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Chapter Text

Sirius counted the stones in his cell the way sailors count heartbeats in a storm. Twenty-three along the long wall if you started at the crack shaped like a caved-in moon; twenty-two if you started where the mortar crumbled under his fingernails. He had counted them so many times the numbers felt like lines from a lullaby mangled by a wolf.

The Dementors did not love numbers. They loved breath. They loved the way warmth thinned out of a body and never quite returned. They loved memories chewed to pulp. They stood outside his cell like a tide that never went out, and the cold they breathed in through the gaps made his molars ache.

He had stopped fighting the sounds days ago: the moans, the shuffling, the occasional wet laugh from a prisoner too far gone to know it wasn’t a joke. But some noises still found him. A baby’s cry, sometimes. It wasn’t real; he knew it. Azkaban didn’t house babies. The Dementors reached into whatever was left of you and yanked up sounds you couldn’t help answering.

Sirius ran his tongue along the edge of a tooth until the sting cut through the fog. He forced the picture of Harry into his mind like a coin into a slot: tufts of dark hair that never obeyed, the way his mouth had opened like a little ‘o’ when he yawned. He remembered James holding the boy like Quidditch gear he was still learning. The careful clumsiness of a man who knew how to fly but didn’t quite know how to land.

I should be there. I should have been there.

He had been a good godfather for precisely eleven months and a handful of days, and then he had become a dog with his teeth sunk into the wrong throat. They’d taken his wand, his coat, his name; they had left him his rage because the Dementors didn’t know what to do with rage that had lost its target.

They were coming for him today. He knew it because the cold had sharpened at dawn, and the rattling keys had changed hands twice down the corridor- sounds of preparation. A trial, they had said. A chance to get it over with properly. Veritaserum. He’d laughed when he heard that, a sandpapery sound that didn’t feel like it belonged to his throat. You think truth will help you, now? he wanted to ask the Aurors. You’ll only hate it when you hear it.

Boots scraped outside his cell. The iron grated. A hooded figure slid the bolt back, and the door swung in on its ancient hinges.

“Azkaban prisoner Black,” said a voice that tried for brisk and landed somewhere nearer to bored. “On your feet.”

Sirius pushed himself up, one hand dragging along the slick stone as if he could pull heat out of it by will alone. His legs trembled with that peculiar Azkaban weakness. The kind that came not from hunger alone but from being hollowed out like a shell. The Dementor at the end of the corridor tilted its head, if that shroud could be said to have a head, and a thread of ice teased across his cheekbone. Sirius bared his teeth at it.

“Don’t,” said the Auror, and Sirius wasn’t sure if the warning was meant for him or the thing with no face.

They shackled his wrists. The iron closed with a click he felt in his spine. He could smell salt from the sea battering the black rock somewhere below; he could smell the thick, coppery stink of fear coming off the other cells where the prisoners pressed to the bars, curious, hungry for a drama not their own.

“Move.”

They marched him. The corridor turned twice, then emptied into a platform, and the wind came like knives. The boat bobbed against the stone as if the ocean were trying to swallow the prison back down into its throat. The sky was the color of old tin. Sirius refused to hunch because even now, he wouldn’t give Azkaban his back. He stepped into the boat with a kind of deliberate arrogance that tasted like ash.

The trip to the mainland was a blur of slap-hard waves and the bite of iron in his wrists when he swayed. The Auror opposite him kept glancing as if waiting for him to try and transform. He’d tried once, early on. Sirius could do it still- become a dog and let the animal instincts blunt the Dementors’ hooks. But they’d learned his trick quick. They threw him in the sea for it, their version of training. He preferred to keep his bones where they belonged.

When the boat thudded against the pier, the world smelled of coal smoke and wet rope. They hauled him onto the slick planks and up into a carriage with Ministry seals stamped into the leather. Sirius stared at the emblem with a grin that had nothing to do with humor. “Lovely,” he muttered. “I’ve missed being judged by people who polish their badges.”

“Save it,” said the Auror. He was young; they were always young these days. The war had chewed the old ones.

“I plan to spend all my cleverness very soon,” Sirius said, and rested his head back against the carriage wall. He thought of Harry again because it was the only thing worth thinking of. The boy would need feeding soon. He’d cry because the person who knew how to warm the milk just right was gone. Sirius could feel the weight of him from memory. The awkward heft, the way babies were all center of gravity and startling warmth.

Hold on, he told the phantom boy. I’m coming.

They took him through the Ministry like he was a thing that might spill, two Aurors to a side, another one behind with a wand tucked loose but ready in his hand. Everywhere was the smell of polish. Wood, brass, stone; the air was chalk-dry with paper dust and decisions.

Courtroom Ten had always reminded Sirius of a particular corner of Grimmauld Place where his mother had liked to hold court over the family: narrow benches, old portraits glaring, the sense that no matter what you did you were already guilty of being yourself. He suppressed a laugh that threatened to crawl up his throat like a cough.

The Wizengamot perched above like ravens dressing themselves in plum-colored plumage. Fudge, recent minister, looked pink and damp the way sponge cakes do when they’re undercooked. Amelia Bones’s monocle flashed; at least there was one person in the room who understood the difference between law and theater. Dumbledore sat to the side as Chief Warlock, his expression as calm and gentle as a pond that hid a whirl.

And there, near a small table laid with glass and parchment, stood Severus Snape.

Sirius would have known him at fifty paces and thirty years. The hair like spilled ink, hooked nose, the deliberate stillness of someone who refused to give any satisfaction to anybody watching. The sight of him opened a window in Sirius’s head that let in warm air and a swarm of hornets in the same breath: Lily. James. The Shrieking Shack. Were you always watching?

Snape was measuring liquid into a tiny crystal phial with a kind of furious delicacy, as if the potion itself had personally insulted him and he was determined to insult it back by brewing it perfectly. The smell drifted- raw metal, sharp clove, something clean and cold that tugged at the back of the throat.

“Prisoner Black,” the presiding witch announced. “We will proceed with Veritaserum. The potions master has certified its efficacy and freshness.”

Sirius lifted his chin so the chain clinked just enough to interrupt the rhythm of their voices. Snape looked up, and their gazes clashed like blades that had rubbed against each other for years. Sirius made himself smile with all his teeth.

“Severus,” he said, and the name tasted like an old dare. “Brewed with love, I trust?”

Snape’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite disdain but somewhere in that mean middle ground where sarcasm has learned to be quiet. “I brew with competence,” he said. “An unfamiliar standard for you, I realize.”

The Auror to Sirius’s right stiffened as if he expected the prisoner to lunge. Sirius snorted. “If I were going to lunge, I’d pick someone less slippery.”

A ripple of laughter died an anxious death against the benches. Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled once, quickly, like a star winking through fog. Bones’s monocle didn’t move.

Snape came forward with the phial. Up close, Sirius could see the faint shadows under his eyes, the lines at the corners that hadn’t been there at school. War hadn’t been kind to any of them. Snape held the phial as if it were both fragile and dangerous because it was. Sirius opened his mouth without being told. The liquid slid in cold as winter river water. The taste hit like pennies held too long under a tongue, then a clean sweeping that wasn’t quite taste at all, but insistence made liquid.

“State your name,” the presiding witch said.

Sirius felt the tug, the rolling out of the truth like rope uncoiling from a winch. “Sirius Orion Black.”

“Were you the Secret-Keeper for the Potters?”

“No.”

“Who was?”

“Peter Pettigrew.”

The word broke the air like a dropped plate. Sirius watched faces rearrange: shock snapping jaws shut, outrage creasing foreheads, confusion puddling behind eyes. He kept his gaze on Snape for no good reason except that Snape’s eyes didn’t flinch away. They narrowed, perhaps; they measured. But they did not flinch.

“Did you betray the Potters to He-Who-”

“No.”

“How did Pettigrew escape?”

Sirius saw again the alley blown open, smoke and screaming, Peter’s little rat eyes gleaming before the street swallowed him. The Veritaserum didn’t make the memory easier to touch; it only made the words impossible to deny. He told them everything: the bluff, the switch, the bomb; his own newborn understanding that he had mistrusted the wrong best friends and trusted the wrong coward.

By the time they were done, Sirius’s throat felt scorched. His wrists chafed under iron, his hands shock-white. He realized dimly that Snape had not moved back to his corner; he stood at a polite remove, listening or maybe guarding the phial, because Severus Snape never trusted anyone to handle his weapons but himself.

Dumbledore’s voice was quiet when it came. “Thank you, Mr. Black.”

The presiding witch cleared her throat. “After deliberation” -the deliberation had taken the amount of time a person needs to look at a clock and pretend they aren’t looking at a clock- “the Wizengamot recognizes that the use of Veritaserum, certified by Potions Master Severus Snape, has established reasonable doubt beyond the threshold required. Charges of treason and murder are dismissed.”

