Harry rubbed hard at his eyes, wishing his day would just end. A very sickly baby girl had been dropped off at the Ministry, clearly suffering under the weight of the poison Crabbe was giving out. But there was no mother, no father, no explanation, just a baby dropped off on the magical threshold of the hospital for the guards to spot.

"Merlin's beard, if we didn't have posted guards…" Harry muttered as he paced the hospital corridor while Nat, Rick and Audrey saw to the baby. He couldn't even see the portraits of the disapproving Healers who were glaring austerely at him for keeping them away. "Shut it," he growled at one old man who eyed him through a pompous-looking monocle. "If that guard hadn't been there that baby would have died so you can piss off!"

The man bristled and said something along the lines of, "Well, I never!"

"I bet you haven't," Harry agreed darkly as he kept pacing. He had Aurors out trying to find the mother, who would surely die soon if she hadn't already, but it was not so much trying to find a needle in a haystack as trying to locate one particular butterfly throughout the whole world. The baby was likely of Indian descent, although it was hard to tell with infants. It was Nat's first impression when she saw the baby, but it had been a brief comment and Nat had gone straight to work.

Harry couldn't stand to watch it this time. He'd been holding his granddaughter not twenty minutes ago and now he was wearing a hole in the ugly flooring of St. Mungo's while waiting to make sure the baby lived.

Life was never, ever fair, but it felt especially cruel at this moment.

"She's okay," Audrey said, stopping him mid-step.

He hurried quickly into the room and quickly resealed the room so Nat could come out from under the cloak. He hadn't called anyone else to be in on this healing, only Nat, Al, and Rick, and the weight of what wasn't said hung thickly in the room as Nat ran her hand gently over the baby's thick cap of black hair.

Now that she was healed and sleeping peacefully, he thought maybe Nat might have missed the mark on where she was from, but he waited.

"She's a Squib," Nat told them quietly. "It's an absolute miracle she made it," she whispered as Al put an arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. "She shouldn't have made it."

"But she did," Audrey reminded her. "You saved her."

Nat waved off the praise and cleared her throat, turning back to Harry. "I'm still going to say Indian or possibly Pakistani or Tibetan origins. I think somewhere in that part of the world, but I think also she's half Russian."

Harry waited a full twenty seconds while his brain processed that information. "How do you come to that conclusion?"

"No idea," Nat admitted grimly as she pushed her messy hair back from her face. "It's just a hunch from seeing so many faces, especially so many baby's faces, over the last few years as I'm pulling out the poisons. But that's who you're looking for. I can't tell you whether the Russian is the mother or the father, but that's my best lead for you. I hope you find her soon."

"This has been a lot of help," Harry told them quietly. "You can head on out and get some sleep if you can. We will let you know if we find the mother."

"I can stay," Rick told him. "I can bunk in a bed just in case she is found. I can't fully heal anyone but I can do some of it until Nat can get here."

Harry glanced over to see Audrey nodding. "Yes, let's do that," Audrey agreed as she stifled a yawn. "We're all beat. I'm going to stay here and monitor the baby for an hour before I turn her over to someone I trust. She should be fine, now, but with her being a Squib… she didn't have the magical reserves that a magical baby would have to survive. I just want to be sure."

"Let's get you home," Al told Nat, but he waited while Nat once again smoothed the hair on the baby's head while the baby slept deeply, as she would because Audrey would have put her to sleep for her own comfort. Nat then turned to Al and took the cloak, putting it back on before they left.

Audrey showed Rick to an empty room and left him to sleep while Harry waited with the baby. He studied her face and marveled at the difference Nat had made in the poor child's life. She'd been writhing in pain, in agony, when Harry had arrived. She was shriveling in on herself by the minute and her skin, which was now a dark bronze, had been ashen, almost to the point of gray. Harry touched a finger to the little girl's hand and smiled when her fingers automatically curled around his.

As soon as Audrey was back in the room Harry left to help aid in the search for the mother.

~*~

Teddy bit hard on his cheek to keep from cursing loudly as they located the woman in the morgue in Essex in a town called Colchester. She'd been found with her stomach cut open and the baby taken.

As Nat had predicted, she was Indian, and at first she appeared to be a local Muggle woman who had the Muggle police baffled.

Harry woke Rick to go with him to see the body and it was Rick who said she was magical. It had to have been a magical person who brought the baby to the hospital, but they had yet to figure out how the baby had been dropped off. It looked like Apparition to Rick, but he simply couldn't be sure that it was because there was a lot of magic that was just outside of the hospital and there was no residue of it on the baby, at least not that he or Nat had seen. It could have been a house-elf. That was a trick Crabbe had used before, but Nat could spot house-elf magic and she'd have mentioned it. As yet, Rick couldn't differentiate between the two.

