Work Text:
‘You’ve got grey hair. Right there.'
'Get off,’ Harry muttered with a sigh, jerking his head out of the tugging hand as those around the table chuckled.
'You have though. Right here. Loads of them.'
'You’ll probably end up with the same problem, you know. I’d be careful with slinging around those sorts of insults if I were you, before they come back to bite you on the arse.'
This only seemed to amuse James further, and he continued to stand behind his seated father and tug at his hair. 'Does it depress you that you’re getting really, really old?'
Ron and George laughed harder, and Hermione’s mouth twitched into a smile at the sight of Harry rolling his eyes. 'Can you go and find something else to do?’ asked Harry. 'Haven’t you got O.W.Ls to be revising for?'
'No, they’ve been cancelled.'
'Have they?’ he asked flatly.
'Yeah, they’re just gonna give me Os for everything to save time.'
'Kind of them.'
'Yeah.’ He leaned further over his father, with a complete lack of awareness regarding personal space, and peered at the table, glancing over the remains of the dinner that the adults had eaten, more sophisticated than the pizza that had been ordered for the enthusiastic teenagers. 'Can I have some wine?'
'No.'
'Just a little bit. A sip of yours.'
'After you called me old? Certainly not.'
'I think it was really, really old,’ corrected George helpfully. Harry flicked a rogue pea at him, though it unfortunately hit a cackling Angelina instead.
'Come on,’ said James, who was clearly not going to let the subject of the wine drop. 'You let Teddy have a little bit of alcohol when he was my age - probably because he’s your favourite…'
'I don’t have favourites, mate, but if you want to be my favourite calling me old probably isn’t the best way to go about it.'
'I do, I have favourites,’ said Ginny, smiling at James teasingly. 'It’s Teddy; Teddy is my favourite.'
They all laughed again, and James made a great show of throwing his head back and rolling it over to give his mother an exasperated look. 'This is child abuse, I’m going to owl the Society for the Protection of Magical Children.’
Ginny tutted. 'You can’t keep threatening to contact the SPMC every time we annoy you, James.'
'I’m a patron of that charity,’ added Harry. 'I’ll just pay them off to cover up the horrible abuse I’m inflicting on you by not letting you drink illegally.'
'It is horrible,’ said James. 'No one has had a worse childhood than me.'
'Hmm,’ said Harry. 'Is there a charity for abused parents?'
'Perhaps I will start one if you’re nicer to me,’ said James. 'And let me have something more interesting to drink than butterbeer.'
Eventually, Harry and Ginny relented, and though they did not permit James to have wine, they did allow him to take a bottle of beer, which was probably his plan all along. Despite their attempts to keep him in the room and spend time with him, the moment the cold glass of the bottle was in his hand, James was darting off to return to his far more interesting cousins upstairs.
'Good grief, he’s getting tall,’ said Ron, watching James scamper away.
'I know,’ said Ginny wryly. 'I’m fairly sure there’s some sort of enchantment on the Hogwart’s Express, because every time the kids get off it they seem to have grown another three inches.'
'Three inches? More like a foot. And more and more determined to continue to fine British tradition of irresponsible drinking. Who’d have thought it? Seems like only yesterday you two were proudly showing him off for the first time, just a sweet little innocent baby with no clue of what he was going to grow up to be,’ said George fondly. 'Your hair was black back then, Harry.'
'All right,’ said Harry wearily. 'Thank you, George.'
'Stop it!’ Ginny scolded as the others laughed. She raised her hand and ran it through her husband’s hair. 'It’s lovely, don’t listen to them.’
'I don’t listen to them,’ said Harry, smiling at her. 'They’re just jealous because mine isn’t thinning.'
There were 'oohs’ and mentions of fighting words from George and Ron, while Hermione, Angelina and Ginny laughed loudly, before the conversation returned swiftly to a general admission that they were all terribly inconsistent and confused about how acceptable it was to let teenagers drink, and whether or not they were all horrible parents.
Ginny was an enthusiastic participant in the conversation (adamant that Ron was flat out lying when he claimed he didn’t drink until he was of age), but she did not move her hand from the back of Harry’s head, her elbow resting lazily on the back of his chair. Her fingers moved slowly, twisting and scratching slightly, tenderly running through the dark hair now lightened and peppered with grey. She did it in an absent-minded sort of way, as one would do to a pet sitting on one’s lap, so casual and easy in her affection that it didn’t even seem to register as a public display of affection in the eyes of her brothers and their wives, none of whom offered up any teasing or sarcastic begging for her to stop. Perhaps he herself was unaware that she was doing it at all, perhaps unaware entirely that even now, even after all these years where he might have grown used to it, taken it for granted, Harry still felt a strange and powerful kind of joy; a quiet thrill at something no one but her could do. His children could reach for and tug at his hair - at their cheekiest moments they had even ruffled it - but only Ginny could lovingly caress it in this way. It was at once deeply intimate and wholly unremarkable.
He raised his wine glass to his lips in an attempt to disguise his eyes closing in a slow, sleepy blink, intoxicated by her touch, barely able to open them again as he set the glass gently back down. He had never thought he would reach an age where he would start to go grey - the chance of reaching adulthood had, at times, felt slim at best. But fainter and wilder still had been the idea that someone could love him so easily, so simply, so utterly.
'You all right, Harry?’ asked Ron suddenly. 'You look like you’re falling asleep.'
Harry started slightly. 'Sorry - I’m knackered,’ he muttered.
Ginny’s hand left his hair, and she rubbed his shoulder. 'You’ve got a big case on at the moment, haven’t you?'
'Yeah,’ he said, seizing on the excuse, though they both knew perfectly well that he didn’t.
'We should get going anyway,’ said Hermione. 'Give you both an early night.'
There was the sound of a small explosion from upstairs, and the distinctive whoops and yells of James, Fred and Al laughing.
'Not much chance of that, I think,’ said Harry.