"I've got something to do!" Remus shouts bolting upright in his marital bed.

"Unless your next line is 'You!' or "Change Teddy's nappy and give you a lie-in, my love! I don't want to know," Dora hissed in hushed tones, one eye on the sleeping green-haired baby nestled under her arm.

"No," Remus assured her, pulling back the covers and leaping out of bed. "It's brilliant. I don't know how I could possibly not have thought of it before… Actually, I really don't know how none of us could have thought of it before… I have to tell you, now."

"If none of 'us' have ever thought of doing it..." Dora yawned. "It's either a really stupid and bad idea or it's impossible. Lie down, think quietly, and tell me which when it's actually morning."

"No. Shush." He hopped across the room, tugging on his trousers and stumbling into the chest of drawers as quietly as he could. "...I'm doing this today!"

"Doing what?" Dora snarled. Remus looked at her, an eyebrow quirked thoughtfully.

"If you tell me one more time that you like it when I 'growl,' I'm going to bite you. Do you comprehend?"

"Totally. Dora, can you take Teddy to your mum's house and go to work as usual? I'll be back in time for dinner... but you might want to make extra."

"No," Tonks assured him, attempting to appear uninterested.

"Yes!" Remus said confidently. Tonks wrinkled her nose. It wasn't often that her husband's golden eyes gleamed with unquenchable enthusiasm. Truth be told, they never did... Unless he was very drunk and acting inappropriately. She sat up, irritably removing her arm from under the sleeping baby.

"Right," she replied, "what's your stupid idea?" "

"It isn't stupid."

Dora smiled at him, "Alright, what's your idea that's so brilliant that none of 'us' have ever thought it was a good idea to try?"

"Right..." He was almost out of breath with excitement.

"...OK," he said. "I'm going to steal a Time-turner, travel back in time, and stop Sirius from dying."

"Oh... Shit," Dora said, carefully getting out of bed and gently wrapping her arms around his neck, kissing his scarred cheek. "Remus, love," she said. "You know that's impossible. You know that. And you're right, of course. Hundreds of people would have done it if that worked."

"So," Remus said, wriggling her off. "I don't care. I'm still going to do it."

Dora stood there, jaw set, watching him put on his socks and shoes. "...You were dreaming, Remus love," she tried to explain calmly. "...But I hope it was a nice dream, you know... Sometimes I dream about Alastor being okay, often, or just that I'm talking to him again... And my dad."

"That's fine," Remus snapped, standing up again. "Don't care right now. Go to work. Act like everything's normal."

"Everything is normal," Dora explained, her patience quickly dwindling. "All the Time-turners were destroyed; that day, Remus, Sirius died; they were all destroyed, and they haven't made any more of them, and even if they had, you could only go back twenty-four hours."

.

"Going back in time is going back in time," Remus suddenly interrupted. "You can either go back in time or you can't. They've just capped it at... It's forty-eight hours actually, you know? You only have to break off the little gold pin at the top and you can go back as far as you want."

"Why don't you just go back to Voldemort's conception and stop him from ever existing?" Dora suggested. "Aside from the fact that it's against the law and you can't actually change anything."

"That's a lie," Remus assured her, laughing bitterly. "This is obviously a lie. If you can't change anything, why use them at all? Why not just look at photos or dip your head in a pensive? And there are Time-turners at Beaubaton's and Durmstrang. They weren't destroyed. They were both given to fifth-year students at the start of this term, Fred Muller and Jacque Noir to be precise."

"You found out which children have Time-turners!" Dora shouted back. Remus studied her quietly. "Remus... What you're talking about is so illegal. You'd go to Azkaban. And it's illegal for a reason. If you actually change the past, you change the present. You could destroy the world!"

"Well, I'm not going back in time to destroy Voldemort before he was born. I'm just going to stop Sirius... from dying."

"But that is a big thing," Dora pointed out. "For God's sake, Remus. That's a massive thing. If Sirius hadn't died... Harry would be different. He might not be out there destroying Horcruxes at all. You... You would be different, Remus. What's to say we would even have married?... You and Sirius might be out there destroying Horcruxes with him."

She swung away and yanked on yesterday's clothes while glaring at them. She went over to Teddy's bed and looked down at him.

"...If you change the past," she explained quietly. "It might be the ultimate outcome of the war between good and evil that you change, Remus, but you might avoid destroying the world. You might not even destroy us, although I doubt it... But I guarantee that night when you were breaking your heart over it all and we conceived Teddy... That will never happen, Remus. If you stop Sirius from dying, Teddy won't be here when you get back... If you even came back."

They finished dressing quietly, while the tiny green-haired baby slept, pink-cheeked, in the bed behind them. "...I'm going to work," Dora finally said. "Take Teddy to my mom's and practice not being such a tosser," she said, but Remus was sitting at the end of the bed, his face buried in his hands, and didn't notice.

Dora ignored him and went over to kiss the sleeping baby on the cheek. He smelled like milk and love, with a hint of a wet nighttime nappy. Her husband, poor excuse that he was, was still hiding in his own hands. "...Poor you," she murmured. "You mess with time, and Teddy won't be here when you return. I know Sirius was great but was he that great?"

"I wish I hadn't told you," Remus said sullenly, causing her to crack an angry smile.

"You, Pratt!" she shouted back. "...and grow up!" She stalked out, slamming the door loudly enough to wake the baby.

Enraged red eyes flashed open, and an equally red mouth screeched in annoyance. Remus scrambled across the bed, muttering rudely about his insensitive wife and stuffing an enchanted bottle into his mouth. He watched the baby feeding, squeezing his shirt with a tiny perfect hand. Red eyes drifted through a rainbow of pretty colors, as they blinked blissfully.

Remus thought about James, a father at barely twenty, trying to explain what it meant. A father. Trying to explain to a nineteen-year-old Sirius, who barely knew how to look after himself, and Peter, who had to have switched sides by now. He shivered, clutching the baby even tighter, his scarred hand curled around the striped yellow and black babygro. His son resembled a bumble bee. Being held in the clawed scared hands of a beast that would happily rip him to pieces like a rag doll if they were stuck in the same room three nights from now.

James had announced, "I'm a father!" He'd said it numerous times. He used 'dad' after that, but Remus thought he'd forgotten he preferred 'dad'. "I'm a father," he'd repeated over and over. They were all barely out of their twenties. The war. The prophecy. He had been a father.

"...I had no idea, Prongs," he whispered, blinking away the river of tears. "I had no idea."

He looked down at the baby, whose eyes had stopped kaleidoscopic on a sparkling silver gray. Remus studied those eyes in silence until the baby blinked and re-opened them, transformed into an inky blackness that looked so much like Snape's that Remus laughed.

"...Daddy is going on a journey," he explained as he slid Teddy onto the bed and grabbed a nappy, changing Teddy with practiced ease. "Look, Ted, I got hold of this last week. Do you know what it is?"

He let his chubby fingers play with the Time-turner while fastening the popper-studs on the bumblebee all-in-one. "...Right Teddy," he said, finally standing over the bed. "If this works... This will work...Come here, little man." He scooped up the baby and carefully looped the fine golden chain around both their necks, pressing his son against his heart and cradling the back of his neck for support. "Didn't think I'd leave you behind, Teddy?" he asked. "Let's go get Sirius."