FOURTEEN
By the time New Year’s rolls around, Harry’s stopped bringing up Ginny's need to be careful and she’s grown tired of listening to him, even if he were to talk about it. As such, she begins heading out on her own again. She picks up pastries and tea from various coffee shops or stops for lunch after her prenatal training sessions at the Harpies’ facility. She even pops into the shops in muggle London, picking up new clothes for herself (which, after her fight with her mum on Christmas, she finally admits she needs) or baby things, like an adorable pair of tiny trainers for Snitch. None of this results in any unwanted attention, so she assumes they’re out of the woods.
January is the month that Harry brings up the issue of where, exactly, Snitch will be born, since Ginny doesn’t think to ask after it herself. “I don’t recommend home births,” Healer Harris explains to the pair of them, resulting in Harry shooting Ginny a smug told you so look; Ginny sticks her tongue out at him in turn. Healer Harris, for her part, doesn’t seem to notice as she continues: “Most births are routine, of course, but when things do go wrong, it happens quickly, and the last thing I want for my patients is for them to need the resources of a hospital and need to figure out how to transfer a laboring woman or newborn baby there in seconds.”
“Right,” Harry agrees, still looking smug. Safety had been his concern, after all; none of this would have ever occurred to Ginny who was one of seven children, all safely born at home.
“So is it St. Mungo’s then?” Ginny pipes in with agitation. She fishes in her bag for her aubergine journal and one of the pens she’s stolen from Hermione (much more useful than quills on the go); she’s used the notebook inconsistently through her pregnancy, but this is the kind of thing she expects should be written down.
Healer Harris smiles. “St. Mungo’s has a maternity ward, but I find it’s typically crowded and, frankly, their services for newborns needing special care leave much to be desired. I deliver at Mayfair Centre for Magical Mothers and Children. Everything there is state of the art, and they have the best pediatric and neonatal healers on staff for babies who require it. It’s also a private facility — meaning, of course, the press will not have any access and those on staff take strict oaths of patient protection.”
“Brilliant,” Harry agrees readily, clearly already sold. He looks to Ginny, beaming, and finds she’s chewing her lip nervously.
“If that’s what you recommend,” she finally agrees after a few moments. Harry furrows his brow in concern, looking at her, and she shakes her head slightly and almost imperceptibly. They’ll talk more about it later.
Expertly reading Ginny’s anxiety, Healer Harris ventures an attempt at comforting her. “Of course, I expect you’ll be just fine,” she tells Ginny. “Everything is progressing just as it should, and Baby Boy looks perfect. I just don’t think we can be too careful.”
Ginny opens her mouth, as if to protest. The truth is that she can appreciate the safety concerns, and her discomfort is with the reminder that she’ll have to give birth in the first place. She closes her mouth and just nods. “And potions and charms are available there as well?” If she’s giving birth in hospital, at least there’s pain relief to look forward to. Ginny’s mum prided herself on her “natural” births, but as far as Ginny and Harry are concerned, they’ve had enough pain for their young lifetimes and there’s no need to suffer when one can avoid it.
Healer Harris nods. “Of course. We can talk more about those options when we enter the third trimester.”
Healer Harris says this like it’s a lifetime away, but they all know that the end of the pregnancy is rapidly approaching. By the beginning of February, they’ll be in the final stretch, those precious final months before they’re parents. It’s exciting, of course, but it’s also distinctly terrifying; this deadline has gone from feeling far off and distant to imminent and pressing in almost no time at all.
They talk about this at dinner later that week, sitting at a table at a posh restaurant in Covent Garden that Hermione recommended for a pre-theatre meal. Ginny sips at her fizzy water, which feels very fancy, but she can’t help but stare longingly at the glass of red next to Harry’s plate. “Would it actually be so terrible if I took a sip?”
Harry raises his eyebrows at her. “I think I’m supposed to remind you that wine could harm our child.”
Ginny groans. Normally this sort of behavior from Harry — refusing to budge on some dumb, overprotective rule — is suffocating. It still is, of course, but this time he at least has a point. “Hark look who’s suddenly a stickler for rules,” she rolls her eyes. It’s hard to muster the energy to feel mad at him, though, not when it’s a rule she knows she should be following anyway.
He ignores her, taking a sip of his wine, and realizing a little too late that maybe that’s adding insult to injury. “I’ll buy you a bottle of whatever you want after he’s born,” Harry promises her, feeling guilty. “Not much longer.”
“Don’t remind me.” They still haven’t talked about what made her so nervous at her appointment that month; he’s probably too considerate to go out of his way to bring it up, remiss to do anything that might make her upset while she’s heavily pregnant with his child. “I need to tell you something, but you have to promise not to laugh.”
Harry blinks rapidly a few times, eyes huge behind the round frames of his glasses. “Okay,” he agrees, more than a bit of confusion in his voice.
