FRIENDS FOREVER
Summary: In the summer after fifth year Harry is contacted by his childhood best friend and is asked a favour that will change is life forever.
Disclaimer: I own Danielle and Luke but everything else belongs to JKR. Thank you to those who gave me such great reviews – please keep them coming.
CHAPTER TWO
Harry choked. Surely he couldn't have heard what he just thought he did. Maybe his grief over Sirius had addled his brains and he was hallucinating. "You can't be serious," he spluttered.
Dani looked at him with the same, calm expression that she had been wearing earlier. "I know that it's a lot to ask but I can't think of anyone better than you to be my baby's father," she said. "We may not have been in touch for ages but you're still the only person that I would ever trust to do this. You're strong, Harry. You can do this and if you did the blood adoption ritual you'd have an actual family."
Harry looked at her thoughtfully, finally coming to terms with the fact that she wasn't kidding, that she really did want him to adopt her son. She clearly did remember him well, he thought. His desire for a real family was one of very few things that he still had that tied him to the person he had been when they'd known each other before. He remembered reading about the blood adoption ritual in charms at one stage and knew that if you performed it on a child early enough in its life the baby really would be your biological child and would legitimately bear your physical attributes, forever leaving the appearance he or she had been born with a thing of the past. On that thought alone, the thought that agreeing would mean he had an actual, real live family member that could never be taken away from him made him want to say that he would do it but there was so much more that he had to consider. He wouldn't even be sixteen for another few weeks for god's sake. Could he really raise a child? It wasn't that he considered himself a child – with everything that had happened to him he had grown up years ago – it was the fact that he was number one on Voldemort's hit list. Combined with the nutters that were no doubt hunting Dani her baby would be lucky to survive a week in his care.
"Have you got any idea how dangerous that would be?" he asked Dani. "I'm not sure who he'd be in more danger with as a parent – you or me."
"The deatheaters don't know that one of them got me pregnant," Dani said at once. "I've been on the move ever since mum died and I've used spells to keep my figure. As for you, you could try and keep him a secret until the end of the war or at least only tell the people that you trust with your life. You're really close to Dumbledore, aren't you?" Harry was surprised at the amount of thought she had put into this. Coming to him clearly hadn't been a spur of the moment decision. "Please, Harry," she added in a quiet voice. "If you say no then I don't know what I'll do. He'll probably have to go to an orphanage and I don't know if I can let that happen."
Harry could see the earnest sincerity in her tired eyes but he still couldn't bring himself to say yes yet. There was so much that he needed to think about. "I'm not saying no but I can't say yes yet, either," he said. "This is huge and I need some time to think about it." Dani looked downcast and clearly thought that this meant he was downright rejecting her request. At the moment Harry was leaning towards saying yes but until he had some time on his own to consider it he wasn't going to reassure her. It was getting late now and in the fading light he looked down at his watch. "How about we meet here first thing in the morning?" he suggested.
"Sure," she said, still looking more than a little depressed.
As he turned to walk away Harry felt like the worst person in the world. He had no idea where Dani and the baby were going to spend the night, hell he wasn't even sure if they had a place to spend the night but he told himself that until he'd had some time on his own to think he couldn't worry about that at all. He turned back around as a sudden thought occurred to him. He couldn't believe that he hadn't thought of asking it before when he was seriously considering making this child his own. "Dani!" he called out to her. "What's his name?"
Dani looked at him with an odd expression in her eyes. "He doesn't have one," she said. "He's only three days old so there's still time, yet. I figured that if you were going to be his father then it should be you that picked out his name."
"Right," Harry said dumbly, turning to walk away. Her words had really struck a chord within him. A father! If he agreed to her proposition then he would be someone's – that little baby's – father. The idea took his breath away. Could he really do it? Marriage and fatherhood, a real family was of course on the agenda presuming that he survived the war but was he ready now? Was he in the position to raise a child on his own? Financially he was – his parents had left him enough gold to last a lifetime – but could he do it on an emotional level? Was he in the right headspace to raise a child on his own? Also what would happen to him if he didn't survive the war? There was every chance that he wouldn't so could he, in all good conscience, make that little baby his own when chances were he wouldn't be around too much longer to raise him?
