Entry tags:

fanfiction, nanowrimo, writing

NaNo FanFic Part 28
Previous Part
Pairings this part: Harry/Luna
Rating: PG
Notes: This is the last part.  I may dabble in this universe some more later, there's just so much going on!
This part has an ILLUSTRATION!  You'll hit the thumbnail in the text, just click to go to the full size art.


Winter Solstice 2008, Orchard's End, Devon

Harry couldn't sleep. 

He ran his fingers through Luna's curls on the pillow beside him. She was so beautiful, even with exhaustion written large on her face. If he kept fidgeting he would wake her, and she needed what sleep she could steal.  He eased out from under the quilts and walked around to the foot of the bed.

A narrow bar of cold moonlight sliced across the hood of the bassinet. Harry reached in to straighten the sleeper bunching around his daughter, and Sophie whimpered. One of her tiny hands clutched at nothing, her mitten sleeve folded open. Harry glanced up at Luna; sometimes the baby's slightest noise had her shooting up out of bed. The quilts did not move. 

Harry let the back of his smallest finger trail along Sophie's cheek.  She turned her head toward it, her lips pursing automatically. Her soft little whimpers would become hungry cries soon enough. Harry summoned a bottle from the charmed basket on the bedside table and levitated it to the windowsill beside the silenced rocking chair.

"Shall we let your mother sleep another hour or two, Sophie?" he whispered, carefully lifting her into his arms.  He was not a large man, but infants made him feel a great clumsy brute.  Sophie's head rested comfortably in his hand. When he sat down in the rocking chair and crossed his ankle over his knee, he could set the hand holding her head on his knee with her body resting on his forearm. She was just long enough to kick his chest, and the child had a very strong kick. Luna knew that better than Harry, having been on the receiving end for months. Harry unbuttoned the bottom of her sleeper to free those feet, folded back her other mitten sleeve, and eased the wee knitted cap from her head. 

She was not exactly bald as she had looked when she was born two days before.  Her head was covered by a soft white-blond fuzz that was almost long enough to be considered hair.  Her skin was practically translucent still, veined with blue except for her cheeks.  Her eyes were the same gray as threatening rain clouds, but Molly insisted they would clear into a real color in time.  She gripped his pinky in one hand and Harry bent to kiss those delicate fingers. 

Just when Harry felt himself overcome with awe and tenderness, Sophie's face turned red and she began flailing her limbs as a tremendous cry pierced right to his eardrums.  He glanced toward the bed even though he knew the one-way Silencing charm was activated on the chair.  Luna had not yet moved. 

"Shh, shh, I've got your milk right here." Harry snatched the bottle from the sill and tested it quickly on his ankle, since his wrist was occupied. Sophie's cries became happy slurping and sucking, and Harry shifted her closer to his body, setting both feet on the floor, so that he would be more comfortable holding her and the bottle.

He rocked gently and looked out at the waning gibbous moon just clearing the treeline. "Well, Sophie. How shall we spend our Longest Night?" Sleeping, eating, and excreting, of course, which would be the whole of the newborn's world for months yet.  Harry laughed softly, thinking of Ron's glee at the opportunity to get Harry back for the relentless teasing during Daniel's first months. Harry understood better now what Ron had really been feeling then, but been unable to articulate.

Holding Sophie was terrifying. 

He could feel the future stretching before him, amplifying that terror through all the expectations of fatherhood.  She would walk, and talk, and grow strong, and learn.  She would know the things he had never known; loving words upon waking, a tender touch before bed, a strong, gentle hand to pick her up when she fell. She would always know that someone loved her, and never be hidden, alone and ashamed, in the dark.

Even if Harry himself were not there, Sophie had the extended family - a family of choice, not blood, and in its own way more binding - to give her those things, no matter what.  This was the future for which he had fought, for which so many had died.  Wasn't it?

"Things are changing. Everything will be different for you."  Sophie opened her eyes and looked at him, pushing the bottle away with hands and feet. "Oh, finished so soon?  We'll see about that."  Harry plucked a clean cloth nappy from the stack by the chair and draped it over his shoulder, then moved Sophie upright against it, and ran a soothing hand up her back to cradle her head.

For such a small person, Sophie made fantastically loud noises. Her burp could challenge  Ron's. She grabbed his hair, since she was now so close to it, and Harry turned his head so that they were almost nose-to-nose. "Yes, that's Daddy's hair, and he'd like to keep it on his head, please."  She tugged.  Harry winced.  

They were still staring at each other when Luna sat up in bed with a muffled cry. "Harry!" 

Harry quickly spoke the keyword to cancel the silencing charm on the chair, and looked away from his daughter long enough to catch his wife's eye. "Here." 

Luna brushed her hair back from her face and took a couple deep breaths.  "Is Sophie -"

"She just ate," Harry said, and winced again when Sophie discovered that she could grab his hair with both hands when his head was turned. "Come sit with us.  We can start a tradition." 

Luna smiled and threw off the quilts, then pulled on her dressing gown.  Her slippered feet made no sound on the wood floor.  "I don't think we'll fit," she said as she crossed to the window.    

"Of course you will. You both fit last week." Harry bent his head as he shifted Sophie until she rested comfortably on the right side of his chest. There was hair there she could clutch, too, so she should be entertained.  Her tiny little voice made innocuous noises, but Harry was not fooled.  She would turn into loud hungry Sophie again in a matter of hours.  Or wet angry Sophie.  Or both at once. 

Luna ran her hand through his hair and laughed as he patted his lap with his free hand.  "Come on, love," he invited. "I promise the chair won't break." 

Harry took Luna's hand and pulled gently.  She sat down across his lap and laid her head on his left shoulder, watching Sophie blink sleepily.  "Tell me when we get too heavy," she whispered, and ran her fingertip down the baby's arm.  Sophie's fingers grasped that finger when it crossed her palm. 

Harry rested his cheek against Luna's hair. Outside, the moon had cleared the trees, its light grown pale and cold but still brighter than the few visible stars.  A touch of frost coated the branches and the eaves of the house in ice. The wind would cut to the bone, Harry knew from previous experience, but winter stopped at the window. 

It was a beautiful night.  

END