NINE
Telling Teddy is something Harry does alone. Ginny offers to come with him, if Harry thinks it would be helpful, but Harry knows his godson. Teddy is going to be most nervous about potentially losing the only father figure in his life, and because of that, he thinks it’s best to tackle this one on one.
It’s an easy decision to make, at least in the same way most decisions around Teddy are easy. Remus didn’t know Teddy would be an orphan when he asked Harry to be his godfather, but Teddy had nevertheless become an orphan, just as Harry was — is — an orphan. Thus, Harry used one simple question to guide all things involving Teddy: how do I wish people treated me? And if Harry can imagine a life he didn’t live — one where Sirius wasn’t in Azkaban and got to be a big part of his life — he’d want Sirius to tell him this sort of thing one on one.
Harry goes round Andromeda’s for dinner at least once a week, usually. He arrives at her house a little earlier than normal. “Why don’t you go set up gobstones for us,” he tells Teddy after giving the boy a big hug. “I just need to talk to your gran for a moment.”
“I’m big now,” Teddy insists. “I can talk with you, too.”
Harry shakes his head and smiles sadly. “It’s about a surprise for you, mate.” And this gets Teddy to excitedly run off.
“A surprise for Teddy?” Andromeda questions, raising one aristocratic eyebrow as she leans against her kitchen island.
“I have something I want to talk to him about,” Harry admits, pushing his glasses up his nose and running that same hand through his hair, two telltale signs of anxiety. “I was kind of hoping I might take him out for ice cream after dinner.”
Andromeda nods. “Are you going to tell me what you have to tell him?” She gestures for Harry to sit. They got off to a bit of a rocky start, but in the years they’ve been raising Teddy together, Harry’s come to rely on her as a parental figure, similar to how he sees Molly and Arthur Weasley.
“Getting there.” Harry sits as instructed, balancing his elbows on his knees. “I’m actually surprised you don’t already know,” he admits. “I expected Molly Weasley would be shouting it to everyone.”
This piques Andromeda’s interest. “So it has to do with Ginny, then?”
Harry nods. “It has everything to do with Ginny, really.” He pauses, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to be a dad.”
Andromeda studies his face for a few moments. “And we’re happy about this?”
Harry nods. “It’s, er, a bit of a surprise, to put it lightly. But yeah,” he grins. “Yeah, we’re really happy about this.”
Andromeda walks over to him, arms outstretched for a hug; he stands and lets her envelop him. “Congratulations! You’ll be a wonderful father, Harry.”
“Thanks. I’m just a bit worried about how Ted will take it, you know?” Harry pulls back from the hug, returning to his seat. “I don’t want him to think that this means I’m abandoning him, of course. And I’d like him to be the baby’s big brother — if that’s all right with you.”
“Of course that’s all right with me, Harry,” Andromeda clucks. “Why wouldn’t it be?” She pauses. “As for the other thing, well. I think you just need to keep being here for him. If you never go anywhere, he won’t be worried about you leaving, will he?”
Harry nods, letting the words sink in. There’d been loads of times in his life where he wouldn’t have minded sharing an adult who loved him with someone, provided any adult loved him at all. And, as he’s learned in the years since he entered the wizarding world, one does not have a finite amount of love in their heart, fracturing more and more as you let people in — like the shreds of Voldemort’s soul that got smaller and smaller the more horcruxes he made; no, your heart simply makes more love to make sure you can give large chunks to every single person you care about. His love grew when he held Teddy for the first time, just as much as it grew when he heard his son’s heartbeat in Healer Harris’ office. He feels so full of the stuff he could burst. So Andromeda is right: he’ll never go anywhere and Teddy won’t be able to worry for long.
After dinner, he announces to Teddy that they’re going for a special trip to the ice cream shop he loves in town.
“Is this my surprise?” Teddy asks, once he’s happily seated at a little table, eating a chocolate ice cream with hot fudge topping. Teddy loves chocolate and would happily eat only chocolate if permitted — which always reminds Harry of Remus.
