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Ginny was exhausted, that bone-deep weariness that she well remembered from giving birth to James. Only this time it was a bit worse; James had been a surprisingly easy birth, given that he had been her first and that the Healers had told her that her hips were so narrow. But this time, fate seemed to have called in its due, and she’d endured nineteen hours of labour before the baby had finally made his way into the world.
Their second baby. Their second son. And they were going to call him Albus Harry.
When they had found out that James was on the way, Harry had been nearly giddy with euphoria, telling anyone who would listen (and some who wouldn't) that he was going to be a father and spending inordinate amounts of time decorating the nursery and buying teddy bears and baby clothes and miniature Quidditch equipment.
It was only when they were alone, one night when they lay cuddled together in bed, Harry stroking the small swell of her stomach with something very close to awe, that he had asked about names.
“What are we going to call him? Or her?” he’d asked, his fingers tracing spirals and whorls over the taut skin.
She’d never heard such a ridiculous question—there was only one answer for either. “Lily for a girl, and James for a boy, of course, silly,” she said, smiling at him, and he’d looked up at her with an expression of such delighted surprise that she couldn’t help but kiss him, and he’d responded with equal enthusiasm, and for a while any thought of baby names was quite driven from both their minds.
Afterwards, when his hand had found its way back to the little baby-bump, he’d asked about middle names. Ginny had sort of shrugged her shoulders. “It’s sort of tradition to give the firsts their parents’ as middle names,” she said. “Like you, and me, and Bill, and Teddy. So, that would be Lily Ginevra or James Harry.”
Harry wrinkled his nose. “I like Lily Ginevra, but Harry James and his son James Harry?” he’d asked dubiously, and she’d snorted.
“Well, what would you like, then?”
He’d cut his wide green eyes to the side and bit his lower lip. “Well,” he said haltingly, “My dad and Sirius were best friends—almost brothers—and they—they both gave their lives for me…” His voice got steadily softer and then trailed off, as he often did when trying (and failing) to articulate his feelings, but he was more than clear to her, this sweet and silly man that was her husband.
“I like James Sirius,” she said gently, and his answering smile was almost shy, and when they fell asleep, it was with his arms around her and their linked hands on the baby.
And in six months’ time, James Sirius Potter was born.
Harry had been in a transport of joy, and her family had made a tremendous fuss over the birth of the first grandson. Teddy had been a bit jealous, of course, but when Harry had made him an honorary big brother and charged him with looking out for little James, any ill feelings were lost and all was well.
Of course, Harry had said saucily one night when James was a few months old (and mercifully sleeping soundly), he still wanted to try for their Lily Ginevra too. Ginny had remarked that he’d be up for “trying” even after they got their Lily Ginevra, and he’d admirably demonstrated just how much he’d agreed.
And somewhere in their zeal to take advantage of those few times they’d had alone with a new baby, they’d been a little less careful than they ought, and they got their chance for Lily Ginevra sooner than they’d anticipated.
Percy and George had ribbed Harry mercilessly (which always made Ron look vaguely nauseous, the hypocrite—he had no room to talk, what with Hermione's stomach entering the room before the rest of her), but Harry had been too happy to care (much). But this time, it had been Ginny who had brought up names as they lay in bed after finally getting James to sleep.
“Lily Ginevra, of course,” he said promptly. “For the two most wonderful women in my life.”
She’d laughed, pleased, and then admonished him, “Yes, but what if it’s a boy?”
“It’s a girl,” he said complacently.
Ginny snorted. “Careful, Harry—Mum was sure that all of my brothers were girls, and look how that turned out.”
Harry chuckled “Well, she was right about you, wasn’t she?”
“No,” she answered. “By the time number seven came along, she’d given up. I was going to be Walter Linus.”
Harry laughed aloud at that one. “Well, I still say it’s going to be our little Lily, but if you think we need a boy’s name ready, did you have something in mind?”
“Well, this one won’t be James, so we can give him your name for his second name,” she said, and Harry shrugged in agreement. “But I don’t know about a first name. My brothers used up a good chunk of the Weasley and Prewett boy’s names, and if there are any more boys born, I bet they’ll use up even more—and anyway, I wouldn’t want a name that was just from my family and didn’t mean anything to you.”
