To prove that he does have real, actual friends, thanks so much, Teddy goes back to London the next day and drops in on Ben Cullen. Ben looks pretty surprised to see him, but they go for a beer anyway and exchange details about their lives. Like friends do.
Ben is looking really fucking shifty for so long that Teddy eventually stops texting Dominique the poo emoji to bug her at work and just asks.
"Alright, what?"
Ben mumbles something at his lap, and then he fixes Teddy with an alarmingly worried stare and says, "Look, mate, I'm really sorry, but I sort of—slept with Victoire? Your ex?"
Teddy considers being hurt by this, but nobody is around who'd get a kick out of it. Also Ben is, like, one of only three of Teddy's friends who aren't Weasleys, so.
"We broke up before she even finished school, Cullen," he reminds him, glancing at his phone as it buzzes with a new snapchat, "Honestly, so long as you both are happy, do whatever, you know?"
"We're not dating," Ben hastens to clarify, "It was a one-time thing, really."
"That's a shame," Teddy tells him absently, unlocking his phone to get at Young Molly's snapchat, "she could do with somebody good in her life. She's not had anyone since that wanker who kept trying to get off with her sister. Which is weird, actually. You'd think she'd have guys dangling off her left right and centre."
The snapchat turns out to be Young Molly with a puppy. It's hard to say which of the two looks more excited. Grinning, Teddy looks up from his phone. Ben is watching him with this narrow stare, brown eyes suspicious. Honestly, it's no wonder Victoire went for him. He's got the best bone structure of any boy Teddy knows, and his skin is dark and smooth as a three AM dream. Frankly, Teddy's surprised it took her this long.
"Seriously, man, it's fine," Teddy reassures him, "it's been years, and she's my friend. It would be incredibly uncool of me to get weird about it."
Ben visibly relaxes, long limbs sprawling out. He brushes a hand across his shorn-short hair and inquires of Teddy, "want to come to a party tonight? Loads of the old crowd will be there."
It takes Teddy precisely four seconds to surf through his other options—go back to Scotland to bug Dominique and Young Molly, attack the pile of job application forms gathering dust on his desk, or visit his grandmother—and eagerly latch onto the offer.
"Sure," he replies casually, "though it had better not be the same shit club as last time."
Come eleven PM he's discovered that it is, in fact, the same shit club as last time, and tonight the people in it are generally an even odder bunch than before. The ones that look overage, that is. There's some girls that look almost as young as Lily's crowd.
In fact—Teddy's eyes narrow across the dance floor—that one is definitely as young as Lily's crowd.
Aggrieved, he purposefully takes the time to finish his drink before waving a general 'I'll be back' gesture at Ben and Victoire, who are ensconced against the bar together. They barely notice him go. Ben is winding the ends of Victoire's long red hair around one finger and she's watching him do it with this quiet, pleased expression. They're both so attractive it could be a scene out of a Hollywood movie, which would piss Teddy off more if he didn't have other fish to fry.
He forges purposefully through the bumping, heated mess of dancers and collars a slim, sweaty redhead from near the DJ, giving the guy who had moved in to grind up against her such a filthy look there's not a word of protest on that front.
"How the fuck," he demands of her, yanking her along with him as he fights his way back out through the crowd.
She starts swearing at him, spitting like a cat, but Teddy has shoulders broad as a beater and is pushing six foot three even without his metamorphagus abilities, so it achieves absolutely nothing.
"You are such a wanker," Lily gasps when he finally has her hauled out onto the street, yanking her jacket out from under his hands. A bouncer steps forward looking a little concerned, but Lily waves at him and explains, "My cousin," which sends him back to his post.
"Aren't you on, like, lockdown?" Teddy inquires, genuinely curious, "How did you get here?"
"I've had the Marauders' Map since first year," she informs him tersely, starting to unwind her long, long hair from its bun, "Won it off Al in a bet. And James gave me the invisibility cloak when he left. Honestly, sneaking out is one of the easiest—"
"How did you get to the other end of the country?" Teddy cuts in, hissing the question out from between gritted teeth. Honestly, Ginny and Harry probably thought it was so cute, to saddle him with the responsibility of being a pseudo-older brother to Lily as a kid, but signing up to occasionally babysit a four year old was not supposed to lead to this kind of bullshit.
