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Chapter Text

It begins and ends, much like in another life, for love of a woman.

“The Longbottom boy, then,” the Dark Lord decides. “It’s him.”

He’s staring absentmindedly into the distance, ignoring Snape where he lies prostrated before his throne, forehead to floor, neck aching, spine contorting. For all the notice he takes of him, Snape might as well be a decorative piece of furniture, or a very exhausted coffee table. His muscles tremble from the tension of holding his position as he waits for him to finish thinking; his lord had greeted him with a Crucio, he suspects just for the sake of it. Still, he holds the kowtow, as the Dark Lord calls it.

(There are things, sometimes, that make Snape wonder. Wizards never had a form of obeisance like this. He knows the Death Eaters consider it the Dark Lord’s own invention, a show of respect for a lord most high, his magic worth kneeling before. Severus knew of it though, a memory from primary school he keeps folded tight in his heart where it can’t ache too much yet cannot fade, hears it recited in Lily’s clear, high voice as she sits propped beneath their favorite tree, her world history book balanced neatly against her knees.

“In Imperial Chinese protocol, the kowtow was performed before the Emperor of China, as an act of deep respect and the highest sign of reverence for the Son of Heaven ….”

They’d practiced it that day, giggling, in the park, until a scandalized governess ordered them to stop. The knees of his trousers had been stained green and earned him a welt across his ear, but Lily’s laughter had made it worth it.

Why does a pureblood Dark Lord, he thinks, who emerged from nowhere with no wealth and no name, know the royal protocol of ancient Muggle emperors?

It’s one of the most dangerous thoughts in his head. He tries not to think it.)

“Not the Potters, after all,” The Dark Lord continues, blessedly unaware of what lies in his head. He strokes the arms of his chair as though soothing a serpent. “Not a girl.” His lip curls. “It must be a boy, to rival me.”

And Snape thanks every god he’s never believed in that Lily carried a girl. That miracle of fate has saved her life. He hopes she will never truly know how close she came to her own ending, and how he led her there himself.

“My Lord,” he says, inclining his head deeper. His voice is muffled by the floor, his lips scraping the tiles, but he doesn’t dare agree. He will know why he does, he will hear the relief—

“The Order is aware that you know of the prophecy,” he says instead. “They’ve taken the initiative to hide both families under Fidelius charms.”

“The Fidelius will be no issue,” the Dark Lord replies with a cold sort of satisfaction. “My spy in the Order already determined who the Longbottoms chose for their Secretkeeper.”

“Who?” Snape asks before he can think not to, but he is remembering that day in Diagon Alley, the last day of spring, and he can’t breathe—

The Dark Lord raises an eyebrow, a knowing smile on his face. “The Prewetts,” he says. “One of them, at least.”

Snape nearly goes slack with relief. “Gideon and Fabian,” he murmurs. Exceptional wizards.

“One of them, yes, although my spy couldn’t ascertain which.” The Dark Lord shrugs carelessly. “It doesn’t matter. They’ll both be easy enough to break.”

Snape doubts this but doesn’t dare voice it. The Prewett twins have a reputation even the most depraved of Death Eaters have learned to fear. They’ve left a trail of bodies behind them through the war.

The Dark Lord still seems to hear it. “Oh, make no mistake, they’d willingly die on their own for the Longbottoms. Perhaps they’d even hold the secret as their own twin was tortured in front of them. But I hear from my sources that they dearly love their little sister.” He smiles, and it makes Snape’s skin crawl; it’s a human expression, universal in every language, yet there’s nothing human in his face. “She has a brood of her own; six sons, if I recall correctly. It’s not commonly known. Her brothers have kept her and her husband out of the war, and they’ve stayed quiet as church mice raising their family and causing no trouble.” The smile twists into something chilling. “A shame, really, that a pureblood witch so fertile has chosen the light and married a blood traitor. We could use those sorts of witches on our side, championing our cause.”

He sighs as though he regrets it, and it’s so performative a younger Snape would have rolled his eyes. “But it matters not to me,” he continues. “I’ll be happy to cull her brood by a son or two … or maybe five.” The smile is back, and now it’s a real one, full of relish at the thought of pain. “But I dare say the Prewett twins will disagree with my methods and view the … disposal of their beloved nephews quite differently. She did name a couple of the brats after them, or so I hear.”

And that’s it, Severus thinks, heart sinking. It’s elegant and simple and ruthless all at once. Because Gideon and Fabian may value their honor and loyalty enough to hold the Longbottoms safe in the face of their own deaths, but not when faced with the torture and murder of their young nephews. They will break.

And through them, the Dark Lord will break the Longbottoms.  

And Lily … she’ll be safe. He represses that afternoon, the sunlight catching on the flame of her hair, with every inch of his soul.

“You’ve done me a great service, Severus,” the Dark Lord says, and he sounds as though he means it. “If you wish a favor of me, name it. I will do my best to grant it.”

He shouldn’t. It’s not worth it. But—

He remembers the way Lily smiled in Diagon Alley, at him, a real one, for the first time in years. It was tentative, uncertain, laced with old scars and bad blood that he knows will never be fully healed. But it was a smile, and there were her eyes—evergreen, not emerald, something eternal and sacred and untouched—looking at him, for the first time in years.  

He thinks of the way she’d cradled the swell of her waist, of how Alice had reached out gently to stroke her belly, hunching forward awkwardly to reach it around the bulk of her own child bulging from her own waist. My godchild, Alice had laughed, tapping Lily’s belly with a playful hand. My godchild, Lily had returned, just as possessive as she placed her hand on Alice’s stomach, and her eyes had shone.

She chose Potter. She chose the light. He knows that. But still.  

“The Longbottom woman,” he says before he can stop himself. “She’s of Carrow stock.”

“Oh?” The Dark Lord says, as though he might be interested, although there’s a smirk unfurling on his face.

“Good stock,” Severus emphasizes, almost mindlessly, and forcibly forgetting he hates the Carrow twins. “The Carrows carry strong, reliable magic. She’ll … she’ll be useful. Consider sparing her. As a favor.”

“Sparing her?” The Dark Lord sounds droll, now. “Why would I do that, apart from her sturdy magic?”

Because Lily would weep to lose her. Because Alice is the one who spotted him that spring day, hovering in the shadows of the cafe’s sun speckled pavilion—he was always in the shadows, always seeking her light— and she didn’t spurn him for a plague, a blight, a thing from Lily’s past that should only ever be erased, eradicated, forgotten. Because she elbowed Lily with a chastising cluck of her tongue when she scowled at him and urged her to acknowledge him instead.

Hogwarts, she said with a gentle smile, was so very long ago. Don’t pout, Flower. It’s a beautiful day.

Because she showed me kindness, once, and I repaid her with the death of her bloodline.

He can’t say that. He thinks back to what the Dark Lord said of Molly Weasley, and with an expertly concealed shudder, forces the words out. “You said yourself we need more pureblood witches aligned with the dark. She’s of Carrow blood. With time, and the removal of her light oriented son and husband, she could be ... an asset.”

It makes him sick, on some level, to advocate for a life by putting forth the value of the womb attached to it. Lily would despise him for it. Lily will despise him for it. But he has nothing else in his arsenal to barter with, and Lily despises him, anyway.  

“An asset,” the Dark Lord repeats, amused, now, and dread sinks through him, because he knows. “And you’re certain this is all in service to me, Severus? It has nothing to do with your pet mudblood and your own selfish desires?” He tilts his head. “Lily Potter is the boy’s godmother, isn’t she? Chosen by the woman from good Carrow stock.”

For a moment, Severus allows himself to be lost in his hatred of Dumbledore and his insurmountable arrogance, his delusional belief in his own infallible judgment. The Dark Lord’s spy is aptly placed; the Dark Lord’s spy is watching the Potters.

Lying would be foolish, but he’s left with no other choice. The Dark Lord did offer him a favor, after all.

“She’s beneath me,” Severus forces himself to say.

“Not by much, these days,” The Dark Lord says, almost thoughtfully. “She’s talented, shows a willingness to embrace wizarding customs, and is well admired, with a fearful reputation.” He pauses, and Severus knows the next words will be a kill strike. “And she’s shown good sense. She chose an equally talented pure blood from an old, wealthy family for a husband, after all. Not the pauper halfblood who lusted after her.”

And doesn’t that hurt just as much as he meant it to? The Dark Lord approves of Lily’s marriage. Mainly from spite, and cruelty to Snape himself. But on some level, Severus cannot deny Lily’s decision better fits the world the Dark Lord envisions for them. The Dark Lord admires power, more than anything else, and the Potters have always possessed power in spades. He’s offered James a place with the Death Eaters more than once. Even the Dark Lord, Severus thinks, almost hysterically, would have chosen Potter over him.

He wishes he had. They’d be very happy together.

Severus says nothing. He’s not meant to; he’s meant to bleed, and he does, where no one can see it.

“I will consider sparing the mother,” the Dark Lord assents at last. “As a favor to you for the service you have done me.” His voice hardens. “But this will be the last favor you ask of me on behalf of Lily Potter. Any more pining, Severus, and your loyalties will be in question.”

“I understand, my Lord. Thank you, my Lord.” Severus presses himself fiercely into the tiles, loses himself to the supplication, words and praises spilling from his lips as he kowtows, and he cannot help but feel relief. It’s despicable, how low he’s become. He knows what he’s accomplished here has been close to nothing. He’s condemned an infant and a good man to die, and he’s begged only for the life of the wife. But he hopes it is something, because it is all he can do for her.

“Yes, yes,” the Dark Lord says, once he grows bored with the groveling. “That will be all, Severus. You may leave. Send Bellatrix to me when you get a chance.”

Severus has only just climbed onto one knee, but something in the way he says that name makes him freeze. It has the hairs rising on his neck, some animal instinct he didn’t know he possessed whispering danger. “Bellatrix, my Lord?” He confirms, noncommittally.

The Dark Lord smiles. “Yes. I have a task for her. Something to keep her busy and out of trouble. She can prove awfully troublesome if you don’t provide her with the correct … activities. This will suit her, I think.”

Severus’s blood runs cold then, because he knows what pleading for Alice Longbottom’s life just cost him. And he knows just as surely that there is nothing he can do, no mercy he can beg. He could prostrate himself before Bellatrix Lestrange, he could kowtow until his forehead bled, he could offer her his soul and his heart ripped from his own chest, and she would never, ever agree to spare Lily’s life.  

The Dark Lord, while cruel, is a man of his word, or at least how he interprets it. Bellatrix is a woman driven by her own demons, and her savagery is tempered by no logical currency.  

It didn’t matter, after all, that Lily bore a girl and eliminated herself as a threat. Because he’s put her in danger himself. The Dark Lord looks unfavorably on competition.

He knows now what he must do. Knows where he must go. 

He locks everything he thinks and feels away, behind that final wall in his mind. It’s a door, he thinks, that Death can’t even open. It’s the door where he keeps himself.

“Right away, my Lord,” he says, inclining his head.

And later, he flees to the same hill that he does in another world, throws himself before Dumbledore with an offer of anything in return for guaranteed safety—

And just like that, a new fate, an old fate, is sealed.

Chapter Text

Fall 1981

October 31, 1981- The Evening Prophet

TERROR IN BRIXTON! PREWETT TWINS FOUND MURDERED BY MUGGLE AURORS; CRIME SCENE RAISES MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS AS NATION MOURNS WAR HEROES.

WEASLEY HOME DESTROYED IN ATTACK! ALL 8 SURVIVE, 2 SERIOUS INJURIES. ‘WE ARE BLESSED,’ SAYS MOLLY WEASLEY.

IS THE DARK LORD AFTER THE PREWETTS? WHAT THE WEASLEY ATTACK AND PREWETT MURDERS TELL US OF HIS MOVEMENTS.

November 1, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

THE DARK LORD DEFEATED!

HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED VANQUISHED! NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM SURVIVES KILLING CURSE. LONGBOTTOMS FOUND DEAD; LONGBOTTOM MANOR DESTROYED.

THE BOY WHO LIVED - NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM HAS DEFEATED THE DARK LORD!!

November 1, 1981 - The Evening Prophet

CHAOS AT POTTER MANOR; POTTERS, BLACK, LUPIN, FIGHT OFF DEATH EATERS; TWO DEAD, 3 INJURED. MANHUNT FOR PETER PETTIGREW UNDERWAY.

November 2, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

PETTIGREW THE TRAITOR!  JAMES POTTER POINTS FINGER AT PETTIGREW FOR PREWETT AND LONGBOTTOM MURDERS, WEASLEY AND POTTER ATTACKS; ‘HE KNEW IT ALL, THAT BLOODY C*NT’

WHERE IS THE BOY WHO LIVED LIVING? INQUIRIES AT THE MINISTRY BY AUGUSTA LONGBOTTOM LEAD TO ROW WITH ALBUS DUMBLEDORE

November 3, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

BLOOD SUPREMACISTS MEET BLOODY ENDING  - BELLATRIX AND RODOLPHUS LESTRANGE CONFIRMED DEAD. BELLATRIX ‘NEARLY DECAPITATED’ BY POTTERS, SAYS INSIDE SOURCE.

November 5, 1981 - The Quibbler

THE DARK LORD LIVES ON INSIDE A LOCKET, SAYS SEER; NECKLACES ACROSS THE BRITISH ISLE MUST BE DESTROYED, SHE ADVISES

November 8, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

CROUCH SR.’S SON REVEALED AS A DEATH EATER!!

DMLE HEAD BARTY CROUCH SR. BROUGHT IN FOR QUESTIONING OVER HIS SON’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE DEATH EATERS; AURORS REVEAL BARTY CROUCH JR. PARTICIPATED IN POTTER ATTACK

CROUCH JR. STILL IN CRITICAL CONDITION; ‘JUST LET THE TWAT DIE AND SAVE US ALL SOME TAXES’ SAYS SIRIUS BLACK; ‘THIS IDEA HAS LEGS,’ SAYS JAMES POTTER, ‘LET’S HEAR HIM OUT’

November 11, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

THE FLOWER OF WAR: LILY POTTER RELEASED FROM ST. MUNGO’S; HUSBAND AND DAUGHTER WELCOME HER HOME.

THE FATE OF THE BOY WHO LIVED - AUGUSTA LONGBOTTOM SECURES TEMPORARY CUSTODY, DESPITE DUMBLEDORE’S PROTESTS; WIZENGAMOT HEARING SLATED FOR DECEMBER

November 18, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

ILLEGAL ANIMAGI IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS? POTTER, BLACK, ADMIT TO SCHOOL BOY CRIME TO AID COLLEAGUES IN HUNT FOR TRAITOR PETER PETTIGREW

November 19, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

FAVORITISM FOR WAR HEROES?? AUROR DEPARTMENT DECLINES DISCIPLINING POTTER AND BLACK FOR ILLEGAL ANIMAGI CRIME; ‘NOT SURPRISED, JUST DISAPPOINTED,’ SAYS INTERIM DMLE HEAD AMELIA BONES; ‘WE HAVE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS GOING ON THAN IF ONE OF THEM CAN TURN INTO A BLOODY DOG’ SAYS MINISTER FOR MAGIC FAWLEY

November 21, 1981 - The Evening Prophet 

RABASTAN LESTRANGE DIES OF INJURIES FROM POTTER MANOR; REMUS LUPIN CLEARED OF MURDER; ‘A CLEAR CUT CASE OF SELF DEFENSE’ SAYS INTERIM DMLE HEAD AMELIA BONES.

RABASTAN LESTRANGE, DEAD AT 23: 'SO SAD' SAYS SIRIUS BLACK

NOVEMBER 30, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

SEVERUS SNAPE, UNDER SUSPICION OF BEING A DEATH EATER, HAS BEEN ‘CLEARED’, SAYS MINISTER.

DUMBLEDORE ADVOCATES FOR CARROW REHABILITATION; THE BOY WHO LIVED HAS ‘FEW REMAINING RELATIVES’, CARROWS CAN ‘HELP KEEP HIS MOTHER ALIVE’

December 1, 1981 - The Daily Prophet

LILY POTTER JOINS AUGUSTA LONGBOTTOM’S SUIT FOR CUSTODY OF THE BOY WHO LIVED  

Chapter Text

February 1985

Remus sits in the parlor at Grimmauld Place, pretending to read. He’s pretending to read because he can’t admit to himself he’s watching the Floo where Sirius disappeared in a mad panic hours ago, responding to a department-wide alert of a suspected magical attack. 

“Explosion in central London,” he says, half-dressed and frantic, his wand in his hand and the war in his eyes. He presses a fierce kiss to Remus’s lips, and only Remus knows him well enough to feel how hard he’s trembling. “At least ten Muggles dead, and dozens injured.”

Remus feels dread prickling up his spine. It’s barely dawn, just past the full moon, and he’s barely recovered from his transformation. His bones ache, his muscles scream, every part of him hurts, and now he has to watch as Sirius runs into danger without being able to accompany him, because Remus may be a member of the Order, but he is no Auror.

“Do they think it’s—” He swallows, and he doesn’t say it. Not from fear, he tells himself, but because it’s bad luck. 

“They haven’t said,” Sirius answers grimly. He kisses him again, gentler this time, his gray eyes locked on Remus’s. They’re full of steel tonight, not mist, and Remus feels relief; he knows that look means he won’t be leaving this world without one hell of a fight. 

“Keep the wards up,” he instructs. “Don’t let anyone in until I’m back, apart from Lily or Ivy.” He fumbles in his pocket, presses something hard and cold into Remus’s hand and closes his fingers around it. “Keep the mirror on you. Lily’s getting closer to her due date, and she might call for help.” Something dark flickers across his face. “Due to the pregnancy, or due to something else.”

The fire, the noise, the screaming of that Halloween is so vivid in his mind for a moment, Remus marvels that he doesn’t crush the mirror in his clenched fist.

“I promise,” Remus vows, because Lily and Ivy are pack. Sirius relaxes infinitesimally, hearing the steel in his own voice. “James?” He asks, and he watches Sirius’s expression shift again, growing tortured.

“He’s already there,” he bites out, and Remus abruptly understands his urgency. He shoves him toward the Floo. 

“Go,” he orders, his own panic clawing at his throat. “Stay with James.”

“I will,” Sirius vows in return, before he disappears into green flame.

It’s night again, now, and a whole day has passed without a word. Lily checks in hourly; she’s pale, but fine, and just as haunted by her fear as Remus is. Some part of him wonders if they should all just give up on pretenses and move in together. They’ve already fought to the death together and came out the other side alive; they can certainly manage household chores without killing each other, and it’s not as if any of their anxiety is getting any better. 

Ivy steals the mirror more often than not, desperate for a new, higher power to appeal her sentencing to. She’s bouncing off the walls locked inside, and deeply unimpressed with the limitations on her freedom. James’s child, Remus thinks, and takes a moment to pity the Minerva McGonagall of the future. The garden, she informs Remus, has snow in it. 

“That’s very nice,” he says. 

“It’s not very nice,” Ivy retorts. “It has snow in it, and I can’t touch it.”

“That’s very sad,” Remus pivots.

“Thank you, uncle Moony,” Ivy says at once, looking relieved. “You get it. I should be allowed in the garden.” 

“That’s … not what I said,” Remus corrects, beginning to feel hunted. 

“Then what are you saying, Uncle Moony?” Her wide green eyes fill up the frame, filled with reproach. “Are you on my side or aren’t you?”

“I…I…”

“Ivy!” Lily scolds. She’s six months along and round as a Quaffle, in the final stages of her Healer training and extremely short on patience. Remus has been quietly terrified of her since November. “Stop bullying your uncle!” 

“But it’s so easy,” Ivy complains, and Remus splutters until the mirror connection is abruptly shut off.

Children, he decides, would be in Azkaban if they weren’t so adorable. The combination of Lily and James’s genes has been … problematic. 

It’s nearly dawn again, now, and there’s still no word, and he’s just beginning to feel the true stages of panic set in. He wishes he could pace, but his body still aches, and he can’t think of anything but the worst case scenario. 

And then the fire lights up, miracle of miracles, and spits out two grubby, exhausted, and soot-stained Marauders, and Remus can finally breathe again. 

“What is it?” Remus demands, once he’s asked Kreacher to bring tea and politely asked him to refrain from spitting in Sirius’s cup again. “What’s happened? Is it —” The name gets caught again. Bad luck, he reminds himself. 

“No,” Sirius says, rubbing at his forehead. “It’s not him.” 

Remus frowns, glancing between their forlorn expressions. “Then what aren’t you telling me?”

James hesitates for a heartbeat, glancing at Sirius; Sirius bites his lip, then nods.

“There’s a child,” James blurts out, looking sick. “Muggleborn, but magical. He was bit by … by a—”

He can’t say it. Remus can. He lived it. 

“A werewolf,” he says, and James flinches.

“A werewolf,” he confirms. He sags into the armchair. “Absolutely rotten luck. What are the odds of a muggleborn kid being in exactly the wrong place on a full moon with a werewolf?”

“Low,” Remus says, because he doesn’t think luck had anything to do with it, at all. “So there wasn’t an explosion?” 

Sirius slumps onto the couch, looking haunted. “There was certainly an explosion. But the magical signature that the DMLE registered was him. His accidental magic saved his life when he … detonated. Kept him from getting mauled, but—” He sighs. “Took a fair bit of the street out in the process.”

“And the werewolf?” Remus queries. “Was it—”

Prongs shakes his head, knowing where he’s going. Childhood bites are usually the specialty of one particular beast. “It wasn’t Fenrir. He’s Muggleborn, so not a known target. We found the werewolf, or what was left of him, and the remains were identifiable enough to rule out Fenrir, although we haven’t the faintest who it was. Like Sirius said, the kid tore half the street apart in the blast, and the wolf went with the pavement.” 

“Powerful, then,” Remus murmurs, and feels sorry for this child who will never be able to wield that power as he should have. He’s been cursed to a half-life before he could inherit that power, revel in it and learn the joy of it, and now he will always be lesser than the rest. 

And now he is a murderer, Remus realizes, intentional or not. Ten lives are more than most members of the Order took.

“Very,” says James, and he looks positively miserable. It’s a rare look on him these days, apart from Halloween, when he looks at Neville as though he wishes he could undo his past.

“Where will he go?” Remus asks, and Sirius growls into his hands. Not a promising start. 

James grimaces. “We don’t know yet. They’re keeping it quiet for now while they figure that out. Official story is that a pipe burst, and he happened to be in the proximity of it. He experienced a bout of accidental magic, alerting Aurors to his presence. It explains why we responded in force, at least, and why the Obliviator Squads were sent.”

“Ah,” Remus says, setting down his teacup. “So, the plan is to lie.”

“Lie, to protect a child,” James retorts. “He didn’t mean what happened. A five-year-old protecting himself from an attack shouldn’t be made into a headline.”

Remus can find nothing to say to that. “So, they’re holding him?” 

“A private room at St. Mungo’s. John Doe. No connection.” James looks weary.  “He can’t go back to his family, though they’ve been obliviated. A child werewolf would wreak havoc on Muggle London. And he can’t go into the Muggle system for the same reasons.” He shakes his head. “Lily will be raging about the lack of common sense in wizard governance once I tell her. She can’t understand why we don’t have an official system for fostering magical orphans in place.”

“It does exist, but it’s usually unofficial,” Remus says to be fair, although he doesn’t disagree with Lily’s assessment. “Blood ties matter more than paperwork to wizards.”

“And for kids with no paperwork, and no blood ties?” James asks bitterly. “What’s done with them, unofficially?”

“It’s an oversight, to be sure,” Remus says dryly. “It’d be logical to fix it.”

“Ah.” James leans back and presses his palms into his eye sockets. “That means they’ll never do it.” 

Remus doesn’t refute it. It’s too bitter, too raw, still, to think of his own forced bite when he was so young, solely for the transgressions of his father. But he can’t help but feel grateful for his parents, in a way he never thought to before; unlike this nameless child, he had a magical family to protect and foster him through his transformations.

“We could take him,” Sirius says abruptly.

Remus spins toward him, heart racing. “What.” 

“We know how to manage werewolves,” Sirius says, doggedly determined. “And we can protect him. No one would need to know what he is.”

“They already know what he is,” Remus argues, exasperated. 

“Not,” says James slowly, warming to the idea, “if the Ministry loses his file.” He looks up at them. “Amelia owes me a favor or two. And I spoke with her before we left the scene; she finds this situation just as upsetting as we do. She’d be more than amenable to his paperwork getting lost. It won’t be the first time the Ministry misplaced important documents, after all. If the magical child who was at the site of the explosion is declared dead ….” He trails off.

Sirius catches on quicker than Remus. “We can blood adopt him,” Sirius says excitedly. “It’s a tricky ritual, but doable. He’ll look like us because he’ll be us. His Hogwarts letter will come with our last name, because he’ll have our last name. Magic will recognize him as a Black.” He glances at Remus, suddenly desperate. “We can say we used a surrogate, or hid him during the war, or blame Black paranoia for why he hasn’t been seen since—”

“Only Amelia would ever know enough to suspect,” James adds, matching his enthusiasm. “And she’ll just be glad he’s getting a second chance.”

“Sirius, this is mad,” Remus says. “Not to mention illegal.” He adds that in for the official record, although something being illegal has rarely been an impetus for James and Sirius. (Rules, according to James, are man-made constructs; because mankind is flawed, rules are often flawed, and because rules were put in place by men, they are capable of being changed by men. This was all, in Remus’s opinion, a very convoluted way for James to say he didn’t much like following rules). “We don’t know the first thing about raising a child.”

“We haven’t killed Ivy yet,” Sirius insists. “Or Neville.” When Remus looks at him in disbelief, he raises his chin stubbornly. “It’s not about whether or not we know how to raise a child, Moony. It’s about if we’re going to leave a child to his fate.”

And that … Remus can’t argue with. Because when Sirius sees this child, he sees Remus, or another version of him, and the dog loyal, dog stubborn part of him will not leave him behind. Just as he refused to leave Remus behind.

He rubs at his temples, feeling the headache coming on, and knowing before he even answers that he’s in for about twenty more years of headaches. “You have a name picked out already, don’t you?”

Sirius grins, a slow, beautiful thing, and for that alone, Remus knows this will all be worth it. 

“Orion,” he says, and James begins cheering. 

Chapter Text

Orion Black has strong magic. He has an even stronger wolf. 

Remus learns this the hard way. He enters the hospital suite expecting a traumatized and admittedly stereotypical orphan: frail, skinny, and maybe a little broken, with ten unintentional deaths on his conscience and a bite on his forearm that will change his entire life. 

He meets, instead, a well-loved child, with powder-blue eyes, a ruinously stubborn chin, and a head full of ash blonde cowlicks that he already knows he’ll mourn once the blood adoption alters them. He has some bruises and a pair of matching scrapes on his elbows that look no worse than what a rowdy boy might pick up playing in the woods or at a skate park. His bite is on his lower back and easy to hide. Remus is deeply grateful for that (although the boy isn’t, and complains loudly about how hard it will be to show off his wicked scar from the time he fought a monster). It’s already healed enough from his powerhouse burst of accidental magic to look like fresh, pink skin. 

He has little to no memory of the attack. Remus is grateful for that, too, and has to briefly excuse himself to the hallway to thank every higher power he can think of for granting this mercy, that his young soul won’t be burdened with what he innocently caused in defense of his own life. 

He is outspoken, suspicious, too clever for his own good, and absolutely furious to learn he can’t return home to his parents and little brother. As far as he’s concerned, the night of his attack was an annoying side quest or something out of a comic book, and he’d very much like to return to watching football and playing video games with his friends in the real world.

It’s an irony not lost on any of them that this is close to the perfect child for Marauders to raise, and also a karmic nightmare they’ve all had coming. 

“This is kidnapping!” He shouts, before throwing his tray straight at James, the closest target. James—unfairly optimized for tantrums with natural athleticism and Auror training—ducks, and it hits Remus in the waist instead. Remus stares, unimpressed, at James. James shrugs unapologetically. 

Your kid, he mouths, because he believes in baptism by fire.

Ah, well. He didn’t need a nice robe, anyway. He vanishes the mess. 

The boy’s eyes widen at the casual magic, then narrow, thoroughly put out. 

“It’s not kidnapping,” Lily says for maybe the hundredth time, although even she’s looking a little unsure. Remus can relate; he’s also not sure whether or not this counts as kidnapping. Technically, they’re breaking about half a dozen laws (although James argues that the laws are kind of being broken with supervisor approval, or at least supervisor willful negligence, so do they really count as broken laws?), and it feels awfully close to kidnapping. The child he pictured would be in need of a home and parents to love him; this child had a home, and parents who loved him dearly, and he’s not much interested in new ones. 

“Of course, it’s a kidnapping! You won’t bring me home to my parents. And you’re all very strange,” the boy points out. He’s pointed this out a lot, mainly by refusing to give any of them his real name. You never give your name out to strangers, he said, unimpressed. Nice try. I knew that ages ago.

“You won’t get away with this. My dad’s a detective, and he’s already looking for me,” he continues, near threatening. It’s the most personal information he’s given out, and a sign, Remus recognizes, that he’s starting to become truly frightened. 

It’s also the most heartbreaking thing he’s said, because he says it with certainty—the sky is blue, the grass is green, my father will fucking kill you lot for this—but it’s the only thing Remus knows beyond a shadow of a doubt to be untrue. His father, no matter how fiercely he loved this wild, little son of his, has been Obliviated. He will never look for him again.

Lily turns away, looking sick.

On another level, all of his borderline paranoia suddenly makes sense. Of course, he’s a Muggle Auror’s child; he’s basically been interrogating them this whole time, while they flail and struggle and offer him tea which he pours on the floor and accuses them of poisoning (Moody, Remus thinks distractedly, is going to adore him). 

Sirius, still too thrilled at the idea of having a child of his own to grapple with the reality of said child wanting nothing to do with them, smiles. Remus can practically hear the thoughts screaming from his head, even without Legilimency, of fate and destiny and all the rest. Their son (because he is their son, even if he currently hates them, something fierce and devoted in Remus’s chest tells him insistently) being the child of a Muggle Auror just makes sense. 

He can understand why Sirius is so effected by it. There’s a universal affinity born from those who fight to protect and risk their own lives to do it. That bond exists even between Aurors and their Muggle counterparts. There is respect, and loyalty, and duty there, and the understanding that sometimes doing that duty means you won’t come home; that to save someone’s child, you must leave your own. And while Remus hates fate, he sees fate in this boy becoming their own; in this child of an officer, unfairly taken from his own son, being raised by a fellow officer in another world. 

We will love him, he thinks at the memory of that man, who burns so brightly in his son’s stubborn chin. We will love him as you would have loved him, and we will keep him safe.

It’s a pittance of an offering; it’s ashes and dust. But it is a vow he will never break, and it will have to be enough.

The boy shares none of these thoughts. He glances at Remus’s most likely anguished expression with a frown, then catches sight of Sirius’s dreamy smile and scowls. 

James’s eyes are suspiciously wet. He is not lost to destiny like Sirius is; like Lily and Remus, he is mourning for this boy’s father, who will never know to mourn his child. “Your father was an Auror?” He rasps.

“Is!” The boy shouts, and he’s having a harder time hiding his fear. “Is! He’s not dead, all right? And he’s not an Auror, whatever that means, he’s the head of London’s homicide unit.” His chin lifts. “I bet he’s already on his way. With guns. And dogs.”

“Do you like dogs?” Sirius asks eagerly before Remus can kick him. It's fate, Sirius’s expression screams. He likes dogs!!! I am a dog!!!! Ignore all of the issues in between, and we’re FAMILY!

The boy narrows his eyes at him. “I like big dogs that bite.”

Sirius positively puffs up, rolling up his sleeves in an alarming manner. “Do I have something—”

He lets out a comical whoosh of breath as James practically tackles him into the wall. “Not now, Padfoot. He already thinks we’re sexual predators.”

“Your father can’t come get you, darling,” Lily says gently, steering the conversation away from madness. She’s serving as their spokesperson because she’s the only one he isn’t being openly antagonistic toward, most likely because of her very round belly. Mums are inherently less scary, and he seems to relax incrementally when he looks at her. “We wish he could, but he can’t. Like we’ve tried to explain, you’re a wizard. You’re also a werewolf, now. It would be extremely dangerous for them.”

“So?” The boy’s face grows mutinous. “Mum and Dad would still want me, even if I’m dangerous,” he says, unshakable in his confidence, and something in Remus breaks. 

Lily breaks, too. Because even if Ivy was a creature born from the darkest of hells sent to destroy their world, Lily would cling to her with every inch of her soul. Merlin, Ivy could announce that she wants to eat souls like a dementor, and James would probably purchase and privatize Azkaban for her to pursue her passions. 

“Of course, they would,” Lily whispers, before lifting a hand to trace a single cowlick, feather light. The boy allows her touch, although a puzzled, worried look is beginning to crease his face. “You’re their child. They love you.”

The worried look deepens. “What’s wrong?” He demands, looking between her and James. With a child’s instinct, he seems to recognize who in this room has been a parent for more than twenty-four hours; perhaps they give off that authority, that responsibility. 

Or perhaps they look at him like they would look at Ivy, grieving for him as only a parent can, and he knows. 

“James,” Lily says quietly, and James looks at her for a long moment. Whatever he sees in her face decides him; he nods. 

“There was an accident,” he says, approaching the bed. “You know that. You remember it.”

“Some of it,” the boy agrees warily. 

“What do you remember?” James asks. He sits with easy grace on the very edge of the bed, not crowding him, but allowing him to feel less alone. “It’s all right,” he adds, patient. “Take your time.”

The boy frowns, but seems to be thinking. He’s responding to the calm, assured way James speaks to him, the direct, level gaze and the paternal way he's treating him, as though he’s an equal and not a child. Remus is simultaneously filled with gratitude for Prongs the mature father figure, and deeply envious. He and Sirius are apparently the least reliable adults in this room, and even a five-year-old knows it. 

“The whole street turned white,” he said at last. “And the air turned into noise.” He frowns, then shakes his head. “I don’t remember anything else.”

Sirius looses an audible breath of relief. 

“You were attacked,” James says, calm and careful as he chooses his words. “Your magic reacted to save your life. It made a big explosion to protect you. That’s why you remember the street turning white and the air being funny. Our government felt the explosion, because it was magical. We sent our detectives to respond and help.” 

“Wizards have detectives?” The boy asks, eyes glued to James. 

James gives him an almost playful smile. “I am a detective,” he drawls, and the boy lights up, relaxing back into his pillows for the first time since they’ve entered the room. He jerks his chin toward Sirius. “So is he.”

“Were you there?” The boy asks, a little breathlessly. “At the scene with the monster?”

“I was there.” He pauses, a trace of sadness entering his voice. “I carried you.”

The boy melts. Grateful, Remus reminds himself, seething all the while. Grateful, not jealous, Prongs you bloody git, must you always be the hero—

“I helped,” Sirius blurts out, but James and the boy both ignore him. 

“Our government has rules,” James continues. “We can’t expose the Wizarding world to the ordinary world. Magic in front of non-magical people is a serious crime. They take it very seriously.” 

“But I didn’t know!” The boy blurts out, indignant and a little panicked. “They can’t get mad at me for that!”

“No one’s mad at you,” James reassures him at once. “You’re not in trouble. You were in danger, and we’re lucky your magic saved your life.” A pause so brief Remus barely notices it, as he braces for the worst part. “But you were bitten by a werewolf, and you’ll turn into a wolf every full moon for the rest of your life.” The boy gives him a disbelieving look, but James shakes his head, firm. “And our government made some decisions in order to remove you safely from the non-magical world.”

“What kind of decisions,” the boy says in a flat voice, as if a part of him knows. 

James looks him in the eye, sympathetic but unhesitating. “A werewolf can’t live with non-magical people safely. They made it so your parents would forget about you.”

A long, terrible pause. Then:

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not,” James says sadly. “I wish I was, but I’m not.” 

“My parents would never forget me.” He spits the words out, but his eyes are wide and desperate, and he’s clutching his fingers together as though it’s a prayer, like he’s begging James to take it back, and he sounds so small and scared even though he’s brave, brave, brave, and Remus wishes he could hug him. 

“Magic,” James says, “can make people forget. It’s a spell that special wizards are trained to use. It’s called Obliviate. It changes people’s memories.” And the way he speaks to him like he’s an adult and he expects him to understand is probably the only reason the boy is staying calm. 

“That’s wrong,” the boy snarls, looking feral and white as parchment. 

“It’s cruel,” James says quietly, “but it’s the law.” He looks at him steadily. “There’s nothing we can do. They won’t take it back.”

