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"Oh, what about Hope if it's a girl? For your father's mother, Teddy..."
"Or Andromeda? Don't you think she'd be thrilled? It'd make such a beautiful middle name."
"Or even..."
The conversation goes round in circles, and Lucy can take no more. Lucy, who has had too much wine and whose cheeks are now delicately flushed, whose tongue is loosened as the conversation turns - inevitably - towards an upcoming anniversary. Lucy, who is tired of the expectation that Vic and Teddy will name their unborn child something 'appropriate'. Lucy, who can count six boys in her House alone named Harry, and sees so many of the people around her struggle under the burden of being named for heroes and martyrs. Lucy, who is not named for anyone, in a unique position amongst her cousins and friends.
Names are important to the Weasley-Potter-Lupin clan. This is a family that lives in each other’s pockets, where lives lived en masse mean that secrecy is impossible and lies are commonplace. This is a family where the wars have not been consigned to memory, and there is an unspoken expectation that the future will pay its dues to the past. This is a family where names create ghosts and an unbearable weight of being.
Harry James and Edward Remus for fathers that the babies will never know. Ginevra for the first daughter born in generations and derived from Guinevere, marking her out as a queen. Fred and George for Fabian and Gideon, James Sirius and Fred for troublemakers extraordinaire. Victoire for auspiciousness, Molly for an apology, Louis for the Sun King and the first male part-Veela in living memory. Albus Severus and Lily Luna because Harry's sense of morality is less black and white than anyone else's. Rose and Hugo to cement their parents’ union.
Dominique and Roxanne can debate the legacy left to them, but the fact remains that only Lucy - alone amidst this crowd of resurrections and walking ghosts - is truly untouched by the past. When she speaks, the table falls quiet.
“So humour me, if you can possibly take a break from pressuring Ted to name his child after his great-great-uncle twice removed who did something special two hundred years ago-“
“Lucy,” her father growls, but he is on thin ice with his youngest daughter. If Percy Weasley grew up doing one thing, it was opposing his family’s conventions.
“If I wanted to pass a law," she continues regardless, "making it illegal for parents to name their children after dead family members, how would I go about doing that?”
Harry looks at her impassively and Teddy grins at the silence that’s fallen over a family usually so loud that Sonorus charms are needed to rise above the din.
“Not that I’d know, of course,” Lucy continues, wine glass in one hand and an insouciant edge to her voice, “but I’d imagine it must be pretty fucking tragic to be named for someone you don’t know, who turned out to not always be such a great person. I mean, laying flowers is one thing, but using children as substitutes for dead people is kind of shitty."
“You’ve never experienced losing someone, Lucy. You’ve never been in a war, you’ve never-“ Bill offers, choosing his words with care.
Lucy's close to snorting with derision, but Bill’s always been her favourite uncle. Still, her attitude comes across in the barely perceptible shake of her hand as she refills her wine glass.
“Mm I’d beg to differ. Not hard to imagine that a good half of the people around this table didn’t lose some sense of who they really are because of a name they were saddled with. Albatrosses around their neck, and all that,” she replies. It comes out far too flippantly but some sort of dam inside her has given way, and her pent-up irritation pours forth.
She feels a twinge of guilt as Grandma Molly gets up from the table and George follows her inside. Harry looks at her like he doesn’t have a clue who she is, and maybe he doesn’t.
Maybe none of them know who their children really are.
The conversation is dead and the heat of this bright, clear summer's day is oppressing. Lucy doesn’t mind when her mother not so subtly switches her wine for water.
-
That autumn, the promotion to the Department for Foreign Affairs that Lucy was busting a gut for goes to Henry (Harry) Creevey, and she wants to believe that her various Ministry-employed relatives had nothing to do with it. Teddy and Victoire name their son Christopher, and little Kit shares his name with no one.
That Christmas, Lucy’s jumper is a little more itchy, a little more snug than usual. Nana Molly welcomes her with open arms, but lets go quicker than she used to. George keeps the Firewhiskey at the opposite end of the room, even if his wife tuts and rolls her eyes.
“She’s allowed to have an opinion, George. Why you all have to act like a bunch of three year olds is beyond me," Angelina snipes, and as Teddy places her godson in her lap, Lucy thinks that some of her favourite family members are those who married in.
Just after New Year’s, Harry pops his head round her cubicle and asks if she fancies grabbing a coffee. From a proper Muggle coffee shop, nonetheless, not the brown muck that comes from magicked machines. They sit awkwardly as Harry talks about Kit and feeling like a grandpa so soon, and Lucy asks about Al’s Department of Mysteries training, but mention of her cousin's name breaks the taboo and suddenly Harry’s trying to rationalise decisions and offer some overdue validation.
Lucy isn’t buying any of it. Not from the Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, a child turned into a saviour and held aloft to be deified and criticised. Lucy can't fault Harry for those labels and the burdens slung around his shoulders, but she can blame him for his complicity in tying down a new generation with the names of those who have gone before them. (And no, she's not stupid enough to pretend that Aunt Ginny didn't have a say in what her children were called, but Ginny either names things Arnold or Pigwidgeon, so those kids were bound to end up with some sort of stupid name. It's just that the names they did end up with have 'Harry' all over them.)
Lucy’s not buying it from a man who named his children James Sirius, Albus Severus, Lily Luna. His generation made people into poetry and wrote their prose for them; Lucy’s generation is merely flipping the script.
-
When the time comes, James Potter, Puddlesmere United’s maverick Beater and reluctant celebrity, cedes all naming rights to his wife.
"Alice did the heavy lifting for nine months, not me,” he jokes to his teammates, but Sophia and Finn have no precedent amongst the Potters or the Barkers. At night, James whispers through the bars of their crib that they can be whoever or whatever they want to.
When the time comes, Albus opts for names that won’t sound out of place in the playground or in the mouth of a three year old learning to write. He and Jennie leave Cleo for the cat, can’t agree on Iona and opt for Ruth: a soft whisper of a name for a little one with a downy mop of brown hair and the bluest eyes her godmother ever saw.
When the time comes, Lily chooses firm names for children who will stand their ground: Max and Benjamin and Olivia.
It doesn’t take long before a nexus develops around Lucy of names chosen for the sound they make, for variety, for favourite literary characters. A new generation of children whose names are their own stands on the shoulders of giants, and there are no references to dead Headmasters or historical dates.
And life is all the more beautiful for it.