Title: Remnants
Characters: Andromeda, Remus, Dora, Teddy
Rating: PG
Length: 4340
Summary: The epilogue gave us hints of Teddy/Victoire and Rose/Scorpius. This is the development of those relationships through the eyes of Andromeda.
Chapter Seven: Teddy
“Is labor always this damn painful?” Dora asked me with a wince as she leaned back against the pillows.
“Yes dear. Squeezing a small human out of a comparatively miniscule opening is bound to cause some discomfort.”
“I think I understand the mechanics of childbirth by now, mum.” She winced again and took a rather ragged breath. “What the hell inspired Molly to do this seven times?”
“Six; the twins were one pregnancy, and I’ve often wondered that myself.”
She gasped sharply and clutched at her stomach, emitting a gentle cry.
“Alright Dora, give me one more push and I think we’ll be done here.”
She nodded, her face set. I didn’t like to see my little girl in pain, but I knew she could deal with it; as an Auror she had been trained to put up with much worse than labor cramps.
It was only a week or two after receiving the news of Ted’s death, so none of us had been in particularly jovial moods. I spent most of those two weeks holed up in my bedroom, not really wanting company, and Dora had spent most of that time resting in bed in anticipation of her upcoming labor while Remus spent most of his time making sure that she was comfortable.
It was around midnight a few weeks into March. I had been sleeping quite soundly when I was jarred out of my sleep by a loud knock on my bedroom door. I pulled on a robe, lurched to the door, and opened it to find a slightly panicking Remus standing there.
“Remus…What-?”
“It’s Dora! She was having these cramps and they won’t stop and I think that she-”
“Oh, I understand. She’s going into labor.”
He nodded rapidly, with a rather wild look in his eyes. I sighed to myself; Remus was going to be one of those, wasn’t he? I’ve delivered a lot of babies, and men never fail to be completely and utterly freaked out by how it’s done.
It amuses me how men fancy themselves to be so tough, and pride themselves on their insect killing skills and their Quidditch playing, broom fixing abilities; but then, when its time for the baby to come, they become absolutely terrified. Luckily I knew how to handle that sort of thing by now.
“Remus,” I said efficiently, “I need you to get me a small tub of warm water, some cloths, and a bowl of crushed ice.”
I thought that he would be pleased to have something to do, but instead he blinked at me uncomprehendingly, and swayed slightly on the spot. I sighed once more, took him by his arm, led him downstairs, and repeated my instructions, twice. After the second repetition he nodded somewhat spastically, and walked into the wall. He looked rather surprised to see the wall there, but then righted himself and managed to make it into the kitchen without sustaining any major injuries.
I suppressed a laugh at his expense, and made my way into their bedroom.
“Mum,” Dora sighed with relief as she saw me, obviously nearly as freaked out as Remus by this whole going into labor thing. I gave her quick hug and gently stroked her hair off of her forehead.
“Just lie down dear; I’ll take care of everything,” I reassured her as I kissed her gently and helped her lay back onto the pillows behind her.
It was a fairly standard delivery; in fact, it went much more easily than most. The average delivery lasted anywhere from six hours to over a day, but Dora’s only lasted for only three. However, to her, it must have seemed like an eternity.
With one last push the baby finally came out. Remus-who had been hovering rather anxiously behind me-rushed over to her and put his hands around her shoulders as she panted with exhaustion.
I carried the baby over to the small tub of warm water Remus bought in at my request, and gently cleaned him off with one of the cloths, also bought in by Remus.
I held the now clean little boy in my arms. I decided then and there that he was the second most adorable baby I had ever seen (Dora being the first), and I’m not saying that just because he’s my grandson; I was utterly charmed by him.
“Erm, Andromeda?”
I was pulled out of my rapt contemplation of my newly born grandson, and looked up to see Remus and Dora watching me expectantly.
I walked back to the bed and placed him reluctantly into Dora’s arms.
“A boy,” Dora murmured. She and Remus were both staring at Teddy just as raptly as I had been. I knew the looks on their faces-they were the looks of utter shock and delight that all first time parents had when they realized that they had somehow created this tiny being.
