Chapter 1
“You are a very odd wizard.”
It was the second time in minutes that Griphook had said as much, and Harry was losing patience. His next words sprang from him with less polish than he would have liked. “I need to break into a Gringotts vault.”
Once he had named the vault, the goblin seemed more curious. He looked slantwise at Harry. “If there was a wizard of whom I would believe that they did not seek personal gain, it would be you.”
Harry felt that there was an undertone to the words; not just another way in which Griphook considered him odd, but like he was trying to tell him something. Like there was something… particular about the Lestrange vault that he ought to know.
Were they on the wrong track? Was there nothing of note in Bellatrix’s vault after all? He couldn’t imagine that there would be nothing, though… and how else would the goblin remember the entire contents? No. Harry, distracted by the prickling of his scar, the progress Voldemort was making towards the Elder Wand, Ollivander’s presence in the next room, and the grief of losing Dobby, was no doubt imagining the undercurrent. Griphook was, after all, a goblin; clever, but tricky.
He left the goblin to rest, moving dreamlike into Ollivander’s room for the next set of questions. The interaction itched, initially, like some half-forgotten thing that he needed to remember, to take out and examine later; but in the weeks of planning that followed, the hours upon hours of plotting the heist of the generation, this tiny, seemingly insignificant detail faded from his mind.
It was Remus, in the end, who reminded him, arriving in a flurry of joy and volume. “It’s a boy! We’ve named him Ted, after Dora’s father! Harry, you’ll be godfather?”
“M-me?”
“You, yes, of course - Dora quite agrees, no one better - like Sirius was to you, of course, uncle and godfather, traditional -”
“I - yeah - blimey…”
Harry toasted to Teddy, his godson - a baby, the reality of which Harry was woefully inexperienced with - and let Bill corner him once Lupin had left, two drinks the merrier and in just as much of a hurry. He reflected that he would be equally as reckless a godfather to Teddy Lupin as Sirius had been to him if he carried on the way he was. And then Remus’s wording floated through his mind.
“Uncle?” he whispered. He squinted. Sirius and Remus might both have been considered his uncles, had he had a normal childhood; they were, after all, his dad’s best friends, and James was an only child with comparatively elderly parents. But he, Harry, was hardly one of Remus’s or Tonks’s best friends... The only way he would be considered Teddy’s uncle would be by virtue of being his godfather.
So what was traditional?
“Lestrange…” Harry said aloud. The name had stirred something in his memory; he knew it from somewhere, and it gave him an odd, creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach.
“They’re in Azkaban,” said Sirius shortly. “Bellatrix and her husband Rodolphus. Mad that y- that Bellatrix could be related to Andromeda. She was my favourite cousin… My sweet old mother blasted her off because she married a Muggle-born, Ted Tonks.”
“You’re related to Tonks?”
“We - yeah.” Sirius turned back to the ancient tapestry on the wall. “Mum blasted me off after I ran away from home… I hated the pure-blood mania. My idiot brother, soft enough to believe them… that’s him. He was murdered by Voldemort. Or on Voldemort’s orders, more likely; I doubt Regulus was ever important enough to be killed by Voldemort in person. But he followed cousin Bella into the ranks… ”
Harry, swallowing down the bitter sting of grief, wishing that the time he had been able to spend with Sirius had been somewhere other than his childhood home, blinked himself back to the present.
The encounter had struck him, at the time, as no more odd than anything else in that week of chaos; of finding out that there was an Order of the Phoenix, and Dumbledore was hiding things from him, and the Prophet was targeting him, and he might be expelled. His reality had warped sufficiently that he simply existed, surprised to learn that Sirius was cousin to Bellatrix Lestrange, related to Draco Malfoy, and more of a brother to his own father, but not able to fully comprehend any of it.
Now, he frowned over it. We are related to Tonks? Is that what he had been going to say? What about the other slip, with Bellatrix and Andromeda?
No. He was overthinking Sirius’s stuttering. He was, after all, talking about something that hurt him much more than he’d ever let on before; the way he talked about his brother gave that away. “Soft,” Sirius had called him. Like he had once loved him.
Harry thought, again, about R.A.B., the anonymous initials. R.A.B., who had turned out to be his godfather’s brother. It fitted the story Sirius had told him about Regulus. It fitted the picture Harry had created in his head of the man Regulus might have become, if he’d lived.