The chains fell away with a clatter. The sound shivered down Sirius’s bones like relief so sharp it almost hurt. For a breath, he felt dizzy. He had prepared for a fight; he hadn’t prepared for the door to open.

He stepped down from the dais because his legs needed to move or they’d give out. Snape stood just ahead, as if he had been placed there to serve as a test. How much control had Sirius learned in Azkaban?

Up close, the man’s presence was oddly clean. He smelled faintly of soap and something green - yarrow? - beneath the metallic ghost of the Veritaserum. Sirius hated that he noticed.

“Didn’t think you’d be the one to help,” Sirius said, voice low.

Snape’s expression barely shifted. “Do not confuse my function with my intention,” he murmured back. “I brewed a truth. What you did with it was your own.”

“Still,” Sirius said, because he couldn’t help himself, “when you go home tonight, raise a glass to Lily for me.”

Snape’s eyes changed there, just the depth of them, like a door he’d kept shut cracking half an inch. “There is no glass deep enough,” he said, and moved away before Sirius could answer.

They didn’t let him walk out with the general crowd. The Ministry liked order, and Sirius was still a man who’d been a headline for a year. They took him down a side corridor to a waiting room that smelled like tea and furniture polish and very faintly of lemon- Dumbledore’s lemon drops, probably, because the scent made Sirius’s stomach flutter with a memory that wasn’t quite friendly but wasn’t quite not.

In fifteen minutes that felt like the tail end of a storm, Dumbledore came in. His beard was wound in a ribbon today; Sirius had a sudden, absurd urge to ask who tied it for him in the mornings. The old man’s eyes were tired in the way that meant he had counted costs before anyone else even knew there would be a bill.

“Harry?” Sirius blurted, before anything else could crowd his mouth.

“He is safe,” Dumbledore said gently. “With Hagrid, for the moment. We will do this properly, Sirius. There are legalities.”

“Then get them over with.”

Dumbledore nodded once. Behind him, a different door opened, and Severus Snape stepped in, followed by Amelia Bones. Snape’s expression said he’d been dragged to a poetry reading against his will. Bones looked brisk and kind in the way of people whose kindness wore steel shoes.

“We require witnesses for the reading of James and Lily Potter’s will,” Bones said. “Mister Black, you are a primary party. Professor Dumbledore, as Chief Warlock and designated executor. Mister Snape, as… requested.”

Sirius’s heart did a small, irritated pivot. “Requested by whom?”

“By the will,” Bones said. “The language is sealed. We’ll attend the secure chamber.”

Snape’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I cannot imagine why the Potters’ will should require my presence,” he drawled. The exact amount of drawl to annoy Sirius, not a syllable more.

“You and me both,” Sirius said tightly.

Bones led them down to a chamber lined in ancient black stone whose seams glowed faintly blue where enchantments lived. The table in the center bore runes burnt so deep the wood had glassed. A goblin sat at the end, thin hands, sharp eyes, a quill like a weapon. He looked at Sirius, looked at Snape, and managed to remind both men that nothing surprised him anymore.

“Names,” the goblin said.

They gave them. Dumbledore placed a wax-sealed parchment on the table. The goblin ran a tested charm over it; the seal shivered and opened like an eye.

“Reading,” the goblin said, and the parchment unfurled.

James’s voice filled the chamber. Sirius didn’t know he’d clutched the edge of the table until the wood dug into his palms. It was James speaking like he’d practiced once or twice, as if he knew how hard it would be for his friends to hear him formal.

“If you’re hearing this, then the thing we feared has happened,” James said. “Harry, my little stag, if you’re old enough to understand, know that your mum and I love you more than anything that’s ever lived on this earth.” His voice caught, very slightly; Sirius’s stomach folded in on itself. “Sirius, if you’re there-” A soft laugh, familiar as dawn. “Padfoot. I expect you are. You stubborn swine.”

Sirius exhaled, and the breath trembled.

“The custody of our son,” James continued, “goes to Sirius Orion Black, our dearest friend, should he live to claim it.” Formal again, then Lily’s hand in the words, Sirius could hear it: “Should Sirius be deceased or incapacitated, guardianship passes to Alice and Frank Longbottom. In their absence, to Remus John Lupin.”

Beside him, Snape stood very straight, hands folded like an insult he refused to deliver.

“And,” Lily’s voice took over, clear as bells in winter, “there is one more request that is mine. Should Severus Snape survive us, he is to offer aid in Harry’s upbringing, as he once promised me he would, long ago when we were children. It is not a demand. It is a trust. Severus,” and her voice softened, in that way that used to make Sirius both angry and strangely hopeful, “I know what you owe and what you don’t. I ask this not for me, but for Harry.”

Silence took the room and held it.

Sirius had thought he was prepared for anything, after Azkaban, after the courtroom, after hearing James’s voice shake, but Lily’s words slid under his ribs with surgical precision. He turned his head, slow as if the air had thickened, and looked at Snape.

Snape looked… not pale; Snape didn’t do pale so much as still. A careful blankness that suggested if you pried it up you’d find something burning under it. He did not meet Sirius’s eyes. He looked at the parchment as if it had become suddenly more interesting than heaven.

“That clause is sealed with blood and promise,” the goblin said into the quiet, businesslike. “It invokes old magic. It compels in no specific action but establishes a binding request. There is no legal penalty for refusal, but there are magical consequences for betrayal.”

Sirius’s arms moved before his mind had caught up. Someone had opened the far door of the chamber, and Hagrid came in, eyes already wet, with Harry bundled against his chest like a precious and breakable loaf of bread. “’Ere yeh go, Sirius,” Hagrid rumbled, voice low, and the whole size of him went careful. “Lil’ man’s been a good’un. Took a bit of warm milk.”

Sirius reached. The weight of the child hit his forearms with an immediacy that made his lungs forget how to behave. Harry smelled faintly of milk and wool and something like new wood shavings, that baby-clean that seems to make the world consider being gentle for five minutes.

“Hey,” Sirius said, and his voice was a rough whisper he didn’t recognize. “Hey there. It’s me.”

Harry’s eyes blinked up- green that hadn’t yet decided exactly how to be Lily’s, ringed with the dark lashes that would eventually be his father’s undoing at every Quidditch practice. Harry didn’t know the words for grief or relief; he knew the shape of the arms that held him. He made a satisfied, sleepy sound and fist-grabbed at Sirius’s robes where the fabric had gone thready.

“Are we concluded?” Snape asked, very evenly, to no one in particular. The sound of his voice snapped Sirius’s head around as if someone had tugged his hair.

He hadn’t realized he’d tightened his hold on Harry until the boy wriggled, a little surprised noise bursting out of him. Sirius eased immediately, shame flushing hot, then cold. It wasn’t that he thought Snape would take the child. It was that the clause had put an old enemy’s hand into the cradle, and every instinct Sirius owned stood up and bared its teeth.

“Don’t worry,” Snape said softly, too softly for anyone but Sirius to hear. “If I wanted to harm him, Black, I wouldn’t require a permission slip.”

It was vicious and clinical and exactly the sort of thing Snape said when he was building a wall he needed more than air. Sirius’s retort rose, something about potions masters and their tender feelings for infants, but Harry shifted, and the little hand opened and closed against Sirius’s collar, and the retort burned to something more measured.

“Lily asked you,” Sirius said, equally low. “Not Dumbledore. Not the Wizengamot. Lily.”

Snape’s gaze flicked to the child, then away. “I heard.”

Bones cleared her throat. “We will file the necessary transfers,” she said, returning them to a universe that had paper in it. “Mister Black, guardianship takes effect at midnight tonight. There will be Ministry visits, informal, for the first few weeks.”

“Send whoever you like,” Sirius said, not taking his eyes off Harry. “They can learn how to hold a bottle while they’re at it.”

“You’ve no home ready,” Bones said more gently, which told Sirius she had a niece somewhere. “Do you require temporary quarters?”

The question hit him with the force of memory. The hidden rooms in Godric’s Hollow blown open; the flat he and James had once shared full of Quidditch posters and dirty socks long gone; the house at Grimmauld Place crouched in his mind like a bad dream that somehow was the only bed left.

“I have a house,” he said, and the words tasted like childhood turned to rust. “It will do.”

“Grimmauld Place,” Snape murmured, so low that only the jab of the name made it to Sirius. “Naturally.”

“I don’t recall inviting you to comment,” Sirius returned, keeping his voice even for Harry’s sake. The baby had nuzzled into a soft place just under his jaw. Something fragile in Sirius steadied.

“You recall little with accuracy,” Snape said, which would have been a clean hit if not for Lily’s voice still lingering in the air between them like a blessing she had set down and walked away from.

