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

19.

November 2034

JAMES

Ella had been coming into James' office even more than usual lately. She was there before classes, at morning break, after classes... any time she had free time during the day, there she was.

James didn't mind it. He wasn't getting anything done at all, work-wise, and had been bringing a lot more home than he usually needed to, but it wasn't like he was going to tell Ella to stop coming in and spending time with him. She was fifteen and she was prioritizing her dad. He knew enough not to take that for granted.

Still, these visits were a little strange. James got the impression she was coming in with a purpose each time, and yet, she never seemed to come out with it, whatever it was.

Today, she came in and just asked if she could do her homework there, because her friends kept distracting her when she tried to work in the common room.

For a while, she did seem to be getting her work done, and James sat across from her in companionable silence, grading a set of essays from his first years.

But after twenty minutes or so, James looked up from the parchment he'd just finished with and saw she wasn't looking at her work at all. Instead, she was looking at a picture he and Elise had taken together a very long time ago, sitting on the front porch of their house. Ella had actually been the photographer. She's gotten a camera for her seventh birthday and she'd been taking pictures of everything. Most of them had been blurry pictures of her stuffed animals or attempts to photograph the birds on the beach (usually the bird zipping out of the frame before she captured it). But this one had really surprised him when they developed the film.

In the photo, Elise had her head on his shoulder and was looking into the camera with her eyes open wide, just the hint of a smile on her face. It had been on his desk for years.

"I always liked that picture," he said now, wondering if he could coax her into saying whatever it was she had on her mind. He could feel her thinking. "That expression is very typical Mum, don't you think?"

Ella just nodded. She set her quill down and pulled her feet up onto the chair, hugging her knees.

Her eyes didn't leave the picture. "Will you tell me about her?" she asked.

James frowned. Piper had sometimes said things like this about her dad, but he had passed away when she was just a baby. Ella had just seen her mum a week or so ago.

"What do you mean?"

She shrugged, still not looking at him. "I don't know. Just something about her. I don't care what."

James thought. He looked at the picture, too, and it made him think how much Elise loved that house, the front porch especially, tiny as it was.

"I wish I had a picture of what the house looked like when we first saw it," he said. "You wouldn't believe it was the same place. I thought I was going to drop dead just by being in there. There was so much mold. But your mum... she has this gift for seeing the outcome early on. She can look at a situation that seems hopeless to anyone else and she sees it all worked out. And I guess there are other people that do that, but then it comes time to actually do something about it and they just lose interest or lose steam or never even get started in the first place.

"Your mum though, she isn't like that. She'll get it done. When she gets an idea in her head, she makes it happen. And I didn't even really know that about her yet when we saw that house, but I remember looking at her looking at it and I knew she wanted that house, even though the floors were rotting out and it was infested with everything under the sun. So we figured out how to buy it and your mum pretty much single-handedly turned it around. I helped her a little, but she did ninety percent of it and it's unrecognizable. I just always liked that about her, how determined she can be. And her follow-through and everything. I like that if she wants something, she just does it."

Ella rested her chin on her knees. "I wish I was like that," she said softly.

"I bet you could be," said James. "You're a lot like her."

Ella looked at him for the first time in this whole conversation. "I don't think I'm like her at all."

"You might not see it yet," he said, "but I think you will. With time. I think you're more and more like her the older you get, in your own Ella sort of way."

Ella just rolled her lips together and looked back at the picture.

"Where's this coming from?" James asked.

"I don't know," Ella said. "I just want to know her better."

James smiled. He couldn't wait to tell Elise this. It would make her so happy.

—

That evening, when Elise arrived home, James accosted her at once.

"Guess what?" he asked.

"You won the thousand galleon prize in the Daily Prophet," said Elise without missing a beat.

"I wish," said James. "Ella came to chat with me again today, and guess what she wanted to talk about?"

"What?"

"You," said James, grinning ear to ear.

But Elise frowned. "What do you mean? What about me?"

"I mean she was asking about you. She said she wanted to get to know you better, wanted me to tell her something about you."

Elise looked at him, her eyes open and round, a faint crease between her eyebrows. She turned away. "Oh," she said softly.

James faltered. He had been so sure Elise would think this was great news. She had been so happy when Ella asked to talk to her.

"What's wrong?" he asked quickly.

Elise gave her head a little shake. "I don't know. Nothing. It's just— I don't know."

"No, E, what is it?"

She sat down on the edge of the coffee table in the living room and looked down at her knees.

"She just shouldn't have to ask you, you know? She should already know."

James sat down beside her. "I think she knows you better than she thinks she does," he said. "The point is she's thinking about you. She wants to be close with you."

Elise nodded, but she didn't say anything else.

"I'm going to change," she said. "And I might go for a walk before I make dinner if you're not starving."

She didn't ask him to come with him — a fact James did not miss — but he didn't press the issue. Elise, he had learned, sometimes needed space to process things.

"Sure," said James. He kissed her on the cheek before they stood back up. Elise lifted her chin a little, but went into the bedroom without another word.

She walked for a long, long time. It was dark by the time she returned and her cheeks were pink with cold. James was sitting at the kitchen table grading some of the things he'd neglected due to Ella's frequent visits. Elise sat down across from him.

"What did you tell her?" she asked.

He considered her expression. She didn't seem quite so sad now, just curious.

"I told her about when we found this house. How it was just trashed but you saw right through it. You saw this," he said looking around at the kitchen. "You saw our home. That's something I've always loved about you. You can see how something could be and then you just make it happen."

Elise got up, walked over to his side of the table, sat down across his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. She held on tight for at least a minute and then she pulled back to look at him, hands still linked behind his neck. "What sounds good for dinner?" she asked.

James just laughed. He couldn't help it. "I like everything you make," he said.