I remember that when I first had Dora I was utterly mesmerized by her, of course, five minutes later this mesmerization turned to fear when I realized that I had absolutely no idea of how to raise a child, but that’s beside the point.
“What shall we call him?” Dora asked Remus softly.
He considered it for a moment.
"Let’s call him Ted, Teddy, after your father.”
Dora stared at him for a moment, and then she smiled dreamily.
“Yes, little Teddy Lupin,” she murmured as she ran a gentle hand through his hair.
She and Remus looked up at me.
“What do you think, mum?” she asked me softly.
I walked swiftly over to the bed and pulled her into a tight hug.
“Thank you Dora,” I told her quietly and then looked over her shoulder, “and you Remus.”
The three of us grinned rather stupidly at each other for a couple of seconds, and then Dora gasped.
“His hair just changed color!” she looked at Remus and I delightedly, and then laughed with joy. “He’s a metamorphagus!”
“Are you sure of that, Dora? It could be a trick of the light,” said Remus.
“Mum?” she asked.
I lifted him gently out of her arms and held him up to the light. Just as the light hit him his hair changed from a dark blonde color to a bright shade of blue.
I turned and grinned at them.
“He’s a metamorphagus alright; Dora’s hair was changing colors the minute she was born.”
Dora was exceptionally pleased.
“I know that when he goes to his first job interviews I’ll let him go with whatever hair color he wants,” she said with a slight smirk in my direction, obviously referring to the time we had argued over her intention to attend her interview for admission into the Auror training program with long, lime green hair.
I looked over her shoulders and raised my eyebrows imploringly at Remus. He shook his head fervently and made a rapid cutting sort of gesture with his hands as if to say “don’t worry; I’ll won’t let it happen.” I grinned at him and then turned back to Dora.
“Whatever you want dear.”
She scowled slightly, obviously rather annoyed by my refusal to take the bait, and pulled Teddy back into her arms. She turned back to Remus.
“Do you think he ought to have godparents?” she asked him.
“There’s no reason why he shouldn’t,” he replied.
They sat with thoughtful expressions on their faces for a minute or two. Remus finally seemed to arrive at a decision.
“Harry?” he asked her.
“Seems about right,” she responded with a grin.
“I’ll go to Bill’s and Fleur’s right now and run it by him.”
He kissed her quickly, promised that he wouldn’t be gone long, and disapparated. Once he was gone I slid onto the bed beside Dora. She leaned against me and let one of her hands play gently through Teddy’s hair.
“I love you mum,” she murmured to me before falling asleep.
The next two and a half months were the happiest we had had in quite a long time. It seemed that, during this time, everything might turn out fine for us. Ted was gone, and I had to come to terms with that, but beside the unfortunate reality of his gaping absence, we were happy. Dora and Remus were adapting quite well to parenthood, and I just loved having the three of them around-I don’t know how I could have functioned with an empty house.
However, as those wonderful two and a half months came to an end, we received word through the communication system put in place by the Order that fighters were mobilizing at Hogwarts for an expected attack on it by Voldemort’s full forces.
Remus and Dora had a brief argument before he left; she wanted to go along and fight with him, and he, like me, knew that it wasn’t safe for her to go with Bellatrix there. Of course, she was offended by the implication that she couldn’t take Bella if she had to, but Remus finally managed to convince her to stay with me and Teddy.
“Dora, listen, I do not doubt your abilities as an Auror, but the fact of the matter is that people who Bellatrix want dead don’t tend to stay alive for a very long time. You’re a wonderful Auror, but then, so were Frank and Alice Longbottom.”
Here he paused momentarily to see if he had gotten through to her. Deciding that he hadn’t, he continued on.
“If you go, there is a very strong chance that you will not survive, if I go, there is also a chance that I will not survive, but I have the benefit of not having a crazy woman on the hunt for me. If we both go, there is a chance that neither of us will make it, and I would much prefer not to orphan our son.”
She scowled at him defiantly, but then, after a moment or two of thought, sighed in defeat.
"I know you’re right,” she admitted reluctantly.
