A Little More Time - Canon Compliant Version Prologue and Chapter 1
Title: A Little More Time (canon compliant verson as of 4th Feb 2008)
Author: jesspallas
Rating: PG-13 to be safe
Genre: Drama/Action/Angst
Written: Post DH
Chapters: 25
Words: 120,029
Status: (technically) Canon Post DH Epilogue
Summary: Was it possible to save two lives in the past without altering history? Was it possible to give his parents a future twenty years after they had supposedly died? Teddy Lupin thought so...
Author's Notes: [ORIGINAL] This is an unashamed post-DH canon-fixing denial fic that I started the day after DH came out as a personal way of coping with the deaths of my two favourite characters. The idea for it attacked me and stuck and wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. Thanks to my Wheat-Thrashing Committee of celtmama snorkackcatcher a_t_rain mrstater gilpin25 drumher godricgal and ladybracknell, who helped me sort through the logistics of the beast and to snorkackcatcher especially for betaring.
[VERSION 2] This is an adapted version of my original fic, which is almost identical in every respect apart from changes made to reflect JKR's declarations regarding the Weasley Family - Penny has become Audrey and various Weasley children have changed name/gender to reflect her comments. The vast majority of the changes can be found in chapter 11 (Family Circus) - as for the rest, it's just a Find/Replace name change for Penelope. If anyone reading this does spot any inconsistancies regarding my Weasley alterations, do let me know - I think I've caught all the out of places references but a second pair of eyes wouldn't hurt. :)This is also my first time directly posting fic on this site instead of links.
A Little More Time by Jess Pallas
Prologue: Watching
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere. We watch only.
It was the one rule they knew they couldn’t break.
It was the absolute. The law. Every new initiate into the Historical Records section of the Department of Mysteries: Time Division was forced to commit it firmly to memory before they were even allowed to enter the Unspeakables realm on Level Nine. They signed their names one after another on the contract that bound them to it on pain of Azkaban. That every precaution possible had been taken against it, that it was believed to be beyond the power of any to disobey whether they wished to or not was entirely beside the point. In the wizarding world, impossible was not always as it seemed and the Division was taking no chances with history.
For that was their job. To watch history unfold. To observe the truth of past events and return with neatly annotated notes and corrections for the history books. Wrapped in a field of passiveness by means of an amulet that once worn could not be removed except in the present, they passed through a Time-Turning Portal into history and drifted through events as no more than invisible, insubstantial ghosts, watching and recording the past into which they silently ventured. They took no wands for passage through the Portal stripped away all magic, all unnatural disguises and they passed through walls and doors and people to find the truths hidden away by the swirling mists of time.
They had solved murders and resolved disappearances. They had watched events unfold in ways unsullied by the politics or allegiances of those who scribed their history books. It was Minister Shacklebolt who, twenty years before, had requested that the Department find some way to see the past without changing it, to learn the truth behind a myriad of unknown fates, to ensure once and for all after the lies and half-truths that had dogged the Ministry for so long could be untangled one way or another. He had wanted to know the truth of history, clean and pure and tell it to the world.
And then, two years ago, came the Portal. It had taken so long to reconstruct even a single Time-Turner, after the last of them had been destroyed in Harry Potter’s venture into the Department of Mysteries when he had still been but a boy. It had taken longer still to construct a means to take a person back not hours, but decades. And time had stretched on further as they fought to turn this single hourglass into a gateway through which a team of impartial observers could step to any time, any place and watch and record what they saw without damaging the past or the future, without affecting events.
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere. We watch only.
And when Teddy Lupin had joined the Historical Records Section, when he’d nodded obediently at the instruction he received, when he’d signed the contract and accepted his amulet with a smile, he’d never imagined that the day would come when he would want to break it.
But it was the Battle of Hogwarts that faltered his resolve.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone. His Divisional head, Audrey Weasley, had taken him aside that morning for a quiet word, saying in a soft, understanding tone that they had received a request from the Minister to start looking at that fateful night in order to establish exactly how and why so many had died. She had squeezed his shoulder gently as she said it would be a difficult assignment for all involved but more so for those who had lost someone that day which was why she was offering both him and Dennis Creevey a chance to back out now. In fact Dennis, she informed him, had already headed off on a holiday with his wife. And she knew, of course, that Teddy’s girlfriend Victoire was graduating from Hogwarts in a couple of month’s time. Perhaps he could take a few weeks off and plan a trip for them both to celebrate…
But at the root of it all was the question. Was he going to stay? Or would he like to go?
And Teddy had chosen to stay.
It would have been a lie to say the thought of seeing his parents die didn’t bother him. But at the same time, he had never known them and it was hard, really hard for him to see them as more than an abstract concept, a could-have-been, an empty hole in his life that ached sometimes but did not sting. After all, he’d never been alone - his Gran had raised and loved him like a son and Harry and his family and friends had always been there for him, treating him like one of them for as long as he could remember. Molly - or Auntie Molly as he had known her since childhood - had told him once that his father had promised her that if anything should happen to her or Uncle Arthur during the war, that he would watch over her children. And Molly Weasley and her family had paid that debt in kind.
It felt odd sometimes, to hear them talked of, these parents that his extended family had known so well and he never at all. Oh, Gran had told him so many teary eyed stories of his mother’s childhood adventures and love of life and Harry’s coming of age gift on his seventeenth birthday had been a trip into a pensieve to watch his father teaching a practical and highly amusing lesson on Boggarts at Hogwarts. That indeed, had been what had got him interested in the idea of the realities of the past in the first place.
But there were so many holes about them, together, a couple. When had they fallen in love? Why had they fallen in love? What had they been like together? No one really seemed to know apart from brief glimpses and hints - both Harry and Molly had ruefully told Teddy that on occasion trying to crack into his father’s emotional state was like trying to dig through granite with a pin, and his mother, usually so demonstrative he was told, seemed to have respected his wishes to keep things just between themselves. The dawning of their relationship had apparently been quite a private thing, about which Molly seemed to know the most and that was very little. Sirius, Harry’s godfather, seemed to have been his father’s principle confident, but Sirius, like his parents, was dead and thus of no real use in unravelling their story. And Gran was no more help - it seemed his mother had not even confided in her about the relationship until she strolled in beaming and informed her parents that she was getting married in two days to a thirty-seven year old werewolf and did they want to come?
He knew they’d had troubles. No one had tried to hide that truth from him. But they’d had good times too and their love for each other had won out over doubts and war in the end. They weren’t paragons. They were people.
Abstract people. Picture people. Story people. People whose faces and expressions should have been so familiar, whose gesture and manner should have been part of his every day, but when he looked into his heart for them he found nothing but photographs, stories and other people’s memories.
They were people he knew of but didn’t know. Somehow, they weren’t quite real.
And if he did happen across them in the past, it would be no different to walking into that pensieve, to hearing stories, to looking at pictures. It wouldn’t give him his childhood with them. It wouldn’t make them any more real.
It wouldn’t make them his.
He had truly believed that. He was wrong.
For the next morning, he saw his parents die.
And it was the most real thing he’d ever seen.
He hadn’t meant to watch. He hadn’t even known that this would be the place. He’d known that their bodies had been found in the courtyard far below and there, he’d assumed they had died. They hadn’t.
It had happened on the battlements above. The battlements that Teddy had chosen to observe the advance of the giants from.
From the sweat-stained, beaten-up look of his father and the Death Eater he had just pursued so furiously up the stairs from the grounds, the duel had been raging for quite some time. The Death Eater Teddy absently recognised from his notes as Antonin Dolohov had wheeled, bellowing spells almost desperately as his father ducked against the chunks of stone that rained down from perilously near his head, before firing back a curse that sent Dolohov reeling backwards, tumbling over, his wand spilling from his hand to rattle against the stone out of reach. Screams and roars, the bellows of advancing giants, the screech of spells tore through the air around them but suddenly it seemed as though nothing but this moment and these two men existed.
“Werewolf scum!” Dolohov’s voice was thick and accented, made awkward by the blood trickling from his nose and lips as he crouched against the wall. “Beast! Savage!”
His father was breathing hard, gasping and his voice when it came, so gentle in that pensieve memory, was a harsh rasp that was all but unrecognisable.
“This from the man who just murdered a child!”
“A mudblood!”
“A child!” His father was spitting the words. “I knew Colin. I taught him. And you mowed him down like he was nothing.” He was shaking his head. “I can’t let this happen anymore.”