Lily heaves a great, careless shrug.
The kid, Teddy deduces, has been paying far too much attention to Dominique's mannerisms.
"Clary Rosier's sister's seeing a guy who lives in Hogsmeade," she explains, starting to gather up the hair she's just loosed from a bun into a ponytail, "She gave me a lift when she came back, then I just got the tube."
She drops her hair to produce an oyster card from somewhere within the depths of her bra, much to Teddy's horror. She looks so pleased with herself.
Teddy feels the onset of a dilemma. On the one hand, if he were Lily, he'd just want to be left to get on with it. Live life, make mistakes, all that. On the other hand, she's fourteen, and he might be an unemployed, feckless, and irresponsible layabout but he's also known her since she was born and can't just abandon her to the perils of a situation she doesn't understand how to navigate. Especially after learning what he learnt about Young Molly, and how easy it is for kids to end up in over their heads.
"Lily," he says to her, catching at her wrist, "This is insane. You're fourteen. This is completely a dick move, and I'm sorry in advance about it, but—"
He starts to pull her away from the club, ignoring her protests, and only waits as long as it takes to find a secluded alley before he pulls his wand out and apparates them both away. When Lily realises that he's brought her to her parents' front door, she kicks him so hard in the shin that it takes him a minute to gulp the tears back down.
He manages to pin her against him securely enough—despite her vicious wriggling and swearing—to ring the doorbell.
"Since when did you have the right to be so fucking parental," she spits from where she's trapped. Her hair is a staticky, fiery mess and it's all tangled up around his forearms, which must hurt a hell of a lot. To her credit, none of the fight goes out of her.
It's not until the door creaks open and Harry and Ginny appear, sleep-ruffled and with their wands out, that Lily finally gives up the ghost.
"Merlin," she says with a great sigh, "Ted, I'll never forgive you."
It takes Teddy about five minutes to explain the situation to his godfather, including an extra minute to apologise profusely for not telling him about the Edinburgh fiasco sooner. As he does so, Ginny pulls her recalcitrant daughter into the house and up the stairs. When the shouting starts, Harry carefully casts a Silencing charm to avoid waking the neighbours.
"Honestly," Harry admits, looking fraught and tired behind the glow of his wand, "I'm really grateful. You kids have always closed ranks so quickly—I appreciate you bringing her here instead of trying to keep it quiet. I appreciate it a lot."
He claps Teddy on the shoulder once and squeezes. Teddy, who has clearly had too much to drink and too little sleep the last few days, feels dangerously close to tears.
It doesn't matter how much he tries to cut it out, there's still a part of himself that would throw itself to wolves for Harry's paternal approval. It was not like he ever lacked it, exactly, just that Harry had never really had a clue what to do with him—too young to be a proper father and too old to be a friend—and then Harry's own kids had come along, and Teddy's status had been eternally fixed as secondary. Not that he doesn't understand, or whatever. But, still, Harry's good opinion matters far more than he'd care to admit.
"Yeah, well, I'm worried about her," he says sincerely, which is definitely a step up from crying, though not up there with nonchalant humour, which is what he'd achieve in an ideal world. "I mean, you know, James did the whole off-the-rails thing and I didn't help even though I could've, so. This is, like, penance, I guess?"
Harry nods seriously and lets his shoulder go. "You want to stay? I can make up the spare room."
"Nah, thanks," Teddy says, "I'll just go home. Early start tomorrow and all that. You back with the lawyers tomorrow?"
Harry passes a hand over his face in exhaustion and replies, "Yeah. Honestly, I don't know what's worse—wasting so much time when I should be at work, or Malfoy's smug bloody expression from across the table. There's no way he's willing to settle. He wants this dragged through the courts. You know," he adds suddenly, a tiny grin lifting up one side of his mouth, "For years after the war, I really thought he'd had all that pummelled out of him? I mean, you'd think, right? But, Merlin, it's like he never suffered at all."
Teddy laughs and informs his godfather, "Young Molly is of the erstwhile opinion that it's getting away with keeping his money and his house. Thinks it's restored his confidence. That and, you know, the 'healing power of time.'"
"Smart kid," says Harry without a trace of irony. Teddy narrows his eyes as his godfather asks, tone deceptively light, "Still seeing a lot of Young Molly and Dominique, then, are you?"
