"A hawk with talent hides its talons"
Winter Holidays, 7th Year (2 years ago)
She' d never been so hungry in her life.
The family dinner had been less than satisfying both in meal and company. It all tasted overcooked and her father had been called away earlier in the day and her mum had left with Louis because he thought it appropriate to be a brat about everything.
Dominque was sick.
Andromeda was late.
Teddy sent an owl saying he'd be there later in the evening.
It was cold even with the warming charm cast around her, but despite the cold she was still outside. It was not worth the risk of getting caught and the tongue lashing her mum would get if her grandmother caught her smoking out the window.
He must have thought he was being sneaky, she could tell by the measured way he was walking across the snow, when he spoke up she was waiting for it.
That tone of chastisement was expected.
"Molly would kill you."
She smiled into the cloud of smoke she blew out and looked behind her with her cigarette clenched between her teeth.
"Grandmere is sleeping. Had two sherries, it es safe to say she is out for the night. Hello, Teddy."
He lit up a fag of his own and smiled down at her.
"How did you know it was me?"
"Eagle Eyes. I put one of 'eem by the back door. You can sit I put a weave down on the snow."
She gestured at the spot next to her and waved a small curved lens glass at him. Teddy took it from her hands and stared at the image in it, it showed the back of the burrow and footsteps in the snow.
"Guess you saw me slip then, yeah?" He shrugged himself further into his coat.
"Very graceful." She tapped the rubber soles of her boot heels together.
"I like your laces."
They were red.
"Thank you."
They didn't speak for some time. Not until she took her smoke out of her mouth and turned her head on her bare knees to look at him.
Teddy didn't look back, just stopped mid-drag to turn his eyes a fraction of a bit towards her. He leaned a hand back and clenched cold snow between his fingers and gave her a grin.
She flipped a tassel hanging off her hand-made hat in his direction and smiled a small smile back at him.
"You'll catch a cold."
He carefully avoided looking at her legs, half-bared and covered with gooseflesh from where the hem of her white nightgown wasn't.
"I didn't feel like getting dressed just to sneak outside. It's not too bad."
She pulled the edges of her tanned leather, fur hemmed jacket tighter across her chest.
"You haven't answered my owls."
He sucked in smoke after he let out the veiled accusation.
"I've been busy."
He blew it out past red and raw chapped lips.
"Is that all?"
She gave him a look and remembered her cigarette as it dropped off ash on her knuckle, she ignored it.
"Yes."
"I thought you were angry at me, for what happened at the station. I knew I shouldn't have gone out."
She took a drag herself and choked on it.
Coughing it out before she looked at him she wondered if her father had cornered him after what happened at the beginning of term.
The thought was not soothing.
"I understand. And, yes, you shouldn't have been out on the day of the full moon. I imagine it must be hard to control your…urges. Did papa…do anything, after I left?"
Teddy laughed hard and husky into the cold night with an acrid smoke cloud forming in the frosty air.
"Yeah, he was a bit peeved. He asked if I had had sex with you."
He paused.
She waited.
"I said 'I haven't touched her,' and he goes 'I wasn't asking about your hands,' but it was alright, in the end. Guess maybe I should have dealt with Jamie before he ran off and told everyone he saw us snogging, huh?"
Victoire nodded and looked up at the sky, it was clear. She couldn't sleep on nights when a moon didn't hang heavy in the sky.
She didn't tell him how she had woken up from a dream of three women with oiled and slicked bodies with the heads of birds and wings instead of arms, claws instead of feet, with their wet eyes watching her and their rank smell marking the air.
She wouldn't tell anyone about the way it set something stirring inside of her that made her have to come outside to see the sky.
"I'm not angry with you." She put out her half-dead cigarette that was already sputtering weakly.
Burying the butt with her boot she tried not to let the smile forming behind her lips show.
"Goodnight, Teddy. I'm glad I got to see you before I went on holiday with mama."
She leaned closer and brushed her lips against his cheek.
Her dream had made her bold, and beneath her cold skin her blood raced, spiked with fear and something savage that mixed her emotions into something heady.
He shuddered at the cold touch of her pout against his still warm skin. His shiver bumped her mouth and she pulled back pressing a hand to it.
"I'm sorry," when she says it they both know it's not an apology, it can't be because it wasn't an accident, and they both know that too.
When she gets up to leave so does he, she gives him a look and he gives one back.
"What do you mean 'holiday?'"
She pauses and chews a strip of skin off her lips, red bubbles at the slice.
