Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Regulus looked at the fat wheezing man opposite him with distaste he didn't bother to veil. He despised fat men; fat Muggles were at the very top of his list.

'I just thought you should know,' Vernon Dursley said as his piggy eyes darted from Regulus to the thin man who stood at the door of his lounge, with Petunia hovering behind him with a duster in her hand and a worried look on her thin face.

She hadn't wanted him to get in touch with Black; in fact she'd seemed to think that some awful retribution would befall them if he did. But Vernon knew right from wrong; he knew a real threat from a vague one. He knew he would prefer his wife to succumb to some mystery horror, which she would be invited to keep to herself, thank you very much, than have his own head smashed against the pavement by the man who now sat opposite him.

'You told me to let you know if anything strange happened to the boy,' he snorted, as though Harry were not even worthy of that lowly title.

'When was this?' Regulus demanded.

'Yesterday. We only waited until today in case she'd got caught up in traffic.' He looked vaguely to the ceiling, wondering if the broomstick traffic lights had got stuck at red somewhere over the M25.

'I see,' Regulus replied. 'Was it the same witch who called? The one who visited a few days ago?'

'Same woman,' Vernon confirmed. He wasn't using any fancy terms; he wasn't acknowledging any of their magic nonsense, not in his house. 'Same woman that always calls.'

'No one comes with her?'

'Just on her own,' Vernon replied, beginning to feel more relaxed. It seemed that a close encounter with the pavement wasn't on the cards after all, and he could even enjoy the fact that the brat had gone from their cosy little lives.

He thought he'd washed his hands of this nonsense years ago, when his stupid cousin had drunk himself to death, after that unfortunate incident with the boy. Damned convenient that had been for Vernon too; he'd got the whole inheritance from their mutual grandmother to himself when she'd popped her clogs a month later. He'd just settled himself into a nice little life when Petunia happened to mention that her sister was ... one of them. Too late it had been, his Dudders was already born or he would have tossed the horse-faced Petunia out on the street where she belonged, pink rubber gloves and all. And then he'd had the Potter boy dumped on him and Petunia a couple of years later, opening up the whole nasty can of worms again.

He squinted at Black and then at Petunia; he wondered if they were following him around through his life. Magic indeed, he snorted to himself. The only magic thing Vernon could really think about was closing his front door on the lot of them forever; that would be magic.

*****

Severus sat down at last. He had cleared up Black's mess in the kitchen, his mess in the bathroom, his clothes strewn messily over the upstairs landing, and re-tidied the mess Sirius had pretended to clear up in the living room. They were the only rooms Snape had managed to make habitable in the three months that he'd been here, and Black and his damned house-elf seemed intent on letting them fall into their usual mess at every opportunity. On the odd occasions when either of them put anything away, they put them in the wrong places, stuffed things into drawers and cupboards that had no business being in the drawers or cupboards they put them in, so that Severus couldn't find anything.

He snarled resentfully to himself as he poured a tumbler of whisky, manfully ignoring the finger marks on the glass. He was going to have a few words with Black when he came in; he'd either have to clean up his act or walk. He didn't let it occur to him that Grimmauld Place was Black's house; that was irrelevant. Severus couldn't abide mess; it ranked with noise, second equal in his list of hates, just below people. He didn't take time to admit that if he hadn't had to clear up the mess he wouldn't have had much else to do; things had gone very quiet, and the wizarding world had gone about the post-war tidying up without help from him.

Severus had been tempted on a few occasions to pre-empt a meeting with Regulus, but he knew well that his hand would be much stronger if Regulus came for him. Apart from that, he wasn't entirely sure that he would have been able to hide the fact from Dumbledore. He hoped he hadn't allowed himself to become remote from what was going on, but as nothing untoward was really happening in the world he had to assume that Regulus Black was content to wait for now, and Severus Snape would just have to do the same.

He swirled the contents of his glass thoughtfully, letting himself wonder for a moment just where Black was, the Sirius version. Surely a meeting with Dumbledore couldn't take all morning; the very fact that Severus hadn't been invited himself meant it wasn't terribly important. He threw the whisky over his throat as he heard the door open and the harridan in the portrait serenade the arrival of her firstborn. That was another thing he hated, that damned portrait; he'd need to do something about it very soon. Maybe Black could take it with him when he left; he could take the elf too, for all the use it was.

