Chapter Text
CHAPTER 2
~The hatchling calls for you, Master~
~Don’t call me Master, Zephyr. What have I asked you to call me?~
~Harry. Harry, the hatchling. He calls out for you.~
Harry snapped unpleasantly into wakefulness as soon as Zephyr’s words had sunk in. From upstairs Teddy could be heard crying out as though in extreme distress. Knocking over his room temperature coffee on his way up from the table, Harry made it up to his and Teddy’s bedroom in record time. He scooped the infant out of his crib and cuddled him close, murmuring apologies and soothing sounds and gently bouncing the baby and rocking slowly side to side.
~You needn’t apologize to me Master, the hatchling’s cries do not bother me in the way that they bother you.~ Zephyr hissed as she slithered into the room and wound herself around Harry’s left leg.
~I wasn’t apologizing to you, Zephyr. I was apologizing to Teddy,~ Harry responded, rolling his eyes, ~And don’t call me Master.~ He tries his hardest to be patient with the young snake, but sometimes constantly answering her questions and having to remind her not to call him… that… gets on his admittedly very frayed nerves.
The tiny rosy boa tightened her grip on Harry’s leg and hissed out a plaintive ~If the apology wasn’t meant for me, why speak it in our tongue, Harry?~
Harry, who had thus been unaware that he was speaking to Teddy in Parseltongue, jolted and forced himself to switch to English. He couldn’t even imagine the hard time George, Neville, or Theo would give him if his child learned Parseltongue as his first language.
Now that Harry was no longer speaking a language that she could understand, Zephyr quickly lost interest and made her way down Harry’s leg. He watched her broken tail slither out the bedroom door and back down the stairs out of the corner of his eye, listening to her childlike hissy snake laugh fade away.
Standing in his room, cradling his young son in his arms and encouraging him to quiet his cries, Harry (who can’t remember the last time he took a shower, finished a cup of coffee, or, merlin forbid, had a quick wank), in a moment of pitiful weakness, thinks longingly of a simple, childfree life like the ones his contemporaries all lead. He would never admit to it out loud, doesn’t even really wish for it, but he sometimes shamefully thinks about how easy his life would be now, if he hadn’t taken on Teddy’s guardianship six months ago when Andromeda had her episode.
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Harry rushed into the waiting room of the 7th floor of St. Mungo’s at 8:42am, six Tuesdays after the fall of Voldemort. He’d received a patronus message from Andromeda asking him to make it here post-haste. Panickedly, he’d double checked that his wand was in the forearm holster Bill had given him when he confessed to having night-terrors when he tried to sleep without it on his person. Silly to even check really; Harry didn’t even remove it while he showered. He couldn’t bear to be unarmed. He checked around every corner for danger, and always felt like there was someone right behind him waiting to attack him when his guard was down. This paranoia was made immeasurably worse since Ron and Hermione weren’t on either side of him, covering his back.
He’d wholeheartedly given his blessing to them running off to Australia to locate the Grangers and undo the Memory Charm that Hermione had placed on them last year, but once they’d gone, he quickly realized that he might be a tiny bit co-dependant on them. To be fair, they report also being very paranoid and wary of strangers, but Harry gets the vibe that their experiences are nowhere near as debilitating as his are.
Harry has set up camp in Ron’s old room at The Burrow, and can count on one hand the number of times that he’s gone into public since his friends went abroad four weeks ago. Since three of those four times he’d had to send Arthur or Bill a patronus to come get him because he was too panicked to apparate home, and the other time he’d gotten so smashed that he’d set fire to a booth in the Three Broomsticks and Madam Rosemerta made Neville carry him up to a private room and tuck him in for the night, Harry really didn’t know if those ventures even counted.
But the one thing that never failed to set him straight into movement, every single time, was his newborn godson. Harry had no issues at all with going over to Andromeda’s to care for Teddy whenever Andy called on him via Floo or patronus. Any hour, any weather, her house or The Burrow. None of it mattered except that that little baby lived a happy, well cared for life. Harry would rather die a thousand painful deaths than watch Teddy Lupin grow up neglected in any way. He’d sworn on Remus and Tonks’ graves that he would be the best godfather that a boy could ever even dream of, and he’d raze the earth to see that promise through.
That led to him rushing through the kitchen Floo in The Burrow into the receiving room at the hospital and up seven flights of stairs only to run straight into Healer Morningside. Audrey Morningside was a Healer that Harry was very familiar with.
For the first three weeks after the Final Battle, Harry had a ritual of knocking on the second door of the second floor of The Burrow at around 1am. Every night he’d be greeted with a sob and a choked “Harry.” Every night Harry silently pushed open the door to Percy’s room and climbed into bed with George, who refused to leave the room or let anyone else in. Eventually, Bill went into the bedroom, gathered George up into his arms, carried him into the shower and cleaned him up, then met Percy in the kitchen where they ushered him through the Floo and to St. Mungo’s. Three days later, Harry had gotten word that George was asking to see him. Thus began a new ritual. Every evening at 6:30 Harry would settle on the floor in the kitchen and wait for George’s Healer, Audrey Morningside, to verify Harry’s identity and take his oath that he’d not attempt to break George out of hospital custody. He’d then be allowed to speak to George for a little over an hour until visiting time was over, and George had to take his potions.
