Disclaimer; Nothing in this fic belongs to me, They belong to J.K Rowling. Only Jessica belongs to me, partly.
A/N; And once again I find myself updating in the middle of the night... So please review and tell me what you think, you should know that I love it, especially constructive criticisms.
Chapter Nine; Coming Home
When Jessica came down to the Great Hall for dinner, Harry, Ron and Hermione were all looking at her funnily.
"What's wrong?" She asked them and sat down.
"Nothing, it's just..." Harry said, but seemed lost for words.
"Your hair..." Ron continued Harry's sentence.
"It's short." Harry ended.
"Yes," She said and started taking food onto her plate. "That's what happens when you cut it."
"I think you look nice." Hermione said.
"Thank you." Jessica smiled and started eating.
Ever since she was a child had her hair been long, and had told James once that she'd rather die than cut her hair to shoulder-length, he'd just laughed and said that one day she'll break. Ironically enough, that was the same thing that he had said about Lily, but since he weren't here to say; "I told you so" and laugh at her, she had taken the opportunity. The hair was now in the length of between her shoulders and chin. At least she thought that she looked better with short hair.
"What have you been doing today, anything interesting?" Jessica asked.
"Not so much, we visited Hagrid, talked." Harry said. "It seems that Buckbeak escaped last night..." He continued and gave her a meaningful look.
"But how...?" Jessica said, but then understood Harry's meaningful look. "Oh... I get it." She whispered the last part so no one would over hear.
Harry smiled as well; he had noticed earlier the day how weird Jessica had acted, he was happy to see that she was feeling better. "What have you done this afternoon?"
"Helped Remus pack his stuff, cut my hair, painting." Jessica explained with a tint of lie and a lot of not mentioning some things, like her pregnancy for instance.
"I'm really starting to believe that whole crap about that there's a jinx over that post." Ron suddenly said.
"What jinx?" Jessica asked confused, she had never heard that there was a jinx over that job.
"It's just a lot of make believe over the fact that this school can't keep a Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher for longer than two years over the past twenty years." Hermione said.
"Fifteen..." Jessica corrected.
"No, twenty... Hogwarts; a History said twenty." Hermione corrected again.
Both Ron and Harry started to lean away, afraid to be caught in the middle; this did not look like it could have a happy ending.
"No, then must the book be wrong, because this year have it been fifteen years since Professor Bingley retired, and he worked on the post for over twenty years." Jessica said to Hermione.
"But..." Hermione started to feel unsure on her facts. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm pretty sure on that, unless you want to call Remus for a liar." Jessica said and started to fill up her empty plate, she felt so hungry; maybe it had something to do with the fact that she hadn't eating anything all day.
"Oh, I need to check that up." Hermione pushed away her half empty plate and stood up, and before anyone else could say anything else in protest, she had disappeared out of the great hall, not so unlike the way that Jessica had left at lunch.
There was a long silence after Hermione had left. But Jessica was the one to break it.
"You would have loved to have Professor Bingley; he was such a wonderful teacher." Jessica said. "Whenever a heated discussion started in the class, which it so often happened, he'd just lean back and let it continue. It was often me and Lily who started to discuss, it happened most often in fifth year when we had a period of philosophy, it was actually hard to believe that we could have two such different opinions. It was most often the two of us, but sometimes would someone else in out class chip in and say something to support either of us."
"You and Harry's mum argued a lot?" Ron asked.
"Oh yes..." Jessica laughed thinking back at that. "She has such a fiery personality, and I'm the kind of person who stands its ground, I got that from dad. We are also from two complete different worlds; she's a muggle-born, I'm a pure blood, she's from a family of working-class, I'm from an upper-class family. So the way we grew up was different and what we had learned and experienced from our parents was also different."
"So you are disappointed that your brother married the one person you hate?" Ron continued asking, his mouth half-full of food. He was still eating, Harry didn't, he just sat and listened.
"No...!" Jessica said chocked and looked at Ron, her plate was still half-full, but she had lost her appetite for just this food.
"It's... I..." She didn't quite know how to express herself. "When James for the first time asked Lily out in fifth year, I knew that he only did it to piss me off. She also knew this and said no, but he continued to ask her out, and she constantly found new ways to let him know that she weren't interested.
