SPOILERS: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

CONTENT: Harry and Albus, Gen

CATEGORY: Next Gen

WARNING(S): Cupboards

RATING: PG

SUMMARY: Harry and Albus discover what's inside the wardrobe.

DISCLAIMER: The Harry Potter series and all the characters associated with it are the property solely of J. K. Rowling, her agents and publishers.  No infringement of any rights is intended from the creation of this story.  Nor is any money being made from it.  This flashfic is written solely for the entertainment of the author and her friends, and is not intended for distribution in any shape or form.

NOTES: This is set after the final chapter of Deathly Hallows but about four years before the epilogue.  Which means it's not AU; good lord, I may develop a nervous twitch.

Comments would be welcome, as always.

Finding Narnia

by Mad Martha

"Sorry, love, this is such a nuisance," Ginny said, looking exasperated, "but he's definitely running a temperature and I daren't take him with us if he has a cold or a tummy upset.  Aunt Matty is such a hypochondriac!  But if you can look after Al today, Mum says she'll come and keep an eye on him tomorrow, and we'll be back on Friday."

"Don't worry about it."  Harry passed her Lily's bag to set beside the Floo, ready for the trip.  "I'll owl Ron in a minute - he might be able to cover for me tomorrow as well, so we don't have to bother your mum."

"Great.  Okay, I think that's everything ... where's James?"  Ginny frowned.  "Lily's fine but I'd better check his temperature as well."

"You're joking.  He never catches anything as simple as a bug!"

Which Ginny had to admit was perfectly true.  Every other child in James's class had caught Mongolian Measles and Toadpox on an almost predictable childhood schedule, but James had somehow avoided these simple infections and come down with Rumbulating Pustulitis instead, which had involved three days in St. Mungo's isolation ward and a Ministry investigation to ensure that Harry hadn't somehow carried the infection home to him from a confiscated cursed artefact.  They still weren't sure how he'd caught it, but apart from that he was almost obnoxiously healthy.

Harry went to the kitchen door and leaned through it.  "Jim!  Lily!  Come on, it's almost time to go!"

There was a muffled yell from somewhere in the house, followed by a thunder of feet, and James raced into the kitchen with his little sister jogging worshipfully at his heels.

"Oy, what are you doing with my chess set?" Harry asked him, seeing it tucked under James's arm.

"I might need it!"                   

"Jim - you don't play chess."

"I'm going to learn."

"Not at Aunt Matty's, you're not!"  And Harry wrestled the set away from him.

"Oh Dad!"

"Don't start," Ginny told him sternly, catching hold of his arm and pulling him to her so that she could check his temperature.  It was like trying to hold an eel; James was a small hurricane made flesh, in perpetual motion.

"Mu-u-u-um!"

"Stand still!  ... No, you're fine.  Lily, pet, come here ..."

Harry put James's bag firmly into his hands.  "Now, behave yourself at Aunt Matty's!" he told him.  Some hope.  "Don't tease your sister, and do as Mum tells you."  James rolled his eyes.  "And don't roll your eyes at me!  There's still time for Teddy and me to find someone else to go with us to the game next weekend, you know."

James adopted an improbably pious expression, which Harry viewed with amusement and resignation.  He still wasn't sure why it had seemed like a good idea to name his eldest son after his father and godfather; it seemed to make sense at the time and only Ron had been kind enough to point out that it was just begging for trouble to name the kid after two of the notorious Marauders.

"All right, we're ready," Ginny said.  "Come on, you two ..."  She took the jar of Floo powder down off the shelf and held it out to James.  "Criggle's Wood, and no messing about!" she told him.

He sighed heavily and took a handful of powder, throwing it into the fire and stepping into the green flames.  "Criggle's Wood!"  He disappeared up the chimney.

"Now you - " Ginny held the jar out to Lily, who carefully took a handful and followed her brother through the Floo.

Ginny turned to Harry.  "Are you sure you can manage?  Don't let Al fuss or rampage about, will you?"

He gave her a quizzical look.  "Is he likely to?" 

"I keep finding him out of bed and poking around at the back of cupboards."

Harry blinked.  "Okay ... I'll keep an eye on him, don't worry.  He'll probably be fine by tomorrow, just a bit off-colour today."

"All right then.  I'll see you on Friday."  She gave him a quick kiss, picked up her bag and stepped into the Floo.

