A/N: I'm back! So sorry this took forever! And it doesn't even have any letters in it. But I think it was a necessary chapter and I hope you find it interesting. Unfortunately updates will be a bit spread out. Hopefully not much longer than this, but I've got Scholarships to worry about. The last due date is March 15, so after that I should have more time to write. Thank you guys SO much for sticking with me. This story has gotten incredible feedback, and I want you all to know how grateful I am for that!

"Teddy!"

The chorus of excited voices broke out the moment Teddy appeared on the stairs, but he paid no attention.

"What've you been doing?" James asked at once, bounding over to him.

Teddy didn't even look at him. His elbow accidentally caught James in the ear as he lurched for the door into the kitchen, and James let out an indignant cry of pain. But he was barely keeping it together. He couldn't look back at James, at the rest watching from the sitting room, at the children Harry had been sure would never exist. His vision was blurring again.

The door swung open before Teddy reached it.

"What's going – Teddy? What's wrong?" Hermione's voice was instantly concerned as she took in his expression.

Teddy clutched the heap of letters against his chest and tried to explain, but all that came out was a strangled sort of grunt. Hermione put an arm around his shoulders and led him into the kitchen, now looking alarmed. James was right on her heals, the others clustering in the doorway, peering nervously at Teddy. They had hardly ever seen him notbeing cool and collected and light-hearted.

He dumped the letters onto the table, breathing hard and fast and trying to find a way to explain.

"I – I found them upstairs," he finally got out as Hermione leaned over to examine the yellowing parchment, frowning.

"Hey, this one's for Dudley!" James said suddenly, snatching a letter off the table. "How come you've got a letter to Dudley upstairs?"

Teddy roughly tugged the envelope out of James's hands. "Go outside or something," he said shortly. A whine of dread had begun in his head at the idea of James, who was only ten, discovering what this was.

James looked at him reproachfully. Teddy was never brusque with him. To show his defiance, James picked up a whole stack of letters and began to thumb through them.

"I mean it, James. Get out of here," Teddy said angrily, pulling those letters away from him, too. Something fluttered loose and he shot out a hand to grab it, realizing that it was the only way he would be able to explain what he had found. "This was on top."

He turned to Hermione and showed her the scrap of parchment with in case scribbled on it. Teddy saw the moment Hermione understood. She went white. Whiter than he'd ever seen someone still standing. She took the parchment carefully from him, as though she expected it to crumble to ash in her fingers, and looked from those words in Harry's cramped writing to the names, the letters already unfolded.

"Children, back into the sitting room," she instructed faintly.

They just stared at her. James was chewing his lip.

"Mummy, what's wrong?" Rose asked in a high-pitched little voice.

Hermione took James firmly by the shoulders and steered him out of the kitchen. "Go on," was all she said to them, closing the door firmly. Then she waved her wand at the door, murmuring "Muffliato."

There was an audible groan from the other side as footsteps shuffled away.

Hermione sank into a chair and stared down at the pieces of parchment covered in Harry's scrawl as though forcing herself to look at some gruesome sight.

"Where did you find these?"

"In an old rucksack in the attic," Teddy answered in barely more than a whisper. "I know I shouldn't have, but I saw the one for my dad and I figured he was never going to read it anyway and – I just had to know. But – but I don't understand! Harry says he left my mum when she was pregnant with me! No one's ever said anything about that! He says that Ron left you two, that something awful happened to Luna Scamander! I –"

He broke off. Hermione had put her head in her hands. He thought she might be shaking. He was trembling uncontrollably.

"Teddy," she finally said, looking up at him. "Sit down."

He gaped at her. Sit down? He wanted – needed – answers now, and all she said was 'sit down'?

"Please," she implored when he did not move. "I – it's a long story and not one I ever thought I'd be the one telling you. Harry would want to tell you himself, but I don't suppose you can wait for him to get back?"

Teddy dropped into a char beside her. She looked suddenly very tired and her eyes kept straying back to the pile of letters.

"That one's yours," he told her, pointing to a letter stuffed roughly back into its envelope. And then, unable to restrain himself, choked out, "What the bloody Hell really happened?"

Hermione didn't answer at once. She turned back to the mess of parchment and began sifting through it, never letting her eyes linger on a letter too long. At last, she found Harry's will and that seemed to confirm her assumptions. She let it flutter to the table before her and stared down at it for a moment or two. She blinked against the wetness gathering in her eyes, and Teddy saw the corner of her mouth jerk up when she read Harry's condition for her and Ron's portion of his money, but she did not read much beyond that. Instead she reached for the letter Teddy had pointed to.

