The Request by redhead414

Chapter 29

James pulled the door open sharply, finding his mother on the other side, holding the strap of her purse with both hands like a lifeline as she looked up at her son. "Mum," he said, standing in the doorway.

"I'm…I'm sorry for calling on you…so late," she said, noticing her son was bare chested and merely donning a pair of sweatpants. "I wasn't sure…I wasn't sure if you would…if you would still have your floo open for the night."

James gave his mother a look, his face vacant of any sort of emotion, until he felt a hand smack him upside the head. "Damn it!" He shouted, turning and giving his wife a glare. "You know I hate that!"

She flung a hand in the direction of the door and gave him an incredulous look. When he didn't take the hint, she pulled the door open wider and gave Ginny a small smile. "Please come in, Ginny," she said.

Ginny hesitated for a moment, her eyes focused on Anya's belly as it was much more noticeable now than it was the last time she saw her at Katie's birthday. Stepping inside the condo, Anya shut the door and motioned towards the living room. "Thank you, Anya," she said quietly, still holding her purse strap.

She took a seat on the leather recliner, sitting tentatively on the edge as she watched Anya push James over to the couch. "It wouldn't have killed you to put on a shirt," she watched Anya tell James as they sat down next to each other.

"It might have," he sarcastically replied.

"Stop acting like me," Anya teased, playfully pinching his side, earning a small grin out of the corner of his mouth.

James reached over and grabbed her hand, his fingers lacing with hers as he squeezed it tightly, looking up at his mother. "I take it you have something to say to us?"

Ginny looked down in her lap, nodding as let go of her purse strap long enough to tuck her hair back behind her ears, one at a time. When she looked up, she saw Anya, lightly drumming her fingers against the top of her stomach as her arm rested on her new little ledge. It wasn't hard to notice that she was now holding James' hand a bit tighter than he was. Maybe she's as nervous as I am, she thought to herself as she took a deep breath and exhaled. "I tried speaking with Hermione today," she began, hoping her voice wasn't shaking nearly as bad as she thought it sounded. "And she…well, she says that she will not speak with me until I make things right…" she took in another deep breath and exhaled sharply. "Until I make things right with you, Anya," Ginny finally managed to finish.

Anya raised her eyebrows, her fingers no longer drumming.

"I was very angry - not that you got married because a blind man could see that day coming - but that you to chose to do it in such a secretive manner," Ginny said, speaking slowly to keep herself from rushing her words into one incoherent sentence. "It was very wrong of me…to insinuate that you were solely to blame for it." She looked up at Anya, and then at her son. "I realize that while James would do…anything for you…as my husband always has…he wouldn't have gone along with something like this unless he thought about it, despite how people like his mother would feel about it."

James rolled his eyes, catching her little dig at the end. "We knew it wasn't going to be a popular decision with any of you - keeping it a secret," he said, holding his ground. "But again - us getting married wasn't about you. It wasn't about you, Dad, Draco, Aunt Hermione, or anyone. It was about us, and what we wanted, and what we felt comfortable doing, and we don't regret it." He saw his mother get ready to speak but he quickly shut her down. "And don't tell me you could have kept it small - it never would have been possible. Small would have meant 500 people instead of 50, and we didn't want a circus."

"It started because of my issues with my mother," Anya admitted as James kept a firm hold of her hand. "I was so excited when James proposed, and then when I got to really thinking about it, all I could think about was all the people we'd have to invite, and how none of them would be her and I just…" she took a deep breath, exhaling upwards as if it would somehow dry the tears threatening to fall. "I just wanted a wedding where I wasn't thinking about it, and James wanted a wedding where our faces wouldn't be on every wizarding newspaper in the world, and this was what we came up with."