Cold Feet

Harry’s suit hung from the back of the bedroom door, gently scenting the whole apartment with vomit. All things considered, he had managed to get out of bed at a reasonable kind of time, but he was still like a bear prodded awake halfway through winter. Hermione thought he was slightly pissed off that she hadn’t bothered to undress him when she put him to bed the previous night. *She* was still very pissed off he looked like a bespectacled alien baby instead of the handsome man she had agreed to marry at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Really, he looked awful. It was worse than she remembered. Those permanent marker eyebrows simply wouldn’t shift, no matter how many times Harry used her exfoliator. ALL her exfoliator – she found the empty tube in the bathroom dustbin.



“You’ve used at least six Galleons’ worth of my skincare,” Hermione snapped. It was an insult to add to the injury of having been coerced into babysitting that night. She still couldn’t believe Harry had volunteered them. To make things worse, he seemed excited about the prospect.



“Francis can watch ‘Star Wars’ with me,” he said happily. “Get his education in Muggle classic films started young.”



“Ginny said he’d be asleep most of the time,” she shot back irritably, more to reassure herself than anyone else.



*



After lunch, Hermione rejoined Ginny in Diagon Alley to spend the afternoon shopping for her date. Or, more accurately, Ginny spent the afternoon shopping while Hermione hung around outside changing rooms, pushing Francis’ pram up and down aisles of robes to stop him fussing. He had developed very early a man’s natural hatred of shopping.



But he wasn’t the only one who got fed up by dinnertime that day. Ginny took half the stock of Wanda’s Boutique into the changing room over a period of three hours, but they still went home empty-handed but for a tub of Sleek-Eazy’s (Hermione’s) and a cheesy Valentine’s card for Harry. Though, given the way he looked, Hermione couldn’t imagine she’d be feeling much more romantic towards him by the fourteenth.



“Nothing suits me anymore,” Ginny moaned as they walked down the main street. “I keep forgetting my body has completely changed shape since I last bought anything new.”



Hermione didn’t bother to contradict her, but attempted to change the emphasis by suggesting instead that it was a good idea to wear a tried-and-tested outfit in a first-date situation in any case. “You must have an old favourite in your wardrobe,” she continued. “A lucky dress or robe. Something you can just throw on and automatically feel confident and comfortable in.”



“Hermione, I had a whole wardrobe of clothes that make me look and feel a million Galleons. Then, I had a baby. Nothing feels good to wear anymore. I feel as comfortable as a walrus wearing a g-string in just about everything I own.”



She wasn’t to be persuaded otherwise, so they parted again until the evening. When Hermione got home, Harry was downstairs, helping Mrs. Smith degnome the back garden. She found she was relieved to have the house to herself for just a little while, reading the papers with the Wizarding Wireless tuned to music rather than Quidditch results for once. She was certainly relieved not to have to look at Harry’s bald head.



*



At six o’clock, Ginny reappeared outside the apartment with Francis, ready for bed in his Moses basket, and a suitcase that had looked rather large even before she got out her wand and returned it to its original size.



“Does he really need all that stuff?” Hermione was horrified, imagining a plethora of baby accessories she wouldn’t be able to master.



“The suitcase is for me, stupid.”



As they set up Ginny’s pre-date preparation station in the spare room, Hermione had a flashback to their college days. Back then, with nothing to do but study, they would spend whole afternoons getting ready for the big events in their social calender – Christmas dinners, end of semester balls, Halloween parties. Now, Ginny spread her bounty over the bed, and Hermione bounced Francis on her hip and tried to amuse him with a succession of brightly coloured bangles and strings of beads while Ginny tried on each combination of clothes and shoes for her benefit. She must have brought across her whole wardrobe.



“I haven’t worn anything without an elasticated waist for the past year and a half. I don’t know if I can even fit into this anymore.”



Ginny held up a beautiful black dress that Hermione had been particularly envious of when she brought it back from New York while they shared their bachelorette pad. She fingered the hem with longing, just as she had done when Ginny first tipped it out of a bag and onto Hermione’s bed.



