I failed to get this out in a timely manner last year, so here's, finally, the wartime Finnigan Christmas fic that I've wanted to write for ages.

I'm going back to the ones that I know

She could almost convince herself he was alright when she had no way of knowing one way or the other. The worry was constant but vague and misty, drawn into her with each breath but the sort of thing she could push aside enough to get through the day. Only alone at night would she have to reassure herself: even with a tyrant at the helm, Hogwarts was still the only place he could safely be. Surely children were too valuable to endanger. Surely, anyway, the children who came from sufficient wizarding stock.

When she sees students start to flood out onto the platform all of the worry condenses around her and fills her lungs like she's drowning. Something oddly palpable, a shiver of anxiety, is running through the crowd, students as much as their fearful parents. Her boy's head appears and disappears in the waves as he makes his way to her, and she finds herself hurrying toward him, desperate to soothe herself.

Seamus emerges before her, standing stiff. He holds her back when she hugs him like he's always done, feels as well-fed as ever, but he pulls away and looks partway-dead in the eyes.

"The train was late," she says conversationally. "We were all worried."

He adjusts his bag on his shoulder and replies, "We just got held up a bit."

She waits a few moments with an expectant smile, but this seems like all he's got to say, so they leave the station in silence.

With whom I can be what I want to be

In another time she was Nora Cooke, Ravenclaw, a stiff-backed debutante who excelled at half-caring. It was that which made her the object of expectations. At eighteen she took things with a jaded dispassion that turned her to clay, gave her the apathetic willingness to do whatever was asked of her. She had fancies, of course: Quidditch, writing, music, but they remained fancies. There was nothing realistic for her but a pureblood marriage and respectable career.

When she met Jack Finnigan she became his Nora. That girl had been homeschooled and sheltered and drank up everything he knew about the world like wine at her first party. He imbued her with life she'd never had; for the first time she understood what it was like to believe a dream could come true. It was as if the world remade itself in 1976. Her parents and her past died in that revolution: Nora Finnigan lived in the moment.

Her magic couldn't die. She'd use it to do the laundry when she was tired and he wasn't looking, or to heal his scraped elbow while he slept, feeling loathsomely dishonest all the while. The thought of revealing her old, foreign self to Jack made her sicker the longer she put it off. Too long, she thought, it's been too long. She should have said something at the beginning, when he asked about her family and she said she had none, or before their wedding day, or before Seamus was born. Fear silenced her. If Jack knew how many years she'd deceived him then there was no excuse; he would be gone and she would have nothing.

"Do you believe in miracles?" Jack said to her in bed one night. It was 1984, autumn, and raining.

"I don't think so," she said.

He stared up at the dark ceiling. "I've been trying to tell myself I'm imagining it, but Nora… There's something really odd about Seamus."

She closed her eyes, and after a long time, she said, "That's no miracle."

It took all night. As the sky grew lighter Jack got more and more quiet and lost-looking, staring blankly as she made the pillows dance along the floor and told him of her childhood. That kept it from being cathartic: she couldn't look away from him as she went on, couldn't keep from worrying.

He spent the next day drinking and the day after that packing his things, and no matter how much she tried to convince him to stay he just kept saying that he needed to think.

She and Seamus were alone for some fuzzy, indeterminable period of time. Enough time to move to the country, somewhere where they could be magical without prying eyes, where she could teach her son to fly someday and hope he loved it as much as she used to. She threw herself into Seamus's happiness. Every day, though, he asked to show his dad whatever new thing he'd discovered.

Alone and far away, it felt as though some of the meaning had been sucked out of everything she did. Jack said something similar when he found them again. That was the first time she witnessed a miracle.

In the days following the Ministry coup, when he left for his brother's in Galway, he said, "I'd feel safer with you." Perhaps he assumed she would be as adept at battle as washing dishes, or perhaps he'd rather have just been close.

"Well, you aren't," she said. "It's better if you're not involved. If they think we've split then you're just no one." She lightly, sadly kissed the side of his mouth, his beard tickling her cheek. "It'll be believable. There's precedent."

That, and she was known for honesty. She hadn't lied since he left the first time, not a word. A virtue learned the hard way. And Seamus, Seamus is so intensely honest, even when his words aren't true. She is proud to have raised a bad liar.

