Two updates in one day!

This fic is dedicated to my grandmother, who passed on December 12, 2016, after her nine-year battle with breast cancer. She was, and will always be, the greatest woman I have ever known.

This is also written for The Dreaming Hare's AU Packet Prompt Challenge. My prompt was an AU in which Harry is raised by Euphemia and Fleamont Potter following his parents' deaths.

Lastly, I don't own Harry Potter. Everything that you recognize belongs to JK Rowling.

Angel

Harry walked down the narrow, clean sidewalks of Godric's Hollow. The house at the end of the block was old, though the grass was as green and neatly trimmed as ever and the exterior of the house looked to be freshly painted. The crisp spring air smelled of blooming flowers, full of life despite the painful pit that was settling in Harry's stomach.

For a moment, he wished that he had allowed Ginny to come with him. She was still at home, taking care of James who had recently come down with some kind of stomach bug. But when she had offered to call up Hermione so that she could accompany him to Godric's Hollow, Harry had insisted that she stay home. He needed to do this alone.

The sidewalk seemed to get narrower and narrower the closer he got to the house. Everything in his body wanted to just collapse onto the pavement and never get up, to let the cold nip at his nose and his fingers and his heart until he couldn't feel the pain that had settled into his soul at the news he had received that morning.

Euphemia Potter was dead. His grandmother, the woman who had raised him, had died that very morning, and of a Muggle disease, no less.

Though his breaths were shallow and quick with grief, Harry pushed open the front door to the house. There were no lights on in the house, but he could barely make out the form of his grandfather's slight frame sitting on the leather sofa in the sitting room.

Fleamont Potter was not a man who sat in the dark. He never walked around barefoot on chilly days. He always remembered to tend to his garden of potions ingredients in the backyard. His sitting room and potions lab were always spotless.

Yet here he was sitting in the dark, with his wrinkled feet exposed to the cool air. Books and photos were littered on the soft carpet around the couch, and from where he stood in the entrance hall, Harry could see the back garden overgrown with weeds and various cauldrons and jars of ingredients littering the counters of the lab down the hall.

"Papa?" Harry's voice was soft, broken just as the elderly man before him was. A quick flick of his wand brought the lights on in the room.

Fleamont looked up, and the tear tracks on his face were illuminated in the light. "Harry," he whispered. His voice cracked regardless, and he returned his gaze to the picture between his gnarled toes. Euphemia beamed up at him from the black and white photo, clad in her wedding dress and looking radiant with youth and love.

Harry fell to his knees as he looked around the room. His grandmother's unfinished knitting was in the little basket next to the couch. Her favorite blanket was draped over the arm of her favorite chair in front of the fire. The deep fryer was still sitting out on the counter from when she had taught Ginny how to make her famous cannolis two days before.

A choked sob escaped from Harry's throat. His grandmother was everywhere in the house, as though she would walk in the front door with a bag full of groceries and a tin of her favorite biscuits any moment now.

But no, she was gone. Fleamont had stuck his head through the Floo that very morning at 5:30am and informed Harry that his grandmother had finally passed. The cancer that she had battled for nine years had finally beaten her, despite the best efforts of all of the healers at St. Mungo's.

Harry's shaking fingers landed on the photo nearest to him. A six-year-old version of him waved happily from the picture, bundled up in a thick coat and woolen gloves and a scarf. His grandmother held his hand tightly in hers as they posed in front of the larger-than-life snowman they had built.

"Where is she?" he murmured, knowing that Fleamont wouldn't be able to bring himself to owl St. Mungo's or enter the room where his wife lay.

Harry followed his grandfather's eyes and made his way to the bedroom. With sweaty palms, he twisted the doorknob and entered the room. And in the split second that it took for his eyes to register his grandmother's form lying too-still under the thick flowered quilt, Harry's heart broke in two. She looked shrunken and small in the bed, her hair thin and her face withered and pale. He almost didn't recognize her.

Harry backed out of the room before he lost it, retreated to the kitchen where he could quickly scratch out a message to St. Mungo's. He sent the letter with his grandfather's tawny owl Sharon and returned to the living room.

Fleamont was still sitting on the sofa where Harry had left him, clutching a picture of him and Euphemia dancing at their wedding and looking as if nothing in the world mattered but for the two of them. Harry had seen the black-and-white photo many times, for it had sat on the center of the mantle for as long as Harry had lived with his grandparents.

"I wish that I could go back," Fleamont whispered, his voice shaking with the tears that threatened to overflow his eyes. Harry sat next to him, not knowing whether he should hug his grandfather or offer words of comfort or to just sit with him. "I wish I could have another lifetime with her – a lifetime to find her sooner, love her better, to hold her closer when we lost James, to be the husband that I should have been all along, to catch the cancer earlier and give her the years of life that she deserved."

This time Harry really did reach out and grab his grandfather's shaking hand. "Don't think like that, Papa. You were a great husband, a great father, and an incredible grandfather and guardian to a little boy who found himself orphaned at a young age." He offered a crooked smile to the older wizard.

Fleamont grinned back, although it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Everything good in my life came from her. Everything good about the way we raised you was her. She came into my life when I was lost and alone and broken and she saved me."

"She saved all of us," Harry murmured. "Do you remember that time that we got all the way to King's Cross and through the barrier before we realized that I had forgotten my potions set? And she apparated back to the house and grabbed it before any of us could blink? Always saving the day, she was." He shook his head at the memory.

"Your grandmother was the greatest – "

" – the greatest woman I've ever known," Harry finished with a genuine smile. Fleamont returned it, the tears in his eyes sparkling.

The Floo chimed suddenly, and four men dressed in white St. Mungo's robes swept into the living room, disturbing the pictures littering the floor. Harry motioned down the hall, watching them follow his directions before turning back to his grandfather. Fleamont had begun to cry in earnest again.

"No one knows what it was like these last few days," he sobbed, clutching onto Harry's hand with a crushing grip. " I – I – "

"I know, Papa. But I know she loved you so very much, and we both know she's in a better place now. She was on pain potions all the time as it was."

And as Harry heard the men from St. Mungo's make their way back down the hall toward the Floo, as he watched them levitate the wrapped body of his grandmother between them, a peace settled over him. The sadness was still there and the tears still threatened to fall from his eyes and onto the carpet beneath his feet, but it would be okay. His grandmother had lived a fulfilling life, she had cared for him and taken him in when he needed someone the most. She had lived a life full of grace and beauty. She had brought goodness to everything she had touched, but it had been her time to go.

Harry squeezed Fleamont's hand one more time. "Papa, Heaven loaned us an angel, but it was time for her to return. But there is nowhere you could go that she won't be with you."

"There is nowhere you could go that I won't be with you." -Moana