Chapter 25
Complexity #25: It takes time to settle into a new sort of normal.
Turning twenty-two sneaks up on me almost entirely unnoticed. I've never made that much of a fuss over my birthday - at least not in recent years, anyways - but that seems to be even stronger this year. Probably because, out of all the things in my life worth focusing on at the moment, turning another year older is near the bottom of the priority list.
My birthday itself falls on a Wednesday, so there's not much opportunity for fanfare in that sense anyways. There are no real plans in the cards, and certainly no party. Instead, I get an extra-affectionate fiancé in the morning while I get ready for work and a card signed by a majority of the department when I get into the office.
Which, somehow, is the perfect level of celebration.
Just before lunchtime, an interdepartmental memo flutters onto my desk. I immediately recognise the handwriting as James', and open it up.
Abby,
Dad asked me if I thought you'd be up for dinner with him and mum tonight for your birthday, if we didn't already have other plans. Don't know why he didn't just walk up to your desk and ask you, but now you're getting me checking with you to see if you're good with it before I answer. Up to you.
James
I read it over, before flipping the memo over and writing a reply on the back.
Honestly, kind of glad he didn't. A family dinner invitation is a weird thing to do with like ten of my coworkers in earshot. But yeah, dinner with your parents tonight sounds lovely.
Abby xx
I briefly wonder if I'll ever be comfortable with Harry acknowledging our personal connection while at the office. It's not exactly something either of us has any control over anyways, and it's not like anyone in the office doesn't know about me and James, but it's still something that stresses me out nonetheless.
The worst thing is that I've probably been conditioned into that stress by the reactions of everyone I work with - and I hate that. I hate that I've let them have that sort of power over me.
But I try not to reflect on it for too long, because I've got lunch plans with Molly, Amelie, and Caroline - and I'd quite like to leave my work-related troubles behind for that.
We meet in some cute little French café in Muggle London, and I eye the colourful macarons in the front display case as we walk in. Given that it's my birthday, I feel no guilt in the fact that I'm almost definitely going to indulge myself in some of those before I leave.
"Happy birthday!" all three of them say, practically in unison, as soon as I get to the table. They all clearly planned to get here before me - at least one of them is always late otherwise.
"Thank you," I say with a grin, sitting down in the fourth chair.
"Any fun birthday plans?" Molly asks.
I laugh, because the answer to that would've been 'no' about an hour ago. "Yeah, James and I are doing dinner with his parents tonight."
"A wild celebration then," Amelie jokes.
"I mean, you've never seen how my Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny party," Molly says, turning to face her. "Honestly, they've done some wild shit at family gatherings, especially now that most of us kids are of age."
I think back to last Halloween, where James' parents convinced James and Al to play them in Beer Quidditch, then proceeded to completely trounce their children and spend the rest of the night rubbing it in their faces.
They're certainly a good time when they want to be, although I imagine tonight's going to be a slightly more casual (and more sober) affair than that.
"It'll be good," I tell them. "Honestly, what with the wedding in just a few months and everything going on at work, I need something low key."
"That's fair," Amelie responds. "I take it vacation days to recover from a hangover aren't exactly easy to come by for you right now."
"Not to mention that Harry's the one approving those time off requests," Caroline adds. "Honestly, I still can't get over how weird that must be sometimes - for both you and Al. Like, with Freddy and his dad it's one thing, because it's a relatively small family business, but… the entire Auror department."
If only they knew. "It's… really something sometimes," I say vaguely. Luckily no one presses it much further than that.
"Speaking of Freddy," Molly asks, "have you finally caved and moved into his place yet?"
This has been an ongoing discussion between the two of them - they've both got their own flats right now, and are locked in some sort of battle over who's going to move into whose place. Personally, I think Freddy's got the upper hand on that one - not only has he lived in his for much longer than Caroline, who's only had her place since moving back in January, but also, his flat is right above the shop he works at, which is a pretty unbeatable location for him.
"No," she replies, in a classic display of her stubbornness. "He's honestly over at mine way more than I'm over at his - and rightfully so, his bed is awful. Seriously, his mattress is fucked."
"You do realise you could just… move your bed to his place," I reply, and I already know she's going to glare at me for my response before she does.
"It's the principle of the thing," she replies. "I don't know, I just moved to this new place, and it's like the first thing to tie me down here, and the idea of immediately moving in with Freddy and losing that is… weird, I don't know."
