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Teddy/Vic/OC

I normally write present tense, so sorry if it's a bit crummy.

For the Twilight, LOTR, HP Challenge on NGF

Just in the 3000 limit: word count: 2999

Myquote: there was uncertainty in his voice. He was really giving me a choice – I was free to refuse, and part of him hoped for that. It was a vain hope.

-Twilight, chapter 10 [interrogations]

"I'm leaving."

Those were the worst words I could ever have imagined issuing from the perfect lips of my then blue hair and green eye coloured boyfriend, Teddy Lupin. By this point, we'd been dating for three years, since before I left Hogwarts, and I was pretty damned sure that we'd be together forever.

True, we had our ups and downs, but we never split up and I thought that now we were stronger than ever. I thought that nothing would faze us…ever.

And now, now he was leaving. He was leaving me and I was positive that he didn't want me anymore. After all, why else would he be saying to me that he was leaving?

My face froze in what I could only hope was an approximation of a smile, or at least an expression that didn't betray every damned bit of betrayal that I felt at his simple sentence, one that hurt more than anything else I could imagine.

Carefully, I looked down from his face and focused carefully on my plate, no longer hungry. It was my favourite meal – lasagne – but I couldn't stomach another mouthful… it took all I had to prevent myself from standing up and bolting out of the room without saying a word. That would only have made me look childish, something I definitely didn't want in front of Teddy.

My Mother taught me something when I was a young girl, something she said that her Grandmother had taught her: you should always have the last word, be the one to break up with the other one if it looks like things are headed that way. Whilst I never wanted to do this, I had to in order to protect my dignity, so that I continued to make every decision in my life.

So, with every bit of strength that I could muster, I stood up and threw my napkin on the chair behind me. I lifted my gaze to once again be staring into Teddy's deep blue eyes, a steeliness to me so that I wouldn't fall into his arms and wait for him to do the inevitable dumping – after all, you can't say those words without wanting to end something.

"It's ok," I said to him softly, my words softly spoken to hide the pain behind my voice. "I get it. You want to split up. Well, I'll make it easy for you, Ted; I'll walk out that door and never come back. Have a good life."

The tears were threatening to well up in my eyes, so I turned away from him, grabbing my bag.

"Vic, wait!" he called after me as I walked towards the door, unable to stay in the room any longer. I heard him clearly, even as I fought to keep myself controlled until I left his house, but pretended not to.

As soon as possible, I prepared to Apparate, barely able to see the furniture in the little hallway of his flat through the tears that broke through the barrier I had attempted to use to keep them at bay, to no avail. I twirled on the spot, realising too late that I had left my shoes but not caring if it meant I could escape the pain from that flat quicker.

Before I could get out of the flat, however, I caught sight of Teddy running through from the lounge area, heard him shouting my name. But I ignored it as I Apparated back to my own flat and let the tears loose officially.

I wailed into my pillow for God knows how long, unable to accept that I had done it: I had broken up with Teddy Lupin, the love of my life. I didn't get why he is leaving, why he wanted to leave without me… unless… but no, he couldn't have found someone else, could he? He couldn't have decided to get with someone else and have decided to use the age old "I'm leaving" excuse to get out of telling me who!

I could only hope that he hadn't.

~x~

The weeks passed and I didn't say a single word to my now ex-boyfriend. My friends and family, especially my Mum and cousins, came round and comforted me, helped me through the five stages of grief… I couldn't get over the fact that he had wanted to dump me. I wasn't overreacting, was I? I didn't break up with him when he didn't have that plan, did I?

I didn't tell my family why we split up, that the reason was because he was leaving and wanted a fresh start without me cramping his style, because I knew they'd try and be optimists and tell me that he didn't want to dump me, that he only wanted to tell me that he couldn't be in England anymore.

Teddy tried to talk to me every day for sixteen days: he would come round but I wouldn't answer the door; he rang and texted me every second of the day, but I turned my phone off; he wrote me dozens of letters, each of which went in the fire without being read. I just wanted him out of my life now that I had made the decision to call time on us…

I guessed that he had left the country when the communication stopped, something which both broke my already devastated heart into more pieces but also gave me a strange sense of closure. He wasn't going to be bothering me anymore, which allowed me to move on with my life, to be able to date other people without him around. The suddenness of the severance of communication, especially with the abundance of it in the days before it stopped, made it all the more shocking… but I didn't care.