His wand lifted slowly, deliberately, his hand shaking slightly but never flinching. “Enough is enough. Avada…”
But he got no further. For that was the moment when the club of the first advancing giant descended with a crash against the wall on which he stood.
The battlements shattered. In a hail of stone and dust and flying rock, Dolohov and his father disappeared.
“REMUS!”
He hadn’t seen her arrive, hadn’t even noticed her until she tore straight through his ghostly, unseen form with a warm flood so touch-like that almost sent him reeling. He caught a glimpse of flapping robes, of wispy brown hair as she lunged desperately forward, grabbing at something he couldn’t quite see as the dust swirled and twisted through the air…
And then, miraculously, there they were. Alive.
“I’ve got you! Remus hold on, I’ve got you!”
And she had. She leaned back, straining against the cracked and broken remains of the battlements, her hands wrapped frantically around his upper arm as she pulled and pulled with all her might. He saw his father’s other hand slap down against the wall, saw his dusty, dishevelled head appear, his eyes fixed upon his wife with a mixture of shock, joy and horror.
“What the hell are you doing here? Get out of here, now!”
His heart pounding with audible force, Teddy felt himself all but laugh out loud at the look that crossed his mother’s face as she grasped the back of his father’s robes and began to haul him bodily up those last few inches to safety.
“Do you mean right now?” she exclaimed, her voices raising a good two octaves. “Or shall I finish saving your life first?”
“Saving my life is good! You being safely with our baby is better!” With a grunt, his father hauled himself onto the remains of the flat stone walkway with a crunch, breathing even more heavily than before. He looked up at her then, one hand still grasped in hers as she helped haul him to his feet. His eyes met with hers then and they filled brim full with a cocktail of pleading, love and desperation so potent that it all but took Teddy’s breath away.
“Get out of here,” he whispered softly. “Please.”
The battle was raging all around them, screams and spells and carnage. But in that instant, that brief, eternal instant, Teddy knew they could see no one but each other.
And in that moment, he knew that they were finally real to him.
“Avada Kedavra!”
“No!”
The whispered word had slipped from between his lips, unconscious, unguided. But it was already too late.
For a moment his parents almost seemed to flicker, undulate, stumble but then the spell struck them both as one, a flash of green that washed across their bodies and dragged the life away from them. Their hands were still clutched together as their bodies crumpled over the edge and disappeared into the courtyard below.
A dusty figure on the far side of the gaping rent in the Hogwarts’ wall was smirking victoriously. Grasping his retrieved wand in one hand, Antonin Dolohov turned and vanished into the dark stairwell beyond.
He’d almost forgotten. Almost allowed himself to forget that they were about to die. He’d lost himself in simply watching them.
He hadn’t even seen Dolohov until the spell had come. That much he shared with his parents.
But they’d been together. And it had been quick.
But if they’d looked up once in that instant. If they’d just seen Dolohov one moment earlier…
His life, their lives. So different.
For one moment of distraction, they paid with their lives. And he lost them forever.
It was then that he looked down, saw the tiny piece of colour fluttering in the harsh wind of battle away from the spot where moments before, his parents had stood hand in hand. Crouching carefully, he stared at it.
It was a photograph. Of a baby. A baby with turquoise hair.
It was him.
A moment later, the wind grasped it once more and tossed it away into the air.
And that single moment was the first time that Teddy Lupin seriously wanted to risk everything
It would take so little. Just a second’s difference would mean so much, a warning, a shove, a stunner fired at Dolohov before he had time to strike them. If he could just find a way…
But.
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere. We watch only.
It was then that Teddy Lupin knew that he should never have agreed to come here.
He couldn’t change history. He couldn’t. Could he?
No. NO. No…
So there. It did no good to anyone to ponder what couldn’t be.
Even if, maybe… That time he morphed whilst in the field, over-stretched the size of his hand to try and record a historical artefact’s size measurement and as he morphed, he’d felt the limited range of the field of passiveness straining around him, yearning to burst. He knew the reach of the field was limited, that it could only stretch so far within the bounds of human movement and then it’d dawned on him that he alone of all of them could stretch that little bit more than it could take. Audrey had been so alarmed when he’d told her - she’d made him swear never to morph whilst through the Portal again and he had done so without giving it a second thought. But was this why? Had she realised what it might be possible for him to do? If he could reach that bit further, if he could break the field and reach beyond it then maybe, just maybe…
He could touch the past. He could change it.
The thought was there. At the back of his mind. And it refused to go away.
He told no one of what he had seen. And if he had been able to stay away, probably no one would have ever known.
But he couldn’t.
The next day, when he should have been out on the grounds, he saw his father rush too late to the aid of blond teenage boy, saw him yell with fury and rush off in pursuit of Dolohov up the stairs towards those fateful battlements. And he had followed him. And watched. Again.
He vowed not to return after that, but then it was his mother, rushing down a corridor, asking this and that fighter if they’d seen Remus, had anyone seen Remus? And this time he followed her. And watched. Again.
The fourth time he was there and waiting.
In the end it was Audrey who found him, watching again, one quiet day two weeks after their examination of the Battle of Hogwarts had begun. Worried about the downturn in the quality of his work, she’d followed him.
He was not at all surprised to find Harry Potter waiting for him on his doorstep when he got home. The Weasley grapevine was the fastest growing he’d ever encountered.
The talk he’d had with his godfather had been long and excruciating. Harry had sat him down with a glass of butterbeer and a bar of Honeydukes Best and told him about his own struggles to cope with the loss of his parents, about his temptation before something called the Mirror of Erised, about the struggle he faced in the Patronus lessons with Teddy’s father between blocking out the horrors and a simple desperation to hear their voices. Teddy had nodding gamely and accepted his understanding.
But he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Harry had always known there was no chance, no hope of seeing his parents again. He’d never had to wonder if they could still be saved.
Teddy no longer had that luxury.
For while Teddy had watched and watched and watched again, he’d also been thinking.
He couldn’t change the history of then, he knew that now. That’d been a pipe dream all along for he knew more than most about the way the laws of time worked and he knew that any changes he made then would already be real in the now. Time was all one piece. If it hadn’t happened, it couldn’t happen, because if it had changed, he’d never have known it to be any different. No. He couldn’t change the past.
But what about the present?
As long as everyone at the time still thought they had died in the battle, if they had indeed been nowhere to be found for twenty years…
Then why not bring them back with him to now?
He watched and he’d watched. And again and again, he’d seen that odd flicker, that shimmer just before the curse struck, just before they died. He had no explanation for it. No explanation unless…
It hadn’t happened yet. Unless it was something he was going to do. Something he was meant to do.
Like breaking the field? Like grabbing them and pulling them through the Portal a moment before they died? Like finding some way to leave behind two corpses in their place so history would still be as it should?
It wouldn’t be easy. But it wasn’t impossible either.
And then it was then that Teddy knew that he was really, truly going to do it.
He was going to save his parents’ lives.
1: Promises
It was times like this, Teddy mused to himself, when he could definitely use a visit from Ron Weasley. He really needed some choicer swearwords.
The theory behind his plan was sound. He was sure of it. But the timing of it, the execution…
Bloody hell. He’d need to be Harry. He’d need to be God.
He knew exactly what to do. He knew exactly how to do it. He just didn’t know if he could.
Picking up his messy pile of scribbled notes, Teddy slumped back against arm of the settee and gazed absently at the mantelpiece for a moment, allowing himself a soft, almost apologetic smile at the picture of his parents that lived there. It was their wedding day, his mother dressed in white dress robes topped by vivid pink curls beaming gloriously in spite of the large pink wine stain she’d managed to provide for herself down one arm. His father was also smiling broadly, if a little disbelievingly at his newly acquired wife, dressed in old fashioned gold trimmed robes that Gran had once told him had been borrowed from Minister Shacklebolt back in the days when he was plain old Auror Kingsley. Every so often, the two figures in the picture would turn, link arms and share a brief, gentle kiss.
Teddy closed his eyes. Well. If God was what they needed, he’d just have to try and provide. Because he couldn’t go back now.
He’d promised them.
Before that, somehow, he’d felt as though he could still back away from his impulsive, emotive decision to break every rule that surrounded his career. And perhaps, given time, he would have taken that step back, accepted the truth that they were gone and simply let it go. Perhaps.
If Harry and Audrey had not decided to be kind.