“If this doesn’t fit anymore, you can have it.”



“I promise I’m not praying that I’ll get,” Hermione told her with her fingers crossed beneath Francis’ backside.



Ginny slipped the dress on over her head. There was an ominous tearing sound as she smoothed the skirt over her hips. “I’m not even going to try doing the zip up,” she sighed, pulling the dress straight back off. “This is yours, I guess, if you can fix the rip.”



Hermione tried not to look too pleased.



“You know what? I think you should probably go for something low-key anyway. There’s nothing worse than getting all dressed up to find out your date was thinking more along the lines of two beers in a pub than a three-course meal in a posh restaurant. Do you know where he’s taking you?”



She named a small, classy restaurant in Diagon Alley.



“Oh, well. In that case, you definitely shouldn’t wear the dress. They’ll think you’ve come to do the cabaret.”



Ginny tried to laugh. She smoothed down Francis’ hair and his small mouth curled up at the edges, revealing his first and only tooth like the tip of a snowdrop poking through the winter earth.



“He’s got such a pretty smile,” Hermione remarked.



“It’s probably wind,” Ginny scoffed. But Hermione could tell she didn’t mean that. Francis had been smiling properly for months. Ginny gurned at him. He gurned back harder.



“You think this is very funny, don’t you, Francis? Your mum getting ready to go on a date. You think I should give up and stay at home in my tracksuit, don’t you?”



Francis bobbed excitedly on Hermione’s knee, happy to be the centre of attention again. Ginny’s own smile slipped away.



“He doesn’t think you should stay in,” Hermione interrupted quickly, much as she would have welcomed an excuse not to be left alone with Ginny’s child. “He wants you to go out there and get him a tall, dark, handsome stepfather, preferably with a flashy car he can crash into a wall as soon as he gets his license. Francis wants you to have the wonderful time you deserve tonight.”



“Tell me why I’m bothering again?” Ginny sighed. “I just feel so old and rusty.”



“You’re twenty-six!”



“I’m so out of practise.”



“True. But it really will be okay. You were always good at the art of flirting. At the very least, you’ve got a night on the town lined up – a night away from the baby, the Burrow and another meal for one. That’s got to make a change. Look.” She pushed some silky black robes with a wide neck towards Ginny. “This is beautiful. You always looked nice in this. I’ve always wanted it.”



“It’s five years old. Completely out of fashion.”



“Or a classic. It makes you look elegant. Accentuate the positive,” Hermione told her. When she and Ginny had shared an apartment, Ginny had that very affirmation written on a piece of parchment and stuck on her mirror. In those days, it was she who was constantly the cheerleader, accentuating the positive in Hermione.



Ginny pulled on the robes and gave herself a critical look in the mirror.



“Wear your hair up,” Hermione suggested.



She piled her coppery-red hair on top of her head. “It’s not too bad, I suppose.”



“It’s great.”



“Then I’ll wear them. Okay with you, Francis?” Ginny picked him up for another hug. He immediately deposited a small dribble of sick over her shoulder and down her back.



“Perhaps it’s lucky,” Hermione suggested.



“Like bird shit?” Ginny cried. “Oh, Merlin. It’s an omen, Hermione.” She sat back down on the bed. “I shouldn’t go out. This date is going to be a disaster. I shouldn’t even be asking you to help me.”



“I don’t mind babysitting,” Hermione insisted.



“Perhaps I mind the idea of you babysitting.”



It should have come as no real surprise that Ginny was nervous about leaving her alone with Francis for the whole evening, even with Harry there. Sure, she brought Francis over to their place at least a couple of times a week, but although Hermione and Harry told her repeatedly that she should just relax while she was in their apartment, pretty much every time Francis squeaked, Ginny was the one who raced to comfort him. Hermione had given him his bottle plenty of times, but always under supervision. She had never changed a nappy. Ginny had a knack of making it seem she was totally relaxed about Francis; she said she didn’t want to be one of those mothers who swooped in every time the baby so much as wrinkled it’s brow. But Hermione knew she was actually hyper-vigilant.



