Hi, so here is another chapter and we are only a few away from finishing this story! Hopefully the next one will not take as long to get out.
I hope all of you understand where Ginny is coming from here when it comes to the war. It's the same headspace i imagine, Lily, Tonks, Alice Longbottom and even in some ways Molly and Narcissa to have as a mother you want the world for your children and Ginny wants a safe world for James and i hope i have made that come across in this chapter.
I am not up to date on the feeding of a newborn other than breastfeeding so therefore any inaccuacies i make about bottle feeding and pumping are entirely my own. Incidently i do not know if bottle feeding is a muggle thing but it was fun to play around with little cracks in the cannon such as these.
Disclaimer-Nothing is mine in this chapter just the cute little baby.
Please Read and Review.
And I will endevour to post sooner rahter than later.
Beat Your Heart Out
Chapter 23-Mummy's Here.
As the weeks pass Ginny adjusts to being a mother and the Weasley family adjust to a new member as they wait out the days before the end of the war. Otherwise known as the calm before the storm. And again some messing around with an ambiguous timing.
It took some adjusting Ginny wouldn't lie.
Actually that was the polite way of putting that first week into perspective.
James was at times an utter nightmare.
For a start he didn't sleep. Ginny had known that going in that babies didn't sleep for at least the first year (and that was if she was lucky) but James didn't seem to sleep for more than half an hour and that was if everyone in the house walked around as if they were on broken glass. It had been a long time since there had been a baby in the house—sixteen years to be exact and Ginny relied on those early days on her mother and father especially when she could barely leave the bed because her body was a mess of blood and something else she didn't want to think about and even shifting on the sheets hurt like hell.
James began to change a little as the days went by and Ginny could see it. She felt like maybe she was the only one who could see it.
Once he had been cleaned up and changed into a little blue jumpsuit with a pattern of golden snitches (courtesy of Uncle Fred) Ginny put the baby on his back one morning and watching him. She found that she could watch him for hours like that kicking his feet up in the air so she cold curl her palm around them and watch as his brown eyes became fixated on the broomstick that whirled around over his head (curtsey of Uncle George) she found that she could see that the matted strands of dark hair were a shade lighter when they were dry and thick—now they could form a tuft of hair. The hair colour was more a combination of the jet black of Harry's hair and the red that was hers and it formed a darker brown she thought, his eyes were all hers, the brown that she had, that her mother had, that her grandmother had had.
He was heavy as well. Somehow she had never thought that he would be this heavy, one day when she was able she took him into the bath with her and watched as his bare toes tickled the water and he kicked. She thought he liked that but when she attempted to wash his hair with water he screamed enough to have Death Eaters at the door if it hadn't been for the protective charms surrounding the house. He didn't like to sleep that much was clear and it seemed every hour of the day Ginny was changing the nappies whose stock had been decimated by the end of the first week.
And then there was the feeding. Ginny had heard stories and read books all of which said that breastfeeding was good. The bottle theory was a muggle one and Ginny couldn't understand it and when she had mentioned it to her mother and Auntie Muriel (who was in the room at the time) both of them had looked at her as if she'd just suggested joining the Death Eaters not that any of that had mattered to James because he had latched onto her nipple easily and had taken to suckling away with minimal fuss a fact that her mother told her was a blessing.
She had taken as well just out of curiosity to bottle feeding which included a complicated procedure in which she pumped milk out. Ginny hated the thing if she was being honest with herself but she had tried it just because she hated Auntie Muriel being right about the correct method being breastfeeding.
(Of course that had been the first day. By the end of the third she couldn't feel her breasts they were that sore and even her t-shirt was killing her)
But she didn't care. She didn't care that she was aching and bleeding and exhausted and that when she looked in the mirror she saw someone that she didn't recognise. She didn't care that she couldn't even wear a bra because everything was sore. She didn't care that nobody in the family had, had any sleep for a week without having to cast charms on their door.
Ginny didn't care.
Because she was a Mummy.
Because she was James's Mummy.
For a moment the world fell away. The war fell away and though it was always on the horizon and the battle that she knew was coming was nearing Ginny didn't care—sometimes she was so blissfully happy her and her baby that she didn't care, and sometimes she wanted nothing more than to be with James. What did it matter that Voldemort was gaining strength compared to the tiny hand with it's tiny perfect fingernail grasping out and reaching hers one morning or the little smile he made when he saw her on the first weekend.
