Work Text:
Of all the great wizarding love ballads his mother had sung to him while he was growing up, he loved Elias and Alcyone's the best. Perhaps because their story was more of war than of love, and like all little boys, fighting and valor and knighthood had intrigued him more than flowers and romance and true love. But when his mother tired of verses of long-forgotten war spells and brave galloping horses, she turned to the love verses, and sang with a love of romance that all females around him seemed to have been born with.
The day Elias and Alcyone met, a tree of golden apples grew beside Hogwarts castle to symbolize the purity of their love. Theodore thought, even at age eight, that the golden apple bit was too embellished for a real love story, which at that time involved wand-swords and eagle familiars and short pecks on the cheek, but his mother had liked it, so it stayed. He'd imagined in his naive fantasies that something would happen the day he set his eyes on his soul mate. Perhaps a stroke of accidental magic, or an eclipse, or maybe even a tree of golden apples. Anything to give him a sign.
As he grew up, he stopped waiting for a sign, but he never stopped waiting for his Alcyone.
He waited for her long after his sisters married and his mother died. He waited for her after he got engaged and waited for her after he married. He only stopped waiting after his divorce papers were finalized and he woke up in a cold bed with the icy realization that he'd waited half his life away and the other half of his soul was probably married to another, enjoying another man's love, or just hadn't been born yet. He shuddered at the thoughts.
He became a bit of a playboy after that, but even that ended with the beginning of his job at Hogwarts. He'd put off teaching for a long while; Babbling had offered him the job his seventh year at Hogwarts and told him the position would always be available to him, but he'd never wanted to deal with little kids.
At thirty, he stared at the eleven year olds with half curiosity, half wonder, and told himself he hadn't wanted children anyway.
For a long while, he was content. He dated and visited family on his weekends, taught ungrateful brats on his weekdays, and spent entire summers abroad, spending the outrageous Hogwarts staff salary.
Then, sometime between the complacent haze and the guilt-wrecked years that came after, Lily Luna Potter came to Hogwarts.
Theodore didn't remember the first time he saw Potter's youngest child. Sure, he'd likely seen her in the newspaper and in the halls between classes, and maybe he'd caught a glimpse of her from the staff table. Maybe the memory of that poetic sudden first attraction still existed in the very bottom depths of his mind, waiting for him to release it from its prison. He didn't remember. He didn't care to remember. He rather liked that the first memory he had of her was after she'd hit puberty, though that excused his feelings not at all. He didn't think his mind could've survived being attracted to an eleven year old, so he thanked Elias' lingering ghost for the small favor.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when he couldn't sleep and couldn't drink, he wondered whether he should add pedophile to his list of faults.
The first time he'd truly noticed her was three months into her first year of Ancient Runes class. He didn't take an active part in his untalented students' lives, and for all her beauty and sweet smiles, Lily was neither very creative nor very smart. Of course, he'd long since given up on finding a student that meets his standards: a student he would choose to replace him. Babbling had taught for forty-seven years before Theodore had come along.
Neither did he take part in his ordinary and somewhat talented students' lives, and he didn't want to. Perhaps that made him a bad teacher. Perhaps that was why a junior teacher had been made Head of Slytherin House when the disaster that was Gleethorn finally left. He didn't care. He was long past identifying himself by his Hogwarts House, and he took no pleasure in the political friendships of young Slytherins.
Three months into class, she had started singing while completing her rudimentary rune work. She sang the song of Elias and Alcyone, and Theodore's mother's voice echoed in his head.
"Should I stop, Professor?" she'd asked when she'd looked up to see him staring at her. She had always been a bit bratty, even at thirteen.
He'd said yes, feeling something akin to regret. He hadn't heard the song in years; he hadn't thought of his mother in almost that long as well.
He never asked how she knew the song; it was the version Darker families knew well, and the Light families' version ended in tragedy. Perhaps Potter had found the song among the Black family's possessions.
That night, he'd hummed the song while showering, dual voices singing in his head; one voice young and strong, the other deeper and weaker. He didn't give in to the urge to take the memory into a Pensieve, but it had been a near thing. He'd only noticed he was doing humming by the third verse, but by then he hadn't cared.
After that day, he'd noticed her, sometimes. He watched her lose the last of her childhood fat, watched her come in with ear piercings on a Tuesday and wondered what little girls got up to in the Gryffindor dormitories, watched her make friends, watched her lose them, watched her during her awkward, pimply, annoying, emotional late teenage phase. She sang under her breath sometimes, always love ballads, and he watched her even more.
He didn't remember when she'd become attractive to him, and not just a hobby to pass the boredom, but she when had first appeared in his dreams, he locked them away and called himself a pedophile, thinking that was the end of it. He was used to his body betraying him at times, and fantasies were just that: fantasies. The second time she starred in his dreams, he took Dreamless Sleep for the next week. After that, he just ignored his dreams.
He noticed when she became attracted to him, sometime in her sixth year. He noticed the blushes, the smiles, the daydreams, the way she'd linger at his desk a little too long. It wasn't the first time a student had crushed on him, and over the years he'd come to recognize the signs. Now that Gleethorn had left, he was the only somewhat young and attractive male teacher Hogwarts had, and for whatever reason, this attracted teenage girls like flies to honey.
She looked all of seventeen years old when she propositioned him, nervous, gulping, and affecting a shade confidence that left a bad taste in his mouth, but it had still taken him a moment to pull away and say no. In that moment, he thought of how it could have gone, had he said yes. The heated kisses, the pretty face in his bed, the unvoiced and unthought of feelings he had for her. And he thought of the other side of the coin: developing stronger feelings for her, watching her leave him for another man, a younger man, having to put up with a teenager's woes when he wanted a wife and children already, and she was just young enough to be his own child.
He sighed into her kiss, wondering if she could taste his guilt and self-hatred, and pushed her face back to her side of his teacher's desk.
"Come back when you're twenty seven," he told her, smiling wryly.
"I'm an adult. I'm not your student anymore." She raised her diploma as though it could wipe away his misgivings, but he just shook his head. If he agreed, he'd never forgive himself, nor would he ever feel truly comfortable in their relationship.
It was gravity that pulled him towards her, but he was a wizard. He could resist gravity.