Chapter Text
The problem with peace was that it always sounded like something else first.
A kettle that almost boiled. A floorboard that almost creaked. The soft, steady thrum of Teddy’s feet on the stairs as he sprinted up them like the world was ending and he had personally scheduled it.
Harry didn’t look up from the counter. He kept his hand on the chipped mug he’d been washing for the past thirty seconds—an absurd, stubborn commitment to normality—until the door to the kitchen exploded inward.
Teddy Lupin barreled in like a small meteor. His hair was a bright, defiant shade of turquoise today, sticking up at the crown as if it had been in a duel and won. His cheeks were flushed. His fingers were stained gold.
Harry’s stomach dropped. “Teddy,” he said, very carefully. “Why are your hands… like that.”
Teddy beamed, proud as if he’d invented hands. “Harry,” he announced, drawing out the word the way he did when he wanted to sound older than he was, “I have discovered something extremely important.”
“That’s never good,” Harry muttered.
“It’s very good.” Teddy climbed onto a chair and leaned over the table like he was about to present evidence to the Wizengamot. “So! I was in that room I’m not supposed to go in—”
Harry closed his eyes.
“—and I found this cool box. And it was locked, but it didn’t stay locked, because it recognized my blood.”
Harry’s eyes snapped open. “What.”
Teddy blinked, as if surprised this detail had caught Harry’s attention out of the entire sentence.
“You know,” Teddy said patiently. “Because I’m a Black. I’m like… a little Black.”
“You are not ‘a little Black.’ You are a Lupin and a Tonks and a menace,” Harry said, but his throat was already going tight. “Show me your hands.”
Teddy held them up obediently, palms out. The gold wasn’t paint. It wasn’t glitter. It clung to Teddy’s skin in tiny, granular flecks, catching the light like ground-up stars.
Harry didn’t like how it caught the light. He didn’t like how it looked as if it wanted to be noticed. And he really didn’t like that Teddy was holding his hands over a small cauldron.
On the table sat one of those “learner’s kits” Andromeda kept buying Teddy—supposedly safe, supposedly idiot-proof, designed for children to brew ridiculous things like “Rainbow Bubbles” and “Mildly Itchy Elixir” without harm.
The cauldron was bubbling anyway. Not violently. Not yet. Just enough to announce, I’m here.
“Teddy,” Harry said, and he forced calm into his voice the way you forced a lid onto a boiling pot. “What did you put in there.”
Teddy’s mouth worked. He did not answer immediately, which was answer enough. “It was… an experiment,” Teddy said finally. “I wanted to see what would happen. Because what if it makes it better.”
“What if it makes it explode,” Harry replied.
Teddy looked offended, as if explosions were a rude stereotype.
Harry stepped forward. The hair at the back of his neck prickled. His wand was in his pocket. He didn’t pull it. He didn’t want to scare Teddy. He wanted, instead, to wind time back five minutes and tell himself to check on the child before the child decided to invent a new branch of magical law. Harry knelt. Eye-level. Like he’d learned to do without thinking, because some instincts were older than reason. He took Teddy’s wrist gently and turned Teddy’s hand toward the light. The gold flecks sparkled. “Did you touch this stuff with your bare hands,” Harry asked.
Teddy’s expression slipped. Very slightly. His eyes flicked toward the cauldron, then back to Harry, then toward the door as if considering escape.
Harry’s voice went softer. “Teddy.”
Teddy exhaled like a balloon losing air. “Yes.”
Harry shut his eyes again. He opened them and tried to keep his temper from showing. He tried to keep his fear from showing. He tried to keep the image of a child’s hands bleeding from showing. “Teddy,” he said, too controlled, “did you—”
The cauldron hiccupped. A small, bright burst of light jumped from the surface like a fish breaking water.
Harry’s grip tightened. Not hard. Just enough. “Teddy,” he said, and now he wasn’t calm anymore, “did you put the sand in the cauldron.”
Teddy hesitated. He nodded.
Harry stood in one abrupt motion, as if his body had decided for him. His wand was out before he’d consciously reached for it.
A dozen spells crowded his tongue. Containment charms. Shield charms. Vanishing spells. The kind of frantic catalogue you built over years of crisis, the kind you used when the universe threw something at you and demanded you improvise.
But the gold on Teddy’s hands… it wasn’t reacting like normal magic.
It listened.
Harry didn’t know how he knew. He just did. The cauldron gave another pulse. The air went thick, like the kitchen had inhaled and was holding its breath. Harry’s mind flashed—quick, involuntary—through objects he’d seen once, long ago, behind glass in the Department of Mysteries. Time-Turners. Sand suspended in crystal. Warnings in small neat handwriting.
Do not touch.
Do not spill.
Do not—
“Teddy, get behind me,” Harry ordered.
Teddy did not move.
“Teddy,” Harry snapped, and the sharpness in his voice finally jolted Teddy into action. He slid off the chair and stumbled back, wide-eyed, suddenly young. Harry stepped between Teddy and the table.
The cauldron’s glow brightened.
Harry raised his wand. He didn’t have time to choose a perfect spell. He chose the first one that could buy them space.
“Protego!”
The shield flared, and the cauldron detonated like it had been waiting for the word. Light filled the kitchen. Not white. Not gold. Something older. Something that tasted like metal and thunderstorms. Harry had one clear, savage thought: Not Teddy. He lunged for Teddy. He grabbed Teddy’s small body and pulled him into his chest, and then the world folded in on itself.