Her brothers had taken to being Uncles better than she had expected but then again nothing they did surprised her. Bill had yet to see the baby but Fleur had come one day and had cooed over James so much that Ginny had had the time to have a leisurely shower, wash her hair and make herself somewhat presentable before she got the chance to get back downstairs to see her mother and father beaming in a highly significant smug way (that told Ginny they were already planning for another grandchild) and Fleur singing James a song in French as he mercifully fell asleep.
Charlie too had yet to meet his nephew (she would not comment on Percy even to her own baby) but he sent a stuffed dragon—a Welsh Green by the looks of it and James had stared at it for a second before wrapping one small finger around the shiny tail and tapping at it with whatever interest he held. Fred and George were inseparable. Ginny joked that they went each day to get their 'five minutes fix' because that was what it was. Each of them would spend five minutes completely at the mercy of James at least twice a day. It was touching to watch and yet Ginny never did because it gave her a few moments of completely uninterrupted sleep time.
Her mother and father were doting grandparents and even Auntie Muriel never seemed to complain about him though she didn't want to hold him, and as the end of the first week turned into the end of April and the beginning of May Ginny found that she didn't even care that her heart was broken and she was missing Harry because her baby boy, her son, made it all better.
She missed Harry like an ache she couldn't get rid of. She wanted to see him so badly. To tell him about her son…about their son…so much that once or twice she had entertained the idea of just taking James in the dead of night to Bill and Fleur's cottage and moving in with him. After all one hiding place was just the same as another.
And then as soon as she thought it she knew that she couldn't entertain that thought a second longer.
Because she couldn't do that to James or Harry or herself. She couldn't make Harry choose between taking on Voldemort or taking on a family because she knew him and she knew that without a shadow of a doubt James would win. But yet she knew that he would never be restful or peaceful and that one day someone would betray them and like Harry's parents she might have to stand in front of crib with her arms outstretched and Harry dead on the floor below saying she would not stand aside for anything.
And she would not do that.
But she was restless. And she was hungry for it.
She loved James. Ginny knew that she would walk on nails for her baby with his tuft of dark hair and his brown eyes and his fingernails like little shells on his tiny little hands and feet, but a part of her was not ashamed to admit that she was struggling with the thought of sitting out the battle that she knew would come, weather it would be in a weeks time, a month, a year, or even ten years. She had known this going into her pregnancy, the reality was much harder to wrap her head around.
As much as she loved him this baby that had slowly become her everything she wanted more for him than a life constantly lived in the shadows. She wanted more for James than never having to go outside or meet friends or grow up thinking his father had abandoned him, she never wanted him to understand the sacrifice she had made for bringing him into the world or how she had laid awake most nights in fear wondering if today was the day her secret was going to be exposed.
And if that meant leaving him perhaps forever then she would do that.
She was not a mother having a baby born in peace. She was a mother in a time of war. Of a mass wizarding war. She could not afford the luxury of doing nothing and letting other people do her fighting for her. That was not the woman she had become and that was not the child she had been raised to be.
She thought about it some nights when she was holding James to her breast and felt that full feeling of her child feeding. Could she go to war and leave him?
But then again she had wondered weather or not she would take this pregnancy to term, weather or not she had to go into hiding or weather or not she would be a good mother. She liked to think she was the last one and she knew she had done the first two.
But she wanted James to grow up in a different world. Not the one she had to endure, when she had been born in a post-war world and grown up in something resembling peace and then had been a teenager in a war again. She needed her baby to have that and though the idea made her stomach turn violently and tears come to her eyes she knew that she would sacrifice herself for that because the love that she was feeling for this small little human in the red playsuit with the lion on it and the knitted yellow blanket tucked around him in his crib was more powerful than anything she had felt before.
Ginny had thought she had known everything but those two weeks of exhaustion and tears and bleeding and a crying baby had taught her much more than the entire years she had spent at Hogwarts put together. She had thought she had known love, her parents constant affection for the other, the passion that had seen Bill and Fleur walk down the aisle, the way that Tonks and Lupin had loved each other from afar, the way Hermione and Ron had taken ages to sort out something so simple and then Harry. She had never thought she could love someone other than Harry this much.
But now she held James in her arms she realised she might as well have been kidding herself.
She said nothing to her family about these thoughts but they were there. Instead she had prepared as best she could writing notes to people in case the worst should happen. There was one she wrote and she wrote that in the case of Voldemort winning, it was the worst case scenario but she thought that if it happened she had put win or lose things in place to ensure that her son was well looked after and loved.