Dumbledore stepped forward. His hand hovered, he did not touch Harry without asking. “Sirius,” he said, and his voice was old. “You have a place to go that is not full of old curses and older portraits. The Order has safehouses.”

Sirius shook his head. “If I’m going to raise him,” he said, “I should start with a place I can change. I can tear the tapestries down. I can make the rooms his.”

Snape’s mouth opened and closed, a remark aborted. He looked- no dazed wasn’t the word; Snape didn’t do dazed. Disoriented, perhaps, as if Lily’s clause had set him a half-step to the left of the world he’d been navigating. He addressed the goblin rather than the people: “Is there any further obligation required of me now ?”

“No,” the goblin said, scratching something at the bottom of the parchment. “But the magic notes your name. Be cautious, wizard. Old magic rarely forgets.”

Snape’s eyes came to rest on Harry properly for the first time. The boy, having settled, had discovered the end of Sirius’s tattered cuff and was mouthing it with the small seriousness of a scholar. Snape’s expression did a strange, subtle tilt. Something that looked, to Sirius’s surprise, like recognition of a problem about which he had opinions.

“Your cuff,” Snape said. “He’ll swallow the thread.”

“I’ll get him something else to slobber on,” Sirius said. He shifted Harry, and the child gurgled a complaint before burrowing back in.

Snape’s face turned away, just slightly. “See that you do.”

Paperwork, signatures, magic that stung Sirius’s fingertips and drew a sliver of blood to stamp his claim onto the wards of the world. He stood through it as though through weather, letting the storm pass over and around him while his body learned again the physics of holding a child. Dumbledore lingered until he seemed satisfied that the magic had taken. Hagrid sniffed damply into a handkerchief the size of a sail and patted Sirius on the shoulder hard enough to rearrange his ribs.

Only Snape moved like he intended to slide back into shadow as soon as it was polite. He gathered up his phials, the stoppered Veritaserum in its padded box. His sleeves were inked with a faint shimmer, protective wards to keep unstable liquids from misbehaving. Sirius looked and hated himself for noticing something so domestic in a man he associated with cold and corridors.

At the doorway, Snape paused. He did not look back; he addressed the hinge. “There will be fevers,” he said, not as a threat, not as a promise. “Children have them. You won’t be prepared.”

Sirius’s jaw squared. “I’m not a complete idiot.”

“You have routinely aspired to become one,” Snape said. “I recommend you fail at that now.”

Sirius barked a laugh that put fissures through his fatigue. “I’ll put it on my list. After ‘buy bottles’ and ‘burn curtains.’”

There was a sliver of silence that might have been a breath if either man had admitted to breathing. Then Snape added, “If you require a draught and cannot purchase a reliable one in a hurry, owl a list. Do not be poetic. Do not be proud. Send dosage information if you possess it; if you do not, I will calculate for the boy’s weight.”

It was almost kindness, except it had been wrapped in barbed wire. Sirius found, unexpectedly, that he did not mind the wire. “Lily asked you,” he said again, because repetition made it more real. “Thank you for hearing her.”

Snape didn’t bow. He didn’t nod. “I am not doing it for you,” he said, which was the politest way Severus Snape knew to say you may rely on this. He slipped out, robes whispering around his ankles like an argument that had decided not to be voiced today.

Sirius looked down at Harry, who had fallen asleep with his mouth open and one hand flung across his chest as if he’d claimed himself for his own. The baby’s breath warmed the rough place under Sirius’s jaw. The world, which had been tilted for a year, leveled by one degree.

“Alright, Prongslet,” he said softly. “Let’s go home.”

He did not mean Grimmauld Place, not yet. He meant the space between his ribs where something battered and animal lifted its head and decided to stay.

They took the Floo because Apparition with a child this small made Sirius’s stomach ice over. The green fire licked up, smelling of mint and old coins, and spat them out into the silent, scowling hall of Number Twelve. The ancestral portrait of Walburga Black burst awake with a shriek Sirius had always thought sounded like a boiling kettle.

“FILTH! TAINT! BRINGING A HALF-BLOOD WHELP-”

Sirius flicked his wand and the curtains snapped shut so hard the frame rattled. Harry startled, and Sirius tightened and then forced himself to loosen, the hold that had become reflex since the clause was spoken aloud.

“It’s alright,” he murmured into soft baby hair. “This is just a house. It only thinks it can bite.”

The air tasted of dust and old wards and the faint almost-sweet of woodworm. Sirius breathed it in, then out. He set Harry’s tiny bag by the staircase, his bag beside it, and in the distance the pipes clanked like an old man clearing his throat to complain.

He stood there for a long breath, listening to the quiet he had to turn into something else. Somewhere in the deep of the house, something skittered. Sirius smiled without humor.

“First order of business,” he told the sleeping child solemnly. “We find every thing that crawls and we give it a relocation package.”

Harry’s fist unclenched against his collar, then tightened again. Sirius felt himself smile in a way that did not scrape. He turned toward the kitchen because kitchens were the only part of Grimmauld Place that had ever learned to forgive anyone. He would boil water. He would wash bottles. He would take scissors to the curtains one by one if he had to, and when night came, he would set a cot near his bed and he would watch the rise and fall of a small chest until dawn taught him how to sleep again.

“Welcome to the family business, then,” he murmured to no one, to Lily, to James, to the black dog asleep in the corner of his own bones. “And we’ll make something like a home out of this,” he added under his breath, testing the sound of it.

Sirius found the cupboard where the bottles had been stacked since his mother last thought infants might be useful and set about boiling water the Muggle way because magic felt like too much noise tonight. The flame licked up blue and then steady orange. He swayed without thinking, the way you do when you hold a baby, the rock-back-forward that says I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

He didn’t think about the man who, in a cramped kitchen in Spinner’s End, traded his robe sleeves for rolled shirt cuffs and measured dosages into bright-labeled vials with hands steadier than his breath. He didn’t think about the old magic humming under his floorboards, tasting names and keeping count. He didn’t think about grief as a river he would swim for years.

He thought about Harry’s breath on his skin and the fact that he could hear it, and the fact that somewhere, through grudges and ash, a thread had been slung from Lily’s hand to Snape’s to his, and it held.

And he smiled - wolf’s grin, man’s relief, godfather’s vow - and began.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place had always been a mausoleum - all shadowed halls, musty velvet, and the oppressive weight of a house that had been told for centuries it was important. The air had smelled of dust and disuse, a tang of old magic clinging to its bones.

Now it had a heartbeat.

Harry’s noises - babbles, gurgles, sudden yelps of excitement - ricocheted down the corridors like sunlight breaking into a crypt. The silence that had reigned for years was now stitched through with the slap of small hands on the floorboards, the low hum of Sirius’s off-key singing, and the occasional wail when things didn’t go Harry’s way.

Sirius had dragged the cot into his bedroom the first night, determined to keep him close. There was no way he was putting him in the old Black nursery, a room that still whispered curses from behind faded wallpaper. Once, while passing its door, he’d swear he’d heard the faint chitter of a long-dead house-elf, and that was enough to keep the boy away from it permanently.

The early days were clumsy. Feeding was simple enough; Harry had an appetite and a knack for throwing food that impressed Sirius almost professionally. Nappies were another story. He learned quickly to keep everything within arm’s reach and to never, ever turn his back while the boy was on the changing table. Grimmauld’s ancient plumbing didn’t help matters - more than once he’d been mid-clean-up when the upstairs cistern groaned and rattled like a dying dragon.

He set a routine without realizing it: mornings in the kitchen, the one room where the curtains let in real daylight; afternoons on the sitting room floor with blankets and soft toys; evenings pacing with Harry in his arms until the boy’s head went heavy against his shoulder. On nights when Harry slept early, Sirius would still walk the halls, as if the weight of the child had trained his muscles into restlessness. Kreacher muttered about “Potter filth” and “disturbing the old ways” but Sirius caught him once tucking Harry’s blanket more snugly around his legs before disappearing with a sniff.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was theirs.

Remus came in the third week. The knock was polite, almost hesitant, and Sirius knew who it was before he opened the door.

He looked thinner, too thin, his coat hanging awkwardly from his frame. The amber warmth in his eyes was still there, but dimmed, as though something inside him had been left too long in the cold. A few more silver threads glinted in his hair than Sirius remembered.

For a long moment, neither man moved.

Then Sirius stepped forward, arms pulling him in before thought could interfere. Remus’s hands clutched the back of Sirius’s shirt, and the familiar scent of parchment and old wool folded over him.

They didn’t speak right away. They just stood there, the sound of Harry’s distant babbling filling the gap where words couldn’t yet go.

When they finally pulled back, Sirius’s eyes burned. “Whisky?” he asked, his voice rough.

Remus nodded.

They poured two fingers each and stood in the kitchen, the cracked tile underfoot and the light from the narrow window catching in the liquid like trapped fire. Sirius raised his glass. “To James and Lily.”

