Disclaimer: None of my work belongs to me, it is solely the property of the one and only J.K. Rowling and any other company which has the copyright of Harry Potter, including Warner Bros. Nothing here belongs to me; all the characters are J.K. Rowling's originally, though any new character not part of the Harry Potter series belongs to me.

Title: All that's left are the memories

Author: hpjkrowling4ever

All that's left are the memories

It had been a long time since the attic had been opened. The last time it had been opened was after her grandmother's funeral years ago. With an alarmed glance at her brothers, Lily Luna pulled out her wand and rushed to the ladder. Clutching her wand in a death grip, Lily climbed up the ladder and stuck her head into the attic. There, crouched on the floor, his black robes spread around him like a pool of darkness, sat her father. Lily stashed her wand away in her pocket and breathed a sigh of relief. She nodded at her brothers, both of them standing at the bottom of the ladder with anxious looks in their eyes. Albus sighed and headed up the ladder, closely followed by James.

"Dad?" Lily asked, stepping softly over to where Harry Potter was crouched. His grey head was bent over a trunk filled with little mementos, and his hands, now wrinkled and gnarled were rummaging through the contents of the trunk. Harry turned at his daughter's questioning voice, and a very soft smile appeared on his face.

"Lils. Al. Jamie." Harry's eyebrows rose with the appearance of his sons in addition to his daughter. He coughed, and one of his hands snuck out of the trunk to the teacup beside him. He drank deeply from it and put it back down. The fresh aroma of her father's favourite blend of coffee reached Lily, and it comforted her on a very basic level. Most of the big milestones or important discussions in the lives of the Potter siblings had been accompanied with their father's coffee. Whether it had been a discussion at the table about buying Lily a "proper adult broomstick" or the revelation that she was pregnant, her father had made his coffee for her each and every time, and the sweet smell of it was reassuring.

"Why are you up here, Dad?" Albus asked. His voice was deep and rich, a lovely bass-baritone that made witches everywhere swoon. A well-known composer, conductor, and singer, Albus had made it his life's work to bring music to every young witch and wizard out there. He was married to Scorpius Malfoy, and as such had no children, but was a doting uncle to Lily and James' children and godfather to a handful of the children of the rest of the Weasley brood.

Harry shifted on the floor and grabbed his cane next to him to haul himself up. Lily rushed to help him up, but he waved her away. Lily was a fully qualified Healer, and ever since her father's horrific accident in her first year of Healer training, she had devoted herself to working alongside Aurors. She was now one of the foremost Healers in the Wizarding World and had saved dozens of lives. The one life she always feared being unable to save, though, was her father's.

"I am looking through memories." Harry said. His emerald eyes pierced each and every one of his children, and made Lily feel like a small child caught red-handed at the crime scene. With a rather weak chuckle, Harry pushed his glasses back up his nose, bent down to pick up some newspaper clippings and made his way to the rocking chair in the corner of the attic.

"Why?" James asked, ever the curious one. James had taken up their father's role as Head of Magical Law Enforcement when he had retired, after spending years as Head Auror. James had worked tirelessly to banish any murmurings that he had only become Head Auror due to his father, and was now accepted as one of the most competent Heads of Magical Law Enforcement ever to have existed.

Harry leant back into the chair and closed his eyes. A half-smile played at his lips, but none of his children said a word, instead forming a loose half-circle around the chair.

"I never expected to outlive my closest friends." Harry said, and his smile disappeared as if wiped away. Lily remembered him collapsing on the kitchen floor, falling, falling into an abyss where none of them could reach him, even their mother, when he had heard that Hermione Granger-Weasley, Minister for Magic, had been assassinated, and her husband, Ronald Weasley, had died protecting his children from that same assassin. Lily remembered the gasping breaths and choked sobs that had wracked their father. It stood out in her mind as one of her worst memories, when her indomitable father was finally conquered.

"Dad –" Albus stretched out his hand and knelt next to his father, putting a hand on his knee. "You can't save everyone."

Harry snorted.

"I did, didn't I? I died for the Wizarding World." Harry gave a rough chuckle, as if it hurt him to laugh. "I'd hoped to live out my life with my best friends, not get to seventy and find myself without them."

