Chapter Text
“Are you sure you’re okay with watching Lily tonight, Teddy?” Ginny asked for what felt like the umpteenth time. “James and Al are at their cousins’, so it should be a quiet night.”
“It’s no problem, Ginny,” Teddy responded easily. He crouched down to Lily’s eye level and gave her a high-five. “We’ll throw a crazy party while your mum and dad are gone, huh Lils?”
“Okay!” she said, running around the living room as fast as her three-year-old legs could take her. “Look at me, Teddy! Weee!”
“You’re so talented. Next great Hogwarts chaser for sure.”
“For Pufflepuff!” Lilly added.
Teddy grinned and fluffed her red hair as she sped by. “Naturally. Though I think you’d be a shoe-in for Ravenclaw, too.”
“No Ravenclaw! No Gryffindo! No Slythrin! Pufflepuff like Teddy!” she chanted, the pronunciation of the house names too much for the small child’s vernacular.
“Thanks, Teddy,” a deep voice behind him said. Harry walked down the Grimmauld Place stairs, shrugging on a black jacket. Faint age lines were starting to appear around the corners of his eyes behind his round spectacles. “We’ll be back around midnight. Earlier, if we can slip away. I hate these things.”
“Expect us around one o’clock, Teddy,” Ginny corrected, rolling her eyes affectionately toward her husband. “Despite what he says, he’ll be talking strategy with the new graduates until I drag him away.”
Teddy laughed and waved good-bye. Harry and Ginny strode into Grimmauld square arm-in-arm before disappearing in a blink.
Teddy turned to the small toddler. Of all Harry’s kids, Lily was his favorite. She was feisty and spunky like her mother while also being tooth-rottingly sweet–a truly dangerous combination. “What do you want to do first, Lils? We can watch a movie or make cookies or–”
“Hide and seek!” she demanded, clapping her palms together. “I hide. You find me.”
Teddy sighed with mock patience, glad that none of his sixth-year dormmates were here to watch him play hide and seek with a toddler. “Okay. One . . . Two . . . Three . . .”
With a squeal of giggles, Lily fled from the room. Teddy tried to tune out her clumsy footfalls on the stairs–a difficult feat with his enhanced half-werewolf hearing. “ . . . Eighteen . . . Nineteen . . . Twenty. Ready or not, here I come!”
Teddy made a show of checking the living room first, narrating as he went: “Hmm, are you behind the couch? No. What about under the coffee table? No. In the kitchen? No.” Teddy ascended the stairs slowly, waiting for Lily to give herself away with muffled giggles like she usually did. His stomach dropped like a stone, however, when he saw a door ajar.
The third door on the left was Harry’s office. There were few rules that Harry was adamant about, but stay out of his office was one of them. Teddy had only been allowed in after his fifth year and then only under strict supervision. He knew that Harry kept the occasional dangerous artifact in his office if it could not be left unattended at the ministry.
Heart pounding in his throat, Teddy ran into the office. “Lils!” he shouted.
Lily looked up from her spot on Harry’s desk chair. She spun in it happily, her head tilted to the side. Between her fingers was a flash of gold on a chain. An empty black box lay open on the desk.
Teddy ran to her, stopping the chair with a palm. “Lils, that’s your dad’s. Please give it to me. We shouldn’t be in here.”
Lily cradled the object close to her chest and stuck her tongue out. “Mine!”
Teddy maintained a calm tone, despite the pounding in his chest. “That is not yours, Lily. It’s your dad’s. Please hand it to me.”
“Mine!”
Teddy caught her wrist and started prying the object away from the toddler’s clenched fist. “No, Teddy! Mine!” Lily yelled, yanking her fist back just as Teddy managed to pry the object loose.
The object–a Time Turner, Teddy realized with growing horror–spun in the air as if in slow motion before careening to the floor, shattering in a haze of glass and sand. Teddy had enough time to grasp Lily’s wrist before they were spun away from the Grimmauld Place they knew and loved.