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Keeping track of his children in a museum was difficult enough at the best of times, especially while Ginny was abroad, but Harry had to keep one eye on his moody and hormonal teenage godson too.
‘Teddy,’ he hissed. ‘Hair.’
Teddy scowled, and his hair, which he had gradually been returning to blue a little at a time in the hope Harry wouldn’t notice, went back to a sandy brown.
‘The statute of secrecy applies to your hair too,’ Harry began in a low voice. ‘You could still get in trouble for it-’
‘Muggles have hair dye,’ Teddy interrupted grumpily. ‘They’re not going to look at my hair and say, gosh, that kid must be a wizard-’
‘Ted,’ Harry moaned, glancing over his shoulder at a (thankfully distracted) muggle family nearby. ‘It just draws attention - please, for a few hours, keep it discreet.’
‘Why did you bring us here anyway?’ asked Teddy. ‘There’s loads of wizard-’ he ignored Harry’s frantic hush, ‘-places we could have gone, and this is really depressing.’
‘It’s educational,’ said Harry firmly, who in hindsight thought he perhaps could have taken them to the Natural History Museum instead of the Imperial War Museum.
‘Yeah, where else would your kids learn about war?’ asked Teddy pointedly.
‘Muggle history is just as - James! Get down!’ James looked over from the armoured truck he was clambering onto, with a credible impression of an innocently confused expression.
‘Dad, what is this?’ came Lily’s voice, and he gave an undignified start as he looked down to see the mildly horrific sight of his child’s face hidden behind huge, dark eyes and a metallic nose.
‘It’s a gas mask, Lily, where did you get it? Take it off-’
‘You’re meant to wear it, it’s in the dress up bit over there-’
‘Right, well, I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Harry uneasily, crouching down and pulling the mask off Lily’s freckled face. ‘They’re not very nice, they were to stop people dying from poisonous gas.’
‘Did you have one?’
‘No,’ he said patiently, ‘I told you, this is all muggle-’
‘I mean when you were a muggle, when you lived with the muggles.’
‘How old do you think I am?’ he asked, baffled. ‘These are from about seventy years ago.’
‘Yes.’ She blinked at him.
‘I’m a lot less than seventy,’ he told her, feeling a little alarmed.
‘Oh. Well can I get one for my birthday? I really like it.’
‘Harry,’ said Teddy sharply, ‘that muggle is talking to James.’
Harry looked over and tried not to swear in front of his five year old daughter. The burly museum guard had successfully coaxed James off the truck, and was now crouched down, rapping his knuckles against the floor. As Harry approached, he heard him say, ‘feel that? That would hurt if you hit your head on that, wouldn’t it?’
‘No,’ said James.
The guard paused, disconcerted. ‘I think it would,’ he said.
‘Not me - Mum says she’s not sure I have pain receptors, because if I did perhaps I would have learnt my lesson by now.’
‘James! Sorry - my son-’
‘He was climbing on this,’ said the guard sternly. ‘People died in it, you know-’
‘Did they?’ said Harry meekly. ‘God, sorry - James -’
‘You can see the bullet holes, Dad,’ said James. ‘It’s really cool-’
‘It’s not cool, James,’ said Harry, avoiding the guard’s disapproving glare. ‘People died-’
‘Yeah, that’s what makes it cool.’
Harry seized him by the arm and, still bumbling apologies to the guard, dragged his son away. He headed back towards Teddy, who was yawning as he frowned up at a Spitfire hanging from the ceiling. ‘You should bring Grandad here,’ he said as Harry reached him.
‘No chance, the Science Museum was enough,’ Harry muttered. ‘James, look - just behave yourself all right? Don’t climb on stuff, and be respectful-’
‘Yeah I will,’ said James, wriggling out of Harry’s grasp and hurrying away.
‘People died, James! They DIED!’ Harry called after him, making a nearby tourist group stare.
‘Don’t wave that around!’ said Teddy, his cheeks reddening as the tourists (including several teenage girls) gawped at them. ‘Merlin, you’re so embarrassing…’
Harry realised he had been shaking the gas mask at James as he ran away, and had probably looked quite deranged. ‘Where’s Lily? I don’t know where she got this from.’
‘She’s looking down the barrel of that big gun,’ said Teddy, jerking his head in her general direction.
‘OK, good,’ said Harry distractedly. ‘And… Bloody hell, where’s Al?’
‘What?’
‘Al. This whole time. Where is he?’ Harry paused for a moment, holding his hands out as though he had just dropped his middle child. ‘I don’t remember when I last saw him. When did you last see him?’
‘Erm…’
Harry made a noise somewhere between a whimper and a growl of frustration. ‘Keep an eye on Lily and James-’
‘Harry!’ said Teddy, desperately. He gestured at Harry’s hand, and Harry gave a great huff as he realised he was still holding the gas mask. He chucked it to Teddy, who caught it with an utterly appalled look. ‘I don’t want it, it’s creepy!’
‘Might give you a bit of edge, Teddy,’ said Harry.
He darted away, hurrying through the somber exhibits, noticing with some relief that plenty of children were looking at the military machinery with excitement rather than trauma. This surely meant that he hadn’t been entirely irresponsible in taking them here.
He finally spotted his son’s dark hair and found him peering into a display cabinet, standing on his tiptoes to get a closer look. ‘There you are! I told you to stay in sight.’
‘Have you heard about Alan Turing?’ asked Al, looking up from an enigma machine with wide eyes.
‘Who?’