"Well technically, now you have Freddy tying you down here as well," Amelie notes helpfully.
Caroline turns to me. "Abby, how did you and James decide?"
I think back to when we first moved in together, which was over a year ago at this point, and I honestly don't even remember it being any sort of real discussion.
"Well, I mean, James was living with Freddy, so it would've been weird for me to move into that space," I reply, trying to remember the conversation James and I had had. "And my place was infinitely nicer, so it was never really a thing we had to think through all that much."
Caroline laughs. "Well that's not helpful. It was such an easy choice for you."
I shrug. "Yeah, I suppose."
It's funny, looking back at it, that James moving in with me was somehow the most natural thing in the world. There were never any extended discussions or intense hashing-outs of details - one morning James rolled over next to me in bed and said we should make this a permanent thing, and a few weeks later all of his stuff was being brought over in boxes. It was simple.
I suppose what we've been dealing with over the past few months is some type of karma for having things so easy elsewhere.
"The real question is," Amelie says, breaking me out of my own thoughts, "who the fuck would move into a flat above a joke shop if you do end up winning this argument."
Caroline shrugs. "I mean, technically, someone other than Freddy has lived there before. Plus, most of his experiments happen in the flat, not in the shop itself."
I laugh at that. "James had to come take shelter at my place on more than one occasion of Freddy's experiments going wrong when they were living together."
"Truly, of all the men I could've decided to fall in love with, I went for one whose job constantly puts me at risk of, I don't even know, randomly turning into a duck or something at all times."
Freddy once accidentally turned James into a Pygmy Puff, so Caroline's not entirely off base there.
"Yeah, you've definitely got the biggest occupational hazard of all of us," Molly tells her. "At worst, Zara just gets paint on me."
She laughs to herself, seemingly remembering something. "Although, it was a bit funny to try to explain to my mum why there was green paint in my hair at family dinner."
Amelie frowns at her. "You still haven't told them?"
Molly shakes her head. "No, I'm… getting there. I've already met Zara's mum and brothers, so it's definitely serious enough for the whole 'meet the parents' mess, but it's a bit hard when you also have to, you know, come out at the same time, you know?"
There's a brief silence that falls over the table, and it's well-timed that a waitress picks that exact moment to come over and take our food orders.
As soon as she's gone, Molly laughs to herself again. "I mean, obviously none of you know, but it's just… I'm still not really sure what I am, if I'm bi or fully gay or what, and I keep thinking I have to have some sort of label figured out before I tell my parents about Zara, and that's a lot to fucking work through."
She takes a sip of water. "But I think I've just decided 'fuck it.' I can sort out that part later, but right now I have a girlfriend who makes me happy and that's just going to have to be enough for my mum and dad."
I smile at her. "Good for you."
" 'Fuck it' sounds like a solid approach, I must say," Amelie replies.
"Ah yes, 'fuck it' - that's also your approach to cute Healer interns, yeah?"
"I've stopped hooking up with him!" Amelie protests loudly, enough so that the group of women a few tables down look over at her in poorly disguised horror. "I mean, yeah," she finishes more quietly, cheeks turning pink, "we decided to keep things strictly professional and maybe revisit things in a year once he's not a trainee anymore."
"So this is like… an actual thing with feelings?" I ask, because last I'd heard, they were just sleeping together for fun.
She shrugs. "I'm not sure. I guess we'll find out in time."
"I love how these weekly lunches always turn into group therapy sessions," Molly remarks. "Like, without fail. This is a birthday lunch, and here we are, all going off about our own relationship problems instead."
Caroline snorts. "And really, if anyone should be getting the free therapy session, it's the birthday girl. We could've called that your birthday gift," she says, looking over at me.
"Let's hear it then," Amelie says. "Do you have any deep-seated issues in your love life that you need to work through?"
I think about it for a second. "No, I don't think so."
And for the first time in a long time, when I tell them that I'm fine, I mean it.
The Potter house smells absolutely heavenly as soon as we walk in the door. There's a very distinct note of freshly baked bread, which leads me to believe Harry and Ginny had been banking on us coming over for dinner tonight long before inviting us at lunch today.
It's actually kind of hilarious that they seemingly just knew we wouldn't have plans otherwise.
But in their defence, they weren't wrong.