"But later in mid-sixth year I noticed that he didn't ask her out anymore because he wanted to piss me off, he did it because he really liked her, because he was falling in love with her. I think I was the first one to realize it, I love my brother, but sometimes he just can't see what's directly in front of him. It was then I started to wonder what the hell it was that he liked so much about her, so I tried to look at her from his point of view and after that I couldn't really not like her; there was a certain charm about her."
Jessica smiled at these memories, it was easy to talk about them because they were so near but still far away, like they were something she had read about in a book or had made up in her mind.
"I'm done." Ron said and pushed away his now empty plate.
"Finally, I thought that you were never going to stop eating." Harry said with a chuckle.
"C'mon, let's get out of here." Jessica said and stood up. "I want to hear what you and Hermione did last night."
"You better tell her," Ron said to Harry, "I'm not sure I'm up to hearing it again, I'll be in the common room." And so he darted off up the stairs.
"Let's get away from the crowds." Harry said and as soon as they had got a far bit away from the great hall, he started to tell her about his and Hermione's trip with the Time Turner.
It was easy to tell that Jessica was very impressed with the patronus, just like Remus had been. Harry couldn't quite understand why they were so impressed, they made it sound like it was something impossible to do, but Harry hadn't found it to be hard, he found it rather easy, well, it was easy because he already knew that he could do it.
"Wow," Jessica said with a smile, when Harry was done with the story they were still walking around inside the castle. "So what form did you patronus take?"
"A stag." Harry said. "Professor Lupin said that that's what my dad was as an animagus. Is it really true?"
"Yeah, James was a stag." Jessica smiled slightly. "That's how he got his name Prongs."
"Why aren't you mentioned in the marauders map?" Harry asked. "You have told me that you helped them create it."
"I'm not a marauder; I'm not one of them. But since James and I didn't really keep any secrets from each other, I gave him some help. And when they told me that they were planning on turning into animagi, I told them that I wanted in on it as well, thought that it would be cool."
"But you never supported what they did as animagi." Harry remembered.
"No." Jessica's smile faltered. "To be honest, I was worried to death sometimes that they would get caught or that someone would get hurt or worse, get killed."
"What kind of animal are you? Are you also a stag, or a doe, something in that category?"
Jessica actually laughed at this. "No." She shook her head. "That is where most people make the mistake, they assume that twins share souls, but our souls are just connected, like with an invisible rope. Twins like, Ron's twin brothers..." She could not remember their names.
"Fred and George."
"Fred and George, they are practically the same person, so it would be more likely that the two of them had similar patronus, but not necessarily the same. James and I grew apart, at least a bit, when we came to Hogwarts. We had two different groups of friends, grew into two directions simply."
"How is it with soul mates, true love you know?" Harry asked, he sounded really interested in this subject.
"They have similar patronus, I think." Jessica answered. "Your mum had a doe... as an example."
"She did?" Harry asked, amused by the fact.
"Well, she weren't the only one." Jessica muttered incoherent deep in her own thoughts.
"What?" Harry asked, not having heard Jessica.
"Nothing. I just..." She bit her lip and actually considered that she could tell Harry, but then she looked over at him, she remembered that he was just a kid, he weren't ready for this.
"What kind of animal are you?" Harry repeated the question he never got an answer to.
"A white-coated German shepherd." Jessica answered after a moment.
"A dog?"
"So what, that doesn't mean anything." She answered offensive.
"Sorry..." Harry said; he didn't realize what he had done wrong.
"Harry..." Jessica said and stopped walking. "I didn't mean to snap at you, I'm just... my head hurts."
Harry didn't respond.
"I'm sorry." Jessica said. "Harry, please say something."
"You don't need to apologize, I shouldn't be so snoopy." The look on his face gave Jessica the impression that he thought that it really was his fault.
"Don't." Jessica snapped at him. "It's not your fault, look at me." Harry looked up at her. "You are supposed to know these things; you shouldn't have grown up like that. You should have grown up with your parents and your grandparents, not like this, not like you did."
"The world isn't a perfect place," Harry muttered.
"Sure it's not, but do you know that it hurts inside of me when I think about the way you grew up. I don't exactly know, but I can tell that your childhood weren't happy, I can see the pain that you are trying to hide from everyone, but you can't hide it from me, and it hurts... That's one feeling I know for sure."
Harry opened his mouth to apologize again, but Jessica interrupted him. "Don't apologize." She said sternly. "I don't want you to apologize for something as stupid as that again, you hear me?"