"You've got Mum." James said, his voice mildly accusing. Lily shot a glare at him, but her father caught sight of it and raised an eyebrow. Lily bowed her head.

"I do have your mother." Harry said, his voice gentle. Lily closed her eyes, swaying slightly. "But your mother would not understand what I am feeling. I lost my closest friends, James. They were my first friends. They were my family. It's been a year today since I lost them."

James swallowed heavily. Lily could see the pain in his eyes as the memories of their father's collapse were brought to the forefront of his mind.

"Sorry, Dad." James whispered.

"Jamie – look at me." Harry met his son's eyes. "Your mother and I are a wonderful team and my love for her knows no bounds. But I loved Ron and Hermione something fierce. They had made all my childhood dreams come to life, and losing them –" Harry gave a mirthless chuckle. "We never expected to come out of the War together. I think we half-expected one of us to die. When we survived, I don't actually think that any of us even entertained the thought that we wouldn't grow old together."

"I didn't know that you were still feeling like this." Lily murmured. Her father had spent weeks after their funerals moping around, before picking himself up and dusting himself off and then organising a trip with Rose and Hugo to the Forest of Dean. She didn't know what had happened, but Rose, Hugo and Harry had come back looking a lot better.

Harry stood up again and placed the newspaper clippings on the rocking chair. He limped over to Lily and pulled her into a hug, wrapping his powerful arms around her and holding her tight. James and Albus approached them, and Harry pulled them into a hug as well.

"You are my children, and you are my priority. I could see how much my…moods…were hurting you. I needed to do something productive and you were all the catalysts to that trip I took with your cousins. I love you all so much, you do know that, right?" Harry gave each of them a kiss, and Lily marveled at his ability to make them all feel like little children in need of a comforting hug. There was something entirely magical about Harry's hugs; they were warm, safe, and let Lily know that she had something to rely on.

"We love you too, Dad." Albus said. They pulled away from the hug one by one, and James went to investigate the newspaper clippings.

"Why do you have these clippings in particular, Dad?" he asked, rifling through them. Harry sat back down and motioned for his children to do the same. Knowing that a good story was coming up, Lily leant against Albus' stomach, and he wrapped his arms around his sister's waist. James sprawled on the ground inelegantly, his eyes closed and his hands behind his head. Despite all of them being in their late forties, none of them felt too old for their father's stories.

"It took Ron, Hermione and me a long time to get our feet back after the War." Harry said, leaning back in the old chair, which creaked in protest. "All people wanted to do was to get back to normal, but what do you do with an entire generation of students who had seen the horrors that they had seen? What do you do with students who were an army? Students who drew their wand and fired spells rather than talk when someone surprised them, or when a bush so much as rustled? The Wizarding World wanted to forget, thinking that medals and thank-yous and money and influence would fix it all up."

Lily had never heard her father being bitter; he was always thankful that the Wizarding World had survived, and told the them the story of the War as if it was a fairytale, a good-meets-bad and bad loses type of story. It all sounded so effortless, so well thought out, when her father and aunt and uncle trekked through woods and lived in a tent searching for Horcruxes.

"Without that influence, I would never have managed to sway the public into voting for Kingsley Shacklebolt as Minister, not just Interim Minister. And he did a lot of good for the Wizarding World." Harry sighed, and picked up a piece of newspaper, yellowed, dry and crinkled with age. "The Malfoys were the first test."

Lily felt Albus stiffen behind her, and she rubbed her thumb in comforting circles on his hand still wrapped around her waist. He had faced a media storm when he had come out, and subsequently married, Scorpius. He was extraordinarily touchy and protective about his husband and his husband's family.

"You remember that I owed Narcissa a Life Debt, and Draco owed me a Life Debt. We were entangled as such, which is why Narcissa asked me to stand as witness for defense in the trial of the Malfoy Family." Harry looked at his children. "Self-sacrificing I may be, but nothing other than a Life Debt would have made me stand up to defend Lucius Malfoy. He had been there when my godfather was killed, after all."

"I don't blame you, Dad." James said from the floor. "Sorry, Al, but old Lucius Malfoy was a bastard."

