Chapter Text
2016
Hannah had gone off her food three days running, and by the third night Neville had talked himself into something serious.
She was the healthy one. She was the one who worked doubles when the barmaid was ill and still came up the stairs at midnight with a ledger under her arm, the one who never so much as sneezed through the whole of a Diagon Alley winter while half the Alley coughed itself hoarse. If Hannah left her supper untouched, something had gone properly wrong somewhere. He had watched her push a plate of shepherd's pie two inches to the left and then two inches back, and he had thought, with the cold clarity of a man imagining the worst, of all the words a Healer might use. He had not said any of this to her. He had cleared her plate and washed it and said the pie had been a bit heavy, hadn't it, and she had agreed too quickly, and neither of them had believed the other.
The pub was shut. The last of the regulars had been coaxed out into the warm dark of the Alley an hour since, and the lamps were down to a low amber, and Neville was doing the thing he always did last, which was to walk the room touching the backs of the chairs. He couldn't have said why. It settled him. Seventeen years of teaching first-years how to hold a plant without crushing it and he still couldn't sit still until he'd put his hands on a hundred small ordinary things and found them where they ought to be.
Hannah was behind the bar with a cloth in her hand and nothing under it. She had been polishing the same stretch of wood for some while.
"You've had that spot gleaming since the Prophet was still warm," Neville said.
She looked up. She had a way of looking up that used to make him lose the thread of whatever he was saying, back when they were both twenty-two and he still couldn't quite believe she'd chosen him. It still worked, a bit.
"Come and sit down," she said.
"I'm nearly done."
"Nev. Come and sit down."
He came and sat down.
She put the cloth away first. She was tidy in a crisis; it was one of the things he loved and one of the things that frightened him now, watching her square the cloth against the edge of the sink and take her time about it, because it meant she had decided something and was only working out how to say it. He put his hands flat on the bar. He looked at the grain of the wood, which he knew as well as he knew his own hands, and he waited, and he did not ask, because if he asked he would have to hear the answer a half-second sooner and he found he wanted every half-second he had.
"I went to see a mediwitch," Hannah said. "On Tuesday. When I said I was doing the cellar."
"Right," Neville said. His voice came out level. He was pleased about that, distantly, the way you notice a thing about someone else.
"It's not — " She stopped. She had both hands on the near edge of the bar now, opposite his, and the lamplight was doing something gentle to her face and he could not read it at all. "It's not what you've been thinking. I know what you've been thinking. You do that jaw thing."
"I don't do a jaw thing."
"You've been doing the jaw thing for three days."
"Hannah."
"I'm pregnant," she said.
Neville did not say anything.
He was aware of the clock over the fireplace, which had a tick you stopped hearing after the first week and started hearing again in the middle of the night. He was aware of his own hands, still flat on the bar, and of the fact that he had not moved them, and that this was strange, because a moment like this ought to move a person's hands. Somewhere above them a floorboard settled. Hannah was watching him with the particular steadiness she kept for difficult customers and grieving families and the two or three times a year the Floo brought bad news into the taproom, and he understood that she had put that steadiness on for him, and that undid something.
"Say something," she said. "Anything's fine. You can even say the wrong thing."
"How — " He heard how that sounded and shut his mouth.
"The usual way," Hannah said. Her mouth twitched. "I can draw you a diagram if the Herbology didn't cover it."
"That's not — I know how. Obviously I know how." He dragged a hand down his face. "I mean. We were — we said. Weren't we. We said we weren't."
"We said we weren't."
"So I just — " He stopped again. He kept walking up to the edge of a sentence and finding nothing on the other side of it.
They had said they weren't. Not in one conversation, dramatically, over a table, but the way most large things get decided between two people who trust each other, which is to say sideways and over years. There had been a hundred small evenings that added up to it. There was the pub, which never slept and always needed them. There was Hogwarts eight months of the year and the long green summers here. There were the two of them, who liked each other's company more than either had ever quite got over, who could take a week's leave and go and stand in a bog in the Hebrides looking for a rare orchid and call it a holiday. It had never been a wound, the not-having. It had simply been the shape of their life, and the shape had suited them, and now the shape was different and neither of them had chosen it.
"There isn't a room," Neville said. It was, of all the things he might have said, the one that arrived. "For a — there isn't a room."
"I know there isn't a room."
"The whole place is stairs and a cellar full of things that'll poison you." He was talking now, which was worse than not talking. "We don't own a single thing that isn't breakable. There are knives at every height a person could reach. Tom keeps a — there's a manticore claw behind the bar, Hannah, for the till, in case of — "
"I'm aware of the manticore claw."
"You can't raise a — near a manticore claw."
"People raise children above pubs all the time," Hannah said. "The Alley's crawling with them. You teach half of them Herbology."
"That's different."
"It isn't, particularly."
Neville got up. He didn't decide to; he was simply standing, on the customer's side of his own bar, with no chair back near enough to touch. He went to the window instead and put two fingers on the cold glass and looked out at the Alley, which was dark and shut and entirely ordinary, and none of it looked the way it had looked an hour ago.
"Are you all right?" Hannah asked. "You've gone the colour of the ceiling."
"Are you?" he said, to the glass.
There was a silence behind him that he didn't turn round for, because he wasn't sure his face was under his own management yet.
"I don't know," Hannah said at last, and her voice had come off its steadiness now, just a little, just at the edges, and that was the thing that finally turned him round. "I've been trying to work out how I feel since Tuesday and I keep not getting an answer. Which isn't like me. I always know how I feel about things. It's the one thing I'm good at."