“But I don’t want them to forget me,” the boy whispers frantically, eyes welling with tears as he begins to unravel, and Lily is suddenly on the other side of him, gathering him into her arms. “I want them to … to .... they should love me. They’re supposed to love me.”

“Oh, darling,” she says, gently, and strokes his back as he finally breaks, crying in deep heaving sobs into her shirt. “You’ll be loved. You’ll always be loved. We’re so, so, sorry.”

It takes a while for the boy to calm enough to continue speaking, through tears and denial and fits of rage. He throws half the items in the room and screams at them to do something, and screams even more when they say they can’t. He curses the Obliviators, and Remus knows he’ll carry a lifelong hatred for that spell. He can’t blame him; it took his family, as surely as the Killing Curse took Neville’s. 

He doesn’t seem to believe being a werewolf is a big deal, and he hates that their world’s ‘stupid laws on it’ are taking him from his parents. Remus would be worried, but he’s so, so, young, and Muggleborn. He doesn’t understand what a werewolf is even after being attacked by one, doesn’t know what a grown one can do. This world seems like a comic book to him, and in comic books, the good guys always beat the monsters. He beat the monster, himself. 

Remus stays silent, feeling raw inside; he knows firsthand that he will only begin to understand what exactly he’s become after his first full moon. That he’s the monster, now.

“What’s happening to me, then?” The boy demands, looking between Lily and James for answers. “Am I living with you? Are you adopting me?”

James looks halfway to throwing their whole plan out the window and saying yes, and Lily looks like she’s going to happily assist him in that. Sirius lets out an annoyed growl. 

“You’ll live with us,” Remus says abruptly in a quiet, steady voice, speaking up for the first time since he’s entered and doing his best to mimic James. “We’ll be adopting you.”

The boy’s bloodshot, swollen eyes flicker to him and Sirius, seeming to have almost forgotten them in his grief. 

“You?” He demands, challenging.

“I’m a werewolf, too,” Remus says, when all he wants to say is, I love you and you’re my son, like it or not. “I know how to manage the condition, and how to hide it. Wizards can be … strange about werewolves. We can keep you safe and protect you.”

He doesn’t tell him about changing his name, or blood adopting him, or how as soon as he steps foot out of this hospital, James will pull strings to have him declared dead. He’s a child no matter how much he wishes to be treated like an adult, and a grieving, angry one. He’ll hate the idea of losing his parents’ name and faces, hate the idea of having theirs instead.

Later, he thinks. There will be time, later, for you to learn to like us, and maybe even love us.

“You’re not parents,” the boy says, trying a new angle in his quest to go home with Prongs and Lily. “Or officers.”

“I’m an officer,” Sirius reminds him, with a murderous scowl at Prongs that goes unnoticed. 

“And we are parents, now,” Remus adds with a small smile, trying to present an unshakable, steady presence, even though he feels like agreeing with him. 

“Do I even get a choice?” The boy asks bitterly, and Remus feels sorrow, because the truth is, he doesn’t. He lost his parents, and soon, he’ll lose his name and face. He can’t even have his preferred new parents (you gits, Remus thinks crossly), because they’ll never be able to explain a second child the same age as Ivy suddenly appearing without people wondering where exactly he came from.

“There’s no good choices, pup,” Sirius says soberly, approaching the bed, and the boy shows a glimmer of something at the nickname. Longing, maybe, or the faintest sliver of hope. “But we’ll make sure it’s a good life.” He reaches down to squeeze his shoulder. “We promise you that.”

“I don’t even know your names!” The boy says, as if it’s his last resort.

“We don’t know yours,” Sirius shoots back somewhat childishly, and the boy scowls, caught. He sticks out his hand. “Sirius Black.” 

The boy stares at it, then glances between Lily and James, before taking it. 

“Owen Richardson,” he says, and Sirius, to his credit, does not combust over how easily the name Owen can become Orion, because even Remus is beginning to believe in fate. 

“Remus Lupin,” he offers, smiling. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Owen.”

The boy—Owen, his son—looks at them for the first time without dislike or fury, but a measuring sort of glance. He’s exhausted , and heartbroken, and he’s terribly brave but terrified, and he simply wants safety. Remus holds his breath beneath the weight of that glance, afraid to move a muscle and be found wanting. 

Owen glances between them, then nods, something cunning in his eyes. He turns to Lily and James. 

“You’ll at least teach them?” He asks plaintively, with puppy dog eyes. “You won’t just let them take me without teaching them first, right?”

And just like that, Owen Richardson, soon to be Orion Black, scams himself a two-week stay at Potter Manor with Sirius and Remus in tow for a crash-course in parenting.

“It is so like my son,” Sirius confides delightedly to Remus as they follow their new little terrorist into the Floo, “to run away from his parents to the Potters.”

Chapter Text

“You’ll like my daughter,” James informs Owen just before he steps into the Floo with him. He’s kept up a cheery stream of one-sided conversation since they got his official permission to abscond with him from St. Mungo’s, probably out of guilt for the fact he’s about to nip off to declare him dead. Prongs has strong bouts of conscience usually once a decade, and Remus figures he’s due for one since the last time Sirius tried to murder Snape in cold blood. “She’s your age.”

“She’s a girl,” Owen says with distaste.

“She says that about boys!” James exclaims, delighted. “In exactly the same tone!”

And he hoists him into the Floo without much more advance warning, and Owen is too busy coughing up ash and clinging to James like a very indignant cat to complain.

When Remus steps out of the Floo into Potter Manor, the customary bell chimes, ringing through the house. It’s a handy bit of charms work, and Lily beams at it with approval.

 “MUM!” Comes a shriek from upstairs.

Prongs sighs, looking wounded. “Never yells Dad, does she?”

Lily swats him on the back of the head. “You work strange hours. She knows it’s me; it’s half past five.”

Owen is too busy gaping at the parlor to notice. Potter Manor did not require the extensive redecorating efforts that Grimmauld Place had; James’s parents had been lovely, delightful, well-adjusted wizards who didn’t consider hammering house elf heads into the wall a bold decor choice. As such, their home is warm, welcoming, and tasteful. It’s built in the Tudor style and a veritable fortress, full of flagstone floors, vaulted ceilings with exposed oak beams, and heavy windows of stained glass. But it’s full of warmth and color and life: cozy burgundy couches and cream pillows, luxurious, layered rugs, and vases of flowers on nearly every surface to brighten up the space. Birds sing somewhere on the property, and the sunlight hits just right to make it feel serene.

Gits, Remus thinks again sourly.

“This is your house?” Owen demands, looking up at James with a new sort of respect. He’s too distracted to complain when Lily clicks her tongue and begins brushing soot out of his hair.

“Yes,” James says easily.

“And you’re really a cop?”

Prongs tilts his head. “We call them Aurors, but yes.”

“You’re rich,” Owen says, sounding awed. His eyes grow round again. “And I really can’t stay here?”

“Oi!” Sirius snaps, bristling. “I’m richer than he is.”

Owen looks to James for confirmation, much to Padfoot’s ire; Prongs nods good-naturedly.

“He’s rich rich,” he says. “I’m just filthy rich.”

“And humble,” Lily mutters, but before they can continue, there’s a clatter as Ivy bursts onto the l-shaped staircase ringing the foyer and bounds into sight, hovering on the final step and staring down at all of them.

“Oh,” says James, at the same time Lily says, “Oh, Merlin.”

James was a charming madman with a Potter’s long face and wild, black hair. Ivy was much the same, but the addition of Lily’s blood had crafted a unique sort of alchemy. Together, his friends had produced a remarkable beauty with high cheekbones, full, petulant lips, and wide, green eyes as radiant as the most hidden and sacred of untouched thickets in an ancient Scottish forest.

Neither of his friends were particularly thrilled about it. James dreaded her growing older (“I would have thought she was beautiful even if she looked like a garden gnome,” he moaned once when deep in his cups. “I don’t need everyone else to think she’s beautiful.”), and Lily was extremely offended at the surprise with which acquaintances usually announced, “Oh, Lily, she’s beautiful”. It was slightly offensive; both of them were quite attractive. But Ivy combined and surpassed them.

She’s outfitted head to toe in pink, with flashy, fairy wings that are enchanted to flash rainbow prisms and spew glittery dust strapped to her back and a tiara that is clearly an heirloom of some value askew on her head. Mystifyingly, she’s wearing boots so caked in mud that Remus isn’t certain at first whether they’re just mud.

“Uncle Moony!” She says excitedly, ignoring the suspicious looks her parents keep casting at the mud-soaked stair runner. “Padfoot! Are you staying for dinner?”

Tilly, the Potter’s long-suffering, harried house elf, careens down the stairs at that precise moment, leaping in vain for her crown. She freezes at the sight of them, panting. She looks slightly careworn and extremely over her day shift. Owen tenses and folds himself tighter against James’s leg.

“Master Potter is home,” Tilly rasps, though Remus thinks it sounds more like, stop leaving me alone with her.

“Tilly,” Lily says warmly, although she means better you than me.

“Her name isn’t Tilly today,” Ivy announces. “It’s Princess Aurora.”

“Of course, it is,” James says, resigned, as Tilly screams at him with wide, reproachful eyes. Ivy’s going through a princess phase. “Til—” Ivy gives him a censuring look, and he course corrects, “Princess, er, Aurora, why don’t you make us all some tea and refreshments for the drawing room and get started on dinner? That is, if you don’t mind—”

“I don’t mind!” Tilly grasps onto the opportunity like he’s going to take it away. “I don’t mind at all!”

She disappears with a crack, and Owen jumps with a small noise of surprise. Ivy catches the movement; she spins, viper-fast, and fixes her gaze on him.

For a moment, they just stare at each other, blue on green. Ivy tilts her head curiously.

“Ivy,” Lily says, approaching her daughter. “This is Orion.”

Owen makes a face. James had gone over, briefly, the need for him to use a fake name; he’d made it sound exciting and as though it were an adventure, a secret assignment for a spy undercover. Owen had given in easily enough, too exhausted and overwhelmed with all the new and strange changes to protest a fake name. The sooner he gets used to the sound of it, Lily had reasoned, the faster he’ll get used to it being his.

“Orion?” Ivy parrots, still looking at Owen as if they’ve brought her a new, interesting room to rampage. “That’s a star.”

“It is a star!” Sirius exclaims, and he strides across the foyer to scoop his goddaughter up and spin her, eliciting a shriek of laughter. He deposits her, giggling, onto the carved balustrade. “You’re very clever, pup.”

“I know,” Ivy says serenely, because she has Prongs’s modesty. “Everyone says so.”

“Oh?” Sirius’s eyes light up, and he playfully tugs on a messy lock. “And how did you get so clever?”

“Because you’re the cleverest, and you taught me the stars,” she recites obediently, and Sirius beams.

“You’re my favorite Potter,” he tells her, before hoisting her back up and dropping her onto the carpet. Ivy beams back at him, but it falters slightly as she returns to looking at Owen. He’s staying glued to James, and he’s not saying a word.

“Is he a Black?” Ivy asks, sounding puzzled.

Sirius grows more reticent, careful of the stewing boy behind him. “He’ll be living with me and Moony from now on.”

“Oh,” Ivy says, brightening at once. “He’s your son?”

“My name is Owen, and I’m not their son.” The words are sharp and pained, and every adult freezes. Ivy freezes, too, and tilts her head again. Remus begins to curse; they didn’t think this through. This situation is complex enough for adults to handle, not considering the half a dozen crimes involved. Ivy might be precocious for a four-and-a-half-year-old, but she’s not exactly the most nuanced.

Her nose scrunches. “Owen is a strange name.”

Owen gives her a disbelieving look. “So is Orion!”

Ivy shrugs. “Orion is a star. Owen isn’t a star.” Sirius preens behind her.

“That doesn’t mean—!”

“Darling,” Lily intervenes, squatting to steer her daughter closer by the shoulder, and Ivy happily places one hand on her mother’s stomach, cat-like eyes fixed on her soon-to-be sibling. She’s recently taken to threatening Lily’s stomach that it better be a girl. “Orion—Owen—has had a tough couple of days.” Owen bristles, but Lily doubles down. “He, Moony, and Padfoot will be staying with us for a couple weeks. We’d love it if you could show him around and play with him.”

“He’s a boy,” Ivy protests, although it sounds pretty half-hearted. Her eyes are sparkling in a way that screams danger at the idea of having a live-in playmate; she’s limited in how often she can see Neville around Augusta’s moods and dictates. Remus imagines he can hear Tilly in the kitchens, weeping and praising the heavens for her reprieve.

“And you’re a girl,” Owen shoots back, looking derisively at her fairy wings. “You’ll make me have tea parties—”

“I don’t have tea parties,” Ivy says, insulted. “I have balls. They’re fancier. That’s why you have to take the best jewelry for them—”

James makes a choked noise. “Ivy, you’re not allowed in the collection and those are antiques—”

Owen continues as if she hasn’t spoken. “—and you’ll make me play dress-up—”

“I wouldn’t dress you up,” Ivy says indignantly. “You wouldn’t look good like Princess Aurora does, even though she begs me not to wear Mum’s clothes—”

“Oh, Merlin,” Lily swears. “Ivy, are you giving the house elves clothes—”

“And I bet you don’t even have a tree house,” Owen finishes, a little breathless, and very pleased with himself.

Oh, dear, Remus thinks.

Ivy straightens, a gleam entering her eye at the challenge. “I have a treehouse,” she says. “Mum and Dad built it for me, so it’s the best treehouse in the world.” James and Lily both glow, immediately forgetting Ivy’s laundry list of crimes; hopeless, Remus thinks. At Owen’s unimpressed stare, she adds, “Mum enchanted it with fairy lights and it’s covered in ivies and flowers, and Dad made it a swing that hangs out over the river. It even has a moat.”

Owen uncrosses his arms, nostrils flaring with an intrigue that both alarms and pleases Remus.

“But,” she continues, “you have to fly a broomstick to reach it.” She pauses, lifting her chin in a facsimile of Lily at her most snooty. “And I bet you don’t even know how to fly.”

“Fly?” Owen sputters, but Ivy is steam rolling him, now.

“And I bet you don’t know how to catch garden gnomes either, or how to throw them,” she accuses. “Or how to spot the best speckled toads in the river, or how to tell what time it is by the stars to know when Mum falls asleep and you can go out looking for ghouls.”

“That is not why I taught you the stars, pup,” Sirius says frantically, looking hunted as Lily twists toward him, outraged.

“And,” Ivy says triumphantly, “what good is a boy who can’t fly, can’t throw garden gnomes, can’t pick toads, and can’t sneak?” She shakes her head, dislodging the crown; it crashes against the flagstones with a spectacular tinkling noise, and James makes a small noise of agony. “Not very good at all.”

A silence hangs over them at this damning pronouncement.

“You pick up toads?” Owen asks, sounding impressed.

Ivy sticks out one mud-covered boot and waves it. “What else would I be doing?”

“Staying inside,” Lily mutters, shooting James a dirty look. These are his genes. “Like I asked.”

“Where are they, then?” Owen challenges.

“In the guest room in the east wing,” she says easily. “In the bathtub.”

Another long silence. Lily exhales hard through her nose.

“Ivy,” she says, “why are the toads in our bathtub?”

Ivy shrugs. “I wanted to see if they’d turn back into princes.”

Lily blinks, then turns to a vindicated-looking James, since these are her genes. “You might have had a point,” she says through gritted teeth, “about the Muggle fairy tales.”

“That’s stupid,” Owen says knowledgeably. “Toads don’t turn into princes. That’s frogs.”

“What do toads turn into?” Ivy demands.

“Don’t know,” Owen says, before setting his shoulders and declaring with authority, “Pirates, probably. Pirates are much better than princes.”

“Owen,” Remus says, shaking his head. “No—”

“Pirates find treasure,” Ivy says, suddenly looking interested. “Like Nifflers. Mum said I couldn’t have one, but if I could have a pirate—”

“Why do you need treasure?” Lily barks, losing her temper. She shifts on her feet, wincing as she touches her lower back. “You already steal all our jewels like a dragon—”

“What’s a niffler?” Owen interrupts, and Remus freezes, because in the time they’ve all been agonizing over this conversation, something magical has occurred: he’s approached Ivy, and he’s talking, and he doesn’t look frightened, or angry, or terribly unhappy.

He looks … interested.

And Remus is suddenly turning toward Sirius, who is also blinking back tears and giving him a sappy grin, because Owen might spurn the name Orion and hate being called their son, but there’s hope, somewhere, that he could learn to like them. Prongs is grinning at them both, and Lily turns her head into his chest to hide her smile.

“Let’s go to my treehouse,” Ivy is saying. “You have a lot to learn.”

“Why do we have to go there?” Owen asks, already following her.

“So, they can’t stop us,” Ivy says as though it’s obvious with a backward wave at the adults, and Remus freezes in horror.

He glances around, and sees his feelings mirrored on every (sane) face.

“There’s two of them, now,” James says, looking very much like he had in sixth year when his 'best prank ever' had led to Peter crashing his Cleansweep straight into a fucking acromantula lair.

Lily rubs at her temples, then stares down at her stomach as though willing her next child to be obedient, despite already knowing it was a lost cause. “Tilly’s going to beg her to give her my clothes.”

Sirius just looks thrilled. “They’ll be best friends, like we were! They’ll sort into Gryffindor, and—”

“Oh, Merlin,” says Remus, suddenly feeling wretched. “McGonagall’s going to kill us.” 

Chapter Text

Owen Richardson, Remus quickly learns, is a menace.

He has no idea why his father was so concerned his son would get kidnapped and wasted hours of his time coaching him on how to resist or evade would-be kidnappers. Any sensible kidnapper, Remus thinks, would have brought the demon back before dusk. 

He hates waking up almost as much as he hates going to sleep, and he absolutely despises having a bedtime, taking a bath, or eating vegetables. He pretends to choke on them. A couple of times he’s so committed to the performance, he actually does start choking. 

“Try enchanting them,” James advises, halfway out the chimney for his night shift. “Ivy hates broccoli, so I make it pink and sparkly and tell her it’s a special kind of broccoli that will make her the smartest witch in the world, and she eats it.”

“I don’t want to lie,” Remus insists, feeling judgmental of Prongs’s parenting. “He should eat it because it’s good for him.”

Prongs laughs so hard he nearly cracks his head on the marble fireplace. “Logic!” He cries out. “It’s been so many years!”

And then he disappears in a whorl of green flame, choking on cinders for his troubles. 

That’s the other problem. James and Sirius are both stuck on Auror on-call shifts, and Lily is determined to cram in the rest of her residency before her water breaks. Tilly, he discovers, is adamant she must clean vague, important things in faraway parts of the house, and only appears at breakfast, lunch, and dinner long enough to drop the plates and flee. This leaves Remus on muppet duty, as James calls it.

(He does try his vegetable trick, and he’s extremely bitter when it works, although Owen only eats them if they’re electric blue and he tells them they’ll make him fly faster than Ivy). 

He loves anything dangerous; he takes to flying like a fish to water, although with less grace and fluidity than Ivy, who was practically born on a broom and shows no regard for her personal safety or indeed, any awareness of the concept of mortality. Ivy is utterly delighted. They spend time daring each other to try more and more reckless and dangerous dives, until Remus spends what feels like half of his time fishing one or both of them out of the river. Even though their brooms are spelled to only fly five feet off the ground, he has a heart attack every time he glances out a window. 

He’s also prone to the same flights of whimsy Ivy currently is experiencing, which Prongs insists is an illness caused by Muggle fairy tales. His tenth night at Potter Manor, he nearly falls and breaks his neck when he makes a rope out of bedsheets, clumsily ties it to his bed frame, and attempts to scale out his window. 

“What were you thinking,” Remus says in a controlled bellow as Lily works on repairing his fractured wrist, because he is not shouting, thank you very much. 

Owen shrugs mulishly. “Saw it on Scooby Doo,” he says, as if that explains everything. Lily makes a noise like a tea kettle and briefly puts down her wand, muffling her laughter in her hands.

“What is Scooby Doo,” Remus asks, aware he’s disassociating. 

Owen gapes at him as though he can’t believe he’s been asked such a stupid question. “He’s a dog,” he says, an unequivocal ‘duh’ to his voice that makes Remus want to throw him back out the window, “that solves crimes.” He pauses, then adds judgmentally, “You’re really old.”

“It’s a cartoon,” Lily says, taking pity on him, because he’s pretty sure he’s about to have a stroke. 

Sirius, who has just arrived in a panicked flurry and is much more entertained than irate, says unhelpfully, “Those are the portraits where the paintings act out plays in their special glass box, Moony.”

That is … a terrible way to describe cartoons, Remus thinks. “I know what a cartoon is,” he says shortly. “Owen, did you actually jump out your window because a talking dog did it, or were you trying to run away?”

“Run away?” Horrifyingly, it looks like he’s given him a new idea. “No. You guys have the fancy canopy beds, and that’s what they always use in the movies to escape places.” He shrugs one bony shoulder again. “I thought it would work.”

“I’m spelling your windows shut from now on,” Remus tells him, out of patience and sanity. 

Owen scowls. “At least Sirius is fun.”

“You can both be fun together, then!” Remus shouts, finally losing his mind. “In your graves, as I weep over them!” 

“Oh, you made him mad, O,” Ivy says delightedly from the doorway, barefoot in her nightgown with manic Potter bedhead and looking deeply impressed. She and Prongs have both taken to calling him O, as a combination of Orion and Owen.

Orion sits up, looking pleased, and waves his half-healed wrist around so wildly it flops. Sirius lunges to steady it. “You owe me a go on your broom.”

“Deal,” she says, before flouncing away, and Remus chooses to drug himself with a strong sleeping draught before he asks if this was possibly a bet to see which one of them could make him lose his mind first. 

 “You have the common sense,” Remus tells his son, “Of a flobberworm.”

***

They make it through fourteen days without any more near-death attempts and return, nearly kicking and screaming, to Grimmauld Place. 

Ivy is nearly as upset as Owen is but cheers up rather abruptly when James reminds her that they’ll be back nearly every day, since not one of them has any personal boundaries. The four surviving Gryffindors basically share a house distinguishable only by a fireplace at this point, and they haven’t bothered to address it. The rest of their pack—Marlene and Mary and Dorcas and Frank and Alice, their names a heartbeat in Remus’s chest, continuously bleeding—died when vulnerable and isolated. They lived because once Dumbledore informed them in a panic that Bellatrix would be hunting the Potters, they stayed together. It’s a bitter lesson to learn, but they’ve learned there’s strength in numbers. And the trauma isn’t going anywhere for any of them.

Might as well use it to watch their kids more effectively, Sirius says cheerfully, before returning to talking shit about the mind healers Amelia keeps begging him and James to see. 

Still, Ivy insists on formally seeing them off. She even asks Tilly—Princess Diana, today, which for some reason makes Lily laugh hysterically every time she says it—to make them a care package for their journey home. 

“We are stepping,” Remus says tartly, “through a fireplace. We will be home in three seconds. He doesn’t need a roast chicken.”

Owen accepts it solemnly. “We could get lost,” he informs Remus soberly. He and Ivy have been obsessively playing desert island the past two days, where they pretend they’ve been shipwrecked on the river and need to survive off whatever they find. They’ve both thrown up more than once from eating strange mushrooms and nearly poisoned themselves when they boiled random bark and berries and grass into a glutinous mud and drank it from goblets. 

Remus fixes Lily with an unamused look.

“The Muggle fairy tales are a problem,” she says firmly, although her eyes dance. “I’ll stop, I swear.” 

Liar, Remus thinks, but Sirius is teaching Owen to use the floo, and that’s a disaster waiting to happen. 

Kreacher greets them in the parlor of Grimmauld Place in his best pressed towel, the linen snowy-white and pristine, his ear hair carefully groomed. He stares at Orion with a bizarre mixture of despair and hope, as though he’s looking at the Antichrist but has been waiting for the rapture. 

“Oh, we get our own?” Orion says brightly. “Wicked.” 

Remus steps on his foot, hard. 

“Kreacher,” Sirius says, practicing his kind expression and patient voice that Prongs and Remus have drilled into him over the years to better his relations with the grouchy house elf. “This is my son, Orion. He likes to be called Owen.” 

Kreacher continues staring at Owen for a long moment, then says, “Tilly has been telling Kreacher things.” 

“Princess Diana,” Owen corrects loudly. 

“Fuck,” says Remus, losing his head completely from the pressure of the last fortnight.

Kreacher’s left eye twitches. “Kreacher has been hearing very bad things from Princess Diana. Nasty, rotten things, she says, about Master’s son. Kreacher has been thinking Master and Wolf Master—” and Remus takes a moment to appreciate how far they’ve come and how much of an improvement those titles are, before it inevitably all falls apart again, “would be telling Kreacher that Princess Diana is a bad elf and a nasty, rotten liar.”

“Princess Diana is most likely telling the truth,” Remus tells him in despair. 

Kreacher, insanely, looks both terrified and overjoyed. “It has been a long time,” he says, “since the House of Black has been having a proper Heir.”

Ah, Remus thinks, that’s right. Terrorizing people is a mark of honor with the Blacks. 

“Well, here he is,” Sirius says with forced cheer, pushing Owen forward. “Your proper Black heir. Don’t tell me I never did anything for you, Kreacher.”

“Master is right,” Kreacher says exultantly, and Remus is starting to grow concerned. “Master is giving Kreacher his wish.”

“Don’t let him do anything dangerous,” Remus begs. 

“I would never ask to do dangerous things!” Owen says, indignant. He turns almost immediately back to Kreacher and lowers his voice. He's five, so he's still basically yelling, but Remus doesn't have the heart to tell him. “I would like to see where we keep all the dangerous things. Just so I know where they are.” He pauses, thinking hard. “To … stay away from them.”

Kreacher shoots Sirius a plaintive glance. 

“Ivy’s coming over tomorrow,” Sirius says cheerfully, without any remorse. “So, brace yourself for that. It’s only going to get worse.”

***

The closer the full moon gets, the more on edge Owen becomes. 

He sleeps in nearly until ten, and he moves through his day sluggishly, his eyelids at half-mast and his head drooping onto tables. His temper, usually quick and easy like a summer storm, shortens considerably, until he’s snapping and waspish and fraying at the seams, before apologizing and insisting he didn’t mean it. He complains of aches and joint pain; he shivers until his lips are nearly blue only to rip off his sweater minutes later, insisting he’s boiling alive. 

Sirius frets endlessly, but Remus is uncharacteristically calm. With this, he’s in familiar territory. 

“It’s his first transformation,” he tells him grimly. “There’s nothing we can do.” 

Prongs, ever loyal, takes protected time off on the night of the full moon. He volunteered to join them before they ever thought to ask, looking serious as he comes through the fireplace that afternoon. 

“Thank you,” Remus tells him, and means it. 

“It’s nothing,” Prong says, rolling his eyes. “It won’t be our first Potion-less adventure, and three Marauders to gang up on the muppet is better than two.” He shrugs off his overnight bag, then fishes out a smoking glass goblet and hands it to Remus. “Bottoms up, Moony. Chef’s special from Flower.”

That’s the other issue. The invention of the Wolfsbane Potion has been a miracle for Remus: allowing him to endure each transformation from the safety of Grimmauld Place curled up in his bed with Padfoot slumbering at his side or roaming the Potter estates languidly with Prongs and Padfoot for company, while Lily observes from the porch and charms enchanted will of the wisps to light their path. The clarity of mind has been paramount, a gift beyond his imagining, and in the past year and a half, it has made his condition nearly bearable. 

Owen is too young to safely ingest Wolfsbane. Its formulation isn’t designed for a user so young. 

Lily has spent the last few weeks in Fleamont’s old Potion laboratory on her off-days and in her free time, attempting to re-distill the formula to better work for his physique and young metabolism, but miracles aren’t on-demand. For at least the first few full moons, Owen will have to learn to endure it without medication. 

Remus had offered to forgo his monthly Wolfsbane as well in solidarity with his pup, but Padfoot and Prongs had immediately shot him down. 

“He’s going to be out of his mind,” Sirius says, with an ill-disguised tick in his jaw of pain and worry. He’s been increasingly frustrated the larger the moon grows, because no matter how strong he is, he can’t bear this burden for their son. “The last thing we need is both of you gone.”

So, Remus agrees, and takes his potion under Prongs and Padfoot’s watchful gazes. 

“How’s the mint taste?” Prongs asks, lazily balancing on the back legs of his chair as he watches him drink. 

Remus takes another sip and tries to hide his gag. Lily, Merlin bless her, keeps trying to make the potion taste more palatable by adding non-interactive, additional flavors. She doesn’t realize it could taste like desiccated, sun-bleached roadkill and Remus would still drink every drop. Still, the mint is particularly abominable. 

“Like dragon dung,” he says. 

Prongs tilts his head, contemplative, and hums. “Maybe orange vanilla?” He suggests to no one, looking very much like an entrepreneurial Potioneer’s son. “The citrus should overwhelm the dragon blood.”

“Ooh, or lavender,” Sirius puts in. 

“Don’t be daft, lavender might interact with the powdered moonstone. Lily mentioned something called root beer—”

Remus is pretty sure he’s becoming a lab rat, but their hearts are in the right places, so he’ll let it slide.

Owen wanders into the kitchen about that point, yawning and grouchy. He brightens when he spies James. 

“Is Ivy here?” He asks. “I found something cool.”

Something cool usually means something poisonous, explosive, or cursed, or some combination of all three. 

“Not today, O,” Prongs says easily, ruffling his tangle of cowlicks. “It’s boys’ night, remember?”

“Oh.” Owen rolls his eyes, looking sour. “That’s right. The full moon.” 

Remus tenses, desperately wishing not to have this argument again. Owen is too young to understand what he is and thinks they’re all being dramatic and annoying. He will know, horribly, after moonrise, how little of this is a joke. 

“Boys’ night,” Prongs rebuts, crossing his arms, “sounds much better than the full moon.” He runs his hand through his wild thatch of hair in a gesture Remus remembers from fifth year. “You’ll get to see me, in all my glory.”

“I’ve seen you in all your glory, Uncle Prongs,” Owen says, deadpan. “You turn into a deer all the time.”

“I’m a stag,” James corrects, a little offended. The chair lands back on all fours with a thud.

“A deer’s a deer,” Owen says with brutally savage five-year-old logic, before turning complaining eyes onto Sirius. “Can’t Ivy come, too?”

“No, pup,” Sirius says cheerfully. “Animals only tonight. Four legs required for admission.” 

“But she knows I’m a werewolf,” Owen insists. “And she knows Remus is, too.” 

“And she can know about it safely from her bedroom,” James says just as cheerfully. “Where she’ll be safely locked up, safely having a girl’s night with Aunt Lily.”

“This is just like in Cinderella,” Owen mutters, and none of them get that reference, but they all know to blame Lily for it. 

Before he can complain further, he suddenly gives a great, wrenching gasp, hands flying to his ribs. 

“Owen?” Sirius barks, leaping to his feet and crossing the room in two strides. “Owen, where does it hurt?” 

Owen shakes his head frantically. His skin is rapidly whitening, then purpling, great swathes of color spreading across his cheeks as his body shakes so violently it looks as though it might snap. Remus swallows his own gasp of pain, twisting toward the windows. He can just spy the faintest sliver of silver dawning on the horizon. Winter moons, he thinks miserably, are the worst moons. 

“Owen,” Sirius is saying urgently, bending to scoop him into his arms. Owen is thrashing, now, his entire body contorting as he twists and heaves, in too much pain to scream. “Owen!”

“It’s time,” Remus says quietly, holding back his own shaking. “We need to go.”

Chapter Text

“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars …”

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

---

They chose the dueling court in the basement of Grimmauld Place for Owen’s first transformation. It’s dank, reinforced concrete, sheltered from the rest of the house with a veritable forest of wards and shields, and it’s roomy enough that the four of them can move freely without feeling confined.

It’s the first time since Wormtail’s betrayal that there have been four of them together at a full moon. It feels strange and raw, nearly as much as a punch to the gut as the first full moon where there’d only been the three of them. Remus sees the thought haunting James’s face as they tear through the hallways of Grimmauld. He wishes he could say something, but he’s too distracted by the familiar shaking spreading up his limbs, little pinpricks of flame turning his body into a gruesome marionette of himself, and by the sight of his son, red and purple and deathly pale, seizing and flailing in a paroxysm of pain as he bounces in Sirius’s arms.

They waste no time in getting there and barricading the door shut. As James raises additional wards, Sirius paces the edge of the court with Owen in his arms, murmuring comfort to the twisting, writhing boy. But it’s no use; Owen lets out a scream, his muscles bunching tight as he bucks in Sirius’s grasp. Sirius looks around, agonized, and tightens his grip, one large hand pressing firm to the back of Owen’s head as he secures him against his shoulder and holds him with a kind of fierceness, as though he can will himself to absorb his pain. He knows he has to put him down, but he can’t stand the idea of leaving him alone.

“Put him here,” Remus gasps, settling himself against the far wall. “Next to me.”

Sirius complies at once, relief stark on his face. Owen slumps into a ball beside Moony, boneless, trembling so hard his body is vibrating. His forehead is soaked in sweat. Remus gently strips him of his shirt, folding it with his own trembling hands and setting it to the side. Carefully, he settles his hand where the skin burns hottest around the bite on his spine. The bones grind under his palm, convulsing, even as his body pulsates in seemingly the other direction, everything twisting and breaking and changing, and Remus wants to scream.

Owen whimpers, then releases one, ear-splitting scream. It sounds divorced from the body that made it; something so small can’t possibly hold that much pain.

Prongs drops into a crouch a few yards away, Sirius standing at his back with his head buried in his hands. They’re both pale as parchment.

“How long?” Prongs asks, watching Owen from veiled, hazel eyes in his Auror’s face.

Remus shakes his head. “There’s no way to know. If he resists—” he pauses as his own wave of convulsions finally asserts itself, thundering through him with the force of a stampeding hippogriff, then takes another moment to rediscover his breath. “—it could mean hours. But if his wolf is as strong as I think it is ….”

James’s eyes flash in understanding. He won’t be able to fight it. “Minutes?”

“Yes.” Remus tries not to think of his own first transformation and how hard he fought it. It’s his last conscious thought, before his own wolf grips him, sinking teeth into his throat and forcing him under. “It’s happening,” he manages to gasp. “Turn, now.”

He doesn’t get to see if Prongs and Padfoot comply; his wolf is furious tonight, keening, and it demands all his attention in recompense for blood.

***

In the end, it takes Owen ninety minutes to transform.

The three of them wait, curled around him in a puppy pile. They can offer no words of comfort in these forms, but they can still speak in their own animalistic language, of heat and tongue and whines. Prongs licks worriedly between his fevered brows, and Padfoot folds his length across his tiny torso, offering him his heat and soft, downy fur. Moony curls behind him in an instinctive, lupine motion, resting his muzzle upon his small, sweat soaked head, rubbing his jaw back and forth as he croons comfort.

Pack, his blood and bone and marrow sing, and for once he doesn’t revile it. This is his pup, and there is nowhere he will be except beside him for this terrible night.

When it finally happens, it is just as sickening and terrifying as Moony remembers. Bones splinter and crack, then reform in a cruel caricature of a human boy, long and wrong. Skin rips and peels, and fur rushes to fill the gaps, lacing tight over exposed sinew. His face lengthens as his teeth reform, growing pointed, and Owen screams. It’s a sound all three of them will carry with them forever—the agony in it is so profound, it leaves a scar to hear it.

And then there is a small, furious wolf wriggling and growling between them, with fur black as night and great, yellow eyes, and they have an entirely new set of problems.

Owen is an unruly, willful child. He’s a nightmare of a wolf. As Remus suspected, his wolf is strong. In his disoriented, freshly formed state, he doesn’t wish for comfort or pack or even solitude. He is angry, like a lone wolf avenging its littermates, and there is a devastation to the way he chuffs and the ravaged way he howls that warns them away. Remus suspects he might be the personification of all the things Owen has lost since his bite. It’s a bitter irony that the wolf—responsible for taking him from his family, friends, and world—has kept the score, kept watch over every agony, stewed on it, been born into it, and now all he wants is blood.

He snarls at them, biting and snapping, circling the court with jagged, graceful steps; he’s impossible to calm down no matter how they approach him and despite his much smaller size. He’s aided, too, by their reluctance to hurt him. It takes all three of them more than an hour to accept he will not be joining them willingly, and the most of another to herd him toward his own side of the court where he at least won’t be agitated by their presence. Moony is forced to pin him more than once, his own, superior jaws and incisors slavering mere inches from his throat, human heart pricking all the while as Owen yelps and whines but refuses to cower, because even as a wolf, he is terribly brave. Just as quickly as Moony releases him, he’s leaping up to stalk the room again, growling and snapping and scratching as he circles, and the cycle repeats. He’s terrified, and furious, and he’s mourning his lost pack in the most vicious of ways, and the hours pass in long, unending moments, until Moony is living from heartbeat to heartbeat. It would have been easier, he thinks, if he didn’t have his consciousness for this. He acts as a beast, by instinct and nature, yet endures it all as a human, and the disconnect between the two is enough to make him feel dizzy.

