TWENTY-ONE
Healer Harris approves Ginny’s release two days after the birth; Cho, on the other hand, who had become James’ de facto healer in hospital, seems a bit more hesitant to release the newborn to go home alongside his mother. James is fine, of course: his breathing is normal, his appetite is healthy, and he’s even able to suckle for short periods of time by the end of his second day before getting worn out and needing a bottle. But there are things he can get in hospital — monitoring by pediatric healers, supplemental nutrition to ensure he keeps growing, time spent underneath a specialized light because his liver is immature and apparently sunlight will help with that, like James is a bloody plant instead of a child — that are not readily available at Grimmauld Place.
It takes a fair bit of negotiation (and Audrey advocating for them) to get Cho to sign James’ release papers. In exchange, they agree to set up the sunlight charm over the baby’s bassinet while he sleeps and consent to home visits from staff healers twice a day for at least two weeks. “As long as she isn’t the one checking in on us,” Ginny agrees when Audrey presents this solution. Audrey, stifling a laugh, agrees that this can be arranged.
They arrive home by Portkey — James is too small to apparate and his lungs are still too fragile for the floo — to find that Grimmauld Place has been decorated. A banner reading Welcome Home James with doodles of snitches charmed to fly around hangs in the foyer and there are bright blue balloons and streamers everywhere. They can’t immediately appreciate the effort their family has put in, however, because as soon as they land, little James starts howling in his father’s arms.
“Shh, little Snitch, it’s all right. You’re safe,” Harry coos soothingly, passing the baby to a concerned Ginny. “I don’t like that sensation much, either.”
“He needs to eat anyway,” Ginny announces, not noticing that her parents, Hermione, Ron, Andromeda, and Teddy are all waiting nearby to welcome them home. “I have the milk I pumped before we left under a cooling charm in the bag. Can you get it out?”
Dutifully, Harry goes to the bag Hermione brought to Ginny while she was in hospital. He reaches in — undetectable extension charms are still a specialty of Hermione’s — pulling out a bottle of breastmilk Ginny pumped for James that morning. He taps it with his wand to warm it up and tests it on his hand before passing it back to his girlfriend. It’s only then he realizes that everyone is there waiting for him. He takes in their faces and the decorations. “Er, hello!” He greets them, squatting down to give Teddy a hug. “Gran let you stay home from school?”
“Uh huh,” Teddy nods excitedly. For a number of reasons, Harry’s godson hadn’t been allowed to meet James at the hospital — namely, he’s too young and not a blood sibling; not even being Harry Potter helped Harry get around that rule. “Gran told me I had to go to school first, but then Hermione asked for my help making signs and I was too excited to go to school, so she told the school I had to go meet my brother and now I’m here!” The little boy stands on his tippy toes, trying to get a glimpse of the baby in Ginny’s arms. “Is that him?”
Harry nods, standing again and extending a hand to his godson. “Yeah, Ted. That’s James. Ginny’s going to take your brother over to the sofa so she can give him a bottle. If you want, we can go sit with them. Would you like that?”
Teddy’s agreement is enthusiastic, and he’s nearly bouncing as he grabs onto Harry’s hand. “A bottle is how he eats, right? Because he’s got no teeth, so he can only drink milk?”
“More or less.” Harry feels guilty, really, that he can’t be fully present with his godson at the moment; his eyes are tracking Ginny and James as Ginny settles onto the couch. Molly is close behind, propping a pillow underneath Ginny’s elbow and tossing a cloth over her shoulder. “C’mon, Ted.” He resolves to give Teddy his full attention while James eats; he’s got two boys who need him now, and it won’t do to appear as though he favors the child who shares his blood. Teddy is sensitive and perceptive, and would certainly notice.
He’ll be six in just a few short weeks and, with the energy characteristic of a child his age, Teddy bounds over to the sofa and jumps onto the cushion next to Ginny. Harry winces, worried for just a moment that Teddy might be rough or loud, but he needn’t have worried. Teddy has always been a sweet boy, a gentle boy, and he instinctively knows that’s the way he needs to be with James.