"You're good at loads of things."
"I don't know how I feel about this, Nev, and it's the biggest thing that's ever happened to me, and I can't find the feeling, and I've been carrying it about on my own for three days because I didn't want to say it out loud until I'd — " She stopped. She pressed the heel of her hand briefly against her mouth. "And now I've said it out loud and I still can't find it."
He crossed the room and came round the end of the bar to her side of it, which was where he should have gone in the first place, and he put his arms round her. She was stiff for a second and then she wasn't. She fitted under his chin the way she had always fitted, and he could feel her heart going, quick, quicker than it should have been for a woman standing still in a shut pub at midnight, and he held on to her and looked over her head at the manticore claw glinting on its hook and thought, with no idea whether it was terror or something else entirely: there's going to be a person.
"We don't have to know how we feel tonight," he said into her hair.
"That's very calm of you."
"I'm not calm. My hands have gone."
"I can feel your hands. They've gone."
"I'm just — we don't have to solve it standing at the bar. That's all. We've got a bit of time before we have to know anything."
Hannah pulled back far enough to look at him. There was colour high on her cheeks and her eyes were bright and she was not crying, quite, but it was a near thing, and she was also, faintly, starting to smile, which he did not understand and which he clung to like a man clings to the one warm thing in a cold room.
"Nine of them," she said. "About nine months. In case the Herbology didn't cover that either."
"I know how long — "
"I'm teasing you, love." She wiped under one eye with the back of her wrist, brisk, and the smile steadied. "God. Look at us. Two grown adults."
"Terrible," Neville agreed. "Shouldn't be allowed near the manticore claw."
She laughed at that, a wet undignified laugh, and put her forehead back against his collarbone, and he stood with his wife in the low amber light and did not, in fact, know how he felt, and found for the first time in three days that not knowing was a thing he could hold, if she was holding the other side of it.
***
He did not sleep.
He lay on his back with Hannah breathing slow and finally even beside him, worn out with the day and the telling of it, and he watched the ceiling go from black to charcoal to the pale grey that came before the birds, and he thought about a great many things, most of which were, when he examined them, the same thing wearing different coats.
There was the room, which there was not. There was the manticore claw and the cellar and the whole poison-and-staircase architecture of their lives, which could be solved, he supposed, the way people solved these things, with charms and gates and a great deal of moving furniture about. Those were not the things keeping him from sleep. Those were the things he let himself worry about because they had shapes and edges and you could pick them up and turn them over, and the other thing did not have a shape, or rather it had one enormous shape and he could not make himself look at it head-on.
He was going to be somebody's father.
He tried the word out against the dark. Father. It didn't attach to anything. When Neville thought of the word he did not get a picture of himself. He got a photograph on his gran's mantelpiece of a broad, laughing man in Auror's robes with his arm round a fair woman, both of them young, both of them fixed forever at the age they'd been before the world ended for them. He got a long white ward at St Mungo's that smelled of clean linen and disinfectant, and a bed with the covers tucked square, and a man in it who looked a little like the photograph and a great deal like nobody, and who had never once, in Neville's whole life, said his name.
That was the picture the word gave him. That was the father he had.
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at Hannah in the grey light, at the shape of her cheek and the fair hair come loose across it, and he thought: you at least had one for a while. You knew what it was. Hannah's mother was buried in a churchyard in Kent, taken by Death Eaters in the spring of Hannah's seventeenth year, and Hannah could still tell you the exact weight and feel of being someone's daughter, could tell you how her mother laughed and what she smelled of and the particular tune she hummed doing the accounts. Hannah had lost a real thing. Neville had lost the idea of one. He didn't know which was worse and he was ashamed of even ranking them, lying there in the dark doing sums with grief.
The birds started up in the guttering. The grey turned gold at the edges. Beside him Hannah slept on, and the person he was frightened of was there too, he supposed, no bigger than a broad bean, keeping its own counsel, and Neville lay awake until the Alley below him began to wake and clatter, and he did not find the feeling either.
They did not talk about it, exactly, over the days that followed. They talked around it, and near it, and sometimes they laid a hand on it and took the hand away again. Hannah told Tom she'd not be doing the heavy lifting for a while and let him draw his own conclusions, which he did, delightedly and loudly, so that by Thursday half the Alley was buying Neville pints he didn't want and clapping him on the back in a manner he found he couldn't return. Neville smiled and nodded and let the drink go warm in front of him and thought that everyone in the world seemed to know how to feel about this except the two people it was actually happening to.
He went out to the greenhouse.
There was a greenhouse behind the pub, small and cramped and entirely his, wedged into the odd triangle of ground where the Leaky Cauldron's back wall didn't meet its neighbour's at any sensible angle. Hannah called it his sulking shed, with affection. It was where he went when a term ended badly or a plant he'd nursed for two years finally died on him or he simply needed to be somewhere that things behaved according to rules he understood. Plants were honest. You gave them light and water and the right soil and you did not lie to them and they did not lie to you. If a thing was going wrong you could usually find out why. He had spent the worse parts of his youth wishing people were more like plants and he had never entirely stopped.
He went down the rows in the green underwater light and touched leaves and checked soil and pinched a dead head off the pelargoniums, and it was, as it always was, a comfort, right up until it wasn't.
He found the seedling in among the herbs.
