Firewhisky Advice

Harry was starting to hate the month of August. When he was younger, he loved August. It meant it was nearly time to go back to school. It meant time at the Burrow after being stuck at the Dursleys. August was carefree days, bragging how far you could throw a gnome.

He missed those days.

He had come home a few days ago and walked into what felt like the refrigerator. This was climate control with teeth.

'Ginny!' he bellowed. 'What is going on? It's arse-bitingly cold in here!'

'It's not that bad,' she called from the kitchen.

'Not that bad? I can practically see my breath in here!'

'Oh, stop exaggerating. It's no colder than the Potions classroom.'

'Without the fires,' he retorted.

'Harry, come on... It's the middle of August, I'm boiling hot, and it's finally cool enough in here that I'm not just one giant sweaty mass of pregnant lady.' Ginny's eyes softened as she saw him shivering in his t-shirt. 'Go put on a jumper and I'll make you some tea.'

But now, he was standing in the shower, with the water as hot as he could stand it, trying to find something else to wash. He'd done his hair, and lathered the washcloth until it was a mass of suds, then proceeded to start at his ears and slowly work his way down to his toes.

What ever charm Ginny had used to keep the flat cool, it was working. Very, very well. Harry had taken to sleeping in a set of heavy flannel pajamas he rarely used, and socks on his feet. Ginny let him have the entire quilt, thankfully, so he didn't have to resort to layering on a few jumpers. It was the trip from the warm, steamy bathroom to the bed that was the problem.

Sending up a silent prayer, Harry twisted off the taps, and grabbed the towel he'd put a Warming charm on earlier. He dried everything thoroughly; even using his wand to make sure his hair was dry. He learned the hard way to not leave the bathroom with any part of his body wet. Especially his hair. Harry pulled on the pajamas that also had been hit with a Warming charm, as well as an old jumper and a pair of socks he'd picked up at Gladrags that were charmed to keep the wearer's feet warm. Taking a deep breath, he opened the door, and bolted to the bed, rolling up in the quilt, shivering a bit.

Ginny shook her head. She still thought it was stifling. Harry poked his head out of the quilt long enough to peck her on the cheek before pulling it back over his head. She pushed herself up into something resembling a sitting position. Sleep was not coming easily these days. Ginny found herself staring at the ceiling comparing herself to Molly. Not that Molly was perfect, by any stretch of the imagination in Ginny's opinion, but Ginny wondered how she could ever hope to measure up. She knew she was being silly, but Molly seemed to do everything Mum-related with one hand tied behind her back, both eyes closed, while hopping on one foot.

'Ginny, I can hear your brain spinning.' Harry's voice floated from the depths of the quilt. His head popped out, even more disheveled than usual. He tightened the quilt around his shoulders and sat up. 'What'cha thinking about?'

'What if I mess up?'

'You won't.'

'How do you know?'

'I don't. But I do know that you got to watch two of the best parents around growing up.'

'That's a lot to live up to,' Ginny huffed.

'Ginny, we're going to make mistakes. We're going to say something wrong at some point in this kid's life, or do something that we're going to regret later. It won't make us bad parents. It just makes us parents. We won't be the first to do it and we won't be the last. We'll just try to do our best and try to raise our kid to be the kind of person we'd like him to be.'

Ginny stared at Harry, as if she had never seen him before. 'When did you get so wise?'

'That's what your dad told me last week. I was feeling a little panicky and he sat me down and gave me the Arthur Weasley Guide to Parenting.'

'Which was?'

'That was it.'

'Seriously?'

'Seriously.'

'That's Dad's big parenting advice?'

'Yup. Molly said the same thing.'

Ginny shook her head. 'Mental. The both of them.'

'Makes sense, really. How else do you think they handled the lot of us?'

'Are you saying we were difficult children to raise?' Ginny looked at him with a sinisterly risen eyebrow.