“To them,” Remus echoed, and they drank. The fire hit Sirius’s throat and chest with a force that made his eyes sting anew.

Sirius fetched Harry from his blanket nest in the sitting room. The boy’s eyes lit at the sight of the new face, his mouth stretching in something that was almost a smile.

Remus reached for him, awkward at first, then with sudden firmness, holding the child close. His palm cupped the back of Harry’s head, his own face bent low until their foreheads nearly touched.

“I keep thinking,” Remus murmured, “that I’ll blink and this will be gone. You’ll be back in Azkaban. Harry will be…” He couldn’t finish. His arms tightened, as if by sheer grip he could anchor them all here.

“You won’t wake up from this,” Sirius said quietly. “None of us will. So we make it better than it was supposed to be.”

Remus looked up, his eyes bright. “Merlin, Sirius… he has her eyes.”

“I know.” Sirius’s voice wavered, but he didn’t look away.

They spent the rest of the afternoon in an odd rhythm with Sirius making tea, Remus telling stories about their Hogwarts days that Harry obviously didn’t understand but seemed to enjoy hearing. The boy kicked his legs happily whenever Remus’s voice took on that storyteller lilt. One tale, about James sneaking into the library in full Quidditch robes to return a book before Madam Pince noticed it was overdue, made Sirius laugh so hard he nearly dropped the kettle.

They laughed again when Sirius tried to demonstrate James’s “victory dive” in miniature with Harry, ending in a near miss with a teacup. The laughter was jagged at the edges but real.

When Remus left that evening, Sirius walked him to the door. “You’ll come back soon?”

“Try and stop me,” Remus said, and gave Harry one last look before stepping into the street.

Two days later, Sirius decided they needed an owl.

Not for letters, though, yes, there would be those but because the old Black family owl had died sometime between his sixth and ninth month in Azkaban, and the only other method of communication at Grimmauld right now was Floo powder… which he wasn’t letting Harry near until the boy was old enough not to try and eat it.

So they went to Diagon Alley.

It was crisp outside, winter wind curling around Harry’s blanket-wrapped form as Sirius carried him through the archway. The street was bustling with the faint scent of roasting chestnuts from a nearby cart, the chiming doorbells of shops, the low thrum of conversation. Harry’s head kept swivelling at the colours and motion, mouth open in a small, amazed “O.”

They stopped briefly in a baby supply shop where Sirius bought more blankets and a teething ring shaped like a broomstick. The shopkeeper recognized his surname and asked, with a mixture of curiosity and politeness, “Are you… from the Black family?” Sirius just smiled sharply and said, “Not anymore,” before walking out.

The owl emporium was a riot of feathers and sound. Barn owls blinked down at them from high perches, snowy owls preened in dignified silence, and smaller tawny owls shuffled along rails like commuters waiting for the next train. The smell was strong, hay, feathers, and that unmistakable musk of bird but not unpleasant.

“Right, Prongslet,” Sirius murmured. “We’re here on a mission. Let’s find someone fast, clever, and with good aim for owl droppings in case we need to send a message to Snape.”

Harry gurgled in what Sirius decided to interpret as agreement.

The shopkeeper, a short, wiry witch with feathers in her hair, came over. “Looking for a post owl?”

“Something reliable,” Sirius said. “Not lazy. Doesn’t faint if the wind changes direction.”

She eyed him knowingly, then waved him toward a row of medium-sized birds. “These here are good temperaments, steady in flight, don’t drop letters unless hexed.”

That was when one of the owls, a barn owl with a striking mottled pattern, hopped forward on its perch, head tilted. It hooted softly at Harry, then, with surprising gentleness, reached its beak toward the blanket and tapped it twice, as if checking the baby over.

Harry squealed in delight and batted at the air with his mittened hands. The owl hooted again, fluffing its chest feathers, and leaned closer as if to nuzzle.

“Friendly, that one,” the shopkeeper said, looking impressed. “Seems fond of children.”

Harry reached out again, and this time the owl nipped very lightly at his mitten with more a playful pinch than anything else. Sirius grinned. “Looks like we’ve been chosen, kiddo.”

The owl, perhaps deciding to prove its mettle, immediately turned its attention to Sirius and delivered a sharper nip to the knuckle.

Sirius hissed and shook his hand out. “And has a bit of bite. Perfect.”

They left the shop with a cage, a small supply of owl treats, and a bird Sirius had already mentally dubbed Regulus. Harry could only call him “Regguh,” his earnest attempt at the name. Sirius pretended it annoyed him but privately thought it suited the bird perfectly.

Back at Grimmauld, he let the owl out into the kitchen. It circled once, landed on the back of a chair, and fixed him with a look that was all calculation. Harry beamed up at it from his blanket nest on the floor.

“Well,” Sirius said to the bird, “you’re ours now. Let’s hope you’re as quick with letters as you are with your beak.”

The owl nipped at his sleeve in reply. Sirius decided he liked it even more.

By the third week after Remus’s visit, Sirius had to admit the Ministry starter potions were running low. Colic Draught, a mild Sleeping Draft, teething relief - all nearly gone.

The idea of buying from Diagon’s less reputable apothecaries made his skin crawl. Which left one option.

He sat at the desk with Harry on his lap, the boy grabbing at the quill. Sirius wrote quickly:

Need replenishment:
- Colic Draught
- Teething Relief (mild)
- Headache Cure (mine)
- Pepper-Up (infant dose)

Charge me if you want. Just don’t water it down like the vendors do.

He didn’t sign it. Let Snape guess. Or better, let him stew.

The letter arrived mid-morning, tied to the leg of a barn owl with a beak that looked capable of breaking a knuckle and, Snape realized with faint dismay, was capable of it. He recognized the bird immediately; the shopkeeper in Diagon Alley had once described it as “devoted to children, tolerates adults, despises most wizards on sight.”

Of course Black would pick that one.

Snape untied the scroll, and the owl immediately nipped his finger. Hard.

“Of course,” he muttered, rubbing the spot. “Tell me, did he give you instructions to make the delivery as irritating as possible, or is that just instinct?”

The owl nipped again, this time at his hair. Snape pushed it away with a flick of his fingers and read the list.

It was typical Black: direct, careless, somehow managing to sound both demanding and reluctant. He set the letter aside and went into the back of the shop, where the air smelled of crushed mint and the earthy sharpness of drying roots.

Brewing for customers was work; brewing for Harry Potter was… not something Snape wanted to categorize. He measured, stirred, and timed with exacting precision. The Pepper-Up simmered to a soft silver before he decanted it into a vial and labeled it in neat, slanted script.

When all four potions were done, he packed them into a small crate with shock-absorbent charms. At the last minute, he added a note:

Dosages labeled. Do not improvise. Return the vials if you expect refills.

He didn’t sign his note either. The owl was waiting on the counter, glaring.

“I should feed you to the Kneazles,” he said, tying the parcel to its leg. The owl nipped him again and launched into the grey street.

The crate arrived that evening. Sirius unpacked it on the kitchen table, examining each label with an almost grudging appreciation for the crisp handwriting. The note he read twice before tucking it into the drawer not because it mattered, but because it was proof of a working line between them.

For the next few days, life settled into a strange sort of rhythm. Harry grew more animated, more curious about everything within grabbing distance. Sirius learned to owl Snape for a replacement when the supply ran low, and Snape learned, Sirius was sure of it, to expect a rude owl with a bad temper.

The fever came at the end of the second week after the first delivery.

Harry had been warm when Sirius put him down for his nap, but babies were warm, that was normal. You tucked them into your chest, and they were little hearthstones, breathing heat into you without trying.

But when he woke, two hours later, the warmth was a furnace.

At first Sirius thought it was the room. The kitchen had been holding the afternoon sun hostage all day, and the air was thick with the scent of the stew he’d been coaxing out of stubborn vegetables. He scooped Harry up, hummed some nonsense, and felt the back of his neck prickle.

The boy’s skin was too hot. Not pink from playing, not flushed from crying. No he was hot, the way you get when something inside is picking a fight with itself.

Sirius shifted him to one arm and pressed the back of his hand to the tiny forehead. It was like touching a kettle just before the whistle.

“Alright, Prongslet,” he murmured. “Let’s not make a habit of this.”

Harry whimpered, not the theatrical wail he gave when hungry or annoyed, but a thin, unfocused sound that made Sirius’s stomach turn over. He reached for the thermometer. The thing had been sitting in the kitchen drawer since he’d unpacked the baby supplies from a Ministry delivery. He’d never actually used it. The process felt like one of those Muggle contraptions James had laughed about.

The reading made Sirius’s chest go hollow: high enough to be trouble.

Right. We keep our heads. We do not panic.

He tried the obvious: cool cloth to the forehead, lighter blanket, rocking. He offered water, then milk. Harry refused with a little twist of the mouth and a miserable sigh. His skin stayed hot, his eyes heavy but unwilling to close.

