Disclaimer: As always I own nothing but the original characters and the situations I put them all into. Everything else belongs to somebody else and that's just the way it's gotta be. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.

Monster Within

Nobody that night failed to notice that something was very wrong with Teddy. Usually the happy go lucky, in the middle of things sort, the eighteen year old boy stood off in a corner, his arms around him like he was trying to restrain himself from self implosion. Everything about him was dark too, from his pants, t-shirt, hair and eyes. All were black and foreboding. Several members of his family had tried to engage him in the fun but he seemed distracted and reluctant to do anything. He'd pretty much wished his grandfather a happy birthday earlier and then retreated into himself and the room's corners.

It also became painfully obvious as the night progressed that Teddy was staying as far away from Victoire as was humanly possible. To the astonishment of the family he'd actually apparated a couple times just to put himself on the other side of the room from her. The bewildered hurt on her face spoke to her being unaware of what she might have done.

As Veelas weren't known for their patience or suffering in silence no one was surprised when after a couple of hours of this Victoire had had enough. With a determined gleam in her eye Victoire zeroed in on the man like a targeted missile, determined to let nothing keep her from finding out what the hell was going on. She didn't expect her Uncle Harry to get in the way.

"Don't go near him." Harry said softly, deliberately lowering his voice for her ears only. "You haven't done anything wrong, but I need you to give him his space right now. Please."

"Why?" She demanded to know, crossing her arms in front of her stubbornly. Most people wouldn't have been able to look so dangerous in a pink tank top but she pulled it off somehow as she glared up at him.

"Because you don't want to ruin your Grandfather's birthday."

Her eyes now conflicted Victoire looked up at her uncle beseechingly. "But why is he doing this? He has been doing this since after his birthday, this avoiding me for a couple days every month. Why will he not explain? We are family."

"He doesn't want you to know. Just know that you aren't to blame and he's doing this because you are family. To…he thinks it's for your own good."

"And if I do not think so?"

"Talk to him in a couple days about it then."

"Fine." Whirling on her heels, her silvery hair flying out behind her, Victoire deliberately stomped over to the spot farthest away from the man who was supposed to be one of her closest friends and confidants.

Now there were two teenage bombs waiting to explode in corners.

Seeing the affect he was having Teddy would have rubbed his hands over his face in frustration if that were possible. But it wasn't, since he needed to keep his arms locked down and close to his body. He hadn't wanted to come, had known it would be like this, but Grandma Weasley had been so excited about this surprise party for Grandpa Weasley that he hadn't had the heart to not show up. And now he was ruining things for everyone.

Muffling a curse Teddy did his best to breathe only through his mouth as he made his way over to the only grandfather he'd ever known. Crouching down as the older man was sitting in his favorite chair Teddy did his best to keep his tone controlled and even. "I'm sorry, Grandpa. I'm ruining this for everyone. I'm going to go, I'm really, really sorry."

Reaching out a hand Arthur set it on Teddy's shoulder and looked deep into his oldest grandson's eyes. The look in those golden brown eyes reminded him of Remus's a couple days before a full moon. Just a hint of the barely leashed animal within. Something was stirred up in the boy and it was obvious being at the party was making it worse. Squeezing Teddy's shoulder Arthur smiled at him. "You've ruined nothing. Thanks for coming."

"Thanks." Love in his eyes Teddy reached up to lay his hand on top of his grandfather's for a moment before rising, trusting his grandfather to pass on the word that he'd had to go. Weaving his way through the crowd he apparated as soon as he stepped into the kitchen.

)

As soon as the people around her had lost interest in watching her Victoire made her own way to the kitchen, apparting as soon as she was out of sight of the others. She would be back before she was missed. With Teddy.

She knew where to go of course, no one knew him better than she did. Or had up until his last bloody birthday. But too much could not have changed, which was why she knew to go looking for him in the tree house.

The tree house was a short walk from the Tonks house and it had been built by her Uncle Harry and Teddy when he was seven. It was a simple and small wooden structure, but really well built, sitting comfortably among the apple tree's branches. You could even lean out one of the windows and grab yourself a snack when the apples were in season. She had spent many a day up there with Teddy and their cousins.

It was also his refugee, where he went to be alone. If the ladder to get up there was up than that was his signal that he didn't want company and wished to be left alone. Of course she'd often ignored this and simply climbed the tree, determined to get to him to cheer him up. She was going to ignore it now too.

