“If I hadn’t been on your mother’s list, would you even notice me?”, he smiled as he brought them breakfast while she sat there in the living room, nursing Lucia.
“I can’t imagine you not being on that list, but let’s entertain the thought for a while”, she smiled back as she took a sandwich. “You were too obviously impressive to ever fade into the background, so I would have noticed you for sure. I would have watched you. But if you weren’t on the list, I wouldn’t feel that I had already been allowed to fall for you. I’d probably ask my mother about you, ask why you weren’t on the list. Depending on what she told me, I would probably feel either guilty or conflicted or relieved, but I trusted my mother’s opinion implicitly, and I felt she knows best what is good for me. One of the main reasons why I felt so comfortable choosing you at the age of eleven was that she pre-approved you. You were the number one name on my list – the prince of the wizarding world. Ancient, highly respectable family, famous and respected parents, enormous family wealth, and she did mention that your mother was a muggle-born, but she shrugged it off because Lily Evans was a generational talent, and we knew there was a prophecy of some kind marking you personally as the one who will have the power to vanquish the Dark Lord, making you an obvious and most desirable choice for her daughter to marry”, she finished.
“Didn’t she mind that my parents were Voldemort’s enemies and there was a prophecy about me being meant to fight him?”, Harry wondered, as he sipped his morning coffee.
“The current political divide meant very little to her. She was about tradition, family, personal virtue, magical power and so on. People shift sides, but the inherent quality of a person is what matters. So, she told me all that about you, and she told me the same history about Neville and his parents, as well as few others. I was well briefed, to the point where I knew that Lily was in the Slug Club and I knew how well James did at Quidditch, and what Neville’s parents liked to eat for breakfast at school. Mom was very thorough, and I’m afraid I had an unfair advantage over you, and I felt I knew you already even before I introduced myself, and, being a stupid kid, I tried to impress you in all the wrong ways and put my foot in my mouth, and you know the rest”, she smiled.
“Yes, you hinted that Ron’s family isn’t really great, and you looked at Hermione as if she weren’t even human, and I looked at that and sorted you in the same group with all the other nasty bullies I knew before. I looked at your noble bearing, interpreted it as haughtiness, saw your pristine, fancy clothes and decided you’re a nasty, spoiled little shit that gets a kick out of offending the ‘lesser people’, and thought you’re the worst person I met so far in the wizarding world”, he laughed quietly, as not to disturb the baby. “I wonder, what did that feel like from your side of things?”
“I was furious and humiliated. I tried to hint that the two of us belong together on a higher plane of things, and you told me very clearly that you think I’m a terrible person unworthy of your company. I had no luxury of thinking something like ‘who are you to talk to me like that’, because my mom already told me who you are. You’re the most important boy in the world. You’re the number one name on my list. You’re the boy my mom spoke of with reverence. Who you were was not something I could use to fix my wounded pride, so I was forced to admit that I messed up. Something I did disqualified me in your eyes, and I didn’t know what it was. I started observing, and soon saw that you are very egalitarian, which confused me because I was taught to always perceive a hierarchy – of family reputation and wealth, and of personal worth and achievement, and to try to be at the top, and associate with others who are at the top, because anything else would be degrading. It was not something I thought about – merely implicit things I picked up from my parents, the way you had all sorts of implicit things you picked up from everywhere. What I didn’t understand was that you thought of yourself as belonging to the lowest, downtrodden class of people who are always picked on by those more powerful and wealthy. I couldn’t understand it, because my mom told me that only the Malfoy, Lestrange and Black families are wealthier than you, as the sole heir of the Potter and Peverell lines, and trust me, none of the above would pick on you, since you would be perceived as belonging to the top echelon of our society. You saw how my parents tried to be polite with you in the beginning”.
“And I treated them coldly and outright refused to have anything to do with them because I felt they are the enemy”, he nodded.
