Chapter Text
Harry realized he was turning into a crazy cat person on a Friday.
He left work early to go home and tidy up for Albus and Lily’s visit. He got them every other weekend, which was not nearly enough, but also totally overwhelming when it happened. James was away at school, so Harry only saw him in the summer and at Christmas.
He missed James. He missed Albus and Lily. He missed all of them all the time.
He missed seeing them, hugging them, feeding them. He missed listening to them chatter and bicker and generally wreak havoc all over the house. He missed the feeling of being needed, of never having a free moment because someone always required a bandage or help finding a shoe or somebody to play Quidditch with them.
It was that feeling of loneliness, that ache that came with no longer being needed by anybody at all, that led Harry to rescue the first cat.
After the divorce, Harry let Ginny keep Grimmauld Place and moved into a house east of Bath. Bath had a sizable wizarding population and was a lovely city besides. Harry’s house was close enough to Bath that he didn’t feel too isolated, but far enough that he had some space. His house was on a wooded piece of land that had privacy and room to run and fly.
It also had a lot of cats wandering through it.
The first one had come to him in late summer, a few months after he’d moved in. He found it lurking in the shed where he kept his brooms and his muggle car and his flying motorcycle. It was small, still quite young, and he wondered why it was not with its mother. It was a soft, fluffy gray, with bright yellow eyes, and its meow had been squeaky and adorably pathetic. He brought it milk in a saucer, which it happily lapped up, and kept an eye out for the mum. But by the end of the weekend, she still hadn’t made an appearance, and Harry had named the kitten Stormy and invited it into the house. He let it out at night when it got a little bit bigger, and it often came back with mice and other assorted goodies, which it left for Harry on the front step. He would pet Stormy and say thank you and then vanish the tiny rodent corpses.
The next two cats showed up in the dead of winter, in the heated outbuilding that housed his woodworking tools. They were even smaller than the first one, just babies, both of them black and white. He’d fed them milk with an eyedropper until they were big enough to lap it up on their own, and eventually, they, too, went out at night to hunt. Unlike Stormy, they didn’t always come in during the day, but usually they did, at least to eat, and sometimes, when they felt like it, they’d laze around the house all day long. Harry called them Biscuit and Bean.
Then, in the early spring, Sunny arrived. She was a big, bright orange mama cat with three little orange kittens that Harry named Morning and Glory and Dawn. They were the most independent of the bunch, living mostly in the shed, where Harry supplied them with a little cathouse and clean blankets and cat food. But they, too, came in whenever they felt like it; it just wasn’t very often.
It was in this way that he came to have seven cats by the time he realized the extent of his cat problem, although, in his defense, they were ‘his’ to varying degrees.
Lily and Albus arrived, bearing their weekend duffel bags, Ginny trailing behind them. It hit Harry hard in the gut, the way it always did, to think that they had to shuffle back and forth between mum and dad, that he hadn’t been strong enough or good enough to make Ginny happy, and his kids were suffering as a result. He hugged them both at the front step and tried not to get emotional about it.
“Those are new,” Ginny said, handing Harry a bag full of Lily’s novels and pushing her sunglasses up into her hair. Lily was a voracious reader who tended to walk into walls because she forgot to look up from her books, and she never traveled without at least four or five. Harry followed Ginny’s gaze, and realized she was talking about Sunny and her kittens, who were all lazing about in a patch of sunshine.
“Oh, yeah,” Harry said, thinking that they weren’t that new, and then thinking how strange it was that Ginny didn’t know everything about his life anymore. There had been a time when she knew every little thing he did, from switching toothpastes to scraping his elbow. Now she didn’t even know he had four new cats.
“You’ve got, ah, quite a lot of cats. How many is that now?”
“Erm. Seven?”
“Oh my god, Harry. Seven cats? That’s a lot. Merlin, how much does it cost to feed the damn things? Do they all use a litter box? Do they stay inside, usually?”
Her voice was definitely concerned. Harry wondered why cats would concern her. “Doesn’t cost too much. And yeah, but. It’s fine. Stormy stays inside mostly, except at night, and Biscuit and Bean come and go. But these four don’t come all that often. Just to eat, and when it storms or whatever.”
“D’you take them to the vet? Have they had shots? Are they fixed?”
Harry blinked at her. He hadn’t considered any of this. The way he figured it, they weren’t, like, pet pets, because he hadn’t gotten them at a pet shop. It wasn’t like Hedwig, for Merlin’s’ sake. “Er, no?”