“I…” She hesitates for so long that Harry looks amused, smirking. “I said no laughing!”
He holds up his hands. “I’m not laughing,” he insists, still smiling that smile of his that tends to precede a laugh. “You’re just adorable, is all.”
She rolls her eyes in the way that tells Harry that what she actually wants is for him to continue. “Are you quite finished?”
“Quite.” He fashions his face into something rather serious. Now she’s the one laughing.
“Harry!”
“All right, now I’m finished,” he agrees. His expression settles to something neutral.
“Okay, so…” She looks down at her plate, pushing a bit of chicken around it with her fork. “When we were talking to Healer Harris, you know, about the…the birth….” She trails off, stuffing the bite into her mouth so that she doesn’t need to finish her thought.
“Yes?”
“That was actually the first time I really thought about it.”
“Thought about what?”
Ginny stares at him blankly. “I — well it sounds stupid when I say it. But I hadn’t thought much about, er, actually giving birth before that.” She busies herself with cutting off another bite of her chicken, and then looks to Harry. “Can I try yours?” She asks, looking at his steak expectantly.
“Er, sure,” Harry agrees, feeling a bit of whiplash from the sudden transition between her statement — which did require exploration — and her quick subject change. He begins to cut off a bite of his steak for her. “Did you want to, er, elaborate on that?” He prods gently as he hands over his fork. “Didn’t you say you always thought you’d give birth at home?”
Ginny chews her bite thoughtfully, not moving to give Harry’s fork back to him. “Only in the general sense, in the sense that I knew I wanted to be a mum one day. Not as it related to actually being …I just could clearly see myself being pregnant, and I could clearly see us having a baby but I never…I don’t know the event connecting those two things slipped my mind.”
“Slipped your mind?”
“Except when it didn’t, and then I just told myself it was later Ginny’s problem,” Ginny sighs dramatically. “I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not, really,” Harry tells her, his voice soft, understanding. “It’s hard to picture something you’ve never done before.” He pauses, looking at his half-eaten steak. “Can I, er, have my fork back?”
Ginny hands it over; it’s clear she’d forgotten she was holding it. “Have you thought about it?”
Harry considers this while he cuts another bite. “A little bit. I mean, I’m not the one, er, doing it, but I’ve thought about being there for you. I’ve thought about what it’ll be like when we meet him.” He pauses, eyes darkening. “I’ve also thought about my fears around it, what I’m scared of happening. I’m sorry,” he tells her genuinely.
“For what?”
“I’m sorry that I’m always preparing for what could go wrong and that it takes away from the things that do go right.” He says this with conviction, like he really believes what he’s saying, and it’s only once she hears it that Ginny realizes this, too, was something she wanted him to say when she broke up with him years ago.
After they finish their meals and their pudding, Harry pays their bill and they walk to the theatre hand-in-hand. They take their seats in the stalls — so close to the stage, Ginny notes with excitement — with only a few minutes to spare until curtain. Ginny knows to expect that it’ll be like a movie, but happening live, and that there will be singing and dancing. But the show, she finds, is so much more than that. When intermission arrives, she’s in total awe.
“That was…” She trails off breathlessly, eyes adjusting to the lights coming back up.
“Incredible,” Harry finishes. “What did Snitch think?” He puts a hand on Ginny’s stomach. This month, Healer Harris shared that their son can hear music and their voices now. They’ve put this to the test by talking to him before bed; Harry’s convinced he kicks harder during storytime.
“He was tapping along,” Ginny smiles. “He’s calm now, though, I think he might be having a kip between acts.”
Harry smiles and withdraws his hands. “I think I should go get some candy, yeah?” There are a few boys walking through the audience with boxes of snacks strapped to their fronts, but none particularly close to them. “I’m just going to grab one of them, I’ll be right back.”
Ginny’s so intent on watching her boyfriend walk away that she doesn’t notice the woman on the other side of her. The woman clears her throat. “How far along are you?”
Ginny’s head turns toward her, and she realizes she doesn’t know if this is the same woman who’d been sitting next to her this whole time. She smiles politely, though. “28 weeks, I think?” She’s pretty crap at keeping up with that, actually, having lost interest sometime around the point where everyone else found out about her pregnancy. She tends to just use proximity to May to judge how much longer she has to go.
“So exciting,” the woman gushes, a smile playing on her face. “You and your husband are out for a bit of fun before he gets here, then?”
It registers with Ginny that it’s odd of the woman to just assume the baby is a boy, but it’s plausible enough that the woman could have been eavesdropping on her and Harry earlier. Or maybe she just assumes all babies are boys. “Uh, yeah,” she agrees. “My boyfriend got these tickets for Christmas.”
The woman pointedly glances at Ginny’s left hand, as if to confirm there’s no ring; feeling uncomfortable, Ginny scans the crowd for Harry. She can’t find where he’s gone.
