ELEVEN
It’s possible that the most surprising thing about living with Harry for Ginny is finding out how little Harry’s job really impacts their lives. When Ginny and Harry were dating during her last year at Hogwarts and after, his job was a very-present obstacle, constantly taking him away for days and sometimes weeks at a time, stressing him out and bringing up bad memories even when he was home; during their friends with benefits situation in the years that followed, Harry would not infrequently go no contact, turning up a few weeks later with a new scar or a dark cloud hanging over his eyes. Only after Ginny has moved in does she realize that the last time he didn’t go home after a day at work must have been before she told him about the baby.
She’d never dare to ask him to spend less time in the field, because Harry loves his job and, more than he loves it, hates the useless feeling he gets from the inaction of desk duty. He’s never been very good at sitting still and letting someone else do the tough, messy, or unsavory bits, and that’s part of what she loved about him — at least at first. It was also a large part of why she broke up with him initially, his inability to pull back from his dangerous job being proof that he was putting the hurt he felt before the people he loved, the same people who would be devastated if anything were to happen to him. In other words, proof that he was putting misguided duty before her.
Once she notices, it’s clear to her that this is a subject she needs to ask about, so she brings it up casually while they’re at a muggle store in London looking at furniture for the baby’s room. “You haven’t been away for work recently,” she comments, running her fingers along the wooden railing of a cot that she can already tell Harry favors. Of course he does: it’s essentially a baby cot version of the Gryffindor four posters.
“Guess I haven’t,” Harry agrees, almost too casually, like he’s trying to pretend he hasn’t noticed. He looks at the price tag on the cot as if the price actually makes a difference to him. Ginny knows it does not; Harry has far more money than he will ever know what to do with, and he’s not going to spare any expense on his son, not like the way the Dursleys spent nothing on him if they could avoid it.
“When was the last time?”
He shrugs. “Dunno. A couple of weeks before you told me about the baby, maybe.” He’d gotten injured enough to land in St. Mungo’s on that last mission, which got him thinking about how he wished he had someone other than Ron and Hermione to be his emergency contact, which in turn prompted him to actually think about his feelings for Ginny and ask Hermione for help. He knows exactly when it was, because when his post-injury sideline was nearly up, he’d asked to not be assigned in the field the week of Ginny’s appointment with Healer Harris, lest he end up in hospital and miss it. After that? Well, Robards had been on him to take a break from the field for a long time, and he didn’t fancy missing a moment of Ginny’s pregnancy after he saw his son’s little form on the scan. “And, er, I actually probably won’t be going back to the field for a bit,” he tells her. “Not until after he’s born, at least.” And, he reckons, maybe not after that either.
“So it’s deliberate?” Harry nods, shrugs again. Ginny is incredulous. “But… you hate…not being in the field?”
“Not as much as I’d hate not being here if anything happened to either of you,” he explains, a finality to his tone as if to say she shouldn’t question anything about this statement. She has so many questions now that he’s admitted it, though.
She wants to know, above all else, what’s different now that she’s pregnant? Why wasn’t she sufficient without a baby? And then, the bigger question on which all of that rests: why does she care what changed? Isn’t it good enough that he’s come around to actually caring about the people he loves enough to care about himself? That was what she wanted when she broke up with him, to some extent, wasn’t it?
His voice snaps her out of the questions spinning around her mind: “D’you like this one?”
She takes a moment to process his question. “It would look good with green walls,” she comments, the room beginning to take shape in her mind.
“I like that idea,” Harry agrees, grinning. “I ordered him a mobile. It has snitches and quaffles and broomsticks — green would fit a quidditch theme, don’t you think? Given who his mum plays for?”
Ginny grins. The store isn’t particularly busy and they’re rather quiet, so it feels safe enough to drop words like quidditch. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds brilliant.” She pauses, her hand floating to her stomach as she feels a sensation like the fluttering of a snitch’s wings. “Whoa.”
Harry looks panicked. “All right?”
Ginny nods and giggles. “I think I might have just felt him move?”
Harry’s expression changes in an instant to one of excitement. “Really?” He places his hand over hers almost instinctively.
“It’s probably too early for you to feel.” She wrinkles her nose apologetically. “I felt it from the inside, not — nothing happened under my hand or anything. But — it’s so strange, Harry. It felt like the way a snitch flutters in your hand after you’ve caught it.”
