The Magic of Time

Teddy Lupin had been one year old when he first met his best friend. Granted, at the time, he sincerely disliked her for three reasons that he had considered extremely serious. His first reason being that it was because of her that, instead of staying the night with his godfather, Harry Potter, like it had been planned, he had to sleep in a very uncomfortable car seat while Harry drove them to the hospital. His second reason was that all of the people who had been like family to Teddy were completely ignoring him, which was unacceptable to him to say the very least. Finally, the third reason, and possibly the most important one, was the mere fact that when he met her for the first time, she highly resembled the look of an oversized, squishy, bald rat wrapped tightly in a bundle of pink cloth. Everyone else, however, did not seem to share his opinion.
"She's beautiful!" squealed Ginny, who had a few tears running down her face as she clutched Harry's hand tightly in her own.
Teddy's gaze shifted to his Grandma Weasley, who also was staring down at the ugly thing in the blankets with tears shining on her cheeks. Teddy still couldn't understand what was so special about this uninvited baby. She had made Fleur complain about being fat for a very long time and also snap at anyone who tried to comfort her, making her very unpleasant company.
Teddy squinted hard at the baby, trying to see what everyone else saw. Finally he gave up and looked at Harry.
“Is she going to get pwettier?” he asked, still unable to pronounce his r's correctly. George Weasley, who was standing close beside Teddy, nearly doubled over with laughter. Harry joined in and ruffled Teddy's hair.
“Don't you worry, Teddy. She'll be beautiful when she grows up. She might even steal your heart,” Harry teased. Teddy made a face in disgust and shook his head. He could hardly see this rat-looking little baby growing to look remotely pretty. Harry chuckled again and lifted Teddy into his arms.
“What's hew name?”
"Victoire," said Bill, absolutely beaming, "Victoire Weasley."
"V-Vic-Victow-" Teddy tried to say, but failed to pronounce.
"Why don't you just call her Vic, Teddy?" Harry offered, smiling at his godson. Teddy nodded and looked back over at Victoire who was now cooing in Grandma Weasley's arms.
"I hope suwe she gets pwettier," said Teddy. The whole room roared with laughter, and Teddy, though he couldn't see much humor in this situation, laughed with them.
Over the years, much to Teddy's great relief, Victoire began to resemble a girl more and more. Soon after her birth, silvery-blonde hair had begun to sprout in wisps from her head and by the time she was two, it had grown down to her chin. She kept the look of delicacy and squishiness until she was about five, in which, she had grown very much from the size she was originally.
After Teddy established that Victoire was not going to grow up to be a giant rat after all, he and she became practically joined at the hip as they both grew from tiny little toddlers to rambunctious children, not even letting Victoire's own younger siblings, Domonique and Louis, come between them.
By the time that they were both in Hogwarts, Victoire was nursing a small crush for Teddy, while he only saw her as his best friend. Determined not to ruin their friendship, she kept it to herself, though, by her third year (Teddy was in his fourth), it was obvious to everyone but Teddy himself.
During Christmas break of the very year that her crush on Teddy became so obvious, Victoire was spending most of it in the Potter's house, watching Harry and Ginny's three kids, James, Albus, and Lily. She was braiding Lily's hair one afternoon while Harry and Ginny were working when Lily said out of the blue, “Do you really love Teddy, Vicky?”
Victoire fumbled on the braid. Instead of starting over, she picked Lily up and put her on her lap.
“What are you talking about, Lily? Where'd you get that idea?” Victoire asked. Lily grinned.
“Mummy said so! She was telling Daddy all about it! She says that you've loved him since forever!”
Victoire smiled and shook her head. “I don't love him, Lily. It's only a crush. Kind of like what you had with Lorcan Scamander.”
“It was Lysander,” she giggled. “And you and Teddy are different, though!”
“How?”
“You guys are old.” Victoire laughed and ruffled Lily's wavy red hair. She leaned in near Victoire's ear and, like she was revealing a huge secret, she added quietly, “And he talks about you all the time while he's here. He doesn't do that with anyone else, so he must like you.”