It took her a long time to slip the parchment out and unfold it, taking care to smooth out the wrinkles. Teddy watched, scarcely breathing, as her eyes slide across the writing. Her hand flew up to her mouth, tears sparkled, ran down her cheeks. Her whole body shook. A choked laugh that sounded almost like a sob escaped her once or twice.

When she had finished, she tipped her head back, pressing the yellowed parchment to her chest. "I remember," she said so quietly it was nearly a whisper, and Teddy wasn't sure if she meant him to hear or if she just needed to hear the words allowed herself. "I remember how angry I was when I found him writing that first letter to me. Maybe it wasn't fair to get so upset, but I just couldn't stand the thought of another one of them leaving me…."

"He – he really didn't think he would live, did he?" Teddy asked, voice higher than usual.

"No," Hermione whispered, carefully setting the letter down. "I – I knew it at the time, too, but – I never let myself think it. Didn't let him think it if I could help it. It scared me. It all scared me so much."

"God," Teddy breathed. He leaned forward and buried his head in his arms.

He heard Hermione take a few steadying breaths beside him before she spoke again.

"Your dad was scared, too," she said, voice stronger now. He heard her chair legs scrape against the tiled floor, sensed her shift away from the table, probably focusing on him instead of the letters. "You have to understand what it was like for him just then. Most of the werewolves were sided with Voldemort. Bigotry was raging, both in the Ministry and the public. Your father was practically a fugitive and anyone associated with him was in danger, too. He couldn't bear the thought of having condemned your mother to that kind of existence, and when he found out about you –"

"Thought he'd beat it before he screwed up another life?" Teddy asked, surprised by the amount of bitterness in his muffled voice. "Leave Mum stuck with me and forget about his mistake?"

"Oh, Teddy," Hermione murmured. He felt her hand on his shoulder. "He loved you. And your mother. And somehow he thought he was protecting you –"

Teddy's head shot up. "Protecting us? It feels a lot more like he didn't give a damn!"

He knew that was harsh. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Teddy knew it wasn't true. He had seen the few pictures of his father and mother and himself, remembered that Harry hadn't believed for a second that Remus didn't care and told him as much in that letter, but that knowledge didn't soften the blow of rejection.

Hermione looked stung by his outburst. "Of course that isn't true," she told him, rubbing circles into his back as she had done when he was a little boy, upset over his frog dying or some other miniscule injustice. "He –" she sighed. "Teddy, your father was scared, just like the rest of us. I can't explain to you what was going through his head when he left, but he came back. And so did Ron. Luna was alright in the end, and Harry… Harry is still plenty alive and perfectly fine eighteen years later. That's what's important."

Teddy looked away from her earnest gaze, drew his legs up onto his chair, and wrapped his arms around his knees. "But what happened?" he asked tiredly. He was not done being angry, but he suddenly felt emotionally spent. Right now, all Teddy wanted was an explanation. That much he knew Hermione could give.

Hermione gave a strange, hollow sort of laugh, fingering a few locks of his turquoise hair that always stuck out around his ears. "Where do you want me to begin?"

Teddy leaned forward again to gather the opened letters into a pile in front of them, staring down at the information, fighting back the sick feeling of Harry's implied death.

"Luna," he said at last. "You said she's alright. What happened to her? Harry – he says it was his fault."

Hermione actually let out an exasperated breath, shaking her head. "He tries to take the blame for everything. I'll have to have a word with him about this…." She reached forward as though to take the letter to read, but changed her mind. "It was certainly not Harry's fault. Luna's father was printing things in his magazine that the Death Eaters didn't like. Supporting Harry and the Order, things like that. So, they took Luna."

"They took her?" Teddy gasped, horrified.

Hermione nodded solemnly. "It was the last year of the war, of course. She was in the same year as Ginny, sixth. They took her right off the Hogwarts express going home for the Christmas holidays. Kept her… kept her locked up for a few months…." She trailed off, lost in memory, Teddy was sure.

"What did they do to her?" he found himself whispering, even though he thought he didn't want to know.

"Starved her," Hermione murmured. She shook her head and Teddy got the feeling there was more to it than that, but he didn't ask. "We… found her after a few months, broke her out. She was alright. She is alright. But when we found out she had been taken, we had no idea. We hoped, told each other she would be fine, but…. I had nightmares about what might have happened to her…. Still do, sometimes."

This was the most unguarded anybody had ever been with Teddy about the war. People told him how brave his parents had been, how he could never understand how hard those times had been. They told him all kinds of lines because he was 'innocent', because they couldn't explain it to him, because they did not like to think about it themselves. They studied the statistics, the major points and the hows and whys in History of Magic, but books and lectures kept things black-and-white and at a distance. Hermione's voice, Harry's writing… it put it all in color.