After two weeks of full-time inpatient mind healing care, George was allowed to return home to The Burrow during the day, and return to the hospital by night. Last week, he made it back to living at The Burrow full time, only having to turn up at Mungo’s for his daily talk therapy with Healer Morningside and group sessions appropriately named ‘Grief Share’. He had made incredible improvements, and had even started to smile at Ron’s commentary of Australian Quidditch during his bi-weekly patronus messages. Harry was unspeakably proud of him.
Healer Morningside cleared her throat and greeted Harry with her usual sharp tone/soft eyes double whammy that never failed to make him think of Madam Pomfrey, but if she was young and pretty fit. “Mr. Potter, I trust you’re well.”
“Just Harry,” Harry responded, “And I’m alright thanks. I got a message from Andromeda Tonks that I needed to make my way here quickly. Is Teddy okay?”
Healer Morningside looked startled for a moment before her expression relaxed and she answered, “Well, ‘just Harry’, I don’t know how Mrs. Tonks managed to get a message out to you in her state, but I assure you, her grandson is quite alright.”
Breathing out a sigh of relief, Harry glanced around, hoping to glimpse a clue of where his godson might be. Finding nothing but an empty waiting room he frowned up at the Healer, intending to ask after his whereabouts, but latching onto a phrase from the Healer’s previous statement instead.
“Wait. Her state? What state do you mean? Is Andromeda okay?”
“I’m afraid I can only share medical information with a patient’s next of kin, Harry. You and I have discussed this already.”
“Healer Morningside, I am Andromeda’s next of kin. Check her records, please.” Harry replied, somewhat desperately.
The Healer waved her wand and whispered for a moment, then a paper airplane shot out of it’s tip and zoomed off.
“Much faster than marching all the way down to records and waiting for Trinity and Tabitha to stop bickering long enough to locate the record needed.” Healer Morningside winked at Harry.
Harry, who was slowly working himself into a panic over Andromeda’s well-being, took the Healer’s lighthearted explanation as a small bit of good news, and slightly relaxed while waiting for the return memo. It arrived after only a few moments, and confirmed Harry’s assertion that Andy had, in fact, named him next of kin. The news, when Healer Morningside broke it, was decidedly not good news.
“Mrs. Tonks suffered a psychotic break this morning resulting in a significant bout of accidental magic and is currently being sedated and held here until she recovers enough for transfer to a better equipped Mind Healing facility.”
It took several beats for the words to register, and even after they did Harry felt his stomach clench and heard his blood rushing in his ears. What. The. Fuck. A psychotic break? Stoic, unshakable, wise Andromeda? This is the woman who held Harry for literal hours while he sobbed the night that Ron and Hermione caught their portkey to Australia. The woman who held his hand at every single funeral that he attended, because he couldn’t face them alone, even though she was grieving her husband and her daughter. This is the woman that taught Harry how to feed, burp, and change Teddy, all while softly smiling at him and then, when Harry mastered transferring the sleeping newborn from his arms to the crib without waking him up and promptly burst into uncontrollable tears, gathered him up in her arms and rocked him, just like he’d held and rocked the baby. Andromeda couldn’t have fallen apart. She was the one who consistently held Harry together. It was impossible.
“Mr. Potter – Harry – are you okay?” Healer Morningside was glancing about the room as though about to call for reinforcements, when Harry came back to himself.
“I’m sorry, I –” he trailed off brokenly, “Do you know where Teddy is?”
She hesitated, and then, “I believe that The Department has him in their custody.”
The Department of Welfare for the Newly Orphaned or Unsupervised Wixen Child, or The Department, for short. A department that had been hurriedly thrown together by the Wizengamot and interim Ministry directors. An unfortunate necessity of these post-war times. With the amount of children whose parents had been killed, jailed, or otherwise incapacitated, The Department was formed, and children who would otherwise be left on their own were rounded up and re-homed to anyone willing to take them in. The entire thing made Harry slightly uncomfortable. He’d gone on record saying that he felt like the process didn’t protect the children quite how he imagined that Ministry officials hoped it would, and that it seemed like there were huge flaws in the system, but his point was thus far ignored.
“I’m sorry Healer Morningside,” Harry began, “But I really need to go collect my godson before we continue this conversation. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
It took over eight hours for The Department to release Teddy into Harry’s care, and it required him to sign official forms naming him the child’s permanent guardian which were then filed both at the Ministry and sent off to Gringotts for further verification and solidification. Three weeks later, Andromeda was away at a long-term rehabilitation facility in France, and Harry and Teddy were apartment shopping and on their own.
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The constant crying began around the time that Harry and Teddy left The Burrow and moved to their little row house. It had sort of just started all of the sudden, and nothing seemed to help. Even on the day that Harry’s petition to officially adopt Teddy passed and they became a family, Teddy wailed the entire time. Harry was so heartbroken that he couldn’t make Teddy feel better, and so tired from being on edge all the time that he found himself with a bit of a short fuse and a lot of secret pent-up resentment. He obviously couldn’t say anything about this to anyone, couldn’t confess his most shameful of sins. So now here he was cradling his screaming infant son and fantasizing about what life would be like if Andromeda had never fallen ill and he’d never taken him in. Father of the year, truly. He hated himself for it.