Harry nodded. After a while he spoke: "How can you see it in me?"
Jessica smiled slightly as the question. "You are like James, not only to the looks, but in the way you are as well. I grew up with James and learned how to read him, on his body language that is. I find it interesting that you were so much like him in that way, and in some other ways are you like Lily. Like when you are lying," She let out a small laugh. "Every time she lied, her lower lip twitched, just a tiny bit, but enough to notice if you knew what to look after."
"I do that?" Harry asked, never have realized that before.
"Oh yeah, and to think about it, McGonagall knew that about Lily." Jessica now was smiling widely. "Wonder if she noticed that you do that as well." She laughed after saying this.
Harry also laughed at this fact, and then he started panic slightly. When he thought about it, he had noticed that Professor McGonagall was looking at him extra carefully when she asked him something he might lie about.
"It's late; we should start to head back to the common room." Jessica said and they started to head back.
"You told me earlier... that," Harry looked unsure whether he should ask her this or not. "You and my dad didn't have any secrets from each other, but still you didn't tell him that you dated his best friend."
Jessica looked at Harry chocked, how did he know about this? "Harry, how did you know that...?"
"I... over heard some teachers talking." He admitted.
Jessica smiled at this, Harry so reminded about James when he said what he had done. "I actually told James about me and Sirius."
"Oh..." Harry said. "I didn't know that."
"That was what James and I discussed when we were out walking on that Christmas day." Jessica told him. "Sirius and I had already, dated," She felt a little weird to use that word, because they weren't actually dating. "For a few months when I told James about us, to my surprise he took it very well. He just told me that I shouldn't let Sirius push me, to not let him push me into doing something stupid before I was ready." She said the word stupid with a small sad smile, thinking that it was already too late for that.
Harry nodded. "Speaking about secrets... yesterday, you mentioned something about Snape and somebody. That you were going to tell me, what was that all about?"
"I could tell you, but..." Jessica hesitated; she really didn't think that Harry could handle the truth. "It's a truth that isn't meant for your ears, Harry. Honestly, I'm not sure that you can handle it."
"Okay." Harry said, but he sounded disappointed by the answer.
"You will find out sooner or later, I promise." Jessica said to him and now had they reached the portrait of the fat lady. They told her the password and entered the Gryffindor common room and found Hermione and Ron waiting for them.
XXX
The rest of the term passed on rather quickly and quietly, few of the students seemed unhappy by the fact that Professor Lupin weren't going to come back next year, some others thought that it was cool to have a werewolf as a teacher, others were freaked out and wondered how Dumbledore could let a man like him teach at the school, and were now happy that he was gone.
Only two days after Jessica had sent her response to Greg Watson, he responded with a place and time at a restaurant in London, all Jessica now had to do was to show up.
As the day of the departure came closer, Jessica still hadn't told Harry about her pregnancy, she blamed it on that she hadn't had so many opportunities to be alone with him so that she could tell him, but truth was that she didn't know how to tell Harry, every time she went over it her mind she saw it impossible to.
She had also received pre-natal vitamins from Madam Pomfrey, when she told Jessica that it was for her Pregnancy, Jessica's head snapped up. It felt so weird to hear somebody else tell her that she was pregnant. To hear somebody else tell her that made Jessica feel like it wasn't just something that she had made up in her head.
So now had the day of parting come, like decided were Jessica set to apparate from Hogsmeade to London and meet up with Greg Watson about thirty minutes after arriving. She had dressed up for the occasion in a rather cute looking dark-green summer dress, thinking that that would be better than cut-off-jeans and a tee.
She had told Harry and the others that she wouldn't be going with them on the train, but she would be going down to the train station, so while they were at the train station Jessica said goodbye to Harry, Ron and Hermione (who hadn't mentioned the argument she and Jessica had a while ago). She told Harry that she'd see him in two weeks and to save his energy for all the fun things she had planned out for the two of them to do.
Once Jessica had landed in London she didn't quite exactly know what to do with the time that was left to her. There was quite a big area of London where both different restaurants and shops laid; the owners of the shops both took Wizarding money and muggle money, because honestly... not all shops could fit into little Diagon Alley.
