Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or any characters you recognise.

Thanks to my beta Choices HP.

Chapter 4: All Those Years Ago

It was a Weasley Christmas Eve, which would have been exciting and wonderful if it weren't for the facts that Grant had already been to sixteen of these, was wearing a pink sweater because little Jesse Potter had thrown it in the wash with his white one, and Grant was about to do something that he was very, extremely, unbearable, terribly, horribly, really-oh-truly-oh nervous about. Just a little bit, though.

"Dad, can I talk to you?"

Ted Lupin turned to him, a little bit surprised. Apparently Hope hadn't told his dad that he wanted to talk, after all. "Er…yeah. Yeah, of course."

His dad may have gotten twelve Outstanding NEWTs and the highest scores ever recorded by the Auror Department at the ministry, but that certainly had nothing to do with street smarts. "Er…you know…alone…?" Grant added, eyeing the huge group of people they were at the centre of.

"What? Oh. Right. Sorry." He allowed himself to be led away from the crowd by his son.

Grant went to the first solitary place he could think of, which was around the pond by the Burrow, under the weeping willow. In a different lifetime, he and Anastasia had snuck to this spot to eat all of the food they'd nicked from the kitchens that they weren't supposed to have.

"Tell me about the war. About Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. It was a command.

For a very long moment, Ted seemed to freeze. Then, he began. He made absolutely no introduction to the topic; he just jumped straight into the middle.

"We didn't see it coming. No one did. The world had been at peace since 1998, but obviously there had been something stirring under the surface because after that day a full-blown war broke out.

"I fancied myself a decent duelist. I was on top of my class in everything and every time I'd had to duel in a controlled setting, I'd come off on top, even when I dueled Hermione. But I'd never experienced anything like it before and we were hugely outnumbered. Harry was already taking on eight people at once before he came to save me. Before the fighting even started, two of my best mates had been shot down and I was already a bit shaken by that. Vee's aunt on her mum's side was the first to die in battle. Your mother and I…er…hadn't been together for around a year at the time, but I still rather liked her family and allowed myself to be more distracted by it than I should have. I was stupid. I was inexperienced, and I looked away from the people I was dueling…"

Teddy didn't even see the spell coming, but before he knew it, he had slammed into the ice so heavily that it cracked beneath him. He tried to pull himself up, but evidently the ice wasn't this only thing that cracked because he felt a sharp pain cut into his side as soon as he started to push himself off the ground. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't ignore it and collapsed back to the ground.

He was laying on his side, half in the snow, half on the ice, watching his assailants advance. There was nothing else for it. They knew he was still alive, but he wouldn't stay that way unless he could somehow find it in himself to get up. So, he reached out and grabbed his wand, forced himself up, and stood his ground. It was weird, but once he did this, he could hardly even feel the pain. And so it started all over.

He dodged, he parried, he tried to throw in a few spells against them. But there were five of them and only one of him, so all he could manage was to hold them back. He couldn't shake them off and he certainly couldn't keep this up forever. Then there was the matter of his mobility. The cracked ribs were making it considerably more difficult for him to dodge the onslaught. Finally, something else hit him. He had no idea what it was, but it made something inside his head seem to explode. His vision completely blacked out, but he had to still be conscious because he could fell his knees hit the ground and could hear someone run in front of him.

But he was in absolute agony. He didn't know how long he knelt there, trying to get whatever was in his head out, trying to be able to see again, but finally, it came back. His vision was blurry at first, but he could see a tall figure with messy black hair trying to fight off fourteen people. It was Harry, who, of course, would be there protecting Teddy because of what Ron called "acting the hero" and Hermione called his "saving-people-thing".

The man who had hit Teddy with the curse was lying on the ground, either unconscious or dead. The world was still swimming, his head aching dully, and his vision blurred, but he knew that time stopped for no man, so he grabbed his wand and, again, prepared to get back up and fight. This time, he was having a real struggle with it because his balance was off as an aftereffect of that last curse. It wasn't as though his balance was great in the first place.

But that changed completely in a matter of seconds. As great of a wizard as he was, Harry could not effectively fight fourteen people at once and a curse hit him. The curse hit him. He had survived it two times before, but, as Teddy watched him fall, he knew that he hadn't done it again.

Harry's body hadn't even hit the ground before Teddy was back on his feet, completely void of any pain and dueling with more strength and energy than he'd ever done before. He actually managed to defeat a couple of people. But Gabrielle and Harry weren't the only ones who had fallen and more people were coming at him than ever before. The rush of adrenaline and fury he'd experienced upon watching his godfather being murdered was wearing off, to be replaced by pain and sorrow. They had dueled their way to the cliff that Gabrielle had taken them here to see by the time someone took him down, too.

The man made a slashing motion with his wand and Teddy's insides quite literally tore apart. The last thing he remembered was falling backwards into nothingness.

When Ted had gotten to the part in his story where Harry died, his voice had cracked badly, but he continued on, sounding rather hoarse. By this point in the story, he had slid down the trunk of the willow into a sitting position and put his face in his hands. Though he wasn't crying, Grant could tell his father was on the verge of tears and that made him feel oddly helpless.

