"Why am I five years old?!"

Bill Weasley frowned as his youngest brother yelled the question. Again. For the fifth time in twenty minutes. He focused on the rather deceptive item in his hand. "This bread is stale."

"That's all you're going to say?!"

Bill swallowed the bite of bread with little difficulty. It's not like they all hadn't had worse bread. It hadn't looked stale but it tasted like it had lain there more than a few days. "Well, it could mean there might not be a town near."

Wizarding houses can be built in the most remote of places, seeing as acquiring supplies would be just an apparation or a portkey away. But the old man – Grandfather, his mind supplied involuntarily – didn't feel like a wizard. Some of the man's thoughts had entwined with his own as he dragged their souls into his orbit desperately – what little he had gleaned of this world sounded like half a nightmare.

"Should we go and check? Explore a bit?" Charlie stretched his arms about his head restlessly.

It looked like his companions hadn't been privy to their elderly savior's mind during the...transition.

Bill shook his head. "I want to know more about Grimm first before we venture out of here."

"Grimm?" Multiple eyes focused on him.

His lips stretched wryly. "It appears this world is beset by soulless monsters. Grandfather -" he stopped, the title having passed his lips unconsciously. The others shifted uneasily, letting him know that they had the same problem. Damned insistent old man. "He was apparently one of the hunters that had the job of killing them. A protector."

It was Harry's lips that twisted a trifle bitterly, an expression so wrong in the soft face of a young child. "I suppose he wants us to continue in his footsteps?"

"There was a definite nudge in that direction, yes." Bill sighed. "But that is not what he asked. He wants the family to continue at least three generations after us."

"That's it?" Fred looked surprised. Bill still couldn't help but be amused by the fox ears twitching atop his brothers' heads. George smirked and flicked his second set of ears deliberately, tauntingly. Charlie's fingers moved toward them almost immediately. George squawked and batted the scratching fingers away.

Bill smiled despite himself. "He was the last of his family. No doubt it was one of his biggest regrets."

Harry nodded and relaxed a little. "So what do we do now?"

"We survive. We live. There is nothing else asked of us in this world."

And that was the kindest thing that Grandfather did for them.


Their first act in a new world was a funeral.

Bill felt it was a fitting bookend to their last life. They had all died in battle and had not the comfort of a goodbye. They could only offer up hopes for the living and well wishes to the dead.

Grandfather had given their restless souls a chance to live again. For that, Bill mused, giving the old man the title of Grandfather and making sure his name lived for a few more generations was a small price to pay.

"We should bury him first." Fleur had a sympathetic admiration touching her blue eyes. "A man whose wish was powerful enough to reach beyond death should have the respect of a fitting funeral, no?"

They had come to be in a rose garden, a garden filled with the dead of Grandfather's blood. Their bodies were freely offered by the hopeful dead, flesh and bone and blood knitted together from the essence of the dead under them. Bill had an idea of the procedure and it was just his relief that they were not inhabiting actual corpses.

Upon their wakening, they had only the strength to wrap the old man's corpse in respectful white before they all succumbed to exhaustion, lying down carelessly in the unblooming garden. There was little energy for anything else.

They awoke in the chill of a breaking dawn and it seemed, once more, a fitting thing to start a funeral as the night waned and the day woke.

Bill flexed his fingers in front of his eyes, noting that they weren't so different from what his hands looked like from when he graduated Hogwarts.

Younger than his old body. Years younger. It was probably too much to give eleven people fully-grown bodies, even with the dead - the ancestors - giving the life of the soil on where they lay. Bill looked around. The carefully planted roses decayed on the graves. He would have to replace the roses or coax them back into green vibrancy.

He took a smooth rock and placed it on the fresh soil of the new grave at the foot of the ancient rose tree that curled around a ruin – the last of ten other similar rocks making the cairn that marked the spot where the last of a family of warriors lay.

A family whose legacy now rested on their shoulders.