They’d thought he was brooding. When he’d turned down Harry and Ginny’s dinner invitations one too many times in order to thrash out his theory by working late in the Unspeakable Library, they’d come to him before work one day full of gentle reassurances and undisguised concern. When Audrey had noted his work turnover had remained below average since his encounter with his parents, she’d suggested seeing a St Mungo’s grief councillor, not realising that his delays were caused by experimentation in the realm of the past; seeing exactly how far he could morph before he could feel from the taut hum against his ears and the grasping tightness around his body told him that the field of passiveness was a frayed thread away from tearing. He never pushed that one step further - he was sure that the Portal would detect an actually broken field and that would probably be the end of his access to the only means he had to save his parents’ lives - but at those time of greatest pressure, he was certain that when he brushed his fingers against the parts of the past all around him, a flower, a wall, a box on a mantle, they did not pass through like smoke as they always had but tickled, just slightly, remotely tingling against his skin.
It was exhilarating. It was terrifying.
He could break the absolute law. He could touch the past.
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere.
He could.
But would he have tried to go that final, enormous, irrevocable step that a fingertip’s flex would invoke? Would his fear of the consequences have overcome his grief in the end?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But that was irrelevant. It became irrelevant on the day that Harry and Audrey had come here to see him, visited him in the home that had once belonged to his father’s family but had now fallen to him and offered him what they thought would be comfort.
Access to the Portal. Private access for up to three hours on weeknights, for as long as he needed it. Why?
To watch his parents. But not to watch them die. To watch them live.
Harry, bless him, had compiled a list as best he could from friends and acquaintances and his own past. The dates and locations of important moments in his parents lives; times when they were happy, times when they were sad, times when they were people just living their lives. Get to know them, Harry had told him. See them as more than a pair of corpses tumbling from the battlements. He hoped it would help.
It had. But not in the way Harry had hoped.
He’d watched his father playing here in this very house as a lonely, isolated child, watched him blossom at Hogwarts in the company of a group of loyal and playful friends. He’d watched his mother, her hair ever changing just as his was, toddle into chairs and fall with a splat over rugs in the house where he had been raised as his Gran, looking young, so young, scooped her up and kissed her bruised knees away with laughter. He’d seen his father’s joy in his work at Hogwarts, his mother’s elation at passing her Auror exams. And then he’d seen them meet.
There had been no fanfare, no fireworks. A simple meeting of the Order of the Phoenix at Grimmauld Place. His mother, endearingly worried, had brought a prank gift of hair tonic for her dishevelled ex-convict cousin. And that cousin’s quiet friend had reassured her, caught her when she stumbled and laughed with her until her awkwardness and nerves subsided. And that most frightening of words - werewolf - entered the conversation, he’d seen his mother take an instinctive step back, seen his father’s expression tighten but then he’d seen glowering in his mother’s face a determination that it took a moment to understand. And then she made a joke about it, he laughed along with her and they were talking again, laughing again, relaxing again and by the end of the evening, they had crouched side by side fighting hysteria as they used the hair tonic to give the large black dog that Sirius Black had become a quite emphatic quiff.
She’d been bothered, he could tell, that his father was a werewolf. She just hadn’t let it get in the way of getting to know him. Of liking him.
And later, of loving him.
He was getting to know them, just as Harry had wanted. And the more he watched, the more he cared.
He lingered now, beyond the time and dates that Harry had given, speculating, exploring their lives at Grimmauld Place, just seeing how they lived day by day. He saw them laughing and joking with their fellow Order members, saw them staying up to joke and mess around with Sirius Black late into the night. He saw the lingering looks they cast almost unconsciously towards each other, saw the way each other’s company made them come alive as they did with no one else. He saw them confiding in each other, drawing in trust, sharing with each other what they shared with no one else.
He saw their first kiss.
His father had been so unsure of himself, of it all, of whether what they were doing was really the best idea. But his mother, oh, she had been so determined. Their feelings, their relationship, tentative at first but undeniable nonetheless, had blossomed, grown and engulfed them both completely.
And once a few months had passed for them, the number of times Teddy had to politely retreat and give them their privacy when they were left alone increased out of all control. There were certain things no son should ever have to witness.
But the joy did not last.
He saw them close up Grimmauld Place, both sorrowful, both grieving at the death of a much-loved cousin and friend. He could see even then that his father was pulling away. He knew they had spent the next year apart, that his father had tried to spare his mother from a life caught in the shadow of his lycanthropy, but no one knew the wheres and whys of their relationship in those troubled times. That secret was lost to their memories alone. Reluctantly, Teddy had abandoned his free ranging and turned back to the notes.
The Hogwarts Hospital Wing. He tailed them outside after their unexpected confrontation, watched them sit quietly together by the lake as his father softly, quietly, willingly gave in. He went to their wedding next, stepping inside the photo on his mantelpiece and learned that the wine stain had been his father’s fault (kissing his mother’s neck from behind while she was holding a full wine glass was apparently not a good idea). They had come back to the house that was now his, the house left to him in his parents will and moved into when he’d finished Hogwarts, and caught in their moment, had whisked each other upstairs. Teddy had discreetly departed. It was around the right time in July and Teddy could most definitely count. No one should have to bear witness to his own conception.
He’d moved on. He’d seen the mingled look of horror and joy, disbelief and terror on his father’s face when she’d broken the news of her pregnancy. He’d seen his father start to lose himself and flee as he faced the death threats and redundancy his wife was suffering after her marriage to him, the stigma she faced from the pregnancy, and shouldered too much unnecessary blame for him to stand. He witnessed the forceful slap his mother had inflicted on his father after he had returned and watched as he placed his hand upon her abdomen and swore on their child’s life - on Teddy - that he would never leave them like that again. He saw them together again as the pregnancy progressed, happy in spite of the world that was falling to pieces around them.
He saw his own birth.
It was messy. And…ow. It made him glad he wasn’t a woman. And the Healer had said that his mother being a Metamorphmagus had made it easier too.
If that was easy… Blimey.
But it had been the moment after, his father wearing the same look of disbelieving joy he’d seen at the wedding, his mother beaming in spite of her exhaustion as they sat side by side on the bed, cuddling their baby, cuddling him… And though he knew he couldn’t have any memory of it, he could almost feel their touch, their love, the press of his mother’s lips against his forehead, the stroke of his father’s hand through his slowly lightening hair…
It was then he’d known.
He loved them.
He’d never known them. But he’d watched them. And the love had crept upon him so gradually, he’d barely realised it was there until now.
They were his parents. And they’d loved him too, he could see it, he could feel it…
He had to save them. He had to.
He had known they couldn’t hear him. He hadn’t cared.
“Mum,” he said softly, addressing the two figures snuggled together with their baby on the bed. “Dad. I’m going to save you. I’m going to give you the life you should have had.” He took a deep, determined breath. “I promise.”
And that was how Teddy Lupin had come to be sitting on the settee of his… his parents… his family home, grasping a sheath full of notes and desperately needing to be a hero, a God, or the luckiest man alive.
He’d got it all worked out. Breaking history had been his first concern, for he knew in order to keep things as they should, there had to bodies for people to find. Harry, he knew, had seen them dead. So had many others. They’d been buried three days later at Godrics Hollow. So there were corpses to be found.
But how?
He had doubted at first. Maybe they really were dead. Maybe he had tried and failed. Maybe the corpses buried in those graves truly did belong to Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks.
But then he had listened to old Bert Croaker.
Albert Croaker was one of the longest serving Unspeakables in the Department and he loved to tell stories. Teddy had always found it a bit of an irony that such a garrulous chap should work in the most secretive part of the Ministry of Magic in a job he was forbidden to talk about beyond the Department itself but that had never hindered Bert for he talked to his colleagues instead, sharing stories of this or that experiment, a rare discovery, the unusual use of a charm or a potion, the subversion of magic and creation of new truth. The Historical Records section had been his dream come true - now at last, everyone wanted him to talk about and share what he saw. And as Teddy had settled at his desk in the office shared by his section one afternoon, compiling his notes from that morning’s expedition to the Death Eater display at the 1994 Quidditch World Cup, Bert had strode in with a massive grin on his face and declared to the world at large, “I knew it!”
“Knew what?” Dennis Creevey had been rather more subdued than usual since returning from his holiday but nonetheless he grinned at Bert as he offered him a cup of coffee from the self-warming pot in one corner.
“Cornelius Fudge.” Bert took a cheery swig of coffee before depositing himself on the edge of Teddy’s mahogany desk. “Faked his death, didn’t he?”
Teddy stared and he wasn’t alone. Exclamations of surprise rose from all corners of the room.
