Generation three “Hey!” It was one of few words that Stanley O’Malley had thus far perfected. He used it for everything--a greeting, an exclamation, an answer, a statement--and rarely when actually applicable. It was clearly a favorite of his.
His brother Wally sat on the floor of the playroom, quietly constructing some sort of block tower. “Hey!” Stanley shouted again, running up to him as best his chubby, wobbly little legs could carry him. But they could not stop as hard and suddenly as he wanted to, and thus Stanley tumbled over, taking Wally’s architecture down with him.
“Hey,” Wally offered back to him, his word holding completely different inflection. Where Stanley’s utterance was excited and perhaps a bit demanding for attention, the younger twin’s tone suggested more sadness. The tears that followed serve only to confirm it even as Stanley, oblivious, picked himself up, dusted himself off a little, and was once more shuffling about the playroom.
That was the babysitter’s cue. Serapes laboriously pulled himself out of his chair. Clutching his cane, he limped slowly over to Wallace, who continued to cry on the carpet beside his decimated block tower. His unoccupied arm reached down and swooped the young boy up around his middle, which initially did nothing to calm him, but once Serapes returned to his chair, slowing lowering himself into it, and abandoned his cane, he could better adjust the sad child.
He placed Wallace on his lap and held him close to his chest, half-inside his dark cloak. It had always managed to sooth Sophia, so he was optimistic about its prospects for her son. Serapes was not very good with words, so this method allowed his physical warmth to do the talking for him, a tangible sign of understood affection and proximity.
He felt Wallce’s dampness soaking through his shirt, but soon enough, the source of the wet spot ran dry. Serapes glanced down to find the boy sufficiently soothed, snuggling up against him. “There now,” he said calmly, his deep voice unaltered, a stark contrast from the mushy, high voice with which people often spoke to children. “That is... much better, isn’t it?”
Speech was still a bit of a strain on him, but for the most part, he was recovering well from the stroke. He hoped to return to work soon, or at least as soon as Sophia would allow him to depart. It was so strange, being away from the school this far into January. He had not spent more than a week away from its refined, English winter since he was a far younger man, perhaps his early twenties. Over two decades of work had been given to the institution, and he could hardly imagine his classroom with a stranger occupying his desk, grading the work he had assigned prior to the holidays and assigning his own. It felt so odd.
And now Sophia was a professor herself at her former school, which made Serapes glow with pride. It was nice to see her happy and grown up. He wished he could have seen Sara that way for longer.
It was strange, sitting here with Sophia’s children. The boys were the third generation, each of a different surname as the young girls became women and adopted new families, he had gotten to know in his lifetime. He remembered when he and Saralynn were young, before their lives had twisted and gotten complicated, weighed down by other people, people who liked him but loved her, who whisked her off, followed by her tag-along childhood friend.
Sometimes he resented Jacob for how fortunate he had been, graced by the love of Saralynn White, flawless and beautiful, shimmering paradigm of perfection. Even now, long after her untimely death, Serapes was tortured by her eyes, the way they had looked at him so desperately through the fire the night she died, the way they shined through her daughter in general naivety, the way they sparkled in a grandson she never met, a little boy who even now sat in his lap and stared up at him. Jacob had been lucky, not only for Saralynn’s love but for her discretion. Serapes knew Jacob’s life without her had not been easy, but at least he did not have to live with the memory of hearing her goodbye, of finding her body, their young daughter begging her to wake up. He did not have to go on while young Sophia’s wails of betrayal rang in his mind, tiny shrieks about promises to make things right. Jacob was lucky, indeed.
It had taken a very long time, but Jacob had moved on, continued his life. Serapes didn’t think he ever could, maybe because he still felt jaded, like his time with Saralynn had been stolen from him. They had met through him, his two best friends, one from home, the other his Hogwarts roommate. Nobody had ever cared about him the way they did, and in many respects, he was grateful to them. He nearly wandered a darker path, into the a realm of dark arts from which he would never have made it out alive. Jacob and Saralynn had guided him, taken care of him, but somewhere along the way, they found each other, leaving him in the dust.
And then they’d gotten married. He was a best man, a duty he’d had to split with Ileum Spurn, Jacob’s other best friend, a Gryffindor who was damn near a Ravenclaw who had needed Jacob as badly as Serapes did. He watched the love of his life wed another man, standing on that man’s side when he wished more than anything to be in his shoes. And then Saralynn White was gone, replaced by Sara Jamison (“Just Sara, please, Serapes. I’m making a new life,” she’d said, but where did Serapes fit into it?), a woman he barely knew but was certain he still loved. He had to. He didn’t know what else to do.
