Happy Birthday Harry!
Title: Third
Words: 457
Summary: Ginny gives Harry a birthday present
Post - Chapter 36 of DH
Pairing: Harry/Ginny
Rating: G
Third
“So," Ginny said in a sleepy voice, her eyes barely open as she looked at Harry from across the room. "Happy twenty-seventh."
Harry smiled and looked over at his wife. "Thanks."
"I couldn't think what to get you," she continued. "Merlin knows we have enough stuff, so I thought it should be something small."
"Yeah?" he said. "It's perfect. She's perfect."
He looked away from Ginny and down at the small newborn wrapped in a pink blanket that was sleeping peacefully in his arms. She hadn’t always been this quiet. She had announced her arrival rather loudly a few hours before dawn in this very room. Ginny had said that for this birth, she’d just as soon stay home. It was a good thing too; the whole labor and delivery had taken less than two hours.
Harry was thankful for that. Ginny had not really wanted another child. “But I love you and the boys,” she’d said. “I don’t need to have another baby. And there’s no guarantee it would be a girl.” And: “I never realized how much work this whole parenting thing would be. Blimey, I don’t know how Mum did it with seven of us....”
But Harry had persisted. He loved being father to James and Al, but something in him yearned for a daughter. And, no, there was no guarantee, but he had a feeling....
“Please?”
“Oh, okay. But only because you said please. And because trying is so much fun.”
And now here she was. He didn’t care that the pink blanket clashed a little with her tuft of red hair; so happy was he to have a girl, a daughter, at last, that he’d charmed everything in the nursery pink almost the moment she appeared.
“Not pink,” Ginny chastised. “The poor thing has the Weasley hair.”
“I happen to like Weasley-red,” replied Harry with a smile and a wink at Ginny. “And anyway, there’s red hair on my side too.”
They were quiet now; Harry’s thoughts strayed to his mother and how she had looked the last time he had seen her, in the Forbidden Forest. She had looked at him hungrily, and now, having children of his own, Harry understood that look completely.
“I’d like to call her Lily.”
“Of course you would. You’d think, after carrying her for forty one weeks and letting you name both of our other children, that I would get some say in the matter.” Her words were harsh, but her tone was teasing. Harry looked at her.
Ginny smiled. “But, seeing that it’s your birthday and all, I guess it would be alright. Lily is a lovely name.”
“Thanks. I love you, you know.”
“I know. And I get to pick the middle name.”