In the days that follow Erin's return, everyone struggles to find a schedule to follow. No one keeps the same hours, the same rhythms; it's all that someone's on their way to testify as someone else comes back from making funeral arrangements as someone else is just getting dressed for the day as someone else is going to bed. There's no keeping track of anyone except for the pictured clock on the wall, just the hope of finding time to catch up.
Erin, excluded by her own accord from the narrative of rebuilding in the wake of war, finds her own routine, a series of nouns that even in their single syllables are almost too much: shower. Garden. Library. Wards. Dinner. Bed. Whatever else goes on, those are the things that she sticks with, even on days that she can barely bring herself to wake.
(Sometimes, she thinks to herself that without all of the severity of war, there's hardly a point anymore. The consequences are not as dire as she's spent the last few years living with. They never will be again.)
Draco, pardoned by the Order for his coerced cooperation, is as always her shadow, a ghost in both demeanor and pallor. He's still wary to be in this place, surrounded by people he so long considered to be enemies. It's a hard thing to be humbled by the generosity of those who have always had so little, when you suddenly find yourself with nothing. Somehow, he's faring worse than she.
In a turn of events that both baffles and amuses everyone, Draco strikes up a quiet companionship with Harry, of all people. Perhaps they've always been two sides of the same coin, but it is still odd to see them seated next to each other at the table. Strange though it is, it's a sight Erin could get used to.
There are days, however, that stand out among the monotony of the rest. The day that Erin meets her old professors' child is one of them. Andromeda Tonks is one of the many faces that filters in and out of the Weasley home, but never, until now, has there been another face with her. Her daughter, her husband, her son-in-law- all casualties of war, and Erin's thought so far that Andromeda had been left alone in the world but for the remnants of the Order. Now, though, she sees that she was wrong, and pleasantly, miraculously, so. Andromeda arrives with a bundle in her arms, nestled against her shoulder, and only as she nears the window that Erin sits at watching her come up the path does Erin realize that the pile of fabric she's holding is alive.
Erin had been aware of the baby that Nymphadora Tonks had carried, but the concept had seemed very abstract, foreign, after so long of so many more pressing matters had reared their ugly heads. She doesn't know whether to laugh or cry that she had forgotten this, forgotten him, a rare pinprick of light in the midst of everything else. She can't even remember his name.
When Andromeda comes in, Molly rushes to fuss over them, and Erin slips upstairs to where Draco is still in bed, not sleeping but close to it. She crawls in next to him, dragging her fingertip down the bridge of his nose and whispering, "wake up, love. We've got a baby."
"Not interested unless it's mine," Draco murmurs, darting his hand from beneath the covers to tickle her stomach, and she doesn't know quite how to giggle anymore but she makes an approximate noise and swats his hand away.
"Not really," she warms at the way that he opens only one eye, still deciding whether or not to be interested. "But sort of. Your cousin. Lupin's kid, remember?"
The ghost of a smile that had begun to lift the corners of Draco's mouth drops like she punched it out of him. He drops, too, his hand that had still been reaching for her, curling it back into his chest. "Oh."
"Don't you want to see him?" Erin asks, knowing the answer already, hoping that maybe he'll be coaxed up if she pretends that she doesn't. "I can't remember what they settled on to call him-"
"Teddy," Draco rasps, rolling so that his back is to her, "they call him Teddy. Tell me when he's gone."
"Well, that's rude," Erin teases, crawling closer again and reaching for his shoulder. She means to go on, do some kind of persuading, but all of the fight drains out of her the second that he shrugs her off, pulling the comforter tighter around himself and shutting her out. "Right. Alright. Well."
There's not anything else there that Erin knows how to say, so she closes the door behind herself when she goes back downstairs. Molly and Andromeda are still tucked away at the corner of the kitchen table, but now they're just the two of them. It takes another moment of searching before she finds Teddy in the sitting room in Ginny's lap, cooing over the sparks coming out of the tip of her wand and fluttering around his face like snow.
"Is he alright with strangers?" Erin asks from the doorway, suddenly all nerves, hands clasped behind her back, chin down, as if to indicate that she's not aggressive. She shouldn't need to be- it's just her sister, it's just a baby, but all at once she thinks that she understands why Draco stayed in bed, that maybe she should have stayed with him.
Ginny's head shoots up, looking at her a little wearily, and maybe Erin was right then to try and make herself smaller. As much as the younger girl has embraced her back into the fold, she seems jumpier, more cautious than Erin has ever known her to be. She can count the times she's seen Ginny afraid on one hand, but there's always something about the way that she guards herself these days that almost makes her rethink that number.
"He's fine, if you want to come say hello," Ginny tells her, jerking her chin at the seat beside her. "And he doesn't bite, either, if you're worried about that."