And at dawn, when they’re all exhausted to the point of collapsing, Owen is a trembling ball of boy again, pale and exhausted, fingers shaking where they trace the curved scar on his lower spine.

“Owen,” Remus croaks, trying to push himself up onto aching hands. His elbows tremble and give, and he barely catches himself from smashing onto the floor. His entire body feels like a bruise, and all he wants to do is sleep and forget, but he knows that look on his face, knows it because he feels it on his own, and it belongs nowhere on his child. “You’re all right. Hey. It’s all right.”

He’s distantly aware of James rummaging through his overnight bag; with frightening efficiency, he produces two wizards’ robes, one child-sized, and steps quickly forward to drape them over them both. Moony feels a rush of gratitude for Prongs, who never seems to break, and Lily, who always thinks of everything.  He shrugs his on, painfully slow, shoulders screaming with each stunted movement. Owen doesn’t notice. He’s fixated on the scar.

“Owen,” he rasps again, and it’s more of a command, a vestige of the theatre they’d performed when they left their human skins behind. Owen flinches, curling inward on himself.

“He made me like him,” he whispers, horrified. “He made me a monster, too.”

Then he is sobbing, each one a shockwave that tears something vital away, and Remus can only watch him in agony, too exhausted to so much as crawl toward him as the weight of his own transformation comes crashing down.

And then Sirius is there, making soft, hushing noises, crooning low and warm as he gathers Owen up like a bundle of firewood and arranges him in his lap. Owen turns into his neck, seeking warmth or comfort or maybe absolution, and Sirius wraps him up tight.

“It’s all right, pup,” he murmurs. There are jarringly dark circles beneath his eyes as though someone smeared bruises there, but his eyes, clear and gray, find Remus’s and hold them. Rest, he orders. I have this.

Owen is sobbing out a litany, his words tripping together as his body shakes, but monster is the constant refrain, and something in Remus breaks. He never wants to hear his son call himself that word again.

“You’re not a monster, O,” Sirius says after a while, when the sobs disintegrate into painful hiccups. He nudges Owen’s face out from under his chin, greeting him with a warm, hopelessly fond smile. Tenderly, he strokes his downy head. Sirius shouldn’t be a gentle person, Remus knows; his childhood aimed to strip that from him. But much like his Animagus, there is an unconditional love in him that no amount of cruelty can varnish, and Owen sucks up that love like Remus himself does, staring at him as though he’s a mirage in the desert.

“I am,” Owen whispers.

“Is that so?” Sirius asks, still with that addictive kindness. “Then do you think Remus is a monster?”

Remus tenses reflexively as their son’s gaze sweeps over him. “No,” He retorts, and something in Remus sags with relief as much at his answer as it does at his show of fire. He looks too much like a specter, a husk of the boy he was.

“But it’s different,” he continues. “I was so … angry.” He shudders, hunching in on himself and hiding in the fall of Sirius’s hair, the words emerging in a wild, hoarse burst. “I wanted to kill you, I wanted to … to hurt you—”

“Owen,” Sirius says, “pup. Look at me.” Owen resists, then lifts his head miserably. Sirius gives him a winning grin. “Do I look dead to you?”

“No,” Owen says faintly.

“How about Prongs over there?” He points, and Prongs waves cheekily, before executing an alarmingly perfect cartwheel. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Owen says again, a little bit of his old annoyance creeping back into his voice. “But I tried to—”

Sirius unleashes a bark of laughter that echoes through the court. “Do you know how many wizards have tried to kill me?” He demands, wiping away feigned tears of amusement. He pinches Owen’s skinny arm between his thumb and forefinger, still chuckling. “You’ll have to eat your vegetables if you even want a chance.”

“Can you be serious—” Owen demands, before realizing his mistake.

Sirius positively writhes with glee. “I have always been Sirius,” he says at once, because he’s a dad, now, and he can make dad jokes.

Owen groans grumpily, but his shoulders are lowering as he relaxes into his chest, and Padfoot presses a kiss, feather soft, to the crown of his head. “That’s not the point.”

“Then tell me your point,” Sirius advises, shifting his hold on him to be more secure as he stands in one fluid movement, “after you’ve had a good rest. Things usually feel a bit better after a good sleep.”

And then Prongs is gently helping Remus up, large palms warm and sure as he takes his weight in the familiar way he has since they were fifteen and first limped home under his invisibility cloak from the Shrieking Shack, except this time feels much more momentous: he’s leading him to his husband and son. When they’re in reach, Sirius doesn’t say a word, only stretches out one hand, that warm smile on his face that Remus has fallen into since he was thirteen. Remus takes it, trembling, and allows himself to be wrapped into his embrace, his nose burrowing into the hollow of Sirius’s throat where his scent emanates and floods his nostrils: dark chocolate and smoke and home and safe.

Owen makes a small, mutinous mewl at being jostled, the noise more wolf than boy, then yawns. Prongs snorts.

Every receptor in Remus’s brain lights up in that moment. Pack, his brain sends. I know, he thinks back.

“My stubborn boys,” Sirius says, and the word catches. “Let me be strong for you, for a little while. You can solve all the world’s problems tomorrow.”

And with Prongs leading the way, they leave the court behind.

***

Owen sleeps but stays quiet and withdrawn. He shows no interest in dangerous things, doesn’t ask Kreacher to break any laws, and doesn’t ask to see Ivy once. It’s such a marked change from the boy he’d been, and it makes Remus deeply anxious. He knows exactly what’s running through his head.

He has no interest in seeing the Potters, or even Sirius and Remus. When Prongs visits after work, he hides in his room, complaining of a headache they all pretend is real. He sits, alone, in hidden spots in the house, and barely says a word at dinner. They let it go on for a week, before they decide to address it.

They track him down to the attic. He’s sitting curled on the dusty floor under the sloped roof, watching the raindrops slide down the skylight.

“There’s a particular girl downstairs, you know,” Remus drawls as he stoops through the attic doorway. “Looking for you.”

Owen tenses, sitting up a little too quickly in a bid to seem as though he’s not been crying. “Who?”

“Who, he says,” Sirius repeats teasingly as he takes sentry in the entryway, arms crossed, and one leg propped up behind him to lean against the weathered doorframe. “As if he’s a regular ladies’ man.” Owen sticks out his tongue in disgust at the label, and Sirius grins. “It’s Ivy, you muppet. She’s downstairs tormenting Kreacher right now, bless her. She wants him to agree to call himself Thumper. Prongs says he doesn’t have the faintest, but he says Lily let her watch something about a deer this weekend when they went to visit her Aunt Petunia, and she’s been hysterical ever since, hugging and crying on both of them and making Prongs promise he won’t get shot by a hunter in his Animagus form.” He wrinkles his nose. “She’s talking a lot about some girl named Alice, too, who James says got stuck in a mirror dimension. Some shoddy charms work, that. Alice Longbottom would never. But Ivy doesn’t care about that. She wants a rabbit and a tea party, and she also wants them to charm her hair blonde, and she’s been having a right fit about them saying no to all the above. And now, she’s going to find loads of cursed treasure without you in the east wing once she gets around to lurking, and she’ll just stuff it all in a pillowcase and drag it back to her lair at Prongs’s house like the thieving gremlin she is—”

“I can’t see her,” Owen bursts out, and Sirius gives Remus a triumphant look. (“I can annoy him,” he’d said confidently on the landing, “into telling us what’s bothering him.” Remus had stared. “Padfoot, that’s a stupid fucking plan.”)

Sirius wriggles his fingers at him, eyebrows raised meaningfully. Remus sighs and surreptitiously presses five galleons into his extended palm.

“You’re not dangerous to her at this time of month,” Remus says, focusing back on Owen, who looks pale and shaken. He’s wrapped his arms around his knees, hunching in on himself, and his heart aches to see their bold, wild child diminishing himself.

You do the same, a nasty voice whispers in his ear, but he pushes it away.

“I can’t,” Owen says, that stubborn chin jutting upward, and Sirius groans under his breath. The battle has begun.

“Do you think I’m dangerous around Ivy?” Remus asks patiently. He walks closer, pretending to inspect the shelves and miscellaneous storage—and, yes, that’s an actual glass box of severed fucking hands, he really did marry into the most delightful family— as he waits for him to answer. Getting Owen to talk follows similar rules to hunting big game. Stalk and wait.

“Of course not,” Owen says at once, with a belligerent shake of his head. “But it’s different. She—”

His lips press tight, suddenly mute, and Remus feels an awful understanding. Behind him, Sirius draws in a tight breath.

“She knows,” Remus provides, looking at him steadily, and Owen flinches. “She knew before, too, darling. You told her, remember?”

“I didn’t know before—” he bursts out, then stops. He takes a deep breath, and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Owen?” Remus prods gently, but he hunches over tighter and shakes his head vehemently, refusing to lift his face.

“You know what I thought when I first saw you?” Sirius asks unexpectedly from the doorway.

Owen tenses, then lifts one eye warily, watching him approach.

“Well, the first thing I thought,” Padfoot amends with a grin, “was that this lad’s a bit mad in the head.” Owen scowls at him, but Padfoot winks and taps his own temple. “It’s a compliment. I was impressed by your lunacy. You have to be a mad lad to fit in with us, pup. You know that, by now. But the second thing ….”

“What?” Owen asks stiffly, interested despite himself.

Sirius crouches over him, clear gray eyes fixed on his son. “I thought, that’s the bravest boy I’ve ever seen,” he says, and his voice is thick with admiration. He lifts one big hand and tenderly pulls a cobweb from his curls. “You survived something most fully grown, trained wizards wouldn’t survive. You were hurt, and scared, and alone, and you looked us right in the eye and told us to piss straight off, thanks but no thanks.” He huffed a laugh. “You wouldn’t even tell us your name.”

Owen looks surprised, his mouth hanging slightly open as his eyes stay on Sirius. Telegraphing his movements, Sirius reaches out and smooths down his jaw, before his fingers settle on his chin. He presses gently, lifting it up.

“No condition,” he says in a low rumble, “can ever make you bow your head. And no disease can ever rob you of your words. You are John Richardson’s son—” And Owen’s eyes well with tears as Sirius’s voice catches for one, hesitant heartbeat, “—and you are my son, and you don’t kneel for anybody. Nothing in this world can take your courage, except yourself.”

Owen swallows, but something lights behind his eyes. Remus settles silently on his other side, lending him his quiet presence.

“Owen,” Sirius says soberly, “use your words and that bravery, and tell us what’s wrong. We can’t help you if you don’t.”

A tremor runs through him, and his jaw clenches, but he doesn’t lower his head. “She knows what I am,” he whispers. “She knows I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster,” Remus says, sharper than he means to, but doesn’t he call himself the exact same thing, in the darkness of his head?

But Owen doesn’t seem to hear him. “I thought it was cool,” he says quietly, “like a superpower. Like the Hulk or Spiderman. I got bit by a wolf, and I get to turn into one.” He shudders, and tears slip down his temple. “But it’s bad, and I hate it.”

“I know,” Sirius says softly, “I know you hate it, but it’s not all bad. Once you can drink the Wolfsbane, it will be better.”

“I’m not normal,” Owen breathes. “I see too much, and it makes my eyes feel scratchy.” He rubs at them in aggravation. “Everything smells funny. Everything’s loud.” He shakes his head in frustration. “I could hear you, when you came up the stairs, and Sirius tripped over the umbrella stand and swore. I can hear Kreacher and Ivy in the kitchen, now.”

Sirius glances briefly across his head to Remus, a querying look in his expression.

“That can happen after your first transformation,” Remus tells him, remembering their son likes things to be explained to him as though he’s an adult. He marshals his thoughts, trying to find small words he’d know to explain something so intangible. “It’s as though your wolf was asleep, before. But it woke up the first time you transformed, and your senses—” he taps on his ears, nose, and eyelids gently, “got stronger with your wolf.”

“Did it happen to you?” Owen asks hopefully, and Remus hesitates.

“Not as much, pup,” he says gently, because he doesn’t want to lie to him. “My senses are better than most, and definitely my hearing; that’s why Padfoot and Prongs always used me as their lookout when they planned pranks. But my bond with my wolf isn’t as strong as yours.”

Remus had theorized that this could happen, although he’d hoped it wouldn’t. Owen is showing a much stronger inner sense of his wolf than Remus ever has, and he suspects it’s because of how his wolf came about. His life had been in mortal danger, and his magic had reacted instinctively to save him. It’s not uncommon; almost every werewolf bite happens when the recipient is in mortal danger. The deciding factor was the strength of his accidental magic, and the power inherent in Owen. It had exploded outward to save him.

But in doing so, his magic had also aided the wolf inside him, newly formed and moldable. Much like steel sharpening steel, Owen’s immense will had lent itself to his wolf, infusing its spirit with his own indomitable drive to survive in that moment.

It wasn’t entirely uncommon. Some werewolves, Remus knew, struggled with their wolves, finding them much more awake in their daily lives, their instincts sharper and much more difficult to control. Remus has spent his entire life cowing and kicking and abusing his wolf. It is a painful thing to realize, that the beast inside him had nearly been broken by his own actions, and perhaps would have become a starved, cowering thing if he hadn’t met Prongs and Padfoot and found another way. But he can’t entirely regret it or show that part of him the sympathy he knows it deserves. It was the only way he knew how to accept his condition.

He will burn their world to ash before he sees his son do the same.

It’s funny, he thinks, the things that you’ll allow yourself to endure, but never someone you love.

“Is that why you’ve been hiding in the attic?” Sirius asks. “Because it’s too loud?”

“Kind of,” Owen says, although he still looks unhappy with Remus’s answer. “There’s too much noise, but the noise isn’t just in my ears.” He shakes his head, frustrated at his inability to explain. “I want it gone.”

He looks at Remus suddenly, nostrils flaring in a distinctly lupine manner. “You smell sad,” he accuses.

“I’m not sad,” Remus murmurs, brushing a hand through his cowlicks. “Not about you, pup. I’m just remembering.”

 “I’ll never be normal,” Owen whispers, and he looks panicked, as though he wishes he could claw out of his own skin. “Who would want to be friends with me?”

And Remus’s heart twists painfully.

“I made friends,” he says quietly, waiting for him to meet his eyes again. “You know them well. They have seen me at my worst, and they have not gone anywhere despite it.” He squeezes his shoulder. “You are infinitely lovable, Owen Richardson, and you have a good heart. Anyone would be lucky to be your friend.”

“But they’ll know—” he argues weakly.

“They won’t know,” Sirius jumps in, a vow in his eyes and a muscle ticking in his jaw. “No one will, unless you tell them. That’s why we did what we did, at the hospital.” Owen still looks doubtful, and Sirius lowers his head to meet his gaze. “I promise you, Owen, no one will know you’re a werewolf unless you let them.”

“But Ivy knows,” he whispers, looking horrified. “And you said wizards don’t like werewolves.”

Sirius rolls his eyes. “She doesn’t count. Ivy’s a Potter. They’re all mad in the head, and they tell no tales. Does James seem like he has a problem with werewolves to you?”

“No,” Owen says, looking a bit more convinced but as though he didn’t trust it. “But what if—”

“Anything that begins with what if, pup,” Sirius tells him, “Is worrying. We have enough madness in our bloodline without adding that. Ivy doesn’t care you’re a wolf. She cares she can’t tell you about this bloke named Bambi.” He straightens his leg, then prods Owen with his elbow when he slumps in relief. “What else?”

Owen bites his lip, then blurts out, “It wasn’t me.”

“What wasn’t you, darling?” Remus asks mildly.

“It wasn’t me who did the magic,” he says. “Who … wanted to live.” He swallows. “It was the wolf. My wolf.”

Remus looks at him, feeling a surge of empathy he has never, ever been willing to show himself. But for his son, he finds it.

“Owen,” he says gently, “your wolf is you.” He flinches, but Moony takes hold of the back of his neck in a gentle grip, forcing him to meet his eyes. “It’s your instinct, and your will, and your strength. It’s your drive to survive, and it’s a part of your soul. I told you that you have the strongest wolf I’ve ever seen. That’s not because of your bite, it’s because of who you are. Your wolf was always you.”

“I can’t go back,” he says quietly, looking up at them. “Can I?” He closes his eyes, but it doesn’t hide the tear that escapes to drip toward his temple. “I thought I could. To Mum, and Dad, and … Dylan.” He chokes on his little brother’s name. “I thought you were all being stupid. But ….” He trails off.

“No, pup,” Sirius says softly, rubbing the tear away with his thumb. “You can’t.”

Owen nods once, then gives a telltale quiver. “So, I’m alone?” he asks in a heartbreaking whisper.

Remus grips his shoulder. “You will never be alone,” he tells him fiercely. “You have us.”

Owen sucks in a breath as though struck, wide eyes locked on Remus. Then he breaks, burying his head into his chest. His shoulders tremble violently with the weight of his sobs, shaking Remus’s grip on him. But he is brave, this boy of theirs, and his wolf is strong; he never makes a sound.

After a long while, he pulls back and looks between them, hesitating. “And I can stay here?” He rasps. “You still want me?”

Remus smooths his hair back from his forehead. “I don’t think Sirius would let you leave,” he says drily.

“I wouldn’t,” Sirius says cheerily. “I’d duel Prongs for you.”

Owen gives a small, damp chuckle, but clings tighter to him, and Remus grows more sober. He’s getting the hang of knowing when he needs levity, and when he needs reassurance. It’s an instinct thing, Prongs had said vaguely, waving his hand in a dismissive motion when Remus had begged him for parenting advice. Ivy was a shameless goblin, but she was also good and kind, so Prongs had some idea what he was doing, even if he couldn’t vocalize it. You just feel your way through it.

He’d wanted to throttle him at the time, but he understood now what he meant, better and better every day.

“You can stay here,” he tells him seriously, “for the rest of your life.” He steels himself with his own Gryffindor courage, and puts his heart on the line, knowing it could very easily be smashed. “You may not care for us very much, but we consider you our son. What’s ours is yours, if you want it. I know you’ve lost a great deal.”

Owen sniffles. Remus reaches out to drop an arm around his shoulders and tuck him into his side, and Sirius shifts closer so his knee presses against Owen’s shins, shielding him.

“But we will keep our promise to you in the hospital,” Remus tells him. “You are our son, and we love you, whether you care for us or not.”

“I do,” Owen says abruptly, “care for you.”

Remus freezes, blood rushing to his head. Sirius makes a noise like a bird getting stepped on, but he doesn’t spare him a glance. His heart has swollen to twice its usual size, and he should probably run downstairs and call for Lily because he’s certain he’s about to drop dead, but he can’t wipe the stupid smile off his face.

“That’s very nice to hear,” he says honestly, incapable of playing this cool like he probably should.

“Yeah,” Sirius chokes out. “It’s … yeah.”

Owen smiles, too, hesitant but hopeful. “And you’ll adopt me?” He asks, looking focused. At Remus’s nod, his brow furrows. “How do wizard adoptions work?”

Sirius shifts over, taking over. “We do a ritual,” he explains, “to blood adopt you. After that, you’ll legally be our son, by blood and magic. The same way Ivy is Prongs and Lily’s daughter.” Owen looks excited, and Sirius warns, “But it will change your appearance, and your last name will be changed in the Hogwarts book and government records.”

“My appearance?” Owen repeats, looking wary.

“Your face, pup,” Sirius says gently, tapping his nose, and Remus’s chest gives a painful throb at the way Owen’s expression twists. “You’ll look more like us, and your name will officially be Owen Black.”

Owen says nothing for a long moment, not looking at either of them. Sirius doesn’t look as torn up as Remus currently feels, but he knows he’s feeling just as terrible. They both know how much his last name and his parents mean to him.

“Orion,” he says suddenly, and he doesn’t sound as bitter as he usually does. He lifts his chin and looks at Sirius. Brave, Remus thinks. “Blacks have star names, don’t they?”

Sirius blinks. “They do,” he says, before adding, “But you’ll still be you, Owen. We don’t love you for being Orion Black. We love you because you’re Owen Richardson, and you’re the maddest, bravest, future-insurrectionist-and-possible-arsonist we know. And you won’t stop being mental and brave and loved because your name is Orion.”

Owen’s eyes well, and he rubs roughly at his face. They both pretend not to notice, studying the cobwebs while they wait for him to recover.

Finally, he nods firmly to himself, then sits up straight. “How soon can we do it?”

“There’s no rush,” Remus says at once, a little alarmed. “We can—”

“I want to do it today,” Owen interrupts, and there’s steel in his eyes. “Can we?”

He glances at Sirius, who looks surprised, but nods. “We could,” he says hesitantly, studiously avoiding Remus’s pointed glare.

“Good,” Owen says, starting to stand. “Let’s go. Now.”

“Owen,” Remus tries again, “We won’t get rid of you. There’s no chance of that ever happening. You don’t need to worry. You don’t need to go through with this today.”

 “It’s not that,” Owen says, looking a little insulted, and Remus is too relieved by the return of his belief that he’s unconditionally loved to feel annoyed at the way he’s staring at him as though he’s daft. “It’s—”

He struggles for a moment, then catches Sirius’s eye. Use your words, he told him. We can’t help you if you don’t.

He lifts his stubborn chin and he’s forty pounds of spitfire bearing down on them. “But I want a family. I don’t want to be alone.” His eyes flash. “And you promised you’d be mine, so be it.”

***

It is, perhaps, the most rushed blood adoption ceremony in history, based on the whims of their dictatorial son. Kreacher makes a banner, but Remus can tell he’s fucking pissed at all of them, because he keeps muttering about floral arrangements and banquets.

Prongs, Lily, and Ivy arrive as soon as Sirius has time to nip through the fireplace and fetch them, because their joint social circle has been reduced by the war down to a grand total of six and they have nothing else to do on a Wednesday night. Ivy brings roller skates she got from her muggle cousin and wears a sparkly, silver dress in honor of the occasion. Owen—Orion, Remus reminds himself—is promptly shoved into an unused ballroom with Ivy and the skates where they’re ordered to entertain themselves. Remus says a brief prayer they don’t burn it down.

The four adults then promptly lock themselves in the downstairs bathroom and have a fierce, muffled debate about who else they could possibly invite. It’s a sad reality they have few friends left.

Lily is insistent about inviting Neville, but Sirius and Remus team up to shoot her down; while they love Neville and have been dying to introduce him to Orion, they don’t entirely trust Augusta. The beauty of few people knowing about Owen before he becomes Orion is that fewer people may one day guess his origins, or his furry problem; blood adoption makes him a legal Black. Gossip works in their favor in this situation. He could be the product of Sirius’s youthful misadventures, or an intentionally hidden, surrogate-born child that Remus and Sirius chose to raise quietly due to their reticence after the war and reluctance to introduce him to the broader public. The more people who are aware it was a blood adoption and can rule those other options out means the more risk will exist of them perhaps connecting the dots and finding the trail back to the Muggleborn boy who died mysteriously in an explosion.

“It can’t just be us,” Lily insists, still looking put out. She loves her godson, and while Ivy has kept her promise not to inform Neville of Orion during their play dates this past month, Lily hates the idea of him being left out.

“Why not?” Prongs demands. “It’s always just us. Kreacher and Tilly can pretend to be guests and clap. Ivy will love stage directing them. It will give her purpose.”

“He’s becoming family,” Lily says, a familiar flush starting on her face. She’s seven months along, now, and her temper is formidably short. “Shouldn’t we mark it in a special way, not here’s pizza, go upstairs and don’t blow up anything?”

“They love pizza!” Prongs cries out. “That’s like, their dream day!”

Sirius straightens, looking grim. “I know who to invite.”

And he disappears for fifteen minutes without another word. When he returns, he refuses to say who exactly he invited, no matter how much they badger him. The three of them eventually grow irritated with his silence, and too distracted by all the things that need to get done. A blood ritual is tricky, and takes the proper warding, and potion, and fresh spring water surrounded by purified white stones arranged exactly right in the ritual room—

By the time the four of them have any time to breathe, they find themselves shoved unceremoniously into the formal parlor room by Kreacher, where the harpsichord is playing itself in a plaintive, ancient tune. Ivy and Orion are lying under the dining room table, legs kicking back and forth occasionally beneath the cloth of gold tablecloth Kreacher rustled up from storage. They’ve completely forgotten about the adults, playing an elaborate game where the air is toxic, and they must live underground to survive.

Remus feels like pizza would have been just fine, but he’s too afraid of Lily to say it. She envisions herself with dignified children, and he wants her to keep that dream.

Sirius sits near the Floo and waits.

Andromeda Tonks floats gracefully out of the Floo half an hour later. She straightens imperiously and stares down at her younger cousin, who’s sprawled insolently in a chair with his feet kicked up on the coffee table. Remus tenses for a moment at the sight of her; she looks unsettlingly like Bellatrix, apart from her wider, kinder eyes and the chestnut hair. The last time he saw that face, he thinks, James had just removed it from its body.

Andromeda is thankfully unaware of where his thoughts have gone, and all her attention is focused on glaring bloody murder into Sirius.

“Dromeda,” Sirius drawls, waving lazily. “No Dora or Ted?”

“You didn’t tell me,” Andromeda spits, “to bring Dora or Ted.”

Sirius rolls his eyes. “Of course, they’re welcome. I didn’t know you needed a formal invite. This isn’t a ball.”

A seething whisper floats through the open kitchen door, somehow overpowering the harpsichord. “Master is making jokes, but there should be being a ball, the Black Heir by blood adoption is always getting a ball—”

Remus subtly waves his wand. The door clicks shut. He will … do something nice for Kreacher, he decides. Just not tonight.

“I don’t need a formal invitation,” Andromeda replies waspishly, “but was it necessary to send me a Howler?”

Remus makes a noise of horror, gaping at his husband. Sirius just grins wolfishly, twirling his wand as though he’s a ringmaster in a circus. “Would you have come so quickly if I hadn’t?”

A muscle ticks in Andromeda’s jaw, and Remus can tell she’s dying to slap him upside the head but held back by her dignity from committing to it. She turns away pointedly and storms toward where James and Lily sit in the dining room, nibbling on cakes Tilly brought over with tea. They both stiffen perceptibly at her face, James’s knuckles going white on his teacup.

“James,” she greets smoothly, “Lily, dear, you’re positively glowing.”

Lily jumps a bit, visibly snapping out of her memory. “Thank you,” she says, with the start of a hesitant smile as she settles one hand on her stomach. “I feel as though I’m—”

“Anyways,” Andromeda says, steamrolling her as she twists back toward James with a beady glare. “Did either of you plan on informing me that I had a new nephew?”

Prongs blinks, then looks at Padfoot for cues. Sirius mimes something that might mean lie through your teeth but also might be a nervous tic. Prongs squints and mouths, what.

Andromeda clears her throats, loudly, and Lily kicks James in the shin.

“Um, no,” Prongs says, straightening. “I thought he was going to do it.”

Andromeda is too well-bred to stamp her foot, but she looks close. “You should know by now that he never does what he’s supposed to do.”

“Well, he did technically tell you,” Prongs says, his instinctive urge to back up Sirius in all things, no matter how ill-advised, kicking in at the worst time. “Tonight.”

“Via Howler,” Andromeda supplies, voice dripping with condescension. She pitches her voice low to mirror Sirius’s barking rasp. “Dromeda, drop by. Adopting my kid. It’s Sirius, by the way.” She straightens, outraged. “I mean, really?”

Prongs blinks again, then stares at Sirius as though he has five heads. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s … actually really bad.”

Sirius mimes the word for traitor, which involves acting out Julius Caesar’s assassination. Andromeda shoots a stinging hex at him, and Sirius leaps out of his chair with a diving roll to avoid it.

“Now,” Andromeda says a little breathlessly, smoothing down her mulberry robes as she turns back to an astonished Prongs and Lily, “I’d like to meet my nephew.”

“He doesn’t have his face yet,” Sirius says, an edge in his voice as he enters the dining room. Remus stiffens, turning to face him; Sirius’s eyes flash like a knife.

Andromeda flushes puce, her outrage palpable. “That is a terribly impolite way to put it,” she hisses. “And what does that matter?”

Sirius shrugs, crossing his arms, and Remus realizes he’s testing her. “Well, he looks all muggle and normal, now. Don’t know if that would offend your Black sensibilities, seeing a Muggleborn heir before he—”

He yelps as she finally lands a stinging hex, right on his hand.

“Sirius Black,” she intones, swelling to nearly twice her height, “Stop bloody talking.” She spins back to James, breathing fire. “Nephew. Now, Potter.”

James shoves a hand under the dining room table, hauling Orion out by his shirt, and holds him out like a loaf of bread. “Found him.”

Orion wriggles in his grasp like an enraged kitten, legs kicking. “Uncle Prongs!” He shouts. “You ruined the game. Now Ivy will be the warlord in the underground city—”

A gleeful cackle echoes up from under the table. Lily sighs and shoves her own hand under, fishing their daughter out. Ivy dangles in her hands, looking put-out.

Andromeda glances between them, a muscle ticking in her jaw.

“Minerva’s going to kill you,” she says, sounding impressed.

Remus winces. “Please don’t remind us.”

Orion tilts his head all the way back to stare at her, and frowns. “You look like Sirius.”

Andromeda looks deeply insulted by that, but all she says is, “That’s because I’m his cousin.” She stoops slightly to better peer at his face, and Orion blinks up at her owlishly, squinting suspiciously like Prongs does, and the imperious witch melts, just a tad.

“And I’m here to welcome you into our family,” she says softly, and Orion smiles. It’s blinding, and Remus suddenly has to turn to blink back tears, because he asked them for family, and Sirius delivered. True, it is the most notoriously insane family in the nation, but it is family, and Orion didn’t specify they had to get along or not be crazy.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he says, nearly shy, and Lily promptly bursts into tears.

“Sorry,” she gasps, “Hormones.” Before wiping her face on Ivy’s captured sleeve.

And it ends up, Remus thinks, being a really nice party, minus whatever Kreacher’s going through.

***

The blood adoption follows the dinner, as is tradition. There’s no formal ceremony for this: just Orion, Sirius, and Remus in the ritual room, and a goblet mixed with their blood and a bunch of other questionable ingredients waiting at its center.

Orion looks nervous. “Will it hurt?”

“Dunno,” Sirius says. “Never been blood adopted.” Remus kicks him. “Er. Not much, if it does at all. More like a pinch, I think. But you’re brave.”

Orion wrinkles his nose. “Will it taste bad?”

“Oh, definitely,” says Sirius, and Remus kicks him again.

Orion hesitates, then makes to enter the circle.

“Wait, pup,” Remus says softly, and he stops, looking baffled. “Let us look at you.”

His face clears in understanding, and he steps back before them. For a moment, the two of them drink in the lines of his face, which have grown so dear in the month they’ve had him: the powder blue eyes and ashy blonde cowlicks, the faint freckles on the ski slope nose, the stubborn chin and mulish set of his mouth. Sirius traces each feature, as though committing them to memory. For a moment, Remus feels torn between such deep love and such deep sadness, he doesn’t know which emotion is which. They have photos of him, of course, squirreled away somewhere only the three of them know, but it’s not the same.

“Okay,” he says finally, with one last sweep of his hand across those cowlicks. “You can go.”

Orion swallows, blinking hard, then steps to the goblet. Brave. He looks at it dubiously, then pinches his nose, and throws it back all at once.

For a moment, nothing happens, except for him dry heaving. Then his features ripple, as though a wave has swept across them, distorting the surface. It spreads down his body in a growing cadence. Remus feels a resonating wave answering in his own chest; he clutches it with a gasp, feeling the concentration of magic flowing outward from him and spooling in cresting undulations around their son. Sirius hisses in a breath beside him, hands knuckling on the ritual circle; the magic thickens, warping, until it suddenly snaps taut.

And Orion is suddenly straightening with a shriek of “it wasn’t a pinch, it was itchy!” As he bats at his body and calls them both bloody liars, and Remus is stunned into silence because—

He looks like them but also like himself.

He resembles Sirius as much as Ivy mirrors James (a fresh and fun new trauma, Remus thinks distractedly, for McGonagall). Black hair has replaced the ashy blonde, and its glossy curls are a dead match for Sirius’s own, but Remus realizes with a quaver of joy there is still a smattering of unruly cowlicks near the temples. His eyes are pewter, like Sirius’s, but a lovelier, softer color, closer to periwinkle. As though the powder blue had mixed with gray, tinging them to the color of a moody sky.

The ruinously stubborn chin is unchanged, although the rest of his features have sharpened, growing to be more of a match with theirs. He has Sirius’s high cheekbones and aristocratic nose, but the square jaw and soft mouth, Remus realizes with a twinge, is all his. His build, too, although young, resembles Remus’s; he’s grown an inch or two, and looks lankier.

“Do I look bad,” Orion blurts out, and Remus realizes they’ve been staring, silent with awe, for far too long.

“You look like us, pup,” Sirius says, nearly reverent. He doesn’t even bother wiping away the tears in his eyes.

“Is that … good?” Orion asks, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant.

“Good?” Sirius bellows, with a playful look of offense. “It’s great! We’re the two best-looking wizards you know—”

“Oi!” Prongs shouts from outside the ritual room, because it is definitely not soundproof. “He knows three bloody wizards!”

Sirius spins toward the door. “Prongs, you prat, do you have to ruin a lovely moment with your vanity—”

 While they bicker through the wall, Remus draws Orion forward out of the circle and yanks him into his arms. Orion returns the hug, hesitantly at first, then with intensity.

“Welcome to the family, pup,” Remus whispers, aware on some level he just willingly signed himself up for about fifteen more years of aneurysms.

He taps the stubborn chin gently, reminding him that he’s still him, and Orion smiles—

And they bring Orion John Black back into his living room to officially re-meet his family.

Chapter Text

May 1985

Lily finishes her program without delivering, despite looking as though she’s going to pop any day (“Aunt Lily, you should lay off the Scooby Snacks,” Orion says cheerfully one teatime, and then can’t understand why everyone’s yelling at him and Lily’s sobbing), and she’s positively smug about it.

“This child,” she tells James, Sirius, and Remus during the celebratory tea James arranges (Kreacher has possession of Ivy and Orion, although they’re all fairly certain it might be the reverse),“might actually listen to us.”

Then her water breaks during her graduation ceremony when they’ve only reached Cadwallader, Rhys, and they realize this child will not, in fact, listen to them, but it will have a flair for the worst possible timing.

“If I was still an Evans,” Lily hisses accusingly as James supports her away from the graduation ceremony in the lobby and up the stairs toward the maternity ward, “I would’ve been able to walk on that stage. I could’ve held out for five more names.”

“Yes, Flower, having a name at the end of the alphabet is terribly inconvenient,” James agrees at once. He’s been agreeing to everything she says for the past five minutes, which have generally been interchangeable variations of ‘how could you’ and ‘you did this’ and ‘you bastard’.

“P is such a a stupid letter,” Lily says savagely, sounding near tears. “They should ban it.”

“I’ve thought the same thing for years,” Prongs confides with a survival instinct that helped him survive the Lestranges. “You’re so right, Flower. James Otter sounds quite nice, I think.”

Lily begins crying in true. “We’d only move forward one letter. Your whole last name is bloody stupid.”

“It’s absolutely horrendous, you’re so clever for noticing that.” He pecks the top of her head, and she snarls at him like a Hebridean Black, but he just gives her a stupid grin.

“To say nothing of the bloodline attached to it,” she says, just warming up. “Your bloody children —”

“If it’s not a girl, can we give it back?” Ivy chirps, skipping along behind her parents and swinging off Sirius’s arm. She’s wearing sparkly, light-up trainers that were a gift from her aunt, and she’s entertaining herself by stamping them on the linoleum corridors, delighting in the way they flash neon pink.

(“Petunia quite likes her,” Lily tells them off-handedly after one visit, eyes sparkling with ill-concealed amusement. “She’s under the impression she’s quite normal, because she loves princesses and Disney movies and sparkly things. And she relishes the idea of me having a normal, non-magical child. She even offered to put in a good word for her at Cheltenham when her Hogwarts letter doesn’t come.”

 “Do you bring another child to her house?” Sirius demands from where he’s scrubbing the vestiges of an Ivy temper tantrum off the walls. They’d forbade her from looking for ghouls to bring back to their attic, so she’d blown up her window.  “Who have you hired to play my goddaughter?”)

