NOW
On the bedside table, his wand flashes and vibrates at four o’clock in the morning, and a bleary-eyed Harry Potter begins his day. Years of needing to be at the hospital by five-thirty have destroyed any impulse he might have had to delay the alarm and sleep a bit longer, so he grabs his glasses from his bedside table and pushes them up his nose as he swings his legs around to exit the bed. As always, the first thing that comes into focus is the picture he has on his bedside table, the one of him and Ginny holding the swaddled bundle of blankets that was Rowan in the hospital hours after the girl was born. They look so happy in the picture, so unprepared for everything that was going to come their way, and it makes him long for that kind of blissful ignorance; he’s never been able to stomach swapping it for a more recent photo.
Harry’s routine begins with his wake up call, after which he dons athletic apparel, chugs a glass of water, and goes for a run. Early in his training, Harry realized the very best way to rouse himself for a shift was to lace up his trainers and hit the pavement beforehand. He’s always been athletic and restless, so the movement gives him energy and helps him to clear his mind before he heads in for a day of patients and procedures. When Rowan was a baby, and he and Ginny still lived together, he’d sometimes bring her along in her jogging stroller, so he could give Ginny some extra time to sleep. He always felt bad — that she was most often the one getting up with the baby in the middle of the night — and wanted to do his part. Of course, that didn’t matter anyway, in the end. It still wasn’t enough, and he knows that. It was wildly insufficient, as he remains today.
After about 30 minutes and roughly 6 kilometers, he finishes the loop near his West London flat — the very same one he once shared with Ginny, though she now resides with his daughter about halfway through his running route — and heads back inside for a shower and some tea, which he’ll drink in a thermos on his way to his rounds. He grabs one of the flapjacks he keeps in his cupboard for Rowan and resolves that today he’ll actually eat it before he gets wrapped up in a case. It wouldn’t do to let anyone — the mediwizards and witches, his fellow trainees, or his supervising healers — notice he’s forgetting to eat.
He arrives at St. Mungo’s just on time, at 5:28. This gives him time to drop his coat and rucksack in his locker, and look at himself in the mirror. Ginny was right, when she saw him the other night: he does look like shit. Healer training is designed to wear you down, and even though every successive generation of healers believes that doing that to the witches and wizards who represent the future of the profession is wrong, almost no one does anything to change it. It’s some logical fallacy — though he’d have to ask Hermione to remind him which one it is — where you feel you can’t change something because you suffered, so everyone else should, too. But at least he isn’t wearing garish lime green robes — healers over 60 still favor them, but everyone else has moved on to the more practical muggle surgical scrubs — and that is, at the very least, an improvement over generations past.
At 5:30 on the dot, he makes his way to the central station, where a few mediwitches are gathered, chatting and organizing charts. He recognizes one of them and waves as he talks a gulp of his tea.
“Good morning, Healer Potter,” calls one of the mediwitches, a jocular woman named Dorthea in her late fifties who has a soft spot for the younger healers. Today, though, she doesn’t bother with any of her usual jokes or antics; she was working with Harry earlier in the week, and was the one who handed him the calming draught he needed after calling the time of death on their patient. “We didn’t know we’d see you today. Aren’t you organizing a colloquium for the student healers?”
“Morning, Dorthea,” he put on his biggest, fakest smile, trying to recover from the fact that this woman had seen him on the verge of a panic attack just a few days earlier. “That doesn’t start until nine, so I wanted to come in and check on Lawson and Renner. Do you have their charts?”
“That depends,” Dorthea responded, sounding more like a strict grandmother than a woman who has more than once stealthily charmed the head healer’s hair blue just to make a patient laugh. “Have you eaten breakfast? You know that tea doesn’t count.”
He reaches into the pocket of his scrubs and pulls out the flapjack, which has gotten a bit squashed in transit to the hospital. “I was planning to as I reviewed charts,” he tells her, opening the packet with his teeth to emphasize the point.
“I’d argue that a snack intended for your four year old also doesn’t count as breakfast, Healer Potter,” she reprimands him. “If you don’t start taking better care of yourself, I’ll need to call up to maternity and get the other Healer Potter involved.” She pauses for emphasis. “I’m sure she’d be thrilled to know that you came in three hours early instead of eating a real breakfast.”
“I’m sure my mother would respect my commitment to my patients,” Harry responds flatly, grabbing a chart from the witch’s hands. He is committed to his patients, yes, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of not checking on them, especially after the incident earlier in the week. But there’s also something else his mother would absolutely pick up on: that if Harry didn’t have Rowan and wasn’t occupied with sleep or family, he didn’t know what to do with himself aside from work.
“But she might also bring you a muffin,” Dorthea retorts, an eyebrow raised.
Harry laughs. He can’t help it. “You’ve got the wrong Potter, I’m afraid,” he corrects her without looking up from the notes the overnight healer left in Lawson’s chart. “My mum might forcibly drag me to the caf, but my dad’s the one who would show up with homemade muffins.”
