Chapter 4:

An Accounting Error

After a week, Teddy was thoroughly sick of being asked why he'd cut his holiday short. His explanation seemed to amuse people he wasn't particularly close to - there was Teddy Lupin, barely of age, thinking himself indispensable in matters he had nothing to do with. Ultimately, he toned it down for them, saying he'd got ill on a bad jalapeño, and he left it at that.

Maddie seemed glad to have him back, and had arranged with her boss, Mr. Croaker, to let him assist her as long as he was here, which gave him something to fill his days, even if it was largely filing and doing Duplication charms. He resumed his travels to France to study with Père Alderman as well, and joined Frankie and Tinny's Muggles and Minions game on Friday nights.

Frankie pushed him for a cat story again. In a moment of inspiration, he went to James and asked for help with a plot. James immediately stopped moping about his late birthday and started to generate plot after plot. He didn't even complain about letting Teddy do the actual writing - "This is for a real book!" Between them over the next two weeks, they built up a short story about James's cat, Martian, accidentally losing a charm that had been concealed on his collar, and his adventures as he went on a quest to find it. Teddy was grateful for the time with James, whose flights of fancy were growing, rather than receding, as he entered adolescence.

They tested the story on Lily, who declared it simply horrible, and asked when they would finish the next one. After quite a lot of outlandish suggestions, they settled on a shared name of "Jim Wolf" for the credit. Frankie accepted it as soon as he got it, paid them a small advance, and made a handful of suggestions that both Teddy and James agreed were improvements. It entered the slow process of becoming a book and quickly left Teddy's mind, except when James brought it up.

The week before school started, the whole family (and sundry others) gathered at Bill and Fleur Weasley's home, Shell Cottage, for a picnic. Teddy had always been the oldest child in the family - Victoire Weasley, who was fifteen, was next - but the older he'd got, the more he'd become the youngest adult. George Weasley and Lee Jordan had treated him as such for years, introducing him to poker games (which he enjoyed) and pipes (which he emphatically did not) at their respective shops. Hermione had been next, talking to him about books and his extracurricular studies, and Ron had followed closely behind (now that he was Ruthless's mentor, he seemed almost a colleague). Minerva McGonagall didn't precisely treat anyone as a peer, but Teddy had noticed of late that she didn't address him terribly differently than she addressed Uncle Harry or, for that matter, Kingsley Shacklebolt.

This really ought to have made gatherings more inclusive, letting Teddy converse with nearly everyone on an even footing, but instead, he felt at home nowhere at all. He caught the edges of adult conversations, but had neither the experience nor the prior knowledge to join them, and the children's conversations were becoming alien to him. Victoire was someone he could generally talk to (except when she was wearing blue, which made her so beautiful that he nearly forgot they were all but related and she was quite irritating besides), but today, she was playing with the younger cousins, pushing them on the old tree swing on the sea cliff. He watched her for a while, enjoying the sunlight in her hair, but ultimately chided himself for this pointless activity and went inside to see if Fleur needed any help.

Instead, he found Uncle Harry and Bill sitting in the living room, looking over several scrolls.

"Teddy!" Bill called. "Come in."

Hesitantly, Teddy entered. "What is it?"

Uncle Harry put down the scroll he currently had in his hand and said, "Bill and I were talking about Borgin and Burke's - what you told me you overheard."

"Oh!" Teddy pulled up a chair. "Do you think it's... you know, part of the murder?"

"No idea," Uncle Harry said. "We still don't have any leads as to what the murder was about. But it's interesting in itself. Borgin told me as much, after the war, but we were busy, and no one particularly bothered with the shop, and it slipped my mind. When you brought it up again, I asked Bill. He knows quite a lot about cursed artifacts."

Bill nodded sideways, an expression that the family had learned to interpret as a smile (the horrible scars on his face, courtesy of Greyback, made normal expressions difficult). "It's helpful at Gringotts, and you should have seen some of the treasures I found back in my treasure-hunting days. Hexed up from every direction."

"So you could break them?" Teddy asked.

"If necessary," Bill said. "If I knew what they were. They could do a lot of damage in a populated area like that before I figured out the counter-curses, though. And of course, I'd have no legal right while an heir was present."

"Maurice and his dad would let you," Teddy said.

Uncle Harry frowned. "I'm not as sure of that as you are. The Burkes lost quite a lot this year in the shop's interest - "

"Mr. Burke said it almost killed Wendell."

"I'll leave that to Maurice to explain or not to you. It's not my place. But Mr. Burke's cousin, Veradisia, did die from a cursed object. I'm surprised that the Prophet hasn't picked that up. Rita's slipping in her old age."