Harry waited until the green flames had died down, then threw a pinch of Floo powder into the fire himself and stuck his head into the grate.  "Ron, mate, are you there ...?"

~~~

"What are you looking for?"

Albus started and tumbled out of James's toy cupboard.  Harry helped him up, perplexed.  "Al?"

"Just checking, Daddy," Al said guiltily.

"For what?"  Harry brushed his son's dark fringe back and rested his palm on his forehead for a moment.  He was definitely too warm.  "You're supposed to be in bed, tiger!  What are you up to?  Your brother'll shout the roof down if he finds out you've been poking around in his stuff."

"I was only looking."

"Well, try looking under your blankets instead."  Harry steered him firmly back into his own room and helped him back into bed.  "Would you like some lemonade in a while?"

"Yes please, Daddy."

"All right then.  You try and take a nap, and I'll bring you some later.  I'll just be downstairs if you need me, all right?"  Al nodded docilely and Harry smiled, ruffling his hair affectionately.  "And no more rummaging in cupboards, all right?  What were you looking for anyway?"

Al looked rather furtive.  "Narnia."

Harry hadn't had much exposure to Muggle literature, even as a child - perhaps especially not then - and his own children were being raised in an almost entirely wizard culture.  He recognised the name but that was all, and he was at a loss to understand how Al had come across it.  As far as he knew, most of the books in their house were wizard ones.

"You mean the book?" he asked, puzzled.  "Does Jim have a copy of it, then?"  It didn't seem likely; James didn't have the patience for reading books and preferred comics.

"Oh no!  I was just checking if it was there."

Harry shook his head, letting it go.  Al could be a bit obscure sometimes, which Harry hoped had nothing to do with his second instance of nostalgic naming.

"Well, you can look for it later, when you're feeling more the thing.  Okay?"

Al agreed to this and Harry left him alone. 

When he returned to the kitchen there was a lanky teenager rummaging in the biscuit barrel.

"Hullo Ted!  I didn't hear you arrive."

Teddy Lupin looked up and his hair, already an interesting shade of sea-green, flushed a deep blue.  Apart from his variable colouring and occasional deliberate changes to his features, he looked an awful lot like his father, something that even now sometimes took Harry unawares.  "I rode my bike here," he said around a mouthful of biscuit crumbs.  "Aren't you going to be late for work?"

"I'm not going in today - Al's poorly," Harry explained.  "Want a butterbeer?"  He took a bottle out of the fridge and handed it to him.

"Thanks.  I brought a book for Al - maybe he'd like to read it now, if he's in bed."  Teddy pulled it out of his pocket and offered it to Harry.  "He really likes the others."

Harry looked at it: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.  "Ah, so that's where he got the idea!"

"Mmm?"

"He's been hunting around, trying to find a book.  It's probably under his bed, if I know him - don't worry, we'll find it and let you have it back."

Teddy shook his head, swallowing his mouthful of beer-and-biscuit.  "'Salright.  He owled it back to me the other day.  I said I'd let him have this one as soon as I found it."

Harry frowned.  "So why's he rooting through every cupboard in the house?  He says he's trying to find Narnia!"

Teddy grinned at him.  "Have you ever read the books?"

"No - by the time I had a chance, I was too old."

"In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the kids travel to Narnia by climbing inside a wardrobe."

Harry rolled his eyes.  "Great.  The last thing this family needs is a wardrobe with a door into another world inside it!"

~~~

Al was not in his bed when Harry went to take the book to him.  He was in Lily's room, solemnly patting the back wall of her closet, oblivious to the little pastel-coloured garments draped about his shoulders.

"Lily's dresses won't fit you," Harry told him, firmly extracting him from the cupboard and steering him back to his own room once more.

"I wasn't trying on her clothes!"

"Try telling that one to your Uncle George!"

"I was just ... looking."

"For Narnia?  It's not real, tiger, it's just a place in a story."

"It might be real," Al asserted stubbornly.  "Sometimes there are things inside cupboards, Daddy."

An inarguable statement, admittedly, whichever way you looked at it.

"There are no foreign countries inside our cupboards and wardrobes though," Harry told him, and before Al could argue the point he added, "and even if there were, you can't explore them wearing pyjamas and running a temperature.  Now, back to bed with you - or I won't let you have the book Teddy brought for you."

Al burrowed back under his covers at once and held out his hands hopefully.  Harry grinned and gave him the book.  Al loved to read and he was quite advanced for a seven year-old, easily tackling all the books that well-meaning family members gave to James.  He let out a little croon of delight when he saw the title and opened it at once.

