The week that passed was egregious to say the least. The cute new boy in the famous band was all that anyone could talk about.
Apparently he was attending the seventh school year so that he could graduate with a full set of N.E.W.T's. They were vital if a witch or wizard wanted a chance at anything remotely resembling a job.
Not that Victorie tended to engage with the gossip of other students anyway, but she unfortunately often found herself within hearing distance of it.
Between her classmates scribbling his name in their notebooks during class; students gradually gathering around him wherever he went and making a racket; to twice being asked by students (along with her cousin Roxanne, who had also known Teddy back before) to give him love letters from them — Victorie rarely found herself at a comfortable distance from it.
But that's all a prelude to the now, she thought as she walked through the candle lit hallway deep down in the castle where few students went, except for maybe Slytherins. Now she knew for sure that for the next hour or two, she would be far from any of that nonsense.
Except that when she jauntily turned a corner, that nonsense happened to be right in front of her, same as ever before and leaning casually against the stone wall.
His hair was now bright blue and spikey, unlike last time she'd seen him, and his usual crowd of people were nowhere to be seen.
Teddy jumped to life at the sight of her, hand flying into his hair nervously. "You lost?" He asked.
Victorie huffed. "You think I don't know the castle? I've gone to school here for six years."
There was a bitter subtext to her words. As though she was but a millisecond away from adding an: 'unlike you' to the end of the sentence.
Teddy took a cautious step closer, shrugged and stuck his hands in his pockets. "I think I know you have potions right now, and this is not the way there."
When he stepped closer, Victorie noticed one of the pins on his robe that stuck out to her. It was in the shape of a small vial with a violet liquid inside. On the vial two letters read: 'DP'
It stuck out to her as she had seen a multitude of students in the last few days suddenly adorning their robes and bags with this little badge. It was everywhere.
Uniquely to Teddy's pin however, he had enchanted the little bubbles in the vial to dance around.
"How do you even know that I have potions?" She asked, once again playing her favourite little game of feigned stupidity.
Before he answered she set off in the direction of where she needed to be, hoping to no avail that Teddy wouldn't follow her.
But so he did.
"Because I take that class." He explained, two steps behind her. "And I've seen you there." Teddy chuckled as they turned another corner and continued, "You're the one who always smiles and laughs at the teacher's jokes."
Victorie held her head high and refused to let the idea that Teddy had this knowledge about her get to her.
"Professor Slughorn." She corrected. She may be a person who doesn't always treat the teachers with the utmost respect, but enough to address them accordingly.
They descended another stairwell, as quickly as possible on her part, in an attempt to shake the boy off while simultaneously taking them further down the abyss.
To her frustration Teddy was as quick, if not quicker, at descending stairs.
"And you're the guy who always disregards the instructions given to you, and resorts to coming up with your own potions — now I remember." She nodded in feigned recollection.
Teddy chortled to himself, obviously thinking himself so cool. "It's more fun that way."
"Sure... except they never do what they're supposed to."
She looked around for potential diversions she could take so as to shake off the persistent boy. She wanted to tell him that this wasn't actually the way to the potions classroom, but that would call attention to the fact that she wasn't actually joining him for it.
"At least they're not Dark Potions." She derisively added.
"Funny." Teddy replied humorlessly. "So will you admit that you're lost now?"
"I think you'll find I'm the kind of lost that's not." Victorie replied. Although ironically she had just led them both in a circle twice. But despite Teddy's suspicions, he didn't seem to have noticed that bit just yet. "...And if you think I'm so lost, why are you following me?"
"Because I am lost." he smiled, "Totally and completely."
Victorie stopped dead (finally) and sighed, slightly out of breath but with a smile she couldn't help at his silliness.
"Potions is on the other side of the dungeon." She admitted and pointed down the desolate corridor in the direction they had come from. "You're in the wrong place."
They had now reached the point where they were far enough under the ground that no one had bothered to come down here and light the sconces. It was dark.
Teddy bit his lip guiltily. "What if I'm not on my way to potions either? After all, I never said I was." He looked unsure of whether Victorie would take lightly to this information or not.
But Victorie bit her tongue, refusing to feel fooled. "Where are you going then?"
"I heard that things happen down here... sometimes." Teddy explained playfully and reached out to briefly grace the one pin that she had attached to her wool blazer with his fingertips. This one was in the shape of a roll of parchment, with the letters W.P.S. engraved on it. They had been enchanted to draw themselves on and disappear in a loop.
Victorie adjusted the tiny pin to its correct position and declared, "Things, which you don't get to be part of."
For once, Teddy's playful smile completely disappeared, and he seemed finally tired of her reluctance to play along. "Come on Victorie, we used to be friends."
