19. New
Tiny, pink socks. That's what hit home with him. He was doing laundry three weeks after his daughter was born and in the middle of the normal boxer shorts and tank tops, he encountered a pair of pink socks, barely big enough to cover his thumb with a tiny frill on the opening.
Isabelle Potter was staying. For the next eleven years. He'd see her every day, he'd be washing her socks for the next seventeen years – at least. It would never be just Harry and Ginny again. It would be Harry and Ginny and Isabelle and whoever else came along.
Harry had no clue what fathers even did, especially with daughters. He didn't even understand why the socks had a frill, what did something with the approximate personality of an incredibly drowsy kitten need with a frill, or, for that fact, socks? It certainly wasn't as if she was going anywhere, and she certainly didn't need the tiny little rubber grips on the bottom.
Harry was only good at some of the things Ginny seemed to know how to do – he didn't see the point in cooing nonsense at the baby, and preferred to speak to her in the King's English, Isabelle seemed to like that, or as much as a child of three weeks likes anything. He could calm her, pacing up and down the short hall between the master bedroom and her nursery endlessly during the night, until she finally, finally fell asleep in his arms with a delighted little yawn. He could bottle-feed her when Ginny went out, and he was absolutely excellent with all the little contraptions that had suddenly popped up around the house to leave the baby in. He had pointed out, quite sensibly he thought, that they could simply leave her in the middle of the dining room table and so long as they didn't put anything on her, she wouldn't give a damn. Molly had thought this was utter blasphemy, and had told him so in no uncertain terms.
He couldn't, for the life of him, change a diaper without magic, which Ginny did without blinking. He had no clue why his bald daughter required quite the number of headbands her uncles had presented her with, and no idea how to pick out an outfit for her. He didn't quite understand why Ginny's huge family insisted on passing the baby around like a Quaffle when she was perfectly content to sit in her bassinet and stare, unfocused, at the ceiling.
Most of the time, Harry went around feeling as if he didn't get it, and it took a tiny, pink frilled sock to make him understand that he could eventually understand this person. After all, Isabelle's tiny world might be completely alien to him, but the look in her slowly greening eyes when she was woken up in the middle of the night was eerily familiar, and the shape of her hands reminded him of something he couldn't quite grasp. A shape he barely remembered, but that was so bloody familiar at the same time.
Isabelle would stay, he knew. And she'd wear stupid socks, and pointless headbands, and she'd wail and wail at night until he thought that all Voldemort should really have done was presented him with a colicky baby and ran off giggling. But he'd tell her about his day in proper English, and she'd look back up at him with huge eyes that looked like they understood every word, and someday she'd speak back, and she'd play Quidditch with him, and fight with Ginny.
Harry decided, once and for all, that he really wouldn't mind washing stupid frilly socks for the next seventeen years.