So, she was facing a night of double stress. It was her first date in months, and the first time she had left Francis alone except in the very capable and experienced hands of Molly Weasley. Hermione and Harry, for their part, were going to be babysitting together for the very first time – if Mrs. Smith ever stopped drip-feeding him sherry in thanks for all his hard work and let him come home, that was.



“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” Ginny asked her.



“How hard can it possibly be?” Hermione shrugged. “I’ve just got to keep both ends clean, right? Besides, Francis isn’t going to give Auntie Hermione any trouble.”



He blew a bubble of saliva.



“You do understand how the nappies work, right? Perhaps I should show you one more time.”



“For God’s sake, I know how to deal with a nappy. Or Harry does. Francis will be asleep most of the time.”



Francis was already rubbing his ear, a sure sign he was getting tired – a habit, amusingly enough, that he shared with his Uncle Ron. Ginny took him from Hermione one last time and gently settled him on the soft blankets in his Moses basket. He kicked his legs in half-hearted protest but his eyelids were already starting to droop. She leaned over him and cooed until they closed. A real baby hypnotist.



“I could still cancel,” she said as Francis tried and failed to hang onto wakefulness for just a little longer.



“You can’t.” Good friend battled bad babysitter inside Hermione. “You have to go now. I know it’s a good idea to keep them waiting for a while on the first date, but there’s late and there’s so late, he thinks you stood him up and goes home to read the newspaper.”



“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Ginny said one last time.



“And I can’t believe I’m going to be a babysitter.”



“Neither can I. Night-night, Francis.” She kissed the tip of her finger and gently pressed it to his forehead. “With any luck, he should sleep until I’m back here, but make sure you keep checking on him, won’t you? And call me if anything happens. Anything at all. Even if he so much as sneezes.”



“Ginny, we’ll be fine. If you stand there worrying any more, I’ll start to think you’re just looking for an excuse not to go.”



“Perhaps I am.” She chewed her lip.



“This isn’t the Ginny I know. Go.”



“I’m going.”



“You’ll have a great time.”



She passed Harry coming up the steps on her way down to the street. He gave her a low, appreciative whistle that made her beam, then joined Hermione at the top of the stairs to wave her off.



“I’m glad I’ll never have to do that first date thing again,” Harry told her.



Hermione looked pointedly at the grey smudge of marker pen where his eyebrows had once lived. “Don’t count on it,” she half-smiled.



She made him tiptoe into the house so as not to disturb their sleeping visitor.



*



Francis Weasley was gorgeous from the very beginning. He wasn’t born looking like Winston Churchill wondering who’d stolen his cigar, as most babies were. Hermione didn’t have to lie about how beautiful he was while secretly thinking he resembled a frustrated raisin. He didn’t look angry to have been forced from the comfort of the womb into the harsh light of the St. Mungo’s delivery room. At least, she didn’t think he looked angry. She wasn’t there at the time, though she was supposed to be.



Though Molly and Arthur Weasley were wonderful, loving people – she had known them as long as she had known Ginny herself and adored them both – Ginny often complained that she found them stifling. After all, she was their youngest child and their only daughter, and they still seemed to see her as the baby of the family. But at the same time, Ginny’s life choices frustrated and bewildered the Weasleys, especially since they had to bankroll so many of them. When she got pregnant, Molly and Arthur Weasley almost went insane trying to work out whether to be angry that Ginny was having a baby outside marriage by a man whose surname she wasn’t even sure of, or delighted she was carrying another grandchild to add to the growing collection they had. And that had been bad enough without the explosive reactions of all six brothers to her news.



After one particularly explosive argument, Ginny had proclaimed that Harry and Hermione were her chosen family, and when the bump started to show, it seemed to make sense that she would abandon the lease on the tiny apartment she had been planning to take. Eventually, she moved back to the Burrow, where she lived still until while she looked for a bigger place, and when the moment came, Hermione was the only person she wanted to be at the birth. Not her mother (though they had made up in plenty of time), not the father. Just Hermione.



“That’s great,” she said when Ginny told her. “I’m honoured. I really am.”



