Work Text:
2010
Hold still."
James held still for about a second and a half, which was his limit, and then he was up on his toes again trying to see the clock over her shoulder. Ginny dragged the comb through the worst of it and let the rest go. His hair had never, in six whole years, done one single thing it was told — black and sticking up everywhere, exactly his dad's, and she'd given up fighting it before nine in the morning a long time ago.
"There. You look very smart."
"Is it time?"
"Nearly."
"Is it time now?"
"It's still nearly, love. Eat your toast."
He didn't eat his toast. He pushed it round the plate till it was in bits, and then he was up and standing by the front door with his shoes already on, and it wasn't time for another ten minutes. Ginny finished her tea standing up. Harry's chair had the week's post stacked on the seat, the way it always went when he was away. It made a decent shelf. Better than looking at it empty.
James had the speech folded up in his fist. He'd written it out four times and this was the fourth, gone soft and grubby round the edges from him not letting go of it. She'd offered to hold it twice. The second time he'd looked at her like she'd offered to hold his actual hand off his actual arm, so she'd left it.
The school hall smelled of polish and poster paint and about forty small children, and someone had strung paper stars up along the beams that turned round and round on their threads with no wind to turn them. Little chairs down the front for the class, big ones behind for everyone else. James went straight off to sit with the others and didn't look back once, which wasn't like him either. He got to his place near the end and sat up dead straight with the paper on his knee, and he kept his eyes on the door.
Ginny got there early enough to keep two chairs beside her. She threw her jacket over one and dumped her bag on it, and the other she left alone. Her mum turned up a few minutes later in the good hat, already pink round the eyes and nothing had even happened yet, and got herself settled with a great deal of fuss.
"Doesn't he look smart," Molly whispered. "Oh, look at him in his jumper. Does he know we're here? James — James, love, we're here —"
"Mum, if you wave at him his speech'll fall straight out of his head."
Molly put her hands in her lap. Then she waved anyway, just two fingers, when she thought Ginny wasn't watching.
"I sent Estelle another letter," she said, quieter. "I don't expect she'll write back. I just want her to know they keep coming." She dabbed at nothing under her eye. "Six months, Ginny. I can't get it to sit right, I can't. Poor Sirius. Those poor kids."
"France'll do them good. Different windows and that." It was something she'd started saying and couldn't stop saying. "Altair sent Dad a drawing. A French owl. First thing he's sent anyone in weeks."
"A French owl," Molly said, like it was the best news anyone had had in years. Maybe it was.
Lilah came in last, sideways through the doors with Riley up on her shoulder and a bag that looked like she'd packed for a siege, moving careful the way you do with a new baby just down, ready to murder whoever woke her. Riley was two months old and cross about most things going, but she was out cold now, one fist up by her ear.
"Am I late," Lilah murmured. "Fred says sorry, he's got Calvin's do this afternoon, we couldn't both be in two —"
"You're not late. Sit down."
Lilah's eyes went to the jacket, and the bag, and the empty chair past them with nothing on it at all. She didn't say a word about it. She budged Riley over an inch, put her hand on Ginny's arm and left it there, and then the lights dipped themselves and a teacher came out and tapped a music stand with her wand so it went ding like a glass, and everyone shut up.
They went up one at a time. A little girl did her nan, who'd apparently once fought off a garden gnome the size of a terrier, and got a proper laugh. A boy did a Chudley Cannons Chaser and went so far over his three minutes the teacher had to walk him back to his chair while he was still talking. Somebody's big brother — an Auror, as it happened, and Ginny's stomach went over once and then settled itself down. Somebody's mum who kept dragons up in Wales, which caused a stir. Ginny clapped in all the right spots and watched James, who wasn't watching any of them. He was watching the door. Every time it opened for somebody coming in late his whole body turned to it, and every time it wasn't the one he wanted, he faced front again and got a bit smaller.
She'd told him straight that morning. Dad's away and Dad can't come, not today — she'd said it plain, because she'd learned that year exactly what you got from giving kids the soft version and letting them fill in the gaps wrong. Sirius had taken Estelle and Altair off to France, to the one uncle in that whole rotten family who'd kept writing when the rest of them wouldn't even say his name, and good, let them be somewhere with different windows for a bit. There was a boy down the front of this hall with both his mum and dad still alive and only one of them away — only away — and she wasn't about to go wasting that in a school hall when there were people she loved with a great deal less to be getting on with.
"And now," the teacher said, going down her list, "James is going to tell us all about his dad."
James got up. The paper had been folded and unfolded that many times it was trying to come apart in four, and he flattened it out on the little stand and pressed it down with both hands. He looked at it. Then he looked up and found her, three rows back, and Ginny gave him nothing at all except her whole face pointed at him, and off he went.