Man he had so much to think about.
He trudged back into number four and headed towards the stairs, hardly stopping to acknowledge his relatives who were just sitting down to dinner. He decided that because he had so much to think about he wouldn't inflict his company on them and would just go upstairs and eat something out of the daily food parcels that Mrs Weasley was sending him. What the hell was he going to do? He thought as he lay sprawled across his bed munching on some garlic bread and sipping some soup from a magically charged thermos. It was a difficult decision that he was going to have to make entirely on his own because if he agreed then at least until the war was over he would have to raise the child by himself. If he agreed the only way he could see to keep the child safe was to do as Dani suggested and keep him a secret from absolutely everyone until Voldemort was dead.
It had been a very long and tiring day but Harry didn't think that he'd gotten more than a couple of hours sleep that night. He wasn't all that bothered, though and the sarcastic side of his brain thought that if he was going to take a newborn into his care then he should more than likely get used to sleep deprivation. He lay awake for hours just going over every possible outcome in his mind, trying to scrupulously consider every possible consequence of each outcome in order to help make a decision. It wasn't an easy decision, though because for every reason he found not to take the baby there was a reason to do what Dani wanted and Harry soon found himself going around in circles. He couldn't come up with a definitive answer but was still leaning towards saying yes. More than anything Harry was being influenced by his desire for a family of his own. Having Dani and her parents around when he was a kid and Hermione and the Weasleys after he'd started Hogwarts had been nice and had given him a taste of what it was like to have a family but there had been little things that happened that had made him realise that no matter how often he was reassured that he was a part of them ultimately he was alone in the world and blood would always come first. If he was honest with himself he really wanted that kind of bond with a person, something that he would never get from the Dursleys and he imagined that it would be that way if he took the baby.
Against his better judgement he also found himself mulling over Dani's words that if he was going to be the baby's father then he should be the one to give him a name. It seemed so personal to be thinking about what he would call the child even before he had made a decision about whether or not to take him and it also meant that he would have an even harder time saying no if that was the decision he made but Harry couldn't help himself. For some reason he really liked the name Zachary and Oliver stuck out as well although he did toy with the idea naming the baby after his father or maybe even Sirius.
In the end he knew that there was really only one decision he could make. In some ways the decision had already been made for him and the baby had already been his from the moment Dani had given birth but Harry knew in his heart that he wouldn't have had it any other way. He had been quite taken with the idea from the second that Dani had put it in his head that going through with this would mean he finally got a family of his own and even if that hadn't been the case he didn't think that he would have been able to, in all good conscience, see the child of someone that had once meant so much to him be shipped off to an orphanage when he himself could take the baby and make sure that it didn't have the kind of childhood that he had been given by the Dursleys. That baby was going to be his and this decided, having received his daily package from Mrs Weasley he was out of the house before the Dursleys were even out of bed and heading towards the spot where he had arranged to meet Dani. With a bit of luck he wouldn't have long to wait for here there, they could have some breakfast together and talk things through about how they were going to handle this.
To his surprise she had beaten him there and was sitting in the exact same spot as the day before with the baby wailing in her arms, wearing the exact same clothes and looking decidedly more dishevelled. Harry vaguely wondered if she had ever left but the baby looked well cared for so she had to have gone somewhere at least temporarily. She jumped as he sat down beside her and the baby cried even louder. "Morning," he said.
She desperately tried to quieten the child but it was to no avail. "Morning," she echoed.
"Can I hold him?" Harry had only ever held a couple of babies before in his life and vaguely wondered if he was insane for doing this when he had so little experience but realised that there was no time like the present to start getting some experience. He bravely took the warm little body into his arms, cradling the head in one arm and the body in the other and rocked him gently, soon quietening him. "Hey there little man," he whispered, awestruck.
"He likes you," Dani said.
"I think so."
"Harry." Dani sounded really awkward. "I need to know. Have you made up your mind?"
Harry gave her a small smile and felt utterly confident in his answer. "I have," he said. "I'll do it."
The End: There's the next one done – please keep the reviews coming. Next the adoption is completed and Harry gives his new son a name.