It allowed me to move on with my life.

~x~

Two hundred and fifteen days after he left for South America – I asked Dom who told me that he had gotten a job working with young wizards in drug producing areas of Rio de Janeiro – I felt as if I could move on. I thought that it would be acceptable for me to go down to the pub and find someone to go on a date with, that it wouldn't be classed as a rebound.

Well, I didn't think that. It was more along the lines of Lily and Rose coming to me and saying "if you don't find yourself a date in the next week, we will arrange a blind date for you, savvy?" which didn't exactly leave me with an option. I knew that they'd probably have dug up a relative of Scorpius' from somewhere and forced me to listen to him droning on about how much wealthier he was than I. So I had to find someone else by myself.

I didn't expect to find anyone in the Leaky Cauldron that I didn't know from school – every single boy, with the exception of the majority of my relatives and Teddy were absolute tools – because it was well known that the Leaky Cauldron only attracted Hogwarts kids. Ever since Tom became unable to differentiate between of-age kids and underage ones, everyone from Hogwarts who could get into London in the holidays would go to the pub to get drunk on all the spirits in there.

I never expected to meet someone there that I didn't know.

"Hey," I heard an unfamiliar voice behind me, one with a lilting accent that instantly made me realise he was Irish. I turned around to see someone who looked about as far away from how Teddy usually looked as possible; his hair was longish and black, tousled in a casually styled way, whilst he wasn't that much taller than me. His eyes were a piercing green colour and his face was handsome in an extremely masculine way, if that makes sense… he wasn't like anything I had ever seen before, which was refreshing to both my eyes and my brain.

"Hey," I responded, a smile playing on my lips as I looked at him.

"I'm Rick," he introduced himself as he slid onto the bar stool next to me, turning instantly to be looking right at me.

"Victoire," I introduced myself, tossing my curled blonde hair over the other shoulder as I focused on him. He was someone different, someone who I could, even then, begin to imagine my life with.

"Pretty name for a pretty girl," he shamelessly flattered me, resulting in a blush rising high in my cheeks.

The flirtatious banter continued for a good hour or two, until Tom announced that it was closing time. I knew it was getting quiet – all the school kids had curfews – but when I looked around at closing time (10:30pm; Tom's getting on), I realised that we were the only people in there.

I slid off my stool and found myself accidentally falling into Rick, someone who had a pretty interesting personality. It turned out that he had a job in South America, but he didn't say where or what doing, and he was starting there in a few months time. He was witty and clever and really, really charming… I was captivated by him already.

"So… do you, like, want to have a drink with me sometime in the near future?" he asked me as we walked out of the pub and into Muggle London, heading for a taxi to get home. He actually lived in the block of flats next to me, so we decided to split the cost and go together – I may have been a well paid freelance journalist, but that didn't mean that I wanted to spend all my money. I realised that I could probably have followed Teddy out to his job… but now I had a chance with Rick, why would I have bothered thinking about that?

"Sure, that sounds great," I replied, actually meaning it; I didn't want a rebound, I wanted a proper boyfriend. Perhaps Rick could be the one for me.

~x~

Rose and Lily didn't believe me when I said I had been on a date the week after.

"You're lying," Lily said, surveying my face. "You went out to a restaurant by yourself and pretended that you went on a date so that we wouldn't set you up with Peter," she continued, ignoring my protests that I had been on a date.

Three nights after my first meeting with Rick, we went out on a date. It was sweet and entirely different to Teddy and my dates – we went to the Muggle bowling alley and scoffed pizza and chips afterwards. It was fun… and it was bliss. It gave me a chance to do things I had never done before, expand my horizons so to speak.

"Actually," I responded, a bit of venom in my voice, "I went on a date with Rick O'Donnel: he's Irish and in town for a couple of months. So thank you very much."

My tone made it clear to them that I wasn't messing around, that I really had been on a date… which only led to more questions from them: what did he look like, how old was he, was he as intellectually challenged as I was?

I gave them all the answers they wanted, only realising as I spoke that there was a bit of a problem.

Once again, I was falling for the wrong person.

Well, Teddy wasn't the wrong person, but he left. And Rick was leaving soon; he was leaving the country to go to the same continent as Teddy… but I couldn't help it…

~x~

"Vic, I need to talk to you," Rick said, three months after we started dating. The seriousness of his tone had me instantly freeze, remembering the same introduction almost exactly a year ago, just with someone else. But I forced myself to turn to him and listen, a smile on my lips.