But when Harry got home from work that night and saw how white her face was, he assumed that Voldemort had returned from the grave.



Anyway, when she agreed to be Ginny’s birth partner, she also agreed to go to all the antenatal classes that were usually attended by a husband or boyfriend. Hermione was able to skip quite a few, using work as an excuse. She’d never had so many late nights in the office. Those she did attend, she found excruciating; it was weird as hell, laying her head on Ginny’s bump to ‘connect’ with the life inside it.



“Count ten breaths,” said the course leader.



Hermione could only hear her own blood rushing in her ears. She’d never been what you could call a tactile person. She didn’t think she and Ginny had ever really had any body contact at all before those classes, unless they were drunk and draping themselves over each other in same fake lesbian display to titillate the boys while they lip-synced to the music.



She got over it. Or rather, she got away with it, with not looking like she hated the thought of touching something so “naturally wonderful” as a pregnant woman’s stomach, though she would have rather put her head in a Manticore's mouth. She was fine at the synchronised panting, too. The worst came when she was left alone with the men.



It happened about a month before the babies were due. While the mothers-to-be bonded over coffee, the ‘partners’ were taken into another a room to watch a kind of Wizarding version of a sex education video, to see what they had agreed to let themselves in for when they agreed to be present at the birth. The course leader explained that by having them watch it without the expectant mothers, she was giving them a chance to express what they really felt about the impending result. They could vent their deepest fears without risking offence to any of the mothers, she promised them. They could ask the questions they felt stupid asking. They could say whatever they wanted.



Horror, horror, horror. Those were the words that ran through Hermione’s head as they settled themselves on the chairs in front of the magical projector thingy. Hermione sat at the back. She hadn’t made many friends amongst the fathers-in-waiting. She suspected they thought she was a spy for the girls. As the course instructor fiddled with the projector, the men joked about the “nasty” film they were about to see, but their voices had taken on the timbre of teenage soldiers in World War One, about to be sent over the top of the trench and into no man’s land. She knew exactly how they felt.



‘The Miracle Of Birth’ flickered the title. A voiceover introduced the brave couple who had allowed their ‘special moment’ to be recorded. Louise, the wife, looked fat and angry as she panted through her early contractions, and Matthew, her husband, looked terrified. Their smiles for the camera weren’t fooling anyone. From their hairstyles, Hermione guessed that the bump must be about twenty-years-old by now. She thought with a mirthless smile that this might be ‘The Joy Of Sex’ couple nine months after they’d been right through the book. She wondered if they were still together. Cut to the delivery room, the Mediwitch and the Healer, all smiling. Nothing to worry about. This was something they did every day.



There was a brief overview of the kind of equipment you might see in the delivery room – charms put up to monitor the mother’s heartbeat and the baby’s heartbeat, towels. Hermione, in her fear, thought she saw a needle longer than her palm.



Louise shuffled into the room while Matthew supported her elbow, then she climbed onto the table. Hermione thought about that scene in the Hitchhiker’s Guide where the alien cow was wheeled into the restaurant live to describe its own best cuts.



“Your wife might choose to squat,” the course leader interjected, making Hermione think of mud huts and witch doctors.



There was some talk of removing body hair and enemas, which Hermione tried hard to block out. Meanwhile, Matthew took his place at the head of the bed and Louise clutched his hand.



“And there’s the money shot,” one joker announced as they zoomed in between the mother-to-be’s legs.



“Louise has been having contractions for a little over three hours,” the voiceover announced cheerfully. “Her cervix has already dilated to five inches and it won’t be long before we can see the top of the baby’s head. This is what is known as ‘crowning’.”



Crowning? More like drowning. When Louise pushed and her vagina edged still wider, Hermione held her hand to her breastbone as though she had just found a grisly corpse in her living room.



“Push!” someone funny yelled from her left.



“Breathe!” someone funnier added.



“Push.”



“Breathe.”



“Push.”



“Breathe.”



The instructions were coming from the film now.



“You can breathe along with Louise if you like,” said the course leader. “Just like we’ve been teaching you to breathe along with your partners.”



