A/N: Quiet Summer is giving me a headache, so while I procrastinate and do everything but work on that next chapter, I'll post this thing. Ahh, Marauders, the things you do to my heart...
Enjoy!
As always,
Mina :)
It's scary how well Sirius gets along with her child, but then, she supposes, that's because he's a little like a child himself. The thought makes her sad. She's got four grown men and a baby to feed and she doesn't want there to be a day when she won't be able to see them all grow up around her kitchen table. It surprises her, how easy and fierce motherhood is, especially when Sirius almost drops Harry and panic rises in her throat, thick and suffocating. He sits the baby upright, of course, but still. She sets the timer on the oven and sits down to give herself a moment to breathe.
"You worry too much," James says, swooping in to kiss her forehead and steal a dinner biscuit from behind her back before prancing off into the living room.
She does. She knows it. He thinks he's so smooth when he disguises the worry lines in his face as those of laughter, but she knows that he's just as scared. His best mates are out there fighting and he's stuck at home with a wife and a baby. It's not fair to compare the two, she knows that, but sometimes when Harry's asleep and Lily sneaks into the kitchen for a glass of water and sees him sitting in the living room, staring at the fire, she feels guilty. She wants to fight just as much as James does. She wants to feel useful, like they're doing something for the cause. But they have a baby now. Maybe if life weren't so fucked up on the outside they could be happy in their little house with a cat and a porch, but she's trying.
The timer goes off. There's a second of silence between the echo dying out and her chair sliding against the laminate when Sirius comes tearing into the room with her baby under his arm like a Quaffle. Harry's giggling up a storm and Sirius' grin is a mile wide, so she lets the reprimand die on her lips, focusing instead on taking dinner out of the oven and not on the urge to kill.
Remus steals into the room quietly with James fast behind. They sit at the table and discuss the Prophet and the prophecy while she busies herself at the counter, trying to tune them out. Sometimes it's too much, she thinks to herself as she pulls plates and silverware and glasses out of the cabinets and drawers that she and James painted last week. She likes this time of day, when she can be a housewife and pretend like nothing's going on outside of their little house, when she can make dinner for her family and pretend like this is what she wants to be doing for the rest of her life. She brings the plates to the table and almost sets a place for Peter before she remembers that he's been absent from dinner for quite a while. She misses his shy smile and the way he'd always say "please" and "thanks, Lily." Now it's left to Remus to show her boys how to be polite and she guesses that'll have to do for now.
Sirius looks up at her pleadingly as she ties a bib around Harry's neck, so she summons one from the laundry room and ties one around his neck, too. It says I'm a big boy! and a pouting Harry flings a handful of applesauce at him as if he's jealous. The table breaks into laughter. Lily's heart swells.
"Oh, don't frown, Mini Prongs," Sirius says, because he hates more than anything to be the cause of his godson's unhappiness. He pauses for a moment, then brings his face close to Harry's and blows an absurdly large spit bubble. Harry claps in glee; James hoots and thumps Sirius on the shoulder, acutely aware that his wife is standing right behind him, glaring, but the look on his kid's face is so worth it; and Remus just shakes his head, because he knows full well that there's nothing he or Lily can do. His best friends are still eleven years old and Lily's well into middle age. She should know better.
Still, she's revolted when the spit bubble pops all over her son's face. "You are such a pig," she declares to Sirius, swatting her husband on the back of the head and wiping the – ugh – saliva off of Harry's forehead. She's kind of peeved, but Harry's smiling that gummy grin and even Remus is laughing in that quiet way he has, and they're eating the dinner she made like it's a feast from Hogwarts, so she stands back and watches and thinks, We'll be okay.