Orion perks up at once. He’s still looking a bit peaky from the last full moon, and he’s been complaining all day that his dress robes are itchy, and that they’re heavy, and that listening to people talk is stupid. Remus barely managed to stop him and Ivy from tying the robes around his head like a turban during the Dean of St. Mungo’s opening remarks, and he lost control of them entirely when they started booing Belby, Silas as if it were a quidditch match. “I want it if it’s a boy.”

Ivy stamps happily for emphasis. Thump thump thump. “See, Mum? We can even sell it—”

“We are not selling the baby,” James says firmly, and then looks as though he’s having an existential crisis trying to figure out how his life led to him saying that sentence.

Blessedly, they reach the maternity ward, and the Healers take over, prying Lily off James’s rapidly purpling arm and helping her into a private room. Prongs follows her in after scooping Ivy up for a quick peck and telling her she’ll always be his girl, and she’ll be the best big sister in the world, grinning like a fool all the while. Remus also finds himself beaming while Sirius makes bets on the over/under of Prongs getting cursed by Lily in the delivery room; it’s exciting for there to be more of them, and it also feels fragile. Orion and Ivy were born in a war, but this baby is born free of it. It’s like spring after a long winter.

Then the kids turn bored, expectant faces onto the pair of them, picking at their formal clothes with huffs and scrunched up faces, and he realizes he’s in charge of entertaining them for however long this goes on for.

“Do you want to play a game?” He asks, trying to hide the fear in his voice. They’ve both been bribed into behaving for boring adult things with a lot of Cauldron Cakes and chocolate and toffees and whatever else they had on hand, because the four of them are short-sighted twits, and they were promised a trip to Florean Fortescue’s after the ceremony. They’re both hopped up on sugar like little addicts, and they are both his problem.

Ivy and Orion share a wordless glance that reminds him unsettlingly of velociraptors communicating during a hunt.

“Hide and seek,” Ivy says, while Orion crosses his arms and nods.

“You are not,” Remus says, “playing hide and seek in a hospital.”

They share another look that raises the hair on Remus’s neck, and his blood pressure, and before he can say another word, they both try to take off. Padfoot is faster; he catches Orion by the nape of his neck and Ivy by an arm, both of them wriggling and squawking and protesting.

“I will stick you to the floor by your trainers,” he growls as he tows them over to the plastic chairs and forcibly sits them both down.

Ivy’s green eyes narrow. “I’ll just take my trainers off.”

No one ever warns you how difficult it is to raise clever children, Remus laments.

But Sirius’s eyes narrow, too. “Then I’ll stick you to my back, and everyone will think you’re a weird, talking wart that sprouted legs and likes pink, and you’ll be stuck there forever.”

They stare each other down for a long minute, and then Ivy desists, grumbling. Orion looks mutinous; he tries to shimmy sideways off his chair, but Sirius catches his ankle, quick as a viper.

“Now,” Sirius says with just a hint of Black madness, “How about we teach you how to play Exploding Snap and sit quietly?”

Remus has never been more attracted to him in his life. 

***

It takes seven, long hours, but Ralston James Potter is born at 8:13 p.m.

… Hardwin Evans Potter is born at 9:08 p.m., much to Lily’s vocal displeasure at the rain delay.

They’re tiny, each one fitting in the palms of Prongs’s broad hands, and soft and mewling, one with a thatch of downy black hair, the other bald as a goose egg that Lily is certain will grow in red. She looks utterly exhausted, but she can’t stop beaming where she lies curled against James, both of them staring at their sons with a look of utter fascination.

Sirius carries Ivy in on his hip, more than half-asleep with her head buried in his neck, while Remus has Orion, who kicks his feet against his back fitfully as he tosses in his arms.

“They’re beautiful,” Remus breathes out in one exhale, looking down at the sleeping faces. And they are; they’re red, and scrunched, and very out of sorts with this whole being in the real-world business, but that’s Lily’s nose on both their faces, and that James’s upper lip. There’s Ivy in their faces, too, around their eyebrows and ears. His world expands instantly from six to eight, and he can’t help the tears that drip into Orion’s hair.

Sirius steps closer, coaxing Ivy into opening her drooping eyes.

“Fawn,” Prongs says gently, “wake up. You have little brothers.”

“Brothers?” Ivy croaks, rubbing a fist over her eyes and lifting her head blearily from Sirius’s neck.

“Yes.” Lily catches James’s eye and smiles, and he returns it with an equally soft one. “There were two babies in my stomach. That’s why it was so big. We wanted to surprise you.”

“Oh.” And for all her professed disdain of boys, Ivy is looking at the bundles with something tentative and excited. “Can I see them?”

“Of course, darling,” Lily says. “If you’re extra careful.”

Ivy wriggles, and Sirius lets her slide gently down his side. She tiptoes to the bed, making the four of them laugh; she looks at them with the annoyed confusion of a half-asleep child who’s trying to follow mysterious, adult directions, then clambers up carefully to tuck herself into James’s side. She stares down at the boys with wide eyes, as transfixed as her parents.

“They’re so little,” she says in a small voice.

“They are,” James agrees. “This is Ralston.” James runs a finger across the dark thatch. “And this is Hardwin.” He smooths his palm across Hardwin’s bald head.

Ivy mouths the names to herself as though memorizing them. “What happened to his hair?” She whispers, following James’s fingers. “Was it ugly?”

Sirius barks out a laugh that sets Orion groaning in displeasure and both babies wriggling. Ivy jumps, looking startled, as though worried she did something wrong.

“No, darling,” Lily says, although she’s laughing, too. “Some babies grow hair later.” She coaxes Ivy’s hand into her own, uncurling her fingers one by one, because she’s so scared of doing something wrong, she won’t do anything at all. “It’s all right. You can touch them. See?” She strokes Ivy’s hand through Ralston’s hair, and then across Hardwin’s nose. “You just have to be gentle.”

“Gentle,” Ivy repeats uncertainly, as if she’s never heard the word before.

“Would you like to hold them?” Lily asks.

Ivy risks a glance up at her mother. “Can I?”

Lily nods, and James arranges her against the pillows before carefully depositing Ralston into her arms. Ivy sits as though petrified, staring down at her little brother in awe. She touches one eyelid, then another, feather light, then kicks her heels together almost on reflex; her trainers light up. 

Orion is awake by now and watching the proceedings from where he leans against Remus’s side with an unreadable face. Remus runs a hand through his tangled curls, offering him his silent presence; he knows he is probably thinking of his own little brother.

James switches out Ralston for Hardwin, and Ivy traces his bald head, studying the baby. Hardwin makes a soft cooing noise, and Ivy’s lips twitch up.

“Well?” James prods, smiling as he watches. “Do you like them?”

Ivy stares for a moment longer, then looks up at Orion. Her eyes hold the faintest trace of Lily’s fire.

“You can’t have them,” she says, her fingers curled around Hardwin. “I changed my mind.”

“You don’t need two,” Orion retorts, as if she’s being selfish.

And Sirius barks a laugh that wakes both babies, and they are promptly ejected from the private room to take the gremlins back to Grimmauld and let the parents rest.

***

July 1985

“I found toast in my drawer last night,” Prongs says from where he’s slumped across the dining room table at Grimmauld.

Padfoot makes a face. “Gross.”

James doesn’t lift his head. There’s a gray pallor to his complexion that makes Sirius glad they’ve removed him from active-duty patrols and put him on desk work, even if he signs his files Prongs Potter half the time in his deliriousness. “I think I went to go change after my shift, and I was eating at the same time, and I took the shirt and put the toast in there.” He groans, sounding near tears. “I think I thought in order to get my shirt, I had to pay my drawer, and that just made sense to me at the time.”

Ralston and Hardwin have not stopped screaming since they left the womb. If Ralston screams, Hardwin immediately joins the chorus; if Hardwin so much as hiccups, Ralston assumes it’s a signal to screech. It reminds Sirius of the Mandrakes in Herbology, and he doesn’t think Prongs or Lily have slept more than two hours consecutively since May. The last time he’d seen Lily, she’d been putting her copy of the Daily Prophet in the refrigerator instead of the milk, and only snapped, “I can’t read braille, Sirius” when he’d pointed it out. He’d been too afraid to ask any more questions.

“Does Ivy even live in our house, anymore?” Prongs asks, muffled where he has his forehead resting on the place settings. His hair sits in a wild tangle in the empty soup bowl like a dead animal. “I had a dream she’s living under my cloak, but that might have been real.”

“It wasn’t,” Sirius says, moving Prongs’s hand enough to drop eggs on his plate. If Remus gets back from the apothecary and realizes he hasn’t fed him, he’ll be in for it. “Your cloak isn’t soundproof. She lives here, hiding from the screaming babies, tormenting Kreacher, and corrupting my son.”

“Oh, good,” James says. “Normal things.”

Sirius stretches lazily. “How’s Tilly holding up? She must be enjoying her holiday from the gremlin.”

“I think she’d take Ivy over screaming babies,” Prongs says darkly, slumping back and looking half-dead.

Ivy and Orion are upstairs playing something called Peter Pan. From what Sirius can tell, this involves them jumping up and down on every bed in the house to simulate flying, since he doesn’t allow them to have their brooms in the house after the incident with the wardrobe. Then, they “fly” to an island by rolling down the longest hallway that wraps around the third floor, but if one of them rolls off the rug, that counts as dying, and they have to start over. Sometimes, there’s an interesting interlude where Ivy dramatically pretends to be a mermaid in the bathroom and tries to drown Orion, but that’s not a guaranteed performance. They also sometimes go into Walburga’s old room and scream “Tinkerbell!” at the doxies in the drapes and clap at them, and Sirius can’t figure out why. For the finale, they pilfer every room in the house of everything they deem valuable, drag it into the family wing’s parlor and toss it into a pile, and then force Kreacher to fight them for it. They call Kreacher Captain Hook and make him fight one-handed and sometimes while wearing Aunt Cassiopeia’s eye patch. In the end, they feed him to a monster.

Sirius is starting to feel sorry for Kreacher.

James looks unsurprised when he tells him, and says “Lily,” before putting his head back down on the table.

“Well.” He lets out a long sigh as Sirius plies him with more tea. “At least someone’s having fun.”

“Kreacher isn’t,” Sirius says idly. “Ivy’s a harsh critic when he botches his lines or misses his cues. Tilly should count her blessings for the screaming babies.”

James hums his agreement. “We’ll have to watch them like hawks at Gringotts.”

Sirius blanches at this new, horrible scenario. “What is with them? They’re like Nifflers.”

“I think Orion likes the fighting part, and Ivy likes the shiny part,” James says fairly. “Lily’s convinced her Patronus will be a raccoon.”

“Great, he’ll rob the place under her orders,” Sirius says. “Exactly what I wanted for my son.”

“Ivy does need reliable henchmen,” James says, sounding more like himself as the caffeine kicks in. “Neville might temper him.”

“Neville has had absolutely no effect on Ivy, and they’ve had regular visits since they were two,” Sirius says drily. “Neville might end up getting worse from exposure.”

They’re coming up on Neville and Ivy’s fifth birthdays, one of the few events in the year Augusta allows Neville to stay over at the Potters for. Sirius should be excited, and he is, but … Augusta is difficult. He admires the hell out of the old bat because she’s a formidable, proud witch with an unyielding spirit, but her attitude leaves something to be desired. While she was proud of her son and daughter-in-law’s sacrifices, she had a habit of loudly telling Neville that his parents were heroes who died for him, as if the poor muppet not thinking about it for a moment was unacceptable. And she exudes a vague dissatisfaction with her grandson that reminds Sirius bitterly of his own mother. Neville, he remembers, has yet to perform any feats of accidental magic.

Of issue, too, is her attitude toward both the Potters and Blacks, which could be described as lukewarm at best. While grateful for Lily’s assistance in firmly securing custody of Neville, a part of her seems to disdain Lily and James, as though they don’t measure up. Sirius—who had come from the night and spent his childhood in the night, lighting himself up sometimes to pretend there was light—has seen the darkest parts of what a human heart can offer. He knows what lies in those looks.

And Sirius … Sirius is never allowed alone with Neville, nor is Neville allowed in Grimmauld Place. She’s cordial enough, but the prejudice runs deep, there.

But Neville is a lovable child, with Alice’s round, sweet face and Frank’s fringe of sandy blonde hair hiding his lurid scar, and Ivy adores him even when he’s too worried about doing something wrong to do anything except sit quietly in the gardens. So, Sirius swallows how he feels and what he sees, because Neville deserves them even if Augusta doesn’t, and he couldn’t look Frank in the eye in the afterlife if he left his son alone.

“Augusta sent a letter,” Prongs says abruptly. “Took me a couple days to be able to read it.” He rubs at his eyes, under his glasses. “Thought it was my Runes homework, for a bit.”

“And?” Sirius asks. “Any new demands?”

“She’s asking more questions,” Prongs says carefully, “about Orion.”

Sirius’s hand clenches on the teacup.

They hadn’t quite figured out a game plan for introducing Orion, and the four of them had decided the best solution was to just gaslight the rest of the wizarding world by pretending Orion has always been around, with mentions here and there of his existence and the occasional, casual outing. Oh, yes, Orion Black? Sirius’s son? You didn’t know Remus and Sirius have a son? How strange. He’s five, already. He’s been here. Anyways.

Lily has proven to be the best among them at the gaslighting (although she will never hold a candle to Andromeda, who behaves as if she’s on a game show where the grand prize is not dying and has made up such intricate childhood memories with her nephew even Sirius half believes they’re real). Lily’s just so good at staring at people as though they’re unbelievably stupid, Sirius muses. She got a lot of practice on them for seven years, he supposes.

It’s been a highly effective strategy, given how concerned wizards are with appearing as though they don’t know something. It’s also been highly entertaining. And it’s a controlled burn, so to speak; no big announcements, just subtle mentions. It’s beginning to make the rounds in certain circles, although they haven’t yet received a letter from Minerva demanding answers on what year he’s expected to enter Hogwarts and if it's actually the same year as Ivy and if this an elaborate prank on her it's not funny, Mr. Black, so it’s not well known, yet, either.

Augusta had been informed in a more formal manner of Orion’s existence by Lily, although she’d artfully skirted providing any actual information on him. Augusta had taken the news with polite disinterest, and she’s shown no interest in introducing Neville to him. All she asked, according to a moody looking Lily, was whether Orion had shown any magic, yet. She hadn’t seemed pleased that he had.

“They’ll get along,” Prongs says, offering him a reassuring smile.

***

Neville and Orion do not get along. In fact, Orion Black and Neville Longbottom dislike each other upon first sight.

In retrospect, Remus thinks, maybe not at first sight. It perhaps all went wrong the second Ivy shrieked and hugged Neville, introducing him as her best friend.

(“That would’ve pissed me off, too,” Sirius confesses much later that night while they ready for bed, both of them attempting to find reasons to justify their son’s abominable behavior. “If James was running up with someone else calling them his best friend—”

“Why don’t you and James just marry each other?” Remus demands, exasperated.

“We’re waiting until you and Flower kick it for the insurance money,” Sirius says with a grin.)

Ivy aside, they are entirely different boys. Neville is shy, introspective, and thinks before he speaks; Orion is brash, opinionated, and convinced he’s invincible. Having both lost their parents isn’t something that softens Orion toward Neville; Remus can’t tell if he doesn’t like the reminder of his own parents, which he knows he can’t speak of, or because he doesn’t like the idea of giving Neville any type of sympathy when he’s encroaching on his territory.

Neither Ivy nor Orion know the full story of why Neville bears a lightning scar. They’re too young. They know one day they’ll have to tell them: about Voldemort’s rise, the social tensions and superstitious prejudices he exploited for his own gain, the golden, anxious years of their schooling while a war rose like a tide in the background—ebbing and flowing but moving ever closer—knowing they’d graduate into a battlefield. The war itself, and what happened.

There are other things they’ll need to tell them, more specifically: about Fabian and Gideon Prewett, and why both Fred and George Weasley have matching scars down their faces; about Mary McDonald bleeding out, and why Lily chose to become a healer; about Regulus Black, and what they don’t know happened to him.

And there are the worst things about them, from that night when the Lestranges and Crouch came to call, that they’ll need to hear from them personally.

(Like why some wizards flinch when they see James, whispering of leaked autopsy reports, and what exactly Remus did to Rabastan that almost resulted in murder charges; like how the last of Lily’s reticence toward Sirius disappeared when he’d abandoned her on the stairs in a pool of her own blood and made a shield of his own body to protect his godchild, after Lily ordered him to save Ivy and leave her to die.

Like Peter, and how he’d looked right at them and mouthed ‘sorry’ as he led the Death Eaters through their wards, as if he thought they owed him forgiveness for his cowardice in choosing himself and letting them die; like how he didn’t help their attackers, but he did linger to watch, almost as if he was waiting to see who’d win; like how that image of him is seared permanently into all of their brains, where no Pensieve can remove it.)

But they’re not ready, and neither are Orion and Ivy, and Remus tries not to feel relief at that, because he knows he feels it for entirely the wrong reasons. For now, Neville is just Ivy’s godbrother, and it’s normal for him not to have parents and have a scar. And there’s relief in that for Neville, too, who has never had the luxury of not knowing. Since he could understand language, Augusta has been reminding him of what his parents gave for him. He’s rarely able to leave the house due to the public’s insatiable appetite for news on the Boy Who Lived, and the press’s ethical deficits in fulfilling that desire. He lives his life even more isolated than Ivy and Orion do.

“You’d think she thank us,” Sirius says, still ranting about Augusta. “She’s always complaining Nev doesn’t have enough of Frank’s fire.” He spits the word derisively, as if a child could ever be wrong if they weren’t an exact copy of their parents. “But Orion brought it out in him just fine.”

And that, Remus thinks, is sadly true. By the time Augusta dragged Neville off—in a towering rage and amid a shouting match with Sirius to rival the worst of Walburga’s portrait’s abuse of them all before James finally managed to transfigure it into a statue and smash it—Neville had given Orion a black eye, and Orion had pushed him down the patio steps. And Neville’s present from Ivy—a Flutterby Bush in a silvery-gold pot that Lily had helped Ivy plant herself—lay mysteriously smashed in the garden.

Although none of the kids would own up to it, and Ivy refused to tell them what happened—which made Prongs and Padfoot both a little prouder than it should, in Remus’s opinion—she also refused to speak to Orion at dinner, which gave them a pretty good guess on who the culprit was. It also made Orion utterly miserable, and the sight of his face twisted up whenever he looked at her twinged at Remus’s heart, despite his bad behavior.

They’d tried to make the kids make up, after the first rocky start. But Orion’s eyes—the gray of his house, now, and so clear in his face they looked like sunlight upon water, or the dagger Sirius kept sheathed at his hip—flashed like a blade when they rested on Neville. And Neville’s eyes—an uncomplicated, deep brown, trustworthy and earnest like his mother’s—burned when they met Orion’s.

“They’ll get along,” Remus says, trying to convince himself.

***

August 1985

Neville and Orion continue to not get along. Their second encounter doesn’t come to blows, but it’s a near thing, and Remus cannot make heads or tails of why his son is so aggressive toward Neville. Merlin, it’s Neville. He’s shy and loves bloody plants.

It’s complicated by Orion’s outright refusal to vocalize why, apart from flaring his nostrils in a distinctly lupine manner and saying, “I just don’t like him. He smells wrong.”

Sirius, as a dog in his spare time and currently spending his full time furious at Augusta, finds this logic sound. This leaves Remus to appeal to a higher power.

Ivy doesn’t think much of their rivalry. It isn’t that she hasn’t noticed; you’d have to be stupid not to notice it, and Ivy has inherited her father’s cleverness and her mother’s emotional intelligence. It’s just something she doesn’t appear to think is relevant.

“What does that matter?” She asks Remus when he mentions it to her. She’s knee deep in the river, hunting for toads, and she’s graciously worked him into her busy schedule by allowing him to accompany her on the conditions he holds the bucket for the toads and only speaks in rhymes (Lily’s reading her the Hobbit).

“Doesn’t it bother you, those two?” Remus asks, forcibly ignoring that he got an O on his History of Magic NEWT and is now reduced to composing leading questions in a rhyme scheme to bargain with the five-year-old crossroads demon Prongs spawned. “Not getting along, isn’t it wrong?”

Ivy wrinkles her nose in disgust. “They’re boys,” she says with such emphasis, it’s clear she holds boys in regard somewhere above worms but significantly below dogs.

“I’m a boy,” Remus argues weakly. “When I get along with others, I feel joy.”

Ivy rolls her eyes and hands him a toad with a yellow stripe down its back she seems particularly enthused about. Remus suspects it’s because the yellow makes her think of gold, and gold means the toad might have treasure she can extort. “You and Uncle Padfoot and Dad are Marauders. You don’t count as boys.”

This logic actually makes sense, so Remus doesn’t argue it. He adjusts his fingers around the toad, and it croaks mournfully; she scowls and snatches it back, shuffling to deposit it carefully in the bucket he holds out.

“Boys are stupid,” she continues, puffing a big breath to blow her tangled curls out of her face. “I have two little brothers, now, so I know all about boys. Hardwin and Ralston can’t talk yet, but they’ll be stupid when they do.”

“What a beautiful view on life, fawn,” Remus tells her drily, and he decides to abandon rhymes and resort to bribery. “If you can make them be nice to each other—”

“I don’t like making anyone do anything,” she says, looking revolted at the idea. “It’s wrong. People should do what they want.”

She’s inherited James’s hatred of rules, then, probably from one too many of his drunken free will speeches shouting about eternal laws and man-made regulations. Lovely. Sorry, Hogwarts.

“But if you just try—” Remus wheedles.

“I can’t,” she says simply. “But they’ll get along anyway, because I’ve already decided we’re all going to be friends, and they both like me.”

And Remus has a terrible premonition about where this might go, one day, but he just sighs and holds out the bucket to accept another toad.

Chapter Text

October - December 1985

“Ivy might need more friends,” Lily says worriedly one night as she paces with Ralston in their bedroom and pats his back.

’That’s just how Orion shows affection!”  James defends at once. Hardwin is lying sprawled across his chest, and he is most certainly not drawing fake hair on his bald head, thank you very much, he’s just wondering what he’d look like as a blonde. “Sirius locked me in his trunk, more than once, I might add, and it was always for really good reasons not at all related to him having attachment and sharing issues.” Lily gives him a look. “It was.”

“It absolutely was not,” Lily says, and gives a breath of relief when Ralston finally spits up. “You were in there for three days after you made the Quidditch team and made friends with the Chasers, and Dumbledore called in the Aurors before he let you out. You’ve just never had any normal friends, and Sirius gaslit you into thinking that was normal.”

James blinks, some weird type of predictive programming surfacing in his subconscious, then shrugs, deciding it’s better not knowing if he’s been Obliviated one too many times by a jealous, twelve-year-old Sirius. “Sirius said people would say that, to try and manipulate me against him.” He scoffs. “You’re making it sound like he didn’t bring me food or spend time with me down there. It was a good break from everything; he was right, I needed that.”

“You’re like a bloody hostage,” Lily swears, and James hums loudly. Better off not knowing. Sirius is the best.

They are coming off a … trying playdate. Orion lured Ivy into Grimmauld before Neville arrived and then ordered Kreacher to hold her hostage in a cabinet, under the premise of a game of hide and seek. (Kreacher, at least, had the tact to not choose a Vanishing Cabinet, although his only answer for enabling this madness was, “Young Master is simply being a proper Black”, which they found new levels of concerning. Sirius also struggled to find an issue with this behavior, which no comment from the rest of them). He then lured Neville to the river.

They’re not entirely sure what happened there, but it involved a rowboat, and it ended with Neville hitting Orion in the head with an oar and trying to drown him. Augusta had been torn between looking thrilled and livid.

Ivy isn’t upset about being held captive by a house-elf armed with a meat cleaver, or that her best friends tried to murder each other. She’s under the impression she won the game of hide and seek and is extremely pleased with herself (it took James like, five seconds to find her. She was in the main foyer. Ivy is terrible at hiding, not that he’ll tell her). She is, however, extremely annoyed they went to the river without her.

There’s something wrong with all these children, James decides, lifting up Hardwin and cooing at him, and it’s good they decided to start from scratch with new ones.

“And it’s not because I’m going to take her away from Orion,” Lily says, and her eyes say because I bloody well know how that will go. “But she might need a female friend at some point. They’re very insular.”

“Because we’re insular,” Prongs says, and he sounds almost sorry about it.

He’s never been good at making friends despite popular opinion; he merely excels in the spotlight and under the pressure of an audience. It’s why he was a Quidditch star, and why he’s in line for next Head Auror at work. If James is pushed in front of an audience, he will give them a show worth watching. But while he’s always been good at making himself admired and possesses the gift of easily winning others’ trust, his own trust has always been hard to earn. And he’s been burned, badly, in ways he will never recover from.

“She needs more friends her own age,” Lily says almost quietly. “We have to be all right with letting someone else in the house, James.”

And they agree to it and half-heartedly make a list that includes Amelia Bones’s niece and Molly Weasley’s daughter, but they both procrastinate on following through for weeks, until Ivy takes their choice away and begs them to invite over a specific girl who happens to be the worst possible option.

The Parkinson’s are gray if you squint and prioritize politeness in social conversation, and dark if you’re not blind and choose to be honest about it. They stayed out of the war more by canny than by virtue, and it’s the only reason James agrees to Ivy’s begging. They bring their daughter to the doors of Potter Manor with stiff backs and both wands drawn, scowling in a way that does little to hide their anxiety. James has a moment of curious relief, realizing that they are having just as hard a time trusting their only child with the Potters as the Potters are with them. No one trusts each other in their society anymore. It’s a terrible realization of what Voldemort has wrought; he’s broken something crucial in each of them, and they’re all traumatized, picking up the pieces.

And in some ways, it’s the best play date James could ever hope to supervise. He sits across the table from Alaric Parkinson, both with their wands drawn, while their wives sit embarrassed attempting to make small talk. Alaric and James don’t drink or make small talk; they need both hands free, and they have nothing to say to each other. They don’t pretend to be anything but fiercely protective of their families and deeply mistrustful of the other’s intentions. By the end, they’re almost smiling at each other. Ah, their eyes say when they meet, almost wryly. So, we have this in common.

Ivy and Pansy are happily oblivious to whatever exposure therapy their parents are currently working through on the patio. They’re pretending to be fairies, or maybe mermaids; the games children come up with swiftly become so complex, they’re mermaids with Veela powers that can fly like fairies and breathe fire like dragons. (James does not have high hopes for Ivy’s future Care of Magical Creatures OWL score). They met in Flourish and Blotts fighting over the same story book, then spent the next thirty minutes chattering away about their favorites, as if they hadn’t left scratch marks down each other’s faces. Pansy is elegant in orchid robes and Ivy is a riot of color; if she doesn’t start showing some discretion, James thinks with a mixture of despair and delight, she’ll buy robes like Dumbledore one day.

“We could, perhaps, do this again,” Alaric says as they’re departing, with one hand pressed behind his back like a gentleman, and the other angled at his side pointing his wand at James’s kidneys. “Once in a while,” he adds. “Not often.”

“I agree,” James replies, with his own wand pressed casually across his sternum, pointed at Alaric’s jugular. He’s older than him by more than fifteen years and nowhere near as spry, but James doesn’t doubt he has an enchanted artifact on him somewhere that would cause him some trouble. “As long as it’s not often.”

Alaric hesitates. “The girls ... seem to enjoy each other.”

And James follows his gaze to where Pansy and Ivy are skipping and spinning, laughing in the maniac way only little girls can, and he softens.

“They do,” James says quietly. “It’s good for them.”

Alaric shoots him a sardonic glance. But hard, it says, for us.

And he thinks this could work, and he and Alaric might end up best friends (and oh fuck, he’s going to end up in Sirius’s trunk again for another holiday, he just knows it). He has never felt so in sync with someone before: they are both terrified of anything happening to their daughters but simultaneously wary of crippling them emotionally by locking them in their houses, so they will sit holding each other at wand point throughout the play dates. James can manage this. Would a mind healer find this healthy? No! Do they need to tell one? No!!

“Perhaps—” a muscle ticks in Alaric’s jaw as he struggles with himself. “Perhaps we could … allow you through our wards, next time.”

James stops, genuinely touched, even as panic subsumes him at what might happen to Ivy behind a dark wizarding family’s wards. It won’t matter, he decides; he’ll bring Sirius and Orion, so he’ll have the numerical advantage. But Alaric will probably invite his own second to the duel—playdate, James mentally corrects—and if it’s Lucius, Sirius might opt to just kill him and deal with the consequences later.

James straightens and does the bravest thing he’s ever done. “If it’s only Pansy and Ivy, I would be happy to bring her to yours for the next play date.” Where we can hold each other at wand point the whole time, just in case, goes unsaid. “Next year.”

“Once a year,” Alaric says immediately, looking relieved, “sounds appropriate.”

He doesn’t lower his wand, but he does offer a pained smile in a promising way right before he Apparates, and James is pretty sure he’s killing this ‘making new friends or barring that, at least being on speaking terms with acquaintances for Ivy’s social development’ thing.

“Okay,” he tells Lily, excited. “I think I’m ready to invite Amelia and Susan over.”

Lily gives him a pointed look. “As long as you’re aware you can’t hold your boss at wand point during tea.”

***

February 1986

“James,” Augusta says as soon as she steps out of the Floo one afternoon when she comes to pick up Neville, “A word?”

“It’s a name, funny enough,” Sirius interjects, grinning like a drawn gun at James’s side. Remus mumbles something under his breath that sounds a lot like, not again.  

Augusta gives him a look of poorly disguised loathing. “Is that supposed to be clever?”

“Factual, more like,” James says reflexively, because no matter how old he gets nor how stupid he privately thinks Sirius’s jokes are, the desire to protect Sirius only grows stronger with age. Brothers, he thinks, are funny like that. Ralston and Hardwin would find that out themselves soon enough, once they figured out talking and walking.

He knows some of it’s trauma, of course. He’s an Auror, and he doesn’t have a habit of lying to himself. The war stripped him of that, killed the recklessly arrogant fifteen-year-old he’d once been. James Potter is dead, long live James Potter.

Lily says the rest is trauma bonding to his abuser, but that’s mad, Sirius would never.

Augusta, however, shares no such trauma with them. She struggles to hide how stupid she finds the lot of them, which endlessly amuses James. Of course, they’re stupid. They’re raising four children under six between the lot of them. None of them have slept.

“Is something the matter, Augusta?” James offers at last, taking pity on her infuriated expression. It reminds him a bit of Minnie’s. “I can fetch Neville from upstairs if you’d—”

“The Black boy,” Augusta interrupts, eyes flashing, and the good-natured smile slips from James’s lips. Sirius stiffens at his side, vibrating with sudden tension.

“We tend to call him Orion,” James says careful now in his lightness. “Seeing as that’s his name. What about him?”

“Must he be over every day?” She asks, straightening to her full height.

“Must my son accompany me to my best friend and godchildren’s house?” Sirius asks, voice heavy with disbelief. He turns to Remus with a performative look of astonishment. “Moony, why haven’t we ever thought about leaving our six-year-old in the pantry? How silly of us.”

Augusta’s jaw twitches, but she doesn’t back down. A part of James can sympathize; a woman who lost her son as brutally as she did has no time for shame or courtesies. And this argument has been a long time coming, he knows, even if he wishes it would never arrive.

“I don’t like him around Neville. Or Ivy, for that matter.”

Remus growls, low under his breath, and James feels anger swirling in his gut.

“It’s fortunate then,” he says mildly, “that you don’t decide what’s best for Ivy. I do.” Augusta doesn’t scoff, but it’s near thing, and James’s anger burns brighter. “Can you help me understand why exactly you don’t like Neville and Orion to interact? They’ve done all right today. Better, in fact. I know they don’t always get along—”

“Get along!” Augusta cries out, reddening in her outrage. “They fight like kneazles and crups, always spitting at each other—”

“They’re young,” Remus interjects firmly, and James catches the way his hands are trembling before he thrusts them behind his back, “and they both consider Ivy their best friend. It’s only natural they’d feel somewhat antagonistic toward each other early on, but the friction will go away with age and maturity.”

Augusta ignores him as though he hasn’t spoken, scowling at James. “I would’ve expected, James, for you to have learned the follies of poor judgment, by now.”

James feels the world go silent. “What exactly,” he asks slowly, “is meant by that?”

“Only that you have, in the past, exhibited questionable discernment when it comes to who you consider trustworthy,” Augusta says. A muscle in her cheek twitches. “And it’s cost me dearly.”

James feels as though he’s taken a bludger to the stomach. He lets out a little breath, and Sirius is immediately in front of him, growling long and low like those police dogs Orion’s always begging them to get, but James can’t think around—

James and Lily had been brought into the Order by Dumbledore. He’d brought in Sirius, Remus, and …

“You’re talking about Peter,” he says, and his voice sounds strange to his own ears. “Aren’t you?”

He knows she is, knows exactly why she chose to gut him in the middle of his own living room, but he still needs to hear her say it. He’d vouched for Peter, after all. There’d been some reticence around his timidity at the time, his poorer magic making for an unreliable soldier who might easily be captured. But James had insisted. Peter is loyal, he’d argued. We won’t do this without him.

What a lie that turned out to be.

Augusta meets his eyes unapologetically. “You brought him in,” she says flatly. “And he gave up the Prewetts. Gave up you.”

“I remember,” James says tightly. “Thanks.”

“Lay off,” Sirius snarls, throwing manners out the window, because he’s never been good at seeing James attacked, and Augusta has gone for the throat. “He’s rotting in Azkaban, thanks to us.”

“And yet,” Augusta says, “the consequences of his actions remain.” My son is still dead, her eyes say.

“It’s not just on James,” Remus says in a sharp voice. “Dumbledore trusted him, too. And this is an entirely different situation—”

“Oh, Dumbledore,” Augusta says, suddenly flushing red beneath her vulture hat, and James winces, because that name is the fastest way to make her spark of rage grow into a bonfire. “Don’t speak to me of that man. After what he did—”

“And what exactly did you do?” Sirius interrupts in a drawl, eyes hard and cruel as he smiles at her. “Sat out the war, didn’t you? A bit beneath you, wasn’t it, to defend your country? That’s what Frank said, when I asked.” Her face goes white at the mention of her son. “But you can stand here, blaming all of us who fought—”

“Blaming the man who let in the traitor who killed my son and daughter-in-law?” Augusta snarls, gesturing at James. “Yes! There were signs that you ignored, and you covered it up with your misplaced Marauder loyalty—”

“It was fog of war,” James says quietly, because he will allow her to attack him for the rest, but not for that. “He was good at covering his tracks. We made the best decisions we could with the information we had.” He swallows. “And we all paid dearly for it.”

“Neville,” Augusta says, “paid the highest price for your mistakes.” The words stab into James like she intends them to, and Sirius’s wand is in his hand, and Remus is too tight, too alert, they’re too close to a full moon, James thinks with distant panic, for this type of emotional reaction to be safe—

“Why are you only blaming James?” Remus asks in a voice that’s too calm.

Augusta throws him the barest glance. “Because I don’t expect better from the two of you,” she says, and it’s the most offensive thing she’s ever said to any of them, but she says it so inoffensively, as if it’s a fact she doesn’t hold against them. Remus is a half-blood outsider who married a Dark Wizard, and Sirius is the lord of the Darkest house in Britain; neither of them are capable of being blamed for a traitor, because she has no expectations of loyalty from them in the first place.

But James Potter, Golden Boy and Auror; James Potter, scion of an old, Light family; James Potter, progressive husband of the most talented muggleborn witch of their age, and father of the only other child even considered capable of being Light and powerful enough to take down a Dark Lord—

James Potter can be blamed, for choosing to trust a shy boy on a train ride and believe he was who he said he was, because he should know better.

“Don’t,” James breathes, because he can feel what Remus and Sirius are about to do, and he’s halfway to letting them, but the memory of fourth-year Frank grinning over his shoulder as he leads his eleven-year-old self to the kitchens for hot cocoa is overpowering, and he can’t bear to lose his son from his life. 

Augusta is still going. “And I won’t have Neville paying anymore. I won’t risk his safety around an unknown, aggressive Black you won’t tell me the origins of. For all I know, he could be Bellatrix’s spawn—”

“My son,” Sirius spits, lip drawing back so far from his teeth it nearly splits, “is mine. He’s my blood.”

“And mine,” Remus says quietly, though his eyes are near amber.

“McKinnon, then?” Augusta demands, ignoring Remus entirely. “McDonald? Who is the boy’s mother, Sirius, if you’re telling the truth? And where have you been hiding him?”