No one took her up on her suggestion.



In fact, after the initial burst of catcalling, which Hermione had feared would set the tone for the whole film, the room very quickly became silent. The wisecracks stopped. Hermione could hear her pulse thumping in her ears as the on-screen action grew more urgent. Grown men shifted in their chairs like children who wanted to be able to duck behind the couch for the scary parts, and Hermione sank down as far as her seat would allow, putting her hand to her mouth.



It wasn’t long before you could see the baby’s head clearly. It had hair, slicked dark and black with mucus. Even though Louise was thoroughly dilated by this time, it still didn’t seem quite possible that anything but a baby with a head shaped like a carrot was going to be able to get out.



Hermione crossed her legs, realising she was experiencing the female equivilant of these boys being forced to watch a fellow man being repeated kicked in the balls. Her pelvic floor muscles tried to take refuge in her intestines. Then, there was the screaming. How long did it go on for? Certainly not as long as it went on for in real life, she was sure. But the pushing, the breathing and the wailing just wouldn’t seem to stop. Seriously, all the charms, spells and potions wizards and witches had at their fingertips, and women still had to go through this kind of agony? That couldn’t be right, she thought, almost hysterically. Was it always like this? It was probably worse. They wouldn’t have chosen the footage of a really painful, horrific labour for an education film, would they? The human race would die out in one generation. One way to wipe out the problem of worldwide overpopulation. Or perhaps, she struggled to think more optimistically, this was actually one of the more agonising labours the crew captured during the film’s making and they decided to run with this one because, after this horror movie, a real, live birth would seem like a child’s cartoon. It was a good idea to show the worst. Hermione was a big believer in being prepared for the worst, because then, you could only be pleasantly surprised.



“You utter bastard!” Louise yelled. “You fucking fucker!”



Hermione wondered whether they’d left in the cursing to prepare the husbands for the same treatment when their turn rolled around.



“It’s nearly over,” her husband simpered. He’d said that fifteen times. “It’s nearly over.”



'Please, let him be telling the truth this time,' Hermione thought. Being the coward she was, she closed her eyes completely for the final push and wondered how she’d ever got into Gryffindor in the first place. She could face snarling three-headed dogs, trolls, centaurs, Death Eaters and Dark Lords, yes – but this was far beyond the limits of her bravery. Far, far beyond.



“Aaaggghhh! You cocksucker!”



“It’s a boy.”



Slap.



“Waaaaahhhhh!”



Cut to Louise and her husband in the aftermath. The baby, washed and wrapped in a white blanket but still an ugly dark pink colour, slept in it’s mother’s arms.



“I’m very glad I saw the birth of my son,” Matthew said unconvincingly. He delivered that line with the kind of conviction you expected off someone who had been under torture for the past twenty-four hours.



“I’m so glad he was able to be here with me,” said Louise. She would probably never have sex with him again.



“And that’s just about it,” the course leader said as she flicked on the lights. “The miracle of birth. Any questions.”



Whoever said, “Do we really have to go through this?” spoke for all of them.



*



Hermione followed the white-faced men back to the room where the women for waiting for them, gobbling down chocolate-chip cookies ruthlessly while they could still get away with claiming they were eating for two. The boys all smiled happily enough and pronounced the film “interesting” and “fascinating” but Hermione could tell something had shifted irrevocably over the past thirty minutes. While the men talked about how much easier it would be now that they knew what was coming, she could only hear the things they had said while outside.



“I’m never having sex again,” one had announced. “At least, not with my wife.”



Prior to watching that film, birth had been such an abstract concept. Most of the guys had been very pleased with the idea of their wives being pregnant; it was proof they weren’t “shooting blanks”, as Harry would put it. Then, there was the happy side-effect of having a wife with bigger tits. After the film, the men looked at their wives as though they knew a terrible secret the poor things weren’t yet in on. They alone knew these glowing creatures with their big, bouncy boobs were about to subject them to the kind of entrail-popping display that only Sigourney Weaver could reasonably be expected to be prepared for.