"I'm not staying, I'm leaving. I want to go home, mama wants to go to Paris, and I didn't want to before, now I do."
"Why?" He feels that it is because of him, but it can't be because he knows she wouldn't tell him if it was, wouldn't even bring it up.
"I can't sleep here, it's…uncomfortable, for me. I like to be home. That's all."
She looks tired, as if she hasn't slept much.
He wouldn't be surprised.
"So you're going then?"
"Yes. I am. I'm going to leave a note, and pack. I'll use the floo. I'm too tired to apparate."
"I'll take you."
When she looks at him, standing there in the snow and smelling of smoke he can't help but understand something is ending between them. It is the moment where they are something else than what they were, in the cold he sees an era of childhood ending, feels it. The girl he'd fallen so hard for years before is no longer there.
Something had changed.
That girl didn't say goodbye but the farewell is understood, even though he's just noticing it now.
She is different than at that moment, and he doesn't know how or why but he figures it has something to do with the way she's suddenly taken up late nights and cigarettes, she's older. She understands herself, not found, but uncovered what was there all along.
They go inside and he waits in the kitchen while she packs up her duffel and dresses in her denims and a soft white sweater.
Her boots are the same and so are the bags under her eyes.
In the dim light of the room while sitting on the scrubbed wood table, watching her pour hot mint drinks for them both out of the kettle he'd silenced, he notices a shimmer around her.
He wonders why she's wearing a glamour and why she would need to, but he doesn't ask because she's a girl and girls do those sort of things, even late at night when everyone is supposed to look their worst.
Hell, he thinks, she still looks like bad weather and tired eyes.
They drink their teas and don't speak.
She looks at herself in the hall mirror as she writes a note for her grandparents to find in the morning.
The note is terse and signed with a V and fakely heartfelt apologies for not staying longer.
The reflection in the mirror, to her, not the beauty everyone makes so much of, is just her face covered with the shine of glamour to cover what the sky, empty of moon, does to her.
He picks at the bowl of chocolates on the counter as he waits for her.
The uneaten confections drive the fact that Molly and Arthur are all too suddenly old home. They keep the candy there for the children that frequent the house, not for themselves.
When she comes into the kitchen he takes her surprisingly light duffel and apparates them just outside the wards of Shell Cottage.
They look at each other and find themselves both surprised by the lack of snow around them.
Silently she takes his hand and smiles at him and they walked. They walk along the garden paths and right up to the edge of the woods and back again to the seemingly small house.
She looks at the lights inside and turns away from them and takes him with her.
They sit in the garden and watch the sky and talk for a very long time. And despite the lateness of the hour and the heat of hand in hand they are still just pals.
Teddy stares at her face, her mouth is black in the dim light and he can smell the, by then, stale scent of her bloodied lip.
Her gaze is leagues away, somewhere in the sky, staring at the stars and beyond them at the one thing that isn't there that night.
They do not talk until dawn or anything as overdone as that, but they do grin at each other and walk back, loping and whimsically to the cottage, her nails scratch at his fingers but she does not complain of the chill the breeze carries.
The sodium yellow lamp-light from her porch gleams off the metal in his eyebrow and lower lip.
She laughs at him and it is raspy, a snort comes and then a cough because girls like Victoire don't giggle or anything so silly.
They laugh, long and shaky because she is as much one of the boys as his mates are.
He doesn't wonder why she laughs because he feels it. It's a private joke he's not privy to, it's something sacred that he wouldn't for anything ask to know about.
The world is visible and colorless and somehow everything seems dull and fuzzy-edged.
Everything except for her.
He wonders if she thinks the same about him.
Victoire takes and lights up the cigarette he'd had tucked behind his ear and points at the sky with the orange tip and laughs again. She shakes her head at the look of confusion that crosses his face.
They do not say goodnight.
They say nothing.
There is nothing left to say.
Nothing left that they can say that the other can't guess at or isn't thinking themselves.
It is a night that cannot be repeated because it is pregnant with so many things that they didn't say and didn't do, and it is perhaps because of such things that it is a night neither will forget.
She walks inside.
He apparates away.
When he wakes up the next morning in his own bed he finds he cannot remember half of what they had talked about, like a language learned in dreams or a dance danced while asleep.
The aftertaste of something important lingers at the edges of his mind, it doesn't matter because he knows it will come back to him eventually.
Like déjà vu, and by then he'll wonder where it was that such a thing came from.
And he thinks one can't have it both ways, he doesn't know quite what that means but it doesn't matter because his head fell back into the pillow and his body into asleep again.