Disclaimer: I don't own it.
A/N: This is a series of one-shots, so don't worry if you haven't read all of them. If this one isn't for you, then maybe another will tickle your fancy. This one is most likely the least-fluffy out of the bunch.
Summary: The Next Generation has an issue keeping their trunks in one piece, so they use their parents' old ones. The only problem is that their parents forgot about their secret compartments and the secret lives stored there.
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1. Teddy and Tonks
"Gran!" Teddy shouted, running down the stairs. "Gran!"
He spun into the kitchen; she was usually in here, bent over the stove or something of the sort.
"Gran, where are you?"
Frantically, he dashed into the living room. Where was she?
"What's wrong, Teddy?" she asked, gently putting a hand on his shoulder.
"My trunk broke!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, come, now," she said, grabbing her grandson's hand and bringing him to his room. "How can your trunk be broken? Falk's Trunks have proudly served Hogwarts students for generations. Merlin knows no one ever has problems with his trunks."
"Well, it broke," Teddy said, pushing the door open to his room. He motioned to the dilapidated trunk, the top of it not fitting right on it and the edges coming apart.
"Oh, my," his grandmother said, quickly going near it. "It seems you have broken it."
"What are we going to do? I need to go to Hogwarts now!"
"Go to the attic; I think…I think your mother's trunk is still up there."
Without a word, Teddy threw himself up the ladder to the attic. It was hot; it always was up there. He knew exactly where the trunk was. As a smaller man, he had played up there often, looking at all the things his parents used to have. He went to the back corner, grabbed the trunk, and dragged it downstairs. It was still in good condition, despite the few stains on the interior.
His Gran waved her wand and all his contents shifted from one trunk to the other. She didn't even look at Teddy's new trunk, but told him to load it into the car. Teddy did as he was told.
"Now take care of that," she said before he went on the train. "It served your mother well for years. If you break that, I will kill you."
"Of course, Gran," he said. "I'll take good care of it."
"Now, have fun at Hogwarts and don't let a soul distract you from your duties as Prefect, understand young man?"
"Yes, Gran. I'll see you at Christmas," Teddy said, hugging her.
"I love you, Teddy."
"I love you, too. Goodbye."
He waved over his shoulder and clamored onto the train, ready for another year at Hogwarts.
3
"So you said it was your mum's?" Vicky asked, staring at the yellow-lining.
"Yep," Teddy replied, taking out the last of his books.
"So she was in Hufflepuff?"
"Evidently; I always thought she was a Gryffindor. I mean, she was an auror, wasn't she?"
"I suppose you don't have to be a Gryffindor to be an auror."
"But most of them probably are."
"You are making generalizations, you know."
"Yeah, I know."
"Does this thing have a false bottom? Some of these older trunks have them, especially if they were made during the war."
"This would have been made pre-Second War."
Vicky leaned in and pulled on the edge of the bottom panel. Sure enough, it flipped open.
"Wow," Vicky said, staring at the mess of papers layered on top. "Either your mum has your organizational skills, or she's hiding something."
"I don't know. Probably both. I hear my Gran complain about it sometimes, about how I inherited her cleanliness, or lack of, and my father's self-control."
"You? Self control?" Vicky laughed.
"Shove it, you."
Teddy put the false-bottom back in.
"You aren't going to look through them?" Vicky asked.
"I…no. Not now, anyways."
3
It was a few weeks before he got around to looking through his mother's things. He wasn't sure why. A part of him really wanted to. It urged the other part to stop being so prudent and throw them around the room, to know his mum better. But the other part was resistant. She was a girl. That compartment was secret. There was a reason it was secret. In it would be secret things. Teddy wasn't sure he wanted to be privy to a teenaged girl's secrets. He especially didn't want to do it around all his other roommates. What would they say? If there was one thing he wanted to avoid, it was others ridiculing his mother, even if she was being unreasonable or silly or something else of the sort that teenaged girls tended to be.