"Don't read yourself into a fever," Harry told him, but he needn't have worried; when he returned fifteen minutes later with a glass of lemonade, Al had nodded off to sleep with the book still clutched in one hand.

~~~

Early that evening - after Harry and Al had eaten a meal together which Al had mostly pushed around his plate before being put back to bed - Harry settled down to read the copy of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe that Teddy had passed through the Floo after lunch.  He felt obscurely that a responsible father should be monitoring what his hyper-imaginative son was reading.  It did not, of course, have anything to do with a lingering wistfulness for the things he had been denied as a child.

It was a slender volume; he finished it well before midnight, then spent another hour pondering.  Then he got up and went to look in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom.

~~~

Al was a lot better the following morning, his temperature back to normal and his appetite roaring for sustenance.  He put away a reassuringly large breakfast while chattering eagerly about his cousin Hugo's upcoming birthday party, then spent all morning out in the garden.  With his assertive older brother out of the way Al was free to entertain himself without interference, which he did by solemnly building himself a small shelter out of bits of boxes propped against the gnarled old tree at the bottom of the garden and retreating into it with a blanket, a bottle of ginger-pop and his new book.

Harry left him to it, only checking up on him once in a while, as he had things of his own to do.

Just before lunch it began to rain and Al retreated to the house, rather put out.

"You can build a fort under the dinner table," Harry suggested, but this wouldn't do.  Al went to glower out of the sitting room window, presumably in the hopes of intimidating the rain into stopping.

"Did you find Narnia?" Harry asked him from the doorway.

"No," Al sighed, very much with an air of someone humouring the unimaginative grown-up.

"Oh.  Did you check all of the wardrobes?"

Al gave him a suspicious look.

"There's that horrible old wardrobe in the spare room that Mum keeps the winter cloaks in," Harry pointed out.  "You know - the ugly one with roses painted on the door."

Feigning nonchalance, he wandered back out to the kitchen.  A moment or two later he heard Al climbing the stairs, and grinned to himself as he finished packing up a small picnic basket.  By the time he reached the spare bedroom himself he could hear Al's muffled crow of excitement from somewhere deep inside the wardrobe.

It was a rather ugly wardrobe, painted white with two decorated panels on the door with the aforementioned roses.  Harry had a vague recollection of finding it in the flat he and Ginny had lived in just before they got married, although why they'd brought it with them when they moved house he had no idea.  Ginny stored their cloaks and welly-boots in it, liberally sprinkled around with her mother's trusted mothball recipe, so in that respect there had been no difficulty in reproducing the interior of the wardrobe in the book.  The extra space to put a small forest clearing in had been more of a challenge, but Harry knew a lot more about the practical applications of magic now than he had when he left school.  As for the 'open air' aspect, that had been easier still, for the spell that made a ceiling look like the sky was covered in some detail in Hogwarts: A History. 

Al had one small criticism.  "There's no snow," he told his father reproachfully, when Harry followed him out of the back of the wardrobe onto springy grass between tall trees.

"I didn't think you'd fancy having a picnic in the snow," Harry pointed out, holding up the basket containing their lunch.  "Besides, it wouldn't be much fun with the White Witch still hanging around, would it?"

James would almost certainly have debated this point quite vigorously, but Al was of a more practical turn of mind and the word "picnic" operated upon him powerfully.  They spread a blanket in the middle of a fairy ring (Harry was particularly pleased with details like the toadstools) and settled down to eat sandwiches and cake with pumpkin juice.

"Does it go on forever?" Al asked at one point, peering hopefully between the trees.

"Well, not really," Harry admitted.  "There's a very good view over that set of rocks there, though."  He was rather pleased with the view too, which gave the illusion of staring out across a vast country, with a little castle in the far distance on the edge of a blue ocean.  He'd even managed some birdsong, and if Al came back here after dark there would be a moon and constellations to look at in the night sky.

It had taken him a good portion of the night and most of the morning to create this, but it was worth it to see Al's delight.  This was clearly as good as the tree house he and Ron had built for the kids the year before.

"Can we keep it?" Al asked hopefully.

Harry hesitated for a second.  He hadn't forgotten the squabbles that had erupted over who 'owned' the tree house, but it wouldn't be right for Al to have something like this and not share it with his brother and sister.  Plus, he wasn't sure how Ginny would feel about having a forest clearing inside the spare wardrobe.

On the other hand, it would be a terrible shame to get rid of it after all the work he'd put into it.  And it was terribly soothing to lie here in a forest clearing, listening to the birds chirping, while outside in the real world it was raining …

"Maybe we could keep it for a while," he said, and Al beamed.

~finis ~