*****

There was something furtive about the Gryffindor grin as Black slid in the kitchen door, Snape thought, something underhand. He was trying to conceal a bundle under his cloak, with little success. Severus hoped it wasn't another ruddy turkey from Mundungus; the last one had threatened to outlast the two men who valiantly tried to eat it day after day. They had even invited Lupin on the night of the full moon to help them; he'd seemed quite pleased at the prospect of getting out of Malfoy Manor for the evening, one of the few things Snape couldn't fault him for. Andromeda always went round when the moon was full anyway.

'What's that?' he asked sourly.

'What?' Sirius asked; he looked ill at ease.

'The thing you're trying to hide under your cloak,' Snape replied, stifling the smirk that rose inside him. Damn Black, and his innocent blue eyes. Perhaps he should throw him over the table and fuck him senseless; he couldn't deny it would take up a couple of the hours he struggled to fill. Severus was feeling the strain of not having renewed his intimacy with Black since he'd come back, but somehow he'd never found the right moment; if he admitted it to himself the real reason was that he wasn't entirely sure that Black would welcome his attentions. They just seemed to have drifted into some kind of grudgingly neutral acceptance of one another. It still felt uncomfortable last thing at night though, on the nights that Black didn't slip out to see Lucius; although why he bothered to be furtive was more than Snape could understand. It was as though both of them were finding it difficult to slope off to bed, as though they each were issuing an unwanted invitation that the other would feel awkward at refusing.

'This,' Sirius said, heaving a breath which looked suspiciously like trepidation, 'is a baby.'

Severus said nothing; he was quite sure that Black couldn't possibly have finished. He watched in alarm that quickly mounted to full-blown horror as Sirius carefully laid a white blanket on the table; it was wrapped around something pink.

'You're pleased,' Black breathed, 'I can tell.'

'A baby what?' Severus heard himself ask faintly.

'A baby baby.'

'What's it doing here?' Severus swallowed hard; he wished he hadn't drained his glass.

'I'm glad you asked that.' Sirius had shed his cloak and put down the bag. He'd wrapped the handles around his wrist so that he could carry the baby as well as the bag without dropping either of them, and now he had a red mark on his wrist. The fingertips on that hand had turned blue for a while, and now they were exploding with pins and needles as his blood swam headily along his veins to stave off the gangrene he had felt sure he would develop on the short homeward Apparition.

As Sirius moved to the fire to warm his hands, the bundle on the table seemed to move a little of its own accord, confirming the worst to Snape. It was alive. 'What is it doing here?' he repeated, trying not to look at the blanket.

'It's ours,' Black declared. He looked like a man who'd been struggling to get something off his chest and had now realised that he didn't fancy where it was going to land.

'Very funny, Black.' Severus marched into the hall and pulled his own travelling cloak from the peg. 'You may send me an owl when it has been removed.'

'Where do you think you're going? Come back; I need you to help me.'

'I am going to see Lucius.' Snape let his eyebrow rise. 'Give it back to its parents, and when it has vacated the premises I might come back ... unless of course Lucius succeeds in his efforts to have me swap the dubious delights of Grimmauld Place for the ... dubious delights of Malfoy Manor.'

Somehow Sirius had managed to beat him to the front door; he stood against it with his arms outstretched in an effort to bar Snape's way. 'You're staying right here until we sort this out.'

'I have nothing to "sort out", Black. You are the one who brought that home.' Severus nodded to the kitchen door. 'Now behave yourself and take it back where you got it from immediately or I shall go to Wiltshire until you do. I am not a ruddy babysitter.' Black looked away, and Snape felt an ill-omened swell in the pit of his stomach. He was almost afraid to ask the next question. 'Just how long were you thinking of keeping it here anyway?'

'I want you to come back into the kitchen for a minute and sit down and I'll tell you.'

'Whom does it belong to?' Severus asked, narrowing his black eyes in suspicion. Somehow he had allowed Sirius to steer him back towards the relative warmth of the fire; there was something desperate about him that worried Snape a little.

'Not until you sit down.'

'Not until you tell me whose it is and when it's going back.'

Sirius held his eyes now, ominously defiant. 'It's ours and it's not.'

Severus felt himself slump down into the seat. 'I have something to tell you, Black, something your mother should have told you when you were a lot younger. I am a man, and you, for want of a more appropriate expression, which escapes me right now, are too. No matter how hard we were to try there is no possibility, may Merlin be thanked for small mercies, of us producing offspring. Now let us start from that point, and explain yourself calmly and succinctly.'

The bundle on the table began to whimper; Snape flinched, and Sirius winced.

*****

Sirius wondered how long he could get away with the blank look he had pasted onto his face; not too long, he supposed as the white bundle began to fret in earnest. He should never have let Dumbledore talk him into this. It was too early; it wasn't fair and he'd told him as much, but the benign blue gaze had seemed completely indifferent to the fact that Sirius's delicate status quo with Snape would be upset.

