Written for QLFC. Hate it a bit, tbh. Had to have Morsmordre and fluffiness.
"I'm sorry to call you in like this, Potter, but it's the third time this week and I really have no idea how to handle him."
The brutal honesty of one of the people Harry Potter respected the most in the world hit Harry like the Knight Bus. Three times this week? What the hell did Teddy need in the Restricted Section so badly that he'd felt the need to sneak in three times in seven days?
"Hey, Ted," said Harry, greeting the sullen boy with friendly wave. "So, interested in Dark Magic?"
Teddy blinked at him. It was possibly because Harry had called him Ted. Harry did not, as a rule, call him Ted.
Harry leaned over the Headmaster's desk (McGonagall had left to get herself a stiff drink) and grinned at his godson. Teddy looked back at him with a mildly terrified expression.
"How about I teach you something?" suggested Harry.
"Teach me…dark magic?"
"Sure."
"You probably can't teach me what I want to know," said Teddy.
"No," said Harry. "Probably not."
"Oh."
"What exactly is it that you want?"
"To resurrect people."
Harry refused to let that hurt his heart in the way that it wanted to. His smile stayed on and he said cheerily, "What if I teach you how to make the Dark Mark?"
"Why would I ever need to know that?"
"I don't know. Promise not to use it?"
Two weeks later, Harry and Teddy were meeting in Hogsmeade, as they had decided to do every fortnight. Morsmordre wasn't a particularly difficult spell for an adult, but it often could be for a third year. Teddy's curious eyes met Harry's the first night as Harry set up the area to practice in an open field.
"No pointing at the sky," Harry warned. "Just in front of you. We can't set off a real Dark Mark. We don't want people to freak out."
"But why are you…"
"No questions, Ted, it has to be done."
And so they began to practice. Harry showed Teddy how to hold the wand, how to aim it, how to pronounce the word. Teddy did it all with an air of confusion.
"How do you even know this dumb spell?" asked Teddy, throwing down his wand in a fit of anger after pronouncing Morsmordre "Mors-morder" for the third time in a row.
"I'm an Auror," answered Harry promptly. "We have to know these things."
"You have to learn Death Eater spells? Are you learning how to be a bad guy or something?"
"Yeah," said Harry. "You have to know how to be a bad guy to take the bad guys down, see?"
Teddy thought about it. "Yeah, makes sense," he said gruffly, picking his wand up from where he'd thrown it on the grass.
Eventually the kid was pronouncing it right. After that it was the getting the hand movement right. It wasn't just pointing at the sky (or, as in this case, an innocent patch of grass), but a slight twirl of the wrist. After several weeks of lessons Harry began to wonder if the damn kid was intentionally getting it wrong.
"Ted," said Harry, who was honestly quite planning on going back to Teddy once this whole debacle was over. "You okay over there?"
Teddy immediately flopped over onto the brownish, slightly snow-crisped grass and began to roll around in apparent misery. Harry watched with mild amusement from above.
"I don't want to learn how to make a giant skull face," said Teddy finally, slightly muffled as he spat grass and dirt out of his mouth. His nose as quite red from the cold. Harry sort of wanted to rub it to make it warm, but the kid was thirteen. He probably wanted to pretend he had some sort of dignity.
"And what was it you wanted again?"
"Mhhhmhhmh."
"Oh, come on, now you're practically just stuffing it in your face."
"Mmmmphhh!"
"Ted."
"Resurrecting people."
"A noble goal, kid, but it can't be done," said Harry honestly. "I'd rather teach you magic like this than have us waste time looking for the impossible."
"Would you do it if you could?"
Harry shrugged. "If it was a true resurrection, not just a…sort of stone that brings people back just to give you a shadow of the person they are, maybe. Maybe not though. We don't know how all that stuff works, not even us wizards."
"Oh," said Teddy. "Okay."
"Giant skull face now?" said Harry."
"Yes," said Teddy. "Giant skull face."
After that, Teddy learned much more quickly. By the end of that lesson he was doing the hand movement correctly. By the end of the next one he was no longer shooting green smoke at the shrubbery. Three more and he'd shot a fully formed Dark Mark into the sky, making Harry wince, Teddy laugh with glee, and the residents of Hogsmeade needing rather a lot of reassurance that the Voldemort was not starting The Third Wizarding War.
Harry brought Teddy to the Hog's Head after he completed it, treating him to a butterbeer (and himself, this kid took a ton out of him).
"I didn't really mean it, I guess," said Teddy out of the blue, presumably talking about sneaking into the Restricted Section. "I just wanted to…explore the possibility."
"Yeah, I understand," replied Harry, thinking about Dumbledore's socks and the Mirror of Erised. "Life can be rough sometimes."
"Tell me about it," said the thirteen year old heavily. "I'm glad I'm almost an adult. Then it won't all be so hard."
Harry managed not to snort his butterbeer out his nose. "Uh, yeah. Wouldn't count on that so much, Teddy."
Teddy's eyes lit up. "You called me Teddy! Awesome!"
"Do you really hate Ted so much?"
"It was freaking weird. Never do it again."
"Can do, buckaroo."
"No. Just-just don't."
Harry laughed and Teddy winced and they drank their butterbeer. It was good.