Teddy bit his lip. "So, er... you said you don't know what the murder is about. So there's no - well, I'd heard - "

"There are theories coming from other departments," Uncle Harry said. "But a source I trust is skeptical of those theories, and therefore, so am I."

Teddy felt himself blanch. Was Uncle Harry ignoring the whole Department of Mysteries just because of something he'd said? "Er... I hope you're... er, not blocking anything out just because - "

"The source in question is a skeptic, and, at least as I understand it, just said to not narrow anything down. He's quite a brilliant source."

Bill gave a snort of laughter. "Harry, do you really think the entire wizarding world doesn't assume you've asked the Department of Mysteries for theories?"

Uncle Harry shrugged.

Teddy sighed. "Well, it turns out that I apparently didn't give you any useful information about the murder anyway."

"Mm." Uncle Harry cleaned his glasses. "Well, Teddy, welcome to a very large group of people who haven't come up with any useful information about that. And oddly, you weren't expected to." He smiled.

"I suppose not. I guess I did cut my trip short for no reason."

"Andromeda's been glad to have you back," Uncle Harry said.

"She keeps trying to push me out the door!"

"She feels guilty about it," Bill said.

Uncle Harry looked shrewdly at Teddy, then said, "You know how glad she is to have you. That's really why you came back, isn't it?"

"Well... yes. I knew Runcorn turned in Cresswell, and he was the one the Snatchers were chasing when they caught Granddad, and - "

" - and you knew she'd be reliving all of it again."

Teddy nodded. "She's doing really well, though. She doesn't need me, not really."

"Trust me, Teddy. She does."

Bill closed up a scroll with a flick of his wand and said, "On an entirely different subject, I opened the account you asked me to. One Jim Wolf now has a Gringotts vault. Just a little one."

"A fine, upstanding citizen," Uncle Harry said. "I always liked him."

"I'll have two keys made, one for each of... him. Did you want to put any of your other assets into that account, for, shall we say, diversification?"

"I don't know. I'll see what's left after I get started after school - I'll need a flat, and some work clothes..." Teddy stopped, noting the way Uncle Harry and Bill were looking at him. "What?"

Bill spoke slowly. "Teddy... did you even read the statement I gave you in April?"

"Yes, I've been meaning to ask you about that. I think I need another one. There's some kind of accounting error on this one."

The corners of Bill's mouth twitched. "What sort of error do you think there was?"

"Well," Teddy started, noticing that both men were looking irritatingly amused. He ground his teeth. "I know there was a good amount in the Brimmann wreck, but it was nowhere near that much. I think it must have got... I don't know. Maybe something there duplicated, and someone counted it on a bad day, and - "

"The accounting is magical, and it utterly ignores Duplicates," Bill said.

"Well something's wrong with it. I don't - well, that's to say..." Teddy looked back and forth between them. "Did you read it? It's absurd!"

Uncle Harry laughed fondly, then said, "Teddy, there's no error. It's all yours."

Teddy tried to say something, but nothing came out. The amount of gold on the statement he'd seen in April had been staggering, numbers that he couldn't even wrap his mind around. He shook his head.

Bill waved his wand, and a rolled scroll appeared. "Here, I'll show you," he said. He moved closer to Teddy and unrolled it. "Here" - he pointed to a large sum that had appeared at the beginning of last summer - "is the gold from the Brimmann wreck. It's quite a good chunk, actually, especially once it starts earning interest."

"Interest...?"

"Gold makes gold," Bill said. "That's why there's so much from the rest. Your allowance has only been skimming the tiniest bit of the interest, and your grandmother has paid all of your school expenses from her own vault. And before you try to push any back, she's hardly destitute at the end of it, and I want you to try and imagine her face if you even suggested it."

Teddy blinked. "Right. Er... What is the rest?"

"Well, it's four things. The first is" - he pointed to a very large amount, but Uncle Harry held up his hand.

"Let's save that for last. I'll explain it."

Bill nodded. "All right. The second bit, here, that's from your Mum. When the Ministry changed hands, Kingsley saw to it that the Aurors who lost their lives fighting for the Order of the Phoenix got a full death benefit. She got hers, and as it turns out, she was also Mad-Eye Moody's heir. He didn't really have anyone closer. I don't think she even knew that, as his will wasn't found until after the war."

Teddy blinked at this number. "Blood money."

"No," Uncle Harry said. "It's something that we all have arranged, to make sure our families aren't left without support."

"Still..."

"The next bit," Bill said firmly, steering him away, "comes from your father."

"Dad didn't have any money!"