'Does the sun rise in the east?' Harry snorted. 'Between Fred and George pranking every living soul and all the trouble Ron and I got into? You and your temper? And Percy?' Harry regarded Ginny soberly. 'Your dad said the hardest thing he ever did was forgive Percy after the war. But he did it because it was the right thing to do. Because Percy was his son. And he'd never stopped loving Percy, just wasn't overly fond of his choices. And it was important to let Percy know that.' Harry paused, and wormed a hand out from his cocoon of quilts, and squeezed Ginny's. 'That's what good parents do. And that's what we'll try to do with ours.' He reached up to kiss her again. 'Try to get some sleep.'

*****

'What's it like?' Hermione looked at Ginny in fascination.

'What?'

'Well...' Hermione sort of gestured to Ginny's middle.

'I'm not sure I should tell you,' Ginny mused. 'You might not want to have children.'

'Is it that bad?'

Ginny caressed her stomach. 'No, it's not.' She seemed to look inward. 'It's certainly different. It's uncomfortable as hell. Well, now at any rate. It was all right until about five weeks ago. I don't even recognize my own body anymore. You get scared about now, because there's not a lot of room, and they don't move as much. So you wake them up, to make sure they're okay.' In illustration, she pushed the heel of her palm into the side of her stomach, and was rewarded with a nudge back. 'They sleep, you know.'

'No, I didn't,' Hermione murmured, eyes fixed somewhere above Ginny's navel.

'They can hear, too. If Harry starts talking, Sam starts trying to turn cartwheels.'

'Why do you call it "Sam"?'

Ginny shrugged. 'You have to call it something. Can't keep saying "it" all the time. It's really Sam-I-Am.'

'Green Eggs and Ham?' Hermione looked amused.

'Yeah.' Ginny smiled

'Do I want to know?'

'Just something Harry started using one day back in April. Kind of stuck.' Ginny stopped talking for a moment. 'You really get scared when you think of all the possible ways you can screw them up. Or you start having dreams. Weird ones.'

'How weird?'

'I had one last night that Harry got sent to Azkaban and the baby and I ended up in the streets. Or the one where the baby keeps crying and I can't find it. Or I drop it and watch it bounce down the stairs in slow-motion.' Ginny bit her lip. 'Or you just lie awake, staring at the ceiling, trying not to compare yourself to your mother, who does everything better than everyone else.'

'I thought you were looking forward to this?'

'I am!' Ginny said quickly. 'It's just... You worry... Because there's so much that can go wrong. And you just want everything to be perfect.'

'So...' Hermione began. 'Picked any names yet?'

'Bloody hell!' Ginny exclaimed. 'The one thing we haven't done yet.'

'You've got what? Four, five weeks left?'

'Yes,' Ginny sighed.

'That's really not something you want to leave until the last minute,' Hermione chided gently. 'What if Harry fills out the birth certificate while you're sleeping?'

'He did mention wanting to use Albus...' Ginny trailed off thinking.

'Seriously? That's sort of...' Hermione stopped to try and find an appropriate word.

'Either a lot to live up to, or going to get the kid beaten up for his pocket money at school,' Ginny admitted sheepishly.

'Erm... yeah.' Hermione chewed her lip guiltily.

'I guess I should start making a list, then.' Ginny found a sheet of parchment. 'Can you help me weed out anything that screams, "Hey, come beat me up for my pocket money"?'

*****

'We've forgotten something.' Ginny was sitting on the couch, feet stretched out in front of her.

'No, we haven't.' Harry looked at Ginny askance. 'We've got nappies, more clothes than Sam could ever wear before he grows out of them, toys, teddy bears, enough blankets to smother Buckbeak, that sling thing, a pram even.' Harry ticked each item off on his fingers. 'What else would we need?'

'Names?'

'Oh... Right. Can't really call him Sam-I-Am forever, can we?'

'Uh. No.'

'So?' Harry chewed a thumbnail, thinking. 'I know the firstborn son usually takes the father's name for a middle name, but could we not do that?'

'Sure. I don't see why not. I'm not crazy about saddling a poor little girl with "Ginevra" as one of her names, either.'

Harry's hand rested on Ginny's stomach. 'Maybe we should have done the thing where we find out if it's a girl or a boy. Make this a lot easier.'

'So, we'll do what George and Katie did. Make two lists.'

