Close Your Eyes, Your Daddy's Here (You Are My Heaven)

17 July, 2001

A hand connects sharply with the side of Harry's face, jerking him awake. He rolls over in bed with a groan and presses his forehead into Draco's shoulder blade, his eyes closed. He takes a few deep breaths, trying to stop himself from falling back asleep.

"Why did you just slap me?" he mutters finally, his hand moving up Draco's back slowly.

Draco grunts into the pillow. "The baby…'s your turn," he says, half-asleep.

Harry grumbles something incoherent, moving to bury his face in the crook of Draco's neck, arm slipping up over his back and around his waist. He doesn't want to get up just yet. Everything is so warm and comfortable here. Maybe if he can just…

"No," Draco says as their legs tangle at the bottom of the bed.

Harry hums into the side of his neck, a sleepy smile spreading across his face. "What?" he asks, feigning innocence.

"I know you, Potter," Draco tells him, and Harry can almost hear his eyes rolling. "You're going to cozy up to me until I offer to go instead."

Harry laughs quietly as he runs his hand slowly down to hook his fingertips under the hem of Draco's pants. "I wouldn't do something like that."

"Of course you wouldn't," Draco says sarcastically. "You forget who you're talking to. I invented this game."

"Fine," Harry huffs, biting down once on Draco's collarbone before pulling back and rolling over. "I'm going."

He drags himself out of bed, still only semiconscious, and runs a weary hand through his hair. Rubbing his face exhaustedly, he begins to shuffle toward the bedroom door, glasses dangling limply from his left hand. He shoves them on his face as he goes, blinking a few times to adjust his eyes. Dim moonlight is streaming in through the windows, just barely casting a silver glow on everything, and he has to fumble a bit before he finds the latch. After a year of living in this house, he's mostly gotten used to all its odd creaks and groans, and he's pretty much figured out where things are, but just now, when he's exhausted tired at three in the morning, on his way to tend to a screaming baby, he's not quite on the top of his game.

Now that he's out in the corridor, though, he's not quite sure how he managed to sleep over the noise. He pads the familiar stretch of hall quickly and creaks open the door as quietly as possible. He needn't have tried to keep it down, though. The little boy is lying in his cot, screaming as if there's no tomorrow. Harry screws his face up against the noise as he crosses the room and lifts the baby into his arms.

"Shh, it's alright," he coos, holding him close to his chest, a hand on the back of his head as he bounces around a bit. "It's okay. Daddy's here."

He keeps shushing the boy, pacing circles around the room with him until his crying finally slows down a bit. The baby buries his face in Harry's shoulder, still sniffling, and Harry carries him across the room to sink down into the rocking chair in the corner.

"You've got a nice set of lungs on you, James," he mumbles softly as he moves to cradle the baby in his lap, pulling the blanket from his shoulder to wrap it tightly around him.

He stares down at James with a small smile on his face, rocking the chair back and forth slowly. Despite his rather superhuman ability to make himself heard in every corner of the house, the little boy is flawless. With his smooth dark hair that's just beginning to come in, his crystal blue eyes, and his vaguely Malfoy-shaped nose, there's no denying that he's a perfect mix between the two of them. Harry remembers when they first found out about the new potion that had come onto the market.

It allowed children to be grown at St Mungo's, closely monitored by Healers, and through samples taken from both he and Draco, James was entirely their son. It had been expensive, of course…shockingly so, as a matter of fact, but it had been worth every Galleon. Draco had been skeptical at first, wrinkling his nose and saying that the whole thing sounded a bit too clinical, but Harry had firmly reminded him that he'd never wanted anything more than he'd wanted a family, and that had been that.

Despite Draco's initial reservations, the first time they had held James, the first time they'd seen him…it had felt like coming home. Teddy had been curious and a bit suspicious of the new addition to their family, and he had stared, wide eyed, at the baby for the first few weeks, a little too afraid to speak to it. After a while, of course, he'd warmed up to his new cousin, and Harry still gets a warm feeling in his heart when he watches Teddy playing quietly with the baby.

He lets his head fall back as he continues to rock James, his eyes drifting shut. He hums softly to himself, just a quiet, tuneless little lullaby, and listens to the baby gurgling sleepily. In spite of the rather uncomfortable chair and the cold floor beneath his feet, Harry feels himself start to float off back to sleep.

He wakes several hours later to James kicking and screaming in his lap again. This time, sun is just beginning to stream through the windows, peeking over the mountains in the distance, and Harry blinks roughly as he stands with the baby, balancing him in one arm and running a hand through his flyaway hair. His mouth feels like it's been stuffed with cotton all night and there's an odd sort of burning fatigue building in his eye, as though he hadn't slept at all.

"You're going to be the death of me, you know that?" he asks James as he crosses the room toward the door, trying to shush him as he goes. "I know you're hungry, but you don't need to wake up the entire family. I'm working on it."

He pulls the door open and hurries down the corridor, trying to get through without waking Draco. On the second floor landing, he pauses briefly, listening for any sounds that might be coming from Teddy's room. He hears a small crash and sighs to himself as he continues on his way. Teddy will be rushing headlong down the stairs soon enough, but he's old enough now that he can handle a bit of time on his own in the mornings. Right now, Harry's first priority is making it to the kitchen so he can get James to calm down.

He walks through the double doors into the yellow-walled, sun-soaked kitchen, brushing past the windows and shifting James to balance him on his hip. He fumbles for the container of baby formula on the counter and shakes a bit into a bottle, adding water and warming it with a clumsy flick of his wand.

Harry lays the little boy down in the pop-up cradle that they have set up in the corner and holds the bottle down to him, waiting for him to grab onto it. James takes hold of it eagerly, both his feet coming up to hold on as well, and Harry can't help laughing to himself as he watches his son scramble for the bottle. He's not crawling yet, but he's got plenty of strength in his arms and legs and he's begun rolling onto his stomach whenever given the chance. Harry can already tell that he'll be a bit of a handful once he's fully mobile, what with his seemingly never-ending energy.

Harry shakes his head, a smile still on his face, and starts going through the motions of making breakfast. As he's putting the kettle on, he hears a noise behind him and turns to find Draco standing in the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

"Did you ever come back to bed?" Draco asks him, confused.

"No," Harry shakes his head and turning back to the stove as Draco moves closer to him, "I fell asleep in the chair again."

He feels a pair of arms snaking around his waist from behind and he smiles, pressing back as Draco rests his chin on his shoulder. They stay like that for a moment, staring out over the back garden, watching the sun come up through the window, and Harry feels completely at home. James gurgling happy in the background, Draco warm and solid against him, and Teddy crashing down the stairs with an excited smile on his face, dancing around the kitchen in his pyjamas. Harry squeezes Draco's hand once, and Draco nods against his shoulder, understanding. This is how life is meant to be lived.

A/N: See? I did it! Biological parents without MPreg! :) Sorry if you like MPreg…just not my thing. I'm too much of a geeky science student to accept that it could exist, even with magic. In my original outline for this chapter, it was supposed to be about James's birth, but that got to be too technical. And once I cut out all the technical bits, it was about 600 words long. Lol So I chucked it all in the bin and started over. I hope you liked it! Please Review! :)