"Not while he was alive. But he sold Fred and George several Charms during the last year of his life - "

"I've been getting those royalties all along, it can't be that much - "

"You've been getting an allowance from them. But the original sales still stand, and George paid off the balance of what he owed, as well as the royalties for years. So that's from your dad."

Teddy could hear his own breath. If Dad had lived, he wouldn't have been poor anymore. It wasn't enough to be rich - it was the smallest of the numbers - but he wouldn't have had to wear patched robes and live in squalor, either.

"This most recent one," Bill said, "is one your grandmother discovered when she was going through old Ted's things. She changed it to wizard gold, but it was Muggle money at first. He was, shall we say, a very good guesser about the future. And he bought a lot of stock in companies that he - guessed - would do well."

Teddy didn't say anything to this. Using Divination for that sort of thing - which Granddad had obviously done - was frowned upon, but difficult to prove, and -

"He was well aware of what he was doing," Bill said. "And I helped him. It was to hide his assets. He wrote a Muggle will whilst on the run, and left all of his accounts to his daughter Nymphadora or her heirs. It never occurred to me that it had got quite that successful."

"Which brings us to the first deposit," Uncle Harry said. "That's your share of Sirius's gold. And your vault is actually his, that's why that was the first deposit and the others were just moved there."

"But he left his gold - and everything! - to you!"

Uncle Harry sighed. "Come for a walk. This isn't just about the gold."

"I'll help Fleur finish up," Bill said, and Vanished the scroll they'd been looking at. He went to the kitchen.

Uncle Harry led Teddy outside. They passed a vegetable patch where Laurel Shacklebolt and Lily Potter were building a tower of trellises, and a windswept hill where the youngest boys were having a race. They rounded a curve in the cliff, and Uncle Harry Conjured a pair of chairs for them, looking out over the sea.

Teddy sat down with some trepidation. The last time Uncle Harry had called him out for a walk to talk about the dead, they'd had a screaming row that had ended with some nasty name calling, and several months of quarantine at Hogwarts after Teddy had let out a plague in a fit of rage. "What?" he asked. "What is it?"

"It's something I argued with Andromeda about," Uncle Harry said. "She said you were comfortable enough as it was, and the Black gold was tainted. I think she's changed her mind about the family since, but the wound was still fresh then, and after I did this - she was a bit cool to me. We haven't really talked about it since."

"Why?" Teddy asked. He thought again about the number. "I'll give it back, really, obviously, I don't need it. It's... it's more than I can use, and James and Al and Lily - "

"Are also quite comfortable," Uncle Harry said. He shook his head. "It wasn't about what you'd need. It was never about that."

"What, then?"

Uncle Harry was quiet for a long time, then said, "I was an insane choice for godfather."

"What? No, you're - "

"I was seventeen. I doubt they were thinking of me as a guardian - you were left in Andromeda's care for a reason." He smiled faintly. "But they did choose me. I think your dad did it because I knocked him in the head with some basic facts."

"I know that story."

"Yes, you do. But I also know that, if Sirius had been alive, he'd have been the one doing that all along. It probably wouldn't have got as far as it did if Sirius had been there to laugh in your father's face about his insecurities. The more I found out about them, the more I realized - if Sirius had lived, he'd have been your godfather, just like he was mine. I don't doubt that at all. And he would have loved you, and seen to your needs as much as he could, just like he did for me."

"But he didn't know me."

"Which left me in the position of trying to guess what he would have done. And what I guessed was that he wouldn't have played favorites. So I split the inheritance. I had the house already - we needed it for the war, and I'd got to like it - and the things in the house. I guessed how much that was worth, then, figuring that into the inheritance, split the number I got. I took a bit of the gold, but most of it is yours. I started to tell you that when I used it to buy the Shrieking Shack - "

"You said that it was going to be mine by the time I came of age, not that it already was, and I thought you spent it on the house..."

"On the Shrieking Shack? That... well, it wasn't a terribly expensive property, and the taxes on the lot aren't very high. It didn't make much of a dent."

Teddy felt his face get hot. Not much of a dent. His parents had wept over that house, been unable to keep Gringotts - under the control of unforgiving Death Eaters - from seizing it, had even destroyed all the work they'd put into it so that the Death Eaters wouldn't benefit from it... and all along, it was just a drop in the bucket for someone else's fortune.

For Teddy's fortune.

"If Dad had had it then..."

"I had no idea how much was in there. And he wouldn't have taken it from me - or from Sirius - which is another reason I gave it to you when you were a year old, before you could protest." Uncle Harry looked out over the ocean. "They'd have found reasons to take the Shrieking Shack anyway. Within a few months, they made it illegal for werewolves to own property, except by special dispensation from the Ministry - which, at the time, was Voldemort."

