Chapter Text
Harry Potter had buried a lot of people in his life. He hadn't expected to bury the whole world.
It had been two weeks since Death had appeared to him — not as the cloaked figure from the stories, not as anything so theatrical, just a presence that settled into the corner of his vision like a held breath — and told him, plainly, that everything was ending. Not *his* world. *The* world. Every world, every plane, folding in on itself like a dying star, and there was nothing left to do but get out and wait for it to be over.
*"A cleanse,"* Death had called it, and Harry hated the word more every time he thought of it. Cleanses were supposed to be gentle. This one was going to eat everything that lived.
*"You and the boy will need to go,"* Death had said. *"Stock everything you can carry. You won't be able to come back for what you forget."*
So Harry had emptied the vaults.
All of them. The Potter vault, the Black vault, the smaller trust accounts no one had touched since the war — every Galleon converted, every heirloom catalogued, every potion ingredient, every book, every bolt of dragonhide and case of phials swept into trunks the goblins had charmed until the metal hummed. He'd paid them in advance for wards that would have made Gringotts itself jealous — anti-detection, anti-decay, expansion charms layered seven deep on a single canvas tent until it could have housed a small village and no Muggle satellite would ever have known it was there.
Teddy had asked, the whole time, with the patient confusion of a seven-year-old watching his godfather pack like the house was on fire, "Are we going on holiday?"
"Something like that, cub," Harry had told him, and hated how true it was.
He'd bought robes and jumpers and trainers in sizes Teddy hadn't grown into yet. School books, both kinds — Hogwarts first-years' texts and a stack of Muggle primary readers, because Harry had no idea how long they'd be gone or what kind of world they'd come back to, if they came back to one at all. Medical supplies enough to stock St Mungo's. A cauldron and three years of potion ingredients, preserved and stasis-charmed. Photographs. Letters. Teddy's baby blanket, the one Andromeda had knitted, soft blue wool gone thin at the edges from being held too often.
He hadn't let himself think too hard about Andromeda. About any of them. There hadn't been time, and grief was a luxury for people who got to stay.
---
Death had told him where to go. Not *how* — just a place, an old word that felt strange in Harry's mouth when he said it aloud: the **Potter family seat**, somewhere in the hills of a country he'd never set foot in, abandoned since before his grandfather's time. *"It will still be standing when nothing else is,"* Death had said, which should have been comforting and instead made the back of Harry's neck prickle.
The Ministry — what was left of it, a skeleton crew of clerks too frightened to ask why the Boy Who Lived wanted an international portkey keyed to a derelict property with no recorded coordinates — had built it for him in eleven hours flat. Harry hadn't trusted it. He'd checked the rune work twice, made the clerk redo the activation ward when the resonance felt wrong under his fingers, and still, when he looked back on it later, he'd know he should have trusted that instinct more.
"Hold tight, Teddy," he said, kneeling so they were eye to eye, the battered tin cup that was their portkey sitting between them on the kitchen table of the house they'd never sleep in again. Teddy's hair was doing the thing it did when he was nervous, fading from its usual bubblegum pink to a dull, scared brown. "Just like always. Two fingers, tight grip, and don't let go no matter what."
"What if it's scary?" Teddy asked.
"Then you hold on tighter," Harry said, "and you remember I'm right there with you."
It was, in hindsight, a promise he very nearly broke.
---
The pull behind his navel was wrong from the first second — too sharp, too fast, a hook dragging instead of the usual smooth yank — and Harry knew, with the sick clarity of someone who'd portkeyed badly before, that something in that rushed Ministry rune work had failed. The world didn't spin so much as *shred*, color and sound tearing apart into ribbons, and somewhere in the chaos he felt Teddy's small fingers slip half an inch on the cup before clamping back down, and he heard the boy scream.
Harry did the only thing he could. He got an arm around him.
They hit ground — real, solid, unfamiliar ground — hard enough that the impact punched the air clean out of Harry's lungs. His left shoulder took the brunt of it, twisting under him at an angle shoulders weren't built for, and the pop of it dislocating was loud enough that he heard it before he felt it, before the pain caught up and white-flashed across his vision. He kept his arm locked around Teddy through all of it. That much, at least, he'd gotten right.
For a moment he just lay there, sucking air through his teeth, the dislocated arm screaming, dead leaves and old wood smoke and something colder, wilder underneath it filling his nose. Not the Potter castle. Not anywhere that smelled like Britain at all.
"Teddy?" His voice came out wrecked. "Teddy, cub, talk to me."
A whimper. Then, small and wet, "My wrist hurts."
Harry forced his eyes open. They were sprawled across the floor of somewhere — wood planking, the smell of pine and gun oil and old coffee, low ceilings, a single window letting in grey afternoon light. A cabin. Not a castle. Not anywhere on any map Harry had memorized before they left.
Teddy was curled against his side, cradling his right wrist against his chest, already swelling, his hair gone fully mousy-brown with fright. Not broken, Harry thought, doing the fast triage that six years of war and worse had drilled into him. Sprained. Painful, frightening, but not broken.
His own shoulder was a different story. He could feel the joint sitting wrong under his skin, the whole arm hanging useless and hot with pain, and for one disoriented second Harry almost reached for his wand with the wrong hand before some animal part of his brain reminded him *left arm, you absolute idiot, use the right* —
The cabin door opened.
Harry's right hand found his wand on instinct, fast enough that the man filling the doorway — tall, lean, crossbow already half-raised like he'd heard them crash through the wall of his own home and come prepared to find out why — froze for half a heartbeat at the sight of the stick pointed at his chest.
For a long, ringing second, nobody moved. Harry registered details in flashes: the crossbow, steady despite the surprise on the man's face; a second man's voice somewhere behind him, sharper, asking *what the hell, Darylina*; Teddy's hitched, frightened breathing against his ribs; his own shoulder screaming with every shallow breath.
"Easy," Harry said, low, the way you talked to something that might bolt — or shoot. He didn't lower the wand. Couldn't risk it, not with Teddy curled against him and a stranger's crossbow trained somewhere in their direction. "We're not — we don't want any trouble. We just landed here. I don't even know where *here* is."
The man with the crossbow didn't lower his either, but his eyes flicked, quick and assessing, from Harry's ruined shoulder to Teddy's bright, terrified, color-shifting hair, and something in his face shifted from *threat* to *what the hell am I looking at.*
"Lemme guess," he said, voice rough as gravel and not unkind. "That's a magic wand, and the kid's hair just turned green."
Harry, despite the pain, despite the wreckage of every plan he'd made in the last two weeks, found himself almost laughing.
"...Yeah," he said. "It is."
Behind the man in the doorway, a second voice — older, harder-edged, distinctly unimpressed — said, "Well don't just stand there gawkin', Darylina. Either shoot 'em or put the damn kettle on."