The year after her brother James graduates, Teddy Potter returns to Hogwarts for her final year. With the Marauders gone, it should be a quiet, peaceful year despite the mounting tensions in the world outside of school.
The problem, naturally, lies...
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Curiously, the flowers don't wilt.
Teddy had tried to throw them away once they had gotten back to their dorm room, but Mary had wrested them out of her hands and made a big show of putting them in a vase of water on their shared dresser. They've been there for over a week now, and the blossoms are as healthy and vibrant as the day they had been handed to her. Black must have put a charm on them to ensure they didn't die — Teddy isn't altogether sure how she feels about that. The girls think that it's simply adorable, though Teddy is sure that they wouldn't think that if they knew it was Black, and not Otto, who had gifted them to her.
She can't help but look at them even as she gets ready for her Hogsmeade date — like always, Mary is hovering around behind her trying to fix her hair and straighten her clothes, but Teddy finds herself preoccupied as she frowns at the little purple blossoms. Truthfully, she thinks they're driving her insane. The only reason she can come up with for Regulus giving them to her in the first place is because he's trying to mock her. It's the only thing that makes sense, but she just can't quite figure out how they're mocking her.
By the time she meets Otto in the Entrance Hall, however, she's managed to push all thoughts of Regulus Black and his stupid poisonous flowers out of her head. Otto beams at her, and she can't help but notice that he looks good — his cheeks are flushed ruddy with the cold, and his flaxen hair shines in the milky wintery sun. He's wearing a velvet-lined cloak with his knitted Hufflepuff scarf, and he seems genuinely excited to see her.
"You look lovely," He says earnestly, despite the fact that she's wearing standard black robes and a plain cloak that's been charmed to adapt to its wearers warmth needs (a birthday gift from her mother). "I thought that we might get a carriage down to the village. It's a bit cold to walk, don't you think?"
"Fine by me." Teddy says easily. It had begun snowing early in the week, and by now the grounds of the castle were covered in a generous blanket of pure white. It was beautiful, and even now students were seizing their chance to engage in snowball fights and snowmen-making competitions, but Teddy didn't much fancy getting her feet all wet and cold trudging through the knee-deep snow to get to Hogsmeade.
She had been a little worried that they wouldn't have anything in common, but to her surprise conversation actually ends up flowing very easily between them. She had half expected the conversation to be dominated by Quidditch talk, but Otto asks her about her family and her own hobbies and interests, and an in-depth discussion about the conservation of ancient magical woodlands. By the time they reach the village, Teddy is relaxed and laughing and genuinely enjoying Otto's company. It comes as somewhat of a surprise, because Teddy had admittedly been anxious about this date all week — it was a complicated sort of anxiety, because it was mixed with excitement. She really was looking forward to her first ever date, but she's also a little scared that it'll go wrong or she'll say something stupid or she might just ruin the whole thing somehow.