It was in the wrong pot. It was coming up strong and glad in the corner of a wide shallow tray of thyme, a fat pair of seed-leaves already thickening into something taller, and it was not thyme and he had not planted it. He crouched down to look. He knew what it was almost at once, the way you know a face across a crowded room before you've placed it — a foxglove, a common wild foxglove, the kind that grew in every hedgerow in Britain and would grow, given half a chance, out of a crack in a paving stone. A seed had got in somehow. On the wind, on his sleeve, in the boot of an old bag of compost. It had found soil that wasn't meant for it and water meant for something else and it had come up anyway, in the wrong place, unasked, and it was thriving.
Neville knelt there a long time with his thumb against the little stem.
The sensible thing was to pull it. It would crowd the thyme; it didn't belong; it would want more room than the tray could give it, and foxglove was poison root and stem and flower and no thing to have coming up unplanned in a greenhouse behind a pub that was already too full of poison. He knew all this. He had taught all this. He put his thumb and finger round the base of the stem to draw it, gently, the way you take out what doesn't belong.
He didn't draw it.
He stayed there in the green light with the little unasked thing between his fingers, and he thought about all the reasons to pull it, every one of them good, and he thought about the fact that it had come up anyway, glad and green and entirely itself, having chosen the worst possible ground and made a go of it, and after a while he took his hand away and stood up and went and found a bigger pot.
He didn't tell Hannah about the foxglove. He wouldn't have known how to say it without saying more than he meant.
He went to St Mungo's on the Sunday.
He hadn't planned to. He'd meant to spend the morning re-potting and the afternoon doing the beer order, and instead he found himself at half past ten standing in front of the wardrobe in a clean shirt, and Hannah, who missed nothing, looked at the shirt and then at his face and said only, "Give them my love," and did not ask, and he loved her for the not-asking more than he'd have known how to say.
The Janus Thickey Ward was on the fourth floor, at the quiet end, past the tea trolley and the sign that asked visitors to keep their voices low. Neville knew the way with his feet. He'd been coming his whole life, first dragged by the hand by his gran in her vulture hat, sat down in front of two people who frightened him and told to be a good boy for his mother and father, and later on his own, more often than his friends had ever known, because it was not the sort of thing he'd found the words for at school. He nodded to the Healer at the desk, a kind round woman who'd been there years and knew him.
"They're both having a good day," she said, which was what she always said, because a good day and a bad day looked, to anyone but her, exactly the same. "Your mum's been at her sweets."
His parents were by the window. There were two chairs and a low table and the light came in white and even and made everything look scrubbed. His father sat very upright in a dressing gown with the cord tied neat, gazing at a point on the far wall with the mild pleasant blankness that Neville had spent forty years failing to find a way behind. His mother was in the other chair in a cardigan buttoned to the throat, her hands busy in her lap with something Neville couldn't see.
"Hello, Dad," Neville said. He pulled the spare chair round and sat close. "Hello, Mum. It's me. It's Neville."
Neither of them looked at him. He hadn't expected them to. He sat with them anyway, the way he always did, and told them about the term just gone, and about a second-year who'd nearly lost a finger to a Snargaluff and been terribly brave about it, and about the orchid he and Hannah had finally found in the Hebrides, and his father watched the wall and his mother worked at whatever was in her hands, and Neville's voice went on quiet and even in the white room the way it did, because whether they heard him or not it seemed a poor thing to sit in front of your parents and say nothing at all.
He didn't tell them about the baby. He'd thought he might. He'd got the shirt on partly to tell them. But sitting there with his father's untroubled gaze fixed on the middle distance he found the words wouldn't shape themselves, because to say you're going to be a grandfather to a man who did not know he was a father was a cruelty, though only to Neville, since his father would not feel the edge of it. He looked at Frank Longbottom's big spoiled hands lying open on his knees and he thought about being carried on shoulders he couldn't remember, and the words stayed where they were.
His mother made a small sound. She had turned towards him. Her eyes, when they found his face, were as mild and far-off as his father's, but her hand had come up, and it was working towards him across the little space, and in the fingers was a sweet wrapper, a Drooble's Best Blowing Gum wrapper, folded and refolded and gone soft as cloth.
"Thanks, Mum," Neville said.
He held out his hand and she pressed the wrapper into his palm, patting it once, twice, her fingers very light, and then she withdrew and turned back to her lap and was gone from him again, off wherever she went. He closed his hand round the wrapper. He had a boxful at home, on the shelf above his and Hannah's bed, forty years of them, given to him one at a time by a woman who did not know his name and had never in his memory stopped, on some good days, reaching out to give her boy a sweet.
He sat there holding it and thought that this was what he had. This was the whole of what he'd been handed to pass on. A photograph of two young people who'd never got to be old, and a ward full of clean light, and a soft folded wrapper in the palm of his hand.
"I don't know how to do it," he said, very low, to the window and the light and the two people who wouldn't hear. "I don't know how you did it. I don't remember it. I've got nothing to go on."
His father watched the wall. His mother's hands moved in her lap. Out on the fourth floor the tea trolley rattled past, and someone laughed somewhere, and the world went on being ordinary all around the small unbearable island of them, and after a while Neville put the wrapper carefully in his breast pocket, over his heart, where it would ride home safe with the others, and kissed the top of his mother's head, and told his father he'd come again soon, and left.
***
He didn't decide to talk to Harry so much as run out of other people.