“Never!” The exclamation came from Rose Zeller, a friendly, auburn-haired witch in her early thirties who had taken Teddy under her wing when he had joined the Department as an apprentice straight out of school. “How? I mean he fell dead out of the Floo on his way to the corruption hearing didn’t he? Most of the Ministry saw his body! There were pictures in the Prophet!”
“Wasn’t his body, was it?” Bert was wearing the unmistakable smile of a man who had news to share and knew everyone would want to hear it. “Replication charm. One quick Geminio and he’d made himself a fake corpse and shoved it in the fireplace. Then he downed some Polyjuice and hopped a Portkey to South America. He’s probably still there.”
There were more gasps and exclamations of shock and disgust.
“No!”
“You’re joking!”
“That filthy weasel!”
“How’d he get away with that?” Teddy heard his own voice cut through the disbelief almost without recognising it. His mind was suddenly spinning. Could this be it, what he needed, could this be…? “I mean, couldn’t anyone tell it wasn’t really him?”
Bert glanced over his shoulder, smiling fondly at the currently purple haired young man upon whose desk he was resting. Teddy sometimes found it a little irritating the way the older members of the Division tended to look and treat him like a twelve-year-old nephew they had adopted into their work place, particularly the ones that had known his parents. But if playing up to it got him answers, this was one time that the attitude might be bearable.
He smiled with as much fake but innocent sincerity as he could muster and, wincing with disgust within himself, added a hint of rosyness to his cheeks. Bert beamed at him fondly.
“Ah, young Lupin!” he proclaimed, slapping one hand down on Teddy’s shoulder in a chummy fashion. “That’s the Replication charm for you. Cast it on something and you’ve made yourself a perfect copy of whatever it is you’ve just touched. Oh that copy won’t last forever and it won’t be as pure or carry any magic cast upon it but it’ll do for tricking someone in the short term. But cast it on a person…” He sucked his teeth. “You get a copy of that person, a perfect physical copy, right down to the spots on their brow or the frays in their robes. But it’ll be lifeless. You can’t copy a soul.” He shook his head. “And the Replication charm doesn’t react well to that. The copy should be perfect but it isn’t. It can’t be. And so after about a week or so, the copy will dissolve, break down, until you’ve nothing more than a handful of dust.” He shook his head. “No wonder Mrs Fudge was so adamant that we get him in the ground so quick. Didn’t want to blow his cover, did she? And then of course, when she moved to Rio to get away from all the memories…” He snorted loudly with disdain.
“Portly git.” Dennis proclaimed with feeling and was met with nods of agreement from all around the room. “He’d probably have only got a few months in Azkaban for being a corrupt idiot with a power complex but now he’ll be up for perverting the course of justice too. And after all that blather about promising to face his fate with fortitude. If he hadn’t been so determined to hide the truth about You-Know-Who…”
“Lord Voldemort.” Lucy Brightwell, a blonde witch in her twenties, intervened. It was a running quarrel between the younger and older members of most of the wizarding world about which name exactly it was appropriate to use for a long dead enemy.
“Whatever.” Dennis waved the old argument away. “I assume you’ve shopped him Bert?”
“Sent Rajesh up to Hermione Weasley with a report straight away. I reckon the Aurors may be off to Brazil on a Fudge-hunting expedition in the not too distant. May need to dose them with some Felix Felicis though, it’s a big country. Maybe we should send some up from the lab, eh?”
The others had gathered round Bert, clapping him on the shoulder and congratulating him on this belated piece of justice, but by then Teddy hadn’t been listening. The Replication charm… A perfect but lifeless copy that lasted a week before dissolving… And his parents had been buried after only three days…
The plan had come together after that. He could not take his wand through the Portal to cast the spell himself for the Portal would not permit anyone to enter the past with a wand or any magical alterations to their person; he still remembered the day Lucy had come in with her hair intricately charmed in place for a date after work and had emerged furious from the Portal when the magic of the gate had undone every last securing charm. But there would be wands available to him on the other side, wouldn’t there? His parents had both been holding them…
So that was it. Still settled on the settee, Teddy crinkled his scribbled notes in his hands. All he had to do was enter the past, position himself exactly where his parents were going to die, morph until he broke the field of passiveness, reach out, grab a wand from his parents and pray it worked for him, cast Geminio on both of them and then grab hold of them as he activated his amulet in order to return himself through the Portal to the present.
Not much to go wrong there then…
Harry. God. Luckiest man alive.
None of these was he.
Unless…
Wait…
Bert Croaker slouched against his desk, laughing as he received his plaudits for uncovering the cowardice of Fudge. …the Aurors may be off to Brazil on a Fudge-hunting expedition in the not too distant. May need to dose them with some Felix Felicis though, it’s a big country. Maybe we should send some up from the lab, eh?
Felix Felicis.
Felix Felicis.
Luckiest man alive.
And they had some in the Department’s potions lab. Bert had said so. And Bert would know, Bert talked to everyone, found out everything…
If he could get his hands on one vial, just one…
Then he could do it. He could do it now. He could do it tonight…
Any weeknight, Audrey had said, any weeknight he could use the Portal. He’d gone home and come back before now. No one would question his presence…
Teddy breathed deeply, his eyes drifting to that picture on the mantle, his mind rushing through all he had seen of their life. He could do this. Tonight, he could do this.
Was he ready?
He stared at the picture. Smiling, his parents kissed.
Yes. He was.
Dumping his notes back on the table, Teddy pulled himself to his feet and took a deep, steadying breath.
“Pull yourself together, Lupin,” he scolded himself firmly. “This is it.”
He felt strangely removed from his hand as it reached into the pot over the mantle, grabbed a handful of green powder and hurled it into the fire. Emerald flames leapt high and strong.
And Teddy stepped inside.
“Ministry of Magic!”
And then with a whoosh, he was gone.
No going back.
* * *
“Teddy! Teddy Lupin!”
Victoire Weasley was not in the best of moods.
He’d promised her. He’d promised. He’d smiled and assured her that yes, of course he would come over to her parents’ house on Monday night, he would be waiting right there as soon as she and her parents got back from their week long Congratulations-On-Graduating-From-Hogwarts trip to see Grandmere and Grandpere in France. And though she’d thought he looked a little pale as he met her briefly off the Hogwarts Express, though she’d been a little concerned about the vague tone his letters had taken in the last month or two and the odd looks her parents and Weasley relatives had exchanged whenever his name was mentioned, she’d never for a moment disbelieved him.
Until he’d failed to show up. He hadn’t been waiting. He hadn’t come.
Her papa had tried to tell her that he knew Teddy had a lot on his mind right now, though it wasn’t his place to explain precisely what. But to Victoire, there was no excuse. He’d promised. And he hadn’t done it.
And so, brushing her father aside, she’d grabbed a handful of Floo powder and headed straight over to his house.
He wasn’t in the lounge. Glowering furiously, Victoire bellowed his name again, storming into the kitchen and then the old study before hurtling upstairs. By the time she returned, still boyfriend-less to the hall, her temper had been waning and by the time she’d stepped outside to assure herself he wasn’t in the garden, she had begun to get slightly concerned. Where was he?
Maybe he was working late or had had to go to his Gran’s for some reason. But then, couldn’t he have called and let her know? For a moment, the fleeting, horrible thought crossed her mind that he could be out, out on the town with another girl, a girl he liked better than…
No. No. Teddy wasn’t like that. She knew him. He wasn’t.
And he wouldn’t have broken his promise without good reason either.
A lot on his mind, Papa had said. But what? What was distracting enough to make him forget a solemn promise he’d made to his girlfriend?
Well, he wasn’t here. And neither was the answer. But she needed to hear from him, she needed to know…
A note. She’d leave a note. After all, he’d have to come back sooner or later.
A pile of scribbled on, scruffy paper lay crumpled on the table by the settee. Scrap then. Maybe if she could just find a blank piece…
Victoire lifted the papers. And froze.
For a few moments, she could only stare, her eyes drinking in the words not believing, not comprehending. Then slowly, disbelievingly, her eyes lifted and fixed upon the framed picture over the fireplace.
His parents.
Teddy was going to…
“Oh Teddy,” Victoire heard herself whisper. “Teddy, you idiot, they’ll throw away the key…”
She had to stop him. She had to tell someone, she had to find a way…
Yes. Yes. He’d know what to do.
Stumbling forward, the notes still grasped in her disbelieving hands, Victoire grabbed a handful of Floo powder and hurled it into the fire.
