Originally written for Next Gen Fest 2015.

Teammates

Dominique felt like death warmed up.

Her hair was a virtual Hippogriff's nest; her tongue felt as though something furry may have died on it during the night and there was a strong, somewhat pungent odour emanating from her pores – a curious mixture of ethanol, cologne and steamed kebab meat.

Overall, she felt like she'd just gone ten rounds against the Elder Wand and – having never been one to weather a hangover well – she really rather looked like it too. In fact, all she wanted to do was make it the final few yards to her flat in peace, crawl into bed and possibly hibernate for the next century. But the universe, it seemed, had other plans.

"Well, well, well. Look what the Kneazle dragged in…"

The door to the crampedLondon flat had barely closed behind her when a perfectly coiffed blonde head shot up from behind the couch. Dominique dropped the broken shoe she'd been carrying with a heavy clunk, one that rather poetically symbolised the sudden sinking of her stomach.

The perfectly coiffed head – that was, in fact, attached to a freshly showered, clean-clothed body – draped itself over the back of the settee and fixed Dominique with a steadfast smirk, observant hazel eyes taking in the gloriously seedy sight in front of her.

"Morning, Vic," Dominique cleared her throat, sounding as gruff as her Uncle Charlie, and avoided her sister's all-seeing gaze.

"And my, oh my, what have we here?" A thin, blonde eyebrow arched knowingly skyward. "Bed unslept in, hair in missionary disarray, and yesterday's dress with today's shame all over it. My dress, I might add."

Dominique hid the glaring red wine stain with her battered old purse.

"'Can't imagine what you might be implying, Vic," she blushed, tugging at the hem of her outfit and wondering just when it had gotten so short. "Why are you up so early, anyway? 'Thought you needed at least fifteen hours of beauty sleep to maintain that dewy glow…"

Her sarcasm, as usual, was entirely lost on her sister, who swung her legs over the couch and came to circle Dominique in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a starving vulture.

"Well," Victoire smiled, gleefully, "when I realised my little sister had not come home and it was well past her bedtime, I was naturally concerned."

"Twenty-two year olds do not have a bedtime, Victoire."

"Could've fooled me," she grinned. Dominique offered her a withering stare; her typical lack of social life was one of Victoire's favourite talking points.

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint but you'll have to get your daily dose of gossip from those horrible Witch Weekly columns you read. I stayed the night at Roxanne's, that's all." Dominique turned up her nose, only for Victoire to let out a very unladylike howl of a laugh.

"Oh, I don't think so! Roxy called the fireplace half an hour ago, asking where you were!"

Bugger.

Dominique flushed an unsightly shade of red and died a little internally. Desperately avoiding Victoire's triumphant look of glee, she tried – and failed – to think of something clever to say, before turning on her heel and stomping towards her bedroom. If she could just manage to get out of her sister's immediate line of sight, she thought, perhaps she might forget that she actually existed and leave her alone.

Obviously choosing not to take this subtle hint, Victoire – blessed with that Delacour grace that had so unfairly overlooked the middle child – danced merrily along behind her.

"So, then…" Victoire wiggled a pair of excited eyebrows, watching as her sister crawled into bed – fully clothed – and let out a rather sickly moan of exhaustion, "who's the lucky fellow?"

Dominique yanked the duvet up over her ears and opted for a response that had yet to have the desired effect in the history of the English language. "Mind your own business."

Victoire chuckled and plopped herself down, cross-legged, on the end of the bed. "Oh, but I dare say this is entirely my business. I mean, if you're going to start dragging our home into disrepute with such a scandalous display every morning-,"

"Every morning?! Don't be so ridiculous-,"

"Besides, I need to know what to tell Grandma Molly for our page in the family newsletter this month."

Dominique threw a decorative pillow at her head.

At this particular moment – and as was often the case – Dominique struggled to recall what on Earth had possessed her to agree to share a flat with her older sister and lifelong pain in the backside. She strongly suspected she may have been Confunded at the time – quite possibly by her mother, who had a vehement dislike for the notion of any of her three children doing anything unsupervised, even as the eldest was pushing twenty-six.

