Chapter Text
It happens on a Sunday, which feels right somehow. Sundays have their own particular quality in their house — slower, looser, the kind of morning where neither of them has anywhere to be and they both know it and neither of them mentions it because mentioning it would jinx it. Ginny sleeps later on Sundays. Harry usually wakes first and lies there doing nothing for a while, which is a thing he's learned to do in the years since the war, the simple and previously unimaginable act of lying still and not waiting for something to happen.
He's twenty-four weeks into doing this with one hand on her stomach.
Not constantly. Not in a way he thinks she's noticed, or at least not in a way she's commented on, which with Ginny amounts to the same thing — if she'd noticed and found it strange she would have said so, directly, in the way she says most things. He just — it's become a habit. In the mornings especially, that half-awake window before the day arrives, his hand finds its way there without him entirely meaning it to.
The baby moves for Ginny. He knows this. He's watched it happen — watched her go still suddenly, watched her hand go to her stomach, watched something cross her face that he doesn't have a name for and suspects he's not meant to see. She's told him when it happens, always, and he's pressed his hand to where she directs him and felt nothing, just the warmth of her, and he's said it's fine and I'm not bothered and these things take time, all of which are true and none of which are entirely the point.
The point is that there is a person in there.
He knows this intellectually. He's known it since the test, since the first Healer appointment, since he sat in a waiting room chair and held Ginny's hand and tried to look like a man who was holding himself together, which he was, barely. He's seen the scans. He has a copy of the first scan in his desk at work between two pieces of card because he couldn't think where else to put it and he wanted it close, which is not something he's told anyone including Ginny because it felt too large to say out loud.
But knowing it and feeling it are different things entirely. He's starting to understand that. The baby is real to Ginny in a way it can't quite be to him yet — it's in her, moving in her, keeping her up at night, making her furious at her own body in ways she reports with great specificity and dark humour — and Harry is on the outside of that, pressing his hand to warm skin and feeling nothing, and he's fine. He is. It's fine.
He tells himself this on Sunday morning, hand flat against the curve of her stomach, not really trying anymore, just there. Ginny is asleep. The room is doing that particular Sunday thing, light coming in slow and gold through the curtains, no sound from outside, the particular quality of silence that means neither of them have anywhere to be. He's not quite asleep and not quite awake. He's not thinking about anything.
He's not thinking about anything, and he's not trying, and his hand is there out of habit, and then —
There.
A flutter. Not a kick — not yet, not the proper kicks Ginny describes, not that — just a flutter, like something turning over, like something shifting and resettling, unmistakable and impossibly small. Against his palm. Deliberate.
He stops breathing.
He doesn't move. He's almost afraid to move, afraid that moving will end it, that it was a fluke, that he imagined it — but he didn't imagine it, he knows he didn't, it happened, it was there, small and real and impossibly actual against his hand. He lies completely still. Waiting. His heart is doing something he can't regulate. His throat has done something complicated and he doesn't have the wherewithal to address it right now.
It happens again.
Twice. Just twice, small and unmistakable. And then nothing, the baby apparently satisfied, going still again, and Harry lies there with his hand on his wife's stomach in the Sunday morning light and stares at the ceiling and tries to remember how breathing works.
He thinks: oh.
He thinks: oh, there you are.
His eyes are doing something embarrassing. He's aware of this. He's choosing not to examine it closely. He blinks at the ceiling. He keeps his hand exactly where it is. Ginny is asleep beside him and he is not going to wake her up and he is not going to make this into a thing, he's going to lie here and breathe and be normal about it, he's going to be completely normal about this.
He is not being normal about this.
There you are, he thinks again, and his hand stays very still, and the morning light comes in slow and gold, and he stares at the ceiling and doesn't move for a very long time.