“Number Twelve Grimmauld Place!”
Author: jesspallas
Rating: PG-13 to be safe
Genre: Drama/Action/Angst
Written: Post DH
Chapters: 25
Words: 120,029
Status: (technically) Canon Post DH Epilogue
Summary: Was it possible to save two lives in the past without altering history? Was it possible to give his parents a future twenty years after they had supposedly died? Teddy Lupin thought so...
Author's Notes: [ORIGINAL] This is an unashamed post-DH canon-fixing denial fic that I started the day after DH came out as a personal way of coping with the deaths of my two favourite characters. The idea for it attacked me and stuck and wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. Thanks to my Wheat-Thrashing Committee of celtmama snorkackcatcher a_t_rain mrstater gilpin25 drumher godricgal and ladybracknell, who helped me sort through the logistics of the beast and to snorkackcatcher especially for betaring.
[VERSION 2] This is an adapted version of my original fic, which is almost identical in every respect apart from changes made to reflect JKR's declarations regarding the Weasley Family - Penny has become Audrey and various Weasley children have changed name/gender to reflect her comments. The vast majority of the changes can be found in chapter 11 (Family Circus) - as for the rest, it's just a Find/Replace name change for Penelope. If anyone reading this does spot any inconsistancies regarding my Weasley alterations, do let me know - I think I've caught all the out of places references but a second pair of eyes wouldn't hurt. :)This is also my first time directly posting fic on this site instead of links.
A Little More Time by Jess Pallas
Prologue: Watching
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere. We watch only.
It was the one rule they knew they couldn’t break.
It was the absolute. The law. Every new initiate into the Historical Records section of the Department of Mysteries: Time Division was forced to commit it firmly to memory before they were even allowed to enter the Unspeakables realm on Level Nine. They signed their names one after another on the contract that bound them to it on pain of Azkaban. That every precaution possible had been taken against it, that it was believed to be beyond the power of any to disobey whether they wished to or not was entirely beside the point. In the wizarding world, impossible was not always as it seemed and the Division was taking no chances with history.
For that was their job. To watch history unfold. To observe the truth of past events and return with neatly annotated notes and corrections for the history books. Wrapped in a field of passiveness by means of an amulet that once worn could not be removed except in the present, they passed through a Time-Turning Portal into history and drifted through events as no more than invisible, insubstantial ghosts, watching and recording the past into which they silently ventured. They took no wands for passage through the Portal stripped away all magic, all unnatural disguises and they passed through walls and doors and people to find the truths hidden away by the swirling mists of time.
They had solved murders and resolved disappearances. They had watched events unfold in ways unsullied by the politics or allegiances of those who scribed their history books. It was Minister Shacklebolt who, twenty years before, had requested that the Department find some way to see the past without changing it, to learn the truth behind a myriad of unknown fates, to ensure once and for all after the lies and half-truths that had dogged the Ministry for so long could be untangled one way or another. He had wanted to know the truth of history, clean and pure and tell it to the world.
And then, two years ago, came the Portal. It had taken so long to reconstruct even a single Time-Turner, after the last of them had been destroyed in Harry Potter’s venture into the Department of Mysteries when he had still been but a boy. It had taken longer still to construct a means to take a person back not hours, but decades. And time had stretched on further as they fought to turn this single hourglass into a gateway through which a team of impartial observers could step to any time, any place and watch and record what they saw without damaging the past or the future, without affecting events.
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere. We watch only.
And when Teddy Lupin had joined the Historical Records Section, when he’d nodded obediently at the instruction he received, when he’d signed the contract and accepted his amulet with a smile, he’d never imagined that the day would come when he would want to break it.
But it was the Battle of Hogwarts that faltered his resolve.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone. His Divisional head, Audrey Weasley, had taken him aside that morning for a quiet word, saying in a soft, understanding tone that they had received a request from the Minister to start looking at that fateful night in order to establish exactly how and why so many had died. She had squeezed his shoulder gently as she said it would be a difficult assignment for all involved but more so for those who had lost someone that day which was why she was offering both him and Dennis Creevey a chance to back out now. In fact Dennis, she informed him, had already headed off on a holiday with his wife. And she knew, of course, that Teddy’s girlfriend Victoire was graduating from Hogwarts in a couple of month’s time. Perhaps he could take a few weeks off and plan a trip for them both to celebrate…
But at the root of it all was the question. Was he going to stay? Or would he like to go?
And Teddy had chosen to stay.
It would have been a lie to say the thought of seeing his parents die didn’t bother him. But at the same time, he had never known them and it was hard, really hard for him to see them as more than an abstract concept, a could-have-been, an empty hole in his life that ached sometimes but did not sting. After all, he’d never been alone - his Gran had raised and loved him like a son and Harry and his family and friends had always been there for him, treating him like one of them for as long as he could remember. Molly - or Auntie Molly as he had known her since childhood - had told him once that his father had promised her that if anything should happen to her or Uncle Arthur during the war, that he would watch over her children. And Molly Weasley and her family had paid that debt in kind.
It felt odd sometimes, to hear them talked of, these parents that his extended family had known so well and he never at all. Oh, Gran had told him so many teary eyed stories of his mother’s childhood adventures and love of life and Harry’s coming of age gift on his seventeenth birthday had been a trip into a pensieve to watch his father teaching a practical and highly amusing lesson on Boggarts at Hogwarts. That indeed, had been what had got him interested in the idea of the realities of the past in the first place.
But there were so many holes about them, together, a couple. When had they fallen in love? Why had they fallen in love? What had they been like together? No one really seemed to know apart from brief glimpses and hints - both Harry and Molly had ruefully told Teddy that on occasion trying to crack into his father’s emotional state was like trying to dig through granite with a pin, and his mother, usually so demonstrative he was told, seemed to have respected his wishes to keep things just between themselves. The dawning of their relationship had apparently been quite a private thing, about which Molly seemed to know the most and that was very little. Sirius, Harry’s godfather, seemed to have been his father’s principle confident, but Sirius, like his parents, was dead and thus of no real use in unravelling their story. And Gran was no more help - it seemed his mother had not even confided in her about the relationship until she strolled in beaming and informed her parents that she was getting married in two days to a thirty-seven year old werewolf and did they want to come?
He knew they’d had troubles. No one had tried to hide that truth from him. But they’d had good times too and their love for each other had won out over doubts and war in the end. They weren’t paragons. They were people.
Abstract people. Picture people. Story people. People whose faces and expressions should have been so familiar, whose gesture and manner should have been part of his every day, but when he looked into his heart for them he found nothing but photographs, stories and other people’s memories.
They were people he knew of but didn’t know. Somehow, they weren’t quite real.
And if he did happen across them in the past, it would be no different to walking into that pensieve, to hearing stories, to looking at pictures. It wouldn’t give him his childhood with them. It wouldn’t make them any more real.
It wouldn’t make them his.
He had truly believed that. He was wrong.
For the next morning, he saw his parents die.
And it was the most real thing he’d ever seen.
He hadn’t meant to watch. He hadn’t even known that this would be the place. He’d known that their bodies had been found in the courtyard far below and there, he’d assumed they had died. They hadn’t.
It had happened on the battlements above. The battlements that Teddy had chosen to observe the advance of the giants from.
From the sweat-stained, beaten-up look of his father and the Death Eater he had just pursued so furiously up the stairs from the grounds, the duel had been raging for quite some time. The Death Eater Teddy absently recognised from his notes as Antonin Dolohov had wheeled, bellowing spells almost desperately as his father ducked against the chunks of stone that rained down from perilously near his head, before firing back a curse that sent Dolohov reeling backwards, tumbling over, his wand spilling from his hand to rattle against the stone out of reach. Screams and roars, the bellows of advancing giants, the screech of spells tore through the air around them but suddenly it seemed as though nothing but this moment and these two men existed.
“Werewolf scum!” Dolohov’s voice was thick and accented, made awkward by the blood trickling from his nose and lips as he crouched against the wall. “Beast! Savage!”
His father was breathing hard, gasping and his voice when it came, so gentle in that pensieve memory, was a harsh rasp that was all but unrecognisable.
“This from the man who just murdered a child!”
“A mudblood!”
“A child!” His father was spitting the words. “I knew Colin. I taught him. And you mowed him down like he was nothing.” He was shaking his head. “I can’t let this happen anymore.”
His wand lifted slowly, deliberately, his hand shaking slightly but never flinching. “Enough is enough. Avada…”
But he got no further. For that was the moment when the club of the first advancing giant descended with a crash against the wall on which he stood.
