A/N: Written for Fire The Canon's "50 Days of Inspiration Competition" over at HPFC.

prompt: Day 6 "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." – Mark Twain

cold summer

He had this habit of sleeping with a sheet on top of him, no matter the temperature. He'd learned it from Victoire, back when they'd dated. The sheet had to cover her ear, she always said, or she didn't feel safe.

It was summer, though, and the sheet made Teddy feel hotter and stickier than he already was. He both longed to kick it off and knew he must keep it covering him, a cloak against things that go bump in the night. Yes, even at twenty-five, a thin layer of cotton seemed to be enough to shelter him from non-reality.

It didn't matter how uncomfortable Teddy was beneath that sheet, though. He could sweat all he wanted; he could wrap himself in sweaters and blankets until his body temperature hit a boiling point. He still would be freezing cold inside.

Teddy hadn't slept in two and a half weeks. He blamed it on the heat when he bumped into friends who saw the purple bags beneath his eyes. "Who can sleep in this heat?" they'd all groan in agreement, suggesting that he purchase an air conditioner if they were one of his Muggle friends or saying things like, "Merlin, Ted, don't you know about cooling charms? You graduated Hogwarts, right?" if they were magical.

And he did know about cooling charms and cheap air conditioners that barely worked and made strange buzzing noises all night. He'd used cooling charms every summer of his past, and he'd once dated a Muggle girl who had an awful sort of contraption that he'd had to lug up to her seventh story flat and stuff into her window and even then it never seemed to keep them cool enough…

Teddy knew about that, but he suffered on. Because God knew he wasn't suffering enough on the inside.

Perhaps he had a theory. He sometimes thought, late at night, that since he was so cold on the inside, he might as well make up for it with his outward temperature. But then he thought that was rubbish, no. He just was a masochist. He wanted to suffer. He deserved it – Victoire deserved it, for him to suffer.

It was the hottest summer in London on record. But to Ted, lonely and alone in an apartment where the walls would sometimes sweat, it was the coldest summer ever.

Lily's summer was cold, too.

Oh, yes, it was hot at Potter House. In the backyard, even the shade of a tree gave Lily little comfort.

Despite the damned heat, Lily sat outside all day through June and July and August. She sometimes reached points of dehydration and nearly fainted upon standing up to run inside for supper. But sitting outside, reading a book or scrawling letters to Teddy (he wrote that he was hot in his tiny apartment as well), was much more preferable to dealing with her brothers.

It would be wrong to assume that Lily didn't like James or Albus or that Albus or James disliked Lily. In fact, the siblings got along quite famously for a house that was once so divided. There was James, the pride of Gryffindor, who constantly wore a sneer and was famous for what he could do on a broomstick. Then there was Albus, the first Potter to ever be sorted into Slytherin, with his famous green eyes and his charming laugh. And finally there was Lily, another Slytherin, the smartest witch in her year. All three had black hair, though Lily's was perhaps just a dark shade of red. All were attractive and smart and popular at school.

They'd hated each other once, for about five seconds. It had all started when Albus had been sorted into Slytherin. James had given him hell and written to Lily, who had yet to enter Hogwarts, in disgust, though she hadn't minded much about what house anyone was in. And then Lily had been sorted into that house as well, and James figured he might as well get over it since Al was just about the best friend he had ever had and Lily wasn't that awful, either. Since then, the three had gotten along quite well as far as siblings go.

So it wasn't a dislike of her brothers that forced Lily outside into the heat and humidity. No, it was something else entirely.

She was fourteen, James barely seventeen, Albus fifteen. And for some reason Lily couldn't quite figure out, there apparently was a vast difference between fourteen-year-olds and their barely older siblings. While Lily would have loved to lounge about in her cool room, she couldn't, because her room shared a wall on the right with Albus's and a ceiling with James's floor. So if Lily were to recline on her bed on any given summer day, she would either have to deal with the sounds of Albus passionately snogging his on-and-off girlfriends (Summer or Marissa – it varied with the week) or the shaking of James's cast-iron headboard against the wall, vibrating down to her room. His girlfriend was at least steady.

And so while Albus was kept warm by thoughts of Summer or Marissa or whoever, and while James's bed was kept warm quite literally, Lily was left cold and alone under her great big tree, beads of sweat leaking onto her letters to Teddy.

It was a hot summer, but it was the first cold summer Lily ever knew.