did? And, like, yelling at Teddy isn't going to change that."
"Well," replies Harry, turning back around to fix his godson with a spectacular stink-eye, "if Teddy hadn't decided to get drunk with a sixteen-year-old boy—"
"Um, he decided to get drunk with me," interrupts Teddy, but everybody ignores him.
"And if Teddy hadn't asked said sixteen-year-old boy—sixteen-year-old Malfoy boy—why Sirius had been given Grimmauld Place at all, when his parents specifically wrote their wills to state that their estate would pass to the next Black relative that wasn't him, then maybe that Malfoy boy wouldn't have gone to ask his father the exact same thing, and we wouldn't need to yell at anybody."
"He's probably only doing it to annoy you," points out Young Molly, which is such an unusually astute thing for her to say that everybody swings around to stare at her again. Slightly taken aback, she continues, "You were like enemies at school or whatever? And I know you say you're all made up now, but really. I mean, I've finished school, and I still want to kill Gemma Barlowe."
"Yeah, but Gemma Barlowe's a bitch," points out Victoire and Dominique's father from where he's lounging in the doorway. Young Molly lets out a startled huff of laughter, and various adults in the room adopt pained expressions. Not looking it, Bill says, "Sorry. I know, I know, kids present."
"I'm not a kid," protests Freddie, the youngest in the room, "Merlin, I'm eighteen now, I'm only a year below Young Molly."
"Yeah, alright, pipe down, ickle baby," Dominique tells him with a wicked smirk. He turns to her with a murderous expression, but before he can snipe back Victoire raps her knuckles sharply on the rustic wooden table in the middle of the room.
"I think we're losing focus," she announces, fixing her younger sister with a pointed glare, "this was supposed to be a family meeting to discuss what to do about Grimmauld Place. Not to put Teddy on trial."
Teddy turns his hair an ardent shade of pink and shoots her an enormous beam. She pretends to ignore it, but he knows she's seen it. They went out for ages, after all. Doesn't matter if it was years ago, he still knows her like the back of his hand.
Ginny's wavering. "You should still apologise," she says to Teddy at last, but she says it without her earlier heat.
Teddy sits up straighter, puts on a serious expression and tells the room at large, "I'm very sorry I fell for Scorpius' tricks, got drunk, and gave the Malfoys the idea to sue for ownership of 12 Grimmauld Place."
"Thank you for your apology," replies Harry. "Now, we need to decide what to do."
It takes Teddy another ten minutes to escape, and he ends up bent over in the front garden with his hands on his knees taking fortifying gulps of the cold fresh air. Someone saunters up behind him and slaps him hard enough on the arse for it to bring tears to his eyes.
"Alright, Lupin?" inquires Dominique in a slow drawl. Young Molly is trailing behind her, concentrating hard on rolling a spliff, ginger brows furrowed.
"I'll be alright if you've got weed you'll share with me," he tells Dom with his most desperate expression. She laughs, grabbing at Young Molly's sleeve and pulling her wand out.
"See you at mine, motherfucker," she tells him, not waiting to hear his frankly hilarious, "I'd fuck your mother," comeback before she's apparating them both away. Teddy gives them a minute or two before following—Young Molly often gets sick from side-along apparition, and he's so not in the mood to Vanish vomit right now.
Just as he's preparing to leave, Victoire comes racing out the front door. She's wrapping an enormous scarf around her neck. Or her head, really, it's that big. Teddy watches it with an expression caught between horror and confusion.
"It's just a fucking scarf, Teddy," she tells him in exasperation, "are you going back to London? I've got Kenjutsu, but we could hang out this evening."
Despite the fact that it stopped being funny when she was ten, Teddy gives a great theatrical shudder at the thought of Victoire doing martial arts with a sword and says, "don't behead yourself."
"Haha, you're comedy gold," she tells him blankly, and then presses, "So, you up for it?"
"I think I'm going to Dom's, actually," he replies, "She and Young Moll said something about a party this evening, thought I'd drop in. Show my face and all that."
"Just don't go as Uncle Harry again," Victoire warns, pulling her wand out, "I mean, it was hilarious, but with this whole court case I don't think he needs pictures of himself falling out of an Edinburgh club at three AM with some twenty-year-old brunette."
"She was twenty-two," Teddy protests, but he's grinning. Harry had given him a stern talking-to about it afterwards, deaf to Teddy's protests that it was the only way to skip the line and, besides, it was barely five minutes in total, he'd spent most of the evening pretending to be various members of Lumos, the current it-band.