“James, look who it is,” Ginny coos, propping the baby boy up in her arms just a bit so Teddy can study him. “That’s Teddy. He’s your big brother. You’ll probably remember him from when he sang to you in my belly.” She glances over at Teddy.
Harry settles in next to Teddy and leans in to talk softly to his godson. “You should talk to him, mate. Help him remember who you are.”
Teddy nods, his hair abruptly turning from turquoise to black — the same color as Harry’s and, now, James’ — as he does. He reaches a finger toward James’ tiny sock, which is too large for his even tinier foot. “Can I touch him?”
“Yeah,” Harry agrees, reaching out to touch James’ foot to demonstrate. “And after he’s done eating, you can try holding him.” He looks over at Molly, who has insisted it’s possible for even very small children to hold babies with the proper precautions. She smiles encouragingly.
Ginny’s readjusting the baby in her arms and moving to bring the tip of the bottle to James’ mouth; like the postpartum mediwitch showed her, she gently rubs the side of his cheek with her finger to get him to turn toward the bottle and latch onto it. James closes his little eyelids over his cloudy greyish eyes in contentment.
Teddy gingerly rubs the baby’s foot, following Harry’s example. “Hi Snitch!” He turns to Harry. “Uncle Harry, even though he’s James now, I can still call him Snitch, right?”
“‘Course you can,” Harry laughs, his heart fit to burst. It never occurred to him when he decided to start calling the baby Snitch it would grow into a lasting nickname, but he thinks James will be at Hogwarts and his parents will still call him that from time to time.
“Hi Snitch,” Teddy repeats. “It’s Teddy! I’m your brother! Not really because your dad isn’t my dad, but he always tells me that you don’t have to be related by blood to be family, so I’m your brother because he’s my godfather! My room is right across from yours, so when you’re bigger and I come and stay, I can read you a bedtime story because I learned how to read this year! Ummmmmm…” Teddy appears to have run out of steam — though he’s rarely out of things to say for long — but it’s clear James is listening; though the baby is sleepy and eating, his eyes open slightly and lazily track Teddy’s voice.
“He knows your voice, mate,” Harry tells Teddy softly. “See how he’s trying to listen to you?” It’s odd even to him, really, how he seems to know how on a basic level that’s exactly what James is doing even though James can’t tell him. He didn’t fully believe it when well wishers told him that so much of parenting would be instinct prior to the actual birth. And yet, like much of the rest of his life, Harry’s instincts have not yet let him down in two days of being James’ dad. Surely he won’t be able to count on that forever, but hopefully by then he’ll be a bit more practiced at being a dad.
“He likes me?” Teddy asks excitedly, clapping his hands together. James’ eyes flutter open a bit and he pauses rhythmic slurping at the noise; after a moment, he returns to his sleepy-eyed suckling.
“He loves you,” Harry informs the boy fiercely. “You’re his brother, and you and I both know how special that is, don’t we?” There’s always been this implicit understanding, though Teddy is still too young to grasp it fully, that Harry and Teddy are the same boy in different contexts. Both of them were orphaned as babies, victims of a madman and his deranged war; however, Teddy, unlike his godfather, has the opportunity to be raised by people who love him. And Harry knows that kids like them — like him and Teddy — will never take for granted the family they are given.
Teddy sticks his finger in his mouth and nods as he stares at James, something both curious and like awe painted across his every expression. “I love him, too,” Teddy breathes as James spits out the bottle, squirming uncomfortably.
“That means he has to burp, right?” Ginny glances over to her mother for confirmation, looking a bit anxious at the prospect of being wrong.
Molly nods. “Just put him over your shoulder and pat his back, dear,” she reminds her daughter. After thirty seconds of this, James releases a belch, which sounds disproportionately large for his minuscule size.
Teddy giggles. “‘Scuse you, Snitch,” he teases as Ginny offers the bottle back to James. “I’m gonna teach him how to be nice, like please and thank you and ‘scuse me!” He looks over at Harry proudly; Harry beams.