"Um," he replies, "Yeah, I guess? I know they're not exactly my age group, but they're hilarious. It's still a bit awkward hanging out with Victoire, you know, and I lost touch with most people after Hogwarts. They all got jobs and lives and stuff. Way too intense for me."
Teddy is ninety-nine percent certain that it's only the late hour and problem of Lily that saves him from the "you really should get a job I think your parents would want that" talk. Instead of limbering up for the lecture, Harry just stifles a yawn behind his hand.
"Fair enough," he says, "See you soon, then. You'll come round for dinner next week? Maybe after Lily's been shipped back to school. I'm a bit worried she'll avada kedavra you if you show your face before that."
"Me too," Teddy tells him sincerely. "Night. G'luck tomorrow."
Harry waves him off. Teddy barely gets to the end of the garden path before he gets too tired to continue walking and decides to just apparate straight out. He ends up outside the front door to his flat, fumbles his way inside, and only takes the time to send a quick text to Victoire saying he took Lily home before collapsing onto his bed fully-clothed and passing out.
It takes two weeks for the Lily thing to come back and bite Teddy in the arse, which is considerably more time than he thought it would. He comes home after a day spent sketching swans in Regent's Park to find his front door ajar and his apartment full of cigarette smoke. Cleaning the air with a simple charm, because he is not some sort of city-dwelling dragon, he is entirely unsurprised to find James Potter sprawled out across his sofa.
"Sick outfit," says Teddy with the precise tone of sincerity that will let James know he's talking shit. James, replete in a white wifebeater, low-slung jeans and an honest-to-god snapback, flips him off in silence.
Teddy piles his art supplies up onto his already-overloaded dining table and throws himself into his armchair. James pulls himself slightly more upright and lights another fag.
"I presume you're here to get back at me on Lily's behalf?" Teddy inquires once James has taken a couple of puffs and blown smoke rings in his most seductive, mysterious manner at the ceiling. Teddy doesn't comment on it. He's told James more times than he can count that the whole mysterious thing only works if you don't start endlessly talking about yourself the second you open your mouth.
"She told me to black your eye," says James indolently, letting his head loll sideways to squint at his godbrother, "But I got in a fight yesterday, so my hand hurts too much. I'm giving you a stern talking-to instead."
"Is that what this is?"
James flicks ash onto Teddy's favourite rug. There's a new tattoo crawling up his shoulder from under his vest. Teddy can't make much out from here apart from barbs and teeth, which probably means it's a very James tattoo.
"She knows what she's doing," James informs him calmly, turning his gaze back to the ceiling, "let her be."
"I'm going to respectfully disagree," Teddy tells him. James grins, just a little, his teeth bright white and his mouth too red.
"C'mon, Ted, you don't do anything respectfully. That's why you've not got a job. Dad would have pulled any string you asked."
"I don't want a job," retorts Teddy petulantly, kicking his legs out, "And also your father has quite enough on his plate."
"Yeah, this court case," James replies, taking another long drag of his cigarette, "Word on the street is that's, like, completely your fault."
"Okay, like, less than sixty percent," Teddy grumbles, "And calling it 'the street' doesn't convince anybody you don't chase family gossip like a bloodhound."
James isn't listening. He's flexing his left hand—his punching hand—delicately, discomfort creeping across his face. As usual, his attention has wandered before the conversation is even close to over.
Teddy watches him pull his fingers in and wince a couple of times before he asks, "have you had that checked out?"
James glances across at him, hazel eyes bloodshot and narrowed, and snarls, "like fuck. It's nothing."
"I mean," says Teddy, "no offence, but it looks like you put it through a meat grinder."
"Well, McLaggen's built like a brick wall, so that's a massive fucking surprise."
"Oh, James, you didn't punch Faolan McLaggen?"
James adopts an expression of righteous indignation that for the briefest second makes him look like he used to when he was twelve and trying to get Albus in trouble, all wide eyes and floppy hair and gap-toothed innocence. Pushing his nose into the air he announces, "'Course I fucking did. First of all, he's got a stupid name, being Irish is no excuse for it, but also Asta says her mum got drunk and told her that his dad is totally copping off with Aunt Hermione. Asta's mum is a filthy fucking liar and a shit-stirrer besides, because I checked, they went out like one time in school and it was a disaster, according to Hugo, and Aunt Hermione would definitely never cheat on Uncle Ron and, like, if she did it would be with someone a hell of a lot better than Faolan McLaggen's dad.