Victorie's eyes furrowed in thoughtful consideration and she crossed her arms. "You used to visit us... but you would be focused on your guitar in a corner somewhere, and I would mostly hang out with Roxanne. We were never friends."
"Perhaps not to you." He looked down at his torn up chequered vans. "But the walls were thin, and I slept in the room next to you guys."
He began smiling at his shoes, lifting his weight back and forth between his feet. "You were the quiet type, but at night-time you came alive, and you two would stay up all night talking, while I laid in my bed."
He began rubbing his neck while glancing at her. "I remember falling asleep to the sound of you, and thinking that you were so sharp and insightful for a ten year old. It was almost comical."
When Teddy stopped talking, the corridor felt quieter than ever. Him and his blushing cheeks would no longer look her in the eye, so she felt like she had to say something.
"Yeah well, joining a band for a tour at the age of eleven is pretty sharp too."
Teddy rubbed the floor with his shoe. "It was mostly a gimmick — 'the eleven year old bassist.'"
"Still, they wouldn't have let someone who couldn't play join." Victorie defended.
"True." Teddy said, finally managing to look at her again. "And a lot of people found it pretty adorable." He suggested confidently with a raise of his eyebrows and a sweet smile.
A loud gust of wind was heard right behind Teddy.
Alarmed by the loud noise he tensely swivelled around to meet the potential danger. He found merely an empty hallway behind him, no threat to be seen, but one of the previously dormant sconces on the wall was now burning on full blast.
Feeling falsely frightened, he swivelled back toward Victorie, only to find that she had gone.
What he didn't miss however was the few millimetres of wall shutting itself before his eyes, and turning back into a regular wall — trap free. Teddy sighed to himself.
He should have known.
After feeling the wall for a minute or two, he declared his quest failed, and left feeling like the personification of a guest towel.
On the other side of the wall stood the crafty girl. She was taking a deep breath of relief and looking straight ahead at the clear coast leading up to the final door of her quest.
But even though the coast was technically clear, it didn't currently seem like a desirable one. The idea of steady and firm land seemed far more appealing.
She took one hard look at that door, one that usually spoke of familiarity to her. All that effort getting there seemed suddenly pointless and she eventually ended up leaving the same way she had come.
She, too, was akin to the guest towel.
Cross-legged, she sat on the floor of her dark dorm room, surrounded by tall, lit candlesticks in a circle around her. She let her hands hover over her body while mumbling softly, opening her chakras one by one.
The smell of leftover stew berated Victorie's nostrils. It was coming from her nightstand, where, on the too frequent nights when she failed to attend dinner in the Great Hall, a bowl of leftovers would usually appear — a blessing from the mysterious house elves. Victorie had come to learn that the house elves at this school had a lot of covert missions.
She tried her best to put the smell out of her mind for now however, as she needed to stay focused.
Pink kunzite. She carefully seized the gemstone from her pocket and revered it in her hand, feeling its energy surge through her. Then laid the stone down to rest on the handkerchief she'd arranged on the floor in front of her.
Next she reached into her pocket for her smoky quartz crystal. Sitting perfectly still, she felt the weight of it ground her. She let it sit in the palm of her hand, weighing her down until her hand tingled from the sensation.
Victorie felt at peace.
Until a whisper from Maya, one of her dorm mates, pulled her consciousness away from her musings. "Did you know that they were originally called Inventors of Dark Potions? But they changed it because it was too long."
What thrilling information, Victorie thought to herself sarcastically, before she caught herself getting distracted from the task at hand.
Instead of letting herself be distracted by trivial matters, she picked up the lemurian seed crystal and watched it glow in the light cast by the candles...
"Edward is such a hot name." Delilah giddily whispered back.
The two girls were sitting on the same bed not two meters away from where Victorie was on the floor, the latter of the three growing rapidly more agitated.
Before she could stop herself, she glanced over at them. A bottle of black nail polish was being exchanged between them, and they took turns applying it to one nail at a time.
"I should start calling him Edward instead. I'm sure he would appreciate that, rather than being called Teddy by everyone."
That's a really bad idea, Victorie thought, but refrained from voicing the opinion.
She closed her eyes, took a long and deep breath and searched her pocket for her aqua aura quartz. It was a beautiful little crystal, turquoise in colour and conducting a vivid sparkling light. She watched as it sparkled, forcing herself into the groove of things, but it proved to be harder than she would have thought...
"I like boys who dye their hair, it's really cool." The girl continued.
Are you kidding me?
And then Victorie happened to blurt out with an ostentatious flare, "He's not dyeing his hair — he's a metamorphmagus. His mother had the same ability." Shocked at herself, she couldn't help but cringe a little. Victorie had never before engaged with their gossip.
Delilah and Maya went quiet. They both stretched their necks to get a view of Victorie on the floor beyond the bedframe.
And then it dawned on Delilah. "Huh, I forgot you knew him, Vicky!"