“Reckon he’ll take it more seriously coming from you, mate.” Harry tousles Teddy’s currently untidy and black hair. It’s easy for him to imagine a five year old James now, with that same hair. Maybe they’ll be introducing a new baby to him then, or maybe it’ll be sooner. Feeling overcome with emotion, he leans over and places a kiss at the top of Teddy’s head.
“I always took directions from my brothers more seriously than directions from my parents,” Ginny agrees, looking apologetically toward Molly and Arthur. “Sorry mum, dad.”
“Can one of you go and get the camera out of the bag?” Harry asks abruptly. He needs to capture this: Teddy and James meeting for the first time, his entire little family that he made for himself. This is one Harry wants for James’ baby book, but it’s also one he’ll put in a frame on his desk in the auror office. It’s a family picture fit for the mantle here, too, in their home.
“On it,” Ron jumps up almost immediately, heading toward the bag, where it was abandoned on the floor. He fishes out Harry’s new camera and fiddles with the buttons before snapping a picture everyone was unprepared for.
“Can you please wait until James is done eating, Ron?” Ginny asks testily. Harry would never call her hormonal to her face, but her hormones had clearly been fluctuating more in the past two days than throughout most of her pregnancy. Her temper was flaring wildly at the tiniest thing and she could cry at the drop of a hat but switch to laughing nearly as suddenly.
“We’re wizards, in case you forgot,” Ron retorts haughtily. “The pictures move. Maybe one day, when James is older, you’ll want to remember what he looked like when he had a bottle.”
Ron’s got a point, so Harry nods enthusiastically. “He’s got a point, Gin. I will definitely want to remember that.” She responds by shooting daggers at him with her big brown eyes, but he isn’t going to apologize for wanting to remember everything about their first days with their son.
There are a few tense moments before James is done eating. Ginny holds the bottle out toward their guests. “Would one of you mind please taking this to the kitchen?” Even calling for Kreacher feels like it requires too much effort at the moment. Hermione steps forward and grabs the bottle from Ginny and heads off toward the kitchen. Then, she holds her arms toward Harry. “Can you take him, love?” Her tone is sweet, and it’s like she hadn’t been cross with him only minutes before.
“Yeah, give him here,” Harry agrees as they pass the baby between them. They’ve gotten good at this — their second victory as parents, if the first was getting the baby into the world safe and sound.
Ginny excuses herself after that — says she needs to use the toilet — and though the other adults are chattering around him, Harry’s focus goes very narrow. It’s just him and Teddy and James on the couch; Harry and his boys. One is his by blood and the other, his by circumstance and choice, but they’re both equally his. Teddy snuggles up closer to Harry, looking at James with something like awe. “Want to try holding him?” Harry asks Teddy softly.
Teddy bites his lip and shakes his head. “I’m not ready,” he tells his godfather. Instead, he leans over to study his little brother’s face. “He’s so tiny,” he breathes. “How can someone so tiny have all of the parts that make a human?”
“Those parts are tiny, too, for now,” Harry explains. “We all start out small, including you.” He pauses thoughtfully. “I didn’t meet you until you were already a month old, but I don’t think you were ever this little.”
“Because he was early.”
“Right.”
“But he’s okay.”
There’s a dim awareness that Ron is peering through the viewfinder of the camera. “Yeah. Healers — like your Gran — are very clever, and they can help protect little babies like James so they can be strong and healthy even if they come too early.”
Teddy considers this, his face scrunched up in intense concentration. He manages to turn his hair royal blue in the process. “I think, when I grow up, I don’t wanna be an auror anymore. I wanna be a healer who helps babies like Snitch.”
Harry beams; he couldn’t be prouder if he tried. “Sounds like a plan,” he tells Teddy. He leans over to kiss Teddy’s head again, then lifts James in his arm to kiss his blue-capped head, too. Teddy follows suit, leaning over Harry to kiss the top of his brother’s cap.
Making up for every instance in which his timing’s been shit, Ron manages to get that picture.