“It’s none of your business,” James snaps, his temper finally fraying and his hand on Sirius suddenly restraining. She’s trying to goad them into divulging information they have every right to keep to themselves, and she’s doing it under the guise of James’s past misjudgments. If there’s anyone she should be blaming, he thinks bitterly, it’s Molly Weasley and her children, because her brothers broke for them; and then he feels immediate guilt for even having that thought, and he quite wants Augusta out of his house, because her anger is toxic.

“Why do you bring him here?” He demands over her spluttering. “If you find us so low and irresponsible, if my judgment is as poor as you claim it is, why bring Neville here at all?”

Augusta stops, suddenly, staring at him.

“Because Alice loved Lily dearly,” she says finally. “And because Neville adores your daughter.” For a moment, he thinks her eyes shine, but she blinks it back, furious. “He’s been denied much happiness in his life. I won’t deny him this.”

“But that’s exactly what you’re doing,” James says.

Her lips tighten. “If the boy will be here, then Neville will not.”

And he knows the easiest solution is to just separate out the kids, to give in and let Ivy see Neville separately on the days he visits, but the part of him that feels like Prongs—the truest aspect of him, an amalgamation of James Potter, prolifically talented light wizard who is willing to die a hero, and James Potter, trouble-making shit stirrer who once enchanted all the gargoyles to hump each other and moan loudly because he was bored during exam week—thinks:

Fuck this and fuck her.

(It’s the same thought he had before he killed Bellatrix, right when he remembered to fight like a Marauder and not a hero. Augusta was safely at home, the night they fought for their lives.)

 “Orion,” James says cheerfully, “isn’t going anywhere.”

“Then Neville will,” Augusta hisses.

And James makes it rain confetti, just to really piss her off.

***

Gran nearly drags Neville from the Potter house, barely allowing him time to hug Ivy goodbye.

“You’re hurting my wrist,” Neville complains, twisting and wriggling in her grasp.

“You mustn’t complain so much, my dear,” Gran says, but she drops his wrist all the same with an apologetic pat.

Neville eyes her warily. “There’s confetti on your hat.”

Her scowl deepens and she storms across the parlor to the coat rack, ripping her hat off and beating the confetti off the stuffed vulture as though the bird has personally wronged her.  She’s muttering all the while about the gall of James Potter, an insolent son of a house of merchant upstarts. Neville tunes it out for the most part. He’s noticed Uncle James tends to infuriate most people into acts of violence.

Then she turns one beady eye onto Neville. “Where’s your coat?”

He touches his robes, then shrugs. “Must have left it.”

“Neville!” Gran scolds. “Must you always be so forgetful? Frank was never so careless with his things! I’ll not buy you a new one, not until you learn—”

“You don’t need to buy a new one,” he interrupts, alarmed by the intensity of her sudden frustration. He’s far too forgetful, and he knows it drives Gran mad, but it’s not the end of the world. “I’ll just get it next week.”

“You’re not going there next week,” Gran retorts. “You’re not going back there ever again.”

Neville goes cold all over. “What do you mean?”

“The Black boy,” Gran spits, as if it’s the darkest of curses. “You’ve told me how he treats you, and I told you I’d do something about it. But Potter—” her face goes sour, “—favors his Dark friend over a house of the light. The insult to Alice and Frank’s memory….” She seems beyond words in her rage and returns to beating her hat. “I don’t know what Euphemia was thinking, allowing that type of brotherhood to develop between her son and one of them—”

“You’re going to keep me away?” Neville blurts out. He rarely interrupts Gran, but the feeling rising in his chest is making breathing feel hard.

“James refused to stop bringing the Black boy over,” Gran says, furious all over again. “In fact, he gleefully told me Orion would be over every day, from now on. And that he’s going to offer Andromeda Black the role of Ivy’s governess, once she starts schooling this summer. And he did it with a transfigured banner and an orchestra.” She shakes her head. “I won’t have you exposed to dark riffraff like that, especially not when he’s already targeting you.”

Neville feels frozen all over, then, abruptly, furious. “Orion’s going to get to play with Ivy every day?”

This is unacceptable. Orion with his shiny hair and confident, loud way and his rude jokes and the way he always reminds Neville he gets to see Ivy all the time when he doesn’t and how strange he acts near the end of the month and the annoying way he flares his nose whenever Neville stands too close—

“Potters,” Gran says with feeling, and he’s not even sure she hears him. “That’s Potters for you. You point out the error of their ways, and they double down with a choreographed dance routine and a dozen hypogriffs for back-up singers. They’re all just so … willful. Fleamont was the same way. You’d almost think they were American.” She sniffs derisively, then spies Neville’s stricken expression. “Don’t be frightened, dear. You weren’t ever in danger with Sirius. He’s all right, in truth; he chose right in the war, after all. But that family of his is cursed, more often than not, and I won’t have you—”

“I want to go back!” Neville blurts out. “Orion’s all right.”

“He’s not all right!” Gran says, sounding near disbelief. “You told me he pushed you down the stairs at the last play date, and the Potters did nothing about it!”

“Um,” Neville suddenly realizes the exact hole he dug himself. “I pushed him first. Down the stairs, that is.” Gran’s face does something strange, and he adds hastily, “He said I only had plants for friends, because no one else wants to listen to me talk. So. I pushed him. But he did push me down the stairs after.” Gran is still not saying anything, staring at him like he’s a lethifold in her living room. “Er … and we kind of raced back up and tried to push each other down again.” He shifts guiltily. “The Potters didn’t do anything because I’d also pushed him, so they just made us apologize.”

Gran draws herself up, looking torn between fury and pride. “Neville! Longbottoms don’t lie.” (And Neville notices she doesn’t say Longbottoms don’t push people down staircases, and files it away for later contemplation.)

“Sorry,” he says insincerely.

She sinks into the winged armchair near the fireplace, her head in her hands, then fixes him with a beady stare. “What else, hmm?”

He starts. “What?”

“What else,” she says through her teeth, “have you possibly exaggerated?”

“Oh. Um.” Neville scratches his head. “I forget.”

She gives him a skeptical look, and he cries out, “I thought you’d make him stop hanging out with Ivy!”

“I did not stop him from hanging out with Ivy,” Gran says, a muscle in her cheek twitching. “I started a very bad fight that it will be very difficult for me to take back instead.”

“Take it back,” Neville pleads at once. “You can’t let him have Ivy! She was my friend first. And he is a dark wizard, like you said—” Gran winces inexplicably at that, but he just doubles down, “—and he is rude and aggressive, and he tells me I smell bad which is weird, and I didn’t mean to lie, but you can’t just take my only friend.”

Gran stares at him for a long moment, then sighs. “I don’t want to take your only friend,” she says, and he slumps in relief. “But James Potter is determined to see his child attached at the hip of the Black heir, just as he was, and that will not change.”

Neville did not like the sound of any of that. “Then I’ll be attached to her, too,” he says, stubbornly lifting his chin.

Something in Gran’s face softens with approval, and a part of him swells with pleasure, because she only gets that look when he reminds her of his father. He misses his father, so terribly, even though he can’t remember anything about him. He’s always flying in Uncle James’s stories, or being brave, or being terribly kind and clever and good. And that’s the other thing he’d lose, if they don’t go back; Gran’s stories aren’t enough to fill the hole inside him, the hunger for more, so that he can learn enough about his parents to be like them. Sometimes, it’s hard for him to swallow down his jealousy when he sees Ivy with Uncle James and Aunt Lily, because she’ll never have to ask other people what they were like, and he wishes so desperately for that, too. But it’s the one thing he can never get back.

His fingers unconsciously move toward the scar on his forehead.

“Don’t do that,” Gran says reprovingly, the soft look fading, and his fingers drop. She’s trying to break him of the habit before he starts Hogwarts and calls it a nervous gesture. “And you want to go back, even if you don’t get along with him?”

Neville lifts his chin again. “I’ll start,” he says determinedly.

She lets out a deep, weary sigh, before standing and striding toward the coat rack. “Then it looks like I’ll be doing something I absolutely despise doing, to the worst, most gleeful people in the world to do it to.”

“What?” Neville asks, because that doesn’t sound promising.

She picks up her vulture hat and shoves it back on her head, then marches toward the Floo.

“Apologizing,” she says, sounding as though she’s going to her own execution as she picks up the powder.

***

And Orion and Neville don’t suddenly become best friends, but they do put an end to the murder attempts and stop purposefully knocking each other’s dishes off the tables when the adults aren’t looking, which is good enough for everyone involved.

***

June 1986

Amelia Bones puts down her cup of tea, straightens it on the china saucer with poised precision, then turns sharply to James.

“Potter. Why do you keep pointing your wand at me under the table?”

James hastily stuffs his wand back up his sleeve and gives her a cheeky smile. “Just checking if you’d notice,” he lies, because he will not let her send him to a mind healer. “Constant vigilance and all that, right?”

Lily buries her face in Hardwin’s growing patch of red fuzz to hide her embarrassment. Amelia just stares at James, her monocle flashing in the sunlight.

“You’re late on paperwork,” she says flatly, then returns to watching her niece swim in their fountain.

I miss Alaric, James mouths at Lily.

*

Sirius stops short as they walk down Diagon Alley.

“Sirius,” Remus scolds, before Orion chimes in in an identical voice, “Yeah, Sirius,” because he is a monster. But it’s a fair criticism; his sudden stop has completely disrupted Orion’s rhythm, who is swinging between their hands as they walk.

“Sorry,” Sirius says, forcing a laugh. He shakes his head, somewhat violently. “Just got the strangest feeling about James.”

Remus tenses at once. “Is he in danger?”

“No,” Sirius says casually, starting to walk again. “He might just need a break, is all.”

Chapter Text

August 1988

Neville shuffles nervously from foot to foot on the rafters, eyes glued to the drop below. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Of course, it’s a good idea,” Ivy retorts loftily, shifting her parasol to her other shoulder and twirling it like a lasso. They’re on the highest peak of Potter Manor, but she barely notices the wind tugging at her robes and batting at her hair as she shifts on her toes with a feline grace she inherited from her father. “I’ve never lied to you, Nev.”

Neville frowns. “You lie all the—”

Ivy steamrolls him before he can start putting too much together. “If a Muggle governess can do it, we certainly can.”

“Thought you said she was magical,” Orion challenges idly from where he lies sprawled across the nearest chimney. He has the handle of his own umbrella shoved in a spot of loose brick and mortar, serving as a shade from the summer sun. His eyes are heavy-lidded, like a lizard, and his hair is tangled where it’s tied in a loose ponytail on his neck.

“She was magical,” Ivy says at once, because she’s beginning to forget the finer details of the film. It’s been a fortnight, at least. Besides, Aunt Petunia always likes her to sing along, while loudly saying her Mum could never carry a tune as well as Ivy could, so she loses track of some of the plot. “But she must not have been a very good witch, if she had to work for Muggles.”

This improvised reasoning works well, Ivy decides; she straightens authoritatively and toes the four-story drop, humming a show tune.

“True,” Orion says, before hoisting himself off the chimney and sliding down the metal tiles to stand next to Ivy.

She frowns at him. “You left your umbrella.”

He squints back at it, then shrugs. “We’ll just share yours.” Neville scowls at him over Ivy’s head, and he smirks back triumphantly. “Are we doing this or not? Aunt Dromeda is due back from Dora’s appointment at noon, and she’ll skin us if she catches us up here.”

“Skin you two,” Ivy says at once, but she opens the parasol anyway and shifts to allow Orion under. “She likes me the best.”

“That’s because you pay her,” Orion says drily.

Ivy elbows him in the stomach, and the rafters creak under them. “You just freeload. And you never listen when she teaches etiquette.”

“Dad says there’s no point in paying family when family is a gift—”

A bluejay twitters by, circling them menacingly for being too close to its nest, and Neville flinches like a skittish mare. He’s too afraid to move, paralyzed by the drop below. “This feels dangerous.”

“Of course, it’s dangerous,” Orion says. “But it’s fine, we’re magic.”

Neville swallows. “But I haven’t—”

The manor door four stories below flies open with a thundering BANG! A tiny head of red hair flies out from under the veranda and onto the terraced bowling green, followed closely by a head of mahogany curls that are positively crackling with fury. Ivy squints and spots big, floppy ears.

“Tilly,” she says furiously. “That traitor, she went and fetched them!”

“IVY EUPHEMIA POTTER!” Lily shrieks. “GET DOWN FROM THE ROOF THIS INSTANT!”

The sudden noise makes Neville startle, and he topples over the edge with a small scream. Orion gives a wild cackle, then wraps an arm around Ivy’s waist and tugs her over the drop. Ivy gives a shriek of joy as they plummet.

“ORION, YOU BLOODY TWIT!” Andromeda roars.

Lily casts cushioning charms in a blind panic as Andromeda throws an overpowered Arresto Momentum as a net to circle all three of them, but it turns out, they don’t need to cast anything on Neville. He bounces when he hits the ground, then bounces up again, screaming madly, before plummeting back down. It’s as if he’s made of rubber, and he bounces happily down the sloped hill, and straight into their river.

**

“Who the bloody devil,” James roars, pacing the red and gold playroom that is serving as a temporary triage clinic, “is Mary Poppins?”

“She’s a much better witch than I thought,” Ivy mutters, scowling at her freshly mended broken arm. “It’s better than Orion’s broken butt, at least.”

“Tailbone,” Remus corrects in a long-suffering tone as Sirius snickers. “He broke his tailbone, not his butt.”

“Same thing,” Ivy says mulishly. “Tailbone is where his butt is, isn’t it? He broke his butt.”

“Stop talking about my ass,” Orion snaps, where he lies face-down as Lily traces pain-relieving poultice up his spine. He’s particularly sour because he counted on werewolf strength to evade any consequences, and he hadn’t been pleased when his father pointed out werewolf strength doesn’t protect from 60-foot drops.

“Orion!” Andromeda snarls. “Language!”

“Dad says ass all the time,” he complains, and Sirius smothers him face first into the pillow.

“And you’re lucky you didn’t break your neck,” Lily says furiously, glaring at her daughter. “If Orion hadn’t twisted to cushion you and taken all of the impact—”

“Orion pulled her off the roof in the first place,” Andromeda cuts in drily. “Let’s not give him too much credit.”

“I thought we would float,” Ivy says, complainingly. “Mary Poppins floats.”

“Well, that’s because Mary Poppins isn’t real,” Lily says tartly. “And you might be magic, but you don’t know that magic, yet.”

“Don’t know how good you’ll be at Charms, anyway, fawn,” James says honestly. “Most of your accidental magic has been Transfiguration.” He preens. “Have a bit of a knack for it, just like your dad.”

Lily’s nostrils flare like Orion’s. “She has quite a bit of a talent for Charms, I think,” she says icily. “She’s my daughter, isn’t she?”

And they devolve into a fight better suited for their children, emergency forgotten.

James scoffs. “She turns her spinach into toads—”

“She summoned Kreacher from Grimmauld!” Lily argues, cheeks flushing. “He smashed through the parlor wall, it was the cleanest, straightest Summoning Charm I’ve seen—”

“She turned the Christmas tree into a puppy when we wouldn’t get her one! Sure, it turned into a toad, too, but—”

“She unlocks everything!” Lily cries out. “You can’t get more advanced at casting alohomora than her, we’ve had to start using Runes to ward against her—”

“She turned Ginger into a toad,” James says smugly, crossing his arms. “That’s animal-to-animal transfiguration, that is, and that’s hard, especially since she’s half-Kneazle—”

“Oh, toads!” Lily shouts, throwing her hands into the air. “You’re just happy about the toads because you have that lazy habit of transfiguring everything that’s remotely a threat into trout, instead of actually solving the situation—”

“Don’t remember you complaining when I turned Rookwood into a trout,” James snipes back doggedly. “All trout can do is flop, not cast Killing Curses, and they make a good fry—”

“Our daughter is not eating Death Eaters for fish fry!” Lily screams, half-mad.

“What in Merlin’s name is going on in here?” Augusta thunders, entering the playroom and staring between all of them as if they’ve reached a new level of mental, even for them.

“Orion broke his ass,” Ivy says helpfully into the silence.

“Ivy convinced us to jump off a roof,” Orion snipes back.

Remus rubs at his temples, looking pained. “That’s not the accusation you think it is, son. You were both stupid enough to listen to her.”

Augusta turns white, then purple. She spins toward where Neville has been sitting quietly this whole time at the children’s table, looking positively stunned.

“Where are you hurt?” She demands, rushing over to him like a mother hen and feeling carefully up and down his limbs. “Neville, dear? Where did you—”

“I did magic,” Neville breathes, sounding awed. He lifts his eyes to his stunned grandmother’s face, as if he can’t believe it himself. “I—I bounced, Gran, straight down the hill into the river—”

“You did magic?” She says faintly, as if she doesn’t quite believe it herself. Neville nods jerkily, and she sweeps her eyes over Lily and the rest for confirmation.

“He did,” Lily says, still looking chagrined. “Nothing broken, perfectly fine. Quite impressive, actually, almost like a modified Impervious.” She hesitates. “I don’t know what you heard about eating Death Eaters and this roof business is obviously a mistake, but Ivy really is a good girl—”

“She’s like a cult leader,” Remus mutters, and James scowls at him.

“As least she leads the cult,” Andromeda snaps, because Ivy really is her favorite. “Orion just joins it—”

 “Oh, Ivy!” Augusta exclaims in delight, rushing over to pull her up and kiss her on both cheeks. “What a clever girl you are!”

Ivy looks stunned, then rather pleased, and beams back. She will never turn down a free compliment. “Thanks, Auntie Augusta.”

“Algie and I have been trying to force Neville’s magic out of him for ages,” she gushes, petting Ivy’s bramble of curls with affection. “We tried it at Blackpool pier when he pushed him in, but Neville nearly drowned, so we weren’t certain. He talked about potentially dangling him out a window next teatime—”

“He what?” Lily shrieks in outrage, before James manages to cover her mouth and drag her back a step.

“But we never thought of pushing him off the roof!” Augusta continues, positively beaming, and James realizes with horror she’s crying tears of joy. “You are such a good friend, my dear. We knew he couldn’t be a Squib, not with Frank and Alice’s genes, but there’s always that worry, you know, since he’s shown us nothing since that Halloween—”

The Blacks and Potters exchange a long look between them, but Augusta has already released a rather perplexed Ivy and rushed back to a bright red, extremely pleased Neville.

“A wizard!” she sobs, clutching him to her bosom and beaming. “I knew it! I am so proud of you, my dear!” She straightens up, fussing over his hair and straightening his robes. “Come, darling. Let’s go to Diagon Alley and get ice cream. Uncle Algie can join us, since he did promise you a pet, and I’ll even take you to Noltie’s Botanical Novelties for a new plant—”

“And they call us insane,” Sirius mutters, with an approving humph! From Andromeda thrown in for good effect.

***

December 1988

“A talented girl,” Dumbledore muses, watching Ivy fly back and forth over their gardens with carefree, reckless abandon. “And a charming one. Not that I expected less—” His eyes twinkle. “—with her parents, of course.”

Lily smiles politely, and focuses on charming the colored, flashing blocks to float around where Ralston and Hardwin are currently fixated on trying to catch them. Hardwin’s hair has finally grown in, a riot of dark auburn curls that makes James grin. They’re quieter children than Ivy, mainly because they speak primarily in their own language to one another, and they show more of an emphasis on taking things apart and rebuilding them than destroying them. But they have a kind of fixed determination that Remus says bodes ill for all of them.

James laughs good-naturedly, but contributes nothing else, hazel eyes wary as he watches his former headmaster. They’re not quite sure why he asked to come by; relations have been strained between them for years. He cajoled them by saying it was the Yuletide season, and he was feeling nostalgic. But he’s not unaware of Augusta’s absolute hatred of him for trying to re-home Neville, and he knows exactly where they stand on that issue.

And James has never quite forgotten that Albus had his cloak that night and never returned it when he promised he would, knowing they were being hunted. (It’s been in James’s possession since November 1, 1981. His first stop, in fact, after leaving Lily in St. Mungo’s. It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.)

Still, they skirt around their obvious questions and settle for watching him carefully. He’s a manipulator, but he’s not overtly cruel, and regardless of anything else, James knows he means well, even if his version of meaning well means his will is carried out over everyone else’s.

“Beautiful, too,” Dumbledore says almost thoughtfully as his eyes watch Ivy swoop down, and every single hair on James’s body rises.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” Lily asks icily, all feigned welcome forgotten. Her green eyes burn like infernos as they fix on their headmaster, who looks bemused by her sudden ire.

“Nothing at all, my dear girl,” he exclaims in that gentle, fatherly way of his. “You must forgive an old man his social faux pas. It’s only—”

He hesitates, and it’s so artfully timed that if James didn’t know him as well as he did, he’d think it was natural.

“Only what?” Lily demands, still positioning herself as though she’s about to duel.

Dumbledore pretends to cave. “Well, it’s only the prophecy,” he says, dropping his voice. “You know I don’t set much store in them, of course—”

“Set enough store to identify which ones of us were most likely to have the prophesied child and declared it to the entire Order, though,” James interrupts, smiling all the time as if it’s a joke, and Dumbledore laughs, as if he finds it funny.

“That’s because I know Tom’s character,” he says.

“And Tom chose Neville,” Lily spits out flatly. “A boy. Not our daughter.”

“He did, he did,” Dumbledore says at once, although his eyes are still flickering over Ivy in a way James despises. “Although it did speak of a power he knows not. His spy didn’t hear that part, of course; if he knew, it might have changed things. A prophecy, of course, is the sum of all its parts ….”

Lily’s wand is in her hand, now, as she prowls closer to the portico, positioning herself between her sons and her headmaster. “And what do you think this power has to do with our daughter?”

“My dear,” Dumbledore says, and he manages to look disappointed. “I think we all know what power Tom lacks.”

Lily stiffens.

“I can think of several,” she says sarcastically. “Metamorphmagus; precognition and seeing; healing; empathy and not being a sociopath; basic political acumen—”

“Love,” James says, cutting his wife off for once. “You’re talking about love, aren’t you?”

Dumbledore nods, his eyes still following Ivy’s form as she flies madly after the snitch. “Exactly, my dear boy.”

“And why would Tom Riddle’s lack of fucking love,” he spits, as the ground starts to shake underneath their feet, “have anything to do with our daughter?”

Dumbledore freezes for a moment, then sighs and straightens his sleeves. “Probably nothing,” he concedes. “After all, he chose Neville. Although, he can always change his mind, particularly with young Ivy showing the sort of aptitude she has toward magic—”

“Kind of goes against the whole fated enemies prophecy bit you keep trying to sell,” James cuts in with a vicious smile. “Not a great salesman when the narrative’s at stake, are you?”

Dumbledore blinks, then smiles apologetically. “You must forgive an old man his riddles and ramblings,” he says.

“I don’t have to forgive you anything,” James snaps, and the air hums when they make eye contact, hazel on electric blue. Ralston and Hardwin fall silent, peering between them all with wide, hazel eyes. Tilly appears in the garden with a crack, alerted by the wards, and silently ushers them into the back hall, long fingers tight around each pudgy wrist. Lily moves herself again, so she’s standing in front of where Ivy flies.

Dumbledore drops the act. “It’s just something worth considering,” he says. “That’s all.”

“No,” Lily says sharply, color high on her cheeks and hair crackling with electricity as she stares him down.  “You don’t get to do that. We’re not fifteen anymore and under the impression you walk on water. You don’t get to walk into our house, comment on how beautiful our child is, imply Voldemort’s fucking prophecy might still have something to do with her, and then talk in a vague, mysterious way about the power of love.” She spits the words at him in disgust. “You do not get to say those things and get away with it. We know exactly what you’re implying, and it’s vile.”

He sighs. “It’s not meant to upset you. It’s just a thought.”

“Not meant to upset us?” James snarls. But he realizes it’s true; Dumbledore isn’t a parent. He’s never loved a child with the fierce, unconditional devotion of one; he understands the magic behind what Alice and Frank did that night, but he doesn’t understand the emotion that moved them, that pushed them in front of their son and drove them to die for the hope he would live only seconds longer. He’s alone in this world no matter how great he is, without a single person who loves him, and James laughs, cold and cruel. “You’re just as incapable of understanding the power of love as Tom Riddle is, Albus, if you think what you just implied about our child shouldn’t upset us.”

Dumbledore flinches, as if James had scored him somewhere he hadn’t known was vulnerable, and he relishes it.

“It’s a thought,” Lily hisses, looking as though she’ll leap across the patio and tear his throat out, “that should have stayed in your head, because it will never happen. He chose Neville. Alice died because of that and died to protect him. Stop dragging us into your wars and schemes. Ivy will have nothing to do with them.”

“I hope she never does,” Dumbledore says gravely, recovering from James’s blow, “but we must be prepared—”

The tip of Lily’s wand is suddenly glowing as green as her eyes. “Get out,” she breathes, “get out of my house, now. You have asked for enough, and you have overreached.”

“My dear girl,” Dumbledore tries, and Lily hurls an Entrail-Expelling curse at him, fast as a viper. Dumbledore deflects it, light eyes flashing, and straightens to stare at her as though he’s never seen her before.

“Get out,” she says again. “The answer is no.”

“Not even for Neville?” Dumbledore asks heavily as he stoops to pick up his hat from the table, and James nearly curses him himself for the barbed manipulation.

“For no one,” Lily breathes. “No cause, and no man.”

James gestures wandlessly, and the wards suddenly press in on Dumbledore, cloying and suffocating. Enemy, he tells them.

“Happy Christmas, Headmaster,” he says coldly, right before the wards eject him forcibly from the property in a burst of crimson magic, and he hopes it leaves burns all down his body.

And they spend the night in an anxious puddle with Remus and Sirius, kids stowed away safely upstairs behind a dozen newly improvised wards, and they make their own vows.

***

September 1989

After years of begging, Ivy finally, finally convinces Lily to allow Orion to visit Aunt Petunia’s with them. Lily agrees, on the condition Orion cuts his hair.

“Vernon despises long hair,” Lily says firmly when Orion whines in outrage. In her heart of hearts, she is convinced this visit will be her last with her sister and nephew because there is no way the two of them together will behave, so she wants to at least start off on the right foot. “If you come in with long hair, he’ll assume you’re a hippie and a communist.”

“I am a hippie and a communist,” Orion says boldly, with no idea of the cultural context of either of those words, and then Ivy drags him upstairs and shaves his head.

It takes Lily three different potions to re-grow it to a somewhat acceptable length, and by the end of it, she’s in tears.

“Do you think Tuney will allow me to at least write to her, from now on?” She begs James. “If I don’t send it with an owl?”

“They’ll be fine,” James says, with the misplaced confidence of a man who is forgetting almost every day of his life. “Ivy has Petunia’s number.”

“And Orion?” She demands. “The verbal equivalent of a loose cannon who we call a godchild?”

“He was born a Muggle,” James points out, although he looks far less certain, now. “So, he at least won’t point at obvious things and ask what they are.” Lily hums but is still unconvinced. “And they’ve both been in lessons with Andromeda for years, now.”

“For wizard etiquette,” Lily says, exasperated. “And Greek and Latin for spell work, and French and German for social reasons, and heir training, and who knows what else, but none of that is useful, here—”

“Of course, it’s useful,” James argues. “They’re posh, aren’t they? And doesn’t your sister love posh?”

Lily knows he has a point—it’s part of why Petunia likes Ivy so much—but she also knows Orion hasn’t listened to anything Andromeda has said in years, and she refuses to make him listen because Sirius won’t pay her.

“We’ll see if Andromeda’s just been robbing us blind, I suppose,” Lily mutters, conveniently forgetting she also doesn’t pay Andromeda for Orion’s lessons, and goes back to her disruptive daydream about her sister one day refusing to attend her funeral because Orion blew up her flower garden, and Lily’s heartfelt letter from beyond the grave (after her tragic death from a terminal illness) that makes Petunia rush to the church and give a moving eulogy begging for her forgiveness and remembering all the things she loves about Lily in a very dramatic scene. The pastor even cries, and James hugs her and calls her family in the rain, and Petunia feels sorry for the rest of her life for ignoring Lily.

The Evans sisters have always been rather dramatic.

They arrive at 4 Privet Drive in the tasteful, silver sedan Lily keeps at a garage near the Ministry specifically for this purpose, because Petunia despises anything that doesn’t reek of normalcy. Plus, Lily truly enjoys driving. There’s a lot of things she loves about the wizarding world, and she has no regrets about who she is or where her life has led, but there are things she misses about Muggle London. The wizards have no good curry, for one, or any good hairdressers. She still has to get hers done in Covent Gardens. And their wardrobes are positively stunted compared to the full breadth and scope of Muggle fashion; none of them have ever heard of a Basque waistline or a sheath silhouette, and Lily has relished the envy of some of the pureblooded witches at the functions James and her get dragged to when they see real style. Plus, the Wizarding Arts are utterly lacking. They have all of three popular bands or singers, and no musicals. Lily thinks Voldemort and Grindelwald both seriously overlooked the Muggle genius for the arts in their world domination tours, because she’d like to see either of them paint The Oath of the Horatii or sculpt the David, and then tell her how primitive Muggles are. Merlin, Muggles have been to the moon. Wizards brag if they’ve made it to France, and the Muggles are building an underwater tunnel to do that.

She’s been lucky her daughter has shown such a love for her mother’s heritage, even if it’s led to a lot of near-death attempts re-enacting her favorite parts of cartoons.

They park right in front of the low garden wall, and Lily clenches the steering wheel hard, breathing through her nose. Orion and Ivy had delighted in the car ride, chattering loudly the whole way, and a part of her feels sorry they haven’t thought to bring Orion back to the Muggle world in so long. It was his, too, after all, before he’d become theirs.

“Mum?” Ivy queries, eyeing her impatiently.

“Please,” Lily begs, looking at both of them in the rearview mirror with the full force of her eyes, “Please act normal.”

Orion frowns. He’s dressed in smart trousers and an expensive, wool jumper that Lily picked out herself which brings out the lovely purple undertone in his eyes and looks quite posh. “I thought you said not to act like we normally do,” he says, as if he’s being tricked.

“You’re confusing him!” Ivy scolds, like the puppet-master she is. Orion follows her will. “Mum, don’t worry. I won’t risk anything for access to Aunt Petunia’s TV. Orion will follow my lead, I promise.”

Lily looks at her daughter, a born liar, and apologizes to her dead parents for what will inevitably be her falling-out with her sister.

“Okay,” she says heavily. “Let’s get this over with.”

The moment they step onto the garden path, the front door opens. Petunia totters out in a tasteful cocktail dress, blonde and skinny and tall, and beams at Ivy. She’d clearly been spying from the living room windows.

“Oh, Ivy!” She coos, coming forward to hug her niece. “Don’t you look darling in that dress! I knew that green velvet would suit you marvelously.”

“I always know you have the best taste, Aunt Petunia.” Ivy beams up at her, looking positively angelic, then gasps loudly. “Aunt Petunia, what a lovely necklace! Don’t tell me Uncle Vernon got another promotion!”

Aunt Petunia cranes her neck in a satisfied manner toward the hedges on either side, where Ivy has pitched her voice perfectly correctly for the neighbors to overhear. She beams at her niece approvingly.

“Oh, this?” Petunia titters, lifting the diamond solitaire. “It was a promotion gift. You’re such a clever flower, noticing the little things.”

“It’s hardly little,” Ivy contests, keeping her voice loud. “I’ll have to congratulate Uncle Vernon. It’s such hard work, being the Director of such an important company like Grunnings.”

Petunia looks at Ivy as if she’s all her hopes and dreams, and then her gaze slides over Lily. She scowls.

“Lily,” she says in a flat voice that barely counts as polite.

“Tuney,” Lily says, glaring at her sociopathic child who shows no signs of defending her.

“Darling, you must remember to brush your hair,” Petunia says, smiling like a knife. “I know you’re much too busy taking care of everyone else with your job, but you simply must prioritize yourself.” Lily has a brief, vivid fantasy of tackling her sister into the hedges, but her attention has already landed on Orion. Her face does something odd.

“Ivy, sweet girl, who’s this?” There’s a note of wariness in her voice.

Ivy straightens; her posture perfect as Andromeda has drilled into her. “This is my dear friend, Orion Black.” She pitches her voice into a lower register. “Orion’s father sits in the House of Lords with my father on our side, and we share private tutoring together in the Classics.”

Lily decides she either needs to fire Andromeda for turning her daughter into a psychopath or give her a substantial raise.

Petunia’s eyes suddenly grow rounder. “Oh, how charming. It’s lovely you’re making connections so young.” She shoots Lily a glare. “I’m glad your father is thinking about your future opportunities, at least.”

Lily feels like she’s in a mirror dimension, because James????? Is suddenly the acceptable one????

But Orion inclines his head, smiling charmingly at Petunia. “I confess that I’ve been dying to meet you, Mrs. Dursley. It’s so hard to get any normalcy with our crowd, and it can be a bit … much.” He shudders reflexively. “My father, Lord Black, much prefers a quieter life to most of our kind. Ivy was kind enough to invite me along. She raves about your treacle tart.”

Petunia positively bursts with pleasure.

Two psychopaths, Lily mentally tallies, staring at Orion with her mouth open. Do they owe Dromeda extra for Orion? No, Sirius should pay her—

“It’s no trouble at all,” Petunia tells him. “It’s Lily’s fault, if anything, for not informing me, of course, because she’s selfish like that—” And Lily gnashes her teeth behind them, “—but I’m sure Dudley and Vernon would be thrilled to meet you.” She turns back to Ivy. “I’ve been meaning to steal you away, darling, for some of winter break. The West End is putting on a winter production of My Fair Lady, and the ladies in the gardening club have all been positively enamored with the direction they’re taking it in. I’d love to attend, but Dudders isn’t one for the theatre. Would you perhaps like to see it with me?”

Ivy’s eyes shine with genuine delight, and she twists toward Lily. “Oh, please, Mum, can I?” She pleads, using the full force of her eyes. Petunia smirks over Ivy’s head at her.

Lily crumbles at once. “Of course, you can, fawn,” she says. Ivy squeals in excitement and hugs Petunia; Lily grits her teeth and meets Petunia’s triumphant gaze. “That’s … very kind of you, Tuney. Thank you.”

And she means it. She’s glad her sister likes her daughter, even if her daughter is putting on the greatest rendition of The Talented Mr. Ripley to ever exist to scheme said sister for pop culture access.

“Well, someone has to see to her culture,” Petunia says snidely, clearly relishing in making Lily thank her, and Lily has to fight the urge to banish her into the English Channel. “I want her on the right foot at Cheltenham.”

Orion and Ivy are led into Petunia’s home, chattering all the while in polite, snooty voices, and Petunia orders Lily to close the door behind her.

Vernon looks up from his newspaper in the dining room when they enter, looking much like a bleached walrus wearing a jacket, in Lily’s opinion. He grunts approvingly at Ivy, scowls at Lily, then glares suspiciously at Orion.

“Uncle Vernon!” Ivy coos in delight. “I’ve heard about your promotion. Congratulations. You take such wonderful care of my aunt and cousin. Aunt Petunia is positively glowing with that new necklace.”

Vernon softens at once, and even blushes. “Yes, well,” he blusters. “It’s a man’s job to provide for his family, after all.” He eyes Lily. “None of this working nonsense happening around here.”

“Aunt Petunia is the backbone of this household,” Ivy says smoothly, before Lily can finally give in and assault her brother-in-law.

“That she is,” Vernon says approvingly. His small, watery blue eyes slide unerringly back to Orion, then narrow. “Who’s this, then?”

“Darling, this is Ivy’s playmate, Orion Black,” Petunia says, taking over. “They share a private tutor in the Classics.” She lowers her voice with frantic emphasis. “Orion’s father is in the House of Lords with James.”

Vernon doesn’t gawk, but it’s a near thing. “Your crowd has lords?” He demands.

“Of course,” Orion says, as though it’s obvious. “And there’s much more overlap between our side and your side than you might think there is.”

“Really?” Petunia demands, scenting new gossip.

“Really,” Orion says, like a fucking liar. “There’s a need to keep the lines of communication open, you’ll understand. Coordinate, for any eventuality. My great-grandfather was at the forefront of the war efforts, when British soil was threatened.”

His great-grandfather was at the forefront of helping Grindelwald invade and one of the ones actively threatening British soil, so he’s technically telling the truth.

“A proper patriot,” Petunia murmurs, pretending to wipe at a tear.

“It’s our country, too, you see,” Orion says modestly, as Vernon hangs on every word. “And my family tends to be very involved in those sorts of things.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “So, if you ever need a favor on your side, my father would be happy to assist with his connections on our side, so to speak.” He smiles. “Anything for Ivy’s family.”