"At least tell me if it was actually a date? Or did you just pick up some random bloke at The Leaky like last time?"

"That man wasn't random!" Dominique's strawberry blonde curls emerged in outrage. "Patrick was my old Potions partner from school and he was very lovely – we've been through this!"

Victoire pretended to think for a moment. "Oh yes, I do remember now. All those heated looks over boiling frogspawn…" she grinned, teasingly. This earned her a kick from beneath the duvet. "So it was a date, then? Oh, come on, you can tell me!" she stuck out a pouting bottom lip. "I always tell you about my love life."

Dominique scowled. "That's because your love life has consisted purely of shagging Teddy Lupin sideways for the last six years. Which, I might add, I've never actually asked to hear about once!"

"Jealousy is a very unflattering emotion, little one." Victoire smirked, without the faintest hint of a blush. "Fine then. If you won't just tell me, I'll have to guess, won't I?"

Dominique rolled her eyes and buried her head back in the blankets with a groan.

"Let me see…" she tapped her chin, thoughtfully, and twirled a strand of hair, "Is it that chap that delivers my magazines? I definitely saw you say hello to him at the door once, and I recently found out that he wears that eye-patch due to a splinching accident – how exciting!"

Dominique chose to completely ignore this.

"I'll take that as a no," Victoire pursed her lips. "What about Uncle Ron's friend, Mr Finnigan? I hear he's newly divorced andhas a bit of a thing for younger women…."

Dominique let out a muffled snort of amusement. "That sounds oddly suspicious. And absolutely, definitely not."

Victoire was not perturbed. "Ooh, I know! What about that Flint boy that used to ask you out at school all the time?" she interrupted herself with a frown. "Though I suppose they don't really let people out of Azkaban to take girls out for dinner, do they?"

Dominique stared at her sister in bewilderment. While Victoire certainly did have many impressive qualities – she would occasionally and grudgingly admit – common sense had never really been among them. And then another thought occurred to her…

"Why is it that the only people you seem to think I'm capable of dating are either twice my age, disfigured or in jail?"

Victoire waved a dismissive, freshly manicured hand. "Everyone knows the first rule of dating is to keep one's expectations low. Besides, you're not giving me an awful lot to go on here."

"Well, maybe," she grumbled, pushing herself up onto her elbows to deliver a proper scowl, "that's because I don't want you know who it is just yet. Maybe I'd like to have a little privacy in this one aspect of my just maybe, I'd like to keep it a secret long enough to decide if we might at least have a second date, without you and the other five hundred members of our family getting involved!"

For an unusually long moment, Victoire didn't say anything at all. She stared at her little sister thoughtfully, as if she were a new shade of lipstick that she wasn't quite sure suited her. Finally, she gave a slow nod and stretched out her long, dancer's legs as she moved to stand.

"Fine, I'll leave you alone. This wasn't any fun, anyway." She headed for the doorway and paused, hand on one hip. "One last question: Does this mystery man work with you at Gringotts?"

Dominique wasn't quite quick enough to hide the tell-tale bloom of colour at her cheeks or the startled look in her suddenly wide eyes.

"Aha!" Victoire cackled triumphantly, leaping back onto the bed. "A co-worker, ey? Very naughty. Now, let's think… Would this someone be slightly on the short side, perhaps? And maybe a little too fond of shiny, gold objects?"

Dominique blinked. "Are you asking me if I went out with a goblin?"

Victoire shrugged, innocently. "How would I know what sort of thing you're into?"

"Go away, Victoire. Now." she tried to make her voice sound as menacing as she possibly could. Unfortunately, her sister was too busy revelling in her discomfort to notice.

"This is brilliant!" Victoire clapped her hands together. "All joking aside though, which eligible young man could it be, I wonder? There's that somebody-Macmillan that works in accounts, or Gabriel Urquhart's really rather yummy. I mean there's Scorpius, of course, but that's ridiculous-," she stopped herself. Dominique had suddenly gone very very still beneath her quilt. Victoire frowned. "- Ridiculous… because he's Scorpius. Rosie's Scorpius. Rose's ex-boyfriend, Scorpius."