…
Eventually everyone — save for Molly — leaves the new parents to settle in at home. As for Ginny’s mum, she insists her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend will need help around, just in case they want to rest or need someone to fix them food while they care for her grandson. Ginny rolls her eyes at this — it’s so typical of her mum to believe that only she can save the day — but she’s secretly grateful. She and Harry fought hard to bring James home with them, but wanting him home with her doesn’t change the fact that she’s deeply terrified of being alone with him. The hospital had provided everything, including people who knew exactly what to do with babies at all times. She isn’t sure who decided that 22 year old women who got pregnant accidentally because they couldn’t be fucked (pun intended, of course) to cast a contraceptive charm before getting railed by their ex-boyfriends in a pub bathroom should also be allowed to take the baby conceived from that union home with no supervision, but that person is probably as irresponsible as she is. Everyone told Ginny that her maternal intuition would kick in the first time she held James; now that he’s here, she feels more like a baby than she ever has in her life as the youngest of seven children.
It doesn’t help that Harry is completely a natural at it. She never doubted he would be, of course; it’s just that she hoped she’d rise to the occasion as well. But James is two days old and Ginny can’t help but wonder if James and Harry have formed a bond, a sort of father-son twoness, that she will never be able to access or penetrate. Her deepest fear is that, though she carried James — he is the only person who knows what her heart sounds like from the inside — she’ll never be connected with him in the way Harry is. She doesn’t voice this fear to anyone, doesn’t ask her mum for reassurance that it’s normal or ask Harry for his support. Because that’s another fear: that they’ll tell her she’s completely barmy for feeling that way. That she's actually broken, missing the mum part of her brain that every woman but her has.
Coaxing James to nurse is more difficult than she ever anticipated. The newborn boy seems completely uninterested in breastfeeding, often latching for long enough to take a gulp or two before giving up and getting fussy for a bottle. “I blame the healers,” Molly tuts as Ginny passes James to Harry, who has a bottle in hand. As for Ginny, she has to pump to keep producing bottles for James — a never ending cycle of failure and then having to take an extra step so she can fail less. “A midwitch would never give a baby a bottle. Once they have the bottle, they learn it’s easier and won’t learn how to nurse.”
“Well, my son came six weeks early and my milk hadn’t come in yet,” Ginny snaps finally, having listened to this for minutes. She’d blame it on the hormones if pressed, but she truthfully feels more than justified at being annoyed at these comments; she doesn’t understand why her mum is — however unintentional it may be — insistent on belittling her parenting with these comments. She shouldn’t feel like a bad mum to James for making sure he’s fed. “He had to eat somehow, didn’t he?”
“Oh, of course,” Molly agrees hastily, having the good sense to at least sound apologetic about how she came off. Ginny isn’t sure whether she means it, though. “I should have asked Audrey if there were some potions that could have helped with that. Healers are just so quick to reach for a bottle, and breast really is best, you know!”
“I reckon fed is best,” Harry chimes in, using his auror voice. The authoritative tone offers little room for argument. He looks so comfortable as he multitasks offering the bottle to James and telling off her mum; Ginny has never found him sexier and totally loses her train of thought as she watches him. “Gin, I’ve got James covered, if you want to go pump in another room?”
“I don’t trust that muggle contraption,” Molly contributes, likely the only person who would dare to defy Harry Potter’s warning tone. She’s referring, of course, to the breast pump, which Audrey helpfully procured for Ginny to make feeding James easier. It makes Ginny feel like a cow, of course, but no more than using one of the horrible manual expressers witches have used in the past would. At least now a machine is milking her and she isn’t technically doing it to herself.
“I don’t really think you need to trust it, mum,” Ginny sighs tiredly, grabbing the pump and heading toward the stairs. “You just need to know that it’s working and it’s helping your grandson gain weight. I’m going up to our room,” she announces, climbing the stairs as if each of her legs weigh a stone.
When he hears the door to the bedroom latch, Harry takes his eyes off James — happily gulping down the breastmilk in his bottle — and looks over at Molly: “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Molly, but you need to be a bit gentler with her.” For a long time after they told the Weasleys that Ginny was pregnant, Harry didn’t feel like he had very much of a right to voice his opinion. He’d promised Ginny he’d let her fight her own battles, yes, but there was also the fact that he’d gone and gotten their youngest daughter up the duff out of wedlock and he was worried if he stepped any more out of bounds he’d lose the only family he’d ever known. Maybe it’s that he finally has a family of his own, or maybe it’s that he’s too tired to have much of a filter, but he feels much less worried about this now.