She gave him a look. “Harry. I don’t want the kids getting rabies or some such thing because of your cats. And you ought to get them fixed or you’re going to end up with a million kittens.”
Did cats get rabies? Did kids get rabies? What, exactly, were rabies? Wasn’t that the foaming at the mouth thing? “Okay, yeah. I can take them to a vet,” he said.
“Or just don’t let them in the house. I think it should be either, or.”
“Yeah, right.” He felt embarrassed now, the extent of his crazy cat person status hitting him fully, making him realize how it must look from the outside, for him to be living all alone with so many of the things running around, mucking up his house. It was weird, wasn’t it? And possibly gross.
She sighed. “How are you, otherwise?”
How was he? Lonely. Bored. Turning into a crazy cat person. Happy in spurts, like when he watched the sun set from his garden patio, or when he saw the Barred owl that liked to hang out in the big chestnut tree. Or when he found a new cat. That was always exciting. “I’m fine. How’re you?”
“Oh, you know. Good. Busy.” She’d taken an assistant coaching position with the Harpies last summer, and he knew it was taking time to get acquainted with a new team and transition from playing to coaching.
“How’s Zabini?” He asked it both out of curiosity and to show her that he was fine with it. Because he was, weirdly. He missed Ginny, missed her company like mad, but he didn’t miss the other parts of their marriage, the parts where he’d failed her, the parts that he’d never quite managed. And he’d found, to his surprise, that it didn’t bother him that she was probably getting those things now from Blaise Zabini, or that Blaise was probably much better at it than he’d been. Ginny deserved happiness. He wished he would have understood all this back when they’d gotten married. But of course he hadn’t.
“Blaise is good. We’re going to Milan tomorrow to see his mum.”
“Oh, that’ll be fun. Never been to Milan.”
“No, me either.”
He realized that it was a stupid thing to talk about with her. He knew she’d never been to Milan and she knew he’d never been. If they had gone, it would have been together. They’d done everything together from the time Harry was eighteen until the spring before he turned thirty-three.
“Well,” Ginny said, casting another look at Sunny and the kittens. “I’d better head out. But, oh, by the way, before I go, I ought to warn you. Albus is in a terrible mood. That Max kid from school is being awful to him. You might want to try to talk to him about it; I can only get so much information out of him.”
“Ugh, Max is a little arsehole. Can’t you just hex him at drop off?”
“I can’t go around hexing muggle children, Harry,” Ginny said, laughing.
“Just a little hex? Maybe a bat bogey?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said, grinning. “But in the meantime, talk to Al.”
“Course I will.”
She nodded. “Thanks. And get those cats to the vet, I mean it! Oh, and my mum’s going to be collecting the kids on Sunday, almost forgot.”
“Yeah, yeah. Alright. Vet, yes. Your mum, yes.” He pulled Ginny in for a hug, because they’d started doing that again and he liked it. She seemed to like it, too.
She kissed his cheek. “Take care, Harry,” she said.
“You too, Gin.”
She waved and he watched her disapparate, and found himself getting teary-eyed, the way he sometimes did at drop off and pick up on the weekends he saw the kids. He didn’t know why, exactly – maybe he was just adjusting, still.
He’d thought he’d found love when he began dating Ginny after the war, because it felt like love, didn’t it, all soft and tender and fond. And at first, he enjoyed all of it. He loved holding her hand and cuddling with her and putting his arm around her. Even kissing was pleasant enough, because it made him feel close to her, and he liked feeling close to her.
But when kissing began to progress to other things, something in Harry had begun to clench up. He’d thought maybe it was something wrong with him because of the war, or maybe just because at eighteen, he’d never done more than kiss anyone, and was intimidated by the whole thing. But it soon became clear, especially once they were married, that it was more than that. Half the time, Harry couldn’t have sex without spelling himself hard, and all the time, he dreaded it. Dreaded it.
That wasn’t how sex was supposed to be, he knew that, but there was no way he was going to talk to Ginny about it. No way he was going to talk to anyone about it, because obviously something was very embarrassingly wrong with him. He knew how much Ron had wanted to have sex with Hermione before it happened, and recalled how happy he’d been once it had. He remembered Dean telling them all very excitedly about the first time he and Luna had sex. Sex was something men craved, something they dreamt about, something that they were willing to go to great lengths to get.