“I named James from my family,” Harry protested.
“We named James from your family,” she said firmly. “I knew Sirius too—and I owe your dad as well, you know.”
He’d smiled at that. Ginny had smiled back, and then mulled over the problem a bit. “I suppose you could look back at some of your other Potter relatives,” she mused. “Dig around in that awful genealogy book of Sirius’s mum’s—and there are a couple of Potters on the old Black family tapestry. Or go and ask your aunt about your mum’s family,” she added after a moment’s thought.
Harry snorted. “Maybe I could name him Vernon,” he suggested, and she’d punched his shoulder. He’d grinned unrepentantly, and then his expression turned pensive.
They’d sat in silence for a moment, thinking, and just as Ginny had been about to rattle off a few random names that she liked, Harry had said, “Gin?”
She’d looked at him expectantly; his voice was just a little hesitant, and she knew that he wanted to say something, something important. “Do you…d’you think maybe…what about Professor Dumbledore?” he’d got out in a rush. The surprise must have shown on her face, because he hastily went on. “I mean, he’s been dragged through the mud since he died—I wasn’t too fond of him just afterwards either, really,” he admitted, “and I know that, well, I know he set me up, and a lot of other people too, but…he did care about me. And he wanted me to live, even thought he didn’t know if I would. D’you think maybe we—we could name a boy after him?” He looked up at her, his green eyes unsure, and Ginny could never refuse him anything when he looked at her like that, and she smiled at him, amazed as she always was with the size of his heart.
“Albus Harry, then?” she asked, and Harry gave her that adoring, sheepish smile.
And, true to her suspicions, Lily Ginevra had not made an appearance, and so here they were, her arms full of blue blankets and new baby boy.
Ron loudly announced to all who would listen that the poor kid was going to be forever cursed to look as though a hurricane had hit his head. Harry himself was inordinately pleased by the wild shock of thick black hair that crowned little Albus’s head, so different from the soft, ruddy brown wisps that had covered James’s head when he’d been born (Harry’s reply to her brother was that he must have passed on his spattergroit to Rose. Ron hexed him, but Harry had just laughed). He was sitting by the bed now, just looking, his emerald eyes bright as he watched his son nurse.
When he was finished, Ginny passed the little blue bundle over to his father, who took him gladly and began to coo; she never failed to take some small, private amusement in watching The Boy Who Vanquished Voldemort simply melt into so much quivering jelly when he held a baby.
“He’s going to look like you,” she said, watching Harry watch the baby curl his tiny fingers around one of his father’s.
Harry glanced up at her with a smirk. “I think he’s going to have your nose,” he countered.
“Maybe,” she ceded, “but he’s got your chin and your cheekbones—and he’s obviously got your hair.” Harry grinned. “And your eyes,” she added.
Ginny blinked; Harry’s smile was suddenly gone, and he was looking back down at his new son with a strange expression, as though seeing him for the first time.
It was true; James had been born with eyes of that muddy grey peculiar to all babies, before they’d settled into a warm hazel-brown. But the moment Albus had opened his eyes, Ginny had seen that they were a brilliant bottle green.
Just as she could see them now, bright as new leaves in the concerned little face of the baby in Harry’s arms, who was regarding his father soberly from his blankets.
“My mum’s eyes…” she heard him murmur.
Harry was quiet for a long time. “Harry?” Ginny finally asked. He looked up at her, seeming startled, and handed back the baby with something almost like guilt. Then he sat back down, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced as he looked at the floor.
He started fidgeting soon after, rubbing absently at his scar and raking his fingers through his hair to rub at the back of his head—the way he always did when he was agitated. She let him fret for a bit as she rocked Albus, and when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to say what he needed to on his own, she gently prodded, “Harry.” He looked up. “What is it?”
He seemed to slump in his seat, and turned away to look out the window. He was silent a moment more, looking out at the February doldrums and chewing his lip, and then abruptly he spoke. “I never thanked him,” he blurted. “I never did anything for him—and he did everything for me.”
“Who?” Ginny asked, perplexed.
“Snape.”
