Date: Sunday 18 January 2002 Time: Morning Location: 12 Grimmauld Pl Characters: James Potter and Ginny Weasley
He'd finally done it.
That smug little music box, with its superior air and lack of visible screws, had finally come apart. However, its contents were hardly less beguiling. All there really was to it was this little green... plastic... metal... thing. Huh. Maybe he had to take that apart.
Music from a reliable, sensible record player slipped around the disemboweled music player, its shell and innards strewn through the air in front of James' face. They never used the formal dining room except to exploit its vast table space. The table in the kitchen was to frequently covered and cleared of food to allow projects like some part off of Sirius' bike to linger for days on end. But the dining room - the dining room table was wide and long enough to sport the couple of mid-stage potions Remus had going, a grease-stained towel nestling a few mechanical parts James thought looked rather interesting despite being completely foreign to him, and James' elbows as his gaze inspected the string of parts held together by odd, flat wires. Sitting a few inches away was reheated pizza from the night before.
Picking up a slice, James leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankle over his knee. He figured he still had plenty of time to sort it out. For whatever reason, whenever there was a house guest James found himself waking up disappointingly early. Actually, he blamed the habit on his mother. Or his father. Or his father in the aid of his mother. It hadn't mattered with Sirius when he'd moved in with James, apart from mornings when they had some kind of spectacular plan in the works. Excited anticipation was the best sort of alarm clock.
Ginny had arrived the night before, keeping to her promise to visit once she got back from Romania. Sleeping arrangements in Grimmauld Place never left anyone wanting for a bed. Really, there were too many bedrooms. Surely some of the rooms could be put to better use. Not that he much needed one, but the familiar desire for an office had been unfurling in the back of his head. He was just used to having one in his house. It was nice, at least, to really start thinking of this place as his home even if he never really expected to Godric's Hollow completely out of his head.
With his pizza-free hand James plucked a slowly rotating piece of the case from the air. As far as he could tell, there wasn't anything particularly special about it. But why on earth had they tried to make the thing to immpenetrable?