'Okay.' Harry closed the book he'd been reading, and tossed it on the coffee table. He went to the desk and found some parchment and a useable quill and snagged an old textbook from the bookcase. He sat back down, and balanced the book on his knees. 'Boys or girls first?'

'Girls?'

'Okay.' Harry wrote Girls across the top of the parchment. 'Elizabeth?'

'Grace.'

'Lucy.'

'Really? Lucy?' Ginny's face scrunched in bemusement.

'Okay, no Lucy.' Harry scratched Lucy off the list. 'Daisy?' he suggested. Ginny made a moue of distaste. 'What's wrong with Daisy?'

'Try calling her to dinner from the back garden,' Ginny challenged.

'Daisy Potter! If you don't come in for dinner now, I'm feeding yours to Crookshanks!' Harry mulled how it sounded. 'Yeah, you're right...'

'Amelia.' Harry scrawled the name on the list.

'Eleanor,' he offered.

'Sarah.'

'Emma!' Harry exclaimed brightly.

'You've been reading way too much of that Muggle lady. What's her name? Jane?'

'Jane Austen.'

'Right. Her.'

'What about Jane?' Harry tested the name in his head. 'No, I'll take that one off myself.'

'Caitlin?' Ginny asked.

'Maybe.' Harry scrolled through a few names. 'Iris, Violet, Rose, Camellia...'

'Lily,' Ginny quietly added. Harry's hand tightened on the quill.

'Would you mind?' he asked tentatively. 'I know it's a little sappy to name your kid after its dead grandmother.' Harry fiddled with the quill, leaving a fine spray of droplets of ink on the parchment. 'Okay, it's a lot sappy,' he sighed.

'It's not that sappy. You want them to have some kind of connection to your parents.' Ginny nudged him with a toe. 'I like Lily. Still need a middle name for her, though.'

'What about using Luna or Hermione's name?' Harry asked.

Ginny shook her head. 'I dunno. Luna just doesn't go very well with Lily, and I don't feel like tripping over my own daughter's name when she's done something that needs a fuss and I have to use the full name.'

Harry regarded Ginny thoughtfully, a flash of something darting through his mind. 'What about Nymphadora?' he asked casually.

'But - ' Ginny stuttered.

'Look, I know you love Hermione like a sister, and Luna, too, but Tonks was a friend of yours. It would be a nice way to honor two women who sacrificed so much.'

'That would be nice,' Ginny sniffed.

'Are you crying?'

'It's the hormones,' Ginny said fiercely, daring Harry to contradict her. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and took a deep breath. 'All right, then. That's a girl taken care of - Lily Nymphadora. What about a boy?'

'James Sirius,' Harry answered promptly.

'You haven't thought about that at all, have you?' Ginny asked dryly.

'Just a little bit,' Harry admitted.

'You'd better hope he doesn't live up to his namesakes, then.'

'What's wrong with that?' Harry protested. 'How many fifth-years figure out how to become Animagi?'

'How about the amount of detentions they got?' Ginny fixed Harry with a gimlet eye.

'Jeez. Did Molly sit you down when you were eight and teach you that look? And how do you know about all their detentions?'

'No, but I got lots of examples when she laid it on the twins or Ron. I was a perfect child,' she said smugly, ignoring Harry's snort of disbelief. 'As for the detentions, I got a bunch with Snape my sixth year after trying to break into the Headmaster's office. He made me rewrite all those records for your dad and Sirius.' Ginny raised a censorious eyebrow. 'I'm amazed they managed to finish school. The amount of pranks they pulled. I thought Fred and George had a big file.'

'Yeah, they more than lived up to the name Marauders.' Harry grinned a bit wistfully.

'And if he gets a file close to that size, you will be the one to handle it.' Ginny stretched. 'Oh, one more thing -'

'Don't tell me we've forgotten anything else...' Harry moaned.

'Not really. But I did decide something.'

'What's that?'

'I want you in there, when it's time,' Ginny informed Harry. 'You were there at the beginning. You should be there for the end. Just...' Ginny bit her lip, trying not to laugh.

'What?' Harry was almost afraid.

'Do try not to faint.'