The long distance -- yeah. I hadn't told Tonks, but I was starting to think about maybe giving up my job here and looking for something in New London instead. There's always work for someone who's good with creatures, or I was thinking of going to Gringotts and trading on my work with the goblins to see if they had any openings. So I could be closer, you know? But then MLE raided Doughty, and it was only idle thoughts anyway, we really do need someone up here with access to dragons. (As Snape reminds me every time he sees me, we are always in need of dragon's blood.)
But yeah. The raid was what made me think it was time to start telling people. I was very nearly there when MLE came in, you know? I'd just apparated in up the street. And Tonks said that when she got shoved through the Floo, she had an awful half hour of thinking I'd showed up and she hadn't noticed me, and that everyone she cared about was dead or captured, and that's when we decided, yeah, it's time.
I think that's what I'm worried most about. That I won't live to see him grow up, that we'll still be fighting this bloody war in twelve years' time and he won't ever get to go to Hogwarts, that he'll grow up without a mum or any of his dads or not live to grow up at all. That if he does grow up and we're all there to see it, that he might grow up and turn out like ... oh, like Percy, and we'll have to watch him buy wholeheartedly into the whole fucked up mess. And then there's the worries that aren't the same kind of worries that everyone with a baby on the way in the Protectorate share, that the magic will have done something to him or he'll wind up tied to the wards somehow and wind up hurt or dead when we do figure out how to drop them, that taking the wards down will wind up needing something from him that will hurt him.
Or, you know, just the usual fears, like what if he gets hurt or sick, or what if I wind up being rubbish at this parenting thing, or what if I can't make enough time and I miss his whole childhood and he grows up thinking of me as that funny stranger who pops in every now and then. That kind of thing.
But then I think of moments like ... oh, do you remember that one summer when the Twins had just started to walk, and they were taking up all Mum's time and effort and she was wearing herself thin chasing after them (and now that I look back on it, she was also being quietly terrified about all the risks Dad was taking with the Order), there was that time you'd gone off to do something outside and I got into Mum's makeup and painted it all over the bathroom walls? The last of her good lipstick, the kind you couldn't get anymore. And Dad came home and he was just at the end of his rope, and he found me, and the look on his face was just this utter exhaustion ... and then he started to laugh, and he didn't stop for five minutes, and when he was done laughing he sat right down there on the floor with me and asked me to explain all the pictures I'd drawn, and he helped me make up stories for all of them.
I'm looking forward to things like that. Getting to know a little person who's half me and half Tonks, and seeing what kind of things he comes up with.
We've told Little Miss she's going to have a brother, yeah. She seems unenthused so far. But she's been having a rough few weeks, the poor kidlet.
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But yeah. The raid was what made me think it was time to start telling people. I was very nearly there when MLE came in, you know? I'd just apparated in up the street. And Tonks said that when she got shoved through the Floo, she had an awful half hour of thinking I'd showed up and she hadn't noticed me, and that everyone she cared about was dead or captured, and that's when we decided, yeah, it's time.
I think that's what I'm worried most about. That I won't live to see him grow up, that we'll still be fighting this bloody war in twelve years' time and he won't ever get to go to Hogwarts, that he'll grow up without a mum or any of his dads or not live to grow up at all. That if he does grow up and we're all there to see it, that he might grow up and turn out like ... oh, like Percy, and we'll have to watch him buy wholeheartedly into the whole fucked up mess. And then there's the worries that aren't the same kind of worries that everyone with a baby on the way in the Protectorate share, that the magic will have done something to him or he'll wind up tied to the wards somehow and wind up hurt or dead when we do figure out how to drop them, that taking the wards down will wind up needing something from him that will hurt him.
Or, you know, just the usual fears, like what if he gets hurt or sick, or what if I wind up being rubbish at this parenting thing, or what if I can't make enough time and I miss his whole childhood and he grows up thinking of me as that funny stranger who pops in every now and then. That kind of thing.
But then I think of moments like ... oh, do you remember that one summer when the Twins had just started to walk, and they were taking up all Mum's time and effort and she was wearing herself thin chasing after them (and now that I look back on it, she was also being quietly terrified about all the risks Dad was taking with the Order), there was that time you'd gone off to do something outside and I got into Mum's makeup and painted it all over the bathroom walls? The last of her good lipstick, the kind you couldn't get anymore. And Dad came home and he was just at the end of his rope, and he found me, and the look on his face was just this utter exhaustion ... and then he started to laugh, and he didn't stop for five minutes, and when he was done laughing he sat right down there on the floor with me and asked me to explain all the pictures I'd drawn, and he helped me make up stories for all of them.
I'm looking forward to things like that. Getting to know a little person who's half me and half Tonks, and seeing what kind of things he comes up with.
We've told Little Miss she's going to have a brother, yeah. She seems unenthused so far. But she's been having a rough few weeks, the poor kidlet.