Ginny blinked at the sudden change of subject, but wasn’t too surprised—this was something that had plagued her husband for years, and he tended to revisit it, to worry at the problem like a hangnail.
Harry had risen from his seat and was now pacing, that familiar, jerky gait of his that she remembered all the way back to their days in the DA.
“I insulted him, I lied to him, I hated him—I wanted to kill him.” He stopped mid-stride, a pained look on his face. “And I’d be dead if it weren’t for him.”
“Harry—you didn’t know,” she said patiently, trying to convince him as she always did. “And you’ve done everything you could since then—he was buried with full honours, he got the posthumous Order of Merlin like all the others—you even fought to get his portrait made for the Headmaster’s office.”
Harry waved that aside. “What does that mean? A footnote in the history books and a nasty painting to sneer at the future Headmasters?” he demanded. “His reputation is saved—so what? What did he ever get?” He turned away, his hands clenched on the windowsill.
“He loved my mum so much,” he said after a moment, his voice quiet now, “that he gave up everything for her—for me—and he got nothing. And because of him, here I am, with a wife, a son—” he turned back to her, “and a new baby with her eyes. And Snape’s dead.”
He flopped back into his chair, and Ginny didn’t speak. Nothing she could say would help. The man had still been a complete git, and even Harry admitted that much, but Harry was right—Snape was dead, and there was nothing anyone could do to change it. And Harry, being Harry, had never stopped being rankled by the injustice of it.
But she didn’t mind, not even after all the other times he grappled with it—he wouldn’t be her Harry if it didn’t. So she sat quietly, letting him work through it on his own, rocking little Albus while she waited for Harry to speak again.
And finally, he did. “Ginny?” he said quietly, looking up at her with his beautiful green eyes. He cast around for a moment, and then said, “I really don’t care if any of our kids have my name, you know. But I—” he stopped again, looking away. “He’s got my mum’s eyes, Ginny,” he said quietly, pleadingly, almost as if it hurt him. He shut his eyes, breathed deeply for a moment, as though steeling himself, and then he turned to look at her, his eyes wide and lovely and impossibly green, and filled with that familiar determination to do right that made him Harry. “Can we name him Severus?”
Ginny stared at him, her mouth falling open. “What?”
Harry’s face, so full of resolve a moment ago, seemed to wilt when confronted with her obvious disbelief. “Not—not his first name,” he hastened to add. “It’s just—I feel like I owe him—something,” he finished lamely. His hands fisted in his hair again as he looked at the floor, his agitation apparent. “Not for his reputation, not for fame just—just something—something for him.”
She was still silent, having no idea what to say. Harry was quiet too, gripping the hair at the back of his head. Was he serious? He wanted to name their baby after Snape?
“I just wish,” Harry whispered suddenly, “I just wish I could—that I could say thank you—and tell him—tell him that I’m sorry.”
Ginny’s vision blurred. She looked down at her little son, his eyes so like his father’s, and then looked up at Harry, that brave and wonderful man she had married. “I love you,” she said, and he looked up at her, surprised and unsure. She reached for him, her free hand tangling in the hair that he had been tugging only moments before, and she kissed him. Hard.
She tasted salt on his lips; a tear or two must have escaped her eyes. They broke apart, his expression uncertain but with a flicker of guarded hope. She leaned her forehead against his, her fingers rubbing the back of his flushed neck, and she smiled and said, “Albus Severus.”
And his eyes lit up with amazement and happiness and relief, and when he kissed her fiercely, this time she was fairly sure that the tears she tasted weren’t her own.
He sat down again when they parted, looking at her with an expression very near to rapture, and reached over to touch their son on his tuft of black hair.
“Your father is turning in his grave,” she remarked, and any of Harry’s remaining tension seemed to dissolve, and he gave a short bark of laughter. “Sirius too, really,” she added.
“The thing is, so is Snape, probably,” he admitted, looking at the floor.
“But I bet your mum is happy,” she said, and he looked up at her. “And so am I.”
And Harry smiled, that shy, happy smile that she loved so very much, and she leaned forward for another kiss. And when they broke apart, they looked down at little Albus Severus, watching them solemnly with his emerald green eyes.