That was the way his parents operated, the way they had his whole life. His mum was the pragmatic one, the one who called him on his bullshit and forced him to handle things for himself. Contrary to popular beliefs about gender roles, his dad was the soft parent, the one who would take care of him instead of making him figure it out on his own every time. The division was the same with the way he and Ginny parented Rowan, probably. But if Harry was the one who spoiled and coddled the girl, it wasn’t because he was innately inclined to it; it was simply because Ginny was with her more often than he was, and he couldn’t bring himself to spend his limited time with his daughter helping her become independent.
Harry reviews the chart for a few more moments before shoving the empty snack wrapper in his pocket and heading for his patient’s room. “You could at least throw your trash away,” Dorthea calls as he heads down the hall.
“Trash is for tossers,” he calls, his trademark cheeky grin across his face. He may look and feel like shit, but he’s a Gryffindor through and through. He can put on a brave face.
…
Like muggle medical school, healer school begins with the fundamentals. And like muggle medical school, one of those fundamental courses is anatomy, taught through the dissection of cadavers.
The course is designed to teach you the structures and systems of the magical human’s body, but Harry has long suspected it was intended to do something else as well. The other, darker goal is to take innocent children — because, in reality, the majority of students entering The Academy are between 18 and 19 years old — who likely have little concept of and experience with death and completely desensitize them to it, while enforcing that they need to treat it with dignity and respect. In a weird way, entering the field of healing is sort of like going to war: you have to get sworn in and your training is a baptism by fire. You’re confronted with the most difficult stuff — death, destruction, disease — right from the jump so that you can more or less ignore it when you’re inevitably confronted with it in the future and get on with your job.
There’s an image of the perfect healer, just like there is an image of the perfect soldier: they are personable and likable, but detached. They are logical and focused, but with the awareness to present their thought processes to those who are not. They are stoic and unemotional, but able to empathize with patients and their families. And they are able to hold someone’s hand as they take their last breath in one room, and joke with a patient in the next without skipping a beat.
In reality, that perfect healer doesn’t exist. If it did — if every healer was that healer — it would be a profession of sociopaths. And it’s not. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. Harry became a healer because he wanted to help and care for people; he chose to specialize in magical and physical injuries to the brain because he wanted a chance to protect a very specific person he couldn’t save in the past. And his mum always reminds him that humanity is at the heart of healing, that it only serves to make him a better healer if he can feel the pain of his patients instead of ignoring it. That’s probably true. But it also means that one case gone wrong has the power to destroy him, that if he’s caught off guard, he may return to the darkest place he’s ever been. And if it happens again, he won’t heave Ginny to help him through it like he did last time.
He’s setting up in the lecture hall, where healers present unusual cases to interested professionals and run classes or lectures for the students, when he looks up to see his mother standing in the back near the door. She’s in a set of navy blue scrubs, her badge prominently displayed from her breast pocket, indicating that she’s here because she’s working and not because she was checking in on him. He beckons her forward. “Hi, Mum,” he calls.
“Hello, love,” she responds with a concerned, almost pitying smile. Harry visibly winces. He’d thought she was just popping by to say hello because they were both there anyway; now, he’s not sure.
“What’s that look?” He demands skeptically. She’s usually not one to tiptoe around an issue — that’s his dad’s forte. He can usually count on his mum to be direct with him.
“I heard you were in at five-thirty, even though you’re only scheduled for colloquium today,” she says casually, an eyebrow raised in question. “Colloquium is from nine to two, Harry. At the earliest, you should have gotten here at eight.” It’s an unnecessary reminder; he knows exactly what time he’s working.
He sighs. “I wanted to check in on my patients,” he tells her confidently, in an authoritative tone that should lead her to believe he knows what he’s doing. But, being his mother, she just breezes right past that.
“Even then, you could have gotten here at seven,” Lily points out. She’s significantly shorter than he is, now that he’s a fully grown man, but her presence is so large that it feels as though they’re going head to head. “Is this about your patient? The one you lost on Monday?” Her voice drops, and it’s now laced with such profound empathy it makes his stomach roil.
“Maybe,” Harry admits, looking down at his lecture notes and the blinded case notes and imaging he’ll be running through with the students. It’s better if he doesn’t meet his mum’s eyes; there’s something about seeing his eyes in another person that leaves him vulnerable — it happens with Rowan, too, even though she’s just a little girl — and now isn’t a moment for vulnerability.
“Harry,” Lily sighs softly, her tone soothing and almost melodic. “There was nothing you could have done. And sometimes, accepting that you’ve done everything you can is less harmful than trying to do more is part of this job. I know it’s shit, Harry, I do. Merlin, you have no idea how many times I’ve sat with a mother whose baby was stillborn and just felt like the biggest failure in the world…” It’s not an exact comparison, but Harry appreciates where his mum is coming from. It’s just that…
“I know I can do more, Mum,” Harry tells her fiercely. And Lily can probably see what she suspected all along: it’s not that Harry is as much torn up about this specific patient as he is about the incident the case reminded him of. It’s about the person he still wishes he could save. “I know that I’m here on this planet and I’ve made it this far in my training to be able to one day make sure that no one ever has to die like this again and —”
“You can’t change the past, Harry,” she reminds him softly, reaching a hand toward her son and caressing the back of his hand. “You’ll never be able to save someone who is already gone.” He looks down and locks eyes with his mother and she sees straight through him, she sees everything right down to the mental images he’s spent the past six years trying to banish from his memory.