“Exactly”, she sipped tea. “You annoyed them, and they thought you to be an insolent brat without manners, and I couldn’t disagree”, she gave him a lopsided smile.
“You were right, I did lack manners and sophistication. I was raised by the Dursleys who didn’t teach me anything, except that I’m worthless in their eyes. Honestly, I wonder how I even learned to speak before Muggle school, where I learned to read and write”, he shrugged.
“That was something so unimaginable to me, that it would never have crossed my mind. I did learn about it, from all sorts of gossip and people I paid money to spy on you”, she winked.
“You paid people to spy on me?”, he was aghast.
“Well, I tried approaching you to talk to you directly, but you would give me that look and just ignore me like I was a thing that got in the way”, she smiled. “So, of course I bribed people”.
“Whom did you bribe?”, Harry was both stunned and amused, because he realised he had no idea.
“I approached a few. Tried Neville Longbottom, but he was so insecure and confused, he didn’t actually talk much to anyone and didn’t know anything, but he was also on my list so I used the opportunity to check him out thoroughly, and decided he’s completely not my type. Then I tried Dean Thomas, but he coldly rejected the idea and told me to go mind my own business, as if somehow you were not my business”, she giggled. “Then I tried Seamus Finnigan, and here I struck gold. His affinity for fancy stuff exceeded his funds, and his affinity for gossip exceeded that of most girls. Let’s just say I got good value for my money”, she looked at her husband mischievously while gently stroking her baby’s head.
“Seamus, you rat”, Harry giggled. “What did he tell you?”
“Well, you would tell things to Ron, and Ron would tell things to everyone, you know how that was. Seamus told me that you didn’t even know about the wizarding world or being a wizard before getting the owl from school, and that the Dursleys even tried to prevent you from receiving the notice so Hagrid had to intervene personally, and that was the first time you ever saw a real wizard. He told me that you didn’t know your parents, didn’t know you were a wizard, didn’t know you were wealthy until Hagrid took you to Gringotts to get money for school gear from your vault, and so on. I was completely shocked at first and couldn’t accept it, but Seamus told it in a completely straightforward way, and I saw you wearing those horrid rags that didn’t make any sense to me before, so I had to accept something that would never make any sense otherwise – you actually thought you were a low-class person, so you associated with others you thought were also low-class, and defended them against a high-class bully, who just happened to be me”, she smiled, with a bitter note of the memory. “My heart went out to you when I realised. I would never have thought that someone who was my equal or superior in social standing could be abused and mistreated like you were, and it felt like a terrible injustice. That night in bed I thought what it would feel like if my parents were killed while I was a baby and I never knew them, and I was raised by nasty people who hated me and neglected me in every way, and I cried”, a tear went down her face. “Something changed in me that night. I stopped taking what I had for granted, because if someone like you could face such fate, it means I could as well, and I think I made my first steps toward adulthood then and there”, she wiped her tears off. “It’s good that I did, because I remembered it when Voldemort came back and degraded my family in our own home, and I remembered what you had to go through with the Dursleys, and felt more connected to you than ever, but of course, you weren’t mine to be connected to back then”, she sighed. “But it’s good that I already adjusted to the thought that something like that could happen to someone like me, so I could emotionally survive it”.
“So, after talking to Seamus, I continued watching you, but with a much changed perspective. I saw how openly friendly you were with people you considered worthy of friendship, and I was sad that I was excluded from that and seen as unworthy. It hurt, a lot. I wished I could just join you, Ron and Hermione at the table and start talking, but I knew you would just stare at me coldly and either leave or wait for me to get the hint and move on. For the first time in my life, I was made to feel like a lesser, unworthy person, which both felt completely unjust, but also earned by my stupid and nasty actions in the beginning, and I started to understand how others would feel when I would dismiss them as people of lower status unworthy of my attention. It softened me, changed me, and it was painful. I continued watching you, especially when you would sneak out, but your invisibility cloak made it hard for you to be seen or caught, so I got caught more than you did and it was so embarrassing. Can you even imagine how embarrassing it was for a girl to get caught sneaking out after a boy?”, she grinned.