There was a crack from the other side of the kitchen door. Both of them snapped their heads around. Ron's cheerful voice greeting the kids came from the sitting room.

"Teddy's crying," Lily's concerned trill rose above the others.

Reflexively, Teddy swiped at his cheeks, vaguely embarrassed that they had seen him like that.

"Why's that?" Ron asked.

Hermione got up and moved to the door.

"Dunno. He found some old letters upstairs and now they've locked us out of the kitchen," James said sulkily.

"Old letters?"

Hermione opened the door and stuck her head out.

"Ron? Would you come in here, please?" she asked, but there was no room for refusal.

Ron appeared in the half-open doorway, taking in Hermione's tearstained face with rising alarm.

"Hey, what's going on?"

"You didn't tell me he wrote them," she said quietly, pulling Ron into the room and shutting the door quickly behind him.

"What?" he asked, utterly perplexed.

She picked up a stack from the table and shoved it into his chest, and Teddy saw some kind of anger that he didn't understand but that Ron seemed to, in her face. His eyes had grown wide, and he looked down at the envelopes with dawning comprehension and something else – something akin to fear.

"Where did these come from?" he asked.

"Teddy found them rotting away in our attic," Hermione said furiously. She strode away from him to the other end of the kitchen before whirling again. "You had these all those months, knew what he was thinking of, and you didn't think to tell me? You didn't think it was important enough to mention what sort of mental state our best friend was in?"

"Well, could you blame him for thinking like that?" Ron demanded, throwing the letters back onto the table. "How many nights did you lie awake wondering how many more you had left? Thinking about what your last words to everybody would be?"

"I spent more nights imagining what my next words would be!" Hermione flung back shrilly. "You knew all along what Harry was thinking. You knew where he'd gone when we couldn't find him that night, didn't you? Before we even started looking! All those months you spent telling me things would be alright, and you had this sitting in your rucksack. Lying the whole time…."

"I didn't even find them until a few weeks before… before we got caught," Ron told her angrily, although he stumbled on the end of the sentence. "If he'd wanted you to know, he would have given them to you!"

They both seemed to have forgotten Teddy was there. He sat frozen in his chair, watching the argument with an open mouth. He had never seen Ron and Hermione fight like this. It was like some old anger had been awakened in them.

"Or maybe he was just expecting you to take off again and not be around the next time Voldemort caught up to us!" Hermione shouted. Ron flinched as though she had struck him, and she pounced, stepping forward with intensity blazing in her eyes. "I didn't believe he would go into the forest, even when he disappeared. Not in a million years did I think Harry would really do that to us. If I'd known about those letters, I wouldn't have taken my eyes off of him for a second! What if Dumbledore had been wrong? If the littlest thing had been off, your best friend would have died and it would have been your fault, because you were the only one that knew what he was going to do, and you didn't tell anyone!"

Ron opened his mouth furiously, but Teddy leapt to his feet, looking from one to the other. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "What do you mean 'what he was going to do'? You make it sound like Harry tried to kill himself or something!"

A transformation seemed to take place at his outburst. Ron and Hermione turned to look at him and suddenly the anger receded and the people he knew were back. But instead of answering, of assuring him he had jumped to conclusions and they would explain the whole thing, they merely exchanged a look.

Teddy swayed. "He did, didn't he? Bloody hell." He collapsed back into his chair, staring up at them and waiting for someone to pull him out of this icy sea he seemed to have fallen into.

"Not exactly," Ron said after a second. "Not like – like suicide or anything mental like that."

He looked around at Hermione for help. Slowly, she crossed the kitchen again and sat down beside Teddy. Ron took the seat next to her.

"It was the battle of Hogwarts," Hermione began heavily. "You – you've heard plenty about that night, enough to know that it was like a living nightmare. Things always seem the darkest before the dawn…. We were losing. The Death Eaters outnumbered us…. So many people had been killed already. We – the three of us – we knew how to kill Voldemort; we were the only ones who knew. And…."

She trailed off, but Ron picked up the story instead.

"V-voldemort gave Harry a way out. He made his voice carry over the whole castle, the grounds, the village. He accused Harry of letting everyone die for him while he hid. Then he said the fighting would stop for an hour. So – so we could collect our dead and –"

Teddy realized with a cold shock that his parents were among the dead collected. Hermione reached out for his cold fingers as she picked up the story again.