“I know that,” Harry replies sharply, feeling like she’s missing the point. It’s not like he doesn’t understand that he can’t bring back the dead. Even with magic, such a thing is impossible. It’s just that he hoped to figure out how to prevent this particular kind of demise by now.
But she isn’t — of course she’s not. “I know you feel helpless. But Harry, your career is only just starting. I trust you to get there — you just need time. Advances in healing don’t often come overnight from determined senior trainees. Next year, you’ll be a fully-certified supervising healer in cerebral healing, though, and I know that you’re going to work on cases that help you figure it out. I know you can do it, love. You’ve always done everything you’ve set yourself to.” My determined little boy, she always called him when he was younger. But he’s not little anymore.
Harry manages a weak smile at that. “Thanks, Mum,” he mumbles. He tries to sound unaffected, but her encouragement means more to him than nearly anyone else’s ever could. He looks at the clock. There’s still half an hour before the students will get here. “Is your shift over? Or just starting?”
“Just starting,” Lily tells him. She taps the CallCoin — used to page healers when they’re needed — on her badge. “But the ward is slow today and I have clinic this afternoon, so it shouldn’t be so bad.” She pauses. “You’re picking up Rowan after the colloquium?”
“I am, yes.” Harry knows he perks up at that. In all of his brooding about his patient, he’d forgotten to be grateful that he gets to spend this afternoon and evening and most of tomorrow with his favorite person in the world.
“What’s the plan?”
He’s about to tell her that she knows the plan, that he told her on Wednesday; then, he recalls that he didn’t, because it’s a surprise for Rowan. He’d only spoken about it with Ginny, out of their daughter’s earshot, that night at the manor. “We’re going to that muggle pottery painting place. I’ll let her paint whatever she wants for herself, and I was thinking we could make something together for Ginny.”
Lily raises an eyebrow. “Making something for Ginny?”
“That’s Rowan’s mum,” Harry shrugs, as if that explains everything. “I thought we could put Ro’s handprint on a mug or something? It would be a nice gesture, I think.”
Lily continues to stare at her son appraisingly. “Lots of nice gestures for Ginny, huh?” She prods gently. “Is she going for a massage tonight?”
Harry nods. “She is, yes,” he confirms. “It’s the least I can do, really. Treating her to a massage or making pottery for her with Rowan every now and again. She is just…well she’s super-mum, really.” And there’s more that he can’t say, not sober at eight-thirty in the morning, about how neither he nor Ginny really knew what they were getting into, having a baby when he was smack in the middle of healing training. She never signed up to be a single mum, certainly. And he still loves her, which is something he recognizes but feels helpless to do anything about, knowing why she’ll flat out reject him. So he’s just doing what he can to support his best friend and the mother of his daughter in the meantime.
“So I’m guessing she won’t want to come to the party with your dad and I,” Lily tries, studying her son’s expression once more.
This awakens something in Harry, a nagging little feeling of jealousy he felt at Sirius’ birthday dinner. “About that,” he says, returning to his firmest tone of voice. “Why are you constantly trying to set Ginny up? That’s weird, Mum. You’re her daughter’s paternal grandmother. You shouldn’t be trying to find a new father for my daughter.”
Lily shrugs. “Well, obviously, I would never set her up with anyone who wanted to replace you,” she tells him, sounding bored. “But when you think about it, as Rowan’s paternal grandmother — and, by the way, I still think I am much too young to be called a grandmother — I have a vested interest in choosing her stepdad. Don’t you trust me more than Hermione?”
“I don’t trust either of you on that,” he responds through gritted teeth, trying to stay measured and avoid the flame of jealousy in his chest from catching fire.
“Because you don’t want Rowan to have a stepdad?” Lily asks, a smirk on her face. She knows she’s got her son down, whether he admits it or not. “She made it very clear three years ago that she wasn’t going to wait for you to get your shit together and figure out how to juggle your responsibilities.”
“Well, no,” Harry admits. “But I finish training in June, and I was hoping she might be open to giving things another go once, you know, work is a bit more flexible.” He’s never said it out loud before; in his head, this was a rock solid plan, but his mother doesn’t look impressed.
“Harry? That’s weak and you know it. You’re going to need to do a lot more if you want that. In the meantime, she deserves to check out her options.” She pauses for dramatic effect. “Women have needs , you know.” Against her chest, the CallCoin vibrates. “I’m needed on the ward,” she explains, giving her son a quick, tight hug before sprinting up the stairs. “Call us with Rowan tomorrow,” she calls back to him as she leaves.