Albus told him with awed excitement, and Harry tried very hard to listen, keen to reward the only child that seemed interested in the exhibits, but becoming increasingly distracted as out of the corner of his eye he saw a child giggling manically as she ran between rooms, her red pigtails poking out from beneath the gas mask.
‘Keep telling me as we head back to the main hall,’ said Harry, taking Al’s hand and pulling him away.
‘But I wanted to read that-’
‘We’ll come back around,’ Harry assured him, walking as swiftly as he felt he could, convinced James would have found some other way of insulting someone. ‘Lily!’ he called, spotting her again. ‘Lily!’
Lily stopped mid run and leaned back, raising her arms up to the sky as she laughed madly beneath the gas mask.
‘And then even after he did all that,’ Albus was saying furiously, ‘he was arrested! Can you believe it?’
‘Awful,’ said Harry, his eyes following his daughter as she ran into the Falklands section. ‘What happened then?’
Sure that she would run back out soon and he could seize her, and more concerned with the multitude of things James might be doing, Harry led Al back into the main hall. He quickly spotted Teddy, his hair blue again, talking to one of the girls from the tour group in front of a large tank.
‘Can you see James anywhere?’ Harry asked.
Albus paused his monologue about Turing and looked around. ‘Yeah, he’s up there.’
Harry followed his pointing finger, which unfortunately seemed to be pointed directly at the ceiling. The Spitfire was wobbling slightly. James’s foot was sticking out of the little window. Harry briefly considered walking out of the museum and leaving the Muggle Liaison office to deal with it.
‘OK,’ he said, far more calmly than he felt. ‘As the only sensible one, I need you to go and find your sister, and then come straight back here. Can you do that?’
‘Yeah,’ sighed Al, in a resigned sort of way. Harry nodded sharply, and squeezed his shoulder.
He ducked behind a large tank, squeezing between the wall and the cold metal, hoping desperately no Muggles could see him as he pulled out his invisibility cloak, conjured up a piece of parchment and pencil, and stuck a note to it.
PUT THIS ON. WRAP IT TIGHTLY AROUND YOU. NO ONE CAN SEE. IF THEY DO, I WILL TELL YOUR MOTHER.
AND I WILL CONFISCATE YOUR BROOM.
He banished the cloak up to his son, and then glared up at the Spitfire, his arms folded, wondering vaguely how no one had warned him about this part of having a family. After a few moments, he saw the Spitfire wobble slightly again, and then, from thin air, a wrist and a hand appeared, giving him the thumbs up.
He sighed, and, with one last glance around the crowded room for watching Muggles, Harry subtly pointed his wand up at the plane. ‘Accio James Potter.’
There was nothing for a moment, and then he was stumbling backwards with an ‘oof!’, pressed up against the tank with the force of his invisible son colliding into him. With fumbling arms, Harry planted the solid but invisible object behind him, shielding him further from view, and pulled off the cloak.
James’s face was elated.
‘What were you doing up there?’ Harry hissed at him.
‘I dunno, I just jumped up - accidental magic-’
‘Was it?’ Harry demanded. ‘Was it accidental, James?’
‘Yeah,’ James lied poorly. ‘The biggest accident I’ve ever done.’
Deciding it would be easier to freely scold his child our of earshot of muggles, Harry took him by the arm again and pulled him back into the crowded hall. Albus was stood in the middle, holding his sister’s hand. Lily still had the gas mask on.
As they approached them, Harry looked over in time to see the blonde teenager Teddy had been talking to stalking angrily away. Teddy ran his fingers sheepishly through his blue hair, and then, at Harry’s gesture and with his cheeks tinged pink, hurried over to join them.
‘We’re going home,’ Harry said shortly.
‘We only just got here.’
‘Really? I feel like I’ve been here years. Lily, time to take that off now.’
‘No!’
‘Lily…’
‘I like it!’
Within minutes, Lily was lying on the floor, crying into the gas mask and kicking her legs like some kind of horror film character, while Harry crouched above her saying, ‘please take the gas mask off, Lily, please take it off. It’s not yours, it’s time to go home now. Please take off the gas mask…’
‘Lily,’ said Teddy eventually, ‘I’ll play the colour game with you if we can just go now.’
This seemed to do the trick, and in a blur of stress and almost shouting, Harry had persuaded his children back into the car, buckling his own seatbelt with an exhausted realisation that it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
Teddy got into the passenger side, but the second the door was closed, unleashed his feelings.
‘Why didn’t you tell me the Nazis were German?’ Teddy burst out furiously, his hair turning a fierce red as he slumped down in his seat and threw his arms over his face.
‘What?’ said Harry cluelessly. ‘I didn’t think I had to - you could have read literally any of the signs for more than a few seconds, Teddy, and you’d have known - why?’
‘That girl was German,’ moaned Teddy, and James leaned forward to grin at him with a goading ‘ha ha!’
‘What did you say?’
Teddy turned bright red, scowling irritably out of the window. ‘She just said how awful it was, and I said yeah, the other side were bastards, weren’t they? I looked like a right idiot, it was so awkward.’
‘You know what, Teddy, I don’t think that section was really the best place to chat a girl up anyway. The whole museum could probably be declared a romantic free zone.’
‘I wasn’t chatting her up!’ insisted Teddy, still blushing furiously. ‘I was just being friendly. And… I… Well maybe you should have taken us to Kew Gardens instead then!’
‘You know we can’t go back there,’ said Harry irritably. ‘Not after what James did to all those plants.’