For her part, Molly looks genuinely perplexed. “What do you mean, dear?” Her eyes flick up and down. “You should prop his head up a bit more while he eats,” she corrects.
It occurs to Harry that this — the micromanagement of James’ care — is exactly the way in which Molly needs to be gentler with Ginny, but he knows that’s the wrong way to approach it. “She’s very…” He pauses, trying to find the right words. “We’re both new to this, and we’re doing our best. Neither of us was prepared for him to come so early, and the healers offered us the best solutions they had to help, er, mitigate the effects of that. The last thing I want is for her to hear so much criticism that she thinks she’s doing a bad job.” Then, knowing flattery will get him everywhere with Molly, he adds: “You’re her role model in all of this. If she thinks that you think she’s doing poorly…” He trails off, holding her gaze meaningfully.
Molly breaks eye contact, hastily shaking her head. “I’m only trying to help. If you don’t want me here —”
“No, no. That’s not it!” He does feel a responsibility to reassure her of this, if only because he expects he and Ginny will be up with James for much of the night and he’s already exhausted enough that he’d like a kip before that. “Just…maybe don’t be so critical of the bottles,” he suggests, tapping the bottle he’s holding demonstratively. “The Healers said it would take him a bit to get the hang of nursing. She’s trying and she feels like rubbish every time he whines for a bottle.” Ginny hasn’t told him this explicitly, but she doesn’t need to; he can see it, the way in which her eyes look stricken and pained and defeat colors her features everytime she fails to nurse James until he’s full.
A frown overtakes Molly’s plump face. “Believe it or not, Ron had a lot of trouble nursing. I didn’t know why it had worked on five babies before him, but he couldn’t seem to — he would cry, the poor dear, inconsolably because he never got his fill. I had to give him bottles, too. I always thought that’s why he eats like he’ll never see food again…”
“That’s the kind of thing you should be sharing with Ginny,” Harry nods encouragingly. “Because Ron clearly turned out all right even though you had to give him bottles.” He doesn’t want to touch the subtext, of course; if Molly meant it when she said breast is best, does that mean she considers Ron somehow less than her other kids? Still, he thinks that Ginny knew that even her own mum — who she often sees as the paragon of motherhood — has struggled in parenting, Ginny would feel less overwhelmed by all of it.
One of Molly’s soft hands clumsily reaches out to pat Harry’s cheek. “You’re such a sweet boy, Harry. You always have been. I don’t know how you got so wise.”
It’s possible he got so wise when he consistently fought battles that weren’t suited for children before he was of age, or maybe it was when he spent his seventeenth year hunting horcruxes instead of finishing school. There was also the time in which he sacrificed himself so that the people he loved might have a fighting chance of survival, only to discover that the man he’d trusted to prepare him for that moment had been fine with him dying all along. But then he looks down at his son, who is, above all else, proof that he didn’t die, proof that he and Ginny made it out alive. And if Harry is wise — which he isn’t sure he is, honestly — he probably only became that way two days ago, when he held James in his arms for the first time.
When Ginny’s done pumping, Molly helps her store the milk in the cooling cabinet and then sends the pair of them back up to their bedroom to have a kip before the first home visit from one of the pediatric healers. Neither of them has much will to protest; even coming from the hospital, where there was round the clock help, two days of parenthood have left them dead on their feet. Even Harry falls asleep instantly as his head hits the pillow, too exhausted to even dream.
The sound of Molly’s voice calling up the stairs that the healer has arrived is what pulls Harry out of his blissful sleep. Ginny doesn’t stir, so he rolls over and shakes her lightly. “Gin, the healer is here. D’you want to stay in bed? I can handle it if you need to sleep.”
“Gimme a minute,” Ginny groans, turning onto her back. “I’ll meet you down there.”