Everything had been going about as well as could be expected in the months they'd been together. Regulus had gone quiet, Lupin had settled in the Manor, and Sirius had almost got Snape trained into not noticing his mess, almost thawed him to the extent that he didn't freeze up the windows when he got angry, which was admittedly quite often; sometimes he thought he'd almost got him to forget about James for as much as five consecutive minutes. In fact, all he had to do now was to pluck up the courage to go to Severus's room instead of his own when he climbed the stairs to go to bed. He was sure he'd manage soon; he just wished he were as sure that the door wouldn't be firmly slammed in his face.

'Take it back before it makes a noise.'

'I can't,' Sirius replied. He pulled a document from the pocket of his trousers. 'Every couple has to lend a hand in taking in the orphans.' He thrust the official-looking manuscript with a Ministry of Magic seal on it at Snape. 'It's all here. Same sex couples aren't allowed to exclude themselves.' He watched Snape sit back in his seat; he seemed to be torn between ignoring the Ministry decree and ignoring the baby. The preliminaries weren't going well; Sirius was a bit worried about what was going to happen when the real fireworks went off.

'In that case I return to my original thoughts on the matter.' Snape stood up and nodded to the baby. 'I am quite sure Lucius hasn't got one.'

Sirius bit his lip; he really needed to do something about the baby. He could hardly leave it lying on the table as an article to be argued over for much longer. It seemed intent on crying; that wasn't going to help matters at all. He took the time to notice that Severus hadn't objected to the term "couple"; maybe that was a good sign, but now he had the baby to consider. He began to wish he'd called at Snape's room last night; it was going to be off-limits tonight.

'Lucius has got one of his own, if you remember. And if you go there, you and Lucius will be a couple, and they'll give you another one ... that way you can have two,' he delivered in triumph.

'Lucius has Lupin to help him, and elves quite capable of keeping his son and heir out of his amazing hair,' Snape flared and gave Kreacher a deprecating look, as though he should not dream to consider himself worthy of even that lowly station in life. 'And I do not intend to be a "couple" with anyone. Anyway, that's a stupid description. Surely two individuals can inhabit the same house without being labelled in such an inane way.'

'Yeah, I suppose they can,' Sirius replied, omitting to add that one of them normally paid rent if they didn't inhabit the same bed too. 'But not if I shop you and Malfoy to the Ministry.'

'You wouldn't dare,' Severus snapped back, caught up in the hypothetical argument.

'Why don't you try me?' Sirius gave him a flat look. He hadn't wanted to do things this way, but Severus was being his usual intractable self. He scooped the baby off the table and began unwrapping the bundle of blankets; he hoped an instruction leaflet would be hidden somewhere inside, but either it had fallen out or someone with a good sense of humour had assumed that the new owner's maternal instinct would kick into overdrive.

'Can't you stop it making that racket?' Snape snarled.

'He's probably hungry,' Sirius replied and poked into the bag he'd been given along with the baby; maybe the instructions were in there. He groped about and produced a paper bag of white powder, the front of which was emblazoned with the legend, "Watch your little witches and wizards grow with Wendy Wonderful's Baby Formula". Sirius poked about again; there seemed to be nothing much more than a few clothes and some cotton squares of towelling he'd been hoping to avoid.

The baby boy had begun to cry lustily, the cry of a six-month-old infant who is becoming angry. Sirius picked him up again and he stopped; he laid him back on the table and he started again, and he picked him up and he stopped ... just like magic. He laid him gently back on the table as though the child wouldn't notice and tried to consider his options, but the baby was making such a racket that he could only do so when he picked him up. 'I've only got two fucking hands, you know,' he snarled at Snape, who was watching him in what he hoped was thinly veiled amusement. 'You could get off your arse and give me a spoon.'

'A spoon?' Snape enquired mildly.

'Yes, a fucking spoon, I need to feed him.'

'I see.' Snape stood up and crossed to the wooden chest. 'Only you seem to be so involved that I thought you intended to breastfeed it yourself.' He tugged at the top drawer, which grudgingly gave way in a rush, trying to spill its contents on the floor as it did so, picked out the cleanest spoon he could find, sat back down and pushed it across the table.

Sirius snatched it up and opened the packet of baby milk powder one-handed, spilling about a fifth of it onto the table. He scooped a spoonful from the bag and held it to the baby's face. Nothing happened, so he pushed it against the tiny lips. 'Come on, little fella, eat up and tomorrow we can play Quidditch.'