But during the first Hogsmeade trip of the year, he had to stay in Hogwarts and make sure the first and second years didn't get out of control. He didn't know why he had to do it. Sally, the girl's prefect, was more than capable of controlling them all. After awhile sitting in the common room, he was bored, even with reading an enthralling book -- a fictional account by a fellow named Gilderoy Lockhart. It was the second edition, a picture of a vampire plastered on the front. The only thing interesting he had to do was go through his mother's trunk. Maybe he would find something in there that was amusing to him.
The papers on top were, more likely than not, to deter someone from looking further. They were all school work -- tests and quizzes and other things of the sort. All of them received top marks. With the image of his mother as a Hufflepuff who was rather clumsy, he hadn't really expected that. She was, however, an auror, so it was to be expected.
Underneath the papers was a mess: more papers, a few round sticks in plastic wrapping, a few notebooks, some potions ingredients, broken quills, a few broken pots, a half-drunk bottle of Fire Whiskey, cards reporting her marks, a few detention notes, notes passed between class, and a letter from the ministry accepting her into the auror program. It looked like the bottom of his trunk after a year at Hogwarts.
He tossed the potions ingredients and broken quills; they were of no use to anyone. Most of the notes were usual among girls. Some were of the latest gossip, others detailing the latest trip to Hogsmeade. For some reason, they made him smile. He could tell which script was his mother's easily -- it looked almost annoyingly like his -- big, sprawling, not quite neat, and she wrote in pink. Always. In every note, that was her color. He could tell which ones were from each year -- the telltale sings unmistakable. First year was marred with acclimating issues. Second year was pining after Hogsmeade. Third was the excitement of Hogsmeade. Fourth year the dance. Fifth year O.W.L.s. Sixth year boys and excessive gossip. Seventh year N.E.W.T.s. But something was amiss. After he read through the notes (he had no idea why he read all of them) he noticed there weren't that much from sixth or seventh year. He shrugged it off; maybe she just became more attentive as the N.E.W.T.s began to loom before her. One of them, though, gave hint. It was gossip again, this time there were rumors about her. He could see several of them were about it, mostly her refuting them, but whoever was on the other side didn't believe her. It never actually said what his mother was being accused of, and Teddy didn't really want to know. He put the notes aside, writing them off as childish, and looked deeper into the trunks.
There were three notebooks, all of them bound with cloth and all of them full of pink ink. Teddy put them aside, not wanting to get into them now. Lodged in one of them was probably more discussion about rumors. Teddy hated rumors as a whole. Instead, he looked at a stack of pictures bound with a piece of string. They went through her whole Hogwarts career, he could easily tell. It was odd seeing her grow up right here, in his hands. First, standing in her Hogwarts robes before going on the train, alone. Teddy's Gran had made him take one of those, too. Her hair was her natural brown, cropped short, and messy. The only way Teddy knew it was her was because the back said, "Nymphadora, '84". He had never seen her appearance sober, as Vicky put it, without any alterations. Each year, there was another picture. In second through fifth years, it was with the same three friends, all of them looking a bit older than her. In all of them, she was natural, her hair the same, and she had only changed a bit -- gotten taller and filled out just a little. She seemed to be behind her friends a bit.
By sixth year, she had settled into the look Teddy was familiar with -- the short spiky hair, her uniform slightly askew, a pair of dragonhide boots, and her face the same. Her friends changed, as well. The girls had been replaced by two boys. One of them had brown hair bleached at the front, his uniform shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. The other had longish brown hair tucked behind his ears, his shirt untucked, and tie loose. They reminded Teddy of Fred and Jim. All three of them were in Huffepuff. The two appeared again in her seventh year picture. The one with the bleached hair now had his died bright red and had physically matured a bit. The other looked scrawnier next to the other boy and had grown a little goatee and cut his hair short probably in an attempt to make him look older. His mother looked like she did in the pictures Teddy owned, but with a bit less trouble and a bit more mischief in her eyes.
When those were gone through, there were a few more -- five of them, to be exact. Each of them had a different picture of his mother, and each of them, on the back, listed the pros and cons of each look. The ones where she changed her fundamental bone structure were immediately let go under the pretense of it hurting too much. The ones where she changed her physical proportions were let go on the pretense of it misleading the boys. And that left one -- the one he knew her as. In the picture, her eyes were blue, but she had evidently dropped it as she got older.