Until the clock strikes nine and students start arriving, Harry finds himself pondering two questions: first, if finishing training isn’t enough to convince Ginny to try again, is he even more fucked than he already was? And second, why are his parents more interested in speaking with his kid than they are speaking with him?
…
Every time Harry brings Rowan to Glaze Craze, a paint-your-own pottery studio in Southwark, he silently prays that his daughter will not choose that day to show signs of accidental magic. There are too many opportunities for it to show up: if she wants to paint a figurine on a high shelf and Harry says no, for example, or if she decides she’s too impatient to wait a week for Harry to pick the finished product up after it’s fired in the kiln. He’d have a hell of a time explaining to the nice shop girl how the pottery turned itself ceramic, after all.
She never does, though. Glaze Craze is their special place, somewhere Rowan only goes with her dad. As such, the little girl is always on her best behavior, though if this is because her dad never denies her anything while there, Harry decides they’re better off not knowing. He tries not to be a cliche, a dad who is present less than he’d like to be and therefore spoils his child to compensate for it. But sometimes, like when his little girl is simply so excited to paint a figurine of a castle that she might burst, he thinks it’s probably okay to give in.
He’s never been quite sure where Rowan gets her creative streak. The girl loves to draw and dance and tell stories and make up songs, and it’s been this way for as long as Harry can remember. Even before she was born, the easiest ways to get the baby to kick for her parents was to play some music or tell her a story, preferably complete with voices for each character. As an infant, she gravitated toward brightly-colored toys and kicked her little legs in time with whatever tune was playing nearby. Her first babbles even sounded a bit like singing. Now, at age four, she asks for dance classes and trips to paint pottery. She tells stories with embellishments that she seems to know are just for dramatic effect and asks Sirius to teach her piano when he plays the one at her grandparents’ house — something neither Harry nor Phoebe ever showed much interest in.
Of course, she is only four. Rowan loves artistic activities, but it’s not like she’s particularly talented at them. It would be nice to sit back and watch Rowan paint her pottery palace, but doing so would be an absolute recipe for disaster. He sits next to her, and helps her coordinate the strokes of her paintbrush and reminds her to rinse the brush in between colors. Even so, the castle, when finished, is mainly painted with random splotches of pink, purple, or turquoise that turn an unseemly brown in the spots where the colors got too close and blend together. He passes the item off to the girl who works the tables — she can’t be older than twenty, which makes Harry feel old — and looks toward the untouched mug he’d planned to paint for Ginny. Defeatedly, he wonders if he has enough time to paint the base, wait for it to dry, and then add Rowan’s handprint. He knows he doesn’t.
It’s only a moment later that Rowan whines, “Daddy! My tummy is hungry.” Just like that, time is up.
“All right, Ro. We’ll get you a snack, yeah?” He waves over the shopgirl — is that the right word for her? — and smiles sympathetically. “I’m afraid I didn’t have time to touch my own piece.”
The girl smiles, picks up the mug to make sure no paint has touched it and, satisfied that’s the case, moves to return it to its shelf. “That’s all right,” she says breezily. “I won’t charge you for the mug, but I’ll have to charge you both a studio fee.”
“That’s all right,” Harry agrees. He takes the opportunity of the shopgirl’s back being turned and the other tables being occupied by their projects to take out his wand and subtly clean Rowan’s paint-stained hands. He stands and offers his hand to his daughter; ever the daredevil, Rowan pointedly refuses to take it and climbs down from the chair herself, looking immensely pleased when she lands on her feet.
He pays for the castle and the painting fees, leaving his phone number so that the store can let him know when the piece is ready, and offers his hand to Rowan once again so they can head outside. This time, the girl takes it; she knows better than to assume her dad would allow her to walk around London without holding onto him.
By now, it’s around four in the afternoon, a bit too early for dinner but a bit too late to give the girl anything substantial. It’s best not to spoil Rowan with sugar, of course, but it’s even better not to spoil her appetite for dinner completely. And, anyhow, Harry is knackered and could do with a coffee if he’s going to make it through dinner and bedtime, so he navigates the pair of them to a cafe where he orders a latte for himself and chocolate chip cookie that is almost too beautiful to eat for Rowan. The pair of them settle into a table near the window and Harry listens delightedly to his daughter’s tales of nursery school as she progressively becomes covered in chocolate.
She’s somewhere in a meandering tale about playing a game of unicorns with her friend Jane (“Daddy, Jane do not know they are real !”) when in her excitement she knocks over her cup of water, spilling it all over the expensive-looking handbag sitting on the floor next to them. “Oops,” Rowan breathes, her small mouth forming a perfect ‘O’ shape in surprise.
“Shit,” Harry mutters, reaching for the small pile of napkins he’d grabbed for Rowan’s hands and face, so he can offer them to the bag’s owner.
“Daddy, that is a bad word!” Rowan admonishes him seriously. “You can’t say it!”