"Yeah?"

"I… you know I have to go to Rio soon," he whispered, his hand continuing to run through my hair. "But… I was really, really hoping that you'd come with me."

The request stopped my heart. I was geared up for an "I can't do an overseas relationship" but certainly not "come with me."

I turned to face him again, narrowing my eyes as I tried to see if he really meant it or if it was a joke to see how I would react. However, I could only see the desire there for me to move across the world with him to do whatever he had to do.

"Sure," I found myself saying, as willing to do this for him as I was to date him when we met. "Let's do it."

~x~

Within three weeks, I was packed and we had hired a magic box – no, really, a magic box – to take all our belongings across to our new flat in Rio without us having to Apparate them with us… I'd already said bye to my family but hadn't told Teddy that I was coming across; I hadn't spoken to him in a year now, so I wasn't going to do so now.

For the first couple of days after I agreed to go with him, he seemed almost wanting me not to go.

"Are you sure you want to come with me? I don't want to force you into any decisions, I just want to make sure that you'll be happy," he would say. There was uncertainty in his voice. He was really giving me a choice – I was free to refuse, and part of him hoped for that. It was a vain hope.

You see, the reason he didn't want me to go – just a teensy bit of him that he openly admitted – was because he would be working undercover. We would be living in a flat surrounded by drug barons and he wasn't sure whether I would be happy. He should have told me before he asked me, he said, but it was too late.

I was too far in.

"You ready?" Rick asked me, his arm around my shoulder. I shook the negative thoughts from my mind and turned to him with a grin.

"Sure am."

And, with that, we left England for the warmth of Rio de Janeiro.

~x~

Within a few weeks – time didn't seem to matter to me after Teddy went – we were settled, me sending my work off to the Daily Prophet as a journal in regards to living in a drug neighbourhood whilst Rick worked with the adult wizards in the area. It turned out that my thoughts that we could use magic to solve the problems were greatly flawed: magic was the thing causing the drug problem, not sorting it out.

Everything was a mess, but at least it gave me a lot to write for work!

When Rick was working, I would end up heading on walks through the slums, smiling as I saw all the wizarding children there. They were so cute and knew exactly what I was (a witch), clamouring for me to come show them more magic, like the others… their parents were the drug barons and had no interest in teaching them magic. My heart went out to them and I ignored the advice of Rick to stay away from them; they only wanted me to show them magic for Christ's sake!

So I did.

Soon, I was a registered worker with the company there to help the kids, able to see the irony that I followed Teddy out here, technically, since we were both doing the same job. I found out from my new colleagues that Teddy was on the other side of the h-u-g-e city, so we probably wouldn't run into one another. That was good. I had only just sorted my life out properly with Rick and even though we were all in the same place, I felt as if Teddy and I were on opposite ends of the earth.

"So, you wanna see how I lift this in the air?" I asked the six year old kids I was working with today, not seeing just a story for me to write for the paper but wanting to help them as well.

They nodded so I cast Wingardium Leviosa, sending the bottle of water flying high into the air, before it made a rapid descent… something that wasn't supposed to happen.

"Now that is Victoire's charms work that I remember," a deep and throat voice I knew inside out greeted me, chilling my heart to ice.

I turned around to see him, Teddy, there… he was perfect, just the way I remembered him.

"Teddy," I whispered his name, unable to do much more. The entire world blacked out around me: no kids, no Rio, no Rick.

Just Teddy and me.

He closed the gap between us and pressed me to his chest in one sudden movement, something that I ought to have protested – Rick, remember? – but I couldn't help myself. To be close to him was heaven.

"I never wanted to split up; I wanted you to come with me," he said barely holding back tears. "I loved you, Vic, I still love you. You could have done this a year ago!"

I nodded slowly, Rick returning to my mind. How could I do this to him?

But this was my true love before me, the one I had loved since before I can remember.

I tilted my head up and looked him in his sky blue eyes, a grin on my lips.

And I kissed him.

Any thought of Rick floated from my mind, though I knew I would have to deal with it later. I should never have been with him, but he brought me back to my Teddy.

I broke his heart to heal my own.

And if that makes me a tease or whatever, so be it.

thoughts?

please don't fav without reviewing, thank you.

vicky xx