"My dad's Harry Potter and he's an Auror, which is the best job there is, it's catching dark wizards, the really bad ones nobody else can catch, he catches those ones because he's the best, my Uncle Ron says so and Uncle Ron works with him so he'd know."
A murmur went round. James waited it out, the way he'd seen grown-ups do.
"He's got a scar, right here —" he drew it on the air with one finger, the lightning bolt, quick and sure "— shaped like that, he got it when he was a baby off the baddest wizard there's ever been, and it doesn't hurt. I asked. Sometimes I forget and I ask him again and it still doesn't hurt."
He looked at his paper. Turned it over in case the rest was on the back. It wasn't.
"He can fly better than anybody, he was the youngest Seeker in a hundred years, and he taught me on the little broom that only goes up as high as the fence. One time I came off it — only a bit, only off the bottom of it — and he caught me before I even got to the grass, that's how fast he is."
"And he does pancakes on Sundays and he never measures anything, he just knows, and he burns the first one every single time and he says that one's for the kitchen. And he does all the voices when he reads, all of them, even the horrible ones, he does the troll and Mum shouts down the stairs it's too late for the troll and he does it anyway."
Laughter, the good kind, and it pushed him on a bit.
"And, um —" he checked the paper "— oh yeah. And if I have a bad dream he doesn't say go back to sleep there's no such thing. He actually gets up. He checks. Even in the wardrobe. Every single time."
He stopped. He had another look at his paper and there was nothing left on it that helped him, and all the sureness went out of him at once, and there was just a small boy in a jumper too warm for the weather, standing at the front.
"He's not here today." He'd gone quiet now. "He's away catching a bad wizard so everybody can be safe, and I don't know when he's coming back, because Aurors can't always say." He swallowed. His chin did something and he made it pack it in. "So I saved him a seat. In case. My mum put her coat on the other one but that one's empty on purpose. That one's his."
Ginny didn't move. Next to her Molly had both hands clamped over her mouth and her shoulders were going, and Lilah had turned her face down into the top of the baby's head. Ginny kept her eyes on her boy and her back straight and her hand pressed flat on her own knee, and she didn't so much as glance at the empty chair one along, because she knew full well what'd happen if she did.
"He's the best dad in the whole world and even when he's away he's still my dad. The end. Thank you."
The clapping was loud and went on a good bit too long, the way a room claps when it's covering for itself. The teacher said something kind that Ginny didn't catch. James folded his paper back into its little square, went back to his chair with his eyes down, sat, and only then — only when he thought nobody in particular was looking — had one more look at the door.
It was another twenty minutes till it was done, more speeches, a song the little ones only half knew, the teacher thanking everyone for coming. Ginny stood in the aisle with her mum mopping herself with a hanky the size of a tablecloth and Lilah swaying on the spot out of two months of habit, and then James came through the chairs and the legs at a run and hit her round the middle and hung on and shoved his hot face into her jumper and didn't say anything.
She put her hand on the back of his damp head.
"That," she said, "was the best one in there. By a mile."
"Grandma Molly's crying."
"Grandma Molly cries at the weather. Don't take it personal."
He laughed, wet, into her middle, which was what she'd been after.
Then Molly had hold of him and there was no stopping it — kissing him, telling him he was the cleverest boy and hadn't he spoken beautifully — and James put up with it, ears gone red. Lilah crouched down with the baby still on her and knocked her forehead gently against his.
"You know what your dad would've done," she said, "sat where I was sat, listening to that?"
"What?"
"Bawled his eyes out. Worse than your gran. Have to leave the room, he would." James turned it over, seemed to find it very satisfactory, and a bit of the tightness let go of his shoulders.
They went out into the sun with all the other families and the paper stars kept turning behind them in the empty hall. Ginny had her coat over her arm and James's hand in hers, and at the doors he stopped and looked back once at the row where they'd sat — the two chairs left empty now in among all the rest — and she waited and let him look.
"He didn't come," James said. Not moaning about it. Just getting it straight in his head.
"No, love. He couldn't." She got down to his level, there in the doorway, everyone stepping round the pair of them. "But I'll tell you what he did do, before he went. He made me promise him. He said, whatever James is up to while I'm gone, whatever it is, I want every word of it when I'm home. Word for word, he said. So you've got to save it all up for him. The scar and the pancakes and the troll and the wardrobe. The lot."
"The seat as well?"
She hadn't seen that coming, and it took her a second to get her feet back under her.
"The seat as well," she said. "He'd want to hear about the seat most of all."
James thought about it and nodded and put it away wherever he put things, and stuck his hand back in hers. Molly was already off ahead of them promising lunch at the Burrow and not hearing a word against it, and Lilah was tugging the baby's little hat back down over one ear, and the four of them — five, if you counted the one asleep and furious on Lilah's shoulder — headed off down the path together into the plain bright morning, and James walked along in the middle of them and didn't look back at the door again.