He couldn't say it to Hannah, because Hannah was carrying enough, and because the thing he needed to say was that he was frightened he'd be no good at it, and you did not hand your frightened wife your own fear to hold on top of hers. He couldn't say it to his gran, who would tell him not to be so wet and remind him that his father had been worth twelve of him and she'd have been right. He'd turned it over all week, and the person he kept arriving at was Harry, which surprised him and then, the more he sat with it, didn't.
Because Harry hadn't had one either. Everyone knew the shape of it, even if nobody said it out loud any more: the parents dead before Harry could walk, and then the aunt and uncle, the ones who'd raised him, whom Harry never spoke of and whose name he'd not taken and whose photographs did not sit on any mantelpiece Neville had ever seen. Whatever Harry knew about being a father, he hadn't learned it at anyone's knee. And Harry had three of them now, three children, and by every account Neville had ever heard he was drowning in them and happy.
So on the Saturday he told Hannah he was going to see Harry about a thing, and Hannah looked at him over the top of the stocktake and said, "A thing," in a voice that saw straight through him and let him go anyway, and he Flooed across.
He came out of the fireplace into chaos.
The house was the kind of house that had given up on being tidy sometime around the second child and made its peace. There were boots in the hall in three descending sizes and a broom-servicing kit spilled across the bottom stair and a drawing of what might have been a dragon or a very angry sun stuck to the wall at knee height with what he sincerely hoped was jam. Somewhere above him a door slammed. Somewhere below him something that was probably a person was shrieking with either delight or murder; it was hard to tell, with children, and Neville brushed soot off his shoulders and stood in the wreckage of family life and felt the whole enormous unshaped thing rear up at him again.
"NEVILLE." A boy of about nine came round the doorframe at speed and stopped dead, black hair on end, socks not matching, holding a Chocolate Frog card up like a trophy. "Neville, tell Albus that Ptolemy is rarer than Dumbledore. Tell him. He won't believe me and it's a fact."
"Er," said Neville.
"He's got it wrong," came a second, smaller, colder voice from the doorway, and here was Albus, seven and grave, arms folded, the very picture of a man who had been wronged. "Dumbledore's rarer. Everyone knows Dumbledore's rarer. James is a liar and a cheat."
"I'm not a liar, you're a — DAD. DAD, ALBUS CALLED ME — "
"He STARTED it — "
"Boys." Harry appeared in the kitchen doorway with a tea towel over one shoulder and a small girl attached to his leg like a limpet, riding his foot as he walked, and he did not raise his voice, which Neville noted, filed away, envied. "Neville's just got here and the first thing he's had to listen to is you two going at it over a Frog card. What's he going to think."
"That Ptolemy's rarer," said James, with feeling.
"That both of you need to go and put your shoes on if you want to be dropped at the Burrow, because I'm not telling your grandmother you couldn't come because you were fighting about cards. Go on. Shoes." Harry pointed. There was a brief hanging moment in which it might have gone either way, and then James wheeled and thundered off up the stairs with Albus in furious pursuit, still arguing the relative scarcity of dead headmasters, and the noise of them receded up through the ceiling, and the house dropped into a ringing kind of half-quiet, and Harry looked at Neville over the head of the child on his foot and grinned.
"Cup of tea," he said. It wasn't a question. "You look like you've come to tell me someone's died."
Ginny came down five minutes later with the boys more or less shod behind her, one shoe of James's still untied and Albus wearing an expression of deep moral injury he clearly intended to nurse all afternoon. She had her hair up and her wand behind her ear and she kissed Neville on the cheek and looked at him with the same quick reading glance her husband had, the Weasley X-ray that ran in the whole family, and whatever she saw she didn't remark on it.
"They're all yours," she said to Harry, meaning the two boys. "Mum wants them for the afternoon and honestly so do I, they've been at each other since breakfast. Lily's staying — she's got a cold coming and Mum's got enough. Say bye to Daddy."
"Bye Daddy."
"Bye Dad. Tell Neville Ptolemy's rarer."
"I will do no such thing," said Harry. "Go on. Be good. Don't let James talk you into the pond."
"That was ONE time — "
"Go."
And then, with the particular suddenness of it, they were gone, Ginny and the two boys through the fire in a whirl of green and argument, and the house exhaled, and there was only the three of them left: Harry, and Neville, and the small girl, who had detached from her father's leg and was now sitting on the kitchen floor conducting a complicated funeral for a stuffed hippogriff with a look of tremendous concentration.
"Lily," Harry said. "This is Neville. He grows the plants at the school your brothers are going to."
Lily considered Neville with round, unhurried eyes. She had a runny nose and a plaster on one knee and Ginny's red hair in two lopsided plaits, and she took her time about him, the way small children do, entirely unbothered by how long it went on.
"Are you the one with the toad," she said at last.
"I did used to have a toad," Neville admitted. "Trevor. He ran off, mostly, though. He wasn't much of a toad."
Lily absorbed this. "My hippogriff died," she said, "but he's coming back," and returned to the funeral, evidently satisfied that Neville was a sound enough person to have in the kitchen.
Harry made the tea. He moved round his own kitchen without thinking about it, the way Neville moved round the greenhouse, one eye always half on the child on the floor even while his hands did the tea, and Neville watched him and thought that this was a competence you couldn't see the edges of. Harry put a mug down in front of him, strong, no sugar, which was how Neville took it and which Harry had remembered from years of shared pints, and sat down across the scrubbed table, and pushed the fruit bowl aside so there was nothing between them, and looked at Neville, and waited. He was good at that. He'd got better at it as he'd got older. He didn't fill the silence to make himself comfortable. He just let it sit there and be Neville's to fill.