("I'm just a guy, I have to get laid," he'd explained with a dramatic wail, which had prompted a lecture about maturity instead of the hoped-for sympathy.)
"Be good," Victoire tells him as her wand begins to slash through the air.
"I'm always good," Teddy lies to the place where she used to be, and then apparates away himself.
They don't make it to the party until gone midnight, and end up leaving Young Molly on the sofa in Dom's flat. Teddy tucks a blanket over her before they leave. Her head is askew on one of Dom's ratty old pillows, her red curls like a lion's mane around her face, and her long legs dangle over the end of the couch. She'd look the picture of innocence were it not for the smell of weed, the empty bottles of beer on the floor next to her, and the fact that her shirt's got caught around a boob and left one side of her bra fully exposed.
It takes Teddy longer than he's proud of to realise that he's not going to be able to get the tiny blanket to cover the entirety of her body, tall as she is, and then longer still to hunt for a second blanket.
"Fucking leave her," grouses Dominique from the doorway, trying to wriggle her feet into her thigh-high boots. "She'll be fine. Her feet aren't going to freeze off."
Teddy gives in. He's desperate to get to the party, and besides Dom's probably right.
"I feel kind of bad about it," Teddy confesses a short while later as they turn the corner out of her street. Dominique, clutching tightly to his arm and slipping about on the icy pavement in her heels, just tells him to fuck off.
"I'm serious," he presses, looking mournful, "She was so looking forward to the party. You shouldn't have let her smoke so much."
"She's a big girl," Dominique retorts, concentrating too hard on where her feet are going to be able to glare at him, "Also, she looks forward to, like, everything. She's so easily pleased."
"What a relief that gene skipped you," Teddy mocks.
Dominique, dead serious, concurs, "I know, right?"
By the time they make it to the party Dominique has nearly broken her ankle twice and gone arse-over-tits once, because Teddy made her walk on her own for calling him a "chameleon circuit, only you pretend to be the stupidest thing in the room instead of the most subtle". Teddy's not precisely sure what a chameleon circuit is, because he's not a loser who watches Muggle sci-fi shows, but he'd been able to guess at the general rudeness of the sentence thanks to the middle finger she flipped him while she was saying it.
The party, contrary to what Young Molly had assured them earlier in the afternoon, is not a "fucking banger", and the only real source of excitement outside the copious levels of alcohol is a rowdy group of girls in one corner doing purple shots out of little glasses shaped like goblins.
"How offensive," Dominique says sniffily, and swans off to find the most attractive woman in the room to flirt with. Teddy, not being the wimp that she insists he is, shucks his coat and heads straight for the girls doing shots.
Anticipating a fun night of drinking, flirting, and ideally scoring, he's unimpressed three shots in to realise that he knows the girl who's just barged into the group to pour something green out of a bottle and straight into her friend's mouth.
"How the fuck did you get out of Hogwarts?" he demands of her, having to grab a fistful of her frankly ridiculously long hair in order to get her attention. Lily Potter, who is drunk and in Edinburgh and also, quite importantly, fourteen years old, swears at him with such spite even Dominique might be impressed.
"James texted me," she informs him, leaning into his personal space and then back out of it without realising, "Said you and Dom and Young Molly were coming to a party here, and I said I'd persuade Maddie to get off with him if he got me here, and, like, Maddie's hot, so here I am."
"You're fourteen," says Teddy crossly. One of her friends starts laughing helplessly and trying to unpick Teddy's hands from Lily's hair. She's so drunk she keeps missing and pitching forwards in her chair. Teddy, not too gently, pulls on the hair so that Lily turns to look at her friend. He demands, "Is this Maddie?"
"Jesus, Teddy," Lily exclaims, looking outraged, "You think I'd pimp out my actual friends to my brother? We're fourteen, you arsehole."
"I know," pleads Teddy, feeling like this conversation is getting away from him, "That's what I said."
"Relax," Lily says, leaning in to pat his cheek reassuringly, having to prop herself up on his shoulder with her other hand to stay standing. Teddy lets her hair go and swears at her. She swears back, then abruptly grabs her drunk friend and stumbles off. Teddy, out of sheer unwillingness to be responsible, lets her go.
"Make good choices!" Dominique yells after her, appearing to collapse onto the sofa next to Teddy. She sprawls into him, pressing a drink on him before he has to ask.
"Were we like that at fourteen?" Teddy inquires of her helplessly. Dominique cocks her head to one side. Her hair falls over her face, shiny and sleek in the low light.