"Teddy!" one of the boys shouted from downstairs. "Are we going to play quidditch now?"
He had told some of the second-years as recompense for not going to Hogmeade, they'd have a quidditch game.
"Yeah -- I'll be right down!" he called back.
3
"So you didn't read the journals?" Vicky asked, sitting across from him in the Great Hall.
"No," he said. "I don't want to know about a teenaged girl's life."
"You might get to know her better, you know," Vicky replied, piling potatoes on her plate. "Learn about her. You only get so much through stories. First hand accounts are a bit more powerful."
"I don't know…"
"If you get uncomfortable, turn the page."
"Hey Teddy," a second year said, sitting next to him. "We want to have a bonfire tonight; do you have any more fire starters?"
"Yeah, here," Teddy said, pulling one of the plastic-wrapped cardboard sticks from his pocket.
"What is that?" Vicky asked.
"A fire starter," Teddy said.
"No it isn't!"
"Then what it is?" Teddy crossed his arms. "We lit a huge fire with it on Saturday."
"It's a tampon, Teddy."
Teddy stared at Vicky, speechless. So that's why there were so many…
3
Teddy looked at the notebooks on his bedside table. He wished he had something else to do. He wished he didn't have to resort into prying into his mother's teenaged life. He wished he could go find Vicky and bring her to a closet somewhere. But he couldn't. He read the journals.
Most of the entries weren't anything he didn't expect; "So-and-so's so hot", "I can't believe what so-and-so did", "why don't I have a boyfriend", and so on -- usual teenaged girl drama. At the end of her fifth year, there was single entry that caught his attention. He knew what it related, too, as well. She wrote hard and fast, the writing barely legible. "Just because I haven't dated anyone doesn't mean I'm a dyke."
Teddy stared at it for a few moments. He felt anger well up in him. As far as he could tell, his mother did nothing to exact such…disapproval from her peers. If anything, she ought to be regarded more. Half of her journal entries were talking about how she did something to help someone, or try and cheer them up, or something of that sort. None of them referenced anything malicious or something like that. He turned the page, and as if nothing had happened, the names of her friends changed. She hung out with Scott and Chris instead, and they started fooling around. The entries switched from cheering people up to blowing up toilets and the like.
Nearing the end of her seventh-year, the entries started to take on a serious note, beginning to write about her career choice and how nervous, excited, and all sorts of other emotions she felt. The last thing she wrote surprised him. "I don't know of You-Know-Who is dead. I'm going to fight until I know for sure." It was the first and last mention of the Dark Lord. It took him by surprise, more than anything. He got the feeling that that was the deciding factor in her becoming an auror. Uncertainty.
He felt tears rise in his eyes as he realized something; she did fight until she knew for sure.
Why was he getting emotional about this? He shut the book and put it on his table. He didn't even know her. He flattened himself on his bed, thoughts unable to be emptied. She fought because she didn't know. Did he have a reason to fight?
"Teddy?" Vicky asked, coming into the room.
"What did I tell you about bursting in here?" Teddy asked half-heartedly. He wasn't angry.
"You know I secretly want to see you half-naked, so why would you even tease me about that?" Vicky asked, lying down next to him.
"You've said that before."
"What are you thinking about?"
"How do you know I'm thinking?"
"You have that look on your face."
Teddy sighed.
"I think I'm fighting for the future."
"What do you mean?"
"I think I'm fighting to make sure there isn't another Voldemort. I'm fighting so that no kid needs to lose his parents again, so that no wife needs to lose a husband and her daughter at once." He looked over at Vicky, her blond hair spread out on the pillow. "I'm fighting so you don't have to."
Vicky looked at him, a concerned look on her face. Her countenance melted into a smile.
"I think that's perfect," she said, resting her head on his shoulder.
"Me too."
"Teddy?"
"Yeah?"
"Why is there a quarter bottle of Fire Whiskey on your desk?"