"Please don't call him that," Dominique's tiny muffled voice came back.

With a gasp, Victoire yanked back the duvet and stared at her sister with wide, astonished eyes. Dominique blinked up at her, guiltily.

"Merlin's bollocks, Dominique! Have you got a death wish?!"

"What- What do you mean?" she scrambled to sit upright, her big toe now poking through a hole in her tights.

"Because Rose is going to murder you the second she hears about this!"

Dominique flinched, but didn't seem entirely surprised at this suggestion. Her blush was starting to creep down her neck. "I don't see what the issue is," she lied, unconvincingly. "They've not been together for years. And she broke things off with him, remember?"

The strange spluttering sounds that were now coming from Victoire made Dominique momentarily concerned that she might be choking on her own tongue. "Rose isn't going to care about all that! All she'll care about is that you're dating and -," Victoire gestured at her messy hair, her smeared make-up and grimaced, "- and having relations with Scorpius! You're not supposed to do that sort of thing with your cousin's ex-boyfriend. It's just a rule!"

"Well, who writes these stupid rules anyway?" Dominique swung herself out of bed and up to her full height with an audible huff, tossing her rat's nest of curls over her shoulder and starting to pace the length of her bedroom. "Why should it matter who anyone's dated in the past? Especially if that someone was horrid to them and left them for some second rate Quidditch player that no-one's ever heard of!"

Slightly startled by this sudden change in volume, Victoire watched her sister stomp across the carpet, arms swinging dramatically, and reminding her very much of the time their parents had told a six year old Dominique that she wouldn't be getting a pet Thestral for her birthday.

"And why should that mean that you just become someone's ex for the rest of your life?" Dominique continued, gesticulating wildly. "And that you're not allowed to get to know the nice, funny, if slightly clumsy girl at work – who may or may not happen to be your ex-girlfriend's cousin – and find that you actually have a lot in common? And that you actually really like each other, as more than just friends. Why does that have to be a rule?!"

"Dominique!" Victoire jumped in the moment her sister stopped for breath. "Get into bed!"

"What?!" Dominique scowled at her. "Why?"

"Because you look like you're about to be sick."

Dominique, who was suddenly – and rather queasily reminded of her blinding hangover, allowed Victoire to find her some more suitable pyjamas and usher her back beneath the covers. A few minutes later, when Victoire returned from the kitchen with one sickly looking Pepper Up potion and a frothy cappuccino, Dominique tentatively grabbed her hand.

"Are you going to tell on me? On us?"

Victoire frowned in confusion. "Tell on you?"

She cleared her throat. "Tell Rosie about Scorpius and me?"

"Well, of course I'm not!" Victoire scoffed, pulling the covers up over Dominique's shoulders and squeezing onto the bed beside her.

"Really?" Dominique asked, only mildly incredulous. She'd thought that if Victoire, with her notorious flair for gossip, were to find out then it would be nothing short of the next morning's Daily Prophet headlines.

"Really!" she laughed. "Why on Earth would I tell? We're teammates, you and me! And Louis, of course, if he ever gets bored of trying to 'find himself' on a beach somewhere and come home." Both girls snorted in amusement. "Besides," Victoire added with a smirk and a sip of her coffee, "I reckon it's about time that Rose 'Head-Girl of the Whole Entire Universe' Weasley had something not go her own way for once, don't you?"

Dominique couldn't hold back her first true grin of the morning, though it was quickly replaced by a grimace and a splutter as she took a sip of Victoire's homemade hangover brew.

"Do you really like him, then?" Victoire muttered after a quiet moment, letting her head flop and rest against her sister's.

Dominique blushed. "I think I really do."

"And you don't think you're a bit too… blonde together?" A not-so-gentle elbow in the ribs told her that this was not in fact a concern they shared. "Well, one thing's for sure," Victoire grinned, "Sunday lunches at The Burrow are about to get a lot more interesting."