Author's note: Enjoy!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights

Content Warnings: NA

A Balanced Meal

Dora's head was slumped against his shoulder as the two of them did everything in their power to think mushy thoughts and sink as deeply into the sofa as possible, trying very hard to become one with the cushions. She had just worked a 72-hour shift, and he was still recovering from last night's full moon—and whatever his werewolf self had been up to last night, it must have been rather wild given how he felt now. See, this was why he so rarely accepted to join Abigail and Andrew for transformations: he was convinced they led him into all kinds of trouble. The fact that he'd slept all day while Harry took Teddy on various adventures throughout London really meant nothing; he was still as exhausted as he'd been when he'd woken up sore and confused and squinting at the sunlight that morning.

Teddy, meanwhile, was sitting on the living room carpet with chocolate smeared on his mouth and all over the pajamas Remus had changed him into when Harry had dropped him off that afternoon. He was very methodically pulling apart a Cockroach Cluster—separating the chocolate and peanut insects from each other and watching the long strands of gooey caramel stretch out between the different parts of the cluster. He dove into his treat starting with the caramel and, once he'd eaten it all up, munched on the chocolate cockroaches. Every now and then, he found a chunk of chocolate with an especially large quantity of peanuts in it and it took him a while longer to chew through it all. It was very methodical and, frankly, sort of mesmerizing given how brain dead Remus was.

"That's what he's eating for supper right?" Remus asked when the thought occurred to him, as Teddy finished one Cluster and reached into the bag for another one. Teddy frowned and put it back in when it didn't meet some sort of invisible criteria, and rummaged in the back for another cluster.

"Did you feed him anything else?" Dora asked.

"No," he said. "Did you?"

"No," she said.

They watched their preschooler get to task on another cluster when he finally found the perfect one. Remus wondered what Teddy's criteria were. Then he wondered why his hair was purple on a Tuesday—he'd been on a pretty strict colour schedule since he'd started learning about days of the week. Then he wondered if there was a spell he could learn to liquefy his bones and disappear into their couch completely so he'd never have to be upright ever again.

"Is this fine?" Dora asked, still looking at Teddy though she didn't seem particularly concerned. In the last three seconds, Remus could swear that the little boy's hands had gotten twice as sticky.

"I think it's fine," Remus said half-heartedly, watching Teddy go for yet another Cockroach Cluster. He took a bite out of it, and then reached into the bag to take a bite out of a different one. "I mean, we could try to stop him…"

"Take his chocolate? He might go into withdrawal. Like father, like son, and all," Dora said.

Teddy dropped the cluster on the floor after taking a bite, and then picked it up and resumed his snacking.

"I saw him eat a banana today," Remus volunteered, although it came up as more of a mumble. And, to be fair, his sense of time was a bit thwarted at the moment so there was a chance that hadn't been today at all.

"A banana—that's fruit. Awesome," Dora said. She snuggled into him some more, and he let her even if she hit a bruise that he didn't know about. His whole body was one big bruise, at this point, and she was soft and warm. "Then this is fine."

"It's so fine," Remus agreed.

"We're good parents."

"We're great parents," Remus echoed, his eyelids fluttering. They may have shut completely had two sticky hands not planted themselves firmly on his knee. He winced as Teddy hauled himself up onto Remus's lap.

"I wanna cuddle too," he declared, burrowing into Dora.

"Yeah you do," Dora said, lifting her head from his shoulder just long enough to kiss the top of Teddy's head. "Merlin, we're so good at this."

WC: 709