Victoire looked down at her young, naive cousin and wished nothing more than her words to be true. But Victoire was mature enough to know when feelings were mutual and when they weren't, and in this case they definitely were not. That didn't stop Victoire from asking her Aunt Ginny about this, though, when she and Harry returned from work that evening, though.
“Staying for dinner, Victoire?” Harry asked, shrugging his fleece jacket off. Victoire shook her head.
“No thanks, Uncle Harry. I have a question for you, though, Aunt Ginny,” Victoire said. Albus and James darted past the three and Harry went after them, telling them to not run in the house. Ginny ushered Victoire into the sitting room.
“What's on your mind?” Ginny said, sitting on the loveseat.
Victoire curled up on the armchair and said, “I heard you were telling Uncle Harry that I'm in love with Teddy and have been since forever.” She batted her eyelashes and waited for her aunt's response.
“That girl,” she muttered. “I told her not to tell you what I was telling Harry.”
“Well, now you've put that insane idea in her head,” Victoire teased. “And she seems to think that he likes me back.”
Ginny smiled. “Well, I may have exaggerated when I said that you loved him, but I don't think that she's exaggerating when she says that he likes you. She's a very observant child, Lily.”
“Right, right. I'm supposed to go for Teddy based on the opinion of a five-year-old. And here, I was thinking that I just had to wait for him to admit it to me. My mistake.”
“So you do like him, then?”
Victoire's face went as red as Ginny's hair and she looked at the floor. Ginny nodded knowingly, still beaming.
“I knew it,” she said. “I just knew that you had feelings for him!”
“Alright, so I like him a lot. But there's nothing I can do about it. He doesn't feel the same for me,” Victoire sighed.
Ginny patted her niece's shoulder comfortingly. “Victoire, d'you know about when Uncle Harry and I actually met during my first year at Hogwarts?” Victoire shook her head. “Well, let's just say I was a bit starstruck.”
“Starstruck?” repeated Harry, walking into the sitting room with Albus attached to his back. “You got wide-eyed and ran out of every room you saw me in and then wrote about me in a diary for almost a year.”
Ginny made a face at him. “Okay, so I had a bit of an obsession, but that died down after a few years and I became normal again.”
“It took until her fourth year until she could speak to me properly,” Harry said, grinning and sitting beside his wife with Albus now on his lap.
“Anyway,” Ginny said, giving Harry a friendly push. “He tried to block out a lot of people from his life that same year, but I wouldn't let him, you see. I knew so much of how he was feeling that year, when he thought that Lord Voldemort was possessing him because I went through the very same thing my first year. He tried to get us all to give up on him, but we wouldn't. I especially wouldn't.”
“That was the day that I knew that I was probably going to fall hard for her,” Harry reminisced, grabbing Ginny's hand. Ginny leaned against his arm. “And fall hard, I did.”
“So what does this have to do with me and Teddy?” asked Victoire, slightly impatient. She loved her aunt and uncle and all, but if they got too lovey dovey in front of her, she would probably vomit all over their son.
“Just don't give up on Teddy. You have to be there for him. Through every mishap, every adventure, every laugh and cry. You need to be more than just his best friend. You need to be the one he can depend on for anything and everything, no matter how wild. I did and just look at how I turned out.”
“The Weasleys have a funny way of making people fall in love with them,” Harry noted.
Victoire nodded. She was very thankful to have her family's advice on the matter, especially since nearly all of them in the future, when she began to seek more of it, said the same thing: “Be with him through every adventure and one day he'll realize how in love with you he is.”
It was that advice that, during Victoire's fifth year led her to say yes when Teddy asked her the extremely vague and slightly untruthful question that brought them on their wildest adventure yet:
“Will you help me with a little project I've been working on?”
How that “little project” would affect their lives, neither knew. Only one thing seemed to be certain.
Nothing would ever be the same.