"Happy birthday!" Ginny says, coming into the entryway from the kitchen and immediately wrapping me up into a hug.
"Thank you," I say, barely able to get the words out for how hard she's hugging me.
At some point in the middle of Ginny's hug, Harry comes into the room and greets James, so as soon as Ginny lets me go, I'm swept up into another round of birthday wishes.
"Can I get you two something to drink? Butterbeer, wine, something else?" Harry asks, looking between the two of us.
"Wine would be great, thank you," I answer, at the same time James replies with, "Firewhisky neat."
" 'Firewhisky neat, please,' " Ginny chides her son, rolling her eyes. "Honestly James, I thought we'd managed to teach you proper manners at least once in your eighteen years living here."
He buries his hand in his hair. "Sorry, mum."
As soon as Ginny turns her back on us to go into the kitchen, I nudge James. "Yeah, where are your proper manners?" I ask him quietly, a devious grin on my face.
"Oh, shut it," he replies, nudging me right back.
I follow James into the living room, and Harry comes bearing our drinks not long after.
"So," he begins, as soon as he's settled into a chair, "how's life? Wedding planning still going alright?"
"Yep, it's moving along," I reply.
"The stress of it hasn't gotten to your heads?"
I can tell Harry is trying, in a woefully unsubtle way, to pry at all the tension he picked up on between James and me before.
"It's… a lot to handle, what with everything else going on right now," I answer, trying my best to phrase it delicately, "but I think we've figured out how to manage it all well enough."
Harry looks at James, almost as if searching for confirmation from him as well. I'd maybe be offended that he's not taking my word for it, but I've spent two months outright lying whenever anyone asked me about James and my relationship, so I guess I can't blame him.
James apparently decides to avoid subtlety altogether. "We're not fighting all the time anymore, if that's what you're trying to ask."
I feel my cheeks start to heat up at the sudden directness of the conversation, and Harry kind of stumbles over his words for a moment, clearly not anticipating James' bluntness either.
"Well, that's good," he eventually manages, then takes a long swig of firewhisky to avoid having to say anything further.
I momentarily worry that we'll get stuck in some sort of awkward silence, but luckily, Ginny picks that exact moment to walk in from the kitchen.
"Dinner should be ready in about fifteen minutes," she announces, taking a seat on the couch on the other side of James. "Has Harry started telling you two about the plans for Lily and Roxanne's graduation party?"
And there it is, the perfect way to segway far away from our previous conversation. "No, we haven't gotten to that yet," I tell her.
"It's going to be a big thing, here in our backyard," Ginny explains. "Both the girls are inviting all their schoolmates over, and of course the whole family will be here as well, and it's going to be this huge bonfire-type celebration."
"Where the hell are you putting a bonfire?" James asks, none too eloquently.
Ginny shrugs. "Harry seems to think it's relatively easy to build a fire pit. I've hired a landscaper for when he inevitably mucks it up."
"I'm not going to fuck it up," Harry argues.
"You said that when you tried to build the broom shed yourself too," she replies, taking a sip of her wine. "Face it, love, household spells are not your forte."
"This is different."
"Which is why I'm letting you have a go at it. But I've got a back-up plan as well, so that we don't accidentally ruin our youngest's graduation party."
It's clear this is a thing they've gone back and forth on many times, and their banter doesn't really have any sort of bite to it. If there's one thing I do miss, even as James and I work on rebuilding our relationship, it's that sort of casual fighting, that both sides know doesn't really mean anything.
I know it'll take time to get to that point of comfort again, and that we're moving in the right direction and getting better at not overreacting to each other all the time, but it still sets off a slightly melancholy feeling in my chest. I can't help but mourn everything we've lost as a result of being at each other's throats for months on end.
"... and between Lily graduating and you two getting married and this new assignment, it's going to be one hell of a busy summer for us."
I realise that I've drifted into my own thoughts and completely missed an entire portion of the conversation. "I bet," I reply to Ginny sympathetically, hoping that my response isn't entirely off base in the context of whatever I didn't hear.
It's apparently the right thing to say; or she doesn't look at me like I'm out of my mind for answering with that, at least, and continues her story. But there's apparently just enough off in my voice for James alone to pick up on, because he reaches over and rests his hand on my knee, giving it a gentle squeeze.