"I mean, I think I was," she replies thoughtfully. "You probably weren't, because you were a goody-two-shoes until Vic got to you—"
"I was not a goody-two-shoes," Teddy interrupts self-importantly.
"Edward," she says, with infinite patience, "You were in Hufflepuff. You were Head Boy."
"Louis was in Hufflepuff, and he's one of the worst-behaved people I know."
"Head Boy," Dominique repeats, twirling a finger in his face.
"Harry said they've written him just to let him know they think Al might be a good candidate for Head Boy next year."
Dominique chokes on her drink. When she's caught her breath, she says, "Fuck me," very weakly. Teddy can't think of any way to expand on that sentiment, so they both sit in silent mutual horror at the thought of Albus Potter as Head Boy for a few moments.
Finally Teddy says, "Shotgun not taking her back to Hogwarts later."
Dominique just laughs.
At six AM, Teddy delivers Lily and four of her friends to the headmistress of Hogwarts with a very smug air. He feels like there might have been a sixth one, but he isn't sure enough to waste time traipsing around Edinburgh to look for her.
"I'm going to kill you," Lily moans from beside him, having to lean into him to stay standing, "You promised to take us back to Slytherin. I'll kill you. I'm going to tie you up, then I'm going to peel your skin off a centimetre at a time, until you're begging—"
"Alright, alright," Teddy cuts in, yanking the last fourteen-year-old into the spiral staircase that leads to the headmistress' office and forcibly turning one of them away from him as she's sick.
"Professor Macmillan," he announces as he herds the five of them in, not even pretending not to be pleased with himself, "I'm sorry to report I found these girls at a party in Edinburgh last night. I've not the faintest idea how they got there, but I thought it best to deliver them back to you."
There's a thoughtful silence from the headmistress' side of the room. Patiently, Teddy waits for the praise to come.
"Last night, you say?" inquires Macmillan, leaning forward and propping her elbows up on the desk. For a woman who was woken by a rather chaotic five AM floo call from a twenty-four-year-old she never even taught, she looks remarkably put-together. Teddy nods in his most serious and grandiose fashion, and catches the Rosier girl by her black net collar as she makes to wander off.
"Is there any particular reason it's taken until six o' clock to return them to school, then?" the headmistress asks in the deadly quiet tone that Teddy supposes strikes fear into the heart of pupil and staff alike. Since she's only been in charge for a year, Teddy has never learnt to be afraid of this tone being directed at him, and is rather good at ignoring icy voices besides.
Some good things come of growing up alongside Weasleys.
"I didn't want to wake you up in the middle of the night," he replies caringly, "So I took them for food before we came back."
"And how did you get back?"
"I've a friend in Hogsmeade," he informs her with a grin, "So we flooed. This one," he adds, releasing the Rosier girl in order to push forward one with alarmingly purple hair, "was sick three times."
Purple hair—Parkinson, he thinks—gives her headmistress a grin that looks more proud than sorry. A very soft sigh drifts over from Professor Macmillan.
"Alright, thank you, Mr Lupin," she tells him, sounding suspiciously like she's had to do this before, "I'll send for their housemaster and see to their punishments. If you could pass this misdemeanour along to Miss Potter's parents, I'd be much obliged."
Teddy salutes her and then turns to march out the door. He pauses to look over his shoulder. Parkinson has bent over to be sick again, and Lily has her head twisted to watch him leave. When she meets his eyes, she gives him a smile with far too many teeth. Teddy tips her a lazy wink and then makes his escape.
He goes back to Edinburgh rather than his place in London, determined that if he's up at six AM, Dominique will also be up at six AM.
"Don't you have any fucking friends your own age," she demands when she opens the door to him. She's wearing nothing but lace knickers and a t-shirt he's pretty sure she got when she was fifteen, which declares "girl power" in an obnoxious black cursive right across her boobs. She also has make-up smudged under her eyes, two new hickeys on her neck, someone else's lipstick on her jawline, and hair sticking up in very unusual directions.
"Well, you clearly behaved yourself," he tells her, sweeping past her and into the messy sitting room, "Did you have fun last night?"
Young Molly rolls over on the sofa. "She did. You should see the girl she's got in her room."
"I'll pass, thank you," he replies, toeing off his shoes and heading for Young Molly.
"What are you doing?" Dominique demands as he drops his coat on the coffee table and then clambers over Molly, squirrelling himself down on his side onto the sofa behind her. She makes a happy noise and pulls his arms around her so they're spooning, which makes them adorable as all fuck in Teddy's humble opinion.