“I’m sorry, Ro,” Harry apologizes distractedly. He doesn’t look up at the owner of the bag before leaning over to press a napkin on the mess. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes to the unseen owner. “She’s only four, and she gets a bit clumsy, but if anything if ruined I’m happy to —”
“Harry?” His eyes snap upward at that. He recognizes that voice, although the memory of it is so distant that he can hardly trust his recollection of it.
“Gemma?” The girl — well, woman, now — in front of him certainly looks older than the person he remembers. In his mind, Gemma Oakley is still eighteen, with shiny dark brown hair and red-rimmed eyes from their painful (for her, anyway) goodbye before she left for Canada. But although this woman is clearly twenty-eight and her hair is lighter than it once was — she must have colored it — it’s definitely her.
“Wow,” Gemma breathes, leaning over to give Harry, frozen in place, a hug. He doesn’t really reciprocate, though it’s not like he harbors any ill will against his old school girlfriend. It’s mostly that so much has changed in the intervening years for him that his brain is having a hard time catching up to the reality of the current moment. “Of all the gin joints in the world, eh?”
“Pardon?” Harry blinks confusedly. Is that a Canadian phrase?
“Just surprising to run into you, that’s all,” Gemma smiles. She takes the napkins from Harry’s hand and surreptitiously produces her wand to dry the bag before anyone around can take note. “How have you been?”
An incredulous sort of cross between a laugh and a huff escapes Harry’s lips. Isn’t that a loaded question. Before he can answer, though, Rowan — never one to be left out of a conversation — interrupts. “Daddy, you know her?”
“Daddy?” Gemma asks, an eyebrow raised. Harry wonders if it’s an act. Surely, someone must have told her about how her ex-boyfriend dated Ginny Weasley — his best mate’s little sister — and knocked her up. He’s positive that his relationship with Ginny singlehandedly fed the Class of 1998 gossip mill for ages. But then, he doesn’t know how closely Gemma kept in touch with anyone, being in Canada for all these years; it’s possible some details didn’t quite get to Calgary.
So Harry smiles. “Gemma, this is my daughter, Rowan.” He gestures vaguely between his ex-girlfriend and the child he had with his other ex-girlfriend. (He’s twenty-eight and only has two real ex-girlfriends but isn’t married. Is that pathetic? Probably.) “Rowan, love, this is Gemma. She went to Hogwarts with me,” he explains to his daughter gently. He’s about to tell her to say hello when the girl interrupts again.
“And Mummy?” Right. Rowan knows that her parents were at Hogwarts at the same time, and knows they were friends. So that must mean any friend of her dad’s is a friend of her mum’s, which is, of course, a logical conclusion.
“I don’t know, Rowan,” Gemma smiles, not unkindly. “Who’s your mummy?” That’s the thing about Gemma: she’s digging for information and it doesn’t even sound like there’s ill intent. Because there probably isn’t. It’s annoying, really, how she manages to be so good.
“Ginny,” Rowan giggles. “She got hair like mine, but I got Daddy’s eyes. See?” Rowan opens her eyes unnaturally wide and leans her face toward Gemma to demonstrate.
“So you do.” A fond expression crosses Gemma’s face; Harry’s unsure what to make of it. Then she turns to Harry: “I would have thought that I’d hear that you had a baby with Ginny Weasley?”
“I also would have expected that, to be fair,” Harry admits, feeling a bit awkward. He never thought about what would happen if he saw Gemma again, but he certainly wouldn’t have thought it necessary to explain everything that had happened in the last decade in the presence of his child.
“I four,” Rowan contributes obliviously, holding up four fingers.
“Oh my goodness,” Gemma gushes, appropriately attentive to the child. “So big!” Then, her attention once again snaps back to Harry. “So you and Ginny are…?”
Harry shakes his head, and he can tell Gemma — who was once so finely attuned to his vocal inflections and facial expressions — takes note that he looks a bit sad as he does it. “We’re just coparents at the moment,” he explains tightly, hoping it’s neutral enough that it doesn’t sound bad if Rowan repeats it to her mother. “Training and a baby — it puts stress on a relationship.” It’s the answer he always gives, more or less the official story of the breakup. But it’s not the whole story, of course. The whole story would take hours, might cause a panic attack, and he’s not sure he wants his other ex-girlfriend to know it anyway.
Gemma nods sympathetically and then prods further. “But you’re clearly not happy about the ‘just coparents’ bit?” She doesn’t sound jealous at all; if anything, she sounds interested and concerned. Naturally suspicious, Harry isn’t sure he trusts it.
Still, he’d rather not give the impression he’d be interested in giving things another go with Gemma, so he offers a weak half-smile and shrugs. “The situation is what it is for now, but let’s just say I wouldn’t be upset if it changed once I finish training.” He looks over at his daughter, who is licking a spot of chocolate on the base of her cookie and listening intently. He can only hope she won’t understand the conversation enough to repeat it.