Teddy has seen Cormac McLaggen brooding on the sidelines of a couple of matches of Dominique's favourite sport, an immensely violent and brutal type of polo played on honest-to-God kelpies. He has also heard the wistful sighs of all the girls in his immediate vicinity any time the broad-shouldered, square-jawed McLaggen Sr wandered into their field of vision, and is therefore inclined to disagree with James' assessment.
However, James is looking fierce, and Teddy really doesn't a) want him doing his hand any more damage and b) fancy taking a punch to the nose, so he decides not to poke that particular wasps' nest and instead makes a non-committal noise of interest to encourage his godbrother to continue.
"So anyway I made Asta fact check with her dad because he's friends with McLaggen's dad—god knows why, you know what pureblood parents are usually like about associating with the rabble—and he just loves to stir shit—which is probably why her parents get along so well, actually—so he said it was true, which meant I had to go find McLaggen to sort it out, and he was actually like a total bitch about it, as fucking usual, so I just punched him to get it over with. I was aiming for his nose but I missed and now my hand fucking hurts."
Teddy squints at him. "I hate to be the one stating the obvious here—"
"Bullshit," interrupts James without looking at him.
"—but you should definitely go to the hospital about that."
With exaggerated care, James stubs his cigarette out on the arm of Teddy's sofa and points out, "Then everyone will know I punched somebody, and McLaggen will sing like a bird the second he realises the media know. He's such an attention whore."
Teddy examines James, the biggest attention whore he knows, sprawled out on the sofa, and tries not to roll his eyes. James is wearing a fucking snapback and he still looks like he walked out of a fashion editorial, which would make Teddy envious if he didn't know how long he spends every day cultivating his image.
He's just reminding himself that he's not duty-bound to spend the rest of his life babysitting wayward Potters and thus one hundred percent is not about to fight James into going to the hospital when there's an exclamation of horror from the vicinity of his front door, and less than two seconds later Dominique and Young Molly storm in with their wands whipped out in front of them.
"If you're murdering Teddy we'll kill you!" shrieks Dominique as she skids to a halt, Young Molly nearly crashing into her. James and Teddy both turn to find the pair wearing expressions fast melting from fury to embarrassment.
"Oh," says Molly, her cheeks flushing bright pink under her freckles. "You left the door open, the lock was broken, we—"
"I'm so touched," Teddy tells them, extending an arm backwards to invite them to join, "I wasn't sure you'd care enough to avenge my death."
"Only because you still owe me a hundred galleons," retorts Dominique, stuffing her wand back into her boot and sauntering right past Teddy to give James a pat on the snapback. Molly weasels her way into the armchair with Teddy while James rearranges himself on the sofa. He's always been much more generous with Dominique than he is with any of his other cousins.
As Dominique calmly folds herself up on top of his legs, James says, "Did you hear this wanker totally sold Lily out?"
Young Molly laughs into her hand, and Dominique grins broadly.
"We did," she confirms, not looking like she feels sorry for Lily much at all, "Such a responsible young man, our Ted."
Teddy shoots two fingers at her and stays silent.
"She's still spitting," James informs them, pulling one foot out from beneath Dominique to push at her thigh, "They've honest-to-god put a tracking charm on her so they can be sure she's in school. She's fuming."
"Is that legal?" Teddy wants to know. James gives him a big, heavy shrug.
"I mean, underage drinking is definitely more not legal, so I think it kind of balances out?"
Teddy gives his godbrother a long, searching look. "James, I don't think that's really how the law works."
"Fuck off," says James, and readjusts his snapback.
Dominique gives him one very hard poke in the thigh and inquires, "Was Lily telling the truth when she said you gave her the lift to Edinburgh the other day?"
James makes a face and pushes at her again, scowling. Dominique adds, looking thrilled about it, "You totally just did it because she promised you sex, didn't you?"
"She's my sister," James cries, looking more alarmed than Teddy thinks he's seen him look maybe ever. Dominique just rolls her eyes at him.
"Not with her, you pervert," she clarifies, "With her mate. That seventh year that Hugo's completely in love with. The Slytherin."
