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.”