"So you don't think Dad would have taken it, and you think I will."

"It wasn't about what Remus would have taken," Uncle Harry said. "It was my best guess at what Sirius would have wanted done with his estate."

"Were you right?"

"Hmm?"

"Did you ask the portrait?"

Uncle Harry blinked, then laughed. "I never even thought of it. I made the call a long time ago, and I didn't really think of it until you came of age."

"You didn't use the - ?" Teddy pointed to a round scar on his palm that had been cut there by the edges of the Resurrection Stone during his first year.

"No, Teddy, I didn't. I trusted my memory. Not that I wasn't sorely tempted."

"You?"

"Me. Why do you think I don't trust it?" He thought for a while. "What do you think? Do you think it's what Sirius would have done? You've spent time with him in your dreams, and in your dad's ring. What do you think?"

He thought about Sirius - not just the times he seemed to appear in Teddy's dreams, or about the portrait, or about Dad's memories, but about the Apparition that had appeared to him in the forest when Uncle Harry had - against his deepest instincts - allowed Teddy to use the Resurrection Stone. He'd stepped aside to let Teddy say goodbye to his parents, but last words he'd said were, "As the one of us without any of his own children, I'm just glad someone remembers me."

He nodded. "It's what he would have done. But it's so much. What do I do with it?"

"That's not up to me to answer, Teddy," Uncle Harry said. "But I believe that, when the time comes, you'll know."

Three days later, Teddy Apparated to France for his last meeting with Père Alderman before school. At first, the sessions had been more or less standard catechism lessons, but Teddy had mastered all of it easily, and at the moment, they were discussing the arguments among the mendicant orders. Alderman noticed Teddy squirming as they talked about living in poverty and depending on charity, and the entire conversation shifted to what he was meant to do with his gold - probably the most practical conversation he'd ever had with Alderman.

"You could make a gift of some of it," the priest said. "And I'm happy to pass along the information that, should you feel moved to do something about it, our steeple needs repairs."

"Done. Call Blondin."

"Thank you. But Teddy... hold onto most of it. Something like that held in reserve - I can't explain it, but I think there's a reason it's come to you. I think there may be a need for it someday."

"What if I want to become a Franciscan monk?"

Alderman snorted. "I think it's safe to say that you have no interest whatsoever in becoming any sort of monk, Teddy."

They talked briefly about the possibility of finishing Teddy's studies this summer - he would eventually be Confirmed, and there would be Confession and Communion - but ultimately, Teddy decided to put it off until after school was over. Alderman thought this a good idea, but asked Teddy to keep writing to him.

"So you can make sure I don't forget my catechism?"

"Because disappointingly few people want to talk to me about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

Teddy gathered his things and went home. Granny was out with Ellsworth Wintringham, so only his cat, Checkmate, was there to greet him. He scooped her up and let her lick his face for a while while he carried her into the parlor and lit the gas lamps with a flick of his wand.

"Wotcher, Teddy."

He grinned at the portrait that was propped on an easel in the corner, waiting to be packed for school. Granny had moved it for tea the other day - probably didn't want Lucius's commentary - but now she'd put it back in its summer location. "Hi, Mum," he said.

She stopped stirring the cauldron of Wolfsbane Potion that would never come to maturity and came forward to lean against the edge of the frame. "You've hardly been home."

"Sorry. I, er..."

She laughed. "It's all right. Young men have things to do. Please tell me they involve a girl."

"Sorry again. Visiting Alderman."

"Oh, well. Back to school in a few days, then we'll see. Unless you've patched things up with Ruth? I do like Ruth."

"I know, Mum. I do, too. But" - he sighed - "that part of it's over, I guess."

"What about that Jane girl? You were seeing her for a while, weren't you?"

"Is this what you'd have been like? Quizzing me on my girlfriends?"

"Does it bother you?"

Teddy thought about it. "No. I kind of like it. But I'll deny it to the world if you mention anything."

"So... who's next?"

"No idea. Where's Dad?"

"Grimmauld Place. He and Grayfur have been arguing about Hogwarts again. I'm sure he'd appreciate a good way out. Go ahead, give him a yell." She moved aside and covered her ears playfully.

"Dad!" Teddy called. "And Sirius... you, too."

Sirius appeared first, coming from what appeared, in the painting, to be Kreacher's cupboard. He made an exaggerated, house elf-like bow and said, "What does Master wish of me?"

"Shut up, Sirius," Mum said.

"If Mistress wishes," Sirius said, grinning, and sat down at the table.

Dad appeared a few seconds later from the stairwell. "Teddy? What is it?"