There was sound, but it wasn’t sound. There was pressure, but it wasn’t pressure. There was a sensation like falling and being held at the same time, like drowning in air.
Harry’s head struck the floor.
He saw Teddy’s hands—smeared red now, not gold.
He saw Teddy curl inward on instinct, small and shaking.
And then Harry saw nothing.
***
Harry woke on cold stone. For a moment, he thought he was still in the kitchen. The smell of smoke clung to the back of his throat, sharp and bitter. His ears rang, high and thin, like a curse that hadn’t quite finished.
Then the air shifted.
Harry pushed himself upright, wincing. The floor beneath his hands was polished black marble veined with dull silver, the kind that reflected light in a way that made you feel small. He knew this floor. The realization landed with a sick, sliding weight in his stomach.
Grimmauld Place.
He was still in the Black family townhouse, but not the one he knew—the one softened by Order meetings and dust and too many mismatched chairs. This version of the house felt sharp. Awake. Like it had just been waiting for something to go wrong.
“Teddy?” Harry croaked.
No answer.
He scrambled to his feet. The room he’d woken in was large and bare, a guest bedroom that smelled faintly of old incense. Heavy curtains blocked the windows. No sign of Teddy.
Harry took one step toward the door—
And the house reacted.
It wasn’t a sound at first. It was a pressure. A crushing, invisible weight that slammed down on his chest and made the air thicken until every breath burned.
Harry gasped and staggered back, clutching at his ribs.
The walls shuddered. Something deep inside the house woke up.
A pulse rolled through the stone beneath his feet, strong enough to make his teeth click together. The torches along the walls flared, blue-white and furious.
Harry barely had time to think wards before they hit him.
It felt like being shoved from every direction at once. Not spells, exactly—geases, ancestral magic, centuries of Black blood and arrogance all insisting on the same thing:
You do not belong here.
Harry cried out as the force drove him backward into the wall. His vision blurred. The magic wasn’t trying to kill him. It was trying to remove him.
“Stop—!” Harry choked, though he had no idea who he was shouting at. He pressed his palms to the stone, fighting to stay upright, fighting a house that weighed more than any giant.
The pressure spiked. Somewhere in the distance, a bell began to ring. Low. Slow. Each toll vibrating through his bones.
An alarm.
Harry slid down the wall, his legs giving out. His head swam. The magic kept pushing, dragging at his skin, his bones, his very presence like it was trying to peel him out of reality.
Then—
Footsteps. Running.
Voices.
“—that bell hasn’t rung in decades—”
“—something triggered the wards—”
The door flew open.
A woman resembling a younger Bellatrix Lestrange stood in the doorway, wand already raised, eyes alight with wild, delighted curiosity.
Harry barely had time to see her before the pressure surged again. He convulsed, a raw sound tearing from his throat as the house tried one last time to expel him.
Bellatrix stared. “Well,” she breathed, almost reverently. “That’s interesting.” She stepped forward as if approaching a fascinating insect.
The wards were still roaring through him. Harry couldn’t speak. Could barely think. He collapsed forward, catching himself on one hand, his other arm trembling violently.
Bellatrix knelt in front of him, heedless of the danger, peering into his face. “The house is rejecting you,” she said, wonder threaded through her voice. “Not stunning. Not burning. Just… pushing.” Her smile widened. “I always wondered what would happen to intruders.”
Harry tried to lift his head. His vision swam. “Teddy,” he gasped. “Where—”
Bellatrix’s eyes flicked, sharp and sudden. “You’re not alone?”
Her tone the same cold echo he recognized from the years before.
She rose in one smooth movement and seized Harry by the collar, hauling him upright despite the magic tearing at him. “Find him,” she barked over her shoulder.
Two masked figures rushed past her into the hall.
Harry’s heart lurched. “No—don’t—”
Bellatrix dragged him out of the room, the wards finally easing as soon as she casted some sort of charm on him. The pressure vanished so abruptly he nearly collapsed again.
Using the spell, she half-carried, half-dragged him down the stairs.
The house was full of people now. Dozens of witches and wizards in dark robes, drawn by the alarm, clustered in the entry hall. The low murmur of voices cut off when they saw Harry.
Bellatrix shoved him forward.
A small figure was being held near the front of the crowd.
Teddy.
Teddy’s eyes were wide, frightened, his hair a sickly, pale grey instead of its usual bright colors. Someone had grabbed his arm, holding him still.
“Teddy!” Harry surged forward.
A wand snapped up, blocking him.
“Stay,” Bellatrix said lazily. “Or he gets hurt. And then things get messy.”
Harry froze, breath coming fast and shallow.
“Teddy,” he said, forcing his voice to steady. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
Teddy’s gaze locked onto him, relief breaking through the fear. “Harry—”
Harry’s stomach dropped.
Teddy’s hands.
They were still dusted with faint golden specks, clinging to his skin like stubborn pollen. Tiny, impossible lights that shimmered when he moved.
Harry stared.
The room tilted.
He knew that substance.
He had seen it once, long ago, behind thick glass in a Ministry vault: sand that did not belong to any clock, any hourglass.
This definitely wasn't 2001.
The last thing Harry saw was Teddy reaching for him, golden dust flashing between his fingers.
Then the world went dark again.