Chapter 1
The days after the battle are a blur. She finds herself comforting the living, burying the dead, and rebuilding her ruined home. Former home. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to see the castle in the same light again. She wishes she never had to see the castle ever again.
It’s hard for her to understand that she’s alive. Harriet was hit by a killing curse. She spoke to Dumbledore. She stood in the train station and debated boarding a carriage. She knew she was dead. Then she wasn’t. Then she was alive and breathing and feeling and hurting and still having to fight. Fight until it was over. Which it is. Now, that is. The horcruxes are destroyed and the Dark Lord Voldemort is dead. She finished the task she was set and yet…Yet she’s still expected to do more.
The Weasleys and Hermione expect her to grieve and mourn their loss of Fred (her Fred). McGonagall expects her to stay and rebuild the castle. Kingsley, the interim minister until election can be held (though she has a feeling he will be elected anyway), expects her to give eulogies and speeches, make appearances and assure foreign leaders that the threat of dark wizards has been neutralized.
Today, it seems that Harriet can add Andromeda Tonks to the list of people holding expectations for her. Barely a week since Harriet’s life ended and began again, she receives a letter asking her to come meet her godson and take him for the day. She wants to refuse. She wants to lock herself away in the Chamber of Secrets and never emerge. She doesn’t want to face the little boy, not even six months old, that she’s made an orphan. How can she bear to face the child whose parents laid down their lives for Harriet? How can she face the mother who lost her daughter because Harriet couldn’t end the fighting quick enough? Then, she thinks of Sirius. Her godfather that she misses straight down to her bones. She thinks of how Sirius was supposed to have been the one to raise her after her parents death and how her life turned out when that didn’t happen. She can’t repeat the mistake her own godfather made just because she wants to be cowardly.
And so, Harriet finds herself walking through the front garden of Andromeda Tonks’ cottage with the same air she walked through the Forbidden Forest, resigned to her fate but willing to sacrifice for her loved ones. Mrs. Tonks doesn’t answer the door on her first knock, or her second, or her third. Finally, Harriet acknowledges the bubbling anxiety that has taken residence in her stomach from the moment she appeared at the front gate. She releases the Elder Wand from its holster, the damn wand that won’t leave her no matter how hard she tries. She lets the icy power of the wand creep through her veins as she creaks the door open and steps inside. The house is eerily silent and still.
“Mrs. Tonks?” Harriet calls out, slowly edging along the wall of the front hall. She sweeps the ground floor but finds no evidence of anyone home. “Andromeda?” The anxiety in her heightens as she climbs the stairs to the next floor, where she assumes the bedrooms are located. The first one she finds holds a nursery. In the crib is the child that must be her godson. Teddy.
Teddy sleeps soundly, eyes moving beneath his lids as he dreams. Harriet can’t help but reach out and stroke the baby’s velvety soft cheek. The child lets out a sleepy sound, causing her to jerk her hand back. When he shows no sign of waking, she makes herself slip back into the hall and continue searching. The next room is void of people, but makes her stop anyway. She drifts her gaze over the unmade bed and haphazardly thrown clothing, as if someone had left in a hurry. The framed photo of Remus and Tonks that sits on the bedside table causes a lump to form in her throat. She leaves the room quickly, almost stumbling in her steps. The final door on the hall stands ajar, allowing her to catch a glimpse of a floral bedspread. She spies a still form on the bed.
Harriet walks quietly, hardly daring to breathe as she enters the master bedroom. Andromeda lays on the bed, seeming to be asleep. The relief she expects to fill her doesn’t come. No, Harriet scans the room and the lump in her throat grows at the sight of an empty potion bottle sitting upon the side table. The bottle sends a jolt of fear down her spine and she scrambles to get to the older witch, grasping her shoulders tightly and shaking.
“Andromeda! Andromeda wake up!” The woman’s head rolls limply on her shoulders, giving no signs of life as Harriet shouts. She presses her fingers into Andromeda’s neck, searching for a pulse. The skin she touches feels like ice. There’s no heartbeat to find.
For the first time she was granted a second chance at this life, Harriet feels tears rolling down her cheeks. A sob tears from her throat and she collapses onto the bed with the corpse of her godson’s grandmother.
Why? Why would Andromeda do this? Why would she do this to Teddy? To Harriet?
She’s not sure how long she cries, but when she comes back to her senses can hear Teddy crying down the hall as well. Harriet sits up, arranging Andromeda on the bed until it looks as if she’s sleeping. Wiping her face, she tries to think. What is she going to do?
First things first. She draws her wand once more and summons her patronus, sending it off to Kingsley with a request for him and at least two aurors to come to the cottage as soon as possible. Now, Teddy.