"It's, er... the gold. Sirius's gold."

Sirius rolled his eyes. "Harry asked me about that a couple of days ago. What are the two of you on about? He wanted to know if he'd done what I wanted with it."

"Well... did he?"

"No, Teddy, if I'd known you were coming, I'd have made sure you never got a Knut. I'd have taken everything else away from you while I was at it. Why, you've no business with your hands on any - "

"Come on, Padfoot," Teddy said. "It's a fair question."

"Of course it's what I would have done," Sirius said impatiently. "Really, Teddy. I left it all to Harry because I knew your dad would've shoved anything I left to him away anyway."

"Which brings us to you," Teddy said, looking at Dad. "How do you feel about it?"

"How am I to feel? It's yours, and I'm..." He pointed at a few paint smears in the background. "Well, I'm not actually here to feel anything."

Teddy frowned at him. "What do the lot of you want me to do with it?"

"Buy a herd of racing unicorns," Sirius suggested. "Then hire jockeys and race them in the Kentucky Derby. The roses would look smashing on a unicorn."

"What?"

"He means, do whatever you like," Mum translated.

"There's nothing you'd have done?"

"There might have been, but the gold isn't mine anymore. It's yours and Harry's. That's sort of the point of a will."

"What would you have done?"

"No idea."

"That's helpful."

"Leave it be, Teddy," Mum said. "It's sat quietly this long; it'll sit a bit longer."

"I know!" Sirius said. "And I mean it, I'd like it for me."

Teddy raised his eyebrows. The portraits didn't generally ask for things for themselves. "What is it?"

"Get one of those abstract paintings from the sixties, where everything is bright and swirling around. I want to see what would happen if I went into it."

Teddy laughed. "I'll see what I can find."

The front door opened, and Granny called, "Teddy? I saw the lights!"

"And think about those unicorns," Sirius said. "They'd be great."

"Unicorns?" Granny asked, coming into the room.

"Better not to ask," Mum said.

"Then I won't," Granny told her, and sat down, smiling stiffly. She hadn't adjusted very well to the portrait's presence, and her conversations with it were always stilted. Teddy tried to get the atmosphere back to the sort of relaxed one it had been before, but it was obvious that the conversation was over. He went to the kitchen with Granny, had a drink with her, and talked about the play she and Ellsworth had seen. (It was a Muggle musical in the West End, and she'd enjoyed it a great deal, but railed about how the wizarding world had fallen so far behind in the performing arts.)

Before going to bed, Teddy took out his crystal ball, an artifact he'd drawn out of the Daedalus Maze. It was something like a permanent Conjuring, according to Maddie, though, when pressed, she admitted to having no idea what it really was. The visions within the Maze had no substance, and there wasn't any way it should have produced a real artifact. But as far as Teddy could tell, it was just a standard crystal ball, albeit one to which he had a particularly strong affinity. He tapped it with his wand, wondering what it would show him. Nothing was clear, but he could see a dark shadow spreading inside of it, taking the shape of the body hung from a wire in over Knockturn Alley, then moving on, swirling into man-shapes on the street, then dissipating.

Teddy shook his head. He was starting to come around to Granddad's view of the subject of Divination (or at least what Granny said it had been): the most useless skill on Earth.

He left the crystal ball out, as it occasionally helped him focus his dreams, but nothing came to him that night except an image of Sirius, standing on the cliff at Shell Cottage and laughing while a herd of racing unicorns ran around him.

The next few days were spent packing, getting his school things together for what he tried to convince himself was the last time. The portrait would be the last thing into the trunk and the first out (he'd shrink it to a quarter of its size and wrap it in about half a dozen protective spells), and except for that, he was packed completely before Ruthless's eighteenth birthday on the thirty-first. She didn't have time for much of a party, as Ron had her interviewing prisoners at Azkaban for most of the day about who Runcorn's enemies were likely to have been, but they did manage to come up with a few things. He gave her a new Beater's bat, and she promptly made a holster for it. Sam Cresswell gave her an antique looking necklace, and they laughed about whether or not "this one" had a curse on it.

Teddy kissed her cheek before he left.

He did dream that night, of the spreading shadow in the crystal ball. It seeped through the streets of the city, like the Angel of Death in Egypt, wrapping itself around lampposts, sinking between the cobblestones of Diagon Alley, finally speeding through the countryside, speeding like a train, like smoke from its stack, like -

"Teddy!"

He opened his eyes.

Uncle Harry's Patronus was standing at the foot of his bed.

"Teddy, come to the station early. Bring the Head Boy and Head Girl if you know who they are. We're going to need your help."