Victorie cringed at the use of her nickname. They both crawled down to the end of the bed and committed their eyes to Victorie, whose muscles tensed at the sudden attention.
"He's a friend of the family." She explained in a way that made it sound like a counter argument.
"Do you know his mum then?" Delilah exulted. "She must be really cool to let him go touring with his band instead of going to school... What's she like?"
Feeling suddenly uneasy, Victorie watched them stare at her for a second. Her eyes were as wide as theirs at this point. She wasn't used to being included in their gossiping. Back when Jamie had been her friend, she would have never found herself entangled in it. But something had changed.
Victorie opened her mouth, but nothing came out immediately. What was she supposed to tell them? It wasn't hers to share and it baffled her they didn't already know about Teddy's mother's fate. "No... we've never met."
"What about his father?"
Victorie looked at them in disbelief. These questions were beginning to rub her the wrong way. "...Remus Lupin, you mean?"
They nodded.
She gazed at them some more. "Part of the Order of the Phoenix?" She explained in hopes it would jog their memories. "...First and second?" She added, but still nothing.
Are other people than my family and I not aware of these people? These people who died to preserve the world we all presently still live in thanks to them. How can they not even know their names?
Victorie looked down at her lap. She realised that she was clutching her quartz crystal quite tightly and put it to rest on her handkerchief. "No, I don't know him either." She mumbled.
"So you're not that close then." Maya declared.
In an instant, all the candles surrounding Victorie all blew out and the room went pitch black, causing Maya and Delilah to gasp. What they didn't know however was that they were being spared the sight of the scowl Victorie was directing at them.
Victorie stormed off in the dark and exited the dormitory. She descended the small staircase swiftly and made her way through the huddles of students who were socialising in the common room, passing Teddy on the way.
He looked up expectantly as she walked straight by him, approaching none other than her cousin Roxanne, who was sitting alone at a table doing her homework.
"They're disrespectful." She declared, sparing no context.
Without hesitation, Roxanne closed her book and placed her quill on top of it. "What did they do this time?" She asked dryly.
"Are people not aware of the Second Wizarding War? Are people not teaching their kids about this major event in history? Our teachers, for one, bring it up frequently, how can they still be so clueless?"
Roxanne crossed her eyebrows in confusion. "Wait, we're talking about your dorm mates right? I forget their names. Are they really not aware of the war?"
Victorie snapped out of her exasperation for a moment and recognized the fact that she may have exaggerated a little without fully knowing the extent of her dorm mates' ignorance.
She leaned in closer to Roxanne. "Well, they didn't know who Lupin or Tonks were." She whispered to assure herself that Teddy wouldn't overhear.
As if on cue, both of the girls' heads twisted around, sight falling on the boy in question.
Roxanne directed herself back to Victorie. "I think most people don't know the names of everyone who fought in the war, yet are still aware that it happened."
But Victorie was busy noticing, to her defeat, that Teddy was conversing vividly with Jamie. She squinted at the sight before Roxanne grabbed hold of her arm, pulling her back to the conversation at hand.
"I'm sure they are aware of the war. It's okay to not know every last detail of it." Roxanne argued calmly. "Just because I have had to drag you out of your room every summer to stop reading your history books, doesn't mean everyone else is as interested."
She reminisced with a doting smile. "...You've always struggled to process the concept that people can be different from you."
But whether Roxanne's sentiment made any sense to Victorie, she would never know, as the girl's attention had long ago drifted back to the two boys.
Roxanne allowed herself to also examine the ancient relic from their past. Teddy had always been untouchable, only minding his music and little else and always at a safe distance away from them and the rest of their families. Now he was back in their lives after all this time, and he was different. He'd come up to her several times since the start of term, just to chat and to see how things were. Suddenly it seemed he was not just willing to be engaged, he was actively desiring to be.
"Kind of cool that Teddy is back in our lives." Roxanne said. "And you and I have been hanging out again... It's like the gang's back together."
When Victorie still wouldn't look her in the eye, she took it upon herself to move the redhead's noggin in her direction. "Hello?" She asked.
"You're right." Victorie finally replied. "It's not disrespectful." She stood up in front of a confused Roxanne. It took her a second to understand what Victorie was responding to.
"Did you not hear any of what I just said?" She asked, finally catching on to where Victorie's mind was.
But without a goodbye to her friend, she was already making her way back to her dormitory. This time Teddy merely watched her wistfully as she passed.
Delilah and Maya had gone to bed, and Victorie entered a quiet dormitory, lit only by a dim kerosene lamp by Maya's bed.
The wooden floors creaked as she snuck into bed. Once again she shut the curtains on her four-poster, then reached for the bowl of stew on her nightstand and ate it in her bed as soundlessly as she could.
Published: 10 February 2022