It’s clear that Harry likes that description; she can tell from the way he moves his hand in front of his face that this has helped him imagine it. “I think this is the perfect theme for Snitch’s room, then.”
“Snitch?”
“I don’t like calling him the baby.”
Snitch. It’s the perfect nickname for him — Ginny loves it.
They pay for the furniture and Ginny doesn’t really understand how a muggle store is going to deliver it to Grimmauld Place, but Harry seems nonplussed. It’s not the first time he’s gotten around this, he assures her.
That night, they stay up late, sitting in the room that will become Snitch’s nursery and imagining a mural of quaffles going through the hoops and a snitch flying around. “We’ve got to have a snitch,” Harry tells her. “Mummy might be a world class chaser, but I reckon Snitch will be a seeker.”
“Snitch can be whatever he wants to be.” She pauses, sleepily resting her head on Harry’s shoulder.
“Even a beater?”
“Even a beater.”
“Even a swot who hates quidditch?”
At this, Ginny throws her head back and laughs. “It’s not my favorite possibility, but if that’s his truth, I’ll still love him, I suppose.”
The tone is playful but the sentiment is serious. They already love Snitch, and they can’t imagine a single thing that could change that.
…
Perhaps it’s naive of them to be surprised — and Harry and Ginny would both concede under duress that their plan of figuring it out when it came up was not much of a plan at all — but they’re both caught off guard when the Daily Prophet arrives the next morning with a picture of them in front of the cot in the muggle store; whoever took the picture managed to catch the moment Harry followed Ginny in putting hands on her stomach, which while small looks decidedly pregnant, so the image couldn’t be more damning if it tried. The headline reads: Boy Who Lived Expecting A Boy of His Own? There’s a subheading that calls Ginny “Potter’s once-sweetheart” and draws the connection between her sudden medical leave from the Holyhead Harpies and them being caught on an excursion in muggle London shopping for baby furniture.
“Fuck,” Harry curses upon seeing it, passing the paper over to Ginny without even reading the full story. He doesn’t think he needs to read it, because all stories about him are the same: a massive pile of made up rubbish rooted in the tiniest bit of truth.
“That cow,” Ginny scowls, looking it over. Of course it’s Rita Skeeter writing it — though Ginny can’t begin to guess how she would have figured out to follow them to a muggle store. “She says that we had a ‘very public’ breakup three years ago.”
Harry, for his part, doesn’t recall it being very public. He’s not even sure they ever made a statement about it; they simply stopped showing up places together. Given that his best friends are Ginny’s brother and Hermione, much of his pain over the breakup had been private, too.
“‘It is unknown when Mr. Potter and Ms. Weasley rekindled their relationship — if they have in fact done so — but the two were seen together near Potter’s presumed residence in London, and at a posh muggle store where they perused baby furniture. Mr. Potter was overheard discussing themes for a baby boy’s room,’” Ginny reads, inflecting a high affectation in her voice. “Honestly, no one was in that store. It’s not like it’s a place to be on a Friday night. How would she have known to follow us there?”
Harry shakes his head, clearly phased. “She probably was waiting outside here and then followed us…” He exhales, running a hand through his hair. “I’m so sorry it came out like this. I shouldn’t have let my guard down.” Or, as his publicist will certainly tell him, he should have preemptively announced so they could control the story.
“No one knows it’s true,” Ginny offers, though they both know that doesn’t matter much. They can’t deny something that isn’t a lie, can they? Unless they want to hide from the wizarding world for the rest of their lives, it’s not like Ginny can hide her pregnancy or Harry Potter’s son forever.
“They will,” Harry sighs. “I can — do you have a publicist?”
“Only when I use the team publicist. I don’t really need my own.”
He nods resolutely. “I can have mine draft something. A statement, I mean. I don’t really fancy writing it and giving it to the press myself. But you can sign off on it before…”
“Sure.” She forgets that Harry has a publicist — that stories on his personal life are something he deals with regularly enough for that kind of professional. It’s easy to disregard that sort of thing, really, when he’s really rather ordinary in most of the ways that matter.
“We’ll confirm that we’re in a relationship.” This statement calms him, just a bit, as he finds himself feeling happy that this is finally true. “And that we’re expecting a son in May. Then some language about how our son’s privacy is very important to us and I will personally curse anyone who threatens that even before he’s born.”