But first she'd make sure he couldn't get away. Drawing out her wand Victoire hurriedly casted several complex and binding spells around the tree that would prevent Teddy from being able to apparate from it. If he wanted to get away from her he would have to physically move her. Once that was done Victoire showed her wand back into her jean pocket and apparated into the tree house. The spells allowed people in, just not out.

)

Lurching out of his seated position when Victoire suddenly appeared in front of him Teddy smacked his head on the roof and saw stars. Not enough though for him not to realize the danger they were both in.

Reading the confusion on his face Victoire smirked knowingly. "You cannot apparate out of here."

Paling Teddy's gaze turned to the nearest window, his intent to throw himself out of one of them after he downsized a little. Or it was until he snuck one last peek in her direction and saw that there were tears glimmering in her eyes. Uh oh. Tears. Victoire's tears. His mortal weakness.

Thank Merlin that her maman had taught her the trick to producing tears on command, Victoire thought as she saw the indecision enter Teddy's eyes. Not that his rejections of her didn't hurt, but they made her more mad than weepy. She just wasn't the weepy kind of girl. Real crying did nothing but wreck ones make up needlessly.

"Don't cry." Teddy pleaded helplessly, his fingers digging into his sides hard enough to leave massive bruises as he fought the need to go to her. "Please don't cry, Tori. You know how I can't stand to see you cry."

"Then tell me what is wrong." She commanded, wiping the crocodile tears from her eyes. "I will go and not cry if you tell me."

"We've been over this." He pointed out, turning to give her his back. He couldn't look at her, smelling her was bad enough. "And you know everything will be alright in a couple days." Until the next family get together that fell on the wrong day, he thought bitterly. And all the months of summer vacation after that.

"And then I will be at Hogwarts and I will not see you." She pointed out. "I will not see you until Christmas and then you will ignore me too. You always do the second last week of a month. Why do I not deserve to know why? What is so horrible that I cannot know? You do this to no one else, just me. I am your best friend, I do not deserve this."

No, she didn't. He knew she didn't. And she did deserve to know. Because really, she wasn't stupid, eventually she would figure it out. His godfather had even said as much. And if he told her she would stay away. If he told her she would stay away from him like the plague. She would be safe.

)

"Are you sure you want to know?" Teddy finally asked, still keeping his back to her. He hadn't been able to explain it to Harry without getting drunk first, and the idea of doing this sober was almost as scary as thinking about what he was capable of in his present situation. "You aren't going to want to know, I promise you. You're going to wish you'd never asked."

"Then it will be my own fault for asking, now won't it?" Was her belligerent response, not about to let him talk her out of getting some answers. He'd finally weakened enough to tell her, she should have used the tears long ago.

Taking a deep breath Teddy turned to face her. That way he could see how she was taking it and when she got it. If he was lucky she'd connect the dots without him having to go into too much detail.

"As you know there isn't a lot of information out there about children with a werewolf parent since they very rarely have children or broadcast the child's parentage for fear of prosecution. I've never even met someone like me, so when…when things got weird after…well a lot of what I'm going to tell you is what I've concluded, okay?"

"I understand."

"Okay. Well obviously this all started when I turned eighteen and the…werewolf genes came into affect. My senses, smell, touch, taste etc were always better than most, but after my eighteenth everything went wild. Suddenly I could hear conversations going on a block away, pick out the individual ingredients in Gran's stew by taste, and my sense of smell…I went from being relatively normal to being able to distinguish people by scent alone. Individual scents, so that I could find you or anyone I knew in a crowded room blindfolded. I can track you guys like a bloodhound."

Eyebrows drawn together Victoire couldn't see how this explained his behavior around her. She would never stop wanting to be around him just because of some werewolf tendencies. Look at her own papa, for Merlin's sake. He would know this, so why?

Reading her confusion Teddy forced himself to continue. "The smell thing took the most to get used to, and then I started to notice…the way the scent of girls would subtly changed, just the girls. A…a coppery undertone sometimes for instance, that I finally figured out meant…well…that the change in scent was for the same reason that there's a day every month when you skip class."

Cheeks reddening Victoire got exactly what he meant. Her first day was always her worst and she always refused to go to class unless she had to. But what did her period have to do with him avoiding her? Hers wasn't due for a while yet. "Go on." She finally said, since he seemed to be waiting for something.

Damn, the light still wasn't dawning. Time to put out a pointed clue. "Victoire…I avoid you every month for two days…and you skip a day of classes once every month…think of the correlation between the two."

