It was amazing how fast two years could go by. Jackie was three. I was twenty-one. And yet it didn't really seem possible. I was twenty-one and yet sometimes I didn't really feel any older than the seventeen-year-old girl sitting on her bed, clutching that pregnancy test, scared out of her mind.
I supposed that in some ways not much had changed in the past two years. Yes, Jackie was older and I had moved in with Teddy, but other than that there weren't many differences. I still worked at Flourish and Blotts. Teddy still worked at the Ministry. Colin was still out of the picture. Grace and Aidan were still broken up. We were all a little older, but sometimes I felt we weren't much wiser.
It was April, and I was currently lying awake in bed, unable to sleep. There was a thought that I couldn't get out of my mind. It was a thought that had been plaguing me for months and I needed to get it off my chest.
"Teddy," I whispered. "Teddy, wake up. I need to tell you something."
He grunted, rolling around so that he was facing away from me.
"Teddy!" I hissed, whacking his arm. "Wake up!"
He groaned loudly, rolling back over so that he was looking at me. "What?"
"I need to tell you something," I said.
He stared at me. "You need to tell me something?"
I nodded. "Yes."
He glanced over at the clock. "It's 3:30 in the morning. Can't whatever it is wait?"
"No," I replied.
"Fine. What do you need to tell me?"
"I think we should get married," I blurted out.
He stared at me for a moment, eyes wide and not blinking.
"What do you think?" I asked nervously.
"Is this just a suggestion or is this your idea of a proposal?" he finally asked.
I paused, considering that question. Was I proposing to him? It was the 21st century. A girl could propose to a guy if she wanted to. And yet, ever since I was a little girl, I'd dreamed of a guy proposing to me. It would be romantic. Fit for a fairytale.
"Er," I said. "I don't know… I...erm…"
He reached over and pulled open the drawer of the table beside our bed. "I was waiting for the perfect time to do this, but since you've brought it up, I guess now's as good a time as any," he said, rustling around inside of it for a moment.
After a moment, he emerged with a small, gray box.
My breath hitched. My heart sped up. "Is that… is that what I think it is?"
"Well that depends. What do you think it is?" he said, smiling.
"A ring," I whispered.
He nodded.
"How long have you had it?" I asked.
"A few weeks," he responded. He paused. "So what do you think?"
"About what?"
"Do you want the ring or not?" he asked.
"Is that your idea of a proposal? Merlin, Teddy, that was worse than mine. If you're gonna propose to me, do it right."
"Fine," he said, sitting up more and clearing his throat.
"Get down on your knee."
He lifted an eyebrow. "Seriously?"
"Seriously."
He slipped off the bed and lowered himself down onto his knee. I crawled over to the edge of the bed and looked at him expectedly.
He took a deep breath. "Er, I had planned on coming up with what I would say to you beforehand, but I guess now I'll just have to wing it."
I smiled at him. "Winging it is better. More sincere."
"I suppose," he said. He reached out and took my hand. His blue eyes met mine and he smiled that beautiful smile of his. That smile that could make every girl in the world melt into a pile of goo, but that was reserved only for me.
"Victoire Fleur Weasley," he began, "I've known you your entire life. I still remember when I was six and you were four and my grandmother made some offhand remark to your mother about how cute it would be if we got married some day. I remember thinking that was the most horrible thing I had ever heard. Girls were annoying. Especially you. You would always follow me around, begging me to play with you. Then I got a little older and girls became a little more appealing, but I still just considered you a little girl, never a potential girlfriend. But then I remember looking at you one day, when you were about fifteen and realizing that you weren't a little girl anymore. You were pretty. You were beautiful. But you were with Colin by then. But then a few years later, you told me you loved me and I realized I loved you too."
He paused, giving my hand a small squeeze.
"We went our separate ways for a while, but we found our way back to each other. Because we belong together. I love you more than anything in the world, Vic. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want the last thing I see when I leave this world to be your face. So please, say you'll marry me. Because life without you isn't really life."
I felt my eyes filling with tears. "Oh, Teddy," I whispered. "Of course I'll marry you."
His face broke into the most dazzling smile I'd ever seen. He grabbed my face in his hands and kissed me. When we pulled apart, he whispered in my ear, "How was that for winging it?"
"It was amazing," I responded.
He opened the lid of the little gray box and slipped the ring on my finger.
"It's the ring my father gave my mother," he said. "I went and asked my grandmother for it a few weeks ago."
"It's beautiful," I said. Before I was able to stop myself, a small yawn escaped from my mouth.
"We should get some sleep," he said. "It's only 3:45."
I watched as he climbed back into the bed. "I don't know how much sleep I'll be able to get," I said, snuggling into him.
"Goonight, Vic," he whispered.
"Goodnight," I murmured in reply.
I guess getting engaged was more tiring than I previously believed because within a few minutes I was sound asleep.
Four months later, the day of the wedding arrived. We'd decided to get married at the Burrow. Hundreds of folding chairs were set up in the yard. There was a huge tent for the reception. Flowers were decorating everything. It had the makings of a perfect wedding.