Half an hour later, Sirius’s shirt was damp with Harry’s sweat, and the whimper had sunk into a lethargic quiet. Sirius looked at the clock. Then at the empty fireplace.

He hated the thought before it was even fully formed.

Snape.

Snape had been sending the requested draughts in a timely manner. Draughts for colic, for headaches, even for Sirius himself and a Fever Draught, age-appropriate. Sirius had tucked it on the top shelf, half out of pride, half out of sheer unwillingness to admit he’d need something from him .

Now, of course, the bottle was not on the shelf. In some act of brilliant forethought, Sirius had decided it was “safer” in the pantry. The pantry, which was currently stacked with half-unpacked crates from a storage cupboard Sirius had emptied in a fit of cleaning zeal that morning.

Ten minutes of frantic searching produced a handful of empty vials, a jar of pickled something that might once have been edible, and a renewed appreciation for Snape’s precise labeling system. The Fever Draught was nowhere in reach.

Harry shifted restlessly in his arms, letting out a sound that was almost a cry and almost a sigh. Sirius felt the edge of panic sharpening. He knew the fever wasn’t yet high enough to be immediately dangerous but he also knew it was climbing.

He could try to brew something himself. It wasn’t an impossible potion. But the time… and his brewing had never been what James politely called “reliable.”

The decision made itself. He crossed to the desk, one-handedly pulled parchment from the drawer, and scrawled:

Need Fever Draught. Now. For Harry. Please.

He stared at the “please” for a second, tempted to scratch it out, then rolled it up and tied it to the leg of the barn owl Harry had picked out in Diagon Alley the one Harry could only call “Regguh,” his earnest attempt at Regulus . The bird blinked at him with slow judgment, then snapped its beak in a way that promised Sirius’s fingers would pay for the errand.

Sirius paced. He carried Harry from room to room, murmuring anything that came to mind: Quidditch commentary, half-remembered lines from bedtime stories, the lyrics to a song he and James had once yelled in the Gryffindor common room until McGonagall had threatened detention.

When the knock came, sharp, two beats, no patience, Sirius almost laughed. Snape didn’t knock like someone visiting. He knocked like someone auditing your wards for violations.

He opened the door to the sight of black robes cutting through the gloom of the street, a small case in one hand. Snape looked at him, then at Harry, then at him again.

“You didn’t have the potion,” Snape said flatly.

“I had it,” Sirius said. “Somewhere.”

Snape stepped past him without invitation, the air moving with the faint scent of herbs and clean parchment. “Move,” he said, heading for the kitchen.

Sirius followed, Harry still tucked close. “I could have brewed it-”

“You could have poisoned him with it,” Snape cut in. He was already unpacking the case: vials set out in a precise line, each labeled in his immaculate hand.

The man’s focus was surgical. He poured a measured dose into a small spoon, tested the temperature against the inside of his wrist, and held it out. Sirius hesitated, and Snape’s eyes flicked up. “I brewed this myself two days ago. If you’d rather wait while I provide a sample for the Ministry-”

“Give it here,” Sirius muttered. He coaxed Harry’s mouth open, tipping the spoon in. The boy grimaced, swallowed, and shivered once.

“Good,” Snape said, and it wasn’t praise so much as confirmation. He began packing the case again, but his hand paused over one of the other vials. “For tonight,” he said, sliding a second Fever Draught across the table. “In case it returns. Two hours apart at minimum.”

Sirius nodded. The air between them felt crowded with things unsaid.

Snape glanced at Harry one more time before closing the case. “Lily would have kept it on the shelf where she could reach it in the dark,” he said, and the words were so neutral Sirius almost missed the sting.

When the door shut behind him, Sirius looked down at Harry. The fever wasn’t gone yet, but his breathing had eased, the small body relaxing against his chest.

On the kitchen table, beside the leftover vial, lay something that hadn’t been there before: a small, soft green scarf, the wool fine enough not to scratch.

The scarf sat on the table like it had been grown there - deep forest green, the kind of shade that belonged in old forests where light had to fight to reach the ground. Sirius reached for it automatically, then stopped, glancing at the door as if it might still be ajar.

He hadn’t heard Snape leave it. He’d heard the latch on the case, the faint hiss of robes against the kitchen floor, the door closing, nothing else. But the scarf was here.

He picked it up. It was soft, finer than anything Grimmauld had ever coughed up, smelling faintly of clean wool and the same subtle herbal note that had clung to Snape’s sleeves. Harry stirred, and Sirius draped it loosely around the boy’s chest, not so much for warmth - the fever was still working its way down - but for the odd sense of security it seemed to give.

The kitchen felt different now. Not warmer exactly, but less like the house was listening. The low flame under the kettle sighed. Somewhere deep in the pipes, water shifted like an old man settling in his chair.

He kept watch through the evening, dozing in the chair with Harry curled against him. Every so often, he’d lift the boy’s fringe and press his lips to the warm forehead, feeling for the slow retreat of heat. The Fever Draught had worked. Of course it did, Snape wouldn’t brew anything less than precise but Sirius still couldn’t quite unclench his grip.

By midnight, the air from the open kitchen window had cooled enough to bring gooseflesh up his arms. Harry’s skin was merely warm now, not searing. He made small contented noises in his sleep, the kind that had texture. A little breathy hum that tickled Sirius’s collarbone.

It should have been relief. Instead, Sirius found himself thinking of Spinner’s End. He’d never seen it, but he imagined Snape’s house in shades of grey: narrow rooms, too much shadow, the constant smell of potion ingredients. And somewhere in there, Snape, sleeves rolled, brewing a Fever Draught he hadn’t yet been asked for. Leaving a scarf without saying so.

Lily asked you, Sirius thought, and wondered if Snape resented that clause every single day.

At three in the morning, Harry stirred with a low whimper. Sirius, half-asleep, jolted upright. The boy’s forehead was warm again, but not dangerously so. He weighed the vial Snape had left, debated, then gave a half-dose. Harry swallowed, sighed, and went limp again in that trusting way only children and the very drunk could manage.

Sirius didn’t go back to the chair. He took Harry upstairs and laid him in the cot, then sat on the edge of his own bed, scarf in his hand. He should put it somewhere. Return it. Burn it. Something. Instead, he went and draped it over a kitchen chair back, telling himself it was simply convenient.

The morning came slow, pale light spilling between curtains Sirius hadn’t bothered to draw shut. He woke to a faint gurgle. Harry, already awake, rolling onto his side in the cot and blinking at him with that wide green stare. The fever was gone.

Sirius scooped him up, breathing in the scent of warm blankets and whatever indefinable thing made a child smell like a child. “That’s better,” he murmured. “Told you we’d sort you out.”

In the kitchen, he found the scarf still draped over the chair. On impulse, he took a scrap of parchment and wrote:

Scarf received. Fits him. Fever gone. Thank you.

No signature. No flourish. He rolled it, tied it to the owl, and sent it off before he could think better of it.

The reply came that afternoon.

Draughts replenish themselves only in Spinner’s End, not Grimmauld. You’ll need new stock. Will deliver.

No mention of the scarf. No acknowledgment of thanks. But Sirius noticed the “will” instead of “can,” and it made something unreasonably pleased shift in his chest.

Two days later, a small crate arrived: Fever Draught, Calming Draught, something labeled Mild Pepper-Up, infant dose . Beneath the vials, wrapped in plain brown paper, was a pair of tiny green socks.

Sirius stood in the hallway, holding the socks like they were contraband, and found himself grinning despite every intention not to.

That night, as Harry banged a wooden spoon against the edge of his high chair, Sirius caught himself watching the door, listening for a knock that didn’t come. He told himself it was just so he could return the crate. Just so he could make sure Snape knew the potions had arrived.

But when no knock came, he told himself he’d send an owl in the morning.

He didn’t tell himself why.

Chapter Text

Diagon Alley had thawed into early spring, all wet stone and a thin, hopeful sun. Sirius told himself the outing was for fresh air and bread, and not because he could feel the walls of Grimmauld Place leaning in when Harry got bored. He had the boy in a sling beneath his coat, a knit cap crooked over the eternally unruly hair. Harry’s breath warmed the hollow at Sirius’s collarbone; every so often a tiny hand escaped the sling and patted the world as if to make sure it was solid.

“Mission: bread,” Sirius informed him, stepping past Flourish and Blotts. “Secondary objective: jam. Tertiary objective: not getting hexed by someone’s grandmother for walking too fast.”

Harry answered with a solemn, “Mmm,” then pointed at a display of sugar quills in a window as if he already knew the concept of corruption.

