Chapter Text
The flat was too quiet for a place that was supposed to be a home.
Harry Potter sat at the kitchen table with his sleeves rolled up, one hand wrapped loosely around a mug that had gone cold sometime during the afternoon. The other hand hovered over a piece of parchment covered in uneven pencil marks—numbers pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
Across from him, his son fidgeted in a chair that was slightly too big for him.
“Teddy, mate,” Harry said gently, tapping the page, “you’ve got the right idea. You’re just… mixing up the steps.”
Seven-year-old Teddy Lupin scrunched his nose in concentration. His hair flickered from bright green to a distracted shade of blue, reacting to his mood before he even spoke.
“I hate subtraction,” Teddy muttered. “It’s like the numbers are fighting me on purpose.”
Harry gave a small, tired smile. “Yeah. I remember that feeling.”
That wasn’t entirely true. Or maybe it was—he just couldn’t remember whether it had been numbers that fought him or something else. So many things in his life had felt like battles at seven. At twenty-four, the battles were quieter, but heavier.
He glanced down again at the worksheet.
Word problems. Of course it was word problems. Someone at the primary school clearly enjoyed chaos.
“If you have twelve sweets,” Harry read slowly, “and you give away five—”
“I’d never give away sweets,” Teddy interrupted immediately.
“—and you give away five,” Harry repeated, more firmly this time, “how many do you have left?”
Teddy stared at the ceiling like the answer might be written there.
“Seven,” he said finally, uncertain.
Harry nodded. “Good. How did you get that?”
“I counted backwards in my head.” Teddy paused. “But it felt wrong.”
“That’s the annoying part,” Harry said, leaning back in his chair. “Maths is often right even when it feels wrong.”
Teddy looked at him. “That’s not helpful.”
A small breath of laughter escaped Harry before he could stop it. “Fair.”
The kitchen light hummed softly above them. Outside, the sky was starting to dim into early evening grey. Harry felt the hours stretching out behind him—work finished, no urgent messages, no meetings, no one waiting for him anywhere else.
No one, really.
Just this.
He looked at Teddy again, at the way his son’s feet didn’t quite reach the floor, at the way he was trying so hard to focus and still drifting away in little bursts of imagination. Harry envied that a bit, the drifting. His own mind stayed too fixed, too aware.
“Okay,” Harry said, pulling the worksheet closer. “Next one. You’ve got eight frogs in a pond—”
Teddy groaned loudly. “Why are there always frogs?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said honestly. “Primary school seems to believe frogs are responsible for most financial decisions in the wizarding economy.”
That earned a reluctant grin.
They worked through it slowly. Messily. Harry had to reread the questions twice, sometimes three times, because Teddy’s pencil would start tapping the table and Harry’s attention would drift with it. Each wrong answer was corrected gently, each correct one rewarded with a quiet nod or a brief, warm “yeah, that’s it.”
But underneath it all, Harry stayed slightly removed from himself, like he was watching the scene rather than living in it.
A father helping his son.
It looked normal. It should have felt normal.
And yet there was a thin, persistent sense of distance, like glass between him and everything else.
“Teddy,” Harry said after a while, softer now, “you’re doing well. We’re nearly done.”
Teddy leaned forward, squinting at the last problem. “If I have twenty-one stickers and I trade—”
“Hold on,” Harry interrupted, instinctively reaching for a scrap of paper to draw it out. “Let’s not rush it. We’ll break it down.”
Teddy nodded, trusting him without question.
That trust landed heavier than any of the numbers.
Harry drew small circles on the paper. Simple. Clean. Containable. Things that made sense in a way life rarely did anymore.
He could feel it then, creeping in at the edges of the quiet—the awareness that once Teddy finished this worksheet, there would be nothing urgent left to do. No distraction. No structure. Just time.
Time was the hardest part.
“Dad?” Teddy asked suddenly.
Harry blinked. “Yeah?”
“You okay?”
The question was too simple for how complicated the answer was.
Harry looked at the page instead of his son for a moment longer than he should have.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I’m okay.”
Teddy accepted it without suspicion and went back to the problem.
Harry kept drawing circles.
Outside, the evening deepened, and the kitchen light grew warmer against the growing dark.