He nodded, gave me a brief hug, and motioned Dora towards the door. She followed him outside; obviously they weren’t comfortable saying-well “expressing” may be the better word here-their goodbyes in front of me. I was actually perfectly fine with that, since, even though they had been married for nearly a year, I was still having trouble dealing with the fact that my son-in-law was only four years younger than me.
Once he was gone, Dora settled on the opposite end of the sofa from me. We stared at the fire and listened to the minutes tick by on the kitchen clock as we waited for news, any news, of the proceedings at Hogwarts.
After an hour of this, during which Dora became increasingly restless, she sprang up from the sofa and swung a cloak over her shoulders.
“Dora, what are you doing?”
“I have to go mum.”
“What?”
“I have to go after Remus. What if something happens to him?-I need to be there.”
“No Dora, the two of you expressly agreed that he would go and you would stay with Teddy.”
She turned to look at me, her eyes were huge and scared, and her fingers shook as she fumbled at the fastenings.
“I have to go. He’s my husband, I can’t just let him run off to battle and sit here twiddling my thumbs while something terrible could be happening to him. Please, mum, try to understand,” she whispered.
“I do understand, believe me, I understand more than you can ever know. But what you need to understand is that you are a mother, and your responsibility to your child trumps your responsibility to your husband, no matter how much that hurts.”
“I know that you’re afraid of what might happen if that Bellatrix catches me on unawares, and to be honest, so am I. But if something was to happen to Remus, and I wasn’t there with him, I would never be able to forgive myself.”
I knew that there was nothing I could say that would keep her from going, so I nodded, and pulled her into a tight hug, hoping for all the world that if I hugged her tightly enough she wouldn’t be able to leave. After about a minute, she reached back and gently disentangled my arms from around her.
She smiled sadly at me, and gave Teddy a kiss goodbye.
“Be good for grandma, Teddy,” she whispered. She looked at him intently as if hoping to burn his image into her mind, and then put him gently into my arms.
She was out the door before either of us could say another word to each other, and as I watched the door swing closed behind her, I knew that she would never open that door again.
As I sat down and attempted to fight off the lump I could feel rising in my throat, I felt a gentle tug at my hair. I looked down in surprise to see that Teddy had wrapped a fat little fist around a few strands of my hair, and was now happily gurgling as he tugged at them. I gently disentangled my hair from his hand and held him tightly against me.
“Looks like it’s just you and me kid,” I murmured as I felt his tiny fist close once more around a few strands of my hair.
When Dora was born, I was terrified by the prospect of raising a child. When Dora was killed, I was terrified by the prospect of raising Teddy alone. If there was anything that I felt less prepared for than raising a child by myself, it was raising a boy by myself; I knew absolutely nothing about boys other than that they love Quidditch and talking about broomstick models.
Luckily for me, Teddy was one of those children who seemed to have been born well-behaved. He was quiet and very well behaved in public. His toddler-hood was just as easy, he threw a grand total of two tantrums during this period, and neither of those lasted longer than five minutes. Usually when he wanted something he would simply tug on my skirt and give me a one word description of whatever it was that he wanted.
He was a wonderful little boy. Other little boys acted like little hellions; running around screaming while their young parents sighed over how well-behaved their little six year-old little monsters were. Teddy was not only well-behaved, but he also seemed to be highly disapproving of that sort of child.
I, of course, was not the only adult figure in Teddy’s life; he absolutely adored Harry. This was a bit of a struggle for me; I trusted Harry very much and quite liked him, but it was difficult for me to let Teddy out of my sight.
However, my main fear about raising Teddy was not that I would screw him up, but it was the anticipation of the questions I knew that I would have to answer.
When Dora was small I had no idea how to answer her when she asked me why she only seemed to have one pair of grandparents. I didn’t even tell her about Bellatrix and Narcissa until she was seven, and I would have liked to have waited even longer.
I had been running errands in Diagon Alley with Dora, when all of the sudden Narcissa came into my line of vision. She was by herself, and when she saw us she stopped short and stared. I stared back, neither of us knowing what to do. Narcissa solved the issue by gathering herself to her full height, and assuming the expression that Ted always referred to as the “stick up the arse pureblood glare” and strode past us without a word.