James' expression morphs from horror into total and utter smugness in under a second. He exchanges a look with Teddy that Teddy returns before he can stop himself, because—well, they've all seen Madeleine Avery. Even Teddy, who is six years out of Hogwarts, has seen Madeleine Avery. The girl's a legend.
"I don't like to brag," says James, to cries of derision from the other three occupants of the room, "But I totally got in there."
Young Molly makes a quiet noise of irritation right next to Teddy's ear. Dominique is less reticent, and picks up a pillow with which to smack her cousin around the head.
"You're such a fucking chauvinist," she tells him. "And a cliché besides. I thought you were too cool to go for the obvious girl."
Teddy lets out a shout of laughter at the idea of James being cool. Certainly the press seem to think so, always commenting on it—they've totally bought the aggression, the tattoos, the bloody black leather jacket Lily got him for Christmas last year that he wears everywhere. But Teddy has known James since he was born, and the wanker lounging on the sofa across from him is anything but cool.
As if to prove Teddy's point, James declares pompously, "Cousin mine, I'll go for any girl regardless of whether she's obvious or not."
"Sounding a little desperate there, son," Dominique mocks, collapsing sideways to lean her weight on James and grind her elbow into his gut. "Is it true you're the one that knocked up Jemima Peakes?"
James twists his entire body in a move that is so unexpectedly athletic Dominique can't save herself. She tumbles sideways, limbs windmilling, and ends up on the floor to the deep amusement of Teddy and Young Molly.
"Fuck no," he informs the top of her head, giving her an angelic smile when she lifts a fiery glare towards him, "Would I do such a thing?"
Dominique and Teddy both reply, "Yes," in the exact same tone of condescending certainty, but Young Molly fires herself up in James' defence.
"Actually," she announces, "My friend Clara was in Ravenclaw with Jemima, and she told me the baby was, like, a healthy nine-month weight when she had it. And it was born in, like, October? I think," she adds, looking momentarily unsure. James waves a hand, airy with disinterest, to indicate that she's correct. Fortified, she continues, "And James didn't start seeing her until at least the end of March, so there's no way it could be his."
"Why the fuck would she try to claim you as the father?" Teddy wants to know. "I mean, no offence, but you're like the worst prospect for a dad ever."
"Fuck you!" James looks genuinely hurt by this.
"James," Teddy says patiently, "Literally this summer your mum tried to make you hold one of Luna's twins and you took it upside down."
"Then you, like, dropped it on the birthday cake," concurs Young Molly, though she sounds quite sympathetic.
Mutinously, James lights another cigarette.
Dominique, in the process of hauling herself back onto the sofa, points out, "It's the Potter thing. Plenty of girls would do anything to be the mother of Harry Potter's first grandkid."
"So it's not my ravishing looks or my winning charm?" inquires James. Dominique, pointedly, goes off into peals of laughter.
"You can all fuck off," James tells them, pulling the peak of his snapback lower over his face and glowering from underneath it.
To cheer him up, Dominique tickles him a bit, targeting the weak spots that have made him crease up since he was three years old, and then they all go to the pub down the road. Teddy even magnanimously buys him a drink to apologise for fucking Lily over, and then a couple of shots, and somehow they end up in some dive of a nightclub at four AM with eight new friends including a half-Veela who is looking very interestedly at Dominique, a girl who manages to fix James' hand with a brief wave of her wand and a four-word spell despite being so drunk her eyes keep crossing, and a guy who claims he once lived with a herd of centaurs for a year.
Teddy is astonished, as he is always astonished, that these are the kinds of things that just happen to James. He, Teddy, has been on a hundred nights out that he always somehow expected to play out like an episode of Skins and instead usually just resulted in him and Young Molly in a chippy at three AM feeling all fuzzy and heavy while Dominique got laid somewhere. James, on the other hand, seems to have a new and ridiculous story or seven every time they talk to him about his latest nights out.
He's so eclipsed by James and Dominique—a dangerous combination to have drinking together, since they're both so unabashed and eager to outdo each other—that he doesn't even bother charming anybody by trying on new faces. Instead he laughs along with everybody else as the cousins tell some childhood anecdote together, blowing everything out of proportion and making their new mates howl with laughter.