"You were a biter," Erin smiles at the memory and the invitation, folding herself into the cushion, not knowing what to do with her hands. "Merlin, your baby teeth were sharp."
"That's true. Teddy doesn't even have teeth yet," Ginny remarks, pulling Teddy into a sitting position on her knees, letting Erin get her first good look at him. "Maybe he'll surprise us and grow fangs."
Erin wants to quip about the lycanthropy gene, if it's reared it's feral head yet, but she finds that she's lost her voice, looking at this little boy in the face. There's something about him that breaks her heart, even though he's smiling a big, gummy smile at her, reaching with chubby hands for a lock of her hair, laughing. She doesn't know the last time that she listened to music, but it sounds like a song.
"Oh, look at him," Erin breaths softly, gently reaching out to brush her fingers against tiny toes, smaller than she ever remembers Ginny's being. It's been a long time since this house has had a baby in it, Ginny being the last, and even then Erin has precious few memories of her little sister that small. Teddy is, here, now, the most perfect thing that she's ever laid eyes on. That's all that she can think about. "Look at him, he looks just like her."
"Doesn't he?" Ginny asks quietly, and Erin can hear the tears there without having to take her eyes off Teddy. She drapes her arm over her sister's shoulders, pulling her in, and there they stay, holding each other up and trying the best that they know how to make a miracle laugh.
It's dark by the time that Andromeda and Teddy leave, the little boy fast asleep on his grandmother's shoulder as they make their way home. Erin watches them go through the same window that she watched them arrive. When they're out of sight, she heads up to find Draco, whether he's still in bed or wandering the halls like a ghost.
She doesn't have to look long, though, because he's sitting at the top of the stairs, elbows on his knees and his chin resting on his arms folded between them. It makes him look young, and while she knows in her head that they are young, her heart feels something else. Erin joins him there, stretching her legs out and down in front of her instead of trying to make herself small.
"He's a metamorphmagus, like his mum," she tells Draco, studying the way that he flinches and trying to puzzle out just which part of that is troubling to him. Instead of puzzling over it too long, she goes for the approach that's always worked best on him. "What? Why don't you like the kid, what did he ever do to you?"
There's a heavy moment of silence, weighed down with all of the words that Draco doesn't choose to say. Eventually, he comes out with it, probably the best way that he can think to say it without upsetting her, but Erin knows that she's going to be upset no matter what. These days, that's just the way of it.
"It's my fault he's an orphan," he says eventually, so quiet that she's barely sure she heard him at all. "It's my fault he's alone."
Erin chooses her words carefully here, too, finding that the flame she'd anticipated is actually more of a dull ache, starting in the pit of her gut and pulsing up to her heart. It's one word, actually, that she chooses, and it does exactly what she means it to. "Ours."
Draco whips his head around to look at her, eyes narrowed and suspicious. Like he has no idea where she's coming from, what she's talking about, how that's an option. Like he doesn't know that that's what she's thinking about him, too.
"If it's your fault, then it's just as much mine, too," she shrugs, as easily as anything. "We were in the same boat, weren't we?"
He shakes his head, sliding his hands up his arms and hugging them around himself almost defensively. As if he has anything to defend himself from with her. "No. We weren't. And that's not true."
"Good, then, we agree. Neither of us are particularly responsible for these particular, senseless deaths." And she doesn't miss the way that he flinches away from that, too, but she doesn't have the time or the patience or the emotional capacity to coddle, currently, so he'll just have to figure out how to deal with it. She does, though, reach out and knot her fingers in the hair at the back of his head, tugging just shy of painfully, just enough to bring him back to the moment that they're in. A little softer, she says, "there's nothing we could have done."
"Right," he says, almost bitter, but he's leaning back into her touch, lifting his chin in a way that's all but familiar. She misses that pride, whatever else came with it. "Because I didn't try."
"And what would you have tried?" She asks, a challenge that he's not fit to meet based on the color that floods his face at the question. "Is it Remus and Dora in particular that you're looking to save, or is it anyone who left someone behind?"
Draco turns his head away, no longer willing to meet her eye. Erin knows that he doesn't have answers. How could he? There are no answers for things like this.
"Then what's the point in thinking about it like that?" She gives one last tug to his hair, fondly, she hopes he knows, and rises to her feet. "You can't go there about it, there's no point. You just figure out what to do with what's left."
It takes him a moment, but eventually Draco takes the hand that she's extended for him and lets her help him to his feet. "I don't know where to start."
"We'll start with dinner," Erin smiles, tugging his hand now as she starts for the kitchen, "I'm absolutely starving."
Two and a half years for an update, huh? Still entirely self-indulgent, still getting there. Thanks for stopping by.