"Hannah's pregnant," Neville said.
It was easier to say than he'd thought, out here, to Harry, in a kitchen full of the evidence that the thing was survivable. Harry's face went through something quick and complicated and came out the other side into a grin so plainly, uncomplicatedly glad that Neville felt his own throat go tight.
"Neville." Harry reached across and gripped his forearm, once, hard. "That's — mate, that's brilliant. That's the best news. When's she — how far — "
"Early. Very early. We only just — a couple of weeks." Neville turned the mug round on the table. "We weren't trying. That's the thing. We weren't — we'd sort of decided we weren't going to. And then."
"And then," Harry agreed. He sat back. The grin gentled into something more careful, and he glanced down at Lily on the floor and back up, and Neville understood that Harry had heard the thing under the thing, the way Hannah had heard it, the way everyone who mattered seemed able to. "How's Hannah about it?"
"She doesn't know how she is. Neither of us does. That's — " Neville stopped. He'd come here to say something and now that the moment had arrived he found it sitting large and awkward in his chest and no obvious way to get it out. "Can I ask you something. And you can tell me to shove off."
"You can ask me anything," Harry said. "I might tell you to shove off."
Neville looked at the mug. He looked at the little girl on the floor, tucking her dead hippogriff under a folded tea towel with enormous tenderness. He looked, for some reason, at the drawing of the dragon or the angry sun on the wall, and he made himself say it, because he'd carried it up four flights at St Mungo's and out to a greenhouse and round and round a sleepless bed and he could not carry it on his own any longer.
"How did you know how to do it," Neville said. "When James came. You didn't have — I mean. Neither of us had a dad. Not really. Mine's — you know what mine is. And yours were gone, and the ones that brought you up, they weren't — you never talk about them, so I'm guessing it wasn't. So when James came, and it was suddenly your job, and you'd never had it done to you — how did you know how? Because I don't. I haven't got the first idea. I've got nothing to copy off. And I keep thinking, what if that's the thing you can't do without. What if you have to have had one to be one."
Harry didn't answer straight away.
He turned his own mug round on the table, a mirror of Neville without either of them noticing, and he looked at it, and when he spoke he spoke slowly, feeling for it, like a man crossing a stream on stones he couldn't quite see.
"I was terrified," he said. "When James came. I don't think I've ever told anyone how much. Ginny, maybe. Not even Ginny, all of it." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Everyone expects you to be — you know. Over the moon. And I was, that as well. But mostly I stood there in St Mungo's holding this — this tiny furious red thing that they'd just handed me, that they let me just walk out of the building with, no questions, like I had the faintest idea, and I thought, they've made a mistake. They've got the wrong bloke. Somebody's going to come and take him off me because it's obvious I don't know what I'm doing."
"Yeah," Neville said. It came out of him like something let go. "Yeah. That. That's exactly — "
"And the thing you're asking. The having-had-one." Harry looked up now, straight at him, and his face had gone very steady. "I thought that too. I thought it my whole way through Ginny being pregnant. Because you're right, I hadn't got one to copy. My mum and dad died when I was a year old, I don't remember a thing, not really — I've got a couple of moments and I don't even know if I made them up. And the people who raised me." He stopped. His jaw did something. "They fed me and they put a roof over me and that's about the kindest way I can put it. I grew up being shown, every single day, exactly how a child could be made to feel like they were nothing. Like they were a — a nuisance you were stuck with. That's what I had to go on, Neville. That was my whole education in it."
Lily had abandoned the funeral and come to lean against Harry's knee, and he put his arm round her without looking, absent and sure, and she stood there under it with her thumb near her mouth and her cold-blocked breathing loud in the quiet, and Harry looked down at the red crown of her head and then back at Neville, and something in his face had changed.
"But here's the thing I worked out," he said. "It took me years. It took me till Al, if I'm honest, before I really believed it. All that — everything they did to me. It didn't leave me with nothing. It's the opposite. It's the reason I know. Because I know exactly what it's like to be a kid who's frightened and not have anyone come. I know precisely what it feels like to be small and to think nobody's on your side. I know it in my bones. So when one of mine wakes up at two in the morning shaking about a nightmare, I don't have to guess what he needs. I know what he needs, because I'm the world expert in not getting it." He gave a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "It turns out the not-having is the whole qualification. Nobody knows what a kid needs like somebody who never got given it."
Neville sat very still.
"You've spent your whole life," Harry went on, quieter, "sitting with two people who can't say your name. I know about your mum and dad, Neville, everyone does, and I'm sorry, I've never said it and I'm saying it now. But you've been doing it your whole life. Turning up. Talking to people who can't talk back, because it's the right thing and because they're yours. You think you haven't got anything to go on. Mate, you've been in training since you were a baby. You just don't call it that."
"That's not — " Neville's voice wasn't behaving. He looked hard at the table. "That's different. Sitting with them, that's — I can't do anything for them. That's just showing up."
"Yeah," said Harry. "That's just showing up." He said it like it meant something enormous. "That's the whole job. That's — Neville, that's ninety percent of it, showing up. The rest is nappies and you learn those in a week."
Lily chose this moment to announce, into the quiet, "The hippogriff's alive again," with the air of someone delivering important news, and held up the stuffed animal, which had apparently completed its convalescence under the tea towel.