"He told Harry that if he gave himself up in that hour, the fighting would stop. No more people would have to be killed. I suppose I ought to have known what he was going to try to do then… the look on his face… but…"

"So," Teddy said slowly. His voice was still that high-pitched whisper. "He tried to sacrifice himself. For all of you."

Harry would do that. Teddy knew, saw it every time he looked at his godfather, how much Harry loved people. He would do anything for them. Anything. More than once, he had explained that to Teddy. When he was hurt at work, when Teddy couldn't understand why he kept risking his neck. It did not take great imagination to imagine Harry casting his life aside for the people he loved. But the thought that he had already tried to die planted a hard seed of sick fear inside him.

He thought about Harry now, up in Scotland somewhere. Would he do it again? It seemed like he got very close every time he left for work.

"There was more to it than that," Ron was saying. "I mean, I don't think he was stupid enough to think that we would really stop fighting if he died. But yeah, he tried to sacrifice himself for us."

"And why didn't you try to stop him?" Teddy asked shrilly.

Ron and Hermione exchanged another look, and Teddy thought he might have seen shame pass there.

"We lost track of him," Hermione admitted. "We came back to the castle – the Great Hall where… everyone else was."

Ron buried his face in his hands, the memories clearly catching up to him. Hermione gripped his arm tightly as she kept going.

"I thought he was with us, thought he came in with us, but – All of the casualties were in there. So many of them… so many we knew, and I guess he couldn't stand to look at them all. It took me longer than it should have to realize he wasn't there. There were three times that night when it felt like the world must have shuddered to a stop and bucked me off, spinning into space. That was one of them."

She fell silent, gazing off into space. Teddy was sure her thoughts were lost in time.

"But it didn't work," he said after a moment, clinging on to the solid fact that made everything better. "Someone stopped him, or something happened. He only tried to give himself up."

Ron nodded into his hands.

"So what kept him alive?" Teddy asked.

Ron finally sat up again, and he and Hermione looked at each other. Hermione bit her lip.

"That's… something you're going to have to ask Harry himself. I'm not sure that even we understand what happened in the forest that night."

Teddy was sure they knew, but whatever it was, it wasn't something they were going to tell him. He could accept that for now. There were other things he wanted to know.

But Ron had spotted the letter addressed to him, was already pulling it towards him.

"I've been wondering what this said for ages," he mumbled. "Guess I might as well read it now. Can't have Teddy knowing more about what Harry thinks of me than I do."

He gave a very weak chuckle as he unfolded the parchment. Hermione sifted absently through the other letters, looking only at the names and vaguely at the dates of the ones that were open, but Teddy watched Ron as he read silently through the letter. Ron didn't cry like Hermione. Once or twice he laughed, but it was not the usual loud, rolling way he laughed. It was almost like he didn't know what else to do but laugh or cry and didn't want to cry. Finally he pushed the letter away and passed a hand over his face.

"Nothing I didn't already know, but…" he mumbled, shaking his head.

"It takes you back, doesn't it?" Hermione asked in a hushed voice, and Ron nodded.

"Right back to that damn tent," he leaned forward, chuckling darkly again. "I dunno how he even managed to write. My fingers were practically frozen off by January. And I was gone a while before that…."

"Where were you?" Teddy asked sharply. Maybe it wasn't his place to be angry since he hadn't even been born, but he couldn't help the stab of betrayal he felt for Harry and Hermione. Ron was always there. It was just a fact of life. There must be some simple explanation, some mistake.

But the eyes Ron turned on him were guilty, and he looked at the tabletop rather than meet Teddy's gaze when he mumbled, "With Bill and Fleur."

"Why?"

Ron didn't seem to have an answer for that. He twisted the sleeve of his robes over his knuckles and kept his eyes down as though Teddy were the adult catching him in wrong-doing. Hermione laid a hand on his shoulder and answered instead.

"You just have to understand how dark everything seemed back then, Teddy," She said quietly. "People do things they aren't proud of when they get desperate. The three of us, we had to drop off the face of the earth, almost literally. Harry was obviously being hunted down by every Death Eater, every person they had imperiused, and every Ministry official and Snatcher out there.

"You know what Snatchers are, don't you?" she added, and when Teddy nodded, hurried on. "By then they were hunting down Muggle-borns too, so I had to be out of sight. And we had a mission. There were things we had to do, things Dumbledore had told Harry had to be done in order for Voldemort to be killed. We couldn't stay tucked away at the Burrow, we couldn't go back to school – Harry and I wouldn't have been able to go back regardless. The Death Eaters had taken over there. All we could do was pitch a tent in a different part of the country every night.

