If I May Be So Bold (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

An Abbreviated History of James and Elise Part 4

December 2019

Elise sat on the floor in the living room folding onesies and pinafores, matching tiny socks into pairs. Raigan was visiting and she'd insisted on helping. Her wandwork was expert. Each pair of leggings folded so neatly it looked brand new.

James meanwhile, was lying on his stomach face to face with Ella, making silly faces at her until she giggled. She let out a particularly gurgly baby laugh and rolled onto her back, grinning up at him. Elise smiled over at them.

"Did you pick a date for the wedding?" Raigan asked out of the blue.

James pushed himself up with some difficulty. He had not spent this much time on the floor since Piper was little. Raigan, he saw, was looking at a picture on the mantlepiece, one he and Elise had taken at her own wedding.

He looked at Elise. They had not discussed a date at all. Elise had said she didn't want to be pregnant when they got married, but that hadn't been the case now for nearly seven months. They'd been so wrapped up in raising an infant that talk of a wedding seemed irrelevant. He thought she would brush it off now, say they should wait till Ella was a little older, till they had more time.

"Just before Christmas?" she suggested.

James let out a startled laugh.

She shrugged. "We don't need much time to prepare. I don't want anything fancy."

"Okay," said James. "Just before Christmas then."

Raigan gave him a sort of bemused smile.

—-

Over the next two weeks, Elise nearly single-handedly threw together all the plans. She went shopping on her lunch break and bought a dress, sent James' dress robes to be professionally cleaned and pressed, and found something sweet for Ella to wear out of the bags or clothes her sister had donated to her from Olivia.

She wrote invitations to a small guest list of people they agreed upon over a twenty minute conversation one night at dinner — their immediate families, Raigan, Piper, and Michael, a few of the other aurors and professors — and mailed them out three days after Raigan had brought up the idea in the first place.

She posed the idea of having a caterer, but changed her mind almost within the same sentence, and instead spent the next week preparing casseroles after work, all of which she froze to bake later. Her sister volunteered to make the cake, and as Elise considered her sister the superior baker, she accepted the help.

She hired a photographer who was available at the last minute, ordered a few flowers for the tables and bouquets for her sister, Olivia, Raigan, Piper, and herself, and asked someone she knew from work to officiate, then declared to James that there was nothing left to do until the day of.

James, who had watched Raigan get ready for her wedding and remembered the lengthy, lengthy to do lists, watched Elise take all this with awe.

Somehow, she didn't seem stressed about any of it.

He voiced this to her one night while they were sitting on the bathroom floor giving Ella a bath.

"This stuff doesn't matter," she said calmly. "I just want to marry you. That's the important thing."

—-

Elise was not superstitious whatsoever. When her mum suggested they spend the night before the wedding apart, she said that would be silly. They'd been living together over a year now, had a baby together, and it made no sense to pretend otherwise. Besides, they both helped with Ella at night. The routine would get all thrown off.