Teddy had been the first to realize that Al and Lily communicated silently.
One long weekend, a few months after Lily was born, he was helping Al build a blanket fort in the library of number 12.
James was downstairs "helping" Kreacher bake cookies.
Lily was in her nursery, napping, as babies are wont to do.
His grandma and Grandma Weasley were babysitting. Aunt Ginny was gone for the weekend, covering quidditch and Uncle Harry had gone along for a bit of adult time.
Al had suddenly stopped pulling cushions from the chairs, turned his head to one side, (looking for all the world like gog, Teddys dog, puzzled by a high noise).
Moving as fast as his toddler legs would carry him, he headed for the stairs.
Teddy, vigilant, even then, followed closely. His godbrothers often had more determination than ability at this stage."Hey bud what's the hurry?"
Al his compact little barrel shaped body struggling up the stairs on hands and knees, looked back over his shoulder. "Lily sad."
Teddy listened closely, he couldn't hear a peep. "You sure buddy? I don't hear her crying."
Al nodded in the affirmative and, having reached the right floor hurried toward his sister.
When Ted caught up with him, Al had his hand through the crib slots, gently rubbing Lily's round little tummy. "Teddy her tummy hurts. Pwease gets a gran. She gonna cry." Sure enough, Lily kept the grandmas up half the night. By morning they ended up with Al and James in the crib too. Al's hand laid gently on the baby's tummy, James curled protectively around his siblings.
Ted paid attention after that, until she could talk Al would just show up with whatever his baby sister needed. Then after she began communicating verbally, Al and Lily hardly spoke to each other out loud, yet each knew exactly what the other was thinking.
James and Al had a strong rivalry growing up, fueled by the elder's penchant for practical jokes. Arguments were frequent, and injuries occasional. Until Al began Hogwarts. Scorpius Malfoy had been sorted into Gryffindor and become friends with Al and Rose. The poor kid was the target of brutal attacks by kids whose families harbored outdated beliefs. After his grandfather had died, his grandmother and dad began remaking their life, in ways public and private, pulling away from the purebred dogma and the people still entrenched in that way of thinking. Lucius had fled after the war, alone. Narcissa eventually divorced him. She and Draco had struggled for a few years financially and emotionally. Lucius returned with plans to kill his wife and son then kidnap Scorpius, to "raise him properly". The Aurors, Uncles Harry and Ron stopped him during a rather dramatic hostage situation involving a muggle school. As far as the living Malfoys were concerned, that speed up their shedding of the old ways and thoughts.So Scorpius was labeled a blood traitor and a Target.
Vic was head girl, Ted already out of school, that first year. Her letters to him had been full of the Weasley/Potter kids' efforts to protect the slightly built boy.
Through the months James, and his fellow prankster, Fred II, began to figure prominently in that protection.
When summer holidays came around there was a new closeness between his godbrothers that had not been there since they were toddlers.
Ted, James and Al were, each in their own way, pretty impressive magic users. Charms and defense came easily to Ted. James had the innate ability to understand how magic worked and an effortless athletic ability. Al seemed to absorb knowledge, process it, understand it and use it like no one else they knew, except Aunt Hermione. If pressed, they would reluctantly admit they were fairly strong in magic, a streak of common sense and humility keeping them from revealing to the public at large, that they were in fact some of the strongest wizards alive. A trait that ran through their cousins, and quite a few of their friends, as well.
To a man though they would point to Lily as the strongest among them. Magically and mentally. She simply was the star they happily revolved around.
The years she had been in America becoming a healer had been difficult for all of them. That was why James, who could be at home with his new wife on this rare day off and Ted were knee deep in weeds behind three townhomes on Grimmauld place.
Freddy and Uncle Rolf had just done a "round up" of magical creatures and Ted and James were about to dismantle the privacy fence that divided the back gardens of numbers eleven and twelve, the muggle way. Until the parameter fencing was demolished and replaced discretion was paramount.
Considering they were interacting with two muggle owned neighboring properties and a busy road, use of magic was tricky. So by hand it was.
Ted could hear Vic's laugh carrying over from number thirteen. She and Molly II had offered up a challenge, to see whose line of fencing, blocks and hedges was down and to the skip first.
James, grinning, was hefting a sledge hammer, ready to swing at the wall in front of him. Teddy had a chainsaw in position to pull start. Freddy, Hugo and Al were positioned along the "guy's" fence with tools of their own.
Ted knew his farmer wife most likely had the chainsaw in the garden of number thirteen. Besides Vic and Molls, Dominique, Lucy and Rose were the "gals" team.
Roxanne, comfortably cushioned in a chair on the back step of number twelve, was their very pregnant referee. "From go: 3, 2, 1, GO!"
Soon a cloud of dust and a cacophony of noise rose from the back gardens. Debris began to fill the skips in front of numbers eleven and thirteen.
The guys had lost and ended up having to muck out the abandoned coy pond behind number eleven.
The dads, Percy and Greorge, plus the granddads, Harry and Bill, made quick work of the demolition inside number eleven. By the end of that weekend it was just a shell, ready for the magical construction crew to transform the inside to three office suites and a dispensing potions lab. The top floor, was to be Al's legal office. Center and ground would be given over to Lily's pediatric office with a small area for Hugo use as a London satellite dentistry office.
Replacing the kitchen area was the dispensary, with a convenient entrance, just down a few steps from sidewalk level.
Number twelve was only being minimally affected. They were stealing a bit of space for a magic lift to service number 11 and a hidden door in to his law office was being installed in his upper floor den.
Number thirteen was to be stripped, it's infrastructure modernized and strengthened, mundanely and magically, but pretty much left as a blank slate.
Lily was going to live at number twelve with Al as she got her practice up and running. Number thirteen would be her long term project.
Less than a year and the Lupin/Potter siblings would all be in England together again.