Work Text:
2008
"Right," said Ginny, crouching down on the cobbles of Diagon Alley so that she was level with her eldest son. "Before we go in. What are the rules?"
James Potter, who was four, and who was at that moment vibrating with the particular electric joy of a small boy standing within twenty feet of the greatest building in the entire world, gave the question the serious consideration it deserved. His untidy black hair was sticking up at the back exactly the way his father's did, and his mother's brown eyes were enormous in his face, and he was, Ginny thought, the single most dangerous person in Britain.
"Touch everything," James said.
"No."
"Touch some things."
"James."
"Touch one thing very gently."
"You touch nothing," said Ginny. "You hold my hand the entire time. You do not eat anything anyone gives you without showing me first. And you do not, under any circumstances, listen to a single word your uncles say to you. Yes?"
"Yes," said James, with the bright, untroubled sincerity of a child agreeing to terms he had no intention whatsoever of honouring.
"Harry, back me up."
Harry, who had a sleeping Albus strapped to his chest and was therefore operating at roughly forty percent capacity, looked down at his son's upturned, hopeful, devious little face, and felt the precise tug of disloyalty he always felt at moments like this.
"Listen to your mother," he managed.
"That," said Ginny, "was the least convincing thing I have ever heard."
"I'm tired, Gin."
"You're weak. There's a difference." She straightened up, keeping a firm grip on James's hand, and squared her shoulders like a woman walking into battle. "All right. In. And remember—" she pointed at the great purple-and-orange edifice of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes looming above them, its mechanical front figure cheerfully lifting its hat to release a fresh white rabbit over the street "—we are here for five minutes. We say hello, we drop off your mother's parcel, and we leave. We do not engage."
They engaged.
***
The shop took them by the collar the moment the door swung open — colour and motion and noise, shelves stacked to the rafters with things that looked harmless right up until the instant they weren't, a Catherine wheel of sparks revolving lazily near the ceiling, and the warm, sweet, faintly gunpowdery smell that James inhaled like a man coming home.
"OI!" bellowed a voice from somewhere above them. "It's the heir!"
"The heir has arrived!" agreed a second, identical voice.
Fred and George Weasley descended upon them from opposite ends of the shop, and Harry watched, with the resignation of a man who has seen this happen many times, every single one of Ginny's rules evaporate in the space of about four seconds.
"There he is," said Fred, scooping James clean off his feet, out of his mother's grip, and onto his shoulders. "There's my favourite nephew."
"You have a lot of nephews, George," said Ginny.
"And he's my favourite. James, my lad — have you been good?"
"No," said James happily.
"Excellent," said George.
"Put him down," said Ginny. "Fred. Down."
"He's perfectly safe up there. Aren't you, James?"
"I can see EVERYTHING," James reported, from a great height, his fists buried in Fred's hair. "I can see the — Uncle George, what's that one—"
"That," said George, following the small pointing finger with the air of a curator unveiling a masterpiece, "is a brand-new line. Reusable Hangman. You won't have seen those. Very educational."
"He is four," said Harry.
"It's never too early to start his education," said George.
"His education is the problem," said Ginny.
"Ginny." Fred set James gently back down on the floor — directly, Harry noted, in front of a low and lavishly stocked display of trick sweets, which was a bit like setting a Niffler down in Gringotts and asking it to behave. "When are you going to learn to relax? He's a Weasley. He's a Potter. The boy is descended from the two finest troublemaking lines in wizarding history. You're not raising a child, you're raising a legacy. We're just doing our part."
"Your part," said Ginny, "is the part I have nightmares about."
***
It got worse, because at that precise moment the bell over the door jangled again and a familiar voice rang out across the shop floor.
"Is that my godson I hear being told off? Marvellous. Don't stop on my account."
Sirius Black strolled in, looking, as he always did, faintly as though he had wandered in off the set of something more exciting, and James let out a shriek of pure delight that could have shattered glass.
"GRANDDAD SIRIUS!"
"There's my boy." Sirius caught him under the arms and swung him up, and James, who had now been picked up by three separate adults in under five minutes and was loving every second of it, beamed down at the room like a tiny conquering emperor. "Look at the size of you. What are they feeding you? Tell me you've been causing trouble. Tell me you've been an absolute menace."
"Don't," said Harry.
"He set the curtains on fire last week," Sirius said, to James, conspiratorially.