He keeps seeing Young Molly being chatted up by this one guy. She's smiling hazily at him in that way that says she really wouldn't mind at all if he asked her to go back to his. Teddy sends her a knowing smirk when she glances his way, then makes a face to indicate that she can do way better. After all, the guy is a good two inches shorter than she is, and everybody knows that Molly wants someone really tall so she doesn't feel like a giraffe. Rose is the only other girl in the family who's inherited that lanky Weasley height so far, and she's not self-conscious with it the way Young Molly is. Molly's always curling her shoulders over, trying to look smaller.
Teddy has never got it. She's the exact right height in his opinion. For starters, he doesn't have to crick his neck looking down at her like he does with Dominique. Then, second, when they hug she just fits excellently against him. It's much comfier than hugging Dom, who is really fond of grinding her pointy chin into his chest for absolutely no good reason.
To emphasise the problem, he deliberately goes to the loo, then sidles past Young Molly on his way back past, brushing just close enough to sing the first line of "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go," so sotto voce nobody but her can hear. After that every time Teddy catches her eye she has to visibly bite her lip to hold back laughter.
In the end, she can't take the guy seriously enough to go home with him. Dominique has also apparently got no interest in the half-Veela girl who kept flirting with her, so the three of them end up in a twenty four hour café in Camden—sans James, who went whooping off in the direction of the Tower of London with his new dragon trainer friend and his best mate from school, the terrifying and irrepressible Astynome Nott, the three of them determined to steal the crown jewels—with an entire table's worth of breakfast food before them.
"Teddy," says Young Molly, taking a thoughtful bite out of a piece of toast, still drunk enough that she smears breadcrumbs across her cheek while doing it, "That was, like, a very dick move to sing the dwarf song. Not at you," she adds hastily to Dominique, whose expression has veered from cheerful to murderous in less than half a second.
Teddy pauses in shovelling bacon into his mouth long enough to reach over to brush the breadcrumbs off her cheek, then blows her a kiss.
"Sorry," he tells her, not bothering to sound like he means it, "But he was tiny."
"He was basically the same height as me!" she exclaims, kicking him in the ankle. Teddy is still feeling agreeably buzzy from the alcohol, so he takes much more notice of how fun it is to wind her up than of the pain. She goes such a darling shade of pink under her riot of freckles, and she has this way of widening her eyes—somewhere between blue and green, a pleasant sort of rivery colour—that makes him think of best afternoons and happiest evenings.
Unrepentant, he shoots her a broad grin, and kicks her gently back.
Dominique at this point causes a diversion by choking on a crumb of toast, and swears at the offending food item with such intensity, her eyes watering like crazy, that the tired waitress sends them a very stiff glare from behind the counter. Dominique glares back, so to avert a crisis Young Molly hastily asks her, "Why didn't you go home with, you know?" She waves a hand to indicate the girl whose name she can't remember—a habit more Weasley kids have picked up off their grandfather than they realise, since Teddy has seen all but two of them do it at some point or another. It's a peculiarly particular flap, one that snaps from the wrist through the thumb and two forefingers, travelling more slowly into the ring and pinky fingers. Teddy finds it funniest when Victoire does it, since she's got a slightly dodgy joint that clicks whenever she moves her wrist too fast.
Dominique proceeds to mirror the gesture back at her cousin without being aware of it—there's the briefest second where Teddy thinks she's being mocking, but then remembers she's much too interested in her food to have the brain space to devote to being unkind to her favourite cousin right now—and Young Molly sits back as though it answers the question.
"Not pretty enough for you?" Teddy inquires, licking ketchup off a finger and then concentrating hard on morphing his features, sculpting himself into the angular, tanned half-Veela with hair the shiny green-black of a magpie's wing. Dominique doesn't even bother looking up from her food, which kind of hurts his feelings.
Young Molly, apparently more drunk than Teddy was aware of since she's never usually so forthright, bangs peremptorily on the table to get his attention and demands, "Change back. Your face is better."
Teddy changes himself back obligingly, hair washing back to brown and face squaring out. In all honesty, he's never been too sure about his face, and spends a lot of time wearing other people's as a result. His hair's all right—Harry's said he got that from his father, like his height, which he likes—but he got too much of the Black looks to be fully cool with his face as a whole. The elegant bone structure, the grey eyes, they speak volumes about a family Teddy is pretty sure were the epitome of spiteful snobs. He's managed to inherit a rugged jawline that comes from way back in his Tonks ancestry rather than the angular Black one, but that's not really enough to disguise his maternal lineage. It's impossible to look at him, knowing anything of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black, and not see it all over him.