"Is he," said Harry gravely. "That's a relief. Is he hungry, after all that?"
Lily thought about it. "He wants toast."
"Course he does. Everyone wants toast. Give me a minute and I'll do the both of you some." Harry didn't move to do it yet. He kept his arm round her and looked at Neville over her head, and the corner of his mouth went up. "See, that's the other thing nobody tells you. Half of it's just — going along with it. Saying yes, the hippogriff's alive again. You'd feel a fool doing it and then you do it and it's the best part of your whole day."
Neville watched the little girl press her recovered hippogriff to her chest, restored to her, and felt something shift a fraction in his own chest, some weight moving over to make a bit of room.
"You still haven't told me how you knew, though," he said. "Not really. You've told me you were scared and you've told me the fear's — the fear's the training, which. All right. But you can't have just made it all up as you went. Somebody must've — you must've had someone. To copy off, even a bit."
Harry was quiet a moment.
"Yeah," he said. "You know, I did, and I didn't work it out till I was a lot older either. I never had a dad. But I had — God, when I actually count them up." He shook his head. "Ginny's dad. Arthur. He never once made me feel like I wasn't his, from the first summer I turned up half-starved on his doorstep at twelve. He taught me more about being a father by accident, just by being one in front of me, than anyone ever taught me on purpose. And there was — " His voice caught on the next one and he steadied it. "I had a godfather for a bit. Sirius. Two years, maybe, out of my whole life, and half of that on the run. But he'd have — he wanted to be everything to me and he barely got the chance, and I've thought since, that was a father, that wanting, even if the time was no good. And there was Remus. And Hagrid, first person who was ever glad to see me in my life, that counts for a lot when you're eleven. And Dumbledore, in his way, though his way was a maze." He turned his mug round again. "That's what I mean. I didn't have a father. I had about six blokes who each gave me a corner of one and never knew that's what they were doing. And when James came I found I'd got all of it stored up, all these bits, and I just — used them. Whatever Arthur would do. Whatever Sirius would've wanted to. You build one out of the people who showed up for you. That's allowed. I promise you that's allowed."
"I named him for two of them," he added, quieter, almost to himself. "James Sirius. My dad and my godfather. Neither of them got to see thirty. And Albus Severus after two men who I'd never once have called fathers while they were alive and who both, it turned out, in their completely maddening different ways — " He stopped. He shook his head again, and smiled, a bit crookedly. "Anyway. You collect them. And then you become one for someone else, and that's how it — that's how it keeps going, I reckon. That's the whole of it. Nobody starts from nothing. You just have to count what you've actually got."
Neville thought about his gran, formidable in her vulture hat, who had raised him hard and scared and loved to the marrow and never once let him drop, whatever it cost her, whatever she'd already lost. He thought about Pomona Sprout, who'd seen something worth watering in a round frightened boy that no one else had bothered to look for. He thought about the men and women he'd stood beside in a war when he was seventeen, and the way they'd made him into someone by simply expecting he already was. He thought about a soft folded sweet wrapper riding home in his breast pocket, given to him by a woman who did not know his name and had never stopped reaching out to give her boy a sweet.
He had thought he was starting from nothing. He did the sum again, the way Harry had told him to, and it came out different.
"Right," said Harry, standing. "Toast, before there's a mutiny. Here — " and before Neville had understood what was happening Harry had scooped Lily up off his knee and deposited her sideways into Neville's lap, hippogriff and all, with the total unconcern of a man who did this forty times a day. "Hold her a sec. She won't let me do the toast if she's on me, she wants to press the — you'll see. Two minutes."
And he went to the counter and left Neville sitting there with a child in his arms.
Neville went rigid. He held Lily the way you'd hold something you'd been handed at a checkpoint and told not to drop on pain of death, both arms locked, spine straight, and Lily, who weighed almost nothing and radiated a startling amount of heat, looked up at him with mild interest over the top of her hippogriff and did not seem to share his sense of emergency.
"You're doing it wrong," she informed him.
"Am I," said Neville faintly. "Sorry. How do — "
"You have to go soft." She wriggled, and burrowed, and rearranged him by main force, tucking herself in against his front and pulling one of his arms down round her like closing a gate, so that he was suddenly not holding her at all but simply had her, warm and heavy and snuffling against his chest, and the rigidity had nowhere left to go and so it went. His shoulders came down. His arms remembered they were arms. Lily gave a small satisfied sigh and settled, and put her thumb near her mouth, and watched her father make toast, and Neville sat in a stranger's kitchen with a sleepy feverish child breathing against his ribs and found that his own breathing had changed to match hers without his telling it to.
He looked down at the crown of red hair under his chin. He could feel her heartbeat, quick and small, through both their shirts. He didn't move. He was afraid to move and he was, underneath the fear, doing perfectly well, and both of those were true at once and neither cancelled the other.
Harry glanced over from the toaster and clocked it, and something moved across his face, and he didn't make a thing of it, which was a kindness.
"There you go," he said mildly. "Terrifying, isn't it."
"I don't want to drop her."
"You won't. You'd know if you were going to, and you're not. Look at you." Harry turned back to the toast. "That's the bit I couldn't have told you, actually. You can talk at a person about it all afternoon and it doesn't get in. And then you're just sat there holding one and your body sorts it out before your head's caught up. Nobody teaches you that. It's already in there. It was in you the whole time."