The battlements shattered. In a hail of stone and dust and flying rock, Dolohov and his father disappeared.
“REMUS!”
He hadn’t seen her arrive, hadn’t even noticed her until she tore straight through his ghostly, unseen form with a warm flood so touch-like that almost sent him reeling. He caught a glimpse of flapping robes, of wispy brown hair as she lunged desperately forward, grabbing at something he couldn’t quite see as the dust swirled and twisted through the air…
And then, miraculously, there they were. Alive.
“I’ve got you! Remus hold on, I’ve got you!”
And she had. She leaned back, straining against the cracked and broken remains of the battlements, her hands wrapped frantically around his upper arm as she pulled and pulled with all her might. He saw his father’s other hand slap down against the wall, saw his dusty, dishevelled head appear, his eyes fixed upon his wife with a mixture of shock, joy and horror.
“What the hell are you doing here? Get out of here, now!”
His heart pounding with audible force, Teddy felt himself all but laugh out loud at the look that crossed his mother’s face as she grasped the back of his father’s robes and began to haul him bodily up those last few inches to safety.
“Do you mean right now?” she exclaimed, her voices raising a good two octaves. “Or shall I finish saving your life first?”
“Saving my life is good! You being safely with our baby is better!” With a grunt, his father hauled himself onto the remains of the flat stone walkway with a crunch, breathing even more heavily than before. He looked up at her then, one hand still grasped in hers as she helped haul him to his feet. His eyes met with hers then and they filled brim full with a cocktail of pleading, love and desperation so potent that it all but took Teddy’s breath away.
“Get out of here,” he whispered softly. “Please.”
The battle was raging all around them, screams and spells and carnage. But in that instant, that brief, eternal instant, Teddy knew they could see no one but each other.
And in that moment, he knew that they were finally real to him.
“Avada Kedavra!”
“No!”
The whispered word had slipped from between his lips, unconscious, unguided. But it was already too late.
For a moment his parents almost seemed to flicker, undulate, stumble but then the spell struck them both as one, a flash of green that washed across their bodies and dragged the life away from them. Their hands were still clutched together as their bodies crumpled over the edge and disappeared into the courtyard below.
A dusty figure on the far side of the gaping rent in the Hogwarts’ wall was smirking victoriously. Grasping his retrieved wand in one hand, Antonin Dolohov turned and vanished into the dark stairwell beyond.
He’d almost forgotten. Almost allowed himself to forget that they were about to die. He’d lost himself in simply watching them.
He hadn’t even seen Dolohov until the spell had come. That much he shared with his parents.
But they’d been together. And it had been quick.
But if they’d looked up once in that instant. If they’d just seen Dolohov one moment earlier…
His life, their lives. So different.
For one moment of distraction, they paid with their lives. And he lost them forever.
It was then that he looked down, saw the tiny piece of colour fluttering in the harsh wind of battle away from the spot where moments before, his parents had stood hand in hand. Crouching carefully, he stared at it.
It was a photograph. Of a baby. A baby with turquoise hair.
It was him.
A moment later, the wind grasped it once more and tossed it away into the air.
And that single moment was the first time that Teddy Lupin seriously wanted to risk everything
It would take so little. Just a second’s difference would mean so much, a warning, a shove, a stunner fired at Dolohov before he had time to strike them. If he could just find a way…
But.
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere. We watch only.
It was then that Teddy Lupin knew that he should never have agreed to come here.
He couldn’t change history. He couldn’t. Could he?
No. NO. No…
So there. It did no good to anyone to ponder what couldn’t be.
Even if, maybe… That time he morphed whilst in the field, over-stretched the size of his hand to try and record a historical artefact’s size measurement and as he morphed, he’d felt the limited range of the field of passiveness straining around him, yearning to burst. He knew the reach of the field was limited, that it could only stretch so far within the bounds of human movement and then it’d dawned on him that he alone of all of them could stretch that little bit more than it could take. Audrey had been so alarmed when he’d told her - she’d made him swear never to morph whilst through the Portal again and he had done so without giving it a second thought. But was this why? Had she realised what it might be possible for him to do? If he could reach that bit further, if he could break the field and reach beyond it then maybe, just maybe…
He could touch the past. He could change it.
The thought was there. At the back of his mind. And it refused to go away.
He told no one of what he had seen. And if he had been able to stay away, probably no one would have ever known.
But he couldn’t.
The next day, when he should have been out on the grounds, he saw his father rush too late to the aid of blond teenage boy, saw him yell with fury and rush off in pursuit of Dolohov up the stairs towards those fateful battlements. And he had followed him. And watched. Again.
He vowed not to return after that, but then it was his mother, rushing down a corridor, asking this and that fighter if they’d seen Remus, had anyone seen Remus? And this time he followed her. And watched. Again.
The fourth time he was there and waiting.
In the end it was Audrey who found him, watching again, one quiet day two weeks after their examination of the Battle of Hogwarts had begun. Worried about the downturn in the quality of his work, she’d followed him.
He was not at all surprised to find Harry Potter waiting for him on his doorstep when he got home. The Weasley grapevine was the fastest growing he’d ever encountered.
The talk he’d had with his godfather had been long and excruciating. Harry had sat him down with a glass of butterbeer and a bar of Honeydukes Best and told him about his own struggles to cope with the loss of his parents, about his temptation before something called the Mirror of Erised, about the struggle he faced in the Patronus lessons with Teddy’s father between blocking out the horrors and a simple desperation to hear their voices. Teddy had nodding gamely and accepted his understanding.
But he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Harry had always known there was no chance, no hope of seeing his parents again. He’d never had to wonder if they could still be saved.
Teddy no longer had that luxury.
For while Teddy had watched and watched and watched again, he’d also been thinking.
He couldn’t change the history of then, he knew that now. That’d been a pipe dream all along for he knew more than most about the way the laws of time worked and he knew that any changes he made then would already be real in the now. Time was all one piece. If it hadn’t happened, it couldn’t happen, because if it had changed, he’d never have known it to be any different. No. He couldn’t change the past.
But what about the present?
As long as everyone at the time still thought they had died in the battle, if they had indeed been nowhere to be found for twenty years…
Then why not bring them back with him to now?
He watched and he’d watched. And again and again, he’d seen that odd flicker, that shimmer just before the curse struck, just before they died. He had no explanation for it. No explanation unless…
It hadn’t happened yet. Unless it was something he was going to do. Something he was meant to do.
Like breaking the field? Like grabbing them and pulling them through the Portal a moment before they died? Like finding some way to leave behind two corpses in their place so history would still be as it should?
It wouldn’t be easy. But it wasn’t impossible either.
And then it was then that Teddy knew that he was really, truly going to do it.
He was going to save his parents’ lives.
1: Promises
It was times like this, Teddy mused to himself, when he could definitely use a visit from Ron Weasley. He really needed some choicer swearwords.
The theory behind his plan was sound. He was sure of it. But the timing of it, the execution…
Bloody hell. He’d need to be Harry. He’d need to be God.
He knew exactly what to do. He knew exactly how to do it. He just didn’t know if he could.
Picking up his messy pile of scribbled notes, Teddy slumped back against arm of the settee and gazed absently at the mantelpiece for a moment, allowing himself a soft, almost apologetic smile at the picture of his parents that lived there. It was their wedding day, his mother dressed in white dress robes topped by vivid pink curls beaming gloriously in spite of the large pink wine stain she’d managed to provide for herself down one arm. His father was also smiling broadly, if a little disbelievingly at his newly acquired wife, dressed in old fashioned gold trimmed robes that Gran had once told him had been borrowed from Minister Shacklebolt back in the days when he was plain old Auror Kingsley. Every so often, the two figures in the picture would turn, link arms and share a brief, gentle kiss.
Teddy closed his eyes. Well. If God was what they needed, he’d just have to try and provide. Because he couldn’t go back now.
He’d promised them.
Before that, somehow, he’d felt as though he could still back away from his impulsive, emotive decision to break every rule that surrounded his career. And perhaps, given time, he would have taken that step back, accepted the truth that they were gone and simply let it go. Perhaps.
If Harry and Audrey had not decided to be kind.