So Harry pulls on a pair of pajama bottoms over his pants and finds an old, worn Gryffindor t-shirt on the floor to cover up his chest and torso before leaving the room and rushing down the stairs. He combs his fingers through his hair as he does, certain his hair is sticking up in all directions as it always is when he wakes up. It’s in vain, of course — Harry’s hair will never be presentable — but he’s still shaking his fingers through it when he finds Molly and a middle-aged witch who must be the Not Cho healer in the sitting room. James is resting on an exam table that the healer must have conjured, fussing lightly as the healer adeptly undresses him.
“I know, love,” the healer coos, her voice lilting in a Scottish accent similar to McGonagal’s, but which has clearly faded in intensity with time; she’s probably lived in England for quite a while. “I know it’s cold, I’ll cast a warming charm in a second.” She looks up to see Harry entering the room and pales a bit before regaining her composure. “Look, baby,” she returns to speaking to James in dulcet, soothing tones. “Your da is here.” She takes this opportunity to smile up at Harry. “Apologies for waking you.” Her tone is a bit tighter when she speaks to him, almost as though she’s annoyed that she’d been greeted by her patient’s grandmother rather than his parents.
“S’all right,” Harry smiles, a smile which quickly turns to a yawn. “Just wanted to take advantage of having Ginny’s mum around since it doesn’t seem likely James will allow us much sleep tonight.” It’s times like this Harry is grateful that everyone knows his life story; he can’t imagine explaining to every random healer why his own parents aren’t around to lend a hand with the new baby.
“Smart of you,” the healer nods approvingly. She waves her wand over a fussy James, casting the promised warming charm. He calms considerably. Harry can’t help but notice that his son looks so small on the table like that, in just his nappy with not enough fat around his middle to have the desired chubby baby look about him. “That’s right, love,” she coos, focusing back on the baby. “You were just cold.”
The healer looks familiar to Harry, but she hasn’t even bothered to introduce herself. He wonders if she’s waiting for Ginny to join them as well, and helplessly glances back at the staircase, wondering if his girlfriend maybe just fell back to sleep.
“He hasn’t lost any weight,” the healer announces, breaking Harry out of his reverie. “How’s he been eating?”
“Er, pretty well, I think,” Harry answers, running a hand through his hair anxiously. The healer turns away from him as he does that, eyes wide as if she walked in on him naked, or something else equally inappropriate. “He’s not really taken to nursing yet, but Ginny — that’s his mum — usually tries before we give him a bottle. He always finishes the bottle once he has it, though.”
“Good,” the healer agrees. “It’s not unusual for premature babies to have trouble nursing. As long as he’s eating, it’s great to keep trying to nurse and supplement with a bottle. Is he eating breast milk or formula?”
“Er, he had formula in the hospital while they worked on Ginny’s milk, but she’s pumping for him now,” he answers, shifting from foot to foot, both uncomfortable with the conversation and knowing he shouldn’t be. This is about James’ health, after all.
She nods again. “I’d like to see him gaining a few ounces over the coming days. Otherwise, we might need to give him a supplemental feed through a tube, and those are never fun. How’s his sleep?”
“Both constant and not enough,” Harry jokes before he can think better of it. “I’m sorry, er, just meant that he keeps us up a fair bit, even though he sleeps a lot,” he stammers.
The healer laughs at something, like it’s a private joke only she knows. “Very normal. Maybe even a bit preferable. Too much sleep, and we start to worry.”
“Can a baby sleep too much?” Harry feels taken aback, and like he now has yet another thing to be vigilant about.
“You’d be surprised,” the healer comments blithely. Her style isn’t like Audrey and Healer Harris — who erred on the side of over-informing. She seems to offer less information, keeping it to herself when it’s not explicitly needed. “Is your wife going to be joining us?” Behind her, Molly Weasley chokes as though she’d very much like to correct her.
“Uh, my girlfriend did say she’d be down. I can run up and get her, if you’d like. I think she’s still recovering from the birth…” He only makes it known that Ginny is his girlfriend rather than his wife because Molly is nearby; if it weren’t for Ginny’s mum wanting the correction — heaven forbid anyone think they’re married before they actually are — he wouldn’t bother with it. He basically thinks of Ginny as his wife, anyway.