“I thought you wanted to get us in trouble”, Harry smiled.
“Well, that’s was my valid excuse – Potter and his gang were up to something and breaking the rules and I wanted to get them in trouble. But you know what they say, there’s always a valid reason and the actual reason, and the actual reason was that I wanted to know what you were doing and see you in action, learn more about what kind of a person you are. That’s why I wanted to play Quidditch against you, too – it gave me an excuse to get physical with you”, she blushed.
“You mean, to throw me off of my broom and plough me into the ground?”, he started laughing, and then put his hand over his mouth as the baby stirred.
“Exactly. Also, have you bump into me and have me bang into a crossbeam”, she snickered. “It wasn’t the kind of physical contact I desired, but I took what I could get, I guess”.
“At some point, I realised that I didn’t even think about other names on my list for months. My list was you. And then I made my decision. It’s going to be only you, ever. Of course, you will have to ask, but my ‘yes’ was a given at that point. I said ‘yes’ at eleven, to the question you asked half an hour after you killed Voldemort”, she beamed at her husband.
“How did I manage to miss all this?”, he massaged his forehead.
“I wasn’t actually loud about it”, she grinned. “You know how girls are. My pride would not allow me to do anything about it, other than greet you in passing and have you sneer at me maliciously, and cry in bed that night. Also, it’s a weird and awkward time for girls – in our dormitory it was all about who got her first period, and the rest of us who didn’t were anxious and thinking whether something was wrong with us. Also, whose boobs started growing, whose figure already started looking more feminine and so on”.
“We boys never even thought about it”, he acknowledged. “At that time I didn’t even understand why boys and girls have separate dormitories”.
“I figured”, she snickered. “Boys always pretend as if periods and other female stuff doesn’t happen, and girls try really hard to keep it discreet so that they hopefully never have the opportunity to find out. At some point, it becomes a monthly routine, but at eleven to thirteen, it’s a whole circus of ‘is there something wrong with me because I didn’t get it yet’ in the girls’ dormitory. We absolutely wouldn’t want boys anywhere near that, because it was too embarrassing”.
“When did you get it?”, he was curious.
“First year, when we played Quidditch. In the air”, she blushed. “I felt something weird, but it was only later in the bathroom that I saw blood on my underwear. I completely freaked out; I thought I was injured by the broom somehow, but then I remembered the cushioning charms, so that couldn’t be it, and also nothing hurt. Then I remembered what mom explained before I went to school, what to expect, and to always wear a pad for safety. I didn’t understand most of it, but you can rest assured I wore a pad for safety since then”, she grinned.
“I can understand why you worshipped your parents”, Harry nodded. “I can’t even imagine going through something like that with the Dursleys, if I happened to be a girl. They taught me nothing and just sneered at me”.
“I know, which is why I had such tolerance for your sneering treatment of me, for two years”, she frowned. “I knew who raised you and how, and that you didn’t know better, but at some point I was so completely done with it and so profoundly humiliated, that I would literally rather have you kill me and be done with it, than suffer it for a minute longer”.
“Thank heavens you did that, because I was too stupid and stubborn and set in my ways to ever snap out of it on my own”, he kissed her. “When I did snap out of it, I felt really embarrassed for treating you badly, and surprised to find out that you’re actually a human person with feelings. I know, it sounds insane”.
“It does, but I guess people aren’t really rational beings”, she mused. “We don’t revise our opinions logically; we just stick with what we think we know until something shocks us into a new reality. I, for instance, stuck with what I thought I knew until I saw Voldemort in person, and his evil shocked me into accepting what you kept telling me for years, and what I kept rationalising around. Only after the new reality becomes emotionally inevitable do we change our minds, because reason is a servant to our emotions, always”. Lucia was done with her meal so she put her on her shoulder to burp.