“You’ll curse them or you disarm them and throw a shield up, hm?”
Harry shoots her a sharp look, equal parts annoyed and genuinely amused. “Not the time to take the mickey, Weasley,” he tells her warningly.
“I’m perfectly capable of cursing anyone who hurts him, you know.”
“Trust me, I do. Unfortunately, the threat might be scarier coming from me, because not everyone knows you’re the Baroness of the Bat Bogey.”
“Meanwhile, you’re a Big Bad Auror.”
“Who defeated Voldemort, yes.” He offers her a half-smile, but despite his jocular tone, it’s clear he’s still rather upset about the whole ordeal. She can’t blame him — she’s absolutely unhappy with the tone of the article and by the implications made in it as well — but she’s concurrently relieved that they already told her family and Harry got to tell Teddy and Andromeda himself. “I’m sure the owls will start rolling in any second…”
As if on cue, a distinctive-looking owl with yellow eyes begins pecking at the window. Ginny wraps her dressing gown tighter around her and, abandoning the paper, goes to greet it. “Hello, Athena,” she coos, removing the piece of parchment from the owl’s leg. “Luna’s back,” she announces to Harry. She reads through the letter. “Mmm, Luna sensed that something was happening with me and she says the article in the Prophet confirmed her suspicions.”
“I didn’t know Luna read the Prophet,” Harry admits sheepishly.
“Well, she has to know what her father’s competition is saying, doesn’t she?” Ginny offers Luna’s owl a treat and then sits down to write a response. “She’s been in Iceland for a few months, but if she’d been here, she probably would have been the person I told instead of Hermione.”
“Really?”
Ginny nods. “I felt bad asking Hermione to lie to you. She was always more friends with you than me.” At this, Harry chuckles, a little disbelievingly. “What?”
“I felt bad asking her to not tell you about…” He trails off, as if he’s not supposed to tell her something.
“About what?” Ginny raises an eyebrow. “Just about you telling her I’m pregnant?”
“Er, yes, but no,” Harry admits, watching as Ginny scratches away at a note for Luna. “I went to her before that for advice on how to talk to you about how I wanted to get back together.” That’s not all of it, of course, but he’s trying not to say he loves her just yet, lest he seem too needy. He was needy in a lot of ways the last go around, and he’s determined not to make the same mistake twice.
Ginny suddenly remembers how Hermione knew almost immediately that Harry was the baby’s father, and how she’d chalked this up to a lack of subtlety on her own part. It shouldn’t make her feel as good as it does, the knowledge that perhaps she played the role as well as she thought all along. “She was your friend first.”
“She’d argue she’s both our friends equally. It usually feels more like she’s my sister, though,” he muses. “Neither of us ever got to have siblings, so we adopted each other instead.” He pauses. He supposes that’s why it’s so important to him that Teddy and Snitch get to be brothers to each other — it’s the only way that Teddy will ever get a sibling, and as hopeful as he feels about his relationship with Ginny, he doesn’t want to presume he won’t fuck it up, which is sort of essential to the conceit of him getting more than this one shot at fatherhood. When he was Teddy’s age, he would have given anything for a brother.
“I’d say you adopted Ron, too, but then that would make him and Hermione siblings, wouldn’t it?”
“Even worse, it would make me your brother,” Harry retorts.
Ginny pulls a disgusted face. “Absolutely not.” And then there’s that little voice, the one she kept quiet for so long, that tells her that if everything works out with Harry this time, Ron and Harry could be brothers, officially, by virtue of Harry marrying Ginny. Yet another thing Ginny once thought was maybe completely out of the question.
As she finishes her note to Luna, confirming that yes , the story was correct and asking how long Luna will be in England so they can properly catch up, Ginny looks up to see Harry is pacing back and forth in the room, practically wearing a hole in the hardwood floor. Still, a past version of Harry would be incensed — it wouldn’t be out of character for that Harry to blow up at whoever was around or throw something; now, his anger seems to be channeled productively, like he’s trying to solve the problem rather than create new ones. She wonders — not for the first time, and certainly not for the last — how he managed to change so much under her nose without her ever even noticing. How long had she been writing him off as unchanged and uninterested in improvement, when she could have been an active part of his growth?