And even though it doesn't completely change everything, the fact that he's picked up on my tiny mood shift is… reassuring, somehow. It's a sign that we're moving back to normal - maybe not exactly as things were, because who knows if things will ever be exactly the same as they were before this year, but a new sort of normal. One where we're back on the same page again.
I rest my hand on top of his and look over at him out of the corner of my eye with a small smile, before tuning back in to Ginny's story about the Prophet's predictions for this year's picks for the English National Team.
The following weekend brings nothing but wedding prep. I'm almost positive that we're getting close to being done with this shit, but somehow, every time I delude myself into that, there's at least thirty additional tasks that appear out of nowhere.
So instead of going out with friends or having a relaxing evening with James, Saturday night finds us both at the kitchen table, working our way through the handwritten placecards.
I must be on the fiftieth placecard by the time I lose patience. "This was a mistake."
At the time, doing all of our placecards by hand - with me doing the calligraphy for the names and James doing the table numbers - seemed like a sweet personalised idea. But now my hand is cramping up and I've got a still-undetermined number of names to go.
James looks up from his place on the other side of the table. "Really? I think they look good, even if my handwriting does kind of suck."
"No, they look great," I agree, shaking out my right hand. "I just - Merlin, we invited so many people to this wedding. I underestimated how many names I'd have to write out."
"Want to take a break?" he offers.
I shake my head, almost automatically. We're getting so close and there's still so much left to be done, that I'm afraid that any moment spent on something that isn't wedding preparations is a waste of precious time. And we'd blocked tonight off for this particular task, and putting it off will inevitably mean we get behind on something else, and it'll all be a domino effect until -
"Taking one little break won't throw the entire wedding off course, I promise." He extends his hand out to me.
I just stare at it blankly, my mind too tired to piece together what he's trying to do.
"If it's still technically wedding-related, will you take a break then?" He flicks his wand at the television, which now apparently responds to his wand just as much as it does to the actual remote, and suddenly the room is full of music. "We could probably use some dancing practice, after all."
And so without giving it much more thought, I place my hand in his, letting him pull me up from my seat.
The music is steady and light, and we find a rhythm relatively easily - James twirls me every so often, and with every spin I start to feel some of my stress ebbing away.
There we are, in the middle of the night, dancing around the kitchen like it's the most normal thing in the world. Somehow, it feels both like a dream and like something so incredibly real.
When the song ends and we come to a stop, we're standing face-to-face, just a few inches apart, and the way he looks into my eyes makes my heart beat faster even though he's been looking at me like this for years.
"What do you think?" he asks softly, hands still frozen where they were when the song ended. "Are we going to avoid making complete fools of ourselves on our first dance?"
I smile at him. "I think we'll manage."
We stand there in silence for a few moments, letting the peacefulness wash over us as the next song begins, then James squeezes my hand.
"I'm glad we decided to fight for this," he tells me sincerely. "I've always liked fighting by your side infinitely more than fighting with you."
My smile breaks into a full-on beam at that. "Always? Are you sure of that?" I tease. "Because I seem to remember more than one instance when we were fourteen where you putting a Dungbomb in my bag was like, the epitome of a good time for you."
"Okay, excluding everything before we got together," he says with a short laugh, "since you want to get super technical with it. But dammit Abby, I was trying to be romantic."
I go up on my toes to press a kiss to his cheek. "We're slow-dancing in the middle of our kitchen. I think we've already achieved peak romance here, you didn't need to add to it."
"I… can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not."
Now it's my turn to laugh. "Yes, you waltzing me around the kitchen is very high up on the romance scale, and I do mean that seriously."
He squeezes my hand again. "Good."
"But I'm glad too, you know," I tell him. "That we're fighting for this."
"In that case, care for another dance?"
I look over at the table and the stack of blank placecards that I've abandoned. And then I look back at James, and the answer is obvious. "There's quite a lot of dancing at weddings - we should probably prepare for all of it, just to be safe."
The music starts back up again, and I think to myself that if this is what our new normal looks like, then I think we're in a good place.
Sneak peek of chapter 26:
Time passes by in a blur and I'm not really sure what to do with that. While I know, objectively, that I should be enjoying the wedding planning process, as it's only something I'll get to do once, I can't help but be impatient for James and me to just be married already so that I can stop fretting about things like finding a time where all the bridesmaids can go in for their second fitting.
When I tell James that I almost wish we'd just eloped instead, he expresses concern that I've been body-snatched.
Which, yeah, is fair.