“He’s supportive, then?” The woman prods tactlessly.
“Of course,” Ginny scoffs, defensive and uneasy. “Not that it’s any of your business, is it? People don’t need to get married to have a baby.” She’s conscious that her wand — which is tucked into her handbag on her lap — can’t be withdrawn in theatre full of at least a thousand muggles. If she could, though, this woman would certainly be on the receiving end of a mild hex or jinx. She looks around for Harry again, and sees him paying a concession vendor; she sighs in relief that he’ll be back soon.
The woman presses her lips together. “Sorry,” she mutters weakly. “I’m going to use the loo,” she announces, as though Ginny would care.
“You do that,” Ginny mutters as Harry returns to her side, Smarties and Cadbury Buttons in tow.
…
She’s forgotten about the rude woman at the theatre by the time the Monday Prophet is delivered. “Not again,” Harry groans miserably when he glances at it, half-putting on his auror robes and half-trying to eat breakfast as he does. Ginny looks up at him. “The press was apparently following us on Saturday,” he offers as an explanation, tilting his head toward the paper.
Ginny rises from her chair to stand by Harry, reading over his shoulder: Potter and Weasley Avoiding Marriage in Feminist Statement .
“You’ve got to be joking,” Ginny scoffs incredulously. She reaches toward her plate and grabs a slice of toast, taking an aggressive bite. “I thought that woman was a muggle!”
“You talked to someone?” Harry asks, eyes wide. If he were thinking, he wouldn’t let his temper get the best of him, but he’s not really thinking right now. “You know we have to be careful about who we talk to!”
“She was next to us at the theatre,” Ginny explains hotly, matching his tone. The reasonable voice in the back of her head tells her she’s itching toward a row, but that voice is rather easily silenced. “When you went to go get candy, she asked me how far along I was. I’d have looked like a bint if I didn’t answer.”
“Then how come you are quoted as saying, ‘You don’t need to be married to have a baby these days’?” He sighs in exasperation, which makes her feel like a child. “Ginny, I told you we had to be careful.”
“Well, first off, I don’t even think I said those exact words,” Ginny scoffs indignantly. “She asked me if me and my husband were out enjoying a bit of fun before the baby and I said my boyfriend got me the tickets for Christmas. Then she looked very pointedly at my left hand and asked if you were supportive. And I told her it was none of her business whether we were married or not.” Ginny feels winded when she’s done shouting.
“I knew this would happen,” Harry mutters, and it occurs to Ginny for the first time that he’s probably more angry with himself than he is with her.
“Actually, you assumed it would happen if I went out without you, and you were in the same room,” she can’t help but correct. It’s weirdly vindicating, knowing that it happened with Harry around, after all the fuss he put up. “And it’s nothing new. So they lied — they always lie, Harry. We could talk to them knowingly and they’d twist our words. We could shut ourselves in and not give them the chance to spy on us, and they’d get bored and make up a story about how I got pregnant because we’re locked in a sex dungeon all the time.”
“That’s the problem,” Harry huffs.
“If they’re going to lie about something, frankly, we could do worse than ‘Potter and Weasley are too progressive to care about traditional family structures’,” Ginny adds, using an affected tone for her exaggerated headlines. “Unless you’re worried about upholding your sterling reputation of playing by society’s rules.”
Harry snorts. At least, it seems, they’re no longer heading toward a massive row. She’s got him there: Harry Potter has never been one for following rules; still, there are some things that he thinks are norms for a reason. “I do care about traditional family structures,” he tells her after he’s thought about it for a few moments, his gaze hard. “And I don’t think it’s bad or shameful or anything that we’re not married, but I care about our son having us both around, and I do want us to get married one day. Hopefully before we give him siblings, but I’ll take whatever fate throws at us, as long as we’re a family. And when that day comes,” he pauses here, staring at her with such heat she feels she might combust, “I don’t want the Prophet reporting that you finally broke me down or slipped me enough love potion to get me to commit. I want the record to show that I’m committed now.”
Ginny’s heart pounds against her chest, so insistently she can feel it in her fingers and toes and ears. Her throat has gone dry and her mind is racing; between the mental fog she’s been battling lately and her overactive thoughts, she can’t form much of a sentence. For one of the first times Ginny Weasley can recall in her life, she is actually rendered speechless.
“I have to go to work,” Harry announces abruptly, almost as if he’d taken Veritaserum to get that thought out and the potion suddenly wore off. “I’ll see you later.” He walks out of the room, his robes swishing behind him. And then, reconsidering it, he turns back to the kitchen to plant a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll see you later, all right? I love you.”
“Love you too,” she calls after she finds her words. She’s not sure whether he hears it, as she picks up on the sound of the fireplace roaring to life.