son amour - j. potter

forty eight

After the burial, the five of us returned to the house, and Sebastian insisted on cooking dinner for all of us. Sebastian left later that night to go home, he had work the next day.

James and I spent one last night in that house before leaving the next morning.

Henry and Beatrice claimed that they would be okay, they only had one week left before they had to return to Hogwarts.

We had apparated to the Potter's manor to say hello to everyone, and to pick up our cat.

Despite my fathers death, James and I still ended up in Paris for the second week of our honeymoon. I wasn't okay, but I was coping.

Plus I had the whole estate thing to figure out in Paris.

My boots clicked softly against the herringbone floor of the manor-, well, my manor now, as I paced the living room.

I wanted to clean the entire house, from the kitchen to the attic, and rid it of anything related to Lucille. James had tried to get me to go home, and to take some time to grief before flinging myself into something else.

The depressing family portraits needed to go. They didn't move like most pictures because if they did then they'd expose the utter unhappiness of our broken family.

I took all of them off of the bright white walls, and set them in a box to bring up to the attic.

"Darling, what do you want me to do?" James asked as he watched me close up the box of pictures.

I sighed, "You can help me carry that up to the attic, then I'm going to to need paint-, a lot of it."

"What color?"

"I don't know," I replied, "Something other than this blindingly boring white paint."

James laughed, "Okay, but let's start by bringing this box up to the attic."

The attic was filled with dust, our boots leaving shoe prints on the dusty floor. It had been three years since anyone had been up here, allowing time for a thick layer of dust to settle.

"Tergeo," I muttered under my breath.

All of the dust gathered into a pile on the floor, and disintegrated, leaving the attic dust free.

"That's useful," James joked as he set the box of pictures on the floor.

Every single box that had ever found its way into the attic was meticulously labeled by my father.

I brushed my fingers across the labels of the boxes, reading each one as I went, looking for nothing in particular.

There weren't many boxes.

Christmas, Easter, Sebastian, Beatrice, Henry, Daphne.

My fingers stopped on the label with my name on it. I picked up the box and set it on the floor, sitting down on the wooden planks beside it.

"What's that?" James asked as he sat down on the floor beside me.

I shrugged, "No idea."

I pealed the tape off of the box, and crumpled it into a ball before opening the cardboard box.

At first glance, the box had several keepsakes from my childhood. I carefully took out my baby blanket, that I thought had been thrown out before we moved to Edinburgh. It was a lovey blanket, with a small fox.

"I carried this with me everywhere for the first five years of my life," I told James as I ran my finger across the smooth blanket. "I thought I lost it once, and had a full blown tantrum, but Seb hid it from me because he was mad at me."