"She didn't have any ID," the police officer told them as they stood around a kettle that had stopped working the moment they'd entered the room. The office had poked at the kettle a few times before shrugging it off as a bad job.

"Has anyone reported her missing?" Harry had asked the Muggle policeman, an older man by the same of Sam White. His hair, contrary to his name, was still quite dark, but the lines on his face aged him a good decade north of Teddy's godfather.

"We haven't had anything come through so far," White told Harry, all while ignoring Teddy. White hadn't really wanted to cooperate with Harry, but had accepted the Muggle injunction from Scotland Yard which Hermione had arranged because Harry was the one who was in charge of the baby in London. White had ignored Teddy and Rick, likely due to their age. He understood it in Rick's case, as the kid was barely of age, but he'd bristled when Harry had said Teddy was his number two in their office.

"We're not sure she's been in England long, as she might be here traveling or on holiday, but she also might be a local that no one took note of," White continued as he rocked back on his heels and let the chaos of the police station race around them.

"I'll have people look on my end," Harry told him as he skimmed their preliminary notes. He glanced up to White and then inclined his head towards Teddy. "I know he looks young, but he's married and has four little girls. He's thinking of that baby and her poor mother. He'll be a good asset for you."

White let out a small sniff, but Teddy saw him back down. "How old are your girls?"

"My oldest is five, the twins are almost three, and the baby is just about ten months old," Teddy told him simply. "My wife and I have been together for about a decade." How long he'd been with her, and yet it felt like a day. Would it ever feel like it had been ten years? He didn't think so. He was pretty sure even when they were together eighty years, he was still going to say all the days had rushed by too quickly.

"Well, you don't look it," White told him, but he handed Teddy the folder to read.

He continued to ignore Rick, but that was fine. Harry had claimed Rick was the medical technician who was going to come to get a swab to make sure the baby did belong to this woman, and White had seemed to buy that.

Teddy was going to have to ask someone to explain that Muggle term to him at some point. It seemed to have worked well. Teddy had been at a complete loss as to explain why they'd needed Rick there.

"I'll get back to you as soon as we have something," Harry told him while Teddy finished skimming the scant notes. "We should have the DNA in two days, but the baby looks like the mother, so I'm betting it isn't a coincidence."

"I tend to agree," White told him as he wordlessly took back the folder Teddy handed over. "Keep me posted and I can reach you by this number?"

"Yes, it isn't a mobile," Harry told him. "I don't have one at the moment. It was broken, so that landline will be the most reliable way to reach me. You can leave a message there and I'll call you back as soon as I get it."

"Alright then," White said as he shook Harry's hand, although Teddy could see the man thought it was odd that he didn't have a mobile phone. "Let's get this solved."

They walked out into the early dawn hours as a light drizzle blanketed the streets around them. For as early as it was, delivery lorries were making their way slowly past the station while a few pedestrians hurried by, huddled in raincoats, not bothering to look around at the three men as they sheltered under their hoods.

"When do you think George will have a mobile available for us?" Teddy asked suddenly, remembering his honorary uncle's plan to get one that would work for witches and wizards.

"He's still running into trouble with them being useless in shielded magical buildings like the Ministry," Harry told him. "He isn't sure he's going to be able to get around it, but he's still attempting it."

"I've had cell phones catch fire when I was too close," Rick told them.

Teddy and Harry stared at him for a moment before Harry said, "Come again?"

"Yeah," Rick confirmed as they walked towards the alley that was sheltered enough to allow them to Apparate back to the Ministry. "Before Nat helped me stop spewing out so much magic, it happened all the time. I had to avoid Muggles or risk their phone catching fire in their pocket. It sucked."

By the time they arrived back at the Ministry with the faked swab, the sun had risen. "We need to find this woman's family so they can come get the baby," Harry said as they headed for his office. They didn't speak again until they were behind a closed and warded door, even though the Auror office was mostly deserted at this early hour. "Teddy, I want you to go to the records room and find out the name of the parents and Rick you can head back to your flat and get some sleep if you want. I think we're done with what we need you for, at least for a few hours."

"Alright," Rick said, barely stifling a yawn. "I'll sleep a few hours and then come back. Is Nat on for healing today?"

"I think she was supposed to, but it might have to wait. I'll wait until Al comes in and gives me a report. If she doesn't come with him, then we will postpone until tomorrow to allow her some rest," Harry told them both.

When Rick had gone, Teddy turned to Harry and said, "It's Tuesday."

Harry stared at him for a moment before he nodded. "Right, cheerleading for Emma. Just go check the records on the baby and then once you get the name, you can head home for a nap before you take her."