“Part of it,” Harry agrees, licking at his own cone of strawberry ice cream. “I have another really big surprise for you,” he tells his godson with the kind of big, excited voice that usually precedes a sentence like we’re going for a fly or I got you tickets to a match.
“A really big surprise?” Teddy repeats, clearly intrigued. He holds his spoon vertically to lick it, dripping chocolate down his shirt as a result.
Harry nods. “And then you can ask me anything at all about it, okay?”
This clearly confuses the boy. “What kind of surprise is this?” His voice is full of childlike exasperation, unable to comprehend why he’d have questions about something like going to a quidditch game.
Harry makes sure to hold Teddy’s eye contact — and Teddy has his eyes right now, so he’s also sort of wondering if the baby will also have those green eyes, his mother’s eyes — before he speaks. “You’re going to be a big brother.”
“No I’m not,” Teddy responds immediately. “My mummy and daddy are with the stars, Uncle Harry, remember?”
A sad smile plays at Harry’s lips. To his mind, Teddy must be the most brilliant child, though it’s never going to stop hurting to hear a small child describe his parents as ‘with the stars’. “Well, what I meant, actually, was that I’m going to have a baby, Ted.”
Teddy looks up from his ice cream, face smeared with chocolate. “But you aren’t married.” Not this again.
“Well, you don’t have to be married to have a baby,” Harry tries to explain gently, taking a quick lick of his ice cream. “Most people are, but, er, there’s lots of different ways to be a family. Like we’re family, right? I wasn’t really your dad’s brother, but I’m still your uncle.”
Teddy considers this. “Who’s the baby’s mummy if you aren’t married?”
“Ginny, of course,” Harry smiles. He still can’t believe his luck, really, getting to have a baby with Ginny. “And she really wants you to be the baby’s big brother, too. We think you’re going to be the best big brother ever.”
Teddy’s smile is so wide, it splits the chocolate stains on his mouth. “I thought I couldn’t be a big brother,” he tells Harry.
“Your little brother is going to be so lucky to have you.” Harry decides not to bring up that he won’t love Teddy less, not unless Teddy does first. If it never occurs to Teddy as a possibility, he’s not going to be the one who puts that thought there.
“A brother?” Teddy asks, eyes nearly bulging from his head. Harry feels a lump grow in his throat, even as he smiles; he gets to give Teddy the family he longed for at the boy’s age, and he’s never felt more accomplished.
…
Ginny’s head is against Harry’s bare chest as he slowly wraps a lock of her brilliant copper hair around one of his long, slender fingers. Their breathing is becoming regular now, in the afterglow, and Ginny wonders if maybe getting pregnant was worth it for the surge of hormones alone. It’s almost like being sixteen again, unable to get enough of Harry after their long separation, and she can’t really say she hates it. She doesn’t really even hate being pregnant anymore, not now that the yuckiest bits — the morning sickness and anxiety over how people will react — have mostly passed. Instead, she finds there’s a lot she’s enjoying about it — nearly all of which are to do with Harry.
“I like it here,” Ginny whispers against his chest.
“I like having you here,” Harry whispers in return, his fingers untangling from her hair and wrapping around her, pulling her more tightly into him. His other hand reaches around until his fingers are lightly dancing across the small bump at her midsection.
She inhales, taking in the scent she has always found intoxicating — a little like sweat, a little like soap, and exactly like Harry, like the comfort she’s always sought in her most difficult moments. “What if I was here always?” She asks before she can stop herself.
She isn’t thinking about it because her mum thinks her flat is too small, and she’s certainly not thinking about it because Ron suggested it explicitly. Earlier that day, she’d been sitting in her flat — the first place that was ever just hers — and trying to imagine where the baby’s cot would go. And she realized she had not a single square centimeter to spare for a cot, so once he was too big for a bassinet, she’d have nowhere for him. Meanwhile, Harry had shown her the room he intended to make into a nursery, right next to his room and down the hall from Teddy’s; he already had some catalogs marked up in the sitting room, with things like a quidditch-themed mobile circled. It clicked for her on her own: it simply made sense for her and Harry to live in the same house if they were going to share a child.