Sirius cut across toward the bakery. The air was thick with yeast and butter, and he bought a still warm loaf, two rolls, and a small jar of rhubarb jam they didn’t need but deserved. When he came back out, a pair of third-years stared at him with the particular intensity of people who had read his name in the paper and weren’t sure whether to run or ask for an autograph.

He tipped an invisible hat and kept moving.

The collapse began outside the Magical Menagerie. Someone had decided the front display needed flair: a cage of overexcited Puffskeins trilled, a Kneazle kitten yowled for effect, and because the gods were cruel someone in Gambol and Japes tested a string of Fwooper firecrackers. The first pop was innocuous. The second ricocheted down the alley like thunder.

Harry went rigid. Then his face crumpled and the wail tore out of him so suddenly Sirius felt it in his teeth.

“Hey, hey, prongslet, I’ve got you.” He cupped the back of Harry’s head, swaying automatically. The sling made it worse. Harry wanted out, but out would mean slippery steps and too many feet and hands. Sirius tried for the shadow of a doorway, patting, shushing, rocking, but the noise had settled into Harry like a spell, and nothing he did could shake it loose. People turned to look. Someone tutted. A little wave of heat rose in Sirius’s neck, anger, shame, a useless cocktail. He adjusted the sling again, hands clumsy now.

“Black.”

The voice cut through the air the way a knife decides it’s done with pleasantries.

Sirius turned. Severus Snape stood just beyond the Menagerie’s window, every line of him immaculate despite Diagon’s damp. A small paper parcel, ingredients, no doubt, hung from one hand. His eyes went first to Harry and then to Sirius, taking in the both of them with a coolness that made Sirius want to bare his teeth.

“Yes?” Sirius snapped before he could stop himself. It came out more deflated than sharp.

“The Alley is neither a battlefield nor an opera,” Snape said. “If you intend to rehearse a duet, kindly do it indoors.”

“Apologies for my infant being an infant.” Sirius bounced Harry, who took that as his cue to cry harder. “Firecrackers. Brilliant idea.”

Snape’s mouth tightened. “Give him here.”

Sirius actually laughed. “I’d rather not hand my godson to a man whose hobbies include humiliation and bat impressions.”

“I brew for toddlers more often than I brew for adults who act like them,” Snape said evenly. “You’re overheating him. Unfasten the sling. Loosen his coat.”

It was not a request. Irritation flared but then Sirius registered the detail he’d missed: Harry’s skin under his palm was scorching. Not fever-hot, but pushed that way by panic and wool. He fumbled the sling open and got the cap off. The air kissed Harry’s damp hair; the crying dropped by a fraction.

Snape reached into his inner pocket and withdrew a tiny stoppered vial. “Calming draught. Mild. ” He stressed the word as if daring Sirius to accuse him of dosing children for sport. “One drop on the tongue.”

Sirius hesitated. Snape’s eyebrow rose, all acid patience. “Or continue the duet,” he suggested.

“Give me the bloody thing.” Sirius wet a fingertip and touched it to Harry’s lower lip. The boy hiccupped, shuddered, and after a moment the sobs collapsed into ragged breaths. His fingers, cool now, clutched at Sirius’s shirt.

“Better,” Snape said, in the tone of someone judging a potion’s viscosity and finding it passable. He slipped the vial away. “You look like hell.”

Sirius barked a laugh that had very little humor in it. “Feel worse. But thanks for the assessment.”

“You require rest,” Snape said. “And he will wake again in two hours unless we keep the descent gentle.”

Sirius glanced down at the small damp lashes, the flushed cheeks, the way Harry had burrowed back into him with the single-mindedness of the newly reprieved. “I can handle-”

“You’ve been ‘handling’ it,” Snape cut in, voice soft but unforgiving. “And you’re shaking. You didn’t notice, but I did.” He held out a hand, palm bare, as if offering a truce that would self-destruct if discussed. “Floo or Apparition?”

Sirius’s stubbornness rose fast and then, faced with Harry’s small hiccough, fell away like a bluff no one believed. “Apparition,” he muttered. “Side-along.”

Snape inclined his head once. “Grimmauld Place.”

They stepped into the narrow space between shops; the world folded and righted. Sirius’s boots hit the stone of his own stoop, and the familiar stink of Grimmauld’s old wards roused like a dog deciding whether to bite.

Inside, the house’s chill crept under Sirius’s collar. Snape didn’t comment on the mess. The stack of laundry that had learned to lean or the toy dragon half-devoured by the stairs. He set the paper parcel on the hall table without looking at it and walked straight for the kitchen as if he’d lived here before and expected the kettle to still be where it belonged.

Sirius followed, hushing Harry as the draught did its work in stages. By the time they reached the kitchen, the crying had settled to small, indignant sniffs. Snape flicked his wand; the kettle sprang to life; two tiny watchglasses jumped out of a cupboard and lined up. He poured a finger of water in each and tested the heat with the briefest touch.

“For him,” he said, passing the first. “You, sit.”

Sirius opened his mouth to argue and then, because the chair was very close and the world had gone pleasantly fuzzy at the edges, he sat. Snape moved around the kitchen with a spare, economical grace, drawers opened and shut, the sweet, medicinal smell of something blooming in steam. He set a small flask near Sirius’s elbow. “For your head,” he said. “And your temper, if we’re lucky.”

“Not sure there’s a potion for that,” Sirius said, but he drank it down. Coolness threaded the back of his eyes and crawled into the place where the headache had been quietly sharpening since the Alley.

Harry, now more curious than undone, slapped a damp hand against Snape’s sleeve. Snape did not flinch. He regarded the hand as if it were a laboratory sample and then said, to Harry, “Your theatrics are impressive. Limit them to an audience that deserves them.”

Harry blinked. “Regguh,” he offered earnestly, as if nominating his owl.

“Exactly,” Snape said dryly.

“Look at you, two old men agreeing,” Sirius muttered. He shifted Harry against his shoulder, and the child sagged with that sudden bonelessness of surrender. “He’s out.”

“Good,” Snape said. He conjured a small cot beside the stove with a gesture so deft Sirius didn’t notice he’d done it until the blanket was already tucked. “Lay him there. Keep the room warm, but not stifling.” His hands, bare now, sleeves pushed to elbows, were steady and precise as he adjusted the blanket himself, a movement so unconscious it startled Sirius more than any insult could have.

Sirius set Harry down, hovered, then backed away like someone leaving a prayer on a doorstep.

“Go lie down,” Snape said, already rolling his sleeves higher. “If you insist on collapsing in a dignified manner, do it in your bed.”

Sirius squinted at him. “Since when are you domestic?”

“Since you proved incompetent,” Snape replied without heat. A copper cauldron came down from the rack with a clatter. “I will brew a calming tea he can take later if he startles awake. And a draught for you that doesn’t render you incapable of hearing him.”

Sirius drifted toward the door on the cool tide of the headache cure. “I can make a sandwich.”

“You could,” Snape conceded. “And the results would be a public health concern. Go.”

Sirius went. He meant to just stretch out for five minutes- fifteen at most. He heard the low hiss of water and the glancing sounds of glass on wood as if through a wall. He thought, briefly and with unbearable clarity, of Lily’s voice in that cold chamber - I ask this not for me, but for Harry - and then the bed rose and fell and he was gone.

The house smelled like old wool and something vaguely damp that no charm had properly banished. It also smelled, now, of baby. Warm milk on cotton, sweet skin, that particular clean-messy scent of recent tears. Snape would never say it aloud, but the combination was not offensive.

He brewed. He measured in silence. He let the kitchen tell him small truths: the way the cupboard near the stove stuck and required a firm nudge; the placement of a tin of biscuits- adult height, out of a reach that was learning to climb. The pantry was chaos. He didn’t sigh, but he did reorganize a row of jars with the same expression he wore when correcting a seventh-year’s mediocre attempt at a shrink solution.

The tea was easy. The draught for Sirius, the kind that would tip him toward rest without pushing him off the cliff was more delicate. Snape labeled both with neat script: Calming Tea - Harry (2 sips, warm) ; Restorative - Sirius (1 vial, with food) . He left them on the table where even a distracted Gryffindor would see them.

And then, because sitting still in a room untidy to offense was beyond him, he cleaned.

Once you started, Grimmauld Place made it hard to stop. A scourgifying charm revealed wood under a stain that Snape suspected had been there since a Black great-aunt died at this table and refused to leave. A stack of laundry in the scullery turned out to be wash that had been started and abandoned; he set the copper to heat and finished it, wand-drying shirts that were mostly clean but had succumbed to the smell of old water.

He found a small sock under the dresser. Green, of course. He set it on the counter beside a neat pair he didn’t remember taking out of his case days ago and stared at them until the ridiculousness of the tableau forced him to move.

He opened the icebox. Its interior was bleak - two eggs, butter, a hunk of cheese with ideas, and the bread Sirius had bought. Snape set his jaw, went to the hall, retrieved the paper parcel of ingredients he’d purchased for his own shop, and took stock: mushrooms, shallots, a small pouch of thyme, a chicken he had meant to join at Spinner’s End. 