Well, that was how Hermione felt when she looked at Ginny. God knew how much worse she would have felt if she knew that, after this hideous experience, she might be expected to continue to have sex with her. She made a pact with herself there and then that if she ever, ever, ever had to be in that table with her legs in stirrups, she would be there on her own. She didn’t want anyone to see her defecate on the delivery table. Forget this modern father-in-the-delivery-room bullshit, no spectators allowed unless they could offer drugs or pain-numbing spells. Not even her mother. Harry would be banned from the hospital or made to wear a blindfold.



“How was the film really?” Ginny asked her, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She reached up and took Hermione’s hand to pull her down to her level. “Look at their little faces.” She glanced around the room at the men. “Terrified, all of them. Thank Merlin I’ve got you as my birthing partner. Girls are so much braver.”



“Absoultely,” Hermione agreed.



*



Waiting for the final month of Ginny’s pregnancy to pass was like waiting for her N.E.W.T scores. Most of the time, she was happy. Most of the time, she didn’t think too much about The Day at all. But there were nights – far too many nights – when she stared up at the ceiling above her head and prayed that the father of Ginny’s child would ride back into her life on his broomstick and insist on taking Hermione’s place in the delivery room.



How could you tell your friend that you’d rather she experienced the ‘miracle of life’ on her own?



Ginny started having serious contractions while Hermione was at work one Wednesday afternoon. Her waters broke all over the Weasley’s maroon couch while she was reading an interior decorating magazine, alone in the Burrow. Hermione got the owl right in the middle of the show. Nathan scuttled across the room with the message scribbled on a piece of parchment.



'Hermione,



Labour. St. Mungo’s. Now.



Ginny'



Elle glanced at the note first and knew exactly what it meant. “You better get going.”



“But we’re in the middle of the show,” Hermione replied hopefully.



“Forget that, woman! We can cope without you. Now, go, for Merlin’s sake!”



Elle thought she was being considerate. She had no idea how little Hermione wanted to be at St. Mungo’s right then, that she wanted to do anything that might buy her just a little extra time. How long did it take for someone to give birth once the contractions had started? It would take her ten minutes or less to Apparate to the dilapidated alleyway just beside the disguised St. Mungo’s if she dragged her feet, and another ten to navigate her way to the ward. Call her cynical, but she thought that hoping the baby would be born in the next twenty minutes might be wishful thinking.



So, she rushed to the door, yelling goodbye to her colleagues, and the moment she was out of sight, slowed right down and walked as slowly as she possibly could downstairs to the Apparation Point. Which took the whole of six minutes.



Two seconds later, she was standing down a dark, dank little alleyway beside the concealed St. Mungo’s hospital.



Two minutes after that, she was in the hospital itself, and contrary to the tradition of hospital receptionists, the witch on the maternity-unit desk was incredibly helpful.



“Follow me,” the receptionist smiled. She led Hermione through a white corridor that reminded her of those documentaries of near-experiences. People having near-death experiences always floated along a brightly lit corridor, didn’t they? They had to walk past six other delivery rooms on their way to the one where Ginny was waiting for her. She felt like that FBI agent visiting Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. From each room emanated the sounds of crying or moaning, and at any moment, Hermione expected a bloodied face to smash up against one of the small windows.



She had never felt quite so scared – and she’d met Voldemort!



As they neared Ginny’s room, the corridor grew ominously quiet.



“Has she had it?” Hermione asked hopefully.



“Oh, no. She’s been waiting for you to get here,” the witch smiled.



Then, she heard it: the most heart-stopping sound since Harry fell twenty feet from his broom onto solid concrete in their final year of Hogwarts, breaking his left femur, and Hermione was near enough to hear the damn thing crack like a gunshot. It was the kind of horror movie kind of noise that made you wish they hadn’t invented films with sound. It was the wail of a soul in purgatory, the scream of the damned. It was the sound of Ginny Weasley in labour.



Hermione stopped dead outside the door, having a sudden flashback of Louise from the film, legs wide and in the air, blood on the bed, trying to pass something the size of a basketball through an opening that had never had to deal with anything bigger than a chipolata previously. It was the agony of a camel squeezing through the eye of a fucking needle, Sigourney Weaver splattered with gore as the thing ripped through her comrade’s chest. She grabbed the receptionist by the arm as blackness crept in at the edges of her vision.