But Harry? Harry stayed down in the kitchen most nights, pretending to work, so that he could go upstairs after Ginny was already asleep and not have to deal with it. He knew this wasn’t normal. He hated that he felt the way he did. And he had no idea what to do about it.
And then, five years into their marriage, Harry had gotten a chest-constricting, heart-pounding crush on one of Ginny’s Pudd United teammates, Connell Quinn. He’d been tongue-tied and clumsy around Connell, but kept looking for reasons to be around him all the same. And Connell liked Harry, that was the thing. He always seemed to find his way over to Harry at parties, and eventually took to asking Harry to grab a pint with him every now and then.
Those trips to the pub were fraught with tension, with a strange awareness of how Connell was positioned on his barstool, of how close his knee was to Harry’s. Harry found himself cataloguing details of Connell’s face, trying to figure out what shade of blue, exactly, his eyes were, and whether his nose was maybe a tiny bit crooked, and how his hair looked when he used product in it versus when he didn’t. He memorized the look of Connell’s hands, and how they gripped his pint glass, how they would settle on the bar or move through the air when he spoke. It was just two blokes grabbing a pint at the neighborhood pub on a Tuesday after work or a Saturday afternoon, but it made Harry feel like a fifteen-year-old-girl on her first date.
When he realized this, he began coming up with excuses when Connell asked him if he wanted to visit the pub, but he still saw Connell sometimes when they socialized with the other Pudd United players and their families. One day, after seeing Connell shirtless at the beach, Harry finally let his mind go with it, and had an earth-shattering wank in the shower, imagining what it might be like to touch Connell’s body, to touch hard muscle instead of soft curves, to feel rough stubble against his cheek. And suddenly, after years of confusion, he was able to admit what the problem was.
He didn’t tell Ginny about this revelation for many more years, not until long after Connell had left Pudd United and gone to play for a Bulgarian team and Ginny had started asking more and more pointed questions about their sex life (or lack thereof). But he’d think about it at night, lying in bed beside Ginny, smelling the lingering scent of the vanilla perfume she sprayed on herself in the mornings, and wonder how it was he’d never known. How did a person not know this about themselves? How had it taken him twenty-six years to figure it out? Was he that dense, or had he been lying to himself?
Then he began to think about school, and about Cedric Diggory, who had been beautiful, and who’d taken up permanent residence in Harry’s head all of fourth year. He thought about the older Slytherin bloke, Cassius Warrington, who’d played Quidditch, and about how Harry’d never quite been able to hate him as much as the rest of the Slytherin team, mostly because of his big blue eyes. Then he thought about Malfoy, about how he’d stalked him obsessively and spent hours watching the map, how he’d kept track of Malfoy’s plummeting weight in sixth year, as well as changes to his hairstyle. He recalled that he’d noticed things like how Malfoy sat atop his broom and how long his stride was (and, incidentally, how long his legs were), and how those weren’t things you noticed just because you were worried that somebody was up to something.
Slowly, he realized it had been there all along. He’d just been stupid.
When Ginny said she wanted to divorce, Harry had been devastated, but also unsurprised. He knew she wasn’t happy, and he knew that he wasn’t able to make her happy. He didn’t want to split up their family because it would hurt the kids, and because he would miss Ginny’s company and her humor and her conversation and her hugs. He did love her, in many ways. Just not in the way she needed.
And now, here he was, in his pretty little country house with its enormous yard, alone except for seven cats. He was definitely turning into a crazy cat person, and he hadn’t even bothered to make sure his cats were safe for his children.
And it wasn’t as though his sex life had improved since the divorce. His ex-wife was in a new relationship – a somewhat serious one -- and all Harry had done was share one drunken kiss with a bloke one weekend when he’d visited Ron and Hermione in London and they’d all gone out to a pub. He’d been so pissed he could hardly remember it, honestly.
And he couldn’t help but wonder what the point was, of getting divorced at all. He wasn’t any happier, and he was much lonelier, and probably he should have just made himself love Ginny the right way. If he’d tried harder, maybe he could have done it. He should have tried. At least then, he wouldn’t be living here all alone, with seven cats.
He walked back into the old, stone farmhouse and wiped his shoes before making his way across the wide-planked wooden floor, worn smooth with age. “Al! Lil! Grab your brooms, you two! We’re going flying!”