She ties the parchment to Athena’s leg and sends her back to Luna. Then, she goes to Harry and stops in front of him while he paces. She opens her arms to him and, wordlessly, he buries himself in them, pressing his nose to the top of her head and taking a deep breath. Harry has always had a thing for her hair, and once, in the golden days of their post-war relationship, he’d divulged that it was one of the things he smelled in amortentia; she often caught him sneaking a whiff, as if he was using it as a personal calming draught, and that’d been true even when they hadn’t been doing more than sleeping together. She presses just one light kiss to the most easily accessible spot on his neck, and feels him relax.
…
Harry takes his role as Teddy Lupin’s godfather incredibly seriously, and this is something Ginny has always known. She’d been there the day Harry met Teddy for the first time, had watched that scared seventeen-year-old fall in love with his tiny godson — and she fell in love with Harry more and more in the process. Still, Teddy was barely a toddler when she and Harry broke up the first time, and Harry had shared a small, messy flat with Ron, then. It’s not like Teddy’s grandmother was eager to let Teddy spend the night with his godfather then.
Now, Teddy is in primary school, and he spends at least one night at Grimmauld Place with Harry every week. Sometimes more, if Andromeda is traveling, but usually not less if he could help it, Harry explains. Of course, if it had been less recently, it was to give her time to settle in, and, having never been there for it, it didn’t occur to her that they eventually would resume. As it turns out, Teddy’s room is not a formality; it is used with regularity. Yet another part of Harry’s life that she had no insight into even though they met up to have casual sex at least as often as Teddy stayed the night at Harry’s house.
Ginny didn’t know what to expect from Teddy’s first sleepover after she moved into Grimmauld Place, and found herself inexplicably nervous about it. Harry, of course, didn’t understand her concern. It’s just Teddy, he’d insisted, not unkindly. And while Harry explained that his godson understands that Ginny is Harry’s girlfriend and lives with him and reassured her that Teddy is very excited about getting a baby brother, Ginny still finds her palms sweaty and her heart rate elevated in anticipation.
The thing is that Harry has plenty of experience taking care of Teddy — lots of practice with kids, or really just this one kid in particular — and aside from playing with her niece on Sunday afternoons or when she goes to Shell Cottage, Ginny doesn’t have much of any. Despite the fact that her son is very much coming, whether she’s ready or not, Harry’s already proven himself as a future father and Ginny doesn’t know if she’s qualified to be a mother. Teddy’s sleepover feels like a huge, monumental test, one she hasn’t studied for. It’s enough to give her anxiety dreams reminiscent of the ones people who had a normal school experience might have before exams.
Andromeda drops Teddy off with them at Grimmauld Place, looking dressed for a nice dinner instead of wearing the Healer robes she wears after work or the casual clothing she typically wears around the house.
Teddy immediately runs to Harry, giving his godfather an excited hug as though they haven’t seen each other in months; in reality, it has been maybe three days. “Uncle Harry! Gran got me a quaffle that’s charmed to fly on its own, like a snitch, but not as fast and it doesn’t have wings, and I brought it so we can play tonight, but I also want to watch that muggle movie — the one about the mermaid with the hair like Ginny’s — Ginny, have you seen the mermaid movie? She gives away her voice!”
Harry laughs good-naturedly. “Well, I’m sure Ginny would love to teach you all the best moves with your quaffle. Right, Gin?”
Ginny nods, some of her nerves dissipating. She can play with a quaffle — that’s her job, after all — and watch a movie about a ginger mermaid who gives away her voice (even if that sounds like a traumatic plot for a five year old). “Yeah, we’ll get you playing like a pro in no time,” she tells him brightly. Satisfied, Teddy goes to run up the stairs and deposit his backpack in his room.
“Teddy,” Harry calls in a firm tone. “You have to say goodbye to your gran.”
Teddy heaves a dramatic sigh, and returns, giving his grandmother a light hug. “Bye Gran.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, love,” Andromeda tells him, planting a kiss on the top of his head — today a bubblegum pink that reminds Ginny of his mother.
“You look nice,” Harry tells Andromeda as Teddy wrestles out of her arms and runs back to the stairs. “Good plans?”