Lily's thumb had gone all the way into her mouth. Her eyes were getting heavy. Neville stayed very still and let her get heavy against him and thought about the foxglove in the greenhouse, come up strong and green in ground no one had chosen for it, and the boxful of soft sweet wrappers on the shelf above his bed, and the enormous unshaped thing that had reared over him all week, and found that it had come down, some of it, come down to a size he could get his arms round, the size of a warm small person who told you that you were doing it wrong and then showed you how.
"How do you know," he said, low, over her head. "When it's your own. That you're not going to — get it wrong. Muck them up somehow. That's the other bit I can't — how do you ever know you're not just going to be terrible at it in some way you can't even see."
Harry brought two plates of toast to the table and cut Lily's into soldiers without being asked and sat back down. He was quiet for a moment, considering, and Neville had the sense of a man deciding to tell the truth rather than the comfortable thing.
"You don't," Harry said. "That's the honest answer. You never know. I get it wrong all the time. I lost my temper with Al last week over something that turned out to be James's fault entirely, and I had to go up and sit on the end of his bed and say sorry, my son, I got that wrong, that was me and not you — and you know what, that's the job too. Not never getting it wrong. Getting it wrong and going back up the stairs. That's most of what they'll remember, I think. Not that you were perfect. That you kept coming back up the stairs." He picked up a piece of toast. "Nobody's ready, Neville. Nobody's ever ready. You just love them so much it frightens you, and you keep showing up, and you go back up the stairs when you've mucked it, and it turns out that's — that's nearly the whole of it. That's fatherhood. Everyone dresses it up. But that's the thing itself."
Lily fell asleep before the toast was cold.
She went the way small children go, all at once, mid-thought, her breathing gone deep and rattly with the cold, her hippogriff slipping from her fingers to the floor. Neville caught it without disturbing her, an instinct he hadn't known he owned, and set it on the table, and sat there not moving because moving would wake her, and Harry ate his toast one-handed and let the quiet be, and for a while the two men said nothing at all, which was its own kind of talking, the kind Neville had only ever had with the friends he'd been afraid alongside.
"You'll be good at it," Harry said eventually, not looking at him, looking at his daughter asleep on his friend. "For what it's worth. I've watched you with those first-years for years. Half of them come to you because they're scared of everything and you're the one teacher who never once made them feel stupid for it. You know why that is?"
"Because I was scared of everything," Neville said.
"Because you were scared of everything." Harry nodded. "There it is. Same as me. Same qualification." He finished his toast. "She'll be all right, your one. Whoever they turn out to be. They've got you, and they've got Hannah, and Hannah's the most sensible person in Diagon Alley, and you'll come back up the stairs every time. That's a good start. That's better than a lot of people get."
Neville looked down at the child asleep against him, at the warm weight of her, at the small rattly breaths going in and out, and he thought that an hour ago he had not known whether he could do this and that he still didn't, not for certain, but that the not-knowing had changed its nature somewhere in the last hour, had gone from a locked door to an open field, still frightening, but a thing you could walk out into rather than a thing that walled you off.
"Thanks," he said. It was nowhere near enough for what Harry had given him and he didn't have the words for the rest, and Harry, being Harry, waved it off before it got embarrassing.
"Take her off me before you go," Harry said, "she'll only wake up when Ginny brings the boys back and it'll be bedlam till nine. Here." He came round and lifted his sleeping daughter out of Neville's arms with the same easy sureness he'd put her there, and Lily stirred and murmured something about the hippogriff and didn't wake, and Harry settled her against his shoulder and stood there in his kitchen holding his child, a man who had built himself a father out of dead men and other people's dads and the sheer bloody-minded refusal to hand down what he'd been handed, and grinned at Neville over her head.
"Go and tell your wife you're going to be all right," he said. "Because you are. And send word when the baby comes. I want to be one of the blokes."
"One of the — "
"The ones you collect. For them." Harry jerked his chin at the general idea of the child that didn't exist yet. "Every kid needs a few spare. I'll take a corner, if you'll have me."
Neville had to look at the floor for a second before he could answer. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. I'd have you."
He Flooed home from the kitchen fire with the taste of a stranger's tea still in his mouth and the ghost of a warm small weight still on his chest, and the last thing he saw of that house was Harry standing in the middle of the wreckage of it, boots and drawings and a broom kit spilled down the stairs, holding his sleeping daughter and lifting the other hand to wave, entirely at home in the chaos, entirely a father, having started from less than nothing and got here anyway.
***
Hannah was doing the till when he came through, cashing up in the last of the daylight, a column of coins in front of her and the ledger open and her hair coming down the way it did by the end of a long day. She looked up when the fire flared, and she read his face the way she always read his face, and whatever had changed in it she found at once, because she went still with a coin halfway to the stack.
"Well," she said. "You went the colour of the ceiling on Monday and you've come back a different colour entirely. What did Harry say?"
"Loads of things." Neville came and sat on the stool across the bar from her, on the customer's side, where he'd stood a week ago telling her there wasn't a room. "Most of them I can't even — I'll not be able to say them right. He's got three of them, Hannah. Three. And the house is bedlam and there's jam up the walls and one of them was having a funeral for a hippogriff on the kitchen floor, and he's — " He stopped, and started again. "He was so happy. In the middle of all of it. He never had a mum or dad, not really, worse than me if anything, and he's got three now and he's up to his neck and he's the happiest I've ever seen him."
Hannah set the coin down on its stack. "And that helped."