“Here…like at my house?” Ginny can hear his heart speed up under her ear, and she wonders if maybe she’s cocked it all up by even asking.
“Would you, er — would it make sense, maybe, for us to both live here so we could both be around for…him?” There’s been this weird dance they’re doing: now that they know the baby is a boy, it feels weird to call him the baby, but neither of them is quite ready to give him a name.
“Erm,” Harry stammers, unable to stop a smile from spreading across his traitorous lips. “I’ve been a bit worried, actually, about how I could, er, be there for you both with you over at your flat and me here. I just didn’t want to presume that you’d, er, be interested in moving in here.” He pauses, waiting to see if she has anything to interject — perhaps that she wasn’t interested, now that he was. “But if you want to live here then…I mean, yeah. Yeah, that would be brilliant.”
“Brilliant,” Ginny agrees, pressing herself up on her hands to look at him.
“And if you want your own room, you can have whichever one you’d like,” he offers, feeling awkward. Because there it is, isn’t it? The invisible boundary they keep crossing but won’t admit should be broken down.
“Do you want me to have my own room?” Turning the question back to him, answering his question with another question, is just another way of continuing the dance around the conversation.
“Only if you want to,” he answers coolly. “I think you know I’d never kick you out of my room, though.” He pauses. “Or our room, as the case may be.” It’s the boldest he’s been in a while, the closest he’s gotten to defining whatever it is they have going on here.
“Well, if it’s our room, then I suppose I can make a few decor suggestions.”
“Suggest away,” Harry agrees easily. He can part with almost anything, especially if she’s the one making the changes.
“The walls are too dark.”
“You can pick a new color.”
“Okay.” Ginny lays her head back down on Harry’s chest, satisfied that he’ll do whatever she says. “This bed stays, though.”
“Good,” Harry smirks. “I’m rather attached to it.” Especially when you’re in it, he adds just to himself, sure he’s never felt as content as in this moment. I’m rather attached to you, he thinks.
“It’s kind of like the Hogwarts beds, but bigger,” she notes mildly. “You had a different one when you lived with Ron.” She remembers that bed well. She spent her Christmas and Easter breaks during her last year at Hogwarts sneaking into it, and plenty of nights after she graduated with him, too. That is, until she went and tore it all up to try and do what exactly? Force his hand to make him deal with something he wasn’t ready to deal with?
Harry’s chin nods against the top of her head. “When I moved in here, I just couldn’t get it to feel like home,” he admits. “I made all these changes and I just kept thinking about how much Sirius hated it here.” He pauses, swallows so deeply she can feel it in his chest. “Hogwarts was my first real home,” he reminds her, as if she could ever forget. “So I found a carpenter to build this bed like the ones in Gryffindor Tower and I got those cushy armchairs for the sitting room and…it started feeling more and more like it was a place I could love.”
“And now?”
“I don’t think I’d let my son live here if I didn’t feel like it was home,” he tells her simply. Ginny is struck, as she often is, by the protectiveness and resolve that fills Harry’s voice and sets in his jaw when he talks about the baby. She lifts a finger to tenderly trace the scars on his chest in affection; these scars are visible, but in this moment, she can clearly see those that aren’t, the ones that make Harry so determined not to fuck anything about being a dad up. The scars left by a decade of neglect at the hand of the people who had been trusted to care for him.
“You’re going to be the best dad,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. She’s not even sure he’ll be able to hear it when it comes up. Then, Harry squeezes her to him so tightly that she knows he must’ve — and appreciated it, too. “I always knew you’d be the best dad,” she admits, still so quiet it’s like she’s saying it to herself.
From the jerky rise and fall of his chest, Ginny can tell Harry is crying, just a little bit. She knows how difficult it is for him to do that, especially in front of someone else, so she doesn’t call attention to it. Instead, she presses a kiss to the scar that she knows is from the second killing curse before wrapping another arm around him and squeezing tightly back.