Just something silly and short for Father's Day being belatedly uploaded onto here. Hello! I'm still alive! Real life is really hard right now, but I'll hopefully have more time for writing soon :)
"Oh, my!" he exclaimed, holding the bottle out in front of him. He looked severely at his daughter, bouncing on the bottom of the bed. "Now, Roxy. Have you been tricking the shopkeepers into thinking you're old enough to buy Firewhiskey again? This has got to stop, you know."
Roxanne giggled. "Mummy gotted it!" she explained.
"Mummy got it," Angelina corrected, yawning.
"Mummy's very old," Roxanne continued seriously, and George hastily turned his laugh into a hacking cough.
"Mummy's not very old, Roxy," he said. "Just…quite old."
"Watch it, you," said Angelina. "Or you'll be receiving soap-on-a-rope every Christmas, birthday and Father's Day from here on out." He pulled a face at her, and she rolled her eyes. "Rox, have you given Daddy the card you made?"
Her face lit up. "Wait there," she said sternly, wagging her finger at the two of them. There was something very disconcerting about this gesture of his mother's coming from his three and a half year old, but George managed to keep a straight face until she'd left the room.
He turned to Angelina, who now had her eyes closed again. "Don't go back to sleep," he warned.
"I should be so lucky," she muttered.
He snorted. Neither of them had had what could be described as a full night's sleep for…oh, three and a half years now, and he was beginning to assume that he'd be tired for the rest of his life. That's just how it was, and how it would be. Life changed. But it wasn't all bad.
"Thanks for the Firewhiskey, by the way."
"No worries," she said, smiling up at him whilst keeping her eyes closed. "I figured I'd better get you something I like. Sharing is caring, and all."
"Sure," he said. "Perhaps not at six-oh-three in the morning, though."
"God," she groaned. "Is that the time?"
He was saved from answering by Roxanne crashing back into their bedroom, carrying a bright pink envelope. "I made this for you," she said, thrusting it in his face in her enthusiasm. He lifted her high up into the air, making her shriek with glee, and deposited her small body between himself and Angelina in the bed.
"Thank you very much," he said, taking the card from her as Angelina sat up and wrapped her arms around Roxanne. Their daughter snuggled into her, and Angelina deposited a kiss on the top of her head. The moment, so normal, so frequent, caught at something in his throat, and he wanted, in that instant, to develop some kind of Time Turner that would take him back to the days and weeks and months after Fred's death, when life seemed barely worth living.
Look at this! He would shout at his past self. How can you want to die when one day this will happen?
Angelina raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly at him, and he nodded back just as imperceptibly. He was okay. Life was okay. More than that, life was good. He was happy. "Let's open this card, then!" he said and Roxanne cheered.
The card (homemade) was also bright pink, with HAPY FATTERS DAY written in shaky letters at the top. The 's' was backwards, and the tail of the last 'y' reached all the way down to the bottom of the card, and underneath were three different coloured blobs of varying sizes. "That's Mummy," Roxanne explained, pointing to the purple one. "And that's you," she added, indicating the green blob.
"So this must be you?" George asked, indicating the final red blob. She nodded vigorously. "Wow! I can see the resemblance!" Angelina's lips twitched. "You know," he said seriously, "I think this might be the best drawing I've ever seen."
The funny thing was, he wasn't being funny. It was the truth.