“Once you finish?” Gemma repeats, balking. “If you finished healer school when I did, which is to say five years and change ago, and the dark arts healing specialty training is only three years, you should be supervising by now, shouldn’t you?”
Okay, Harry thinks to himself. So there’s quite a lot Gemma doesn’t know about the years since she left for Canada, then, and he’s not sure in front of Rowan is the best place to explain it. He decides to keep it brief. “I switched. Right before specialty applications, actually. I’m, er, doing cerebral now. So I finish in the summer.”
Gemma’s eyes widen in realization and Harry breathes an involuntary sigh of relief. Blessedly, there’s one thing he won’t have to rehash to Gemma. “Of course,” she says hurriedly. “I did hear about — Harry, I am so sorry —”
“Thanks,” Harry cuts her off. Even after all these years, he can’t bring himself to say it’s all right . It hurts less now, doesn’t consume every day like it once did, but it’s a loss that will always be painful. So he accepts the sympathy, but doesn’t want to talk about it. “What about you?” Changing the subject seems one of his best available options now. “Did you end up in witches’ health like you planned?”
Gemma laughs. “No, actually. Pediatrics, funny enough,” she smiles again at Rowan. “That means I’m a healer for kids, like you,” she explains gently, making an effort to involve the girl now.
Rowan nods excitedly. “That what I wanna do when I get bigger,” she responds happily. Harry, who has never heard his daughter express the desire to be a pediatric healer looks at her skeptically. “Or a ballerina or a dragon,” she adds, as if all of those things are very similar and make sense in the same sentence.
“Those are all excellent options, Rowan,” Gemma agrees, somehow not sounding at all condescending. “I trained in Canada,” she tells the girl, her attention now focused solely on the child. She’s good with her, Harry notes; in hindsight, she always had been great with children. Phoebe Potter adored Gemma when she was small (although, it’s worth noting, never as much as she did Ginny). “Do you know where Canada is?” Rowan screws up her face in concentration, visualizing the globe she sometimes studies with each of her parents, but she can’t recall a place called Canada; she shakes her head. “It’s juuust north of America. Do you know where America is?”
At this, Rowan nods. “I been to America! Grandmum and Grandad and Daddy and Aunt Phoebe taked me last summer.”
Gemma shoots Harry a questioning look. “For my block off last summer, we went to New York and California,” he explains, a bit sheepish.
“We goed to this place with walking mouses and doggies, but they not people doggies like Padfoot,” Rowan explains excitedly. “They just wearing a dog outfit.”
“We took her to Disneyland,” Harry explains. “Y’know, the muggle amusement park in California?” Perhaps the weirdest part of speaking with Gemma is that it isn’t weird at all. Part of it, of course, is that Rowan could make conversation with a brick wall, but Harry can’t shake the uncomfortable thought that time really didn’t completely erase the familiarity he once felt with the young woman in front of him. The residue of it is there, even now.
“That must have been fun,” Gemma agrees. “But I just moved back to England, actually,” she reveals to Rowan, in a voice that sounds like she’s telling a secret instead of just a fact about herself.
This, too, shocks Harry. It never occurred to him that she may ever move back; he naively assumed that once she was gone, she was gone for good. Now, knowing she’s in pediatrics, he can envision the kind of case that would necessitate them working together, and it’s not his favorite possibility. Seeing her is fine, but having to closely interact with her and what she represents — a painful memory of a world before : before tragedy, before Ginny, before everything changed — on a regular basis sounds borderline traumatic. “You did?”
“Mmm,” Gemma agrees. “I’m going into private primary care,” she explains. “I did a couple of years supervising at the hospitals in Canada and it’s just not for me. My parents are getting older, anyway, and the distance was hard to justify if I was unhappy with the job, you know?” It sounds as rehearsed as Harry’s line about why he and Ginny aren’t together. There’s more there.
Harry does know, to a point, anyway. He can’t really relate to aging parents, because his are only forty-eight — practically children when he considers he’s inching closer to thirty himself. But he can imagine being in Gemma’s shoes — if his father, like hers, was in his fifties when he was born — and knows that he’d want to be closer in that case, too. And the hours in primary care are certainly better. “Fair enough,” he nods, responding a bit too late. “Welcome home, then.”
“Thanks.” Gemma glances around the coffee shop and then moves to grab her handbag where it still lays on the floor. “I should be going, actually — meeting my mum and dad for dinner. But I guess I’ll probably see you around, Harry.” The healing community is small, and even if they wanted to avoid one another, it would be difficult to. But Harry sees no reason to avoid her; this chat, if a bit awkward, wasn’t unpleasant.
“I’ll see you,” Harry holds up a hand in farewell.
“Bye! Nice to meet you!” Rowan looks positively angelic, with her proper manners and her chocolate-smeared cheeks. She’s the very picture of the highs and lows of parenting in that moment. Every time Harry thinks he can’t possibly love her more, can’t possibly enjoy being her dad more, the little girl surprises him.
Where Gemma’s smile for Harry was forced, her grin for Rowan is genuine. “Nice to meet you, Rowan.”