"I'm sleeping," he replies as though it should be obvious, "Like fuck am I getting in the bed when you've been having sex in it all night."
Dominique looks murderous enough to throw them both out, but Teddy's practically asleep already anyway.
"Edward," she tells him, leaning in above them both to really up the threatening factor, "It is high time you got yourself either a girlfriend or some actual friends."
"Like, we're his friends, though?" offers Young Molly hopefully, reaching one hand out to ping the elastic of her cousin's pants against her hip.
"I've got friends," lies Teddy tiredly, mumbling into the back of Molly's head, "Now fuck off and let us sleep."
"You're going to die alone," says Dominique.
"So long as you're not there."
He wakes at seven in the evening with a raging hangover and, somewhat embarrassingly, a hard-on.
"I knew you loved me," says Young Molly sleepily from in front of him. Because she's not Dominique and therefore doesn't automatically deserve spite, Teddy kisses the back of her head before he pushes her off the sofa. She lands with a thump and a yowl but she's laughing by the time she sits up, pushing her haphazard curls off her face.
Forty minutes later they've both showered, Teddy has taken care of his problem, they've found clothes that haven't seen two days' wear, and Dominique has failed to appear from her bedroom.
Teddy makes the executive decision to go and find food without her.
"I think she'll be mad?" suggests Young Molly as they wend their way down the rickety staircase that leads from Dominique's top-floor flat.
"She should have got the fuck out of bed, then," Teddy replies through a yawn, holding the door open for her. She floats by him with a serious expression, tendrils of hair already starting to escape from the plait she pulled her hair into before they left the flat. The wispy bits are drying fast, corkscrewing back into her usual curls. The rest of it, on the other hand, is still dark red with water, several shades removed from its usual fire. Having received several lectures from his grandmother about chivalry and whatnot, Teddy gallantly grabs her in a headlock to force his hat over her head, nearly sending them both sprawling down the steps outside.
"Um," she says when he releases her, already going to pull the hat off.
"Your hair is still wet," Teddy tells her authoritatively, clamping both of his hands onto her head to prevent her from removing it, "it's November. You could die."
She scrumples her nose up at him, a frown drawing her brows down. Eventually she offers an uncertain, "…thank you?" and then sets off down the garden path.
They end up in some overpriced hipster saloon, munching through burgers and trying to decide if their stomachs are feeling strong enough to go for the hair of the dog and order beers with their meals. Feeling the burger churning uneasily in his stomach, Teddy decides to focus his attention elsewhere.
"Young Moll," he says, distracting her from her thoughtful perusal of her sweet potato fries, "were you a hell-raiser at fourteen?"
She considers this for a second, bending a chip between her long freckled fingers.
"Um, I don't think so?" she offers eventually, stuffing the chip into her mouth. "I mean, like, Dominique got me drunk a few times. But I didn't do parties or anything until sixth year."
"That's what I thought!" Teddy exclaims dramatically, glad to be proven right. "Lily's just out of control, right? That's what—"
"I did have sex with Alistair when I was fourteen, though," she adds absently, reaching for another chip, "the one I told you about?"
Teddy racks his brains. Young Molly doesn't go through boys with the same voracity that her cousin goes through girls, but he gets her conquests all mixed up in his head with various other Weasleys', and it usually takes him a while to sort through.
"Wait," he says suddenly, "The Alistair who was Dom's dad's friend Alistair? That was when you were fourteen?"
She nods with a grin, reaching for her water glass. "He was excellent. He said I was, like, the light of his life."
Teddy, who was still dating Victoire when she went through her Nabokov phase, feels a shudder travel right from the top of his head to the tips of his toes.
"Molly," he says. She looks up, alarmed to be addressed just by her given name and not the pet name she's been called since literally before she could talk. Teddy is way, way too hungover to be doing this. He says, "I mean—you do realise that's, like, rape?"
She shrugs, tearing off a bit of burger bun to stuff into her mouth.
"Dom explained that all to me right after," she informs him, mouth full, "And then she hexed him, like, really badly. I think he had to have, like, a ball removed. But that was kind of nasty of her, because it was my fault anyway."
"You were a kid," Teddy says firmly. He wants to cover her hand with his or something equally sympathetic, but hers have got ketchup all over them.
"Yeah, but I snuck into his room at, like, three in the morning in just my underwear and went straight for his dick," Molly explains, finishing her water and reaching for his, "I mean, what would you do if someone did that?"
Teddy's mind strays to Lily's friends the night before, with their swathes of bare skin and tiny scraps of clothing, and he's very relieved to find that all his conscience is saying is "fuck no".