On the first of May, Ginny woke up late and with the sense that something was going to happen—other than James's thin wailing cry and the smell that told Ginny he had pooped again. She quickly bathed him in the little baby bath she had watching as he smacked his tiny hand in the water kicking upwards with is feet and she laughed catching the foot in her hand and tugging on it feeling the flex and the pull of the muscle and the love for a living child that was healthy and vibrant and strong.
She had gotten into the habit of sleeping when James slept because that was the only time when she got sleep anymore and her eyes were drifting shut when his eyes did. She kept him on her chest like a warm little pillow and drifted and dreamed for an hour or so.
She was awoken sometime late in the afternoon by James's thin cry and she sighed.
"Again?" she asked with more amusement than she felt unhooking her bra and letting him latch on. She thought looking out at the afternoon sun that maybe today she would get changed into something other than gritty leggings that were unwashed, dirty and covered in something she really hoped was baby sick but if she was being honest she was unsure about.
She popped him down on his changing table when she was done and she changed his nappy her mind absent as she went though the motions. It seemed that no matter how much sleep she managed to gain she was always more tired waking up from a nap as she was when she went to sleep. She found a pair of jeans and winced as she put them on—it seemed she had vastly underestimated the amount of weight she had gained from having a baby—and then mercifully found a pair of clean leggings. She found a bra that would keep everything in and a purple shirt with buttons at the front that was also able to keep everything in and a dark enough purple where she would knew that if she started leaking she would get away with it until she got up to change which was a good thing because she didn't think she could stand the embarrassment that came with being caught unawares.
She picked James up and took him downstairs to where Fred and George were gathered around the radio. There was something in their expressions that Ginny didn't want to comment on so she took James to the kitchen and opened the fridge door peering inside so she could see the milk stocked neatly at the side though it was often accompanied by a snide comment by Muriel who thought keeping baby milk and formula in the fridge was unseemly.
Ginny turned and saw Fred leaning against the doorframe.
"Mum and Dad have gone to see Bill and Fleur, Harry, Ron and Hermione disappeared from Shell Cottage this morning."
Ginny sucked in a breath, James gave a little whimper and shifted a little in his blanket already tired and in need of a nap. She couldn't lie and say she had not been expecting this.
"Where is he?"
"Don't know but there reporting some kind of disturbance at Gringotts…you wanna talk about what's bothering you?"
"Fred, I haven't slept in two weeks, I am holding a child that half of the Wizarding World would want dead and there is a battle on the horizon in which I might loose my family, the man I love and my own life. Pick a topic…any topic"
Fred snorted. "Please anything is better than listening to George causally drop in hints that he would like to date Angelina when this over. I mean you go to a dance with a girl when you are fourteen and people think your in love with her forever" he shook his head. Ginny looked a him and suddenly she was reminded that the twins were only twenty years old. Already Ginny thought when she looked at them she could see their father in their faces. She didn't want to think about what she looked like. Already she felt older than she had ever felt in her life.
And then suddenly she couldn't help herself.
"If this comes to a battle, weather it's tonight, tomorrow or ten years from now I am leaving James with Muriel and going to fight. And if I die then it will be in the making of world for him where he doesn't have to live in fear and I know that Mum and Dad won't get that but…"
Fred shrugged. "Mum and Dad won't understand or like any of us fighting or dying in this war. As for George and me…we get it we do. It's the way we've been raised, we weren't raised to hide away from danger. I never thought you'd be any different really besides…Tonks, Harry's Mum and Dad, Neville's parents, we all want and wanted a better world than this. He's your baby Ginny. You have to decided. George and I wont stop you but I should warn you, if you go there's a very good chance Muriel will be left holding the baby and I'm not sure if you want to summit baby James to that trial and tribulation in his first month of life"
Ginny let out a laugh that was loud and real and the first one in months. James woke up with the loud noise and made sure that everyone knew he was annoyed at this by promptly screaming the house down for an hour and a half.
The night continued. Ginny had been on the sofa for a good portion of it rubbing her thumb over her baby's head. The news had been steadily trickling in and she found she couldn't move even as James dozed of intermittently.
Harry, Ron and Hermione had broken into Gringotts, into the Lestrange's vault and had escaped on the back of a dragon smashing it's way through the bank and most of Diagon Ally in an attempt to escape.
Had she not been listening to it on the radio she would have thought that it was a dream. Even Muriel had come down to listen her eyebrows rising steadily higher with each word. Their mother and father were not yet back at the house. There was a sense of something in the air, a great sense that if something was to happen it was going to happen tonight. The very air seemed to still and the only person who seemed completely unaware of what was going on was the precious little baby in Ginny's arms.