“You’re not going to pass out, are you?” she asked.



“I just don’t think I can do this,” Hermione told her.



And she vomited all over herself, the receptionist and the shiny tiled floors. Then, she slipped in her own mess and fell over.



She went down as heavily as Harry did when plummeting from his broomstick ten years ago and cracked her head on the corner of a trolley. She was out cold. Within seconds, she was being levitated onto that trolley and checked for signs of head injury. The Mediwitch who treated her smiled knowingly when her colleague told her she had just wheeled Hermione up from maternity.



So, that was how she came to miss Francis’ birth. She had a bump on her forehead pretty much the same size as the bump Ginny shed the same day. When he was satisfied that it was safe, Hermione’s Healer allowed Harry, who had left work to race to her side, to take her to go and see Ginny and her newborn.



“Always trying to be the centre of attention, our Hermione,” Ginny announced when they arrived in her room.



After a couple of minutes of obligatory baby admiration, Harry went out to get some sandwiches, leaving Hermione and Ginny alone. Considering she had just given birth, she was looking remarkably perky.



A knock at the door and a Mediwitch bustled in to check on the new baby’s progress. “Incredibly short labour,” she said in something like admiration as she placed Francis back in Ginny’s arms.



“Thank Merlin,” Ginny grumbled. “If you can call three hours of the most intense pain short of having your nipples pierced with a blunt needle ‘short’.”



“You must be sad that you didn’t get to see your son being born, though,” the Mediwitch added.



To Hermione.



Ginny just about managed to hold in a snort of laughter until the Mediwitch had left the room.



“My son?” Hermione asked, incredulous.



“This is London,” Ginny reminded her. “Even in the Wizarding World, there are more than a few babies who have two mothers and two fathers.”



“I’m sorry I missed him being born,” she said then, almost sincerely. In truth, she knew she had been more frightened of the impending birth than Ginny had been, and weeks later, as Ginny recounted her tale of pain, fear and inprompto diarrhoea in front of a simply gorgeous Healer, it got increasingly hard to say she was sorry to have missed the moment when Francis came into the world.



“So, what’s he going to be called?” Hermione asked as she sat in the chair beside Ginny’s hospital bed and popped grapes into her mouth in quick succession. ‘Jacob’ and ‘James’ had been the top two contenders for boys’ names in the weeks running up to the birth. If the baby had been a girl, she would have been another Hermione, despite Hermione’s protests that her name was old-fashioned and unwieldy.



“Francis,” Ginny said suddenly.



“Francis?”



“It’s in a book I’ve been reading.” She nodded to her overnight bag. Hermione could see the corner of a romance novel sticking out.



“What is that? One of those trashy novels?”



“I found it in the waiting room while I was in for a check-up last week. It’s really rather good.”



“But naming your son after a hero in a cheesy bodice-ripper?”



“I don’t care. I like it. I really think it suits him.”



She tucked her finger into the blankets around the baby’s head and gently pulled them away so that Hermione could see his tiny face.



“Francis. Francis Aidan Weasley. It’s a manly name. He’s going to be a hero.”



“Trust me, that job is seriously overrated,” Harry said as he stepped back into the room, having returned with sandwiches. “He should be a gardener instead.”



But it didn’t take long for them to get used to it. And now, six months on, it seemed almost impossible that Francis might ever have been called something else.



“Handsome boy,” Hermione murmured over his sleeping head when she checked on him about thirty minutes after Ginny’s departure for the restaurant. “The handsomest boy in the world…”



“What about me?” Harry crept in and was standing beside her. He wrapped his arms around her slim waist. “Have you forgiven me for the eyebrows yet?” he asked.



“If you change the first nappy,” she told him. “And the second one,” she added while she still had the upper hand.



“Anything you say, babe. I just love changing nappies.”



Hermione had a feeling this babysitting thing was going to be easy.



As long as Harry was in charge.