"This is what Dumbledore sends his defender! A songbird and an old hat! Do you feel brave, Harry Potter? Do you feel safe now?"
-Chapter 17, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
A baby, Harry realized, is impossibly small. The toes like fairy eggs, the nose with its openings almost too narrow to breathe through, the whole of James' body so light in his shaking hands.
The heart. Fuck, the heart. He imagined it thrumming within its ribcage, no bigger than a Snitch, and it baffled him how much his seemed to grow so very quickly.
Ginny spoke from the bed beside him, content and exhausted, the sweat thick on her face and floral in his nose. "He's perfect."
Harry responded without hesitation. "You're perfect." She smiled faintly.
"He's…small." Ginny frowned, weakly raising an eyebrow.
"Not in a bad way! He's…God, Gin, he's the world, and…I love him. I love you. We…we made this, didn't we? You and I. We made this."
"That's how it works, Harry. I'm going to sleep." Ginny, he knew, was not really one for eloquent declarations, but the soft look that she gave the both of them as she slid down to the pillow told him more than enough. He bent his lips to hers and they held there for a moment before her eyes closed.
Harry managed, distracted by too many visitors and too little rest, to stay quiet about it for the next three days, but there was something about giving James his first bath that made things impossible to keep to himself.
"Merlin, Gin. He's so vulnerable. What if…." It felt too dangerous to say the rest aloud. He turned away from her on the sofa, hoping against hope that she hadn't heard him.
"What if what?"
"What if we, what if I, can't do this? What if I can't keep him safe? What if I can't do right by him? I mean…I know, we've talked. I know, I've thought about it all. But he's here, now, really here, and what if…"
She cut him off. "Harry."
"I'm sorry." He looked away from her again and down, sliding the fingers of one hand along the wrist of the other.
The kindness in her voice surprised him. "That's not what I mean."
She said his name again, shoulders turned to mirror his shoulders, one hand lifted to still his restive movements.
"Think of what you've done already."
He wasn't sure he understood. "I…painted the nursery?"
Her smile made crinkles at the edges of her eyes. "Look…imagine yourself, eleven years old, coming to Hogwarts, that first night. And someone tells you you'll have to do all the things you end up doing. Could you do them?"
He shuddered. "I'd jump in the lake and swim back to the platform."
The look she gave him then was half amused and half serious. "Would you really?"
"No. But I see what you're saying. Would…would you jump? Would you swim away?"
She seemed to consider it carefully before choosing her response. "I'd want to. But I wouldn't. It wouldn't get us here."
He thought of Ginny in her first year, eating supper ninety times with a monster in her head. How afraid he had been after Mr Weasley was attacked, how certain he was that Tom had possessed him—and then her calm words in Buckbeak's room, handing the whole of him back to himself. I'm not the weapon after all. That's not how it works. She'd know. He thought of himself crouched over Dumbledore's broken body, rebuffing the voices of the people who swarmed, concerned, around him, yielding at last to her gentle, insistent hand. Remembered the moment of his death with her image in his mind.
She was warm and real beside him when he pulled himself away from the forest, her steady breathing guiding his own. As it had so many times, with and without her conscious awareness of what she did for him, a small beam of light that he followed through his mazes. If she could give that to him…if she was right when she said that he gave that to her…how could either of them not give a child those gifts?
James would have all of it and none of it, he decided in that instant, with a fire crackling in the hearth and their tea getting cold. He would have every protection his parents' love could give him, every possible bit of that strongest, surest magic. And he would face fewer enemies. His Boggarts would be uncomplicated, the dark he feared benign. Adults would stand in his corner, fighting alongside him, but alive.
It would be terrifying. It would be beautiful. Harry could never see himself as ready, but gratitude suffused him as he considered how much they had accomplished, how blessed he had become. The confidence blooming quietly within his very center was not in just himself, alone. Harry smiled as he realized it would never have to be.
While that understanding grew inside him, Ginny looked at her husband—regarding him fully and considering the years. The hero from her books, impossibly in the Burrow's kitchen, shrinking from her mother's touch but still flashing her a grin. The child she woke up beside on the slick chamber floor, blood on his robes and a gash in a diary. The boy who steadied her wand hand in the Room of Requirement. Not now, he had breathed, when his sleeve shifted by accident and her eyes lit on the words that had been carved into his wrist. You've almost got your Patronus. Just a little higher up. The wizard who, red spots on his cheek and faint hairs ghosting his upper lip, faced Bellatrix with a glass ball in his hands at the Department of Mysteries, threatening to end her if Ginny got hurt. The Seeker who stood in the common room while his friends held a silver Quidditch Cup, meeting Ginny's determined look with heat in his own eyes.
The man who went off to war with Hermione's beaded bag.
Everything else seemed to move backwards and away from her as she reached for his hand, threading her fingers through his as butter-soft light played on both of their rings. "We can do this. You can do this. We'll do this together."
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