"Will do," Teddy said as he headed towards the lifts to head down to records. When he made it to the room he was unsurprised to see no one on duty and the doors locked. It was bloody early, after all, but Teddy's wand to the door with a muttered password had the door unlocking for him and he pushed into the room. It was a small antechamber that led off to a Quidditch stadium-sized room full of records of magical births going back a thousand years, possibly more.

Thankfully, he wouldn't need to have to search out this new baby's birth. It would have recorded on the scroll in the front room and the parchment would be waiting to be filed by the clerk later this morning. Teddy moved over to the machine and saw the baby they were looking for straight on top. It listed the mother's name as Emma Gupta. With that they had a name for the poor woman who had been murdered and the father was… Teddy stared. It was blank.

For a moment his tired mind couldn't register what he was seeing but then his thoughts clicked together and he realized it meant the baby hadn't been conceived here, in England, and that the father wasn't magical.

It didn't always happen this way. Often times the scroll would be able to name the father, but sometimes a foreign Muggle father wouldn't register. The mother's name always, always, appeared, but the father's… it was less certain.

Emma Gupta… it was a common enough last name, but the first name might suggest she was born in England and he had to find out more. Without being able to locate the father, he was going to have to track down her family and let them know they had the baby.

Teddy scrubbed at his tired eyes and glanced glumly at the stacks that lay hidden behind the door. He'd try once and if he failed, he'd leave it for another of the Aurors to do when they came in.

In theory he knew how to summon the parchment he wanted, the one that would tell him about Emma Gupta, but in practice he had only succeeded once and every other time he'd had to get the clerk to call it up for him.

Teddy put the scroll back down so it could be filed properly, once the baby had been named, and went to face off against the records.

The room was enormous and filled with shelves upon shelves of filed birth and death records. Teddy raised his wand and did the complicated wand motion and then gave it a little flick, just as he'd been shown, before saying "Accio Emma Gupta."

It wasn't a simple summoning spell, because honestly that wouldn't have worked. There could possibly be a hundred Emma Guptas in the room and he'd never know if he had the right one. But somehow the wand movement combined with him focusing on the Emma he wanted would do the trick.

And when nothing happened, he figured it had been a failure like every other time.

He'd actually turned to leave when the scroll came out and smacked him on the back of the head. Teddy tried not to yelp, but he was sure he now had a paper cut on the back of his neck as he turned and caught the paper. He studied it for a moment, his brow furrowed as he looked through the names.

This was going to be interesting. Teddy held his wand to it and made a copy before he left the scroll in the tray for the clerk to file away.

As he left the archives, the clerk, a woman of about sixty with long, curly salt and pepper hair and a kind smile waved to him. "I was wondering who was back there. Did you find everything alright, love?"

"I did, thanks," Teddy told her as he held up his copy. "The baby on top was dropped at the hospital this morning. We're trying to find the family so she can be picked up."

"Very good, then," the woman said as she moved around to study the parchment. "Hopefully she has a name soon, so I can get this filed. Best of luck locating them."

"Thanks," Teddy said as he left and went to pass this mess off.

Emma Gupta had no siblings and no parents. She had grandparents who lived in London and a few cousins spread around the country.

Someone would be sent to speak to the grandparents, likely someone in Hermione's department, to let them know that Emma had been killed.

Then they could proceed from there.

Teddy went straight home and fell into bed next to his wife, finding baby Ireland nursing in her sleep. He studied his wife and his baby and closed his eyes in grief as he thought of the poor woman who had been found dead on the street, the baby cut from her.

He didn't think, after that thought had settled in, that he'd be able to sleep, but he was so exhausted he managed to drop off and didn't wake up until Emma crawled into bed to tell him it was time to get up and take her to cheerleading with Aunt Caroline.

Teddy groaned and stretched and peered through one sleep drenched eye at his oldest child. She was no longer a baby. She was starting to look like a big girl and it was hard to imagine that soon enough he'd be sending her off to Hogwarts.

Well, it wouldn't be soon, but he was close to halfway there with her. "Come here," he told her as he pulled her in to cuddle and he kissed the top of her head as she put a hand on his face and rubbed at the stubble there.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, sweetheart?"

"When we have another baby, can I have a brother?"

Teddy grinned and buried his face further into her hair. "I love my girls, though."

Emma let out a small, impatient sound, that was almost an exact replica of the same noise that Gran Molly made. "Mummy says it's your job to make the boy and I just wants to know why you haven't."

"Well," Teddy said, trying to wade through the quagmire his wife had neatly dumped him into, "I don't really have a choice."

"Mummy said you do."

Teddy let out a sigh and said, "How about we get curry take away for lunch?"

"Yay!" Emma said, bouncing up. "Let's go!"

If only all life's complications could be solved so easily.

Author's Notes: Thank you Arnel for beta'ing!

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