She couldn't put him down. Not yet.
Not until she knew.
The call came a little after eight just as the sky was turning to dusk and the darkness of another night was coming down around them. James was still asleep, he had woken and fussed and Ginny had fed him and then just for the hell of it had talked Muriel through the bottle feeding techniques she had learnt. It was a mark of how tense things had become was that Ginny was sure she was listening if only to take her mind of this endless waiting—Ginny found that she didn't care that the woman was loudly complaining that this was rubbish and that she was a hundred and seven to boot and should not be worried about baby food but Ginny thought that the old bat understood and she wondered if perhaps Auntie Muriel was a lot smarter than she was cantankerous.
Fred was rocking James when she came in and she was content for a second to leave him in his Uncle's arms. Ginny would confess to being selfish with her son and the boys rarely got a chance to hold him for this long amount of time. George wrapped an arm around her and then without warning a silver animal bounded into the room and took the form of a fox and Ginny knew what Seamus was going to say before the animal opened it's mouth.
"It's happening, we reckon tonight. Neville's took care of informing the Order but I am calling all members of Dumbledore's Army to arms…Harry Potter is at Hogwarts with Ron and Hermione. The time to fight is now. I repeat Harry Potter is at Hogwarts with Ron and Hermione"
Ginny moaned a little. Fred's grip on the baby tightened, George stood up and between her two brothers there was a grim look passed.
"So we fight" George said tightly. "And we either win or lose. Ginny if you don't want to go nobody will ever think less of you…"
"I know" Ginny said standing up and taking her baby out of Fred's arm her brother pressing his hand against his nephews head for a second. "Grab my wand will you"
It was a feeble attempt at her telling them to give her a moment with her son but they took to it.
Ginny waited until she was alone and then she lifted James up so that they were face to face and the brown eyes were staring at her.
"I have to go" she said holding him close and kissing him, whispering in his little ear. "I have to go and fight James and I might die. If I do then you will be looked after and you will be loved and I hope one day you will understand. But if I come back then I will come back with your father and he will look at you and fall in love with you just as much as I did and we will be together and we will be happy. And if we don't then I think I've given you the best chance you can. If I don't win this for you, this war then I'm sorry for that too and I've written you a letter so that you understand. But I want you to hear my voice even though you don't understand it just yet. I want to say this to you now. I want you to know James that I have loved you since the second I found out that I was expecting you and I will love you until my last breath. And it was an absolute joy to be your Mummy even if it ends today"
She kissed him on the head again and James snuffled next to her his hand already in his mouth and Ginny held him until one of her brothers knocked on the door.
Auntie Muriel was already there her shawl wrapped around her and her face a picture of emotions that Ginny had never seen on the older woman before.
Somehow Ginny found the strength to hand her baby over to her great aunt who patted her on the arm as she took him. James became enamoured Ginny could tell on her broach and not on the fact that his mother's heart was breaking right in front of him.
"If I don't come back there are letters upstairs, for Harry, for the family…if we lose…Auntie Muriel do you know a Cyrus Greengrass?"
"Aye, good man, well better than most in that family, outclasses his father without trying though I suppose if you don't have a perversion to women just out of school or powdered belladonna then your doing better than that man—"
"Auntie Muriel he has a daughter Astoria, she's a pure-blood and I reckon she's done enough to keep herself safe if he wins. She'll be the best option to hide him"
She didn't comment on what Astoria Greengrass would do, she didn't think about her relationship with Malfoy or even if the woman was still considered pure enough to live in a world where Voldemort won. She didn't want to think about that because Ginny was going to ensure that they won, for her son, for Harry, for the dead and the dying she had to ensure that Voldemort was destroyed.
And if she took out that bitch Bellatrix or the twisted little snake Dolohov then the better for her and the worst for them.
She turned away and gripped her wand and stepped into the floo behind her brothers. She didn't look at her son as George whipped the floo around and she disappeared in smoke. Instead she closed her eyes and felt the blood rise and that thrill she felt when she started fighting. And Ginny felt her heart give a jolt again when she thought that she was going to see her brother again, her best friend again, Harry again.
She didn't look back.
She couldn't look back.
She had a war to go and fight.
And there you are, i hope you enjoy. And i will see you next time for the action.
Next Chapter-Ginny returns to Hogwarts for a reunion with her brothers (both of them) her friend and Harry. The Battle for Hogwarts begins and though they dont all know it at once, the Weasley family is ripped apart to never be the same again.