The correlation? Her skipping day was a result of cramps and heavy bleeding, things he would not experience as a man. So what other…wait a minute. Eyes narrowing Victoire suddenly realized another way to look at things. The time between his desertions and the start of her periods...it had been about the same length every month since his weird behavior had begun. Almost as if his behavior was in sync with her…cycle. Mentally doing the math Victoire saw the pattern, but not the cause.

"You're starting to get it, aren't you?" Teddy asked softly, knowing her face well. She wasn't all the way there yet though. She was still in the room after all.

"I am missing something." Victoire agreed, this royally pissing her off now. To have the pieces of the puzzle before her and be unable to put them together was frustrating as hell. She could sense the answers were just out of her reach.

"I've always been more emotional during full moons, less able to control my impulses. People, particularly women, are in tune with the moon as well, just to a lesser extent. For the two days I'm away from you I'm even more…wild than I am during a full moon and I'm dangerous. To you. Just you. It's not something you've done; it's just the way it is. It's the monster inside me, as Dad called it." His godfather had told him about how'd when he'd been a sixth year he'd referred to his attraction to his Ginny as a monster inside him. Teddy had thought the title for it oddly fitting. He felt like a monster when his inner animal had him by the throat. Right now, it was all he could do not to pounce.

"And why just me?" It wasn't like she was the only girl who went through the period crap.

It figured that she wouldn't be content to just know most of it. But she needed to know the danger he posed to her. Or more specifically the type of danger.

"The female praying mantis eats the male after sex, as does the black widow often enough. Males of many animal species will fight to the death for the rights to a female and lions will kill off the cubs of the former pride leader so that his bloodline alone continues. In the animal world, in my world some would argue, survival and the continuation of the species are the two most important things. The instincts that drive us the hardest. And those that survive the best, Tori, are those with the best bloodlines. The strongest, smartest, most beautiful. Those with the traits most valued by the species are the ones who will be sought out to produce the next generation with. Regardless of the personal cost to either."

)

Staring at him Victoire could feel the veil fall from her eyes, finally seeing what he'd been trying to tell her. Why he had avoided telling her for so long. Why he avoided her period. They had been raised as family, as cousins. But they weren't related by blood. And while she had never thought or gotten the impression that Teddy saw her as a woman apparently she'd been mistaken. For two days out of every month he knew. The two days that represented the peak of her cycle, when she was the most fertile, the most likely to conceive.

"But I'm not even your type." She finally blurted out, her brain on overload. "There has to be some other explanation."

"Tori…if I didn't love you so much, if it wasn't so against my core nature, I'd have ripped your clothes off when you arrived and taken you on the floor whether you were agreeable or not. Hell, it would have already happened long before now, that first day I came down the steps and really smelled you for the first time. The way you smell right now…it's worse than a hundred caldrons full of Amortentia."

Watching her take a couple steps back from him hurt more than he could put into words. But he was getting used to the pain. Turning his back to make it easier on her Teddy stared at the wall papered with a faded Quidditch poster. "Don't worry about it, Tori. Just give me my space and everything will be as it always was in a day or so. Go back to the party now." It wouldn't ever be the same between them, but he preferred to lie to himself at the moment. It was safer for them both if he deluded himself as long as possible.

"How can this not change things?" She demanded to know, trying to reconcile all this in her head. She had never really thought of Teddy as a man except in the abstract sense. He had always been cousin and than friend first. Now she was seeing him as a real man for the first time, one who was possibly dangerous. She looked at him with new eyes, eyes that took in his superior height, his muscular build, his sharply featured face which had lost all its baby fat without her even realizing it.

Trust her to pick at it. Typical woman, Teddy thought with an agonizing smile. "If you don't want to be around me ever I understand. I just ask that you don't…don't tell anyone else okay? I'm not dangerous to them and I don't…can't…lose them too."

Chewing on her bottom lip Victoire's blue eyes fired up when the meaning of his words hit home. "You think I will just abandon you because of this? That I am so weak and flighty that I will not stand at your side? That we will not be friends and family anymore? I am part Veela and you yourself often say my temper is more destructive force than Fiendfyre. If you can put up with my temper than I can put up with your stupid hormones for a couple days."

And to drive her words home Victoire took the steps necessary to throw her arms around his waist, hugging herself to him.

Teddy would think later that he'd actually heard his control snap in that moment.