They’d thought he was brooding. When he’d turned down Harry and Ginny’s dinner invitations one too many times in order to thrash out his theory by working late in the Unspeakable Library, they’d come to him before work one day full of gentle reassurances and undisguised concern. When Audrey had noted his work turnover had remained below average since his encounter with his parents, she’d suggested seeing a St Mungo’s grief councillor, not realising that his delays were caused by experimentation in the realm of the past; seeing exactly how far he could morph before he could feel from the taut hum against his ears and the grasping tightness around his body told him that the field of passiveness was a frayed thread away from tearing. He never pushed that one step further - he was sure that the Portal would detect an actually broken field and that would probably be the end of his access to the only means he had to save his parents’ lives - but at those time of greatest pressure, he was certain that when he brushed his fingers against the parts of the past all around him, a flower, a wall, a box on a mantle, they did not pass through like smoke as they always had but tickled, just slightly, remotely tingling against his skin.
It was exhilarating. It was terrifying.
He could break the absolute law. He could touch the past.
You do not touch. You do not change. You do not interfere.
He could.
But would he have tried to go that final, enormous, irrevocable step that a fingertip’s flex would invoke? Would his fear of the consequences have overcome his grief in the end?
Maybe. Maybe not.
But that was irrelevant. It became irrelevant on the day that Harry and Audrey had come here to see him, visited him in the home that had once belonged to his father’s family but had now fallen to him and offered him what they thought would be comfort.
Access to the Portal. Private access for up to three hours on weeknights, for as long as he needed it. Why?
To watch his parents. But not to watch them die. To watch them live.
Harry, bless him, had compiled a list as best he could from friends and acquaintances and his own past. The dates and locations of important moments in his parents lives; times when they were happy, times when they were sad, times when they were people just living their lives. Get to know them, Harry had told him. See them as more than a pair of corpses tumbling from the battlements. He hoped it would help.
It had. But not in the way Harry had hoped.
He’d watched his father playing here in this very house as a lonely, isolated child, watched him blossom at Hogwarts in the company of a group of loyal and playful friends. He’d watched his mother, her hair ever changing just as his was, toddle into chairs and fall with a splat over rugs in the house where he had been raised as his Gran, looking young, so young, scooped her up and kissed her bruised knees away with laughter. He’d seen his father’s joy in his work at Hogwarts, his mother’s elation at passing her Auror exams. And then he’d seen them meet.
There had been no fanfare, no fireworks. A simple meeting of the Order of the Phoenix at Grimmauld Place. His mother, endearingly worried, had brought a prank gift of hair tonic for her dishevelled ex-convict cousin. And that cousin’s quiet friend had reassured her, caught her when she stumbled and laughed with her until her awkwardness and nerves subsided. And that most frightening of words - werewolf - entered the conversation, he’d seen his mother take an instinctive step back, seen his father’s expression tighten but then he’d seen glowering in his mother’s face a determination that it took a moment to understand. And then she made a joke about it, he laughed along with her and they were talking again, laughing again, relaxing again and by the end of the evening, they had crouched side by side fighting hysteria as they used the hair tonic to give the large black dog that Sirius Black had become a quite emphatic quiff.
She’d been bothered, he could tell, that his father was a werewolf. She just hadn’t let it get in the way of getting to know him. Of liking him.
And later, of loving him.
He was getting to know them, just as Harry had wanted. And the more he watched, the more he cared.
He lingered now, beyond the time and dates that Harry had given, speculating, exploring their lives at Grimmauld Place, just seeing how they lived day by day. He saw them laughing and joking with their fellow Order members, saw them staying up to joke and mess around with Sirius Black late into the night. He saw the lingering looks they cast almost unconsciously towards each other, saw the way each other’s company made them come alive as they did with no one else. He saw them confiding in each other, drawing in trust, sharing with each other what they shared with no one else.
He saw their first kiss.
His father had been so unsure of himself, of it all, of whether what they were doing was really the best idea. But his mother, oh, she had been so determined. Their feelings, their relationship, tentative at first but undeniable nonetheless, had blossomed, grown and engulfed them both completely.
And once a few months had passed for them, the number of times Teddy had to politely retreat and give them their privacy when they were left alone increased out of all control. There were certain things no son should ever have to witness.
But the joy did not last.
He saw them close up Grimmauld Place, both sorrowful, both grieving at the death of a much-loved cousin and friend. He could see even then that his father was pulling away. He knew they had spent the next year apart, that his father had tried to spare his mother from a life caught in the shadow of his lycanthropy, but no one knew the wheres and whys of their relationship in those troubled times. That secret was lost to their memories alone. Reluctantly, Teddy had abandoned his free ranging and turned back to the notes.
The Hogwarts Hospital Wing. He tailed them outside after their unexpected confrontation, watched them sit quietly together by the lake as his father softly, quietly, willingly gave in. He went to their wedding next, stepping inside the photo on his mantelpiece and learned that the wine stain had been his father’s fault (kissing his mother’s neck from behind while she was holding a full wine glass was apparently not a good idea). They had come back to the house that was now his, the house left to him in his parents will and moved into when he’d finished Hogwarts, and caught in their moment, had whisked each other upstairs. Teddy had discreetly departed. It was around the right time in July and Teddy could most definitely count. No one should have to bear witness to his own conception.
He’d moved on. He’d seen the mingled look of horror and joy, disbelief and terror on his father’s face when she’d broken the news of her pregnancy. He’d seen his father start to lose himself and flee as he faced the death threats and redundancy his wife was suffering after her marriage to him, the stigma she faced from the pregnancy, and shouldered too much unnecessary blame for him to stand. He witnessed the forceful slap his mother had inflicted on his father after he had returned and watched as he placed his hand upon her abdomen and swore on their child’s life - on Teddy - that he would never leave them like that again. He saw them together again as the pregnancy progressed, happy in spite of the world that was falling to pieces around them.
He saw his own birth.
It was messy. And…ow. It made him glad he wasn’t a woman. And the Healer had said that his mother being a Metamorphmagus had made it easier too.
If that was easy… Blimey.
But it had been the moment after, his father wearing the same look of disbelieving joy he’d seen at the wedding, his mother beaming in spite of her exhaustion as they sat side by side on the bed, cuddling their baby, cuddling him… And though he knew he couldn’t have any memory of it, he could almost feel their touch, their love, the press of his mother’s lips against his forehead, the stroke of his father’s hand through his slowly lightening hair…
It was then he’d known.
He loved them.
He’d never known them. But he’d watched them. And the love had crept upon him so gradually, he’d barely realised it was there until now.
They were his parents. And they’d loved him too, he could see it, he could feel it…
He had to save them. He had to.
He had known they couldn’t hear him. He hadn’t cared.
“Mum,” he said softly, addressing the two figures snuggled together with their baby on the bed. “Dad. I’m going to save you. I’m going to give you the life you should have had.” He took a deep, determined breath. “I promise.”
And that was how Teddy Lupin had come to be sitting on the settee of his… his parents… his family home, grasping a sheath full of notes and desperately needing to be a hero, a God, or the luckiest man alive.
He’d got it all worked out. Breaking history had been his first concern, for he knew in order to keep things as they should, there had to bodies for people to find. Harry, he knew, had seen them dead. So had many others. They’d been buried three days later at Godrics Hollow. So there were corpses to be found.
But how?
He had doubted at first. Maybe they really were dead. Maybe he had tried and failed. Maybe the corpses buried in those graves truly did belong to Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks.
But then he had listened to old Bert Croaker.
Albert Croaker was one of the longest serving Unspeakables in the Department and he loved to tell stories. Teddy had always found it a bit of an irony that such a garrulous chap should work in the most secretive part of the Ministry of Magic in a job he was forbidden to talk about beyond the Department itself but that had never hindered Bert for he talked to his colleagues instead, sharing stories of this or that experiment, a rare discovery, the unusual use of a charm or a potion, the subversion of magic and creation of new truth. The Historical Records section had been his dream come true - now at last, everyone wanted him to talk about and share what he saw. And as Teddy had settled at his desk in the office shared by his section one afternoon, compiling his notes from that morning’s expedition to the Death Eater display at the 1994 Quidditch World Cup, Bert had strode in with a massive grin on his face and declared to the world at large, “I knew it!”
“Knew what?” Dennis Creevey had been rather more subdued than usual since returning from his holiday but nonetheless he grinned at Bert as he offered him a cup of coffee from the self-warming pot in one corner.
“Cornelius Fudge.” Bert took a cheery swig of coffee before depositing himself on the edge of Teddy’s mahogany desk. “Faked his death, didn’t he?”
Teddy stared and he wasn’t alone. Exclamations of surprise rose from all corners of the room.