It catches her eyes as she turns to leave the room. The piece of parchment beside the potion’s vial that she had missed upon her first examination. She’s quick to snatch it up, unrolling it to find a neatly written note. The elegance of the written words painfully reminds her of the letters she used to receive from Sirius. It’s easy to forget that Andromeda was her godfather’s cousin.
Harriet,
I wish to first tell you that I am sorry. I’m sorry for what has happened to you in your short life. It is more than most fully trained wizards would be able to handle, let alone a child.
I’m even more sorry for what I am doing to you now. I will not ask you to understand, but I will ask you to forgive me. To not hold my actions against Teddy.
I have never claimed to be brave. Cunning and sly, yes. But I do not possess the bravery to continue facing the world each day. Not without Ted. Especially not without Nymphadora. If I were to stay, I fear that I would do Teddy a disservice as his guardian. That I would look at him and see all that I have lost instead of what I have gained in him. You, though, you possess bravery in spades, Harriet. I need you to be brave now. I need you to teach Teddy to be brave. I need you to take Teddy and love him, raise him as yours. Do for him what we all failed to do for you.
I’m sorry for many things, Harriet. But I am not sorry for leaving, only for the pain it may cause others. Thank you for making Teddy a better world to grow up in.
I shall see you again,
Andromeda
It’s as if her chest caves in and cracks open at the same time. And she can do nothing about it, not when she can still hear her godson squalling from his crib. Her moves are automatic. She holsters her wand and pockets the letter, closing the door behind her as she leaves the room. Numbness seeps into her bones, reminiscent of how it felt waking up alive in the clearing of the Forbidden Forest with Narcissa Malfoy, of all people, lying for her. She robotically lifts the baby from the crib, cradling him awkwardly against her chest. She’s never held a child before. Never been close enough to even attempt such a feat. She lowers them both in the rocking chair that sits in the corner, staring off into nothingness as she attempts to comfort the boy. Her godson.
Harriet has worn and shed too many titles in the past week. From the Harri Potter: Girl-Who-Lived to Harriet Potter: Woman-Who-Conquered. From girlfriend to fiancee to nothing at all. From godmother to mother. She stares down at Teddy, who has finally stopped crying and is blinking up at her with green eyes that mirror her own in every way. She watches the color shift to blue then silver then brown and then land on green once again. A ghost of a smile pulls at her lips as she stares down at the little wizard, her son.
She would end the world for him.
-
Teddy grows faster than Harriet can imagine. By the time his first birthday rolls around, she feels as if she’s experienced an entire lifetime and a blink of an eye all at once. Her and Teddy have a small party in their home, just the two of them and Kreacher gathered around the kitchen table at Number 12 Grimmauld Place. Her little boy doesn’t quite understand how to blow out the candles, but he definitely enjoys smashing his slice of cake. Harriet makes sure to take tons of pictures.
She had approached Kreacher after gaining custody of and adopting Teddy. The house elf had remained at Hogwarts after the battle, trying to find his place among the other elves, but she knew that she would need help. And a home. She couldn’t find it in herself to live in the house that Andromeda had died in, which left her one option: the townhouse left to her by her godfather. Kreacher had been wary of the arrangement, originally unsure of serving the ‘halfblood heir of blood traitor Master Sirius.’ Harriet had then offered to free him and pay him for his work, but Kreacher had seemed so offended by the notion that she was scared that he may have a stroke. In the end, their odd family of three had taken up residence in the former headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix and set about making it a home, or returning it to its former ‘glory’ as Kreacher insisted. Anytime Harriet found herself pulled away to attend meetings or events by Kingsley or McGonagall, she found herself trusting the elf with her son more than she did anyone else. It should have been isolating, not interacting with her friends, but it was a relief if anything. Everytime she was in their vicinity, she felt her heart rate pick up and her anxiety rising, picturing herself in battle or starving in a tent or wearing a horcrux around her neck. She’d had to put distance between them if for nothing else than not having her PTSD effect Teddy.
It’s easier to mourn her losses without Ron and Hermione. Ron reminds her too much of Fred, her funny and caring and ambitious Fred. The man that had held her together before she’d struck off on the hectic hunt with Hermione and Ron, then still held her tight and asked her to marry him when they reunited the night of the battle. Seeing Ron’s red hair and blue eyes leaves her dreaming of what could have been. It does her no good to dwell on dreams.
So, while the Weasleys cling to one another and their remaining family, Harriet clings to hers. If her family was an infant and a house elf, well that was her business and no one else’s. She loves Teddy and she cares for Kreacher. They are all that each other needs, or at least that’s what Harriet tells herself.