When Sophia came along, he thought his heart would shatter.But it didn’t. He held this tiny blonde child, and he felt… happy. Perhaps he deluded himself, somehow content that the bestowed role of godfather (another title he had to share with Spurn) made her his, like she should have been. Saralynn had other children to attend to, her orphanage expanding, and Jacob worked day and night when the big cases came in. Serapes spent all the time he had with her, a magnificent feat for a young professor without tenure, although much to his discontent, Spurn had gotten perhaps the most time with her, as the man could never keep a job.
Somewhere along the way, sometime after watching her mother die and losing much of her faith in adult women as an unintended consequence, Sophia grew up. She graduated school (He had always felt Sonora was too damn far) and found an apprenticeship to become a potioneer, a fact for which he felt responsible, having allowed her to brew with him most of her life. She got married and had children (although not exactly in the correct order, as he’d discovered she had in fact been pregnant at her father’s wedding and then disappeared with Ryan thereafter, although they’d covered their tracks well enough). So somehow, the world kept turning all these years without Saralynn, and Sophia had changed.
He’d spent so long taking care of her, even living in the Jamison home for a summer when her father had vanished, for which Serapes had yet to forgive him fully, but things were different now. She could take care of herself, and for anything additional, she had a husband, a pleasant young lad whom Serapes liked well enough, as far as he ever liked anyone, but was not quite good enough for her through no fault of his own: no one was. In fact, even as he sat, taking care of their sons, Sophia was now taking care of him, through her insistence he lodge with them. She had her mother’s stubbornness, and there had been no reasoning with her.
But the situation was, he felt, actually working quite well for all of them. While he felt a pang of longing for the institution he knew so well, had spent so long in, the O’Malley household was a nice change of pace. It afforded him the freedom and adulthood of tending once more to young children as he watched Wallace and Stanley, while allowing Sophia to look after him, assure his recovery. Like most things in his relationship with his could-have-been daughter, it was mutually beneficiary. They were always there for one another.
Serapes had gotten lost in these thoughts, his mind a big fogged down by both nostalgia and medication, but a light snoring broke him out of it. He glanced down expectantly at Wallace, but to his surprise, the bright-eyed boy stared back up at him. “Hi,” Wallace beamed, his voice content but low, as he was rather quiet for one so small, not much of a crier or a whiner, a happy, quiet thing. Serapes smiled weakly at him before looking around the room. Stanley, the human incarnate of an energy drink, had evidently crashed, as he was completely asleep in the center of the room, his chubby cheek smushed against the carpet, his body flat like a plank as he laid on his chest.
After a moment of contemplating the situation, Serapes rose with great effort, holding most of Wallace on his long forearm, his wand at in the hand at the end, the other side of his body occupied by his cane. “Bear with me,” he stated plainly in Wallace’s direction. “Levicorpus.”
Carefully, Stanley rose into the air, his sleep undisturbed, seemingly unaware of anything changing around him. Wallace giggled at the sight of his floating twin leading them down the hallway, wherein Serapes carefully placed Stanley into his crib. Serapes paused there for a moment, gazing forward. He rested his cane against the crib and strenuously stood on his own, freeing his hand to offer something physical to the resting child. His bony thumb ran gently across Stanley’s temple, pushing a tuft of dark hair away from his closed eyes. “Say goodnight…. to Brother, Wallace,” he whispered.
“Night night,” Wallace said, waving at the crib. His quiet voice went even lower in volume, matching Serapes’s whisper.
Serapes patted Wallace’s head before reclaiming his cane, a wave of physical relief washing over his body, though it did not last long as movement was once more expected. He shut the nursery door behind them and, as they headed down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen, he offered simply, “Juicebox?”
Wallace lit up with the sort of toothy grin (or, rather, what would have been toothy if he had quite all of his teeth yet) that Serapes vividly remembered seeing on his mother and perhaps even his grandmother in their days of youth. He wondered what Saralynn would say to being a grandmother, if she would feel excited or old, if she would babysit constantly or refuse to change diapers, and he wondered what she would say to see him this way, playing babysitter to her grandsons. But like most of his thoughts along that vein, Serapes had to reside himself to never quite knowing. Saralynn was a mystery in life, and he supposed it was only respectful to allow her to remain that way in death.