The restaurant where Jessica was to meet Greg Watson was in this area. Jessica thought that she could spend some time look up on things that have happened during these past 17 years, she had missed the entire 1980's, a lot of things must have happened during then, both fasionly and worldly. For all she knew could a nuclear bomb have happened in Australia and the entire country had sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
There was one certain shop that caught her attention more than the rest. The name on the shop was "Baby Boom", it was a baby clothing and accessories store. Before Jessica had any chance to control where her feet were heading, she had already opened the door and entered.
Seeing all the baby things made Jessica feel all gooey inside, they were so cute, and small, and adorable. She had never felt that way about seeing baby stuff; she had just never been the type. She reckoned that it must be the fact that she was pregnant that she felt this way.
For several minutes she walked slowly around the store, just looking at all the small things, before somebody broke her out of her trace.
"Can I help you?" The female shop clerk asked Jessica, who became slightly startled by the voice, she hadn't seen the clerk approached.
"Oh." Jessica said, trying to find an appropriate excuse. "I... um, a Friend of mine is, um... having and, Um... I was, she's... Present." Jessica stumbled over the words, not so sure what to say. "I'm looking for a present... For her I mean." That was truly Jessica's biggest weakness, she had trouble finding the words for a lie when confronted, but otherwise she was very good at lying.
But the shop clerk didn't seem so much bothered with Jessica's stuttering, because she continued smiling and asked. "Anything particular in mind?"
"Um... No." Jessica said. "I'll just keep looking around."
"Alright then, just tell me if you change your mind." The shop clerk still smiled and walked away from the scene.
So now Jessica felt slightly forced to buy something, maybe it was something that the shop clerk meant for when she talked to Jessica, to force her to feel obligated to buy something.
Jessica walked over to the book part of the store, thinking that she might as well buy a book. As far as she knew didn't they have any books about pregnancies at home, about small children and babies she knew that they had, but not pregnancies. She looked at the price and decided that she might as well also buy one of those soft and huggable teddy bears she had seen in the front of the store.
Looking at the clock she noticed that she was in a strict time limit, she only had five minutes before she had to be at the restaurant. She hurried to the cashier to pay the things she wanted to buy.
"You want me to gift wrap it?" The woman behind the cash-register asked.
"What?" Jessica looked at her.
"For your friend." The woman continued and it was now Jessica saw that it was the same woman as the one who had asked Jessica if she wanted help.
"Just the book." Jessica answered.
Once Jessica was out of the store, she couldn't help but feel a little stupid for what happened in the shop. The woman working in there must have thought that Jessica were an idiot for the way she acted. But to be honest hadn't Jessica been in a shop for the past seventeen years.
The chosen restaurant was a small and cosy looking French restaurant. Jessica wondered slightly if her dress was right for this kind of place, maybe it was too much summer in it. But Jessica didn't bother with that so much once she stepped into the restaurant. She handed over her bag and jacket to the female in the coat room and walked on to the very French looking man by the thing with the book.
"Hi, I'm meeting with a Greg Watson." She said to him. And at the moment she hoped to Merlin that the man would actually know what she was talking about and she wouldn't once again manage to make a very terrible first impression, she was good at that.
"Just follow me please." The man said in a French accent and guided Jessica down into the main restaurant area.
He led her down toward a table in the centre of the dining room and by it was already a man sitting.
Greg Watson didn't look like the man Jessica could remember, he had... aged, in a lack of better words. Greg Watson stood up and held his hand out to Jessica with a smile as they greeted and sat down.
"It's been a long time, you look... the same." Mr Watson said as the two of them had sat down and received a menu.
Jessica also smiled. "And you're older..." She joked.
"Yes, well, not everybody end up in a freezed state." He answered. "How have this past month and a half been for you? Must have been hard thinking about... everything."
"I just take one day at the time." Jessica answered. "How have you been during these seventeen years? Didn't you have a daughter who was about three years old the last time we met?"
"Yes, Little Gabrielle. She's all grown up now... She's working on a fashion magazine in New York city." Mr Watson answered. "Otherwise not so much has happened, mostly been working."
Jessica nodded; she didn't come up with so much else to have small talk about. She was starting to feel hungry, and talking about that, the waiter showed up to take their orders.
The small talking continued over the time they waited for the food to show up, it was mostly Mr Watson who did the talking, and it wasn't until the food came that Mr Watson started on the reason for why they were there.
"Maybe you have already figured out the reason for this meeting." Mr Watson said.
"Yeah, I have a tad idea." Jessica answered.
