Chapter 80: Harry and the Godson

He lay facedown, listening to silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not perfectly sure that he was there himself.

A long time later, or maybe no time at all, it came to him that he must exist, must be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface. Therefore he had a sense of touch, and the thing against which he lay existed too.

Almost as soon as he reached this conclusion, Harry became conscious that he was naked. Convinced as he was of his total solitude, this did not concern him, but it did intrigue him slightly. He wondered whether, as he could feel, he was able to see. In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.

He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings. The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be.

He sat up. His body appeared unscathed. He touched his face. He was not wearing glasses anymore.

Then a noise reached him through the unformed nothingness that surrounded him: the small soft thumpings of something that flapped, flailed, and struggled. It was a pitiful noise, yet also slightly indecent. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was eavesdropping on something furtive, shameful.

For the first time, he wished he were clothed.

Barely had the wish formed in his head than robes appeared a short distance away. He took them and pulled them on. They were soft, clean, and warm. They were also trimmed with red: robes for Gryffindor, although he most certainly was not at school.

He turned slowly on the spot. He was the only person there, except for—

He recoiled. He had spotted the thing that was making the noises. It had the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath.

He was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, he did not want to approach it. Nevertheless he drew slowly nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon he stood near enough to touch it, yet he could not bring himself to do it. He felt like a coward. He ought to comfort it, but it repulsed him.

"You cannot help."

He spun around. A boy was walking toward him. The boy looked to be about Harry's age, and he wore Hogwarts robes just like Harry's. The boy's robes, though, were trimmed with yellow where Harry's were trimmed with red. A Hufflepuff, then, and a prefect to boot. But Harry didn't remember ever having seen the boy in the castle corridors, and he knew that he would have remembered. The boy's hair was bright turquoise.

"Is that…?" he didn't know quite how to phrase the question. "Did it work?"

The boy beamed at Harry. The expression had a familiar echo, but Harry couldn't say why. "Yes, it worked. The last Horcrux is gone."

"Am I dead?"

"That's for you to decide."

"Are you dead?" It was a rude question, but something ephemeral about the boy demanded that Harry ask it.

"Like you, I'm not precisely dead." The boy didn't seem to care to elaborate further. There was a teasing in the boy's not-quite answer that reminded Harry powerfully of another time he had nearly died at Voldemort's hand. He'd been in the hospital wing under Madam Pomfrey's care, and Tonks had refused to tell him how to get into the Hufflepuff common room to see Cedric.

"I wouldn't even know how to get in. I know the entrance is down by the kitchens, but it would be almost impossible to sneak in without the password."

"Especially as Hufflepuffs don't use a password."

"What do they use?" asked Harry keenly.

Tonks tried to smile. "House secret," she said.

Harry knew, then, who this must be. The fluorescent hair. The Hufflepuff robes. The smile he'd seen before. "Lupin and Tonks. They're your parents?"

"Yes." The boy extended his hand for Harry to shake and Harry grasped it. The hand felt warm and solid and not unlike the other hands Harry had shaken. "My name is Teddy Lupin. You would have been my godfather."

Harry stared at Teddy, dumbfounded. Teddy put his hand on Harry's shoulder— the way Lupin did when they were about to have a difficult conversation—and led Harry to a bench beside the train tracks.

"We're in King's Cross Station!" Harry realized.

"Yes," confirmed Teddy. "I was told that that was probably what you would create. You've been here before, but I don't imagine you have any way of remembering that now."

"I was here before?" Harry glanced around, dumbfounded. "That was when your dad— changed things?"

"That's right. They said you had a fine mind."

"Who's they?"

Teddy shook his head. Harry wasn't particularly disappointed; somehow, he hadn't expected an answer. There were many more questions to be asked, though.

"Would I have been a good godfather to you?" he wondered. He supposed that Sirius would be the godfather now. That made sense; Sirius was an adult, and he was Tonks' cousin as well as Lupin's oldest friend. Harry felt an uncomfortable twinge of jealousy. Teddy would always know that his godfather loved him and would do anything to protect him. Sirius wouldn't need to fumble about trying to do the right thing for Teddy; he would grow as a godfather while Teddy grew as a person.

