Chapter Text
The instructions are in Swedish.
Not entirely — there's an English section, technically, three pages of it wedged between the German and the French, and Harry had found it with some relief and then read the first paragraph twice and concluded that whoever translated this document from the original Swedish had done so using a different English than the one he speaks. Words are present. Sentences exist. The meaning is unclear.
He sits on the floor of the nursery with the instructions in his lap and the pieces of the cot arranged around him in what he's decided is a logical order and what is almost certainly not a logical order, and he reads the first step again.
Insert dowel rod A into corresponding panel slot, ensuring flush alignment with base bracket. Do not overtighten.
He looks at the pieces. He looks back at the instructions. He looks at the diagram, which has been drawn by someone who has either never assembled a cot or has assembled so many cots that they've forgotten what it's like to not know how to assemble a cot.
Right, he thinks. Dowel rod A.
There are fourteen dowel rods. None of them are labelled.
***
He'd decided on Saturday approximately three weeks ago, when Ginny mentioned — casually, in the way she mentions things she actually cares about — that her mum had offered to come and help set up the nursery. He'd said that's great in a normal voice and then spent the rest of the evening thinking about it and arrived at a conclusion he hasn't shared with anyone, which is: he wants to do it himself.
Not because he has anything against Molly, who he loves unreservedly and who would absolutely do an excellent job. Not because he thinks he'll do it better — he's a reasonably self-aware man and he knows his limitations, and his limitations include but are not limited to: flatpack furniture, patience with instructions, and anything requiring what Arthur cheerfully calls a good eye for a straight line.
It's just — he wants to be the one.
He can't entirely explain this, even to himself. It sits in the category of things he understands emotionally before he understands them intellectually, which is a category that has expanded considerably since he found out he was going to be a father. He wants to build the thing his child will sleep in. He wants to do it with his own hands, on a Saturday, while Ginny is at her mum's and the house is quiet. He wants, when it's done, for it to be done — finished, standing, real — so that when she comes home she can walk in and find it there.
He wants to give her that.
He is currently struggling to identify dowel rod A.
***
He borrows Arthur's tools. This is non-negotiable — he owns tools, technically, in the way that he owns various things he's never used and can't always locate, and he's learned from experience that owning tools and having tools that work and are where you think they are are different categories of thing. Arthur's tools are organised. Arthur's tools have a specific place and are returned to that specific place after use and Arthur knows exactly where each of them is without looking, which Harry finds quietly extraordinary.
Arthur had handed them over with the particular look he sometimes gives Harry — fond and slightly careful, like he's holding something he doesn't want to break — and said: take your time with it, Harry. There's no rush.
He'd meant the tools. Harry thinks he might have also meant something else.
He takes the tools upstairs.
***
Step one takes forty minutes.
This is not, he tells himself, because step one is difficult. Step one is not objectively difficult. Step one is the joining of two side panels via a central support beam, which sounds straightforward and would be straightforward if the central support beam came pre-drilled, which it does not, because apparently whoever designed this cot wanted to build character in the assembler.
He drills the holes. One of them is slightly off. He looks at it for a long time.
He drills it again, slightly to the left, and tells himself this is fine and that no one will be able to tell and that the structural integrity is absolutely not compromised, and then he sits back and looks at the two side panels joined by the central support beam and feels something that is disproportionate to the achievement, which is: satisfaction.
Genuine, uncomplicated satisfaction. From drilling two holes and putting a beam through them.
He's going to tell absolutely no one about this.
***
Step four is where things go wrong.
He won't go into the specifics — the specifics are not flattering and involve a dowel rod, a mallet borrowed from Arthur's toolkit, and a decision he makes that the instructions specifically told him not to make, which is: overtightening. He overtightens. The panel cracks. Not catastrophically — not oh no the whole thing is ruined cracked, just a small split along the grain, barely visible, structurally meaningless — but he stares at it for approximately three minutes doing a full audit of his options.
He could start over. He has a spare panel — he bought two of everything, on instinct, because he knows himself — and he could unassemble what he's done and begin again and Ginny would never know.
He looks at the crack.
He leaves it. It's on the inside of the panel, facing inward, invisible once the mattress is in. The cot will be sound. The cot will hold. He runs his thumb along the split and thinks: alright. fine. that one's mine. He thinks: I know where it is.
He keeps building.
***
The thing he doesn't let himself think about directly — the thing he thinks about sideways, in the way he's learned to approach things that are too large to look at straight on — is that nobody built anything for him.
This is not self-pity. He's past self-pity, mostly, or at least he's made a kind of peace with it that holds on all but the worst nights. It's just true. There was no nursery, or if there was he doesn't remember it, doesn't have anyone left to tell him about it. He doesn't know what his cot looked like. He doesn't know if his father assembled it with borrowed tools on a Saturday while his mother was out, doesn't know if James Potter sat on a floor in Godric's Hollow with incomprehensible instructions and fourteen unlabelled dowel rods and a slightly off-centre drill hole that he decided was his to keep.
He'd like to think so.
He'd like to think his father was the kind of man who wanted to be the one.
He thinks — he's thought this before, in various forms, in various moments — that he's been building toward this his whole life without knowing it. Not this specifically. Just — something of his own. A thing that stays. He'd spent so long with nothing that the having of things still catches him sometimes, still lands with a weight he wasn't expecting: the house, the job, Ginny, and now this room, this cot, this particular Saturday afternoon with the light coming through the window he'd painted light yellow in the spring.
There is going to be a person who sleeps in this cot.
A person who will never have to wonder if they're wanted. Who will never lie awake listening to silence and understanding the silence as an answer. Who will have a room painted yellow and a cot assembled slightly wrong and two parents who would take apart and reassemble the entire world if that's what it took.
He tightens the final bolt — carefully, this time, no overtightening — and sits back on his heels and looks at what he's built.
It's slightly wonky on the left side. He's aware of this. It's not visibly wonky — or it is, a little, if you're looking for it, but you'd have to be looking for it — and he's decided this is character rather than error, which is a reframe he's fairly pleased with. The crack is invisible. The dowel rods are all where they're meant to be. The cot stands.
He puts his hand on the rail and pushes it, gently. Solid. Sound.
Good, he thinks. Alright.
He sits down on the floor next to it, back against the wall, and looks at it. The afternoon light is doing something nice through the white curtains Ginny picked. The room smells like paint and sawdust and something else, something that might just be new, and outside a car goes past and the house settles and he sits there in the quiet and looks at the thing he built.
He doesn't mean to fall asleep.