"I'd kick them the fuck out," he replies, very relieved to be saying it honestly. Molly grins, ketchup smeared across one of her front teeth and her hair escaping like a mad thing from under his hat.
"That's because you're, like, honourable."
Teddy makes a face at her, and she goes off into peals of laughter.
"Eat your fucking burger," he tells her grouchily, pushing her plate closer to her. She swipes up another chip, still chuckling, and shoves it merrily into her mouth.
The topic doesn't come up again until they're wandering home at ten, the moon a bright and serious companion, her arm twined past his and her hand in his coat pocket.
"He was, like, the best sex I've ever had? Alistair, I mean. Much better than Colin Hills, who was, like, age-appropriate. He went down on me three times and didn't make me do it back once."
"The true modern gentlemen," Teddy mocks. Molly chuckles and tucks her hand deeper. Glancing sidelong at her, Teddy is very relieved that she's got Dominique watching out for her. It saves him all the trouble of hunting down that Alistair fellow and destroying him himself.
That being said, he's not sure he won't track him down and get him arrested at some point.
When they arrive back at the flat, Dominique is in a tearing fury at being left behind. Teddy knows it's a doozy of a tantrum because her hair—usually a neat, sharp red bob—is a frazzled frizzy mess, tangling around her raging white face and ferocious blue eyes.
"Oh, man," says Young Molly apprehensively, which is about all she's got time to say before Dominique powers across the room and gets right in their faces to yell at them. Since Molly has got the spidery long legs of a Victoria's Secret model and a good seven inches on Dominique's five foot three, and Teddy definitely isn't above giving himself an extra couple of inches to get his head out of her immediate line of fire, to be this close to their faces is quite a feat.
She reels off a whole stream of expletives, mixed in with disparaging remarks about their appearances, attitudes, and feelings towards each other, and rounds it all off by calling Young Molly an angel-faced fucknugget and Teddy a "total and complete cunt".
Once she has stopped shouting, and sparks have stopped fizzing out of her fingers—which, hey, means she's getting closer to actually being able to do the wandless magic she's been bragging about for years—Young Molly tentatively pulls their peace offering out from behind her back.
"Anyway, we brought you a burger?" she offers hopefully, presenting it to her cousin with a smile. "It's the venison one you love."
By the time Dominique has sworn at them a couple more times and munched her way mutinously through the burger, she's almost completely calm and ready to engage in conversation like a civilised human being.
"No offence," Teddy tells her from where he is lounging beside her on the sofa watching Dance Moms, "but I think you have some severe abandonment issues."
"Fuck you," says Dominique, stealing the remote to switch over to Project Runway.
She's kicked her one-night-stand out, so by midnight the three of them are all tucked up in her bed together. Dominique, for reasons bemusing to Teddy, can't fall asleep unless she's on her front, so she's starfished out with one arm draped across Teddy's chest and her left leg hooked between both of Young Molly's.
"Hey," Teddy says into the dim room. Dominique makes a sleepy sound of curiosity, and Young Molly turns her head to regard Teddy. There's a yellow-orange streetlamp outside and Dominique is too skint to buy curtains, so the glow washes them all in a subtle sunset hue.
"What?" Dominique mumbles eventually, pressing her nose hard enough into her cousin's upper arm to make Young Molly grumble quietly at her.
"Do you think it's our fault? Lily, I mean. With her, like, wild child thing."
"Why the fuck would that be our fault?"
"Well, we don't exactly set a good example, you know? We all drink too much, and we do drugs quite a bit, and we never try to hide that around any of the younger lot."
"Ted," Dominique admonishes in muffled tones, lifting the hand on his chest to press it over his face, "chill out. We could be angels and she'd still have those brothers."
"Yeah," Teddy replies earnestly, "but don't you think maybe they're our fault too?"
"I think, like," Young Molly pipes up, to Teddy's surprise, "They'd probably be like this anyway? They've never had, you know, privacy. With the media and everything. 'Cause of Aunt Ginny and Uncle Harry. I don't think that's our fault. I think it's good they've got us, actually, you know? Like, if we weren't like this, probably the stuff they do would look way worse by comparison."
"Besides, we're in our fucking twenties," concurs Dominique, and adds, "or practically, anyway," when Young Molly murmurs a protest from beside her. "This is all perfectly regular behaviour." She removes her hand from Teddy's face and hooks her arm around his neck. Having forcibly dragged him closer, right into the crook of her shoulder, she says, "now shut up and go to sleep."
Pinned there, Teddy doesn't have much choice.