“Oh, you know,” Andromeda waves her hand vaguely. “Having dinner with my sister.” After the war, Andromeda and Narcissa had reached a grudging peace, which Ginny knows was at least in part because Harry testified that Narcissa had saved his life in the Forbidden Forest. Still, despite Harry’s show of forgiving Narcissa Malfoy, he becomes considerably more tense hearing this; it’s clear to Ginny that Andromeda seeing her sister on nights when Harry has Teddy is a deliberate move, though she doesn’t know if that’s a request Harry’s made or a conclusion the older witch came to on her own.
“Er,” Harry rubs his hands on the legs of his trousers. “She might ask about us — given that article in the Prophet — and if you could just…”
“Oh, Harry,” Andromeda clucks sympathetically. “I would never tell Cissy anything about you, you know that. If she asks, I’ll just tell her that I don’t know much more than what your statement to the press said.” This is, of course, a lie; Andromeda probably knows more than Ginny’s own mother does. She smiles, eyes drifting over to Ginny. “You do look absolutely glowing, darling.”
“Thank you,” Ginny mutters, her lips curling weakly. She still doesn’t know what to say to comments like that, and she reckons she won’t figure it out before Snitch arrives. Maybe by the second baby, the bothersome little voice in her head whispers. But Ginny knows that she has to make it through the first baby with her relationship with Harry intact to even begin to consider that possibility. Things are good — really good, in fact — but it’s early days still, with her pregnancy further along than their rekindled relationship. Her mother may already be daydreaming about their wedding, but Ginny is trying to keep a level head, to make it through the next few months, one day at a time.
Harry spoils Teddy with pizza and ice cream, though he makes it clear before Teddy arrives that this is only because Teddy’s nights with him are special and apart from his everyday life. He reassures her that Snitch will eat plenty of vegetables and not get to watch his favorite movies every night, but Ginny doesn’t know that she’d mind if Harry spoiled Snitch like this. Her boyfriend clearly experiences great joy doing it, and joy has always been hard for Harry to come by. When she plays with Teddy and the charmed quaffle — a bloody brilliant invention, if she says so herself — Harry watches them from the couch, positively beaming; it’s one of the best feelings in the world, giving Harry that happy glow that had been all too absent in his early life. If he’s spoiling Teddy, it’s because he wants Teddy to have the childhood Harry himself deserved but never got. So if Harry wants to be the fun dad? She might allow it, just to see him light up from the inside like that, over and over and over, forever.
The little boy passes out on the couch while they watch the movie, exhausted from his sugar crash and playing with Ginny and the quaffle. His head is on Harry’s lap, hair fading from bubblegum pink to the sandy blonde Harry calls his ‘natural color’ as he sleeps. When the movie finishes — Ginny is enjoying it far too much for Harry to hit pause — he scoops Teddy into his arms and carries him up the stairs to his room. Teddy is probably getting a little too big to be carried like that, but Harry doesn’t complain or seem to mind at all. Ginny follows, watching through a crack in the door as Harry tucks his godson in and gives him a kiss on the forehead. “Sleep tight, Ted,” Harry whispers; Ginny feels fit to burst.
She jumps back as the door opens so Harry can leave. Closing it quietly behind him, he whispers: “I thought you might have been watching.”
“Did you?”
Harry nods. “I’m always intensely aware of your presence,” he confesses.
She knows the feeling well.
That night, she lays on her side in bed, turned away from Harry. Officially too pregnant to enjoy being snuggled up to Harry’s side for long, and also hindered by her son from sleeping in her stomach as she prefers, she’s struggling to get comfortable enough to sleep. Harry is as uneasy a sleeper as ever, but tonight he seems mostly peaceful — laying on his back and his breath coming out in even inhales and exhales — so she’s reluctant to move much. On some level, he probably does deserve being disrupted, because he’s the reason she’s so uncomfortable to begin with, but she’d rather let him sleep now. In a few month’s time, she plans to use the fact that Harry doesn’t sleep to her advantage to get him to take night feedings.
She’s finally on the brink of sleep when she feels him shift and roll over next to her, curling around her like a spoon. It’s clear that he’s still out from the heaviness of his arm draped over her — she’d call it dead weight if that didn’t remind her so much of time he’d actually died — but that doesn’t stop him from nuzzling his nose in her hair. Unconscious, Harry almost certainly doesn’t know what he’s saying as he mumbles in his sleep, but Ginny is alert. She knows exactly what he says to her: “Love you.”