"It did. I don't know why it did but it did." He turned his hands over on the bar, looked at them. "He said nobody's ready. He said you just love them and you keep turning up and when you get it wrong you go back and say sorry, and that's — that's most of it, apparently. Coming back. He said the being-frightened is the qualification, not the thing that stops you." He looked up at her. "I've been frightened my whole life, Hannah. Turns out I've been doing my apprenticeship this whole time and never knew it."
Hannah came round the bar. She did it slowly, and she pulled the near stool round to face him, close, their knees between them, and she took both his hands in both of hers on top of the ledger and the coins, and she looked at him with her eyes very bright.
"Can I tell you something I've not said?" she said. "Because I've had it since about Thursday and I've been too frightened to say it out loud in case saying it made it not true, which isn't like me, and I'm sick of not being like me."
"Say it."
"I want it." Her voice wobbled and held. "That's the feeling. That's the one I couldn't find. I found it Thursday, in the cellar of all places, counting barrels, and it came up out of nowhere and knocked me flat and I've been sitting on it ever since because I didn't dare. I want this baby, Nev. I didn't plan it and there isn't a room and there's a manticore claw and I don't care. I want it so much I can't breathe when I let myself. And I couldn't say it because you were so frightened, and I didn't want to — I didn't want to weigh you with it if you weren't — "
"I want it too," Neville said.
He heard himself say it and knew as he said it that it was true, had been true, maybe, since the greenhouse, since the moment his hand had come away from the foxglove of its own accord. It hadn't felt like wanting, all week. It had felt like fear. He understood now, with Hannah's hands round his and her face wet in front of him, that they had been the same thing wearing different coats, the whole time, the way the important things always were.
"I've wanted it and been too scared to know I wanted it," he said. "Which is a very me way to go about a thing."
"It's an extremely you way to go about a thing." She laughed, and pressed the back of his hand quickly to her mouth, and laughed again. "God. Look at us. We could've just said. Days, we've had. We could've just each said."
"We're not very good at saying."
"We're going to have to get better at saying," Hannah said. "There's going to be a person. Persons need saying."
"There's going to be a person," Neville agreed, and this time when the enormous unshaped thing rose up in him it had a warm small weight to it now and a red crown of hair and a runny nose and a hippogriff, and it did not wall him off, and he found he could get his arms round it after all.
He took her out to the greenhouse before they went up.
It was nearly dark now, the Alley gone quiet behind its shutters, and the little glass house held the last green light of the day the way it always did, so that stepping into it was like stepping under water. Hannah came in behind him, still wiping her eyes, and looked round at the rows of pots and the drying herbs and the whole crowded thriving muddle of it, his sulking shed, and asked what he'd dragged her out here to see when there was a bottle of something upstairs with their names on it.
Neville led her to the herb bench and showed her the foxglove.
It had settled well into its bigger pot. It stood up strong and green and glad in the failing light, a hand taller already, the first faint promise of a flower spike beginning to rise up out of the middle of it, and Hannah looked at it and then at him, waiting, because it was, to anyone who wasn't him, only a weed in a pot.
"It came up on its own," Neville said. "In among the thyme. Last week. A seed got in somehow — the wind, or my sleeve, I'll never know — and it took root in soil that was meant for something else and drank water that was meant for something else, and it came up anyway. Strong as you like. In completely the wrong place. Where nobody planted it and nobody asked for it." He put a finger very gently against the stem. "It's poison, mind. Root and leaf and flower, the whole plant, every bit of it. No sensible person would let it come up in a greenhouse behind a pub that's already full of things that'll kill you."
Hannah looked at the foxglove for a long moment.
"You didn't pull it," she said.
"I went to. I had my fingers round it." He took his hand back off the stem and looked at it. "I couldn't do it. It had come all that way and made a go of it in the worst possible ground and I couldn't — I found a bigger pot instead. I couldn't even have told you why, at the time. I do now."
"Nev." Her voice had gone thick again. "It's a foxglove. It's a lovely, poisonous, entirely unasked-for foxglove."
"It's a volunteer," Neville said. "That's what we call it. When a thing seeds itself and comes up where you never sowed it. A volunteer." He looked at her in the green underwater light, at his wife, at the wet shine of her eyes and the smile pulling at her in spite of it. "I've been growing things my whole life, Hannah. I know how to do this bit, at least. You don't pull the strong ones just because you didn't plan them. You find a bigger pot. You give them more room than you thought you had. And you let them come up glad."
Hannah put her arms round him in the dark greenhouse and held on, and he held her, and between them, no bigger yet than a broad bean and keeping its own quiet counsel, the person who had seeded itself in the wrong place and taken root anyway rode along in the warm dark with the both of them, unplanned, unasked, entirely itself, and entirely wanted.
Above their bed there was a box of soft folded sweet wrappers, forty years of a woman reaching out to give her boy a sweet. There would be room on the shelf beside it, Neville thought, for whatever this new person turned out to need handing down. He'd work out what that was as he went. Everyone did. You counted what you actually had, and it was always more than you'd feared, and you found a bigger pot, and you came back up the stairs every single time.
He put his hand, very lightly, flat against the front of Hannah's apron, over the small unremarkable spot where the whole of the future was quietly getting on with the business of arriving, and left it there, and neither of them said anything at all, because some things are too big to say and don't need saying, and outside the last of the green light went to grey, and inside the little glass house the foxglove stood up tall in its new pot and reached, in the way of all growing things, towards whatever light there was.