Lily feels as if she’s having an out-of-body experience.

“Oh, what a gentleman,” Petunia gushes, and Vernon gives Orion an approving stare.

“Well raised, the both of you,” he says, then shoots Lily another look of dislike. “A credit to your fathers.”

THEY ARE ONLY HERE, Lily screams in her head, FOR YOUR FUCKING TV. 

But she just smiles and says, “Yes, we are very proud of both of them.”

Petunia scowls at her. “I’ll go fetch Dudley. I’m sure he’s still getting dressed, of course.”

They all know Dudley is playing computer games upstairs, but none of them are willing to admit that in front of a lord’s son.

“I’ve heard you’re considering Smeltings for Dudley,” Orion says in an approving manner.

“Yes, that’s where we’re hoping to send him,” Vernon says. “I was a Smeltings man, myself.”

“A proper institution,” Orion says firmly. “You can always tell a Smeltings man, my father says.”

Sirius says no such fucking thing, but Vernon is on a roll, now, about his schoolboy days, and Orion is lying through his teeth about how Smeltings is on the short list along with Eton for his attendance if he doesn’t enroll in their crowd’s schooling, and Ivy is looking at Lily over her shoulder mouthing get it together, because Lily is the liability in this theater performance they’re putting on.

Dudley thuds downstairs, blonde hair plastered against his forehead and shifting uncomfortably in his maroon jumper. He’s gained possibly more weight since their last visit, and he scowls at Ivy, Orion, and Lily with equal annoyance.

Dudley is Lily’s favorite, because he hates them all equally for stopping him from playing computer games.

**

Dudley gets to choose the movie, because he nearly throws a tantrum over watching another princess movie. Ivy submits graciously, but Lily can see her jaw grinding.

Is it bad she kind of wants her to have a burst of accidental magic?

And then the world ends, in close to a literal manner, because Dudley puts on Indiana Jones, and neither Ivy nor Orion ever recover from finding out you can steal treasure for a living.

(“I’m going to be a tomb raider,” Ivy announces, as soon as she comes home. “Orion, we’ll have to run away and become Muggles—”

“We have those, sort of,” James says, scenting the danger of a fresh, new catastrophe. “We call them curse-breakers.”

Orion looks at him dismissively. “Curse-breakers have to give the treasure back,” he says as though it’s obvious. “We want to keep it.”

“Oh,” Sirius says, cheering up. “So, you just want to go around the world robbing burial sites.”

“Exactly,” Orion says.

Lily will live to curse the day they saw Indiana Jones.)

**

Lily is silent for most of the drive home. After a spectacularly lovely visit, Petunia insisted they bring Orion back again, before scolding Lily for keeping them out so late and ordering her to bring the trash down to the bins.

“How?” She asks finally, after about forty-five minutes have passed. Both of them meet her gaze in the rearview mirror and blink in tandem, the little soulless gremlins reminding her of hunting raptors.

Ivy shrugs. “He doesn’t listen when Dromeda talks, but he does when I talk.” And she pets Orion on the head, and hands him a Cauldron Cake she pulled out from Merlin knows where.

“You trained him like a parakeet,” Lily accuses, and Ivy just hums in agreement.

“Dromeda said it would be good practice,” she says, “for if I ever have minions.”

Do you give someone a raise for training your child for a potentiality where they become a Dark Lord? Lily doesn’t know at this point. It’s very thorough.

“Maybe you should take lessons from Ivy, Aunt Lily,” Orion says, after he’s swallowed the last of his Cauldron Cake and finished preening under Ivy’s grooming. He seems completely unoffended that his aunt believes him to be merely a flying monkey carrying out Ivy’s will.

“Oh?” Lily says, feeling the enamel coming off her molars.

“Yeah.” He hums and rests his cheek on the top of Ivy’s head, scrunching his nose. “They all seem to really dislike you back there.”

Lily nearly crashes the car on purpose.

***

January 1990

It takes Lily close to 5 years of sweat, tears, and nearly poisoning Remus and Orion as her lab rats for her to make a more palatable version of the Wolfsbane Potion that doesn’t taste like desiccated roadkill mixed with swamp mud. It was notably easier to make a child-friendly version of the potion safe for Orion’s metabolism; the mystery meat taste, as Orion calls it, is far more stubborn.

“Shame you can’t make it taste like Fanta,” Orion sighs one full moon, having dry-heaved his way through her latest attempt (honey and lime and cayenne and all right, even she didn’t have high hopes for this one).

“Fanta is a Muggle drink, darling,” she reminds him, exasperated.

“Exactly,” Orion says. “Can’t interact, can it? It’s all chemicals and sugar.” He catches an accidental whiff of his goblet and gags, hastily shoving it toward the far side of the table, where Kreacher swiftly banishes it to the kitchens. “But Uncle Prongs says it needs citrus. Fake citrus might work.”

“That’s stupid,” Lily says. “Fake citrus won’t work.”

….

Lily buys a liter of Fanta and is half-furious when it works.

***

May 1990

“Aunt Dromeda,” Ivy says, in that angelic voice she uses when she wants something. She slides herself into her usual seat in the Potter Library and smiles.

Dromeda raises an eyebrow encouragingly but says nothing. Never give away anything for free in a negotiation, even your emotions, is rule number one of these lessons. (Rule number two is cover your ears and hum loudly whenever Orion makes suggestions about proper etiquette, and she’s considered moving it to first place more than once.)

 “Orion and I,” Ivy continues and Dromeda notices her nephew has slunk into the room and sprawled himself out near the fireplace with an insolent grace he could only have learned from sharing Sirius’s DNA, “have decided to take a more active role in our education and have a request for additional subject matter.”

Dromeda gives Orion a look, and he gives her a charming smile that raises alarm bells. She’s feeling particularly charitable to him ever since Lily handed her a generous lump sum payment accounting for his entire education a few months ago, to cover for Sirius’s years of IOUs and dodged invoices and 3 a.m. Howlers saying, “we’re family, what do you mean it’s not free”.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you,” Lily had told her, looking moderately horrified.

“Then it’s working,” Dromeda had replied, delighted.

Orion is a darling, but he has too much Sirius in him to ever be anything but a social liability. He’s like a bell: loud and bold and clear, without any care given for how loudly he strikes or who he jolts awake in his bloody cacophony. Dromeda has done her level best to make sure he won’t get murdered for annoying the wrong person to death at exactly the wrong time, and she’s reasonably optimistic on those odds.

Ivy, however, has potential. She has all of James’s charm with all of Lily’s emotional intelligence, and she came out with a face fine as china and a nerve like steel. If she weren’t so prone to flights of fancy and the whimsical, outlandish, and megalomaniac tendencies that come from being raised by the Marauders, Dromeda is certain she’d be Minister for Magic, one day.

Unfortunately, she was raised by them, so Dromeda’s main focus is on keeping her out of Azkaban instead. She suspects that’s why James hired her.

She taps the mahogany surface and hums reflexively, tilting her head. “You are quite advanced,” she admits, and Ivy preens, because she loves a good compliment. “And there’s not much left to teach you, although our time left together is very limited.”

“We’d keep at it in the summers,” Ivy says at once.

Ah, Dromeda thinks, lips twitching. So, it’s something she really wants, and can’t learn at Hogwarts.

“And what would you like added to your curriculum, may I ask?”

“Gobbledegook,” Ivy says at once, and Orion nods fervently from the floor.

Dromeda … stares at them, trying to figure out their angle.

“Gobbledegook,” she repeats. A long pause, where the fire only crackles. “Why?”

“We want to be tomb raiders,” Orion says. “Steal treasure, all over the world, and sell it to the highest bidders.”

“I see,” Dromeda says, cursing the Potters and her blasted cousin for their fucking whimsy infecting their children. Who just says that to an adult, as a career choice, with such earnest certainty? “And why do you need to know Gobbledegook for that?”

“Well, Gringotts has all the treasure,” Ivy says, eyes shining with admiration. She has long held a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the goblins and discovering how exactly they guard the vaults. “Which means they have all the information on where any possible treasure might be. If we work for them as curse-breakers for a few years—”

“Learn all their techniques and innovate on them,” Orion adds, “Get them to trust us because we speak their language and advance faster, eavesdrop, maybe steal some maps—”

“Then,” Ivy says excitedly, “we can strike out on our own, and get the treasure for ourselves.”

They are … going to start another Goblin Rebellion, Dromeda realizes.

“This is what you two decided to do with your lives,” Dromeda says, just to be clear. She pauses again, trying to find any fucking rational thought in this explanation. “You know you’re both from extremely wealthy families, right?”

Ivy and Orion exchange a confused look, as if she’s just asked them the circumference of the moon and they can’t possibly figure out why it’s relevant to their discussion.

“What does being rich have to do with stealing treasure from dead people?” Orion asks, sounding baffled, and Dromeda understands why Remus has that one corner of the gardens he screams in before dinner sometimes.

They’re both looking at her with such round, hopeful eyes, emerald green and that delightful purple gray she finds so enchanting on her nephew—like the jewels they want to steal, a voice in her head screams at her, but she ignores it—and they are showing initiative—

 They’ll grow out of this, she decides. Probably. Or someone else will put a stop to it.

…Probably.

“It is a useful skill to be able to understand what your portfolio manager is saying to his colleagues when you go into Gringotts to get your accounts checked,” she says, warming to the idea from a mixture of misplaced familial pride and probably some Stockholm Syndrome. “Goblins love to skim the tops off our vaults.”

They both stare at her with utter rapture.

“So, we can learn Gobbledegook?” Ivy asks, near breathless. “You’ll arrange a tutor?” Dromeda’s lip curl into a smile, and she inclines her head, and the two of them nearly topple her with hugs.

“You won’t regret this,” Ivy promises, eyes shining and cheeks flushed with triumph.

Dromeda is absolutely certain she’s going to regret this.

***

July 1990

For Neville’s tenth birthday, Ivy gifts him a magnificent Flitterbloom, specifically grown at a specialist herbology shop with ruby petals to match his birth stone.

For his present, Orion lobs a Beater’s Bat he found in the broom closet at Neville’s head and tells him he can hit him with it ten times, in commemoration of the ten years he’s been a complete killjoy.

Beating Orion with a bat is easily Neville’s favorite present he’s ever received, and it takes all three Marauders to wrestle the bat away from him.

“That was way more than ten,” Orion says, sounding annoyed more than angry as Lily makes him pinch his nose to control the flow of his bloody nose.

“Oops,” Neville says, and Augusta cuffs him on the back of the head hard, because Longbottoms might viciously beat people with bats in public, but they’re not smart about it.

“What is wrong,” Remus shouts, hefting the confiscated bat at the two unapologetic boys and swinging it in an arc to encompass where Ivy is crouched with Ralston and Hardwin, helping them practice their numbers by counting the swings, “with all of you?”

Orion spits out a mouthful of blood and glares at him in disbelief. “I’m not going to spend Galleons on him,” he argues back. “This is a good deal for me!”

There are some benefits to being a werewolf, Orion feels, and werewolf strength is one of them.

Hardwin fixes Remus with a disapproving stare that reminds him far too much of a young Lily Evans. “Uncle Moony,” he says, planting his little hands on his hips, “you’re ruining everything right before cake time.”

Remus smashes the cake with the Beater’s Bat before flinging it into the river in a dramatic fit of fury five years in the making, and James and Sirius immediately Apparate out to get a second, larger, better cake before their children cannibalize them for this sin. The party still ends on a rather sour note due to what the children perceive to be a completely unwarranted and unreasonable emotional outburst.

“Uncle Moony always gets so emotional at his time of the month,” Ralston says complainingly to Ivy. He’s five, and he’s finally noticed there are other people to talk to besides his twin, and that they do it in something called English. Ivy is his preferred conversation partner because he believes his big sister knows everything, which is a fact responsible for many sleepless nights for Lily and James. “Rion’s moon better not make him like that.”

(Neville, walking close enough to overhear, misses a step.)

“It won’t,” Ivy reassures her little brother, ruffling his hair. It’s the same inky color as hers, but he’s inherited Lily’s straight, thick texture, whereas Hardwin has the Potter curls in auburn. “O is completely reasonable. Uncle Moony has always been prone to …” she searches for the word, delicate brow crinkling. “Mum calls them fits of fancy, I think.”

“Well, he’s very fancy,” Hardwin puts in petulantly, in his serious, judgy manner. He’s still bitter about the raspberry vanilla cake’s swift and gruesome death, even if he likes Devil’s chocolate better. Two cakes, he reasons, would be better than one. “Not at all like us.”

“No,” Ivy agrees, swinging their hands together happily. “Us Potters are all quite sensible people, I think.”

Remus overhears this and goes to his garden spot to scream for a bit in peace.

***

Halloween, 1990

“Orion!” Sirius bellows, throwing open the door to the gardens behind Grimmauld with an enormous smile stretched across his face. Remus follows right behind him, also beaming, and waving a sheaf of parchment embossed with emerald ink. “Orion! Your Hogwarts letter came!”

Orion brings his Nimbus into a hover, then exchanges a bemused look with Ivy, who is balancing a Quaffle on her head with her arms outstretched. “Okay.”

He starts to fly off.

“Okay?” Sirius demands, incensed, before casting a wandless momentum spell to slow both of their brooms. Ivy gives a whine of complaint as her broom’s shuddering lurch knocks the Quaffle off her head, ruining her attempt to break her record of six minutes, thirteen seconds. “You’re not the least bit excited?”

“I mean, it’s not exactly a surprise, right?” Orion asks. “I accidentally blew up a werewolf and bombed Muggle London before I could read.” Remus splutters, but he just shrugs. “It’d be a bit irresponsible for them to be like, ‘nah, not enough magic to educate him’, and inflict me on the rest of the world.”

“They’re inflicting you on the rest of the world, regardless,” Sirius mutters under his breath. Orion catches it with his superior hearing and has the gall to look flattered.

“That’s … not the way I would describe your, er, incident,” Remus says with a wince, before trying to lure him down again. “Don’t you want to see the list of school supplies? There’s some interesting stuff on here.”

Orion suddenly brightens. “That depends. Am I getting my wand today?” Ivy, who has been hanging upside down from her broom in a sulk, shoots up straight with eagerness.

“No.” Remus scowls at them both. They’d agreed with Lily and James to get Orion and Ivy’s wands together after Ivy turned eleven, delaying for as long as humanly possible equipping either of them with weapons. They know they stand no chance of keeping them from their wands, even if they lock and ward them. Ivy has started studying Runes in anticipation of this, and while she doesn’t understand much, her practical application was concerningly effective. Besides, the easiest way to make something a challenge to either of these monsters was to hide it and forbid it.

Orion wrinkles his nose in distaste. “Isn’t the rest of the list just robes and books? Why would I want to see that?”

“That sounds boring,” Ivy chimes in, back to hanging upside down. Her hair hangs around her head like a bat.

“You’re ruining a very exciting moment for us,” Sirius bellows. “Get down here right now and pretend to be excited!”

“Why?” Orion whines.

“Because regular, proper families are excited about this!” Sirius shouts, beginning to turn red. “They hug and laugh and cry!” Orion looks revolted, now, so Padfoot resorts back to orders. “Get down here and act surprised and laugh and hug us!”

Orion lifts his chin stubbornly and crosses his arms.

Remus tries a different approach. “Come on, O, be a good sport,” he coaxes. “Kreacher even went and got the camera for this, it’s important to him. It’s important to all of us.”

On cue, Kreacher emerges into the yard, carrying a Wizarding camera the size of his torso that forces him to waddle awkwardly. Without even pausing to look up, he angles the lens up, snaps a photo of the soles of Orion’s trainers, then turns back toward the house.

Orion and Ivy laugh so hard they nearly fall off their brooms.

“Oi! Kreacher!” Sirius shouts. “What was that?”

Kreacher frowns at him in consternation. “You told Kreacher to take a photo of Young Master after he has been receiving his Hogwarts letter.” He taps the camera, a little affronted. “Kreacher did.”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” Sirius snaps. “I want a photo of him with the letter, and with us.”

Kreacher scowls. “That’s different.” He shuffles back out and begins to take more photos of Orion’s trainers, muttering all the while. “Master is always thinking he has a creative eye and knows good angles, but only Kreacher understands lighting—”

“If you let us go trick-or-treating in Muggle London tonight for my birthday,” Orion says suddenly, “I’ll come down and behave.”

Remus and Sirius hesitate. The pair of them look like hunting hounds, watching them with avid, hungry eyes, and the last time they allowed them to go trick-or-treating ….

“You know you’re not allowed,” Sirius bargains back. “Lily will have our heads.”

“It was one prank,” Ivy says pleadingly.

“That made the nightly news,” Remus says, deadpan.

Ivy throws her arms up. “I’m sorry, I thought this was a Marauder household. I didn’t know I lived with the Diggorys.”

“OI!” Sirius shouts, outraged. “Don’t you dare compare us to that stick-in-the-mud!”

“You’re a stick in the mud if you can’t appreciate the brilliance of what we did—”

“You Spello-taped a boggart to your back and terrorized the city!” Remus shouts. “London Police thought the candy in that area had been laced with hallucinogens!”

“Sugar’s bad for you, anyway,” Orion says, after a pause. “We did them a favor, making them release an advisory to throw it all out.”

Remus turns to Sirius. “Padfoot. We can’t morally condone them being unleashed again.”

Kreacher has grown bored with all of them and is taking some rather lovely close-ons of the daisies near the kitchen latticework.

“I know, but—” Sirius sighs. “I really want a Hogwarts letter photo.”

Remus blinks, then steels himself. He turns back to the terrorists. “And you swear you won’t tell Lily?”

“We swear,” they say, like liars. But really, they’re both under the impression they won’t need to tell her; whatever they do will probably make the news, and she’ll find out that way.

Sirius and Remus get their Hogwarts photo with a beaming, thrilled Orion pretending to be surprised and hugging them, but they also get banished from Potter Manor for a week and a half when Lily hears from Petunia that some young hooligans in Mayfair ran around flashing “frighteningly realistic” shrunken elf heads at strangers while screaming HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

***

August 1991

Neville and Ivy turn eleven and the Marauders officially run out of excuses to not buy Ivy and Orion their wands.

“We’ll have a month, now,” Prongs says at breakfast, “to teach them what they need to know. Leg-locking Jinx, Jelly Legs, Stinging Hex, Bee Sting Jinx, Tripping Jinx—”

“Lumos,” Lily adds, with a disbelieving look at her husband.

“That, too,” Prongs says. “Look, Flower, an upperclassman is probably going to try to kill them by day 3. As a responsible father, I have an obligation to teach them basic self-defense.”

Lily sighs heavily. She’s a loving parent, but she’s not a delusional one about her child’s temperament. “Don’t forget the Knockback Jinx, then. It’ll give them time to get the cloak on and make a run for it.”

There were more than a few concessions going into their Hogwarts experience. For one, Dumbledore had agreed enthusiastically to allowing Sirius, James, and Remus into the Shrieking Shack every full moon to accompany Orion during his transformations for at least the first few years at Hogwarts. He’d also agreed—extremely reluctantly, and under much political pressure due to subterfuge and some outright blackmailing and extortion—to allow Ivy home at the full moon for a night, to draw attention away from Orion’s repeated departures.

“They’ll just assume we’re doing a weird, family dinner if they’re both gone,” Lily had said, still flushed from her triumph over Albus and preening like a cat. “Everyone knows we’re strange, by now. I think part of why he fought me so hard was because he knew half the other parents would be clamoring for similar exceptions.” She smiled viciously. “I hope he gets a lot of owls about it.”

Petunia has been beside herself at Ivy’s acceptance and has written no less than five letters accusing Lily of forcing her to go in between ordering her to ensure her niece has the best of everything and no expenses are spared on her wardrobe, because Ivy is a good girl who would do far better at Cheltenham and Petunia is convinced the wizards will bully her. Ivy, the fucking traitor, put on a brave face for her aunt at her last visit, lower lip wobbling, and told her not to worry, for she would do her family duty and attend Hogwarts to ensure she became a proper witch. Petunia refused to even so much as pass the potatoes to Lily at dinner.

“Thank goodness,” she told Ivy on the porch, squeezing her tight through her tears, “You’ll have Orion with you.”

Pathological gaslighting by her sister and daughter aside, Lily is most concerned about taking them to Gringotts. She knows what she raised, and it has … never gone well.

“Right then,” James says, once Orion, Sirius, and Remus arrive through the Floo, two of the three looking as though they’re attending a funeral, “No use for it. Let’s go.”

**

“When the bloody fuck,” James hisses as they frogmarch the monsters out of the bank, “did they learn Gobbledegook?”

Griphook loves them. A little too much. Ivy has immense, almost god-like respect for the goblins, much to their utter confusion and delight.

“A proper Heir for the Potters this time,” Griphook says as he escorts them out, ignoring James’s outraged protest of hey! “Congratulations to you all.”

He fails to notice how many questions Ivy asks about how exactly they ward their vaults or how they locate global treasure sites.

“That’s the first step,” Orion says in a low voice to Ivy that they all overhear, because neither child has quite grasped the concept of whispering. “Win their trust.”

Moony lets out a strangled noise and shoves him past the armored security guards.

**

“You cannot buy a Niffler,” Lily says in a deadened tone.

Ivy gets a snowy owl, and after a brief, furious fight with Orion conducted almost entirely in fucking Gobbledegookwith some Greek thrown in and a round of rock-paper-dagger that almost ends in a fist fight, she names it Indiana.

Orion sullenly names his Northern Hawk Owl Raider.

**

They’re handed directly to Madame Malkin for robe fittings, who is ordered under no circumstances to let them off their stools until they return, and then Padfoot sticks their trainers to the stools for good measure in front of a baffled seamstress and a blonde boy with a pale, pointed face who doesn’t seem to know what to make of any of this. This isn’t a foolproof solution; Padfoot knows they can potentially jump up and down until the stools break, but they need to pick up their books and potions ingredients and the queues for both are killer, and they do have the tracking bracelets on them, now.

“Behave,” Padfoot barks, before backing out slowly from the shop. “If you’re not here when I get back, there will be no ice cream.”

Ivy and Orion exchange an eyeroll at his dramatics, especially when they catch him watching through the window.

“Like we’re going anywhere,” Ivy mutters. “Our wands aren’t paid for, yet.”

“Hogwarts, too, then?” The blonde boy drawls, after Madame Malkin has measured every inch and stuck them full of pins.

“Was it the Hogwarts robes that gave it away?” Orion drawls back, because he’s still a bit sore about the owl naming, and obvious questions drive him mad.

The boy stiffens like an offended peacock. Ivy offers him a pacifying smile, used to smoothing out Orion’s rough edges but hoping he gives up on talking to them.

The boy relaxes, incrementally, then refuses to take the hint. “I’m Draco, by the way. Draco Malfoy.” He pauses, as though expecting them to know the name.

They do both know the name, and Ivy endures her first bout of existential dread.

Is this how my parents feel? She thinks, in a moment of dazed, eleven-year-old enlightenment. She throws the thought away at once. No, no, I’m delightful—

“No,” she mutters aloud, as Orion positively writhes with delight beside her, “oh, no.” She tries to step off the stool, but Sirius put paid to that, and she only manages to stab herself on about sixty sentient pins for her troubles. She then begins hopping her stool sideways. She wants nothing to do with what’s about to occur. Andromeda will skewer her.

“Well, clearly you know who I am,” Draco Malfoy says, sounding pleased.

“You know who we are, too,” Orion says with a grin that shows far too many of his teeth. “This—” he points at Ivy like a circus attraction, “—is Ivy Potter, and I’m—”

“Orion Black,” Malfoy spits out, suddenly flushing pink with fury.

Orion tilts his head insolently, still grinning. “I was going to say the one who stole your inheritance away, but I suppose that works, too.”

“You—” Malfoy sputters. “You dare—”

“How many legal actions has your father filed by now?” Orion goads with absolute relish. “Ten? Twenty? Shame it’s always the same answer. At this rate, he’s going to blow through all your inheritance trying to get a Knut of mine—”

“As if you’d ever make a proper Black heir,” Malfoy snarls. “You’re a half-blood from nowhere, with an unknown mother—”

“We all know who your mother is, and you’re still not good enough to be the Black heir,” Orion says gleefully. “Kreacher says I’m the first proper Black Heir in ages—”

“No, he doesn’t!” Malfoy explodes, positively enraged, now.

“He does. He says it all the time. I show all the right traits, like locking people up and terrorizing family and hoarding rare objects—”

“He’s a half-mad house elf!” Malfoy spits. “It’s not like his opinion even matters. You can’t be serious—”

“He’s Orion,” Ivy interjects serenely, making a show of straightening her sleeves. Sorry, Dromeda. “His father is Sirius.”

Orion beams at her. Malfoy looks as though he wants to set the whole shop on fire and let them all die together.

“Stay out of this, Potter—” Malfoy begins.

“Talk to her again, and I’ll burn you off the tapestry tonight—”

“You can’t just burn me off the tapestry!” Malfoy bursts out, sounding attacked. “There are rules!” He spins on his stool. “Potter! Tell him there are rules!”

Madame Malkin ends up putting dividers between their stools, because the shouting begins to disturb other patrons.

**

Orion matches with a handsome, thirteen-inch wand of blackthorn and dragon heartstring, with a flash as bold and bright as a lightning strike. The smile that lights his face almost makes whatever he’s about to inflict on them worth it, Sirius thinks. 

“A warrior’s wand,” Olivander warbles in his approving, creepy fucking way that drives Padfoot up the wall. No disrespect to the man, sure he’s lovely and has some mates who like him and he brings a nice casserole to parties, but shouldn’t he be dead by now? He was ancient when Walburga dragged him in here at eleven, stooped and ominous and fluttering about like a punch-drunk moth, but he’s showing no signs of kicking the bucket or stopping his bullshit. “Blackthorn is the wand of Aurors … and of Azkaban inmates.” He blinks owlishly at Orion, with his eerie, see-through eyes. “Only a wizard who endures much hardship and pain can truly bond to a wand like yours—”

“All right,” Sirius says, because that’s enough of that, is what it is, and he still can’t believe they all just allow this man around children. “Ivy’s turn.”

Olivander grows somehow more delighted, which sets Sirius’s hackles rising.

“Ah,” Olivander says, looking fervent. “Ms. Potter. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“That’s so kind of you to say,” Ivy says, because she’s absolutely willing to ignore any creepy undertones in exchange for compliments. I am a delight, after all, her expression says.

“A curious girl,” he says, and James stiffens. His eyes trace up to her forehead, then back. “An accident of fate, perhaps—”

“Her wand,” Lily bites out, “is what we’re here for. Ivy, give him your hand to measure.”

Ivy stretches out her right hand obediently.

Olivander makes a show of measuring her, then commences to throw every wand in the shop at her, growing more and more erratic as no reactions occur. Lily and James’s expressions grow darker and darker as it goes on.

“I think that one might have—” Ivy tries to tell him, but it’s ripped from her grasp before she can finish her sentence.

“I wonder,” Olivander mutters dramatically, before blowing dust off a box in an unused corner. Ivy sneezes as it hits her in the face and gives him a scowl. “Here. Try this.”

Ivy obeys and takes the wand, stares at it, then stares at him, unimpressed.

“This one sucks,” she says flatly.

Olivander looks baffled. “Nothing?”

“Nope.” Ivy pops the p. She smiles a little viciously, and Sirius sees Lily in it. “Sorry.”

It takes Olivander another round of rambled muttering and erratic hand motions to recover, but he finally matches her with an eleven-and-a-half-inch wand of phoenix feather and applewood with elegant spirals up its ridges, and he looks positively sour about it.

“What’s special about applewood then?” Padfoot can’t help goading. “You haven’t said.”

Olivander grumbles unintelligibly, then says, “It’s a rarer wood that makes for a powerful wand, although it mixes poorly with Dark magic. They prefer charming wizards.” He nearly grits his teeth. “Possessors of apple wands are known to be well-loved and long-lived.”

“Oh, it’s perfect, then,” says Ivy happily, with all the tact of a child, and Lily starts laughing so hard James has to nearly carry her out of the shop.

“Seven galleons,” Olivander barks, and Sirius cheerfully flings ten at him to piss him off.

**

Minerva McGonagall is minding her own business, walking down Diagon Alley on her way back to the Leaky Cauldron, when she nearly gets trampled to death outside of Ollivander’s by a crowd of hapless idiots who have never walked in public.

“Oh, Professor McGonagall, are you all right?” Lily Ev—Potter says in a voice so high it nearly cracks, and Minerva realizes she knows these idiots. They’re her idiots.

She straightens her tartan robes with a huff, then fixes them with an unimpressed stare. “Bit of a hurry?” She asks tartly.

“Ollivander is fucked,” Sirius says defensively, before letting out an oof as Remus and Lily both elbow him in opposite sides of the abdomen.

Minerva can’t disagree with this assessment, so she just pinches her lips together tighter.

They’re all here, her former best and brightest, and just as attached at the hip as they had been during their school years, although the lack of curses between Lily and James is certainly an improvement. She feels a pang, catching herself looking for a small, plump shadow, then hardens her heart. The Peter Pettigrew she knew is dead; the Peter who sits rotting in Azkaban tried to kill the four people in front of her and deserves none of her pity.

They’re all looking rather guilty, and none of them are quite meeting her eyes, and she swiftly realizes why. She steels herself then says in a resigned tone, “Hogwarts shopping then?”

She refused to believe it was true, living in a state of utter, willful delusion until both of their bloody names came out of that bloody book and she had to sign their letters and look happy about it.

Ivy Potter and Orion Black. Children of James Potter, Sirius Black, and Remus Lupin. Same age. Same year.

She would blame fate, but she can blame the four people in front of her with much more relish and consequence.

“Yes!” James says, with near desperate enthusiasm. He looks, she realizes, incredibly guilty, and this raises all her alarm bells. Anything that makes James “I just became an illegal animagus at age fourteen for a laugh why are you all so worked up about it” Potter look guilty is truly terrible news for her.

 “Saved the best for last with the wands, as is tradition,” he says, striving to keep the conversation going. No one assists him.

McGonagall does not so much as crack a smile. “Well, I might as well meet them early,” she says grudgingly, because James has always been her favorite, and it was impressive Transfiguration work, after all.

“Of course,” Lily says hurriedly, and the four adults shuffle as though she’s asked them to line up, clearing space between them. “Ivy, Orion, introduce yourselves.”

McGonagall looks down, then blinks suspiciously. She looks back up. “Where exactly are they, then?” She asks in an irritated voice, as if she suspects this is all a prank.

The four adults blink and then follow her gaze down to the spot where two children had just been fucking standing.

“Bugger,” James says, although he sounds pleased. “They really capitalize on distractions, don’t they? How fast was it this time, Moony, if you had to guess?”

“We don’t want them to get faster, James,” Remus bites out. “Stop keeping track of their escape times like it’s a Quidditch trial—”

“Did you lose them?” McGonagall demands in her most indignant tone, because what kind of parenting is this?!

Lily, of all people, shoots her a rather annoyed look, which is a first for her former Head Girl. She’d always been a perfectly behaved child before she married James. You try keeping track of them, her look says.

McGonagall realizes with mounting horror she’s going to have to do exactly that.

“We didn’t lose them,” Lily says, straightening her robes with a huff. “They ran off. It’s different.”

McGonagall doesn’t see much difference, and her pinched lips express that for her.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sirius says, wand swishing and flicking over a gold chain on his wrist. “This is why we put the tracking charms on their bracelets, yeah? And they can’t remove them anymore, not after what happened at the opera.”

McGonagall looks unimpressed. “So, this is a common occurrence, then.”

“Ivy shows a talent for transfiguration!” James blurts out, desperate to distract her as Sirius pulls up the tracking charm.

“Oh?” McGonagall turns to him, intrigued despite herself. She always had a soft spot for James, she could admit; he was the most talented student she’d taught in decades, and if Ivy showed half his talent and didn’t share his bad habit of making everything into trout—a useful, spectacularly precise Transfiguration, but it got tiresome after a while when he ruined all of her in-class dueling exercises by turning his opponents into fish—well. She wouldn’t say no to that.

“Yeah. Our cat scratched her, so she turned it into a toad.” He pauses. “She turns a lot of things into toads, actually. It’s like her thing.”

“So, she has a talent for toads,” McGonagall surmises, hope shriveling up and dying. “It’s a step up from trout, I suppose.”

“It’s handy for dueling,” James argues, looking offended. “If a Centaur is charging her and she transfigures it into a toad, can’t do much damage, can it?”

“Do you expect a lot of enraged centaurs to charge your eleven-year-old?” McGonagall asks.

James opens his mouth, and Lily steps on his foot. Hard.

“How’s that tracking spell coming, Sirius?” Lily asks with forced cheer, refusing to make eye contact with McGonagall, who is staring at her with betrayal and disappointment.

“They’re moving,” Sirius mutters, and with a flick of his wand he pulls up two glowing dots on a gold, grid lined map of Diagon Alley projected from his bracelet, three-dimensional and hovering. McGonagall leans closer despite herself to admire it—it’s a talented bit of inventive spell work combining several disciplines, and she expects nothing less from these idiot savants—then notices the racing dots are labelled Crossroads Demon and Child Insurrectionist, and despairs. You only invent something this complex from necessity.

Moving, moving —

“Is that.” Remus blinks, then groans. “That’s Gringotts.”

“It’s fine,” Sirius says, although his voice is higher pitched. “They probably got lost, and it’s the main landmark they know—”

“They have wands, now,” James says, looking up slowly. “You don’t think—?”

The four of them share a long look.

And then they take off at a full sprint without another word. McGonagall has never seen anyone run so fast in her life, even during a war.

She watches them until they disappear and stands there for a few more moments.

Then she walks straight into the nearest tavern.

“Minerva,” the bartender, Elias, looks surprised to see her. “A bit early for you in these parts.”

McGonagall says nothing. She thinks she might hear sirens going off in the direction of the bank, but she hopes it’s just an auditory hallucination from stress.

His brow crinkles at her dead-eyed silence. “Gillywater, as usual?”

“Fire whiskey,” she says. “On the rocks.”

She needs to drink away the next seven years, or she’ll end up in Azkaban.

Chapter Text

August 31, 1991

“We could keep the cloak,” Remus suggests, holding his glass of bourbon on the rocks to his temples to ice his headache.

Lily, of all people, is the one who bristles at this suggestion. “Absolutely not,” she says at once. “The cloak stays with Ivy, or she doesn’t go at all.”

The cloak has always been the last and greatest line of defense that the Potters can provide for their bloodline, and Lily has never forgotten the exact flavor of terror they suffered the night they needed it most and lacked it. With a silencing charm, Ivy could have been safely hidden in the Manor while the four of them focused on dispatching the Death Eaters. Instead, they had to divide their focus between offense and defense, and she nearly lost her life to protect her daughter’s.

They’ve drilled into Orion and Ivy all summer that if anything ever goes wrong at school, they’re to not say a word to anybody, put on the cloak, and immediately make for the Shrieking Shack. Outside of Hogwarts’s wards, they’ll activate their charm bracelets and wait under the cloak until one of the four of them comes to fetch them and proves their identity with an agreed upon safe word. Ivy and Orion, to their utter relief, have agreed to this contingency without any issue. Both seemed rather baffled at the idea they’d do anything other than wait for their parents to come fix whatever’s wrong, which had made James so happy he’d served them cake for breakfast for an entire week.

The trade-off, Remus understands, is knowing that they’ll use the cloak much in the way the Marauders once used it, for mayhem and chaos and their personal reign of terror.

Remus puts down the glass and conjures a wet compress for his eyes instead, settling back in the settee. “Then we’re doomed,” he says conversationally. “They’ll be back with us by Halloween.”

Orion and Ivy have swiftly deduced (via “experiments” with Kreacher that Kreacher seems extremely proud of but none of them could find any evidence of despite frantic searching, although James swears the dining room curtains whispered to him when he passed them) that the Trace doesn’t apply in Wizarding households the way they’d all been bluffing it did. Orion’s ability to smell strong emotions like fear and terror and despair, Remus reflects, is awfully inconvenient, and he wishes he’d get a head cold for a week. He’s spent most of his day hunting for where they’ve hidden the wands they’ve stolen back with little success. He suspects the treehouse, because Ivy’s warded it with Ogham runes she has no business knowing how to use. He could easily neutralize them with a common rune chain—she might be a prodigy, but she’s eleven, and KEEP OUT scrawled in tree bark isn’t exactly a Fidelius—but he knows whatever she goes for next will be even more advanced and definitely more dangerous.

Sometimes he wonders if she’s viewing the exercise as some type of applied academics. He wants her dumber, not smarter.