"That was an accident—"
"It was a brilliant accident. Best accident I've heard in years." Sirius set James on his hip and turned his most innocent expression on Harry and Ginny, which fooled precisely no one, having been honed over forty years specifically not to. "What? I'm only saying hello."
"You are the reason," said Ginny, "that this child thinks setting curtains on fire is a personality."
"I'm the reason this child is interesting."
"Sirius."
"Harry." Sirius appealed to him directly now, jiggling a delighted James. "Back me up. You turned out all right, didn't you? And I raised you. I'm experienced. I've done this before."
And there it was — the trap Harry walked into every time, the one he could see coming and stepped in anyway. Because he had been raised by this man. He had spent his whole childhood being spoiled rotten by Sirius Black and quietly un-spoiled again by Remus, hauled out of trouble by Marlene and right back into it by Sirius, and the awful, inconvenient truth was that he had loved every chaotic minute of it, and he could not in good conscience pretend otherwise to his own son.
"You let me fly a broomstick into the side of the house when I was five," Harry said.
"And you've got a fantastic sense of balance to this day."
"I had a concussion."
"A brief one." Sirius waved this away. "The point stands. He's in excellent hands. Now—" he set James down, crouched to his level, and lowered his voice to the warm, dangerous register of a man about to do something he absolutely should not "—come here, sprog, and let your old grandpa show you the good stuff, the things they keep behind the counter—"
"Sirius Black," said a new voice, "I'll send you to the retirement center early if you keep that up."
Lilah had appeared from the back of the shop with a clipboard and the expression of a woman who managed, on a daily basis, to be the only fully grown adult in a building full of them. She kissed Harry on the cheek in passing — "All right, little brother?" — relieved him of the parcel without breaking stride, and fixed her father-figure with a look that could have curdled milk.
"Lilah," said Sirius, wounded. "I'm bonding with my grandson."
"You're radicalising him." She turned to Ginny with the weary solidarity of one besieged woman to another. "I'm sorry. I've been trying to keep a lid on the three of them all morning and it's like herding fireworks. A rare day off - Marlene's off with Stella and Altair and graciously took Calvin outta my hair for a few hours. Also, Fred's already taught James the word he isn't allowed to say."
"He has not—" Ginny rounded on James. "James. What's the word you're not allowed to say?"
James drew himself up, took a deep and proud breath, and announced it to the entire shop at full volume.
There was a small silence.
"...He doesn't even know what it means," offered George, into it.
"He doesn't NEED to know what it means," said Ginny, "he just said it to a shop full of—"
"I'll get him a Pygmy Puff," said Fred quickly. "Apology Pygmy Puff. On the house."
"I don't want him to HAVE a—"
But it was too late. James had already heard the words Pygmy Puff, and James was already gone.
***
Afterwards, none of them could entirely agree on the order in which things happened.
What was certain was that James, slipping his uncle's grip in the manner of a small greased eel, made directly for the great glass tank of Pygmy Puffs in the corner — the little round fluffy creatures in pink and purple that hummed and squeaked and were, in James's expert four-year-old opinion, the best thing that had ever existed. What was also certain was that, in his enthusiasm to greet them, he climbed. And that the display he climbed was not built to take the weight of a determined four-year-old. And that, somewhere in the cascade that followed, his small flailing hand closed around a entirely different box on a entirely different shelf — a box that he then, in the spirit of scientific inquiry that had already cost the Potters one set of curtains, hurled at the floor to see what it did.
What it did was Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder.
The shop went black.
Not dim. Not shadowed. Black — total, absolute, swallowing dark, the kind that pressed against your open eyes and gave them nothing, the entire crowded shop plunged in an instant into a pitch so complete that Harry could not see the sleeping baby strapped to his own chest.
For one frozen moment, nobody said anything at all.
Then, from somewhere in the dark, came the unmistakable sound of a four-year-old having the best afternoon of his life.
"I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING!" James shrieked joyously. "DAD! DAD, IT'S NIGHT TIME!"
"James, stay STILL—"
"WHERE'S THE PYGMY PUFFS—"
"Don't move," said Ginny and Harry, in the dark, in unison, with the specific terror of two parents who have lost visual contact with their child inside a building full of explosives.
"Bit of a classic, this," Fred's voice observed, somewhere to Harry's left, sounding deeply, infuriatingly pleased. "We sell cartloads of it. Don't usually get to enjoy the effect from the inside, mind."