“Never!” The exclamation came from Rose Zeller, a friendly, auburn-haired witch in her early thirties who had taken Teddy under her wing when he had joined the Department as an apprentice straight out of school. “How? I mean he fell dead out of the Floo on his way to the corruption hearing didn’t he? Most of the Ministry saw his body! There were pictures in the Prophet!”
“Wasn’t his body, was it?” Bert was wearing the unmistakable smile of a man who had news to share and knew everyone would want to hear it. “Replication charm. One quick Geminio and he’d made himself a fake corpse and shoved it in the fireplace. Then he downed some Polyjuice and hopped a Portkey to South America. He’s probably still there.”
There were more gasps and exclamations of shock and disgust.
“No!”
“You’re joking!”
“That filthy weasel!”
“How’d he get away with that?” Teddy heard his own voice cut through the disbelief almost without recognising it. His mind was suddenly spinning. Could this be it, what he needed, could this be…? “I mean, couldn’t anyone tell it wasn’t really him?”
Bert glanced over his shoulder, smiling fondly at the currently purple haired young man upon whose desk he was resting. Teddy sometimes found it a little irritating the way the older members of the Division tended to look and treat him like a twelve-year-old nephew they had adopted into their work place, particularly the ones that had known his parents. But if playing up to it got him answers, this was one time that the attitude might be bearable.
He smiled with as much fake but innocent sincerity as he could muster and, wincing with disgust within himself, added a hint of rosyness to his cheeks. Bert beamed at him fondly.
“Ah, young Lupin!” he proclaimed, slapping one hand down on Teddy’s shoulder in a chummy fashion. “That’s the Replication charm for you. Cast it on something and you’ve made yourself a perfect copy of whatever it is you’ve just touched. Oh that copy won’t last forever and it won’t be as pure or carry any magic cast upon it but it’ll do for tricking someone in the short term. But cast it on a person…” He sucked his teeth. “You get a copy of that person, a perfect physical copy, right down to the spots on their brow or the frays in their robes. But it’ll be lifeless. You can’t copy a soul.” He shook his head. “And the Replication charm doesn’t react well to that. The copy should be perfect but it isn’t. It can’t be. And so after about a week or so, the copy will dissolve, break down, until you’ve nothing more than a handful of dust.” He shook his head. “No wonder Mrs Fudge was so adamant that we get him in the ground so quick. Didn’t want to blow his cover, did she? And then of course, when she moved to Rio to get away from all the memories…” He snorted loudly with disdain.
“Portly git.” Dennis proclaimed with feeling and was met with nods of agreement from all around the room. “He’d probably have only got a few months in Azkaban for being a corrupt idiot with a power complex but now he’ll be up for perverting the course of justice too. And after all that blather about promising to face his fate with fortitude. If he hadn’t been so determined to hide the truth about You-Know-Who…”
“Lord Voldemort.” Lucy Brightwell, a blonde witch in her twenties, intervened. It was a running quarrel between the younger and older members of most of the wizarding world about which name exactly it was appropriate to use for a long dead enemy.
“Whatever.” Dennis waved the old argument away. “I assume you’ve shopped him Bert?”
“Sent Rajesh up to Hermione Weasley with a report straight away. I reckon the Aurors may be off to Brazil on a Fudge-hunting expedition in the not too distant. May need to dose them with some Felix Felicis though, it’s a big country. Maybe we should send some up from the lab, eh?”
The others had gathered round Bert, clapping him on the shoulder and congratulating him on this belated piece of justice, but by then Teddy hadn’t been listening. The Replication charm… A perfect but lifeless copy that lasted a week before dissolving… And his parents had been buried after only three days…
The plan had come together after that. He could not take his wand through the Portal to cast the spell himself for the Portal would not permit anyone to enter the past with a wand or any magical alterations to their person; he still remembered the day Lucy had come in with her hair intricately charmed in place for a date after work and had emerged furious from the Portal when the magic of the gate had undone every last securing charm. But there would be wands available to him on the other side, wouldn’t there? His parents had both been holding them…
So that was it. Still settled on the settee, Teddy crinkled his scribbled notes in his hands. All he had to do was enter the past, position himself exactly where his parents were going to die, morph until he broke the field of passiveness, reach out, grab a wand from his parents and pray it worked for him, cast Geminio on both of them and then grab hold of them as he activated his amulet in order to return himself through the Portal to the present.
Not much to go wrong there then…
Harry. God. Luckiest man alive.
None of these was he.
Unless…
Wait…
Bert Croaker slouched against his desk, laughing as he received his plaudits for uncovering the cowardice of Fudge. …the Aurors may be off to Brazil on a Fudge-hunting expedition in the not too distant. May need to dose them with some Felix Felicis though, it’s a big country. Maybe we should send some up from the lab, eh?
Felix Felicis.
Felix Felicis.
Luckiest man alive.
And they had some in the Department’s potions lab. Bert had said so. And Bert would know, Bert talked to everyone, found out everything…
If he could get his hands on one vial, just one…
Then he could do it. He could do it now. He could do it tonight…
Any weeknight, Audrey had said, any weeknight he could use the Portal. He’d gone home and come back before now. No one would question his presence…
Teddy breathed deeply, his eyes drifting to that picture on the mantle, his mind rushing through all he had seen of their life. He could do this. Tonight, he could do this.
Was he ready?
He stared at the picture. Smiling, his parents kissed.
Yes. He was.
Dumping his notes back on the table, Teddy pulled himself to his feet and took a deep, steadying breath.
“Pull yourself together, Lupin,” he scolded himself firmly. “This is it.”
He felt strangely removed from his hand as it reached into the pot over the mantle, grabbed a handful of green powder and hurled it into the fire. Emerald flames leapt high and strong.
And Teddy stepped inside.
“Ministry of Magic!”
And then with a whoosh, he was gone.
No going back.
* * *
“Teddy! Teddy Lupin!”
Victoire Weasley was not in the best of moods.
He’d promised her. He’d promised. He’d smiled and assured her that yes, of course he would come over to her parents’ house on Monday night, he would be waiting right there as soon as she and her parents got back from their week long Congratulations-On-Graduating-From-Hogwarts trip to see Grandmere and Grandpere in France. And though she’d thought he looked a little pale as he met her briefly off the Hogwarts Express, though she’d been a little concerned about the vague tone his letters had taken in the last month or two and the odd looks her parents and Weasley relatives had exchanged whenever his name was mentioned, she’d never for a moment disbelieved him.
Until he’d failed to show up. He hadn’t been waiting. He hadn’t come.
Her papa had tried to tell her that he knew Teddy had a lot on his mind right now, though it wasn’t his place to explain precisely what. But to Victoire, there was no excuse. He’d promised. And he hadn’t done it.
And so, brushing her father aside, she’d grabbed a handful of Floo powder and headed straight over to his house.
He wasn’t in the lounge. Glowering furiously, Victoire bellowed his name again, storming into the kitchen and then the old study before hurtling upstairs. By the time she returned, still boyfriend-less to the hall, her temper had been waning and by the time she’d stepped outside to assure herself he wasn’t in the garden, she had begun to get slightly concerned. Where was he?
Maybe he was working late or had had to go to his Gran’s for some reason. But then, couldn’t he have called and let her know? For a moment, the fleeting, horrible thought crossed her mind that he could be out, out on the town with another girl, a girl he liked better than…
No. No. Teddy wasn’t like that. She knew him. He wasn’t.
And he wouldn’t have broken his promise without good reason either.
A lot on his mind, Papa had said. But what? What was distracting enough to make him forget a solemn promise he’d made to his girlfriend?
Well, he wasn’t here. And neither was the answer. But she needed to hear from him, she needed to know…
A note. She’d leave a note. After all, he’d have to come back sooner or later.
A pile of scribbled on, scruffy paper lay crumpled on the table by the settee. Scrap then. Maybe if she could just find a blank piece…
Victoire lifted the papers. And froze.
For a few moments, she could only stare, her eyes drinking in the words not believing, not comprehending. Then slowly, disbelievingly, her eyes lifted and fixed upon the framed picture over the fireplace.
His parents.
Teddy was going to…
“Oh Teddy,” Victoire heard herself whisper. “Teddy, you idiot, they’ll throw away the key…”
She had to stop him. She had to tell someone, she had to find a way…
Yes. Yes. He’d know what to do.
Stumbling forward, the notes still grasped in her disbelieving hands, Victoire grabbed a handful of Floo powder and hurled it into the fire.
“Number Twelve Grimmauld Place!”