Search:

SIYE Time:16:57 on 28th March 2024
SIYE Login: no


A Normal Life
By Mojomig

- Text Size +

Category: Post-Hogwarts
Characters:None
Genres: General
Warnings: None
Story is Complete
Rating: G
Reviews: 12
Summary: Harry contemplates life for a moment.
Hitcount: Story Total: 4793



Disclaimer: Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J.K.R. Note the opinions in this story are my own and in no way represent the owners of this site. This story subject to copyright law under transformative use. No compensation is made for this work.



Author's Notes:
One of those plot bunnies that won't get out of your heard until you write it down...

Thanks to Z-C for your help.





ChapterPrinter


It was a normal Thursday evening. It had been a fairly normal day. At this precise moment, Harry Potter was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed in the smallest bedroom of his quite ordinary house. Despite the family wealth, Harry and Ginny Potter refused to live a gluttonous, ostentatious life style, opting instead for quiet and mundane. After their wedding, they moved into a modest, three bed-roomed home in a Muggle neighbourhood, in a quiet country village. In order to fit in with their neighbours, the Potters lived a relatively Muggle life. If you understood Muggle technology as they came to, there was very little need to use magic around the home.

The wooden-framed, single bed was under the window, along the front wall of the house. At the end of the bed was a tall, green Billy bookcase, its shelves filled with books, pots, baskets and packets. Next to that were a plain wooden cupboard, and then a child's coat stand before the door to the landing. Opposite the window, built in wardrobes were crammed full of junk that the Potters had collected over their years together but no longer used and never got around to throwing away.

Against the fourth wall stood a slim chest of drawers and a cot with a rainbow canopy. As Harry Potter sat slouched on the bed, propped up by pillows and a large, red, velvety cushion, he listened. He listened to the sounds that filled his world on this Thursday evening.

If he tried hard enough, Harry could just make out the faint ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom of his own heart beating. It was steady and strong, not the racing speed of a boy who feared for his life, or the slow thudding of one fighting to survive an injury. Finding himself in those extreme situations was naught but a distant memory, and only a hard session in the gym would get his heart racing these days.

There was the mechanical tick, tick, tick of the clock on the wall. It was a carved wooden clock in the shape of Noah's ark, painted in bright colours. The time was about eight thirty. The light was too dim to tell accurately, but it didn't really matter; he wasn't going anywhere.

Outside, the gentle patter patter patter of a spring shower drummed lightly against the windowpane. No more did he sit in his dormitory staring wistfully out at the storm-ravaged forest, longing for a family to belong to.

The slap slap slap of a person's footsteps as they hurriedly walked a dog along the footpath at the front of his house began, grew louder, and then faded again as man and beast passed by, just as they did every evening around this time.

From inside the house, Harry heard the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the hot water system, sending warmth to the radiators and running water to the taps. The hum, hum, hum of the pump cranking on and off interspersed the sound of the pipes. Harry laid his head back on the cushion and closed his eyes.

Coming from downstairs, he could make out the grumbling sound of the television in the lounge. Chatter chatter chatter went the question master on some game show, as he made terribly scripted witticisms based on the contestants' personal details.

Filtering up from the kitchen came the delicate aroma of a simmering stew. The plopff, plopff, plopff of bubbles rising to the surface of the liquid before bursting reminded Harry of bubbling cauldrons, filled with potions of every colour and smell. But that was a lifetime ago, and this was the perfectly ordinary noise of his dinner cooking on the stove. Occasionally a clank clank clunk would disturb the rhythm of the bubbles, as Ginny took a spoon and stirred the pot.

After each stir, Ginny would return to her seat at the kitchen table, and the click-clack, click-clack, click-clack of knitting needles would resume, as she worked away on yet another jumper.

Harry Potter's mind drifted through the rooms of his house, listening for any sounds. The master bedroom, which was on the floor above, was empty and dark and consequently silent. The other bedroom on this floor was similarly unoccupied at present, and yielded no noise. The final room on this floor was the bathroom, and although it was quiet now, Harry smiled as he thought back to earlier, and the splash splash splash of bath time as the water went everywhere.

Suddenly, the telephone rang in the lounge. The low-pitched ring, ring, ring ended abruptly when Ginny picked up the receiver. From the floor above, Harry could just about make out her laughing voice as she chatted casually, no doubt with one of her friends or brothers.

Harry tuned out the girlish voice of his beloved wife and focused on the sounds once more. There was one more sound to consider. The one noise that combined all the others into a perfect harmony and blended them into a tapestry of normal life. It was the sound of breathing. Not his own breathing, as that was a silent as the empty rooms of his house, but the heavy, snuffly breathing of the small child that was currently asleep on Harry Potter's chest.

The gentle snore of Harry's one-year-old son cut through all other sounds and filled him with a sense of enormous calm. At this precise moment, at around eight thirty on a Thursday evening in spring, Harry Potter realised he had achieved his life's dream. Normality. Everything about his life was normal, and in Harry's eyes, that meant perfection. It didn't matter that his son, James had howled the house down when he was put down in his cot. It didn't matter that Ginny had been made redundant from her job at the Daily Prophet. Because these were normal things, that happened to regular, everyday, ordinary people.

Relaxing back into the pillows, Harry Potter continued to listen to the sounds of the world in which he lived. The sounds of his life. A normal life.
Reviews 12
ChapterPrinter




../back
‘! Go To Top ‘!

Sink Into Your Eyes is hosted by Grey Media Internet Services. HARRY POTTER, characters, names and related characters are trademarks of Warner Bros. TM & © 2001-2006. Harry Potter Publishing Rights © J.K.R. Note the opinions on this site are those made by the owners. All stories(fanfiction) are owned by the author and are subject to copyright law under transformative use. Authors on this site take no compensation for their works. This site © 2003-2006 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Special thanks to: Aredhel, Kaz, Michelle, and Jeco for all the hard work on SIYE 1.0 and to Marta for the wonderful artwork.
Featured Artwork © 2003-2006 by Yethro.
Design and code © 2006 by SteveD3(AdminQ)
Additional coding © 2008 by melkior and Bear