"It was September when we started camping out, and it only got colder after that. Half the time we didn't have any food. We couldn't contact anyone, didn't know if the rest of our friends and family were safe. They might all have been killed and we wouldn't be any the wiser. And on top of that, we had no idea what we were doing."

She laughed again, shaking her head. Teddy could almost see her sliding back through the decades to that tent, back to the war. She gripped his fingers even tighter.

"Dumbledore told Harry what had to be done to kill Voldeomrt, set him the task of doing it, but he hadn't told him how or where to go. Didn't give us any tools to do it. We were blundering around in the wilderness, freezing and starving and cut off from everybody with the lives of the whole wizarding world on us, and we had no idea what to do."

She paused, looking at Ron. It was a bleak picture, to be sure, but Harry and Hermione had toughed it out. Teddy didn't think it was any excuse for Ron to bail. Not when things were so dangerous as they were.

"And…" Hermione said hesitantly. "It didn't help that we were carrying something full of dark magic. We had to take turns keeping it safe, and it… preyed upon us in a way. It played on our fears and our weaknesses, made us think things… things we might have thought anyway, but it made them worse. Ron – he had the most to lose, the most to worry about –"

"The most weaknesses," Run muttered, speaking for the first time in Hermione's explanation.

"No," Hermione tried to protest, looking at him. But he merely nodded his head and said with conviction, "yes."

Then he turned to Teddy, looked right into his eyes, his face blazing with some sort of intensity. "Harry and I got into a fight. I said some awful things, he was ready to curse me into a jelly. We might have had it out right there if Hermione hadn't put up a shield charm. So then I walked out. We'd just heard some stuff about my family and it was my night to babysit that damn hor- er thing we were carrying around, and those aren't excuses, but that's why I left. Hermione tried to stop me, tried to come after me, but I was just… too far gone that night."

He ran his fingers along the grooves in the table, a brooding look on his face now, and took a moment to continue.

"And that's the funny thing about hiding out. You really can't find anyone. I knew almost the moment I left what a great moron I was being. I swear, I would have come straight back, but I got caught by a group of snatchers. By the time I managed to get away from those idiots, it was too late. Harry and Hermione had moved on. They could have been anywhere in the country, and even if I happened to wonder across them, I wouldn't even know it because the enchantments we used to hide made us pretty much invisible and silent to the rest of the world. It was really like we'd disappeared. No matter how much I wanted to get back, I couldn't have."

"But you did," Teddy reminded him. "Harry says you came back. How did you do that if it was impossible to find them?"

Ron sighed. "Yeah, I got lucky. Dumbledore figured I'd ditch them, so he left me something in his will that helped me find them. Course he didn't tell me that's what it did. It was just lucky I kept it on me all the time and figured out what to do with it."

He reached into his pocket and withdrew the little silver gadget he had carried with him for as long as Teddy had known him. It was a Deluminator, Teddy knew, that Dumbledore himself had made and passed on to Ron. He flicked it open and clicked it more out of reflex than anything, it seemed. The lamp above their heads went out.

Ron looked back over at Teddy earnestly. "It was the biggest mistake of my life, Ted. I've never regretted anything more. Can you believe that?"

Teddy nodded. "I just – I always thought – I dunno. I just had to know why."

"I thought I knew what went on back then pretty well, but… I had no idea. Still don't. My dad was gone and you left… Harry's talking like he's dead…." He laughed but it was in the humorless way Ron and Hermione had been laughing earlier. Laughing instead of crying. "I wasn't expecting to stumble across all of that in your attic."

"I should've given them back to Harry after the war," Ron said, looking over the other letters. "Don't even know why I kept that old rucksack. Not a lot of good memories attached to it. Maybe he'll finally burn all these and we can forget–"

But at that moment a flash of bright light shot into the room. Ron turned, snapping into Auror-mode as though he'd hit a switch. A bright red orb bobbed urgently up and down over the stove, and Teddy recognized it as one of the systems the Auror office used to communicate.

Ron's chair clattered to the floor as he leapt up, and both Teddy and Hermione's eyes snapped onto him. He'd gone almost gray.

"What's wrong?" Hermione asked, eyes wide.

"That means I'm temporary Head of the office," he croaked. "Something must have went wrong in Scotland."

A/N: Ooo, kind of cliffy, isn't it? Sorry! I really will try to update as soon as I can! I'm thinking two/three more chapters to go. I'm not sure if Teddy will read all the letters or how I'll deal with them now, but rest assured YOU will know what they all say by the end of this story.

Please review! I really love to know what you think and what your suggestions are!