Ted took several stabilizing breaths before continuing in a voice so quiet it could easily have been mistaken for the sound of a breeze against the trees, "The healers said I was lucky. I had suffered severe internal and external trauma and I'd been lying there, buried in snow for nearly eight hours before some Muggles who'd gone up the mountain for a ski found me. I should have died. I would have died if some rocks and ice hadn't gotten in the way to slow my fall down the cliff. If my cells hadn't been able to rearrange themselves to stabilise my condition…if I hadn't been a Metamorphmagus.

"I wished I had died. I wished it could have been me instead of everyone else. Hell, I would have been happy if I'd managed to have one person live instead of me. But instead, I was the person who lived. I was the person who couldn't save anyone…my godfather—the closest thing I'd ever had to a parent—was dead because of my stupidity. And everyone else…Cayden, Jenn…you've probably never even heard of them but they were—were two of the first friends I made outside the Potter-Weasley family. And then Gabrielle, Ginny, Gran…

"Lucky my arse… "

His voice, already so soft, trailed off at the end so that it was difficult to tell when exactly he'd stopped talking.

The silence that followed was long and painful. Grant found himself at such a complete loss for words that, despite how much he had said already, how much pain he was obviously in after reliving the memory, Ted was the first to talk.

"Why?"

Grant thought that was a very good question. Why had they done that? Another question might have been who. Who had done it and why? Why? Why did everything happen to his family? Why had his father lost everything? Why had Grant lost his sister? Why?

It wasn't until he saw the look on his dad's face that Grant realised the question was not rhetorical. "Why what?"

"Why did you ask about this?" Ted asked, running a hand through his chocolate brown hair. Two things about this let Grant know that his father was still far out of his comfort zone. First was the fact that he was running his hand through his hair, which Grant hadn't seen him do since before Anastasia died. The other was his hair itself. It was several shades darker than usual but still a very soft colour. Although Grant had only seen his hair this colour a handful of times, he knew it meant his dad was depressed.

"Because I've been wondering about it for a long time." This wasn't a complete lie. He hadn't cared enough about it to ask until recently, but he'd at least been curious before.

"Then why wait so long to ask?"

"Why wait so long to talk? You've been telling me I should for ages, but it sure as hell seems to me that this is the first time you've done it and you've had ages longer to brood than I have."

Grant could have sworn that Ted almost laughed at that. "Grant, this is not the first time I talked about this. I've probably done it…Merlin…at least six times before now. Maybe more. Talking doesn't make it easier to relive what happened, it just makes it easier to survive when you aren't."

Grant stared at him for a long time before asking, "Yeah? Then who all have you told and why hadn't you told me?"

"The first person I told was Kingsley Shacklebolt, and that was kind of against my will. He came into my room at St. Mungo's the day after I woke up and asked me about it. The ministry had to know, and I was the only living person who would admit to being there, so I really didn't have a choice. After that, I told your mum…really, I kind of blew up at her about it, but…well…anyway, I've also told Grandma Molly and Grandpa Arthur, and each of the Potters separately. I don't think I've mentioned it once since the end of the war, which is why you haven't heard about it yet."

Grant looked out at the partially frozen lake. "I want to know everything, not just that. The war…you and Mum never talk about it…"

Ted leaned back against the tree and looked at the sky. It was starting to get dark. "Grant…" he said, his voice breaking slightly, "I…can't tell you everything. Not now. Not when…" His voice trailed off again and he ran his hand through his hair, staring out at the pond.

Grant groaned in frustration. He had thought he was getting somewhere, but it was quite obvious he wasn't going to get anything else out of his dad. "Thanks," he said, a bit more coldly than he'd intended, and got up, leaving his father sitting under the willow.

He was completely lost in thought when he returned to the Burrow. He'd found out a bit about his dad, sure, but the story really had brought about more questions than it had answered. The most obvious (and least important) of these were the things Ted had left out just so he could get done with the story faster. Where were they when it happened? Why was it just those people there? Really, his dad and his friends seemed out of place in that group.

Then, there were matters that Grant was quite certain he had dodged on purpose. At what point had he and Grant's mum split up and why? With a horrible lurch, he wondered if it could happen again. Who had killed Harry? An uncharacteristically dark look had crossed Ted's eyes when he mentioned it: angry, rather than sad as Grant would have expected. Did Ted know him?

After some time walking aimlessly in the backyard of the Burrow, Grant found himself standing just outside a huge snowball fight between all the Potter kids, most of the Weasleys and, oddly, some of their parents. Normally, he wouldn't join in with this kind of thing, but he thought maybe it would help clear his mind, so he leaned over, picked up some snow, packed it, and threw it at the back of Jesse Potter's head. Jesse's head lurched forward with the impact. He reached down, grabbed some snow, and turned to throw it back at his assailant. When he saw who it was, though, he froze, looking as though he thought the world had gone mad.

As he packed together another snowball, Grant thought that just maybe it had.