"After your mother died, your brother and you inherited pretty much everything." Mr Watson told her. "Your half of the money was to be put in a new vault in Gringotts and put it up in your name so that you had access to it. But later, just a few weeks before Harry was to turn a year old, he came to me and said that on the day that Harry would turn seventeen, that money would be put in his vault, in case that something happened to him or if you never woke up. In the way he spoke it sounded as if he was sure that he was going to die young, I guess that he was right about that."
There was a short silence before he spoke again. "And as it goes for the estates, you probably know that they are entailed to the oldest living son."
Jessica nodded to show that she understood.
"This means that they went to James, and now, they will be in the name of young Harry Potter once he turns seventeen." Mr Watson continued.
"That I also know," Jessica said. "But Harry doesn't seem to know that..."
"No, he probably doesn't." Mr Watson answered. "But anyways, since Harry is an underage wizard yet, the estates are in the care of your hands until the day he turns seventeen."
Jessica nodded. At least she knew that she had someplace to live at without there would be any complications with legalities and such.
"And I'm sure that you can work something out with Harry about living arrangements before this child arrives." Mr Watson continued.
Jessica looked up at the elder man, what had he just said? How could he possible know? Or maybe he meant something else. But what other child could he have meant?
"Oh, don't look so surprised," Mr Watson said with a slight smile on his lips. "I'm the family attorney; it's my job to know these things. And more importantly, it's my job to make sure that... unless you approve of it, nobody else have to know about your pregnancy."
Jessica felt a relief when he said that, suddenly it made things a lot better and easier.
"I actually know because Headmaster Dumbledore contacted me," Mr Watson continued. "To discuss some legal matters for you and the child."
"Speaking of that." Jessica interrupted; there was actually a question that she wanted to ask him. "On birth certificate, there is a spot where you write in the father's name, and I was wondering if there was any way of skipping that, not to write in the father's name I mean?"
Mr Watson took a moment to think about it. "There is no law that says that you have to write in the father's name. It happens at occasions that some women don't write in the father's name." He answered. "And in your case, if the father is who I have a suspicion it is, it would be in both yours and the child's best interest if you didn't say who the father is, at least that's my opinion."
Jessica nodded at this. She had also thought that it was better if she didn't write up that Sirius was the father, she might know that he was innocent, but not everybody did. And not everybody might know that Jessica became pregnant before her coma.
The rest of the evening they talked about what had happened in the world during the late seventies and whole eighties. Mr Watson filled Jessica up with feminism, which had taken a rather big rise in the wizarding world during the eighties.
Jessica felt a slight disappointment that she had missed the rise of feminism, she had always been a feminist, and just to prove that women can do just as well as men, she had then decided to become a female Auror, the first in the history of the wizarding world. She had been joined up by Alice, and the two of them was going to change the world. Jessica was happy that even after she had ended up in her coma, Alice had still continued with the plan and proved the point.
At the end of the evening, before they parted, Mr Watson gave Jessica a envelope containing some papers for her to sign, it was so that she could get access to the Gringotts vault her money had been put into, also a few about that she would be the temporarily caretaker of the estates, until Harry had turned seventeen. She had also received keys to the estate, since he had figured that she probably didn't have any.
Mr Watson also told Jessica that she could drop by with the papers in the beginning of the next week. And with Jessica promising that, they parted. The sky was already darkening outside when Jessica apparated home.
The home where she and James had grown up, where her father himself had grown up was up north over London, it took about four hours with car to London from there. The area was habituated only by wizarding families, wealthy wizarding families who had several generations going backwards.
The house itself couldn't actually be described as a house; it was a mansion, a big mansion with several rooms and a large back yard by the forest. In the family estate three different places was included, a town house in London, this mansion and a small lake house, meant mostly for vacations, in Wales.
Jessica looked up the place and took a deep breath. "Welcome home Jessica." She muttered to herself before walking through the wrought-iron gate and down the cobbled path toward the great wooden doors of the Potter mansion.
A/N; School started this week and that means that I won't have time to write and update as much as before, Sorry about that.
My reflection about the magic concerning Patronuses and Animagi might not be so fully accurate with the one J.K Rowling have, but you are just going to have to live with that. And with the whole Hermione and Jessica thing... don't you just love to prove her wrong and make her question her books? I know that I do, and that means that such a thing will happen again.
Goodnight and hope you have had a happy reading time.
review!!