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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James and Lily's wedding is like something straight out of a fairytale. The grounds of Potter Manor have been transformed into a wonderland of flowers and fairy lights made with real pixies who dart around the garden leaving trails of shimmering light in their wake. Her parents must have been working on the charmwork for weeks, because the effect is nothing short of dazzling.
The ceremony is held beneath a canopy of trailing white blossoms just before sunset, and the light from the evening sun sets Lily's hair ablaze against her beautiful white dress. She looks positively ethereal, and no one can blame James for promptly turning into a sniffling mess as soon as she'd walked down the aisle towards him.
Teddy certainly can't judge — as soon as they'd smiled at each other, she'd practically burst into happy tears and had to hide her face in Remus' shoulder.
Afterwards, everyone moves to the back garden for drinks and food and dancing, and Sirius approaches her with a little handkerchief to dry her face. She lets him wipe her tears away as though she's a child, then gives him a big watery smile. He kisses the top of her head fondly, then leads her over to James and Lily.
Lily greets them both with an enormous, beaming smile. Her baby bump is just barely visible through her wedding dress, though she keeps cupping it with her hands almost unconsciously, as though checking that it's still there. She really does look as though she's glowing — James is still staring at her in pure amazement, his mouth half open as though he really can't believe his luck.
The first thing he says to them when they approach is, "Look at my wife! Look how beautiful she looks!"
Teddy and Sirius exchange their congratulations, and hug and kiss the newly wedded couple — when James catches sight of her dress, he bursts into delighted, childlike laughter. It's a pretty sage green, and the hem has been carefully embroidered with two deer that have been enchanted to prance around the flowing petticoats at the bottom of her dress. It had taken her weeks to get the charm right, though her mother had helped with the embroidery; it's worth all of the work to see the look of pure glee on James' face.
There are so many people eagerly awaiting the chance to offer their congratulations to James and Lily, so Teddy and Sirius step aside after a couple of minutes of chatting so that they can go and get some food.
The lawn has been transformed into a dancefloor, and garden gnomes run in amongst everyone's legs, kicking at their ankles to make sure that no one starts to dance before James and Lily have had their first dance. Sirius laughs so hard that he chokes on the bread roll he's eating when one of the gnomes kicks old Elias Budgeworth so hard in the back of the knee that he goes careening to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
It's Easter break, so Teddy can see plenty of her classmates at the wedding party. Her parents seem to have sent out a blanket invitation to everyone they know — they're a Pureblood family, which means that all the other Pureblood families would have been invited too, though thanks to their blood traitor status the invite seems to have gone ignored by the majority of them. All the same, Teddy doesn't think she's ever seen her home so busy in her life. There are people she doesn't think she's ever seen before in her life, laughing and drinking and just having a genuinely wonderful time celebrating James and Lily's marriage.