“You can leave,” he told himself, not softly. The house listened and did not argue.

He set to work. The knife felt good in his hand; the slow, even thock of shallot against board steadied his thoughts in a way nothing else did. He browned the chicken in stages, let mushrooms release their juice until the pan sang again, and deglazed with a splash of white from a bottle that clearly had no business in Grimmauld Place but had arrived anyway (Sirius, apparently, believed in buying wine like he believed in sleep: optimistically).

A separate pot took to boiling for potatoes. He peeled and quartered, salted the water with the practiced flick of someone who had cooked enough to know the difference between bland and comfort. He added a knob of butter, a splash of milk, crushed the potatoes until they yielded into softness. For the baby, he reserved a small portion, thinning it further, shredding a measured amount of chicken into the mash with a suspicion-quieting dash of stock.

He set the table. He could go now. He had done enough. He could but then the soft footfall in the hall changed his mind for him.

The smell of chicken and mushrooms coaxed Sirius up from sleep in increments: first as a memory of dinners he’d wandered into at the Potters’. Lily teasing James for burning toast; then as a present fact anchoring him to the bed, making his stomach argue its case. He scrubbed a hand over his face and winced. Sleep had done that thing where it made him feel like he’d been hit by gentle furniture.

He padded down the hall barefoot and paused in the kitchen doorway.

Snape had claimed the room without making it his. Apron tied tight around his waist. Sleeves pushed to his elbows. Hair pulled back in a small tie that looked more purely functional than Sirius had believed possible for human vanity. He was spooning mashed potatoes into a tiny bowl with a concentration that would have made a poisoner blush. The table was set. The sink was… clear. The laundry basket that had been sulking by the door was gone, replaced by a neat stack of folded shirts.

“Who are you,” Sirius said hoarsely, “and what have you done with the bastard I went to school with?”

Snape didn’t look up. “Sit.”

Sirius sat because his legs had decided that would be easiest. He glanced at the cot. Harry was still asleep, cheeks pink, breath even. Relief loosened something low in his spine he hadn’t realized had seized. He closed his eyes for a second, because it was either that or show his face breaking.

When he opened them, a plate had appeared under his nose. Chicken glistened with its own sauce. Mushrooms nestled against a mound of mash with an indecent promise of butter. He looked up to say something heroic and grateful.

“Eat,” Snape said, already setting the tiny bowl within reach for when Harry woke. “Then we can argue.”

Sirius picked up the fork. The first bite almost made him groan. He settled for, “Merlin’s left sock, this is good.”

“Language,” Snape said. “You’ll teach the child to swear.”

“He’ll learn from the best,” Sirius said through another bite.

They ate in a quiet that felt more like a treaty than a silence. Somewhere between mouthfuls three and five, the tension across Sirius’s shoulders eased to the point that his voice could slip through.

“I’m not… I’m not actually doing this well,” he said. It sounded as if the confession had been waiting against his teeth for weeks. “I can make it look like it sometimes. And he’s alive, which is a start. But half the time I feel like I’m catching knives. He deserves more than someone improvising.”

Snape’s fork paused mid-air. “He deserves someone who stays,” he said, as if reciting a ledger entry.

“I will,” Sirius said fiercely, so quietly the table had to lean in to hear. “I am .”

Snape inclined his head once, acknowledging a fact that did not require argument. “You require help,” he said, and the words were unadorned, practical, not unkind.

Sirius tipped his fork at him. “From you.”

A humorless twist ghosted across Snape’s mouth. “Against my better judgment and in keeping with an old promise.”

“Lily asked you,” Sirius said, because it seemed important to say it aloud in the kitchen where everyday promises lived. “In the will. You heard her. I… I’m asking too.”

Snape’s eyes met his fully for the first time since the Alley. For a second - just one - Sirius saw how tired he was beneath the composure, and how much steadier a person can be when they allow themselves to be tired in front of someone. “I will come,” he said. “I will not live here. I will not stay the night.”

“I wasn’t-” Sirius began.

“You were,” Snape said mildly. “And on storm nights you will be tempted to suggest it again. I won’t. Boundaries prevent homicide.”

Sirius huffed a laugh. “Fine. Come as you can. A few days a week? Or… when you’ve brewed and need to gloat?”

Snape considered, set his fork down with a precise click. “I will bring food that is not an insult. I will stock your pantry properly. I will brew and deliver draughts before you realize you are out of them. You will owl in emergencies and only in emergencies.” A faint glint, almost but not quite amusement. “And you will keep your owl from assaulting me.”

“Regguh likes you,” Sirius said. “For values of ‘like’ that include light maiming.”

The smallest, briefest sound escaped Snape, something that might one day, if fed, grow into a laugh. “He has taste,” he said.

Harry woke as if he’d been waiting for a lull to slip into. A small questioning sound, a roll onto his side, and then a determined push upward with that infuriating, miraculous toddler strength. Sirius was out of his chair before he spoke, lifting him easily, breathing him in as if memorizing him again were a necessary daily chore.

“Hungry?” Sirius asked. “Chef Snape has prepared a degustation of mashed things.”

Snape took the tiny bowl from the table and a spoon that had appeared somewhere in the unguarded minutes. “Sit,” he told Sirius. “Your technique wastes half the food on his chin.” He took Harry with a competence that startled Sirius for reasons he refused to examine, settled the boy in the crook of his arm, and offered the first spoonful like a man negotiating with an intelligent creature whose goodwill could not be bought. Harry considered, then opened his mouth. Victory did not change Snape’s face, but it rearranged the kitchen’s air.

“Show-off,” Sirius muttered, unable to keep the absurd relief out of his voice.

“Observation,” Snape said. “You feed him as if he were a Hippogriff: performative bowing, no aim.”

Sirius, who had bowed to many Hippogriffs and exactly one man in his life, conceded the point with a snort.

They finished the meal that way, three bodies occupying the same small orbit without jostling. After, Snape rose, washed the few dishes with a thoroughness that suggested the plates had personally offended him, and dried them with a folded towel because magic was sometimes simply louder than necessary.

“When will you be back?” Sirius asked, surprised to hear the question unembarrassed.

“I have orders to fill in the morning,” Snape said. “Afternoon, perhaps. If you are foolish enough to venture to Diagon Alley, avoid the Menagerie and all known sources of fireworks.”

“I’ll take him to the park,” Sirius said. “Let him terrorize ducks.”

“His owl is terror enough,” Snape said, picking up his case. He paused—only a heartbeat—and added, without looking at Sirius, “You did not fail him today.”

Sirius swallowed around a tightness he refused to name. “We didn’t,” he said.

Snape inclined his head, that almost-bow he did for no one and nothing else, and was gone in a sweep of black and a soft click of the latch.

The rhythm didn’t settle so much as grow. Snape did not come daily; he came when he came, which turned out to be often enough to matter and irregular enough to keep Sirius vigilant. Sometimes two days in a row; sometimes a week without. He would arrive with a case and a bag of groceries that looked like they belonged to an organized adult, not a haunted house: onions, carrots, a slab of beef for a stew that perfumed the entire ground floor until even Kreacher admitted, under his breath, that “the new stink was less offensive than usual.”

The pantry transformed. Jars lined themselves under Snape’s hand into an alphabetical parade. Labels appeared in his clean slanted script: TEA (Proper) ; TEA (Sirius’s Folly) ; Baby Cereals ; Biscuits, Regrettable . An inventory chalkboard arrived from nowhere and lived on the inside of a cupboard door, spells keeping it dustless. At the very bottom, in small letters that Sirius pretended not to notice: Wolfsbane - deliver Tuesday; dosage for Lupin adjusted (weight loss noted) .

Sirius learned to read the notes as a kind of weather report. Bread, baked; drawer two. Apples, left to stew lightly for Harry; do not feed hot. Headache Cure, yours, try not to squander it on the house. He left his own in return, mostly childish just to see if Snape would erase them: Tea consumed (the proper kind). Eggs destroyed (two). House still hates me (in progress).

Snape never stayed the night. The first time Sirius tried - “It’s sleeting, and your shop is a mile of bad road from the Floo-” Snape’s look would have withered a younger man. “I do not sleep where portraits hiss my name,” he said, and buttoned his coat with the air of someone completing the last step of an old ritual.

Sometimes, when the hour was late and the weather uglier than dignity, Sirius would find a folded blanket left on the back of the settee and a small card propped against it in Snape’s hand: No. -S.