…
“Well, Daddy taked me to paint! I maked a castle!” Rowan’s mouth is speeding, struggling to keep up with her brain as her story comes tumbling out. On either side of her at the table, her grandparents hang on to every word as if she’s telling them the secret of life, or at the very least, a good piece of gossip.
“A castle?” James repeats, eyes wide; Rowan giggles. “A castle like Hogwarts?”
Rowan seems to consider this before shaking her head. “No, not like that. A princess castle. Like in Cal-ee-for-yuh,” she explains, making sure to enunciate every syllable of the foreign place they visited as a family — a family minus Ginny, anyway, which Harry thinks isn’t a very complete family — a few months earlier.
Harry hadn’t intended to see his parents this weekend. He’d spent more than enough time with them during the week, between Sirius’ birthday and his surprise chat on love and healing with his mum the day before. But when Rowan woke up in the morning, she demanded to call Grandmum and Grandad, and once they were on the phone, she invited herself over. Dutifully, Harry packed her up and brought her through the floo to Potter Manor. It’s another experience that makes him appreciate what Ginny does in taking care of Rowan alone so often; like most of those experiences, it also reminds him of how much is lost by not being a proper family. For all his babble about how there are so many ways to be a family, he can’t help thinking that it should be both of them.
“Daddy got a mug but then he painted with me, so he gived the mug back,” Rowan continues explaining between gulps of pumpkin juice from her lucky purple cup. “Then we goed for a snack and I eated a biscuit and then I spilled my water on Daddy’s friend!”
Both of his parents’ heads snap toward him, questioning looks on their faces. What friends does their son have that Rowan wouldn’t already know?
Harry blinks at his parents, trying to decide if it’s better to come clean or lie that they ran into someone he works with. He doesn’t have a chance to do that, because Rowan continues: “Her name is Gemma and she’s sooooo nice!”
James’ eyes widen, almost fearful, which confuses Harry. Sure, his parents knew Gemma wasn’t going to be Harry’s forever love, but when they dated in school, the Potters liked her more than enough. “Gemma? As in Gemma Oakley?” He clarifies, looking at his son rather than his granddaughter. Lily, for her part, just tilts her head to the side and tries to read her son’s expression.
“Yeah,” Harry agrees, sounding as nonchalant and unaffected as he, frankly, feels about the situation. “Er, she apparently moved back to England,” he shrugs. “She was in the coffee shop, at a table next to us, but I didn’t notice until Rowan spilled water on her bag.” He pauses for a bit, and then decides to share some more information, just so he won’t look evasive. “We caught up a bit. She’s in pediatrics now,” he adds for the benefit of his mum, who had even mentored Gemma a bit, knowing she wanted to pursue witches’ health.
“Lots of people change their mind about specialties,” Lily comments blithely. “You did.” She and James share a tension-filled look. Harry is usually annoyed at that, the way his parents are constantly having nonverbal conversations, often about their children, but today he feels more jealous of it than anything else. He’d rather not examine why that is.
“Must have been weird to see her, yeah?” James asks, lifting his mug to his lips and eyeing his son thoughtfully.
Absently, Harry cards a hand through his hair, something both of his parents take note of; they share a look to confirm they’ve both clocked it. “I think the weirder part was that it wasn’t, to be honest,” Harry responds with a sort of defeated sigh. If his parents have heard about this from Rowan, there’s no hope that Ginny won’t . And everyone, of course, is reading into it, although it’s not inherently a big deal anyway. “Y’know,” he continues, wanting to convey to them just how little the encounter meant. “Just like running into an old acquaintance.” Which is what it was, more or less.
James raises a dark eyebrow toward his son, and if Rowan weren’t there, Harry knows exactly what his dad would say: I don’t think you can call the girl you lost your virginity to an acquaintance, Harry. But, at the very least, his dad has the presence of mind to save that for another time, a time when a chatty, curious child will not be hanging on their every word. And, most likely, a time when Sirius is around as well. (In his mind, he can also hear his godfather’s retort: Well, Prongs, they certainly were acquainted. )
“Daddy,” Rowan interrupts as if on cue. “What’s an ac-caint-ace?”
Harry snaps his attention back to the girl at the head of the table. “It’s like a friend, but one you don’t know very well.”
“Ohhhh,” Rowan nods, as though she understands perfectly. She probably thinks she does, and with luck, she’ll just accept it and drop the whole thing. “Can we go flying, Grandad?” When Rowan Potter decides the conversation is over, every member of the Potter family listens.
So that’s what they do, Harry and James taking turns having Rowan on their brooms as the little girl howls in delight for the better part of an hour. When they finally touch down to head inside, she’s exhausted, and Harry needs to carry her inside, her head resting sleepily on his shoulder. As the girl gets closer to turning five — only a few short months from now — she takes fewer naps, but it’s clear that today is a day she’ll need one. He’s got a few hours until he’s due to return her to Ginny, to the flat he sometimes-bitterly thinks of as his daughter’s real home, so he announces to his parents that he’s going to let her kip in the room they keep for her.