Their only reprieve in the month since they’ve gotten their wands has been their utter obsession with the mysterious break-in at Gringotts that happened on Ivy’s birthday. The two of them have taken over an entire wall of the playroom with guesses and leads like a Muggle detective board (Lily’s fault, although she protests it’s Orion’s birth father’s fault for being a detective in the first place), and Indiana the snowy owl has been flying like rent’s due with letters to Griphook every other day as Ivy probes him for information.

“They won’t get expelled,” Sirius says, and he can hear his eye roll from across the parlor.  “Dumbledore would never expel a Potter or a Black. Wizarding Britain would riot, thinking their own heirs will be next. We just ignore all the letters home, get Minnie a gift basket of gold bars every Christmas, and poof—” He waves his hands, “—they graduate and go rob tombs like they want.”

“I wonder sometimes about allowing you near children,” Moony tells his husband drily.

“We’re losing track of the largest problem,” Lily says wearily. “Which is their boredom.” Moony lifts his eye mask to peek at her and finds her giving all three of them a look. “You became underage Animagi and ran around every month because you were bored.”

“Well,” Sirius begins, blustering.

“I think you’re oversimplifying it a bit, Flower,” James tries at once. “It was a noble thing for us to do—”

“I am not,” Lily retorts, exasperated. “And it might have been noble, but it was also self-serving. Your classes were too easy, and you weren’t challenged, so you entertained yourselves by tormenting the rest of us.”

“And by asking you out all the time,” Prongs says smoothly, throwing her a charming smile.

Lily looks at him, unimpressed. “That counted as a form of torment,” she says, deadpan.

Prongs makes a sound as though he’s been hit with a Cruciatus and crumples dramatically backward into Padfoot’s waiting arms, pretending to swoon, and Moony, on reflex from years of setting the scene, wandlessly magics the Potter’s piano to start playing a mournful, haunting ballad. Lily makes a frustrated noise like a tea kettle.

“She’s rejected me again, starlight,” James moans, putting a hand to his forehead.

“Don’t despair, my lord of the forest,” Sirius cries out, cradling him closer. “She just needs another grand gesture, is all.”

Remus dims the candles without looking and encourages the melody to swell.

Sirius is still going. “A hundred—no, a thousand—doves, to signify the purity of your intentions. We’ll transfigure all the owls in the Owlery into doves and bombard her with love poems at breakfast—”

“We’ll steal Dumbledore’s phoenix!” James cries out, flinging his glasses dramatically across the room, because he used to say there was no point in seeing if Evans didn’t see him for who he was, and then they’d have to help him around all day while he pretended to be blind with a crup they smuggled in as a seeing-eye dog. “A match for the red of her hair! A woman of flame deserves a bird of flame!”

Remus twitches his fingers again, and it starts snowing indoors, the snowflakes glistening bewitchingly as they swirl around James and Sirius in their dramatic scene.

“We’ll engrave all the goblets and plates with I love you, Lily—”

“We’ll bewitch the House Hourglasses in the entrance hall so they rain lilies instead of gems, because Lily is worth more than a thousand gems—”

“We’ll break the warding around the Hogwarts seal and rename it Lily Evans School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, just give Prongs a chance—”

“Can we get back to the children?” Lily bellows, and the symphony cuts off mid-crescendo with a screech. “The ones the three of you ruined?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Remus says, returning the candles to normal and canceling the snow, because he will never admit it, but he’s aware that Ivy and Orion are entirely their fault.

“It’s not like you’re innocent in this,” Sirius counters, releasing James and returning to eating his biscuits as if nothing happened. “Ivy didn’t get her temper from James, and you’re just as dramatic as we are.”

Lily pretends not to hear him, because her disruptive daydreams are her business, thanks very much. “They’re going to be too advanced,” she says, patting the couch beside her, “and that’s why they’re going to make trouble.”

“You were just as advanced as we were, darling,” James says, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head as he settles obediently back into her side, and she curls up into him. “But you behaved.”

“Yes, but I had better self-control,” Lily points out. “And I wasn’t born a wizard. Everything was new to me in a way it wasn’t to the three of you, and there was so much to learn and get right. Things didn’t come as instantaneously to me as it did to all of you. Besides, I had to be perfect.” Her face darkens a little. “A muggle-born couldn’t get away with what you lot got away with.”

Prongs’s expression softens, hopelessly fond. “You were always perfect, Flower.” Lily beams at him, and Sirius makes a gagging noise.

“I’m glad you finally admitted that if you’d been born a witch, you would have probably been the fifth Marauder,” Remus comments, ruining the moment. Lily shoots him a scowl. “Don’t look at me like that. You’re always like, why are you all like this, but even back then, you were always hanging around us and yelling too much to be disinterested. And when our pranks weren’t up to snuff, you were always handing us parchments with corrections and critiques of how you would have done it better.”

Lily sniffs and tucks herself into James. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says primly.

“Right,” Remus says drily.

“Well, no one can blame us they ended up mad, I suppose,” Sirius reflects. “We’re their parents, and everyone knows we’re all mad.”

“That’s it!” Prongs cries out, looking excited. “We’ve been thinking like parents. We need to think like Marauders.”

And Remus doesn’t comment on how Prongs immediately equates Marauders with mad, because he has a bad enough headache without reflecting on his own role in this disaster.

“I hate wherever this is going,” Lily says, then after a long pause adds, “But I also feel like whatever you’re going to say is correct.” James gives her another grin and she lets out a resigned sigh. “Proceed.”

“We need to talk to them like we’d talk to us,” he says.

“We do,” Sirius says.

“That’s the problem,” Remus adds. “That’s why they’re insane.”

“But we’re more insane,” Prongs says gleefully. “Ivy might be a crossroads demon, but I’m the original crossroads demon that spawned her.” He stands. “I can make a bargain with her.”

**

Ivy and Orion enter the living room and take note of the four of them warily.

“We had nothing to do with the curtains,” Orion says immediately. “And we know nothing about whether or not they’re a portal, now, but it’d be best to stay away from them.”

“The treehouse warded itself,” Ivy says at the same time, opting for gaslighting. “It’s sentient. I’ve been telling you all that for years.”

“You’re not here for that,” James says, waving the words away.

“Oh,” Ivy says, then relaxes, turning to Orion. “They just want to spend time with us, O. I told you.”

Orion looks James up and down suspiciously, stubborn chin lifting. “I don’t think they just want to spend time with us, fawn.”

“No,” Prongs says merrily, settling onto the coffee table and crossing his legs like a trickster in a fairy tale. “You’re here because I know what you’re going to do.”

Orion scoffs. “No, you don’t.”

“You never know,” Ivy adds pityingly. “You taught us that.”

Prongs’s smile only grows wider. “I know what I would do,” he says. “Which is what you would do.” He leans forward. “And I have a better deal for you.”

Ivy cocks her head, intrigued. “I’m listening.”

“Then listen,” Sirius says from where he leans against the fireplace like a villain all in shadow. “No big pranks or disasters your first few years.” Orion scowls and starts to interrupt him, but he just shoots him a dismissive look. “You’ll just embarrass yourself, pup. Neither of you will know enough magic until you’re at least third years to do anything worthwhile, and people will talk about you being our children and how disappointing your pranks turned out compared to the majesty of ours.”

Remus is lying sprawled across the couch in feigned casualness to hide his utter terror of this plan, and he sees the way Orion bristles as they poke at his competitive streak.

“We can’t have that,” Remus adds on, playing his role to perfection. “It hurts our legacy. We can’t have you doing anything less than impressive.”

“But if you impress me,” Prongs says, taking back over, “Impress us ….” He leans back, smiling like a card trick. “Then I’ll give you what you really want.”

Ivy’s breath catches audibly, her eyes widening as she stares at her father. “You’ll make us our own map,” she whispers in awed disbelief.

“A better one, to replace the one Filch took,” Lily says. “Exactly like your tracking charms. I’ll link it into your bracelets with a new rune chain, so you can access it anywhere at Hogwarts.”

“And we’ve been innovating on the design,” James dangles carelessly. “It could even send you alerts.”

That has their interest. They exchange one of their unreadable glances, and Orion gives a short, terse nod.

“What do we have to do?” Ivy asks, turning back to her father with a shrewd look. “Get good grades and be boring?”

“That doesn’t sound like behavior deserving of your own map, and you’ll get good grades, anyway,” Prongs retorts, making a face. “Find one place we don’t know about, and we’ll make you your own map.”

“One—?” Ivy blinks, startled. “You’re telling us to explore?”

“You’ll have the cloak,” Prong says. “You don’t have to follow the rules, but I expect you to break them in reasonable ways.”

“And I expect you not to get caught,” Lily adds, giving her daughter a censuring look. “A child of mine should be clever enough to get away with it. If I get a single owl telling me you got caught sneaking out like an amateur, I’ll be very upset with you.”

Ivy looks offended. She hero worships her mother, who is beautiful and clever and has the heart of a wildfire, and the idea of not being clever enough to be Lily Potter’s daughter is clearly an insult of the highest degree.

“And if you want your own map of the castle,” Sirius adds, “you need to earn it. We’re not just going to give you one based off all our hard work.”

“What kind of place?” Orion demands, already doing mental calculations with a hungry look. “Does it have to be a room, or—?”

“A passageway or entrance leading from the castle to the grounds we don’t already know about,” Prongs says, “or a room or chamber we didn’t map, with some type of magic in it worth knowing about.”

“And don’t even think about making something up,” Remus warns. “Marauder’s honor.”

Both children look utterly revolted at the idea of lying. “We would never,” Orion snaps. “We can find loads better places than the lot of you, we don’t need to lie.”

“Good,” James says. “Because if you want your own map, you’ll need to. If you find one place we don’t know about, we’ll give you your own map, along with our blessing to do with it what you want.”

Orion and Ivy exchange another glance, one of the ones where they appear to have an entire conversation in micro-expressions. Orion quirks an eyebrow; Ivy twists her lips downwards, then cocks her head. Orion huffs and rolls his eyes, and Ivy smiles.

“Deal,” Ivy says. “We solemnly swear.”

“Then we solemnly swear,” James says. “Impress me, fawn.”

“I will,” Ivy vows, grinning. Her brow wrinkles. “It’s crazy. For a second there, I thought you were going to make us swear to behave in class and act normal for a year before you’d make us our own map.”

“But sneaking out all the time to discover a secret tunnel,” Orion puts in, “is much more entertaining.”

Prongs feels Lily’s glare burning into the back of his neck from across the room.

“That … would have been boring,” Prongs says, because he will not admit that he is just as demented as these children and the thought never even occurred to him to ask them to behave.

(“And really, Flower,” he tells Lily much later, “they never would have held up their end of the bargain.”

“McGonagall should thank us,” Lily decides, because she will never admit it, either, but she is just as mad as the rest of them. “Not only have we given them something to obsess over, but we’ve also guaranteed they’ll be chronically sleep deprived for at least their first year. They won’t cause as much trouble in her class if they’re too busy falling asleep.”

“Exactly.” James kisses her. “We’re such good parents.”)

***

September 1, 1991

They arrive at King’s Cross Station with only ten minutes to spare, partly because they don’t trust their children with any more free time than what will amount to just enough to stow their trunks on the train and lob their children on board, and partly because regardless of how monstrous they are, they’re still their children, and they don’t really want them to leave.

Lily keeps hugging Ivy to her by her shoulders, tucking her into the fall of her red hair and smelling the cold forest scent of her. She’s like James, her daughter, and she’s inherited the smell of the forest from his Animagus. Ivy doesn’t complain; as excited as she is for Hogwarts, she simultaneously dreads going. Her world, while small, is full of everyone she loves. She’s not quite sure she wants it to get bigger.

James is half-scanning the platform for threats as he allows his wife her goodbye. It’s never not stressful, having everyone he loves in one place that’s vulnerable and open; he keeps remembering the attack on the Hogwarts Express in their fifth year, and he knows it’s been years, but he can’t relax. He’d tried looking for Alaric earlier, thinking it’d be nice to have someone to point a wand at for the stress relief, but Sirius had started growling, and James really doesn’t have time for another holiday right now. It’d been hard enough to explain his absence last time to Amelia without incriminating his best friend, who everyone always seems so eager to accuse. Black Family prejudice, James thinks with feeling, is such an unspoken crime in their society. Just because he takes James for a week against his will, they automatically accuse him of kidnapping. It’s so unfair. Sirius deals with so much, and he stays so strong despite it.

Andromeda is keeping Ralston and Hardwin, her newest Potter proteges, occupied by explaining the barrier between the Muggle and magical platforms. Ralston and Hardwin have begun to show an unsettling preoccupation for taking things apart and putting them back together and wanting to know how exactly magic works. It’s an interest that Prongs knows at its best could make them highly gifted at spell deconstruction and counter curse creation, and at its worst could have them designing the first Magically powered firearm.

But it’s an interest that keeps them much quieter than Orion and Ivy’s love of chaos, so they’re continuing to encourage it. Parenting is hard. You choose your battles when you have children like these. (Besides, Griphook has espoused at length just how valuable the patent from the first magical firearm would be, and James suspects paying for Ivy and Orion’s future legal bills will seriously deplete the Black and Potter estates.)

The twins submit to hugs from their sister, however, who runs her fingers through Ralston’s sheaf of thick, black hair with a mournful “Minnow!” Before turning her attention to Hardwin’s frown and serious gaze behind his round glasses and wailing, “Flounder!”

The nicknames have stuck, because Ralston and Hardwin are like a school of fish; they’re never without each other. Ralston is quicksilver, curious and darting; Hardwin is cautious and grumpy and far too similar to what Lily remembers of her own father, and Ivy watched The Little Mermaid and has never been more certain a cartoon was based off a character than her crotchety little brother.

Neither boy protests the nicknames, arms wrapping tight around her waist as they bury their little heads in her stomach and cling to her, and Lily nearly says fuck it and gives in to the temptation to Stun her husband and take her little family back home through the Floo where no one can bother them ever again.

“Remember not to pick a fight with Peeves, at least not in first year,” James says, for maybe the fifth time.

“But also make him aware you’re our kids,” Sirius orders. “Stare him down, like you do with a dog. He smells fear. We owned that bitch. He worked for us.”

“Padfoot,” Remus hisses, because other parents are staring at them. He can’t stop himself from wrapping an arm around Orion’s shoulders and tousling his dark curls for the tenth time, and Orion doesn’t lean away from the touch, humming deep in his throat in a lupine manner.

Sirius’s expression falters from its merriness at the noise, revealing cracks of true sorrow like fault lines in the earth. When he’s hiding emotional pain, he tends to get more erratic. He’s already stuffed enough fireworks into both of their trunks to count as a felony. He reaches for their son and lifts his stubborn chin, cradling it in his hand. Orion nuzzles his palm, purple-gray eyes locked onto him like they have been since his first full moon. Sirius closes his eyes as though the sight pains him.

“You’ll see me in three weeks,” Orion reminds them softly, because he’s always been the bravest of them.

“Three weeks,” Sirius murmurs, and there’s a hint of silver in the gunmetal of his eyes, “is far too long to be away from you, pup.” Orion falters, and throws his arms around his waist, allowing both Remus and Sirius to encapsulate him.

“Remember what we told you,” Sirius says gruffly, tapping Orion’s chin. “You’re my son, and you take no shit in this world.”

“Only from us,” Remus rasps. “Although you certainly do your best to avoid even that.”

“I’ll remember.” Orion releases them, because the train is beginning to steam, and if they don’t leave now, they never will. Lily still hasn’t released Ivy; she’s having a fierce argument with James over where her dark head is nestled against her chest, insisting they revisit home tutoring, or she’ll divorce him for real this time. Lily finally relinquishes her hold only to cup her daughter’s cheeks.

“We’ll have a girls’ night in three weeks,” Lily says tremulously, her fingers trembling where they trace Ivy’s bone structure and down the bridge of her straight, high nose as though memorizing her. “And every month, all year.”

“I know,” Ivy says softly. “It’s the only reason I’m going.”

Lily blinks hard, then leans down to kiss her cheeks. Her lips linger near her ears.

“Remember, fawn,” she breathes. “For no man, and no cause.” She draws back. “Promise me.”

Ivy’s not certain what the words mean, but the fierce look in her mother’s eyes makes her aware she means it.

“For no man,” she repeats obediently, holding her gaze. “And no cause. I promise.”

Lily lets out a breath of relief and finally releases her daughter. “Be good, fawn.”

“Or whatever good means for you,” James adds. “It’s very relative, in our household.”

The children run for the train, which is beginning to move, and barely manage to clamber on board.

The four of them watch it until it’s out of sight, while Andromeda keeps half an eye on their emotional unraveling and another on the twins. They’re all aware that on some level, they’ve taken the excitement and magic out of Hogwarts for their children; they couldn’t wait to board that train, once, but they departed on it and arrived at a war, and the scars from that have never faded.

“It’s three weeks,” Lily says at last, although she hasn’t blinked from staring at where the train has disappeared. “It’s only three weeks.”

“And we’ll see them every month,” Moony adds, although that one night seems like a pittance, now. “Or more, depending on how often they get suspended.”

Lily’s bottom lip trembles. “I hope they get suspended a lot,” she hiccups, before hiding her head in James’s chest.

“Me, too,” Prongs confesses fervently, wrapping his arms around her. “I hope they’re so, so badly behaved.”

“What do we do, now?” Sirius asks, and none of them comment on how his voice cracks.

“Let’s get drunk,” James decides. “Let’s get so, so drunk, and break everything in my dining room.”

Lily begins crying in true. “Can I burn down our greenhouse?”

James cradles her cheeks and kisses her forehead. “You can burn down the whole garden,” he tells her earnestly. “Whatever helps you feel better, Flower.”

Andromeda pinches the bridge of her nose and turns to the two pairs of hazel eyes watching this fucking madness and learning by osmosis the best way to deal with your sad feelings is to destroy your own house. “Boys, we’re having a sleepover.”

She hopes they know she’s charging them extra for an overnight.

***

Ivy and Orion find an empty compartment halfway down the train.

“We start tonight,” Ivy says before the door has even closed. “After the feast.”

“How do we do it?” Orion asks. “Floor by floor, obviously, but do we start at the top or the bottom?”

“We start at the library,” Ivy decides. “We’re going to need to canvas by hand and record it all on parchment. We need to know some spells to make it easier. The magical scribing section—”

“Architecture,” Orion interrupts. “We need to be able to replicate floor plans. And we can’t use Kreacher to scour during the day because Dad and Pop will notice him missing and know we’re cheating.” He scowls. “And Tilly will tell.”

Ivy sighs and scrubs at her face. “Between the Gringotts break-in and this, are we even going to have time for classes?”

“We’ll skip them if it gets too much,” Orion says. “This is more important for our careers.”

They launch into their tactical planning session, ignoring the occasional slide of the door opening and closing as students peer in and promptly decide they want nothing to do with whatever this energy is before the school year even starts.

“Well, well,” says a voice. “These look like some determined firsties, Fred.”

“Couldn’t have said it better, George,” replies another voice. “But what are they so determined about?”

Ivy glances up and has to swallow back a noise of shock.

A pair of identical twins are peering in at them from the doorway, with flame red hair and freckles and matching, devious grins. But she doesn’t need to ask who they are. On the left side of their faces, a gruesome, matching scar stretches from the hollow of their throats to their temples, acidic and raw looking, twisting across their cheeks as though it melted the muscles. It’s a parting gift, Ivy knows, now, from Antonin Dolohov, the night Voldemort tortured the Prewett twins by making them watch the attack on the Burrow. 

Fred and George Weasley need no introduction.

“We’ve been given an assignment,” Orion says, barely bothering to glance up.

The twin on the left—Fred, Ivy thinks, although she has a harder time telling them apart when Ralston and Hardwin have made her life convenient by choosing not to be identical—tilts his head. “What kind of assignment?”

“We can’t make trouble,” Ivy says, “until we prove we’ve earned the right to make trouble.”

“Who told you that?” George looks baffled. “Trouble is free.”

“Not if you’re a Marauder,” Orion mutters, handing Ivy a book he smuggled out from Grimmauld on charmed parchments. “Think you can attempt that?” He jabs at a spell halfway down the page. “We’ll have to enchant the floor plans, so people don’t figure out what we’re up to.”

Ivy blinks at it. “It’s in Swedish,” she complains. “Isn’t there an easier one in English?”

Orion stares at her, unamused. “Sure, there is. Everyone else will know it.”

She sighs, relenting, and jots down learn basic Swedish by Christmas. “I’ll add it to the list.”

Neither of them has noticed how the twins have gone still, alert as hunting dogs in the presence of a fox.

“Did you say Marauder?” The one on the right says slowly.

“What do two little firsties--” the one on the left continues.

“Know about Marauders?” Finishes the one on the right.

Orion shoots them a dismissive look. “More than you,” he says. “Seeing as they’re our parents.”

The twins look as though they’ve been hit over the head.

“And who are your parents, exactly?” Asks the one on the right. Ivy decides he’s Fred. She doesn’t care if it’s George.

“James Potter, for me,” Ivy says without looking up. “Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, for him.”

“That’s impossible,” Fred says, as though she’s said something insulting to logic. “James Potter is next in line for Head Auror, and Sirius Black has an Order of Merlin.”

“You want us to believe they’re the Marauders?” George demands.

“You can believe whatever you want,” Ivy says waspishly. “They are what they are, and making a bargain with them is very demanding, so if you’d please—”

“James Potter turns into a stag,” George interrupts, grabbing his brother’s shoulder. “And Sirius Black—”

“A dog,” Fred breathes, looking as though his world has been absolutely rocked off its foundations. “Of course. Mum is always complaining they got off with no consequences.” He suddenly looks excited. “And they did it at Hogwarts, of course, it’s them—”

“Why are you both so obsessed with our dads?” Orion asks judgmentally.

The twins startle and stare at them, although their smiles have become much, much warmer.

“Little Prongslet,” Fred says.

“Padfoot spawn,” George says.

“You need anything,” Fred says.

“Anything at all,” George continues.

“And you come to us,” they say together.

Orion frowns at them suspiciously. “Why would we need anything from either of you?”

“Just hedging our bets,” Fred says.

“In return for a favor,” George adds.

“Have a nice train ride,” they say together, then close the door.

Orion looks at Ivy. “That was weird.”

“Dad’s famous,” Ivy says, already absorbed in the runes. “It’s probably nothing.”

**

Neville finds them a short while later, looking near tears.

“Did you take Trevor?” He demands frantically, glancing between the two of them.

“Like I’d take your toad,” Orion snaps. “Ivy can make me my own. I’ll find and feed him to Raider if you don’t stop accusing me, and that’ll give you something to whine about—”

Neville’s eyes narrow. “Trevor would poison your oversized pigeon from the inside out—”

 “Nev!” Ivy cheers in welcome, breaking the fight. Neville smiles, relaxing visibly at the sight of her. “Come sit.”

“But Trevor—” Neville tries.

“You’ll find him,” Ivy tells her godbrother. “If he’s on the train, the magic will remove him from the train.”

Neville relents and finally enters the compartment. Orion, who’s sitting on the same side as Ivy, pointedly kicks his feet up in the space next to her and shoots him a glare. Neville scowls back and settles into the seat across from her instead. It’s then they notice a tall, redheaded boy with gangling limbs hovering awkwardly in the doorway, glancing between the three of them as though he’s not sure what to make of them.

“Oh,” Neville flushes, looking embarrassed. “Sorry. This is Ron Weasley. He’s been helping me look for Trevor.”

Ivy smiles cheerfully at him, and Orion gives an insolent flick of his fingers in greeting. Ron returns her smile uncertainly, then edges into the compartment to sit near the windows.

“This is Ivy Potter, and that’s Orion Black,” Neville says, finishing the introductions.

“You’re a Black?” Ron Weasley asks, with so much revulsion and surprise in his voice that Ivy stiffens.

“And I’m a Potter,” Ivy says, with just as much emphasis, “and you’re a Weasley.” She turns a wide, sharp smile onto Ron. “Isn’t it so fun, saying all our surnames?”

“Easy, fawn,” Orion snickers, nudging her with his trainers. “Don’t go making friends too fast.”

Ron’s cheeks flush. “It’s not that it’s bad,” he mutters, “it’s just, well—” He shoots Orion a slightly apologetic look, “—they’re famous for all being nutters.”

“So are the Potters,” Ivy says. “My father is such a nutter, he famously convinced Orion’s father to become an illegal Animagus at fourteen. Sirius Black is my godfather, and Andromeda Black is my tutor, so I’m just as much a nutter as they are.” She tilts her head, green eyes narrowed as she smiles. “Is that a problem?”

“Shame if it is,” Orion puts in lazily. “Crazy people are famously unpredictable.”

“No,” Ron says, looking taken aback. “My dad’s a bit mad, too, if I think about it. He’s obsessed with Muggle electronics. He’s always messing with cars and ranting about planes.” He pauses, suddenly looking thoughtful. “His mother was a Black.”

“So, we’re all mad,” Ivy says, relaxing as if he’s passed a test.

“I’m not,” Neville says unhappily.

“You don’t count,” Orion tells Neville, before he and Ron begin talking about Quidditch. Ron follows the Chudley Cannons, of all teams, and as a Puddlemere fan, Orion cannot believe the stupidity of this. Ivy ignores them both; the Potters are historically from Wales, and anything that isn’t the Holyhead Harpies is considered sacrilege in their house.

They’ve only just reached an agreement on hating the Appleby Arrows when the compartment door flies open again, revealing a bushy haired, brown eyed girl who’s already in her Hogwarts robes. Ron scowls at her and Neville winces.

“Have you seen a toad?” She demands of Orion and Ivy. “Neville Longbottom has—” She pauses, spotting Neville where he shrinks into his seat and tries to look invisible. “Oh. Hello, Neville.”

“Hermione,” he says, with a faltering smile.

Hermione spies the stack of parchments in between Orion and Ivy, and her eyes brighten with interest. “What are you working on?”

Ivy slides the stack toward Orion, who swiftly makes it disappear. (Sirius had made the mistake of teaching them sleight of hand one summer and had promptly been sentenced to eating dinner alone upstairs for an entire month, which was a punishment their parents had decided on whenever one of them taught them something that should have been obviously off-limits. It was a highly effective punishment for the co-dependent Marauders. Sirius had had to lie down and yell through the floorboards to try and join their conversations, and Lily had made Kreacher sing Christmas carols to drown out his bellows for mercy, even though it was July).

“A project,” she says vaguely.

Hermione’s eyes sharpen. “What kind of project?”

“Personal research,” Orion says.

“What kind?” Hermione demands, settling into the space across from them despite Ron’s moan of protest. She hasn’t even introduced herself, Ivy realizes, and she looks as though she’s going to launch herself across the space and wrestle the papers from Orion. “If you’re already doing magic, you should be willing to tell others about it. I’ve done a bunch of spells myself, of course, once I discovered I was a witch, and they all came easily enough to me. I’m sure I could help you; I’ve already memorized all our textbooks. There’s no need to feel embarrassed if you’re not very good yet—”

“We’re very good,” Orion says flatly, because he’s always had less patience. “We just don’t want to tell you.”

Hermione huffs, and Ivy kicks Orion in the shin and offers her a pacifying smile. Lily had made her promise to be nice to muggleborn students no matter how much they might annoy her, because it was hard to be new to an entire world. Orion grumbles at her in Gobbledegook but relents.

“We’ll let you know if we need help,” Ivy says gently, and Hermione relaxes, offering her an uncertain smile before spinning back toward Neville.

“Did you find Trevor, then?” she asks bossily.

“Er.” Neville glances at Ivy, feeling hunted. “No, I—”

“That’s awfully irresponsible of you,” Hermione says disapprovingly. “Why have an animal, if you’re not going to take care of it? He could get stepped on or taken—”

“I think he’s smart, losing his toad as soon as he can,” Ron mutters. “No offense, mate, but toads aren’t exactly fashionable familiars.”

“Toads are easy to transfigure,” Ivy says in defense of Trevor, because she doesn’t disagree he’s mostly useless, but toads are still her favorite. 

Hermione spins back on her, nose wrinkling. “You can’t transfigure toads. That’s fourth year transfiguration.”

Orion and Neville share a rare look of commiseration, then burst out laughing.

“We’re not laughing at you,” Neville tells an offended looking Hermione. “We’re laughing because she makes everything into toads.”

“Really?” Hermione looks dubious but suddenly interested again as she swings back toward Ivy.  “That’s quite advanced. I wonder if—”

“Trevor,” Orion says solemnly, trying to stave off another round of questioning, “is still missing. Neville, you hate animals, to leave him alone like that. I knew you were a serial killer.”

Hermione spins back, re-focusing. “That’s right. Trevor. You really should keep looking for him, Neville—”

“Fine,” Neville grits out, “Fine.” He stands. “See you later, Ivy. Choke on a Cauldron Cake, Orion.”

Hermione and Ron both look taken aback, but Ivy just waves. “Bye, Nev!”

**

The compartment door swings open again twenty minutes later. Draco Malfoy stands in the entrance, framed by two massive boulders of boys.

Orion perks up like Christmas has come early.

“No,” says Ivy firmly, before slamming the door shut and magically locking it with a half-bastardized Ogham rune.

Malfoy splutters in the hallway and begins banging on the glass. “Potter!”

Orion pouts at her. “You never let me have any fun.”

**

All her efforts are for nothing, because Orion manages to push one of the human boulders overboard at the first-year boats when they get off the train and then drags Ivy into the boat with Malfoy and the other boulder. Both Malfoy and Orion end up overboard, while Ivy and the other boy—Crabbe, she finds out—awkwardly sit in embarrassed silence while they try to drown each other, spitting and shouting about something to do with Kreacher liking Orion better, until Hagrid comes by and rams their boat like a pirate, puncturing the bow. He scoops both boys from the lake and forces Crabbe and Ivy to board his vessel.

“You Sirius Black’s boy?” he barks at Orion. He squints, then snorts. “‘Course ye are. You stole his face, if you’re not.”

“Of course, I am,” Orion snaps, half-drowned. “Who else would do this?”

Draco kicks at him weakly from the bow. Orion grabs his foot, wrestling him for his shoe, then flings it overboard. Crabbe sighs and leans over the side, fishing around clumsily for Malfoy’s shoe.

Hagrid grunts, although there’s a hint of a smile on his face. “Your dads are good sorts.” He looks at where Draco gasps on the floor of the boat, blonde hair glued to his face. “Still. Seems excessive for day one, even for Sirius Black’s son.”

“I’m Ivy Potter,” Ivy says brightly, intervening with a charming smile. “I’ve heard everything about you. My parents said I should owl you to see if I could stop by your cottage for tea.”

Hagrid softens instantly, blushing red beneath his beard. “James and Lily remember me?”

“Of course, they remember you,” Ivy says as though it’s obvious. “They love you.”

Hagrid beams at her, then looks hesitantly at Draco. “Reckon you had a good reason,” he says at last, “for the attempted murder. Especially since you were willing to die in the attempt.” He shifts. “No need to tell McGonagall about it.”

“Oh, come on,” Draco says, and the rest of the boat ride is quite nice, in Ivy’s opinion, once Hagrid starts talking about creatures and they all agree to ignore Draco’s complaining. (Crabbe even offers an opinion about unicorns. It’s wrong, but they all politely let him contribute.)

***

McGonagall leads them into a small, empty chamber off the entrance hall where the first years huddle together and begins a long speech welcoming them to Hogwarts and explaining the houses. Orion tunes out most of it since it’s information he already knows, but he notices McGonagall’s gaze seems to keep lingering on him and Ivy with a wariness he finds familiar; it reminds him of Mad-Eye Moody when he stops by Grimmauld. He meets her gaze, and she blanches like she saw a ghost.

When he points it out to Ivy, she only brightens.

 “Our dads were her favorites, you know,” Ivy confides in her deafening whisper. “She’s just watching us because she’s hoping we’re in Gryffindor, but she’s too afraid to say anything.”

And Ivy winks at McGonagall, whose lips press so tightly together they disappear, and she loses her place in her speech, before promptly barking at them to stay here for a few minutes until she returns to fetch them.

The moment she leaves, Ivy begins scanning the milling, muttering crowd, before visible delight suffuses her face. She rushes toward a small gaggle of girls.

“Susan!” She hisses, practically vibrating with excitement.

A tall, austere looking girl with a long plait of auburn hair down her back whirls around and looses a breath of relief.

“Ivy,” she says delightedly, pulling the smaller girl into a brief hug. “I looked for you on the train, but I couldn’t find you—”

“We were in the back,” she says happily, tugging Orion forward. “You remember O, right?”

Susan rolls her eyes. “Of course, I remember your shadow.” She offers Orion a smile. “Hello, O.”

Orion waves back, unoffended. “Susan. Any guesses on what’s next?”

“No.” Susan sours, suddenly nervous. “Auntie Amelia wouldn’t tell me anything—”

Ivy stumbles hard, and Susan braces her at once with a squawk of annoyance and an outraged “I never!” Orion twists around, an incensed snarl on the tip of his tongue.

“Down, Black,” Pansy Parkinson says, rolling her eyes and brushing off her robes from her artfully delivered hip-check. She gives him a look of mixed amusement and annoyance. “You’ve never gotten better at sharing, have you?”

Orion scowls at her.

“Pansy!” Ivy cries out, somehow even more delighted. “I should have known you’d try to kill me!”

“A true friend stabs you in the front, Potter,” Pansy snipes, although she leans down to fuss with Ivy’s French braid and reties the red ribbon at the end, then greets Susan with a curt, friendly nod. Ivy tangles their fingers together happily and gives them a brief squeeze, and Pansy’s lips quirk up with exasperated fondness, as if Ivy is something she quite likes against her will.

“It’s been ages,” Ivy says complainingly, before leaning against Pansy like a content, sun-warmed cat. “I think my father was more upset than I was when you had to cancel our last annual play date to visit your grandmother in Prague.”

“I think my father misses your father, too,” Pansy confesses, wrinkling her nose. “He can’t draw his wand on anyone else’s parents I’m friends with, and he always says, that James Potter is a sensible man when he’s mooning over him.” The girls shriek with laughter, and Pansy smirks. “Mother thinks he’ll leave her for him.”

“Is that why James always draws his wand on Auntie Amelia?” Susan asks with a scandalized giggle. “She was beginning to think he had to go to a mind healer.”

Orion waves his hand vaguely. “Alaric Parkinson and James Potter have a whole … thing.” He lets his disapproval of this thing color the word.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Pansy says with a sniff. “Mutual distrust turned into some type of mutual crush is more accurate.”

“They pine for each other,” Ivy puts in, with a dramatic hand to her forehead and a swoon into Susan’s chest.

“Oh, that’s adorable,” Susan gushes, and Orion hides a scowl. It’s not adorable. Why does Prongs need new friends? He has Dad, he doesn’t need Alaric.

“My dad wanted to ask yours to hang out, actually,” Ivy recalls. “Mum and I thought they might become real friends, other than this enemies-to-lovers thing they have going on.”

“You didn’t tell me that!” Pansy hisses, swatting Ivy on the arm. She rolls her eyes again when Orion glares at her and inspects Ivy’s arm, who happily holds it out to him without complaint. “My dad never mentioned it!”

“I don’t think he asked.” Ivy frowns, her forehead crinkling as she thinks. “Uncle Sirius surprised him with a boys’ trip that weekend that went on so long Mum had to go ask for him back, and Dad never brought it up again.”

Susan’s brows rise, because her aunt works in law enforcement, Orion remembers with a silent curse. “That’s … strange.”

“James really needed that trip,” Orion cuts in smoothly, because there’s no need for all these questions, James is perfectly fine, and they’re both being nosy. “Sometimes, he gets stressed and needs to get away.” He feigns a careless shrug. “My dad always knows when he needs a break.”

Pansy and Susan stare at him, then glance at Ivy, who’s perfectly oblivious and nodding along in agreement, as if her dad probably being held captive by his best friend is normal for their family.

“A break,” Pansy repeats. “Sure.”

Orion scowls at them over Ivy’s head.

“Has anyone seen Neville?” Ivy asks, gripping Susan’s shoulders to stand on her tiptoes and peer around the poorly lit room. “I lost him ages ago—”

“If we’re all done talking,” McGonagall says tartly, staring at the four of them as though they personally spit in her teacup because first years are supposed to be nervous and obedient this early on and Ivy Potter is already inciting chaos,“I can bring you into the Hall to be Sorted.”

“We’re done, Professor,” Ivy says with complete sincerity. “Thanks for checking, first, that’s so thoughtful of you.”

McGonagall’s eyebrow twitches and she whirls around without another word.