'Perhaps if you were to dissolve that stuff in water?' Snape enquired with his eyebrow raised even higher. 'Unless of course you are intent on choking it.'

'He's a boy, not an it,' Sirius snapped back, trying to hide his relief. He had been playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship, and he hadn't been entirely sure that Snape hadn't seen through it. All he had to do was to continue to draw him out, and it would be fine.

'Don't think for one second that I cannot see right through you, Black.' Snape tipped the entire contents of the bag of accoutrements onto the table, and two glass bottles with rubber teats attached to them rolled towards Sirius. 'My input stops here.'

'Your fucking input doesn't stop until you put some warm water in one of those fucking bottles and mix some of this stuff into it.'

'And stop swearing in front of the baby.' Snape smirked.

*****

'Why is it still making that noise?' Snape asked through gritted teeth as Sirius at last took the empty bottle from the baby, and he began to howl again; it was the third bottle he'd had.

Sirius frowned; he really should have looked up a book about this, or even asked the smirking Minerva McGonagall as she'd handed him the bundle and hastily closed the door on his face as he tried to balance a baby and a bag of accessories and turn away from her door at one time. 'D'you think he's still hungry?' he asked.

'I doubt it,' Snape replied dryly. 'He's eaten more than either of us has today. In fact I'm almost longing for another of Fletcher's turkeys.'

Sirius hoisted the baby up on his shoulder and rubbed his back. He remembered seeing Molly Weasley doing that to one of her babies when it was crying; although to be fair he also remembered Molly Weasley knitting as she fed a baby, but this was the easier option. He sat for only a moment rubbing the tiny warm back. The baby seemed to have become a little more content, a fact that Sirius wasn't sure he wanted to associate with the loud burp and the ominous gurgling sound that had accompanied it. The deathly silence from the other side of the table warned him not to look, but he just couldn't resist it.

This was very bad; in fact Sirius couldn't think of anything worse at that point than seeing Severus watching the pool of regurgitated milk on the table, especially when it was dripping off the front of his shirt. He watched as Snape wordlessly lifted one of the towelling squares which still lay on the table, and very slowly began to wipe the mess from his clothes; it was hard to clear clotted-white off black, and he wasn't doing an awfully good job of it. Sirius resisted the almost overwhelming urge to tell him he was only making it worse, and that he'd be better taking the shirt off, that and the even more irresistible urge to explode with laughter. He knew Snape had only foregone cleaning the mess by magic to maximise the impact; Severus wasn't above a little theatre when he felt the occasion demanded it. He watched Snape fling the cloth into the sink, after wiping the pool from the table, and stand up slowly; Sirius knew he was making for the door. The tiny boy chose that time to make the first pleasant baby sounds that he had made since he'd arrived, a lovely little singsong cooing sound, interspersed with a deliciously sleepy snuffling noise; it was really rather nice.

'Well, little Harry,' Sirius said in a mixture of trepidation and he wasn't quite sure what else. This hadn't gone well at all. 'It looks like it's going to be just you and me.'

Snape had stopped, mid-stride, and Sirius winced; he hadn't meant the name to slip out, not just yet. He was going to work up to a point where Snape had accepted the boy before he dropped the bombshell of just whose son he was; he'd been working on this for so long. And now he'd blown any chance of that, along with the fuse Severus was about to blow, if he hung about for long enough. He almost gasped as Snape turned on his heel and grabbed the child from him, hoisted him over his own shoulder and opened the door.

'Hoi ... what d'you think you're doing?'

'Taking him away from you,' Snape replied, 'before you cause him an injury. I have never seen such a display of ineptitude. Anyway you have far too much to do to take on looking after a baby.'

'What d'you mean?' Sirius asked suspiciously, but with a degree of relief that Snape hadn't yet left Grimmauld Place. 'What have I got to do?' He watched in puzzlement as Snape turned yet again and reached one-handed under the sink, groped about for a bit and dragged Kreacher by the ear into the middle of the floor, before kicking his arse and sending him sprawling, all without dropping the baby.

'You and that lazy piece of shit have got this place to clean up.' Severus bent down, still clutching Harry to his chest with one arm, quite competently, Sirius thought, and plucked Kreacher upright, with the same ear. 'And I mean clean,' he hissed dangerously into the ear he held. 'We're not bringing a child up in this pigsty.'

Snape hoisted Harry up again and made for the door. Sirius thought the look the baby gave him as the door closed was a touch too smug for comfort. He'd been here for two minutes and already they'd ganged up against him.

*****