In the part of his memory that he often keeps hidden from even himself, Harry knows the room that is now Rowan’s room was also Ginny’s room, the room where she first stayed when she was ten and stayed with Potters’ for Christmas for the first time. By the time Rowan was born, she’d stopped needing her own room at the Manor, because by then, Ginny just slept in Harry’s room with him. Now, she still doesn’t need her own room at the Manor, because she rarely — if ever — stays the night. The room is different than it was that Christmas, the one where Ginny Weasley went from being stranger to part of his close-knit tribe of family and friends who were good as, save for the gold metal bed where Rowan now sleeps, but Harry can feel her everywhere. Especially when the little girl who looks so like her mother is sprawled like a starfish, fast asleep against the fluffy duvet and soft pillows.
Harry remains quietly in the room for probably ten minutes after it’s clear Rowan is down for the count, just watching her sleep. With her eyes closed, he thinks Rowan is all Ginny. Sure, her skin is more olive than her mother’s, less freckled, and her hair maybe half a shade darker, if you squint to look for it; but she’s got her mum’s round face and pert nose, small and nondescript. In contrast, Harry’s features are long and narrow. The girl is on the lanky side, favoring him in that way, but she’s also small and seems destined to be petite despite the long lines of her limbs. Another thing she gets from Ginny. Another thing that reminds him he will always be in love with the mother of this little girl, and that his fate was sealed on the March day Rowan entered the world.
He finally leaves, careful to close the door silently behind him. When Rowan was a baby, she slept lightly and was easily woken, and he’s never broken the habits that began to avoid waking her. Because of those habits, he tiptoes down the stairs — but when he continues his careful trod to the kitchen, it’s because he can hear his dad talking. About him.
“I don’t like Gemma being back,” James is saying, never one to mind his voice when he doesn’t think he needs to.
Harry can almost hear the shrug in his mum’s voice as she responds: “Honestly, Gemma is harmless. We both knew that Harry was never going to marry her. She was just pretty and had similar interests and was willing to shag him while they were in school.”
(Harry really regrets that he’s always had an open enough relationship with his parents that they know these things, but what’s done is done, he supposes.)
“All right, but,” James continues, “you are constantly trying to set Ginny up with other blokes —”
“Because Harry fucked it up and Ginny deserves to move on if he’s not going to actually go after what he wants,” Lily cuts him off with a correction.
James ignores her. “Okay, but let’s say that Ginny actually gives into your, like, peer pressure and starts dating one of them. You know what Harry will do?”
“I’m not Ginny’s peer,” Lily states. “And he’ll either actually fight for her — which you and I both know is what he should have done three years ago instead of just accepting her assessment of the situation as unchangeable fact — or move on himself.”
“I don’t think he’ll ever move on,” James counters. “To be honest, I don’t even know if he’s had sex since they broke up. Sirius and I are pretty sure he’s basically a monk.”
“Well, I’m not going to touch the fact that this is apparently what you and your brother talk about.” Harry is certain his mum is rolling her eyes, which at least makes him feel better about the fact that his dad and godfather aren’t wrong.
“And I don’t think he’ll be able to justify staying celibate once he’s out of training and his hours are normal,” James continues. “And if Ginny is taken and he can’t try to prove to her that he’s able to be what she and Rowan need, he’s not going to try to meet someone new . He’s going to go somewhere comfortable. Somewhere familiar. And I’m pretty sure Gemma is the best candidate.”
“Stop spiraling,” Lily hisses, a reprimand. “We don’t even know if Gemma is single.”
“Why would she move from Canada if she had a bloke there?”
“Maybe he came,” Lily points out. “Anyway, your son seems to think Ginny is just going to fall right back in with him the second he finishes training.”
“He’s your son, too.”
“Not when he acts like this. This behavior? This level of delusion? Classic James Fleamont Potter.”
He’s hoping they’ll continue, but they pause for long enough that they can see Harry come into view. So wounded is his pride that he can’t tell them he’s heard everything, and he can’t ask them what they suggest he should do, then. It’s clear that this isn’t the first time they’ve spoken about this.
Instead, they have tea and cake and talk about anything else. When Rowan wakes up from her nap, Harry returns her to Ginny’s flat, and resists the urge to tell the mother of his child that she looks beautiful, that he loves her, that all he wants is to make things work and can she just please tell him what to do? Because that wouldn’t be respectful of his ex-girlfriend’s space, and that’s what’s missing from his parents’ perspective, isn’t it? The acknowledgment that Ginny wouldn’t necessarily welcome him trying to be with her again now, before the biggest roadblock is cleared. That’s the crucial puzzle piece only he seems able to see.
Instead, he and Ginny agree that they’ll see each other at Rowan’s dance showcase on Wednesday. He gives his daughter a kiss on her head and her mum a kiss on the cheek, wishing he didn’t have to say goodbye at all.