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It starts at Teddy’s first birthday party. A niggling in the back of her mind as she holds Harry’s hand, watching the one year old giggle on his grandmother’s lap. She feels her eyes widen and when Harry looks over to her, she shakes her head, unable to verbalize this new feeling. Later, when Harry asks her to dance in the moonlight, she tucks the mystery into the back of her mind and takes his hand.
It’s September later that year before the feeling, this free-fall spiral of emotion, becomes semi-coherent. She stares at the little boy wrapped in his godfather’s arms, hair black and fluffy just like their Harry’s, brilliant green eyes shining with adoration, and she starts to do the math. She smiles when her boyfriend turns to her, and he clearly doesn’t see anything remiss in her expression, but it falls as soon as he turns away. She does the math and she stares at the baby in his arms and her body feels cold.
It’s not until she’s holding James Sirius in her arms almost half a decade later that those thoughts dredge themselves out of the hole she forced them into every time they saw Teddy, the boy shooting up like a sprout and constantly filled with joy. She stares at this sleeping baby and she knows, like Lily, like most mothers, that she would do anything for her child. But she stares at him and she looks up to her husband, beaming with joy, and she feels sick. Nausea sweeps through her frame, and she shudders against the feel of the soft cotton blanket in her arms and the small puffs of air as her Jamie breathes. It feels different, now, being a mother. Not just to her own child, but to all children. Teddy’s sleeping on Andromeda’s lap in the corner, he had bounced in with such glee the hour before that she couldn’t refrain from smiling. And she feels different. She is different. And she looks at her husband’s clear adoration and then at the bundle in her arms and all she can feel is nauseous.
Jamie’s first birthday comes and goes with little fanfare. Okay, a lot of fanfare. His grandmother is Molly Weasley, for crying out loud. Hermione has definitely been her ally in trying to get out of huge family affairs, but she generally allows it for Harry. He loves the chaos of their large extended family.
Jamie’s first birthday passes and she’s counting. She’s counting and everyday she feels more ill, like something’s building inside of her. They find out she’s pregnant again in late September and all she can think is two more weeks. And then one more week. And then one more day.
She wakes up on the day of Jamie’s 15th month and she stares at the ceiling. She doesn’t want to get up. Harry’s lying in bed beside her, so it must be early. The sun’s barely risen in the sky, the black of night lightened to a deep purple hue. She stares at the ceiling, grey in the dark, and she knows she has to get up. She has to look at him, she has to see him.
She moves out of bed like she’s marching to her death, and she feels like she might be. The air feels thick like honey and every step towards the nursey makes her feel like she’s drowning. She’s been choking on this thought, the thought of this day, for the past seven years. Seven years. That’s how long they should’ve gone to Hogwarts. Seven years.
The doorknob feels cold, but she can’t register it. She hears her baby’s breathing and she steps up to his crib and she looks at him and she looks and she can’t breathe. It all comes crashing down on her all at once, the thought that’s haunted her for seven years and she falls to her knees. She stares at her baby, their baby, sleeping in his soft blankets and she cries.
“Ginny?” She turns and Harry’s standing in the doorway looking confused, and then immediately concerned. “What’s wrong?”
She looks and him and her silent weeping becomes pained gasping and she can’t breathe. She looks at him and she can hear the first time he ever talked about the Dursley’s to her. Her fifth year, wrapped up in her favorite quilt in the common room at two in the morning, whispering secrets to each other in between kisses. “They hated me,” he had said. “They hate me, and they made me hate myself.” She looks at her husband now and she can’t. Stop. Crying.
“Gin, you have to talk to me,” he says nervously, crouching down to her level and rubbing her cold arms with his warm hands.
“You can talk to me,” she had whispered after the war. After the battle, after the dead, after the letter from Dudley that she knows, she knows, gave him the nightmare that had woken them both that night. “You can always talk to me, Harry.”
15 months. She doesn’t understand. How could they? How could they?
“Gin?”
“How could they?”
His eyes narrow in confusion. “What?”
“How- could- they?”
And suddenly, she’s angry. These thoughts that she’s held onto for the past seven years, since Teddy’s first birthday, since she finally did the math, the thoughts she should’ve had before, before when he told her, when he whispered his darkest truths in the dark, his lips moving in her red hair, the color of his dead mother’s hair- how dare they?
She turns away from her anxious husband and looks at her baby boy again, his nose wrinkling against waking up, the noises rising him from slumber. 15 months. 15 months.
She remembers the first time he told her of the cupboard. It was a story from when he was nine. Always older. Never younger than six. Six. Teddy is older than that and she cannot imagine shoving that vibrant little boy into a broom cupboard and she’s furious. She knows, she knows, he was always in there. That’s what he said. “My bedroom for ten years,” that’s what he said but he never speaks of it before the age of six. Before the age where he was accustomed to it, to where it was no longer a punishment, to where it was expected-
Fifteen months.
Harry was fifteen months when his parents died and he ended up on the doorstep of the family who would abuse him for the next decade and she cannot even fathom it. As a human, as a parent, as a mother, she can’t, she’d never- how dare they?
“Who, Ginny?”
She turns back to him, her Harry, the Harry the world never sees, the Harry the world will never know- the doting husband, the anxious father, the little boy shoved into a dark, enclosed space-
She looks into his eyes and knows he can’t hear this. He can’t bear the brunt of her anger at his past, can’t know that he inadvertently caused her stress, especially now that she’s pregnant- God, she loves him, but he was an absolute nightmare last pregnancy. She went to her mother’s to escape his mothering- multiple times. She looks at glittering emerald and she takes a deep breath. He can’t hear this. He can’t be angry with them, he never was, for all their last night reminiscing, he was never truly angry- maybe if he started, he could never stop. She knows he can’t handle this, not now, maybe never, so she takes another deep breath and quirks a smile.
“I had a bad dream,” she whispers into the stillness, her voice cracking on the lie that’s not a lie. God, she wishes this was a dream. His hand comes up to rest on her cheek and she leans into it softly. “Honestly, don’t even remember what it was about, anymore, I was just angry.” She turns her head and kisses his palm gently, “Sorry, love.”
He smiles at her, and pulls her into his arms, warmth instantly surrounding her. She lays against his chest and closes her eyes and tries not to imagine what her Harry looked like. Fifteen months old, the same age as her Jamie, today, the same soft black curls they both share, and Harry’s unique green eyes in a pudgy baby face. Locked away and beaten down.
Harry might not be able to be angry yet, but she will be for him. She’ll be angry for Lily, for the mother who sacrificed everything to lose her little boy to the worst type of people. She’ll be angry for her children, the thought of them suffering in the way their father had.
She’ll be angry for this until the day she dies because nothing burns brighter than a mother’s love except for her anger.