Harry wanted that for Teddy. He wanted it for Sirius, too.

He was still jealous.

The jealousy evaporated when Teddy beamed at him again. "You would have been a wonderful godfather. It wouldn't have been easy, you know, at first. With my parents dead, I would have lived with my grandmother—"

"Tonks died too?" Harry was struck with an unexpected pang of grief even though he knew that Tonks was perfectly fine. She was probably spending Easter with her parents and she would never need to face Voldemort in battle.

"Yes. My parents would have decided that it was more important for me to grow up in a world without Voldemort than it was for me to grow up with them. They would have trusted my grandmother. Dad actually would have asked Mum to stay with me, but he wouldn't have believed she really would. She would have come to fight. They would have died within minutes of each other at the Battle of Hogwarts. You would have seen them lying dead on your way to meet Voldemort the way you did today."

The pang of grief grew even more sickening. Harry was glad that he hadn't had to do any of that.

"You would have struggled," Teddy continued casually, as if he hadn't noticed Harry's reaction. "You would have spent your teenage years as a soldier. You wouldn't have gone back to Hogwarts for your seventh year. You would have been forced to compete in the Triwizard Tournament—"

"And Cedric would have died," Harry put in, wanting to sound like he knew something about something in this strange world.

"Yes," said Teddy. "Then the Ministry would have denied Voldemort's return."

"And Umbridge would have tortured me with a blood quill and Sirius would have died."

"You would have been the leader of the resistance after Dumbledore's death. Undesirable Number One. You would have spent most of a year hiding in the woods, looking for Horcruxes, waiting for the day you had to die to protect everyone else. And then all of a sudden it would have been over. You would have been godfather to an orphaned baby being raised by a grandmother who'd lost everyone else she'd ever loved. My grandmother would have been a bit intimidating."

Harry could believe it. Andromeda was a bit intimidating when she wasn't trying to protect a baby and when Sirius was right there casting some sort of familial shield charm around Harry. "We would have worked together though? For you?"

"You would have." Teddy smiled again. "You would have learned to trust each other, to be family to each other because you both would have been family to me. You would have treated me like your own son, even— especially— after you had your own sons."

"My own sons?" The thought made Harry dizzy.

"You and your wife would have had two boys and then a girl, but there always would have been room for me at the table. I would have been round for dinner about four times a week, and your children still would have said I ought to move in. The boys would have offered to share a room, and you would have said that only would have happened if you wanted the house demolished. They would have been very different, your sons. You and your wife would have had your hands full."

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me my wife's name."

"No. You're a different person now to the person you would have been. You haven't gone through the things you would have gone through."

Harry thought then of the beautiful lagoon in Florida, and all of a sudden brilliantly green plants appeared around them. Clear water replaced the train tracks.

"Lupin—Remus— your dad— talked to me about that last summer," Harry told Teddy. "He said he worried that he took something from me by changing the past. That he deprived me of the experiences that would have made me the man I was meant to be. I told him I'd rather be a lesser man and have Sirius and Cedric be alive. I told him I don't like it when people say that you have to go through adversity to become a good person. That's like saying Ron and Hermione can't be good people because their parents love them. And Ron and Hermione, they're the best people."

"Then you wish to go back to them."

"Of course I want to go back to them! Why wouldn't I?"

"You will return to a world that is, perhaps, less painful than the world you would have been living in were it not for my father. It will not be a world free of pain. You will always face loss and challenges and sadness."

"But I'll face them with Ron and Hermione and Sirius and— and one of these days, you."

Teddy shook his head. "No. This will be the only time you meet me."

"But… Tonks, she said she was going to forgive Lupin. She said she wanted to marry him when he got out of Azkaban. He is going to get out of Azkaban, isn't he? It wouldn't be fair if he just died there, not after everything…"

"Harry, are you under the impression that life is fair?"

"No." Harry slouched back against the bench. It felt more like one of the benches in the real King's Cross Station again.