It’s mid-April when she finally makes herself enter Sirius’ old bedroom, trying to distract herself from the upcoming anniversary of the battle. Kreacher and Teddy were downstairs, the house elf entertaining her son by floating his animated dinosaur toys around the sitting room. Hearing Teddy shriek with laughter, Harriet tries to hold the warm feeling of her son’s happiness in her chest as she pushes open the door to the bedroom. It’s exactly as she left it during the horcrux hunt, still ransacked from where Snape tore the room apart. She might be thankful to the man for giving her the vital information no one else would, but his wrongs will forever outweigh his rights. She might not have wished the wizard dead, but she wasn’t going to mourn him now that he was. She had enough deaths on her conscience without adding the man who made her years at Hogwarts miserable over some obsessive crush he had on her dead mother.
Taking a deep breath, Harriet enters the room fully, categorizing the contents in her mind. She decides to start with stripping the bed and then go from there.
She works for a couple of hours, cleaning the bedroom and sorting Sirius’ possessions into piles of broken and unbroken, keep or not keep. After making considerable progress on the mess, she breaks for lunch with her boys and then puts Teddy down for his afternoon nap. Kreacher shoos her out of the kitchen when she attempts to wash their lunch dishes, so she forces herself back up the stairs to confront the remainder of her self assigned task.
It’s as she’s digging under the bed for empty whiskey bottles that she finds a shoe box. The box doesn’t seem to be very old and the lid bulges with the amount of items within. She shimmies out from under the bed, sitting back on her heels and staring at the box in a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. Slowly, she opens it and is greeted by mounds of pictures, magazines, newspaper articles, and more. Not exactly what she thought she was going to find in her godfather’s room. Pulling out the pages, she sorts through them. She’s even more surprised when she finds that all of the contents contain mentions and pictures of the same man, some famous muggle it seems. Harriet feels as if she recognizes the man, but she’s not completely sure why. What sort of obsession did Sirius have with the man? The box and contents are fairly new, so this must have been an interest he developed after Azkaban. But why?
At the bottom of the bottom is a piece of parchment that seems much older than everything else. Harriet unrolls it, a pit settling in her stomach. Surprisingly, she recognizes the handwriting. Her mother. She’s only seen her mother’s writing once before, in a letter written to Sirius that she found during the war, but she had ingrained the loopy writing into her brain. The letter is dated just a few days after Harriet’s birth.
Padfoot,
James finished brewing the potion and we did the parentage test. It’s official, the Heiress of House Potter is the daughter of a muggle.
Jamie says he doesn’t care, that Harriet is his daughter in all ways that count, I still just feel as if I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which is why I’m writing to you. James was adamant that we keep the truth about Harri a secret, never mentioning Tony in any capacity, but I figured that you deserved to know, at least. If you’re going to be her godfather, you need to have all the facts. So, I’m laying it out for you. I’m trusting you with my child, Siri. Don’t ever make me regret it.
You know that Jamie and I moved up the wedding because of my pregnancy. You know that we weren’t sure if the baby was James’. What we bent the truth on was how Harriet came to be. It wasn’t a wild night between me, James, and a random muggle. It was a week-long affair I had with a very famous muggle after James and I broke off our engagement. We had a fight about Sev. He had written to me, wanting to reconnect. I wanted to write him back. James did not. The argument was massive, Pads. A complete blow out. It ended with Jamie calling off the wedding and me throwing the ring in his face.
I met Tony in a bar in London three nights later, drowning my sorrows in cheap liquor. I didn’t recognize him at first, not until our third night together. Then I realized that he was a famous American named Tony Stark, not a university student named Anthony. He is a muggle weapons manufacturer and has quite the reputation.
Jamie and I reconciled not long after Tony and I parted ways, him heading off for places unknown and me for a bottle of tequila and my couch. It wasn’t until a few weeks after James and I sorted our issues that we found out about the baby. I think I always knew what the potion results would say and James did too.
The question is, do you still want to be Harriet’s godfather knowing what you do now? James may say that she’s his, but not everyone will see it that way. We’re in a time of war as well. Harri is already in danger because of my blood status, let alone if others were to find out about Tony. I need you to really consider this, Sirius. You know what is asked of godparents and I need you to fully understand what you’re signing up for. No matter what you decide, Jamie and I still love you and you’ll always be Harri’s Uncle Pads.
Talk to you soon, Siri,
Lily
Harriet sits on the floor of her deceased godfather’s bedroom in shock for what feels like hours, unable to process the words before her. How can this be true? Tony Stark? The man in the pictures is Tony fucking Stark? How is this her life?
Eventually, Kreacher interrupts her panicked contemplation. He has Teddy in tow and both are demanding her attention. The distraction allows her to wave her wand, sending all of the photos and article clippings back into her box. She drops the box and letter into her bedroom before joining the two in the sitting room for afternoon playtime. She tries to let Teddy’s giggles and Kreacher’s halfhearted grumbles occupy her mind, but she’s not sure that she will be able to think of anything other than the fact that she’s not truly a Potter ever again.