Dora was a smart little girl, and she realized that something important had just happened. However, she didn’t bring it up until later that night at the dinner table.
“Mummy, who was that lady we saw in Diagon Alley? She looked like you.”
I paused, fork halfway to my mouth, and looked up at Ted. I knew that Ted did not approve of the fact that I hadn’t told Dora about my family.
Ted met my eyes and gave a rather blank sort of look that clearly told me that he was not going to help me out of this one.
I put my fork and knife down onto my plate, threaded my fingers together, and placed my hands on the table.
“Well, Dora, that was my sister.”
“You have a sister?” she asked me, genuinely shocked.
“Erm, yes, I actually have two sisters.”
“Why don’t we ever see them?”
We were around Ted’s siblings rather a lot, and Dora was very fond of them, so the idea that she had two aunts whom she had never met must have been an odd one for her.
“Well Dora,” I began hesitantly, looking imploringly at Ted; he shot me the same blank sort of look and took a bite of his chicken, “my sisters are very angry with me and don’t want to talk to me.”
She chewed seriously, obviously giving this piece of information some serious thought.
“What about your mummy and daddy?-Are they angry with you too?”
“Yes. Very angry.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t like daddy.”
“How could anyone not like daddy?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“That’s silly,” she scoffed.
“Yes, Dora I know.”
Luckily for me, Dora became tired of that particular line of conversation, and began to tell Ted a very in depth story about a puffskein she had seen in Diagon Alley.
I knew that I couldn’t do that with Teddy. I knew I couldn’t keep it from him. With Teddy I had the advantage of being on speaking terms with Narcissa, which made the inevitable explanation of my family a bit less difficult. It was the questions about why he had no parents that I truly dreaded.
He knew that they were dead of course, although I wasn’t entirely sure that he understood the full implications of the word “dead,” it was a difficult concept for young children to wrap their minds around. I knew that Harry had told him a bit, but they never got very in depth. We finally discussed it when he was about five.
“Granny,” he began “why are my mummy and daddy dead? Harry said that they died in the war.”
“Well, yes, Harry was right; they did die in the war.”
“But why?”
This was the hard part. How do you explain to a five year-old that his mother died simply because one woman wanted her dead? How do you explain a war to a five year-old? I decided that I wouldn’t go into Bella or the whole pure-blood issue right now; I’d explain that to him when he was a bit older.
“Because, bad people wanted to take over, and people like your parents, and Harry, didn’t want that to happen. They were killed trying to keep the bad guys from winning.”
“Harry said that his mummy, daddy and godfather are dead too.”
“Yes, they died fighting the same people.”
Teddy nodded seriously and went back to his soup. After contemplating this piece of information for a couple of minutes, he completely changed the subject and began discussing with me the merits of having a kneazle around the house.
When the time came that it was appropriate to discuss the war, and my family with Teddy on a little more of an in-depth basis, he already had a general idea of what my family was like. This was mostly due to Narcissa’s quest to reclaim our sisterhood. As a further result of this, Teddy was exposed to the Malfoys rather a lot, and astoundingly, he was quite fond of them.
He would become genuinely excited when he knew that “Aunty Cissy” was coming by-something which made Harry rather uncomfortable despite his knowledge that Narcissa mostly harmless. Teddy didn’t like Lucius, and whenever he was around Lucius he would always ask me why Aunty Cissy’s husband was so mean. I told him that Lucius had always been like that, and advised him to ignore it. Lucius was too afraid of me to be outright nasty to Teddy, but Teddy was a very perceptive little boy and picked up on Lucius’ hostility quite easily.
Teddy was never overly close to Draco. Draco always seemed as if he was very closed off, very unwilling to get close to people. He certainly seemed fond of me and Teddy, but that was as far as it went.
Draco’s wife, Astoria, was never as vehement about pureblood distinctions as her in-laws were. She obviously put some sort of importance on the fact that she was a pureblood, and never would have considered marrying a non-pureblood, but this never extended to her perception of Teddy and I.
