Number Twelve Grimmauld Place looked exactly as desolate as Teddy felt. The stones making up the snow-capped numbers eleven and thirteen ground into the pavement and lurched apart in the frigid night air to reveal a home so deserted that not even a house-elf had set foot upon the worn front steps in the better part of two decades. Teddy wondered if his godfather had perhaps made the same connection, and if that was what had given him the idea to send Teddy here. "Some time away," Harry had said across the Potters' kitchen table with the kind of exasperated finality only a parent could. "To figure out your next steps."
'Steps,' Teddy thought with indignation as he climbed up the stone steps, December wind howling in his ears, as if his life thus far had simply been a series of missteps that could be righted. As if spectacularly dropping out of Auror training at the very last second in a fit of panic and hiding out at his Grandmother's doing fuck all for the past two years in a paralysed state of childhood regression could be righted simply by owling the Ministry a bit of spare parchment saying, 'Sorry for flaking, order my uniform robes in size medium, xoxo Teddy Lupin.'
Teddy bounced on his feet, blew into his numb hands, and pulled his beanie down over his ears, eager to get out of the cold. He stared at the serpent knocker where there ought to be a door handle and fought to remember all the wards Harry'd told him about to get into the goddamned place. Admittedly, Teddy hadn't done much in the way of sophisticated magic during what Andromeda had delicately been referring to as his 'gap years,' but he'd graduated at the top of his class and made it through the vigorous Auror training programme with flying colours, so for fuck's sake, he could unravel some home security wards.
The icy air licked at Teddy's exposed ears as he worked, constantly losing focus and stumbling over enchantments as he replayed the conversation with his godfather in his head.
*
He'd been making a cheese sandwich while watching the snow fall outside the Potters' kitchen window and minding his own business when he'd been ambushed, as if his godfather had been working up the nerve to say something to him all morning.
Harry cleared his throat and motioned with a nod of his head to the dining room table as if to say, 'We need to talk, young man.' Teddy left his sandwich on the sinkboard with a silent prayer that whatever this conversation was about, that it would be quick.
Harry cleared his throat again, with a look on his face that was nothing like his usual openness, much more similar, in fact, to the few times Harry had come in to speak to Teddy's class of Auror trainees. Teddy might have even been intimidated if it wasn't for the hideously festive Weasley jumper Harry was sporting, making it hard for Teddy to take him seriously.
"Teddy, listen. It's not that I don't love having you, and you know you'll always be welcome here, but Gin and I have been talking and we'd like to know... what's your... plan?"
Teddy groaned. It wasn't like Harry to pull the parent act on Teddy, but he had evidently become frustrated with Teddy's constant deflection enough to attempt it, awkward as the attempt seemed to Teddy.
"First Gran and now you? I'm not going back to the Aurors if that's what you're getting at."
"You don't want to be an Auror anymore, fine, after all I did to get you accepted into training, fine, but—"
"I was Head Boy and I got seven N.E.W.T.s With all due respect, Harry, I could have got in without you."
"But you didn't! I arranged the whole thing. I made the calls, sent the applications, and you showed up the first day hungover."