Bill glanced up, feeling a measured gaze on him. He met the eyes of his wife and his lips curved. It is somehow adorable to see that seriously assessing look on a pre-adolescently childish face. "You're cute as a kid."

Her eyes narrowed at his teasing. "And you're untidily scrawny as a teen-ager," she retorted.

He laughed with slight hysterics and her gaze softened. "This is a mess, isn't it?" he asked.

"Only if it has to be."

He bent and dropped a kiss on her temple fondly. She lifted up on her toes and pressed her lips to his cheek.

He smiled. Then a thought came to him and he looked down on her sternly. "Nothing happens until you're seventeen."

She reddened. "Dieu, what brought this on?"

"Really, love? You're the one asking that?"

The color on her cheeks darkened but she was undaunted. "Veela become active at fifteen." She crossed her arms. "Why should I wait longer than that?"

"You said you needed time to get used to your heritage after it came to the fore. Also, I want to court you properly."

She looked pleased, though she said, "My being Veela may have been changed in this world."

He ran a hand through his hair, the roots now black as night but with red flowing from half the length to the tips. "We may have been changed but possibly not that much. A lot of the courtship dances can't be conducted until both partners are of age. Consider it a precaution."

"That is...true."

He tugged at her blonde hair teasingly, whose tips were tinged the red-orange of a flickering flame. She had kept her eyes though, that summer sky blue he loved. "Don't look so down about this, it's really disturbing on the face of a ten-year old."

She pouted at him, then her face became contemplative. "Nine, I think."

"You know your age?"

"Vaguely, but not quite ten, I believe."

"That would make me sixteen." He had been de-aged ten years.

"What's this brother? Snatching babes out of the cradle? For shame, for shame."

"Shut it, toddler."

Fred gasped. "The hormones have addled your wit, oh elder brother. Toddler? By the hair on my gorgeously foxy ears, are we even related?"

"Dear elder sister, are you sure you want this fop?" George widened his eyes at Fleur, his fox ears twitching adorably.

Fleur recovered from the interruption and started threatening them in her native tongue. The twins laughed and still teasing, started backing away.

"Get back 'ere!"

"Why?" called George. "I wanna live!"

Bill watched them run around the garden that held the gravestones of Grandfather's lost family, dodging the rose bushes that marked the graves, and could not stop a smile. They may be all grown up mentally but it made him happy to see them acting their physical age. He wanted them happy in this new life and he would do everything to ensure it. He was the eldest, after all.

There were a lot of things that were gnawing away at the back of his mind, things that should be done, plans vaguely coalescing. But at this moment, he could believe that everything would be alright.

He blinked as a thought crossed his mind. If he was sixteen, it would make Ron six instead of five. He glanced at the adorably sullen faces of the four youngest pre-adolescents. Well, he wasn't telling them that right now, he cackled inwardly with the glee of the older brother well aware of the vast gulf between six and five in the mind of a child.


Arthur Weasley was not the firstborn son. He was not even third-borne. But Bill Weasley was the eldest grandson to a woman steeped in the lore of a family that, when everything was measured and done, had clawed and spat its way to the very edge of survival before it gave in with an insane screech and a mad laugh.

They did not have their names, not outside the mountain. What deals Grandfather made with the shades in the place of Between had given them their faces but not their bodies. But they were Family. It was all the consolation Bill had at this moment. They were Family and in this world, they were alive.

"Family is not in name," he said, carving the words into the reality they were in. "It is in heart and soul. We are still family and we are still together. This is enough."

Because Grandfather had torn away a part of them and patched it over with his dying hopes and dreams.

"Be polite, be kind. See and observe. Play to their conclusions, don't give anything away. Be true. Lie only if you must." He studied the others. They were looking back intently, trusting in his words. "Alright. Let's go see what this world has to offer, shall we?"


AN: Another HP crossover. My RWBY fic wasn't taking off (had been making notes for nearly two years) so I decided to make a crossover, haha.