Chapter Text
“So…everyone knows I’m pregnant,” Harry says as they’re walking down to the Great Hall the next morning, both their robes glittering like mad. “Like…the whole school.”
“Yes.” Draco squeezes his hand encouragingly.
“And I had an attack…in front of the entire school.”
“Yes. But you can blame it on the curse-entity.”
“And you’re, like, okay with…the fact that everyone saw, and everyone knows?”
Draco stops in the middle of the corridor outside the Entrance Hall and takes Harry’s face in his hands.
“Harry,” he says softly. “Are you afraid I don’t want people to know we’re literally married?”
“Not literally,” Harry can’t help saying. “We haven’t had, like, the white robes. We’re bonded until we die, but—”
“I want people to know we’re married.”
The sound of everybody in the Great Hall is starting to fill up the corridor. It’s a great hum, getting louder every second, and Harry knows it’s a good thing. He does.
“Er…” Out of nowhere, there’s sweat all down Harry’s spine, and his heart is pretty much falling out of his mouth. “I’m, like—I look pregnant. I actually look pregnant. I don’t have any charms.”
“You don’t have any charms, and you look wonderful.”
“Should I—oh my God. What should I do? I can’t do this.” Harry feels like he’s falling, only Draco’s hands are there, steady on his face. “Should I do a primal scream? I don’t—”
“Shh,” says Draco, but it’s sort of too late.
Harry completely freaks out.
He comes to again with Draco holding him in some alcove near the Entrance Hall.
“What was that?” Harry feels completely ridiculous. He’s pretty sure he, like, hyperventilated. “Jesus in a mist.”
“I think—don’t take my word for it, Potter—but I think you’ve just had a panic attack.”
On the last evening, when all the students are packing, Harry roams the halls as best he can.
He is so. Bloody. Pregnant.
Really, someone should give him a medal for walking as far as he has. Tomorrow, he’s got to be somewhere he can get naked immediately.
When he’s sure no one’s watching, Harry leans his face near to the stone wall.
“Listen,” he whispers. “Could you just, like, come back for a second? I wanted to—”
“Potter, what on earth are you doing?”
Harry startles and tries to leap away from the wall to hide what he was doing, but he’s too pregnant, so he trips over his feet.
Doesn’t fall, though. Draco catches him.
Then Draco feels his forehead and looks deeply into his eyes. “Are you ill? Have you gone into labour? You’re not supposed to, you know. If you have, you must tell me.”
“I’m not in labour. I was just…looking around.”
Draco narrows his eyes, then pops them open wide again. “You were looking for the Fount!”
“I was not.”
“Oh, my darling, you are so sweet. Of course you want to make a better wish. You must realise, however, that the Fancy Fount did not respond to desperation. It responded to whimsy. And it—”
“Whimsy!”
“—only appears once in a thousand years. If I could get it back for you, I would, but—”
There’s a cheery little pop behind Harry.
He whirls around—more of a slow sort of turn—and there it is.
The Fancy Fount.
“You’re joking,” Draco says.
Harry rushes to the weird little bump in the stone at his current top speed, which is no speed at all.
“Please.” His reflection ripples in the shallow pool. “Let us keep the tower. I really like it, and I’m sort of scared you’ll take it away. I want to keep it. Help me keep it.”
At the far end of the hall, Pansy and Hermione come around the corner.
“Is that—it is!” Pansy shrieks. “Berry, don’t move! Stay right where you are!”
“Also, I wish Pansy and Hermione would hurry up and snog each other,” Harry says quickly. “I wish Hermione and Blaise would come back next year. And Seamus and Dean. Everybody. Please.”
“What is she calling you?” Draco laughs. “Barry?”
“Berry. Like a…like a berry. It’s my nickname.”
Halfway to the Fancy Fount, Hermione trips on Pansy’s foot or robes or something and goes spinning away from her like she’s a ballet dancer. Pansy goes after her, howling with laughter, and they end up in an alcove, still laughing but sort of muffled because of the snogging.
Draco gives the Fount a fond pat. “See you soon, I should hope.”
The Fount disappears with another pop.
In August, Harry wakes up in the Manor under a load of Cooling Charms and totally disoriented.
“God. Baby? Baby,” he calls, but his baby son doesn’t appear.
Harry gets out of bed—Draco’s bed, in Draco’s rooms—and washes his face and does a charm for his teeth and tries to remember when he fell asleep.
It was sometime in the morning.
The baby was up most of the night, doing this grizzling thing that made Harry actually cry, and Harry had a bit of a freakout this morning. He vaguely remembers giving an impassioned speech about how he’s got to be able to sleep because his magic is, like, a hundred times the size of other people’s, and did everyone want him to throw up again? Because Harry doesn’t want to!
Narcissa listened to most of it, then whisked the baby out of Harry’s arms and said lie down in that bed, there, would you please?
So Harry did.
And now it’s afternoon, and he’s not sure where the baby is.
He follows the thread of the baby’s magic—and also Draco’s, and a bit of Narcissa’s—down to the ground floor and through the house and out to the garden.
Narcissa is sat on a blanket under the shade of a tree, and Draco’s stretched out with his head in her lap.
Lucius has got the baby strapped to him in a carrier that Harry’s pretty sure he got when Draco was a baby.
He’s really sure, actually. Lucius has told him about it several times.
Lucius is also on his broom, flying a cautious fifteen feet above the ground in slow, soothing loops. Harry can see from here that he’s keeping up constant chatter. He pauses to adjust the baby’s sunhat, which is at least twice the size of the entire baby.
Harry joins Draco and Narcissa on the blanket and sprawls out flat on his back.
“Sleep well?” Draco asks, and takes Harry’s hand.
“Didn’t know where I was when I woke up.”
They watch Lucius fly in his steady, careful loops for a while.
“Father looks happy,” Draco says. “Don’t you think so?”
“Oh, yes,” Narcissa agrees. “He couldn’t be more thrilled if he caught a sunbeam.”
Lucius has caught a sunbeam, Harry thinks.
Harry’s caught one, too.