“I’m here!” As if on cue, Ginny’s voice floats down the stairs. James immediately turns his head toward the sound, whimpering softly, like he does right before he gets a bottle.
“You hear your mummy coming, do you?” The healer talks to James in the same soft, engaging voice she’s used throughout the exam.
“That’s the sound he makes when he’s hungry,” Harry manages to point out as Ginny appears next to him.
Her hair is in a nearly-undone plait, and she’s in a pair of stretchy pants and an oversized Holyhead Harpies sweatshirt. She never expected her body to be toned and lean again immediately after she gave birth, of course; still, while she never hid her bump while James occupied her, she feels an intense need to shroud it beneath baggy layers now that he’s out in the world. There’s grace in letting her body readjust in its own time, no doubt, and she certainly can’t do much about it when she’s still leaking all kinds of fluids — blood and milk and tears and other substances she couldn’t even hazard a guess at — but she finds such grace hard to come by. Just as she barely recognized herself as her athletic frame expanded to make room for James, she no longer knows who she is if she’s neither fit nor pregnant. And then Harry’s arm snakes around her waist and for a second she finds herself; she may not recognize her figure or feel comfortable in her own skin, but she knows she’s his . It’s not always enough, but today it feels like the closest to herself she could be now.
“What did I miss?” Ginny asks softly, leaning into Harry’s touch.
“Not much,” Harry tells her. “Just talking about his eating habits.”
“Getting bottles isn’t going to hurt him, is it?” Ginny asks the healer, clearly sounding a bit anxious. It makes Harry want to glare at Molly, and it’s only with great restraint that he resists that urge.
“Of course not, dear,” the healer tells her kindly. Harry notices that her expression is much softer and more open to Ginny than it has been for him. “As long as he’s eating, that’s what’s most important.” She pauses. “And the healers at the hospital briefed you on the sunlight charm, yes?”
“Twenty minutes every hour,” Harry recites faithfully.
The healer nods, and then goes back to her work. She explains what she’s doing, but it seems to be directed at James, who at least seems less miffed about all of it when she speaks to him in that lilting Scottish accent of hers. As she finishes the exam, she begins to dress James back up in his bodysuit. As she replaces his cap on his head she comments: “Quite a head of hair on him.”
“Gets it from his dad,” Ginny jokes weakly.
“I got it from mine,” Harry contributes, trying to force a smile.
The healer turns to him, seeming to really take him in for the first time since he entered the room; her expression is still strange, almost unfocused. “I reckon you did,” she comments vaguely, before scooping James up and offering him to Ginny.
As Ginny settles their son in her arms, and the healer clears the exam table from the room, as if it wasn’t there at all, Harry puzzles over her statement. Did she know his father? Or did she simply know the story of Harry Potter, who looked exactly like his murdered dad, save for his eyes?
“I’ll be back in the morning tomorrow, and then around the same time in the afternoon,” the healer declares, as she reaches for her bag. “It was so nice to meet you both,” she tells Harry and Ginny, before looking over at the fragile little human in Ginny’s arms. “And of course, you, Jamie,” she coos. “I’ve a feeling you’re going to be one of my favorite patients,” she tells him in the singsong voice that seems reserved just for the baby.
“How are you getting back? Floo? Apparating?” Harry asks, realizing he isn’t sure how the witch got to their house in the first place.
“Apparating, I should think.”
“Well, Ginny, James, and I will show you to the door, then,” Harry offers. They walk from the sitting room to the foyer in silence; as they arrive at the door, she repeats her schedule for follow ups, and that it was nice to meet them. “I don’t think we got your name, actually. Apologies, I think we missed the formal introduction,” he adds with a self-deprecating chuckle.
The healer looks taken aback but regains her composure quickly. “Of course,” she smiles uneasily, extending a hand to Harry. “I suppose if I’ll be caring for your son, that’s important information. I’m Healer Macdonald.”