"Precisely," said Teddy, now sounding very like Remus. "In any event, magic comes with a cost." He gestured toward the flayed, naked child which still lay gasping for breath on the floor. "It's easier to see with dark magic. When you use magic to commit murder, you rip your soul. In his quest for immortality, Voldemort found a fate far worse than death. I believe you know that the blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death—"

"But you will have a cursed life from the moment the blood touches your lips," Harry completed. He had learned that lesson from the centaur called Firenze in his first year at Hogwarts. "But Lupin—Remus— he didn't do any dark magic. He put the Imperius Curse on us in class, but that was only to teach us. He never hurt us. He wanted to stop us being hurt."

"All magic has a cost," Teddy repeated patiently. He might have been sitting in the Defense classroom telling Harry and Cedric about a new dueling spell. "The cost of transfiguring a matchstick into a needle is so small that you cannot even perceive it, not if you did nothing but transfigure matchsticks every hour of your life for one hundred years. What Remus Lupin did was much, much more than even the greatest wizards do. There are things magic cannot do. It cannot create food where there is none, nor create true love, nor raise the dead."

"What he did came close to raising the dead."

"There is often an irony to very old, very powerful magic. He asked to go back for me, you know. He was willing to die for me, but he wanted to live for me. To know me."

Teddy waved his hand, and Harry saw Remus Lupin looking older and more ragged than Harry had ever known him to be, even on the morning after a full moon. This Remus Lupin was bleeding and battleworn, and he was pleading with a woman Harry couldn't quite see.

"If you won't let me move on, why not send me back? Give you enough time to sort out your bureaucratic errors. There must be corpses stacked like cordwood at Hogwarts. With Harry alive, who would notice one old werewolf standing up and going home to his son?"

"Dozens of people," she said. "I'd have to send you back to before you died, and you'd simply fall to Dolohov again."

"So send me back to before I duel him," snapped Remus. "Send me back five hours and I'll practice. Or send me back five months so I can manage not to walk out on my pregnant wife. Or send me back five years, and maybe I'll keep Voldemort from rising at all. Or—"

The scene vanished.

So too did the remnants of the lagoon.

The train station was a train station again.

"He wanted to come home to me," Teddy concluded. "Instead he forged a world in which I can never exist. He can't replicate the circumstances that would have led to my creation. Not even if he marries my mother. Not even if he has children with her. There is too much chance involved in such a thing. Any children they have will not be less worthy of life than I, but they will not be me."

"Are you angry?" Harry asked, suddenly wondering if Teddy was here to punish him. Remus' actions had made Harry's life much better, but they had kept Teddy from having a life at all. Harry's parents had died for him; Teddy's parents had died for him. They had been equal, once, and now they were not.

"When I was orphaned, my father hoped that I would understand that he died to make a better world for me. And I would have understood. When he realizes for certain what he has done, he will hope that I understand that he was, again, trying to make a better world for me. And he will be right. I understand."

"He doesn't know he'll never see you again?"

"He is aware of the possibility. But he has hope. And when he loses that hope, you will know what to say to him."

Harry wasn't looking forward to it, but it was one more reason he needed to get back to his life. "I will. How do I get back there? Do I catch a train?"

"Before you make your final decision, there's someone waiting to see you."

Teddy led Harry onto a train, and just as quickly off of it. Then Teddy was gone without explanation and Harry was standing in a warm, welcoming room. The chairs and couches were soft; sunlight seemed to stream through every window. Racing brooms leaned in one corner and the walls were covered with all sorts of interesting photographs.

In the middle of the room stood a man with messy black hair and a woman with bright green eyes.

For the first time since he'd been fifteen months old, Harry Potter ran into the outstretched arms of his parents.

To be continued.

Auxiliary Disclaimer: The paragraphs prior to Teddy's appearance are from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, slightly modified.

Recommendation:

Meet the Teacher by SweetDeamon. It is story number 9425905 on this site.

Summary: In which Remus and Dora receive word from Hogwarts that their son's homework has been completed in a far from satisfactory manner. The subject? Defence Against the Dark Arts. The topic? Werewolves. They've been expecting trouble since the beginning of term...but who feels less prepared? Teddy's parents or Teddy's teacher? Neville has a hunch... AU. RLNT. Rated for mild language.

This author has written many snapshots about a world where Remus and Tonks survive, but this one is my favorite. I love the portrayal of Teddy and the small but pivotal role played by Professor Longbottom.