“She’ll be heartbroken if we’re not in Gryffindor,” Ivy tells Susan and Pansy with a sigh. “You can tell.”

**

The Great Hall is a spectacular sight, with thousands of floating candles and an enchanted ceiling to look like the night sky that reminds Orion achingly of the observatory at home. Ivy is fascinated by the gold plates and goblets on the table and visibly deflates when Hermione Granger butts in to inform her they’re enchanted to returned to the kitchens when the meal finishes.

“Even if someone removes them from the Hall?” Orion presses, looking for a loophole.

Hermione frowns at them, looking scandalized at the thought of someone disobeying a rule. “Why would someone take the plates—”

“Gold plates,” Ivy corrects, equally scandalized at this casual minimization of gold, which is sacred, in favor of plates, which are boring. “They’re made of gold—”

A professor coughs pointedly behind them, and Hermione flushes red and shoots them both a glare as though they tried to get her in trouble before swinging back around to watch McGonagall set up a four-legged stool and put a demented looking hat on it. Orion rolls his eyes. She’s not going to get additional points for watching.

The Sorting Hat sings its song, and just like that, they begin getting picked off one-by-one.

A blonde girl named Hannah Abbot becomes the first Hufflepuff, and before Ivy can fully prepare herself, McGonagall calls out in a slightly strangled voice, “Black, Orion!”

Ivy reflexively clenches Orion’s hand. He’s never first, she thinks, with faint, distant panic; he goes where she goes, it’s not the other way around, and what if—

Orion gives her a cheeky smile. “See you at the other end of the alphabet,” he says, then swaggers off to the stool. There’s a pause where McGonagall closes her eyes as though in prayer, then steels herself and drops the hat on his head.

**

Oh, says a small voice inside Orion’s ear, and it sounds amazed, as though it’s looking at a marvel of the world. You are brave.

I’ve heard that, Orion thinks back with a grin, once or twice.

**

The Sorting Hat has barely settled upon Orion’s head before it’s shouting, “GRYFFINDOR!” to an explosion of cheers from the table on the far left, who stamp with delight at the lightning quick sorting. Orion grins at Ivy, hands the hat back to McGonagall who for some reason has her eyes closed, then takes off to the Gryffindor table. Ivy sees the Weasley twins shaking his shoulders and dragging him into an empty seat.

“Poor Minerva,” someone murmurs at the high table behind them, as though in lament.

“Bones, Susan!” McGonagall calls, determinedly not looking at her own House.

Susan quickly sorts into Hufflepuff to loud cheers, which Ivy joins in. Susan shoots her a pleased smile from the Hufflepuff table, and Pansy and Ivy close ranks, stuck waiting for the end of the alphabet, as is the lot of P names. Ivy scans down the line of swiftly dwindling first years and finally spots Neville, white in the face to the point of looking as though he might faint, next to Ron Weasley. She waves until he catches the movement and twists toward her, showing her the naked terror in his brown eyes. His hand lifts then drops, an aborted movement toward his scar hidden beneath his bangs.

She’s vaguely aware of Hermione Granger becoming a Gryffindor, only because Ron groans loudly in despair. 

You’ll be fine, Ivy mouths, but for the first time, he doesn’t look as though he believes her.

And when McGonagall finally calls, “Longbottom, Neville!” The Hall explodes with whispers, students rising in their seats to peer at him and murmuring madly among themselves. Neville shrinks in on himself further, shoulders hunched, then starts with jerky movements toward the stool, stumbling over his own robes in his rush to make it there. 

“They’re like seagulls,” Pansy murmurs in amazed distaste as McGonagall drops the hat over Neville’s head, blessedly blocking his view from the teeming, peering crowd. “They’ll never leave him alone.”

Ivy scowls out at the hall, suddenly deciding that her mum was quite right about most of the Wizarding population being no better than vultures. Neville wilts with pressure, and she hates that she can’t take it from him.

“They’ll learn to leave him alone,” she says dangerously, and Pansy hums her agreement.

The Sorting Hat takes a long, long time with Neville, which does nothing to quell the whispers. Even the professors are whispering, muttering that he’s approaching a Hat Stall.  She can see his knuckles gripped white on the stool, as though he’s fighting with something, and—

“GRYFFINDOR!” The Hat finally shouts, and the hall explodes into the loudest cheer yet. Neville lifts the hat, looking white with a mixture of dread and relief, and practically runs to the Gryffindor table, sinking into the seat between Orion and Seamus Finnegan as though he wants to disappear.

After that, it seems to move swiftly. Draco Malfoy scowls at Ivy and gives Pansy an indignant look that makes her roll her eyes as he struts by, and the Hat barely thinks twice before announcing him a Slytherin. Pansy follows him shortly into Slytherin with a smug smile of satisfaction, and Ivy cheers loudly, ignoring the looks from the other first years.

And then, finally—

“Potter, Ivy!” McGonagall calls, as though bracing herself.

Ivy makes herself walk forward at the controlled pace Andromeda taught her and sits gracefully on the stool, tilting her head back for McGonagall to drop the hat over her eyes.

**

Well, now, says the Sorting Hat, what do we have—

Yes, hi, Ivy interrupts him. Gryffindor. Thanks.

The Sorting Hat is quiet for a moment, and Ivy gets the mental impression it’s staring at her with astonishment.

You know, it begins again, a little testier, we usually at least have an introduct—

No, yeah, it’s all sorted. O is in Gryffindor, and Nev is too, obviously, and we both know I’m a Gryffindor. So. We’re all set here. She pauses, then adds, thanks for your hard work.

Dad always told her; people like to be thanked. He was talking about the Aurors who reported to him, of course, but in this situation, it did feel a bit like the hat—

I do NOT, interrupts the Sorting Hat, beginning to sound indignant, report to you.

Oh. Sorry. Ivy’s silent for a moment, then can’t help herself: Gryffindor, then, thanks.  

I haven’t even told you about your potential, the Sorting Hat rages. You have skills and traits that fit almost every house, and you’ll come away from this with a much better UNDERSTANDING of yourself if you make a balanced choice--

I don’t need to hear all THAT, Ivy thinks back quickly, feeling revolted. Balanced choices sounded like balanced breakfasts, and she hates those. Especially since we BOTH already know what you decide on. I already understand myself, and I’ll just figure out the rest on my own. Gryffindor, please and thank youuuuuuuu—

The Sorting Hat is silent for a long moment, while she repeatedly spawns the word Gryffindor at it like the mental equivalent of poking it with a stick, hoping to irritate it into agreeing with her. Really, what use is knowing herself? She already knows herself, thanks very much.

… Based off that answer, you are in fact perfect for Gryffindor, it says drily. Very well. It’s been a pleasure, Miss Potter, as … direct as you’ve made this. But I think it’s time for—

You’re going with Gryffindor, right? Ivy butts in. Then, because at this point it’s a mental reflex: Gryffindor. Thanks.

STOP THANKING ME, the Sorting Hat howls at her. I was GETTING TO THAT, if you’d just let me FINISH A SENTENCE!!!

… Gryffindor, thanks, Ivy thinks at it mutinously, because it doesn’t need to be so rude about it.

The Sorting Hat bellows “GRYFFINDOR!” to the hall and tries to backflip off her head from sheer frustration, desperate to get away from her.

McGonagall starts at the loud shout, and even though she knows it was a foregone conclusion, she can’t help feeling slightly sorry for herself. Was it just her imagination, or did Sprout and Flitwick just fucking high five?

Did the Sorting Hat sound aggravated? No, she’s overthinking it; she’s projecting. She’s seen hundreds of ceremonies. The hat doesn’t get annoyed at students.

But it was on Ivy Potter’s head …

No. She’s overthinking it.

“Here you go,” Ivy says brightly, handing her the Sorting Hat as the Hall explodes into applause. “He gets awfully snippy, doesn’t he? Kept trying to make me find myself.” She makes a face, as if the Sorting Hat had asked her to eat her vegetables instead of done a basic tenet of its literally ordained duty.

Dread sinks cold claws through McGonagall’s stomach as the Sorting Hat quivers with helpless fury in her hand. She pets it absentmindedly in commiseration.

“Happy to be in your house, Professor!” Ivy Potter says, beaming mischievously and that is James’s smile no, dear Merlin, no, before she races off to the Gryffindor table to thunderous applause and slides into the seat Orion bloody Black saved for her. 

**

In the aftermath of the welcome feast, the Common Room is dead silent at 1 a.m., an hour of ghosts as the castle sleeps.

Ivy finds Orion at the foot of the girls’ dormitory stairs, scowling ferociously at the steps.

“They won’t let me up them,” he complains as she offers him a hand and hoists him up. “This castle is sexist.”

“Life is sexist,” Ivy says, without even realizing it’s one of the smartest things she’s ever said. She throws the cloak at him. “Come on. Let’s get looking.”

The portrait opens and closes, and only the fire is there to witness it.

***

Dear Minerva,

Congratulations on your latest Gryffindors! We are also very sorry

Perhaps a bit of advice on managing outsmarting bargaining our children: Ivy and Orion do best when they have something to fixate on. Ivy and Orion do their absolute worst when they are bored.

See you at the next full moon,

James, Sirius, and Remus

“What does that even mean?” Minerva screams at the owl, who only blinks back at her blankly, as though bearing witness to her complete nervous breakdown was far less entertaining than it thought it would be.

***

In Minerva’s first Transfiguration class with the Gryffindor first years, several things swiftly become apparent.

Ivy Potter is a prodigy. She sleeps through her entire lecture, using her parchment as a pillow instead of taking a single note (much to the disdain of Hermione Granger, who keeps huffing loudly and glaring at her), only waking when the sound of students casting spells grows tumultuously loud. She then gives the barest glance at the board to read the incantation and turns her matchstick into a needle on her first bloody try. She hums in a pleased way, stabs it into her own hand to test its sharpness like a psychopath, and goes back to sleep.

Hermione Granger lets out a noise of complete frustration, and McGonagall can’t entirely blame her. Potters are frustrating creatures.

Orion Black gets it on his third try, tests its sharpness by reaching across the aisle and stabbing it into Neville Longbottom’s shoulder (who responds by hitting him in the head with a book bag without looking, and wasn’t Neville supposed to be shy?), then goes back to sleep, as well.

Every alarm bell in McGonagall’s head starts ringing. Why aren’t they sleeping? What are they doing at night if they ARE NOT SLEEPING?

She clears her throat loudly over the pair of them, and they straighten, growing alert.

“Well done, Ms. Potter, Mr. Black,” she says loudly, because she has to admire the spell work involved. It won’t do for the other students to see she doesn’t praise exceptional work, or for them to sense her terror and despair.

Ivy smiles at her, and it’s so much like James that McGonagall feels herself temporarily soften. “Thank you, Professor,” she says drowsily. “Do you have anything harder to do?”

The alarm bells are ringing so loudly, McGonagall feels herself getting a headache.

“Not today,” she says through gritted teeth. “It’ll take most of the students the week to master this.”

“Oh.” Ivy elbows Orion, who slides her his book bag to use as a pillow. “Okay, then. Guess we’ll sleep until next week.”

And she goes back to sleep.

(The Fat Lady is insistent she has not seen them exiting after curfew, despite McGonagall’s extended interrogation.)

***

Orion tenses the moment they enter the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, then grabs Ivy by her wrist and drags her to the very back row.

“Smells bad,” he mutters, refusing to relinquish Ivy’s wrist as he shoves her into the corner seat, so her back is to the wall, and she faces the room with Orion’s body as a buffer. “Smells really bad.”

Ivy wrinkles her nose sympathetically for his werewolf senses. The onion smell is extremely strong, now that the door’s closed. Poor Quirrell looks embarrassed when Orion grabs his nose and manually pinches it shut, and begins stuttering even worse than usual with nervous, darting looks toward the pair of them.

“He’s bad news,” Orion says flatly as they leave the room, taking in deep gulps in the corridor. “Smells worse than Neville.”

Neville kicks him hard in the back of the knee as he walks past, and Ron adjusts his pace to allow it, already used to these random acts of violence Neville only directs toward Orion and occasionally Draco Malfoy, who seems to have chosen Neville as his alternate rival when Orion’s too busy to pay attention to him.

“He might have a skin condition?” Ivy tries. “Some people just smell. Maybe he sweats a lot. I can ask Mum to send him some prescription deodorant.”

Quirrell slams the classroom door behind them with more force than necessary.

Those children are idiots, his turban hisses at him, feeling deeply insulted about the deodorant comment.

***

Potions Class is in the dungeons on Fridays, and it’s their only shared class with the Slytherins. Ivy vacillates at breakfast between being extremely pleased she’ll be able to see Pansy, and extremely annoyed Orion and Draco will be in the same, confined space for a double class period.

“And it’s Snape,” Ron adds gloomily. “Everyone knows he favors Slytherins.”

“Well, he won’t favor us,” Orion says, and Ivy snorts her agreement. Neville winces.

“What’d you two do to him?” Seamus asks curiously.

“We didn’t do anything,” Ivy says, “but our parents hate him, and he hates them.” At the gawking looks they receive, Ivy shrugs. “They were all in school together.”

“It didn’t go well,” Orion puts in. “For the school, or Snape.”

The Slytherins are loitering outside the Potions classroom when they arrive, and Ivy makes a beeline for Pansy, ignoring the other girl’s show of complaining when she wraps both arms around her waist and hugs her happily from behind. Pansy, exasperated but pleased, introduces her to Daphne Greengrass, a pretty blonde who offers her a warm but cautious smile, and Millicent Bullstrode, who scowls at her suspiciously. Ivy ignores the hostility as well as the looks the other Gryffindors are shooting her and begins chattering away happily with Pansy and Daphne.

Ivy’s departure leaves Orion to his own devices, which means sidling up to where Malfoy stands with his cronies to annoy him.

“Cousin,” he croons, loving the way rage flickers across his pale face. He pets his head, noting with relish he’s taller than Malfoy. “Green washes you out, I’m afraid.”

Malfoy smacks his hand away like a spitting cat, flushing bright pink. Crabbe and Goyle menacingly crack their knuckles behind him, showing all the sentience of moving boulders. Orion ignores them, feeling slightly bad about the way Goyle had almost drowned in the lake before they all remembered he’d kicked him into it.

“We’re not cousins,” he spits. “And every Malfoy has worn green at this school since its founding, something you would know nothing about—”

“Every Malfoy has looked bad in green, then,” Orion says pityingly, reaching out to straighten Malfoy’s collar. “It’s harsh on your skin tone, makes you look sallow—”

Malfoy flails away, half-mad.

“Stop touching me,” he snaps.

“Don’t be like that, cuz,” Orion pleads earnestly, “I’m just trying to make sure you look presentable and don’t embarrass the family—”

“POTTER!” Malfoy roars, out of patience as he spins toward the girls. “Come fetch your pet!”

Pansy scowls at him, and Daphne matches it. “She’s busy, Draco.”

“I don’t care if she’s busy, she’s the only one that can control him,” Malfoy snaps. “You always take her when I need her—”

“Get your own Potter,” Pansy shoots back, growing annoyed. “I have this one—”

“They don’t exactly grow on trees! Parkinson, give her back—”

“Don’t fetch me, fawn,” Orion says perversely, ignoring the snickers from the watching Gryffindors and the mild interest of the Slytherins who are watching the power dynamics as though it’s a quidditch match, “We’re just starting to bond—”

“We are not bonding,” Malfoy retorts.

“It’s a breakthrough—”

“There is no breakthrough, you half-blood mutt—”

“That’s such a cute nickname,” Orion goads relentlessly, reaching out to boop Malfoy on the nose. “Can I call you Pointy Pure Blood—”

“I’m not pointy—”

“Pointy, don’t be like that—”

The Potions classroom door slams open, revealing Severus Snape in all his greasy, bat-like glory.

“Everyone shut up and go sit down,” he snaps. “The next person who talks gets detention.”

Inside, Snape engages in a long, droning lecture about bottling fame and brewing glory that they doze for most of, before spinning like a top toward Ivy.

“Potter,” he barks. “What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”

Ivy doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s a near thing, because really? Her grandfather was a potioneer, and her mother is a healer who received her Potions Mastery in her spare time from St. Mungo’s. Her father made up rhymes to help her study, reciting them in his deep, warm baritone to make them all laugh.

Wormwood and asphodel, one way ticket straight to hell—

Ivy misses her parents with sudden ferocity.

“The Draught of Living Death, sir,” she says aloud, keeping her tone pleasant.

Snape’s mouth tightens in an unpleasant manner. “Black,” he grits out, “Where would I look for a bezoar?”

“Goat’s stomach,” Orion says, and he does roll his eyes. He’s an Auror’s child, and he’s spent half his weekends at uncomfortable dinners with Mad-Eye Moody, who’s been white knuckling his PTSD for the better half of a decade like it’s a bad cold he just needs to shake off. He knows two dozen ways to cure poisonings. Moody even demonstrated the best way to gut a goat for him when he was nine, although Remus got home before Kreacher could return from the farm for the practical part of his demonstration.

Snape looks furious, now. “Goat’s stomach, sir.” Orion just stares at him, unimpressed, and he gets a nasty look in his eyes. “What’s the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane, Black?”

Ivy stiffens, green eyes narrowing as she glares at Snape.

“They’re the same,” Orion says, not missing a beat, although she can feel him tensing slightly beside her. Andromeda’s training is thorough enough that his unease doesn’t show, but Ivy feels her own lip curling back. “Also known as aconite.”

Snape swings back toward Ivy. “Describe the smell of Amortentia exactly, Potter.”

“That’s a trick question, sir,” Ivy says, smiling politely. “It smells differently depending upon what each individual loves.” Her smile grows sharper. “For instance, when my mother smells it, she smells my grandmother’s garden, and lavender blueberry cake, and broom polish and pine for my father’s cologne—”

“Enough,” Snape snarls at her.

Ivy tilts her head in feigned confusion, smiling like a knife. “I’m sorry, sir. Was it something I said? It’s smelled the same to her since she was fifteen, so she was certain when she told me.”

Snape’s face twitches involuntarily. Orion loses his composure and begins laughing uncontrollably.

“Ten points from Gyffindor,” he hisses, before twisting toward the board and beginning to bark out instructions for a simple potion to cure boils.

“But they answered it right,” Hermione mutters, sounding scandalized. She has her hand folded on the desk in disappointment; he never even looked to call on anyone else. “What kind of professor takes points away for being right?”

Ron eyes the Potions Master warily, then turns his gaze onto where Ivy and Orion are both glowering back at him. “I don’t think any of that was about being right.”

By the end of the class, Snape has shifted his attention to berating Neville as though he’s personally wronged him, who grows so nervous he melts Seamus’s cauldron in a cloud of acid green smoke. When Ivy tries to leave her own station to take him to the hospital wing, Snape takes five more points from her, accusing her of seeking attention by using her godbrother.

Ivy leaves in an absolute fury.

“My mother,” she says loudly, “has impeccable taste, if that was her other option.”

The Potions classroom door slams shut so loudly behind them it shakes.

***

“That took forever,” Ivy hisses to Orion, making room for him under the cloak. The common room fireplace crackles and pops, and they both tense. “I thought they would never leave.”

When they open the portrait hole, Neville and Ron are already halfway down the corridor, Hermione chasing after them in her bathrobe like an enraged goose as she whisper-shouts at them. 

“Where are they going?” Ivy wonders, impressed at the gall of them.

“Somewhere we aren’t,” Orion says waspishly. “They’re going to bring half the castle down on them like amateurs, running around like that.” He turns. “Come on. We almost have that replicating spell down.”

They hear a lot of banging and screaming from the empty classroom where they sit with their stolen library books, but neither of them bother to check. Neville is pale faced at breakfast the next morning, and Ron sits beside him looking as though he’s seen a ghost. Hermione stalks straight by both with a glare and slides into the seat next to Ivy with a huff.

Ivy offers her a smile and slides her some fruit, and Hermione relaxes slightly. Orion scowls at her but he contains most of his grumbling to Greek.

Hermione glares at Ron and Neville all throughout breakfast, muttering under her breath. Draco, Ivy notices, is staring at the Gryffindor table with a crestfallen expression.

“Is something wrong?” Ivy finally asks, bemused.

“Don’t worry about it,” Hermione snaps. “They only nearly killed me.”

“Oh,” Ivy says, because that’s normal for her. “All right, then. I thought it was serious.”

Hermione does a double take, but Ivy’s already returned to her toast.

***

During the second week, McGonagall tries separating them.

“Ms. Potter, why don’t you sit with Ms. Patil and Ms. Brown, today?”

“That doesn’t work, Professor,” Seamus Finnigan interjects apologetically, before she can even try moving them.

“Flitwick and Sprout both tried that,” Lavender Brown adds. “And they just shout at each other from across the room the whole time. It doesn’t seem to bother them.”

“It’s a nightmare,” Ron Weasley moans. “None of us can concentrate. Please, Professor—”

“It’s fine,” Orion says. “I have good hearing.”

“And I have a loud voice,” Ivy adds cheerfully, already picking up her bag to head toward Susan Bones’s table, who slides over to welcome her.

Ivy and Orion both sleep through the lecture again and transfigure their marbles into rocks within the first three minutes. Orion throws his at Neville. Ivy goes back to sleep.

(“I haven’t seen them,” The Fat Lady shouts, exasperated. “They’re not sneaking out!”

“They’re using the windows,” McGonagall says, already moving. “You’re right.”)

***

Neville nearly breaks his neck during their flying lesson.

“Nobody moves until I’m back from the infirmary,” Madame Hooch barks, helping him to his feet.

“Why are you looking at us?” Ivy demands, twirling her broom like a staff.

Madame Hooch dearly looks like she wants to leave Neville to his fate, but she still hoists him over her shoulder and starts sprinting for the castle.

“Hey, look,” Orion says, mere seconds after she’s out of sight as he squats in the grass. “He dropped his Rememberall.” He hefts it in his hand, then looks at Ivy, who’s already mounting her broom. “Catch?”

“Catch,” Ivy says.

“You’ll break it!” Parvati scolds them.

“You’ll get expelled,” Hermione adds in a shrill voice.

Malfoy sneers. “You’ll never catch that.”

“Go to the top of the Astronomy tower and drop it straight down, O,” Ivy directs, already moving. “It’s a shame there’s not more cliffs around here.”

Ivy is on the Quidditch team by the end of the day, and McGonagall celebrates herself for thinking of a way to keep her occupied along with organizing shelf space for the Quidditch Cup, which is about to live in her office for the next seven years. James Potter might have raised a crossroads demon, but the demon can fly. She's not sure if Ivy's aware she can die.

“I want her in double sessions,” she growls at Oliver Wood, who looks both delighted and alarmed. “Morning and night. Afternoon if you can manage it. I’ll write you any note you need, just keep her busy.”

James Potter sends her a basket of gold bars the next morning, along with a note that just says, thinking of you this Thursday :). She’s not sure whether it’s an apology or a bribe, but she keeps them anyway.

***

Lily steps through the fireplace into Minerva’s office and throws herself at her daughter.

“You’ve gotten taller,” she murmurs frantically, kissing the top of her head. She spies Orion, then drags him into her arms as well with a dry sob of joy. “You’ve both gotten taller.”

Orion returns her hug, then peers past her toward the fire. “Where are Prongs and my dads?”

“Sirius is finishing up his shift. They’ll be here in fifteen.”

“Good,” McGonagall says bitingly. “I want to have a word with them.”

“James is bringing you something,” Lily tries.

McGonagall glares at her. “Is it another basket of gold?”

Lily clears her throat and turns back to Orion, handing him a flask. “Here, pup.” He takes it with a sigh, settling himself in a squishy armchair in the corner to drink it.

“Albus asked me to remind you,” McGonagall says tentatively, “that Hogwarts is more than happy to provide his Wolfsbane. Severus is a capable—”

Lily’s eyes flash, and McGonagall stops short.

“Please thank the headmaster for me, but tell him that won’t be necessary,” Lily says coolly. “I prefer to provide for my family myself.”

“Lily,” McGonagall lowers her voice, because she remembers a happy, redheaded child hunched over a journal in the library with a dark-haired Slytherin who smiled at her like she wore stars in her hair. “Severus might be a bitter man, but he wouldn’t tamper with a child’s—”

“I don’t know what he’d do,” Lily snaps, keeping her voice low. Her jaw works angrily. “Remind them that I learned to brew it with Alice. In case they forgot about her.”

“No,” McGonagall says softly. “I don’t think he’s forgotten.”

“Good,” Lily says, turning back to her daughter, who waits impatiently at the fireplace, eager to go home. “Because I haven’t forgiven.”

***

During her third week, Minerva decides to take James’s advice.

“This is a nice saucer,” McGonagall tells Ivy, “But the pattern is uneven.”

“It is?” Ivy pops up, frowning at the saucer. She gave them wooden coasters today to transfigure into saucers, so they can get a feel for how different materials react to being molded. Ivy got hers on her first try again and has been dozing ever since.

“Notice how it still looks like bark a bit on the sides?” McGonagall says, running her finger along the rim of Ivy’s saucer. “You made it ridged.”

Ivy peers at it, and hums reflexively. “Oh, I see. You want it smooth?”

“Can you make it smooth?” McGonagall tests.

“Of course, I can,” Ivy says absently, spinning her wand through her fingers. “I can transfigure anything.”

McGonagall is beginning to wonder if that’s true, and how exactly she limits the fall-out of the next seven years if it is. She’s shown a gift for Charms and is at the top of her year, but Flitwick says she needs to work at it. Transfiguration is like breathing to her. She’ll need to apprentice her, she realizes with dread, by fifth year latest if it continues to be this easy.

“Professor?” Hermione Granger’s shrill, panicked voice interrupts them. “Are we being graded on the patterns and presentation? You didn’t say that during the lecture, and you didn’t teach us how to account for the aesthetics in the incantation. You said we were just focusing on the material transformation at this stage—”

“Ivy Potter is being graded on the patterns, Ms. Granger,” McGonagall says, because she’s given up on being fair, and James said to give her tasks. “So is Mr. Black, if he cares to wake up.”

“Don’t care,” Orion mumbles, waving one hand in a carry-on gesture and keeping his head down on his desk. “Saucer’s a saucer. Deduct points, Professor.”

Hermione bristles. “Why are only they being graded on the patterns? We should all be graded on the patterns—”

“Are you mad?” Ron Weasley hisses at her, kicking the back of her chair. “Stop talking. The rest of us still have wood, including you—”

“Your father,” McGonagall says loudly, ignoring the two bickering in favor of the large, emerald eyes staring up at her guilelessly, and why are they rimmed in red where is she going at night, “could do a lily pattern in his first year.”

Ivy straightens and snatches the saucer back, examining it carefully. “I can do a lily pattern.”

“Make stars,” Orion yawns, turning over to rest his head on Ivy’s forearm. “They’re more interesting.”

“But you haven’t taught us how to do patterns—” Hermione Granger tries again.

But Ivy is already fixated on her saucer because she doesn’t need to be taught this to intuit it, so McGonagall decides to count it as a win and grade her on a ridiculous curve for the year.

(“Your stars are a little pointy,” McGonagall lies with a straight face at the end of the lesson, when Ivy hands her a saucer ringed in pristine blue and gold starbursts.

Ivy takes it back and frowns at it. “You’re right.”)

***

Heads of House Meeting, October

“And how are the first years settling in?” Albus rumbles.

There’s a collective outburst of groans from the staff.

“I see.” He has a knowing twinkle in his eye. “Let’s start with the easiest one, then. How’s Neville Longbottom doing?”

“The boy’s shy,” Flitwick says reluctantly. “And he seems to lack confidence, apart from attacking Orion Black. He struggles with most incantations, although he’s told me he’s using his father’s wand. Augusta refused to get him his own.”

Albus looks displeased at that and lets out a long, weary sigh. “I see she’s still holding onto Frank.”

“She can hold onto Frank all she wants,” McGonagall says tartly, “if she learns to appreciate the grandson she has. He’s behind the class in Transfiguration, but he shows a strong understanding of the material.” She sighs. “But his wand movements lack certainty. He second guesses himself.”

“He has a talent for Herbology,” Sprout says loyally. Dumbledore looks pleased at this and asks her a few follow-up questions to gauge his abilities. Snape scoffs and rolls his eyes.

“So, he’s a near Squib, but he can garden,” he sneers. “How wonderful. He’ll make a useful groundskeeper when Hagrid retires.”

“Severus,” Minerva barks, twisting in her seat to scowl at him. “He’s a child.”

“Talk to me when he’s been inflicted on your Potions lab,” Snape shoots back. “The most he can do in your classroom is stare at his desk and cry. He blows mine up. He’s utterly hopeless. If I could ban him from my classroom, I would.”

“Severus,” Albus murmurs, a note of censure in his voice. “He’s young. Be patient.” Severus bares his teeth at him, and Albus sighs. “Are Ivy Potter and Orion Black proving troublesome?”

“They’re not troublesome,” McGonagall says tartly, “because they’re mainly asleep.” Dumbledore stares at her. “They’re doing something at night, I’d bet my broomstick on it.”

A strange smile crosses Dumbledore’s face. “Let’s not accuse them out of—”

“No, they’re definitely doing something,” Flitwick interjects. “I don’t know what, but they are.”

“Are their grades suffering for it?” Dumbledore probes.

“Well, no, because they don’t seem to need the classes—”

“Then it’s fine!” Dumbledore declares, clapping his hands.

Sprout stares at him. “It’s not fine. That’s the other problem. They’re asleep all day, and still the top of their year.”

“It’s driving Granger insane,” Flitwick mutters with sympathy. “We might need to consider moving them up a—”

“Young minds need seven years to develop,” Dumbledore cuts him off firmly. “We’ve seen this curve before, with advanced youth from wizarding families. Their peers will catch up to them eventually, or the coursework will.”

“I seriously doubt that will be the case in transfiguration at least,” McGonagall says, and she can’t hide the awed pride in her voice. “Ivy Potter might be a once in a century prodigy in the subject.” Dumbledore’s eyes light up, and McGonagall grits her teeth. “That is bad, Albus. She is bored, and much like James or an extremely motivated border collie, she will make up things to entertain herself if she gets too bored.” She slumps backward, pinching her nose bridge.“I’ll need to take her as an apprentice by fifth year if this continues.”

“I’ll take her,” Albus says abruptly, and the room stares at him in bewilderment. “I was the Transfiguration professor before you were, Minerva. It’s my expertise.”

“Well, I know how to manage her,” McGonagall replies stubbornly, suddenly annoyed. Albus should find his own personal demon protege, instead of trying to take hers. She’s invested at this point.

“You just said she’s ungovernable,” Albus argues.

“I’m learning to manage her,” McGonagall retorts, because she thinks she might have Stockholm Syndrome. “You just keep her busy by inventing tasks with more and more elaborate criteria without teaching her how to do any of it, and she occupies herself figuring it out.”

“That’s hardly a foolproof plan, Minerva,” Severus says drily.

McGonagall glares at him. “Either way,” she says testily, “it’s not a problem for first year. The larger problem is what exactly they’re up to at night—”

“Well, their grades are fine,” Dumbledore says cheerfully. “So, let’s just leave it for now.”

The Heads of Houses stare at him, then at each other.

“They’re minors,” McGonagall says.

“You remember what it was like to be young, Minerva,” Dumbledore says.

“Yes, I remember,” McGonagall says. “I remember going to bed at ten p.m. Which they are clearly not doing.”

“Have you written their parents?” Sprout asks.

“James said, don’t worry about it, and sent me more gold,” McGonagall says in frustration.

“What does that even mean?” Flitwick demands. “Why does he keep sending gold?”

McGonagall throws her hands up. “I don’t bloody well know why James Potter does anything! I don’t know if James knows why, either!” She covers her face with her hands. “Merlin, I thought I was done discussing that man.”

“Anyways,” Dumbledore says, still looking far too cheerful. “It’s good to see the parents agree with our approach. Ivy and Orion will eventually reveal what they’re up to—”

“Or it will blow up,” Sprout mutters, “in a spectacular fashion in front of all of us—”

“Exactly,” Dumbledore says, without seeming to see this as a problem. He turns. “So, Severus? Have they behaved in Potions?”

“I have no idea why Minerva’s calling her a prodigy,” Snape says immediately, a muscle in his face twitching. “The girl shows no talent for Potions.” He pauses, struggling with himself. “She’s at best average.”

All of them avoid looking directly at Severus, because they all know that’s not true, but don’t want to call him on it. He’s already going through it.

***

Halloween, 1991

Neville, Ron, and Hermione fight a troll on Halloween.

“A troll?” Ivy demands, impressed despite herself. “There was a troll at the feast?”

“No, there—” McGonagall does a double take, eyes narrowing as she looks at her and Orion. “Ms. Potter, were you at the feast?”

“Of course, I was,” Ivy lies. “The troll was enormous when it burst—” Neville frantically shakes his head behind McGonagall, pointing at the floor with emphasis, “—into the dungeons, according to eyewitnesses at the feast.”

McGonagall stares at the two of them. “What were you two doing this evening?”

“It’s my birthday,” Orion says, which isn’t an answer.

Ivy yawns.

McGonagall’s eye twitches. “Excuse me. I need to talk to the Fat Lady.” She rounds on Ivy before she leaves. “Where’s Wood?” Ivy shrugs, and she grits her teeth. “Tell him I need him, next. The Gryffindor Quidditch team needs to double up on practices.”

“We’re already doing doubles,” Ivy protests.

“Triples, then,” McGonagall says, already wheeling toward the entrance. “I’ll write you a note.”

“She’s always talking to her these days,” Ron says in a murmur, sounding perplexed. He and Neville and Hermione have been murmuring in an undertone about Snape and a dog and other nonsense that Ivy thinks sounds boring, because none of that sounds like a secret room, so they’re particularly paranoid. “Wonder what that’s about.”

“Who knows.” Orion squints at the tables where the feast has been laid out in the Common Room. “Amazing. There’s still Cauldron Cakes.”

They hear shouting coming from the direction of the portrait, and it sounds a bit like the Fat Lady is crying, but Ivy decides it’s probably not important.

***

November 1991

Dad,

There’s an enchanted mirror on the sixth floor in the west corridor beyond the broken tower that leads into a small hallway. You have to sing in perfect falsetto to get back out.

Love,

Orion

*

Pup,

Is this amateur hour? We locked Snape in there in second year for three days. He has the voice of a dying frog on good days, and it only got worse with dehydration. James got the portraits to sing operas at him for a month.

Try harder.

Love,

Dad

***

December 1991

Neville is cagey just before Christmas break. He hardly congratulates Ivy when she wins her first Quidditch match by a landslide, and he’s always lurking off with Ron and Hermione, all of them talking in hushed, muted tones while they shoot suspicious glances at Snape or skulk around the library pulling down dry, dusty tomes. Ivy finds this all rather melodramatic, and she’s too busy working her way through the sixth floor of the western castle with Orion to care much, until she overhears them discussing the unsolved Gringotts break-in from the summer and they drag her and Orion straight into their mess.

“It was Snape,” Neville blurts out when she corners them and demands answers, because how dare they try to solve the Gringotts break-in without her? “Snape broke into Gringotts.”

Ivy makes a noise of outrage, because the Gringotts thief is her hero, and she will not have anyone besmirching that marvelous trickster god by claiming he is Severus bloody Snape. She’s recently found out Bill Weasley is a curse breaker, and she plans on marrying him, if the Gringotts thief isn’t single or turns out to be ugly. “I seriously doubt Snape has the bollocks to break into Gringotts.”

“Just because he bullies you in class, Nev, doesn’t make him a criminal mastermind,” Orion adds.

“It was him,” Neville insists. “He let the troll in on Halloween and tried to break into the third-floor corridor, Ron and I saw him, and the three-headed dog bit him—”

“What three-headed dog?” Orion demands, because that sounds like something James and Sirius most definitely do not know about.

“It’s guarding the Sorcerer’s Stone,” Hermione says, as if they should know what that is. “Snape is trying to steal it.”

“Why would Snape want to steal a rock?” Orion demands.

“It makes you immortal, and it makes gold,” Ron says with a shrug, and he fails to notice how Ivy and Orion both freeze. “But now that you know, we need your help with watching—”

“Sorry,” Ivy interrupts, her eyes glittering like emeralds.  There’s a loud ringing in her ears that’s hard to shake, and her blood is pumping so fast through her body she thinks she might pass out. She smiles charmingly at her trio of concerned, noble friends. “Did you say that it makes gold?”

“Yes!” Hermione cries out, wringing her hands. “And Snape’s trying to steal it!”

Orion looks at Ivy, and Ivy looks at Orion.

“It would be absolutely terrible,” Ivy says with wide-eyed sincerity, “if someone were to steal it.”