But of course, being such a huge event, it was far from perfect. I supposed you could say a lot of things went wrong.
Like the fact that Jackie, who was the flower girl, made it halfway up the aisle with her little basket of flower petals, before turning the basket upside down and dumping the petals in a giant pile on the ground. She then proceeded to scamper off in the direction she came.
Or the fact that at the reception, Albus and James set my sister's dress on fire. Luckily, Dom had recently graduated from Hogwarts and had enough magical ability to put the fire out immediately before any real damage was done.
Rose and Scorpius Malfoy got in a huge fight on the dance floor after they were coerced into dancing by Andromeda against their will. It ended with Rose kneeing him in the groin and loudly calling him a bastard. But, I couldn't help but have my suspicions about the two of them. There was something about the look he gave her when she caught my bouquet that made me think that someday they would realize they didn't hate each other. Especially after I saw how red her face got when she caught him looking at her, causing her to drop the bouquet on the ground and bend down hastily to pick it up. Which of course caused his gaze to drift to her bum. He was definitely a fifteen-year-old boy.
I also saw my aunt Hermione duck behind a potted plant upon the sight of Victor Krum, who my mother had made me invite because the two of them had been in the Triwizard Tournament together a million years ago. And after that, mysterious things kept happening to Krum. Like, whenever he went to take a drink, his glass would suddenly be empty. One look at my uncle Ron laughing a few tables away and I knew immediately who was behind it.
And then something happened that I thought might actually be a good thing, but it turned disastrous as well. I saw Aidan approach Grace and say a few words to her before taking her hand and leading her onto the dance floor. She wrapped her arms around her neck and they swayed slowly to the music. But then the music stopped and Grace pulled away and hurried off the floor, without even a glance back.
And worst of all, I found Dom in the broom shed, snogging Robert, one of Teddy's groomsmen. I immediately dragged her out of there, telling her that if I caught her with him again there would be hell to pay; I could assure her of that. She was only eighteen and he was twenty-three, for god's sake.
But in the end none of these things really mattered. Because there was really only one thing about the wedding that was truly important. And it went completely according to plan. Not a single mistake.
I am of course referring to the moment when Teddy and I stood up before all the people we loved and said the words that bonded us together for life. In the end that was all the mattered. All the little things that happened before and after were trivial in comparison. They weren't important. Nothing was important except that Teddy and I had promised to spend the rest of our lives together.
"Do you, Ted Remus, take Victoire Fleur to be your lawfully wedded wife?"
"I do."
And do you, Victoire Fleur, take Ted Remus to be your lawfully wedded husband?"
"I do," I replied. I looked out into the crowd and saw my mum clutching my dad's hand, tears in my eyes. I smiled at them, before turning back to Teddy. My husband. The man I loved.
"Then I declare you bonded for life."
Well, I suppose saying that nothing else that happened was important was a bit of a lie. There was one thing that happened at the reception that I ended up bitterly wishing I could have stopped, but that I didn't find out about until two weeks later, when we returned from our honeymoon.
Dom had lost her virginity to Teddy's friend Robert that night.
After receiving the news, I curled up in a ball on our bed. Teddy came to sit down beside me.
"This is all my fault," I said. "I should have watched her more carefully after I caught them snogging. I should have made sure she understood the importance of waiting for the right boy. I should have made sure she knew that a drunken 23-year-old guy who shags you up against the wall of a broom shed is not the right boy."
"Vic…" said Teddy.
I cut him off. "I'm a bad sister," I whimpered. "I haven't spent enough time with her over the years. I'm a prime example of what not to do when it comes to boys and yet I never bothered to share my wisdom with her. I keep trying to comfort myself with the fact that she at least waited until she was three years older than I was when I first slept with Colin, but it's not working. He's twenty-three, Teddy. Twenty-three."
"Vic, it's going to be alright," he said, rubbing my back. "Who knows, maybe the two of them will fall in love, get married, have five kids, and live happily ever after. Stranger things have happened."
"You don't really believe that, do you?"
He snorted. "No. Robert's a manwhore."
I buried my face in my hands. "I should have done something."
"Vic," he murmured. "Look at me."
I slowly raised my head. "What?"
"You can't protect your sister, or your brother for that matter, from everything. They need to be allowed to make their own mistakes, or else they won't ever learn from them and grow into the people they're meant to be."
"But it's really hard to see Dom make some of the same mistakes I did and not be able to stop her."
"I know," he said. "But look at it this way; if you hadn't made all the mistakes that you did, you might not be here right now. Everything you've do, every choice you've made, has made you into the person you are today and given you the life you have. And if I do say so myself, I think your life is pretty good."
I nodded. "Yeah, it is."
"So you have to let Dom and Louis make their own choices and live their own lives. And they'll be fine, I promise."
"Yeah," I said. "I know they will." I paused, looking up at him. "But, that doesn't mean I'll object if you want to kick Robert's arse for me."
He laughed. "Maybe later," he said. "Right now, I have something better in mind."
I raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah? And what would that be?"
He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me into his lap. "You'll see," he said, leaning in to kiss me.
Teddy and Vic are married!
One more chapter and an epilogue left.
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