The 'I' in Family

Chapter 2: Home

Some eleven years later
April 18, 2009

Edward Lupin stared out the window at the bright, 7:00-in-the-morning sunlight, trying to fall back asleep. But, of course, he was never going to fall back asleep, because that was just the way life liked to annoy him.

Pushing his currently natural-colored light brown hair out of his face, Teddy sighed and rolled over so he was facing the ceiling. He wasn't that tired, but it still would have been nice to sleep in a little bit, especially because he was off school for one more day. It had been a sort of "spring break" for him that started on his eleventh birthday two weeks back.

His grandmother, Andromeda, and his godfather, Harry, had decided to wait until he turned eleven to tell him the full story of what happened when Harry was his age. They had spent the last two weeks telling him everything that had happened.

Up until Teddy's eleventh birthday, Harry had told him the good parts of the story, like when he'd first met Teddy's dad and then, a bit less than two years later his mother. But there were bad parts to the story, too, because Teddy knew it was a story about war, and war was painful and destroyed things.

Like families, Teddy thought. Like mine.

Harry had been orphaned himself in a very similar way to Teddy: when he was a baby, except Harry's parents were killed three months after Harry's first birthday instead of barely a month after he was born. And Teddy's dad was best friends with Harry's parents and Harry's godfather, Sirius, who just happened to be a distant cousin of his. Something like first cousin twice removed, Teddy was pretty sure, because Sirius and his grandmother were first cousins.

The story had started with some confusion as to who was who and what happened when, but with some help from Harry, Andromeda, and most of Harry's friends, they had managed to get the story between them. Now Andromeda was telling Harry and Teddy about Sirius when he was a little kid, before Andromeda had been disowned by her family.

Teddy knew that Harry didn't have many connections to his parents, but he'd known Sirius for barely two years, and a connection to him had made it much better. Andromeda was also telling them stories about Teddy's mother, and it turned out she and Sirius were very alike in some ways. Teddy guessed that, had they been the same age, they would have been much closer to each other.

Then there was that. Age. Another one of the sad parts of the story was that it took a long time for Teddy's parents to admit their feelings for one another. Or, more specifically, his dad. There had been many things holding him back. For one thing, he had barely any money, for another, he was thirteen years older than her, and the biggest problem was not even that they were in the middle of a war.

No, the biggest problem was that Teddy's dad was a werewolf.

This didn't affect Teddy at all(mostly), but of course nobody knew that, and that only caused more problems when Remus finally decided to go for it, after being convinced. They were married not even a month later and, when Dora revealed she was pregnant (with Teddy) Remus ran away in fear.

He admitted he'd been stupid, and that he made a mistake, and had stuck by Dora and the unborn Teddy for the rest of his life. But it was this that killed him-- because he hadn't been going on missions for the order anymore, he'd been inactive for so long that he wasn't as good as he normally was.

That wasn't to say he wasn't good, though. Others fighting in the battle had said that Dolohov had gotten lucky with the killing curse; Remus had almost dodged the blow when it hit him on his side. And Teddy's mother hadn't gone down without a fight, either.

There were a few of the sadder things Teddy had known beforehand, though. Like how—or why, really— Harry's parents had died, and everything behind the traitor. Andromeda was very hesitant to tell him, because even Harry was too young to know the truth when he found out at thirteen. Harry had said he wasn't too young to know the truth, but then again, Harry didn't have a normal childhood and had dealt with much more than a normal thirteen-year-old. Teddy, on the other hand, was being given as normal a childhood as possible.