Albus said nothing, but Lily knew that he felt the same. It was only his loyalty to his husband that prevented him from agreeing with his brother. Lucius Malfoy had been a massive obstacle to the marriage between Albus and Scorpius, but they overcame it, and shortly after it, Lucius Malfoy died of natural causes.

"This clipping is the media furor that broke out when it came out that I was defending the Malfoys." Harry closed his eyes and tapped his stick against his sore leg. Lily winced and it was all she could do not to tell her father to stop. "I wasn't reading it because I had regrets, but because it reminded me of Ron." Harry put his fingers to his temple and breathed deeply. "Ron stormed into the Prophet building, sat Rita Skeeter down and forced her to give him an interview with a proper quill. He defended me ferociously, and the media calmed itself. I paid my Life Debt, and the Malfoys went free, but not without a lot of money magically disappearing from their vaults. Even I couldn't save them from that."

Harry leant forward, his head in his hands.

"There are moments," he whispered brokenly, "Where I remember Ron, Hermione and I talking about our futures. We'd grow old together – make fun of our children – our grandchildren. There are some things that they knew that your mother couldn't understand. Living in that tent for the better part of a year brought us together in ways that no one other than they could fully comprehend. I miss that. It's that camaraderie that I mourn." Harry fingered another clipping, where a front-page photo of Ron and Hermione, along with Harry was plastered. It was their wedding, where Harry had been best man. Harry had given an interview then about his friendship with Ron and Hermione. It was such a moving interview that Lily always got tears in her eyes when she read it.

"We miss them too, Dad." Albus said. It was true. Every family photograph reminded them of Ron and Hermione. Their aunt and uncle had almost been like a second set of parents to them. The Granger-Weasley house was as familiar to the Potter children as their own house. The fact that they were gone was still a hard pill to swallow.

"You know, I foiled assassination after assassination attempt on Hermione and Ron and myself, but mainly them. Any time Hermione had to go to another country for some diplomatic meeting, I organised the security for that. I wouldn't have trusted the life of my friends to anyone else." Harry took a shaky breath. "But my accident – I almost blame myself for my accident, because I had to quit being an Auror and Head of the DMLE. I had to trust the security of my friends to someone else. And they failed. They didn't only lose the assassin once he'd killed Hermione, the assassin went and killed Ron as well!" Harry's voice rose before tumbling down again, a precarious tower of bricks carelessly knocked to the ground.

"It wasn't your fault, Dad." James said, the only one of them who perhaps knew vaguely what Harry was feeling.

"I know it wasn't, Jamie." Harry sighed. "Every photo I look at is bittersweet. Laughter, fun, family – Ron and Hermione defined a lot of those words for me. I didn't have a proper family before I had them." He stroked the last clipping, one of Hermione, with a large grin on her face, naming Harry Head of the DMLE. Lily remembered her words "There is nobody else I would be happier to entrust the safety of the Wizarding World to."

She was surprised to feel tears on her cheeks. A glance at her brothers saw them in the same situation as her.

"Remus Lupin was the last of the Marauders. They died in reverse order – Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. I am the youngest of the three of us and I will be the last to die. Remus was their friend to the bitter end, and I will be Ron and Hermione's friend to the bitter end."

"You still have us, Dad." Lily extricated herself from her brother's embrace and gave her father a hug. Harry's eyes looked deep into hers and he cupped her cheek, rubbing his thumb against it very slowly.

"My darling, you're not going anywhere unless I give the explicit say-so." Harry gave a watery chuckle. "If it wasn't for you three and Gin, I think I'd have given up a long time ago."

"To the bitter end, Dad, to the bitter end." James said. He had pushed himself up into a sitting position and was giving his father a cheeky grin.

"Even if all that's left are the memories?" Albus retaliated, eyes blazing at what he thought was his brother disrespecting his father's sadness. It wasn't James who answered, though, it was Harry, with an admonishing look at his son.

"Especially if all that's left are the memories. I would hate forgetting everything we'd been through. It would be like losing them all over again."

Harry's three children converged on him in a group hug, and it would be a long time before anyone pulled away.

"Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch."

A/N: I used all the prompts for this small one-shot! I don't know if it was bittersweet enough, but I felt that I got a sad tone to it. Hopefully it's good. This is in response to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Challenges and Assignments) Potions Classroom Assignment #3.