Young Molly, though, doesn't seem to mind. She beams at him and blows him a kiss, nodding in a very satisfied manner at him before returning to her toast. Teddy pretends to catch the kiss, just to be dramatic.
"God, get a room," grouses Dominique, then shoves an entire roasted tomato in her mouth. She then proceeds to stare the pair of them down, her blue eyes diving dangerously between them as she chews through the tomato with her mouth wide open. Unwilling to show weakness, Teddy stares back. Young Molly, on the other hand, makes a retching sound and screws her eyes shut.
He waits until she's swallowed before he says, "why the fuck?"
In response she just shrugs and returns to her mushrooms.
They somehow make it through breakfast without anybody storming out, and weave unsteadily back to Teddy's flat. He tries to be noble and sleep on the sofa, giving up his frankly tiny bed to the girls, but they make the very fair point that his place is as cold as the Arctic tundra and that they would rather Drunk apparate to the depths of Gringotts than sleep without him in the bed with them.
"You run easily like the sun times hotter than Molly," says Dominique, which Teddy is reasonably sure doesn't make sense at all, but, to be fair, Young Molly has the average body temperature of a reasonably chilly iceberg.
"It's because his dad was a werewolf," Young Molly announces, already tucked up in bed with the duvet pulled up to her chin. She's managed to get most of the make-up off her face and her hair—which had started the night in a messy, sophisticated sort of knot—is standing out around her face like a halo. He'd say she looks about fourteen, except the only fourteen year olds Teddy has seen recently were dressed like a hookers.
"It's not fucking Twilight," he replies, stripping off his jeans and shirt and tugging his favourite pyjama top off Dominique, who is trying to pull it on over her naked torso whilst simultaneously toeing her skin-tight jeans off, "Honestly. I'm not going to pull some Taylor Lautner shit and be your space heater."
Dominique, who is now shivering all over as she rootles through the pile of sweaters in the bottom of his wardrobe in just her knickers, snorts loudly. Withdrawing a Grandma Molly classic from the very bottom of the pile—in a fetching mustard yellow, which Teddy is delighted to discover looks terrible on her, which might make it the only colour in existence that doesn't suit her—she yanks it on over her head as she speaks.
"You do realise that making that reference reveals you have, in fact, read and seen Twilight?" she inquires cheerfully, bounding past Teddy to leap onto Molly and then burrow down under the covers beside her.
Teddy manages to unearth a basically clean pair of pyjama bottoms and begins to pull them on. "Fuck off. Also I can't be Taylor Lautner, I'm probably a foot taller at least."
"Even Young Moll's like a foot taller," points out Dominique.
Molly makes a noise of protest and says, "He's five-seven and a half, so I'm only, like, two and a bit inches taller."
"Why do you even know that?" Dominique is looking at her askance.
Teddy, now wearing two jumpers over his pyjamas, hurries over to join them in the bed, interrupting the conversation. It really is bloody freezing.
"Budge over," he says fussily, climbing right over Dominique to squirrel down between them. Grumbling, they shift just enough to give him space to tunnel his tall frame under the duvet with them. The bed is nominally a double, but on the small side of that and almost definitely not intended for three people. Especially since Teddy has to lie sort of diagonally so his feet don't hang over the edge. There's a brief period of rustling and swearing until eventually they end up all tangled together. It's oddly comfortable, and very cosy.
"Jesus, Dom, when did you last shave your legs?" Teddy demands, lifting a foot to rub it up her bristly calf, "You get way too much action to be spiky."
"It's never going to be your problem, you raging sexist," she shoots back, biting his shoulder for good measure, "So fuck off."
"I'm smooth," Molly whispers from his other side, dissolving into helpless giggles. Dominique and Teddy exchange a look, and then burst out laughing too.
A grey December dawn is starting to creep through the cracks in Teddy's curtains when they all subside, and he feels so weirdly at peace. Still a little bit drunk, not quite tilting into hungover, with his two favourite people in bed with him and Christmas not too far away.
He's asleep bare seconds after Dominique starts snoring, not really conscious of the way he pulls Molly in closer to be sure she's still, you know, there and everything. Just to be sure.