"Good arm on him, though," said George's voice, with naked pride. "Did you see the distance on that throw? Four years old."
"He gets it from our side," said Sirius's voice.
"He gets it from MY side," said Fred.
"FRED," roared Ginny into the blackness, "FIND THE LIGHTS, OR SO HELP ME—"
There was a great deal of bumping, and a crash of something tumbling off a shelf, and a customer near the door saying excuse me, has anyone — oh and walking directly into a stand of Skiving Snackboxes, and the steady, delighted, disembodied giggling of James somewhere down near the floor, moving — Harry could hear it moving, the little traitor, navigating the dark with the confidence of a child who has correctly deduced that no one can catch what no one can see.
"Got him," said Lilah's voice, suddenly and firmly, from down low. "I've got him. Stop wriggling, you horror. Fred — the counter, there's a clearing charm under the—"
"I know where the clearing charm is, I made the—"
A muttered incantation, a soft whump, and the darkness lifted as suddenly as it had fallen.
The shop blinked back into existence. And there, revealed in the returning light, was the full and glorious extent of it: a toppled Pygmy Puff display, several of its small fluffy occupants now bouncing free and humming across the floor; a customer extracting herself with great dignity from the Skiving Snackboxes; Harry with his arms wrapped protectively around a still-sleeping and entirely oblivious Albus; Ginny with her hair on end and an expression of magnificent fury; and Lilah, on her knees, with a firm grip on the collar of one small, beaming, completely unrepentant four-year-old.
"I made it night time," James told the room, radiant with achievement.
***
It took ten minutes to set the shop to rights, round up the Pygmy Puffs, apologise to the customer — who turned out to have eight grandchildren and waved the whole thing off, saying she'd seen far worse and at least this one was creative — and reduce the three grown men responsible for the situation to something resembling contrition. Which, in the end, they did not manage, because they were not in any way contrite.
"In our defence," began George.
"There is no defence," said Ginny.
"In our defence, we didn't give him the Darkness Powder. He found that one himself. That's initiative. You should be proud."
"I would like," said Ginny, with terrible calm, "to take my children home now. All three of them. Before any of them learn another word, or throw another object, or are taught to do anything at all by anybody in this family who is over the age of thirty and should know better."
"That's most of us," said Sirius.
"That's the point, Sirius."
She gathered up James, who went, finally, without complaint, worn out at last by the sheer scale of his own triumph and going boneless and heavy against her shoulder in the way that only the very young and the very pleased with themselves can. The fury was already draining out of her face — Harry watched it go, the way it always went, leaving the tiredness underneath and, beneath that, the thing she'd never quite admit to in front of her brothers.
Sirius caught Harry's arm as they made for the door.
"You know who he is, don't you," he said quietly. He was watching James, half-asleep on Ginny's shoulder, his untidy black hair flat against her neck. "When he gets going. When he's standing in the middle of the chaos he's caused, grinning like he's just been handed the world." His voice had gone rough, the laughter draining out of it all at once. "He's James. He's your dad, Harry, all over again. The hair, the trouble, the — that grin. I keep turning round and seeing him and forgetting, for half a second, that it's seventy years too late and the wrong one." He cleared his throat. "It's why I can't help it. Spoiling him. I know I shouldn't. But I lost James once, and then — there he is. Four years old and setting off Darkness Powder in a joke shop." He shook his head. "What am I supposed to do with that?"
Harry looked at his son — black-haired, brown-eyed, fast asleep and utterly impossible, the spitting image, by every account he had ever been given, of a grinning grandfather he had never got to meet and only knew through this man's stories — and felt his throat tighten.
"Nothing," he said. "There's nothing you can do with it. I've tried." He gripped Sirius's shoulder. "Trust me. I was raised by you. I know exactly how this goes."
Sirius huffed a laugh, and pressed the back of his hand quickly against his eyes, and pretended he hadn't.
"Right, then," said Ginny from the doorway, James drooling gently on her collar. "We are never coming back here."
"You'll be back next week," said Fred.
"We'll be back Thursday," Harry admitted.
And they stepped out together into the bright noise of Diagon Alley — Ginny with the sleeping menace, Harry with the sleeping baby, the whole impossible, infuriating, beloved lot of them — while behind them in the shop three grown troublemakers stood in the wreckage of the afternoon and watched them go, already, Harry had absolutely no doubt, planning what to teach him next.