In fact, she was quite fond of Teddy; she thought that he was utterly adorable and always had a little present waiting for him. I quite liked Astoria, but then, I was fond of nearly anyone who was fond of Teddy.
However, of his Malfoy side of the family, Teddy’s favorites were “Aunty Cissy,” and Draco’s son Scorpius. Scorpius too seemed to adore Teddy. That wasn’t much of a surprise. Children of about Scorpius’ age seemed to universally adore Teddy. Molly had Teddy and I around quite frequently, and all of her grandchildren seemed to be just as crazy about Teddy as Scorpius was.
Harry’s children were particularly fond of him. When Teddy first realized that Harry was going to have children of his own he became very upset. He knew that, if Harry had children of his own, those children would always cone before him in Harry’s affections.
When Teddy’s despair reached the one week mark, I explained what he was feeling to Harry, who immediately put down what he was doing and came back with me to speak with Teddy. He sat down with Teddy (who had been sulking in his bedroom), and told him that the fact that he had his own children in no way meant that he cared for Teddy any less.
Ginny, who was also very upset when she heard how Teddy was feeling, came by when Harry left to reiterate that no matter how many children she and Harry had together, Teddy would always be a part of their family.
Harry and Ginny spent the next couple of days with Teddy, and when Ginny went into labor Harry took Teddy along with him to the hospital in order to firmly drive home the point that Teddy was a permanent member of their family.
They had Teddy present at the births of all of their children; he was even allowed to hold them and help out with the naming process. I knew that if the dead had any way of monitoring the actions of the living, James, Remus, and Sirius would all be exceptionally pleased by this.
James, Albus, and Lily grew to regard Teddy as a kind of older brother, and whenever we visited the Potters we were greeted by shrieks of: “Mummy, Daddy, Teddy’s here!” They would then proceed to launch themselves at him.
Ron and Hermione’s children were nearly as fond of him as Harry’s, and the rest of Molly’s grandchildren all regarded Teddy as a bonafide member of the family.
The only snag in all of this was the animosity between the Weasleys and the Malfoys. The Potter-Weasley clans were all rather disturbed by how close Teddy was to the Malfoys, and an unpleasant silence would always fill the room whenever Teddy mentioned any of the Potters or Weasleys around the Malfoys. Luckily, Teddy was always amused by this animosity, and never paid much attention to it.
His childhood went by so easily, and so happily, that it seemed like no time at all had passed before his Hogwarts letter arrived.
I admit that I was a bit of a wreck. I didn’t want my little Teddy to go to school, and have to deal with people, and teachers without me. While I didn’t doubt Teddy’s people skills, I absolutely hated that he would be out of my sight for months at a time.
Harry came with us to King’s Cross, of course, and Teddy spent most of the car ride there talking to Harry at a mile a minute about Quidditch, classes, Houses, and everything that a first-year could possibly want to know. When the train finally pulled up he was nearly bursting with excitement.
Teddy boarded the train, and Harry and I watched together as it sped away into the distance. Harry was grinning proudly and I was fighting my initial reaction of bursting into tears. Harry noticed my slight distress-by now, after we had practically raised an eleven year-old child together, he was able to read my emotions quite well-and struck up a conversation in an attempt to avert my thoughts from their current state of distress.
“So what House do you reckon he’ll be in?”
“Ravenclaw,” I said without having to give it even a moment of thought. His entire family was a very Ravenclaw one. Ted had been in Ravenclaw, I had nearly been put into Ravenclaw, but was put into Slytherin after begging the Sorting Hat, Remus had always teetered on the Ravenclaw edge of Gryffindor, and Dora told me that the hat had considered making her a Ravenclaw before finally landing on Hufflepuff.
Harry considered it for a moment.
“Yeah, seems about right,” he agreed. We smiled at each other. “Care to grab some lunch?”
“That sounds lovely, dear.” We walked together back to the car, and I drove us down to the Leaky Cauldron.
Despite my tendency towards over-protection, despite my worry, and despite the fact that I wouldn’t be seeing Teddy until December, I knew that everything would be alright.