Just one more week for the feeling to go

It is three days before Christmas and she has brought down all their boxes of tree ornaments, the tissue-paper layers they're packed in strewn about the floor. A record of holiday songs plays from the alcove. These are songs they used to dance to as they hung paper snowflakes from the ceiling, that Jack used to sing as he lifted Seamus to put the star on the top of the tree. It isn't like the other years, but she tried. She's become fixated on the idea of a good Christmas, a normal Christmas, lately, dragging Seamus from his room to bake and decorate, forcefully trying everything he loves to make him smile.

"I don't like that we're doing this, when there's a war on," he says over the music. All week he's been drifting about the house in an unfocused daze but these words of his are solid and aggressive, almost like he's trying to start a fight.

She closes her eyes and breathes in. Moments ago she'd have cried in relief at so much as a hint of passion, something that reminded her of the son she sent to school that September, but she fears his anger just as much as his listlessness. "War or not," she tries to reply gently but firmly, motherly, "it's Christmas."

He seems to think this over for a while, dangling a cheerful Quidditch-playing Father Christmas from his fingers.

"'War or not,'" he says, "sounds like…you're ignoring it."

"No one's ignoring that times are bad," she insists. "But that's—"

Seamus bubbles with frustration. "I just—to do something so—" He flails, Father Christmas swinging wildly. "People are dying!"

"Don't you understand?" She loves his compassion, admires it, but Merlin, does she hate to see him suffer for it this way. "That's exactly why we need to—"

He interrupts her, so violently she steps back on reflex. "You don't know what it's like. You couldn't possibly—all you've ever done is—"

"And you're a proper soldier, then, are you?" she snaps back.

At this he shuts up, teeth clenched stiffly.

She has had enough. She can't live anymore with this stranger who won't let her in. Something's wrong and she can't stand not knowing. She tries to think of anything he's told her lately, any clue, but all she's heard is what's in his letters: bland sentences that don't mean anything delivered with broken seals.

"I need to know what's going on at that school," she says.

And with you there to help me, then it probably will

"If you keep going on like this," Jack always said, "he's never going to grow up." He said this jokingly, when she had doubts about sending Seamus to Muggle nursery school or wouldn't let him cross the street alone in the city, but to her it gave legitimacy to a very real worry. So many things she had ruined with fear: her adolescence, her marriage. She refused to ruin her son. All she ever wanted was for him to look up to her, to trust her, and when he didn't it always felt like failure. But she's come to realize that when he defies her is when he shows his real character. Those are the moments that prove her success. Or just his success, perhaps. That despite her, he managed to grow.

The floor creaks outside her bedroom and she rolls over to look. Seamus is silhouetted in the doorway.

"Can I come in?" he asks.

"Of course," she blearily replies, through her dry tears.

That evening, Christmas tree forgotten and record no longer playing, he had looked uncomfortably out the dark window and said, "Do you remember when the train was late? We got stopped partway there, for a kidnapping."

The stories he told, of Hogwarts under murderers and Death Eaters, made her sick. "A lot of it's pretty tame," he said quickly to reassure her as she paced. "Brainwashing stuff, like lines, or whatever, and probably a lot of it we don't know about. It's just that sometimes they sort of, yknow, make examples. The older ones, from the DA, we get the worst of it. Even when we haven't done anything, they make up a reason because they know we will."

She demanded to know what precisely "the worst of it" was, past tender sympathy, just seething with anger. He told her.

"You're not going back," she hissed.

"Mam—"

"We'll leave the country if we have to—"

"I have to be there, Mam, I belong there-"

"Not if you're being tortured you don't!" she shouted, startling the owl into a flutter of feathers.

He stood there, cheek turned from her anger, and said, "I'm part of something." She couldn't think of any reply she hadn't used already a hundred times, that didn't involve some selfish obsession with keeping him safe. "You have to understand," he said. "Hogwarts is the only place I can help."

As they lie together in her bed she is so grateful that someone this strong and decent can still love her. "Why are you so good?" she asks, quietly, into his hair. "I know it isn't because of me."

He mumbles, "Dunno."

She doesn't say anything more. He deserves a peaceful sleep.