Harry learned new tricks with an audience. He pulled himself to standing using Snape’s trouser leg with the suicidal confidence of toddlers and drunks. He said “Regguh” whenever the owl swooped through the kitchen window and, once, when Snape passed him the spoon with a wary patience that would have looked soft on anyone else. Sirius caught the slip of sound, “Reg- Sev-” and filed it under later. He did not mention it. He did not have to. Snape’s ears went pink and then white and then normal, and the spoon continued on its course as if the world had not tilted for a fraction.

The day Remus walked in and found Snape already there, the house drew itself tight as a wire.

Sirius had invited Remus for stew (“There’s enough to feed a small regiment,” he’d written, which was to say, Snape cooked again ). He hadn’t planned the overlap; timing did that thing where it created narrative out of coincidence. The front door opened; rain hissed in; Remus shrugged out of a coat that had known better days and stopped in the kitchen doorway like a man who had wandered into the wrong chapter.

Snape looked up from the stove. He did not reach for his wand. He did not sneer. He merely stood as if the length of his spine had been measured against a rule.

“Lupin,” he said, not cordial, not hostile, just placing the piece on the board.

“Snape,” Remus returned, tone even. His eyes went to the cauldron, then to the glass jar labeled Wolfsbane - Week of 14th. Something eased in his shoulders, a notch. “You brewed this week’s?”

“I brew every week,” Snape said. “The Hogwarts supply is unfit.” A pause, one heartbeat long. “I assume you are, for the moment, fit to take it.”

Remus’s mouth quirked. “For the moment.”

Sirius hovered, uselessly, with a tea towel. He felt twelve again, jammed between two friends who had decided to dislike each other as a matter of philosophy. “There’s stew,” he offered, genius that he was. “And bread. And Harry insists on showing off his latest trick, which is spectacular drooling.”

“Bread first,” Remus said. He stepped into the room fully, the decision silent but made, and held out a hand. To Snape. “Thank you,” he said simply. “For the brewing. For… the other things.”

Snape looked at the hand as if it were a puzzle that might turn out to be a trap, then took it. “I am not doing it for you,” he said, in the softest echo of a statement he had made before in another room.

“I know,” Remus said. His fingers firmed once, then released. “I’m still grateful.”

Mutual respect did not bloom. It did, however, put down a seed.

Dinner was awkward for ten minutes and then not. Harry decided that was the night he would try to walk along the edge of the settee, tiny fists hauling, feet a comedy of courage and physics. All three men, old instincts forgotten, reached out at the same time when he wobbled; three hands steadied him; three breaths let out one shared laugh. Harry crowed, drunk on his own greatness, and would not be convinced to sit for the rest of the evening.

“Menace,” Snape informed him, but it had no specific target.

“Just like his father,” Remus said, and it wasn’t sad this time.

When Remus left, the rain had gentled. He paused at the threshold, turned back, and looked not at Sirius but at Snape. “If you ever need anything for the shop,” he said, “within my reach, owls, deliveries, let me know. Consider it… professional reciprocity.”

Snape inclined his head the length of a courtesy he might eventually offer a colleague. “I will keep that in mind.”

The door closed. The house expanded its lungs again.

Sirius busied himself with bowls purely to buy a moment to think. The kitchen felt different once more. Not warmer exactly, but more occupied by the kind of quiet that happens when people have stayed long enough to leave their outline in the air.

He leaned his hip against the table and sighed. “You stayed,” he said, not a question.

“I cooked,” Snape corrected, as if the verbs were mutually exclusive.

“You cleaned. You brewed. You fed him.” Sirius glanced at Harry, now asleep in a tangle of blanket and triumph on the settee, thumb just shy of his mouth. “You stayed.”

Snape collected his case and shrugged into his coat without answering. At the door, he paused and looked back into the kitchen. At the stoop of the lamp, the inventory board, the tiny green socks folded with suspect precision on the shelf. “You need a proper pan for searing,” he said, which in Snape was perilously close to yes .

Sirius smiled, that wolfish, tired thing that had learned softness around the edges. “Write it on the board.”

Snape did. In his even script: Skillet, cast iron (10”). Beneath it, smaller: Tea (Proper) - buy more. And, in letters so tiny Sirius had to squint: Regguh - train manners.

“Good luck with that,” Sirius said.

Snape made a sound that might one day become a laugh in a house braver than this one, lifted two fingers in a salute not meant for anyone else’s eyes, and slipped out into the night.

Sirius stood in the doorway to the sitting room and watched Harry’s chest rise and fall. The stew scented the air with thyme and something like the possibility of ordinary. The inventory board glimmered faintly under a stasis charm against dust. On the chair back, a green scarf waited as if it had been here a long time and would be, now, for longer.

“Alright, prongslet,” Sirius whispered to the sleeping boy and to the house and, almost, to the space Snape had just vacated. “We’re getting somewhere.”

Chapter Text

It began with errands.

Not the kind Sirius used to run with James at his shoulder and a plan half-sketched on a napkin, but the stubborn, ordinary kind that keep a life moving: buy flour, replace a cracked scale, fetch a sleeve of stoppers that won’t go brittle in damp spring air. If someone had told Sirius Black that he would one day take Severus Snape to Diagon Alley to debate the merits of pewter versus nickel silver while wearing a sleeping toddler across his chest, he would have laughed himself hoarse. Yet here they were.

The sky over the Alley was a washed blue, sunlight striking off windows where winter grime had been half-heartedly scrubbed away. Harry rode in his sling under Sirius’s coat, a ridiculous knit cap crooked over hair that refused to obey physics. Every so often a small hand emerged, patted the world as if checking to make sure it remained attached, and disappeared again.

Snape walked with the mild scowl of a man on his daily constitutional through a neighborhood he considered poorly run. The list in his hand was folded into a rectangle so crisp that Sirius suspected it might stand up on its own if placed on a flat surface.

“Stirrers first,” Snape said, as if Sirius had suggested they elope. “The old ones have warped.”

“They’re not warped,” Sirius said. “They’re… individualistic.”

“They’re bent,” Snape corrected. “Like your schedule.”

“Low blow,” Sirius said, but he was smiling.

At Borage & Co., Snape tested the balance of stirrers the way other men tested wands. He flicked each between two fingers, listened for a note Sirius couldn’t hear, and rejected six before deigning to add one to the basket. Harry watched solemnly, offering an “Oh,” each time the metal chimed.

“See? The boy has taste,” Snape said without looking up.

“Or gas,” Sirius said. “Hard to say.”

They added a set of scales and a packet of stopper charms that “any competent brewer” could apply. Sirius paid before Snape could protest, more from wanting to than from obligation, and earned himself a glance that might, on a kinder face, have been approval carefully disguised as disdain.

They made it as far as Gambol and Japes before Sirius veered.

“No,” Snape said immediately, not altering his stride.

“We’re not going in,” Sirius lied. “We’re cutting through.”

They cut through directly into the Magical Menagerie.

Snape stopped at the threshold as if he’d walked into a crime scene. The shop was a confused orchestra: trilling Puffskeins, a cage of ferrets arguing in squeaks, something in the corner snoring at a volume normally reserved for hogsheads. The air smelled of hay, feathers, and faintly of fish.

“You already have an owl,” Snape said. “And, at certain times, an overgrown black dog.”

It took a heartbeat for the remark to register, sliding into place like a belated insult. Sirius’s mouth twisted, half ready with a retort, half deciding it wasn’t worth giving Snape the satisfaction.

“Regguh’s not exactly a cuddler,” he said instead, drifting toward a pen of Kneazle kittens. One lifted its triangular head and blinked at Harry with the slow, judgmental grace of an aristocrat. Harry reached, mittened hand opening and closing, and the kitten headbutted his wrist with absurd tenderness.

Snape came to stand beside them, arms folded, face composed. “A Kneazle will object to your housekeeping,” he observed.

“So do you,” Sirius said.

“Yes,” Snape said, as if conceding a chess move whose inevitability annoyed him.

They didn’t buy anything. Sirius could feel Snape’s low hum of resistance and, besides, there was something appealing about the idea of wanting without taking but when they left, Sirius caught the mirror-glance Snape gave the kitten that had decided Harry’s sleeve was a pillow. He filed it away under evidence for later mischief .

Outside, Diagon Alley moved around them with that specific spring energy that comes from people convincing themselves warmth is permanent. A witch in a lemon cloak waved distractedly at Sirius, realized who she’d waved at, and became very interested in her shoe. Sirius adjusted Harry higher in the sling and chose to be amused instead of stung. The boy burbled to himself, gnawing contemplatively on the rim of his mitten.

“Bread,” Sirius said, aiming them at the bakery. “And jam.”

“No jam,” Snape said.

“Jam is a human right.”

“Jam is a distraction from the absence of nutrition.”

“You’re a distraction from fun,” Sirius countered. “Which is why we balance each other.”

Snape made a sound that might one day grow into a laugh if someone fed it and kept it warm.

On a Thursday three weeks later, Remus took Harry for the afternoon “He can investigate whether my kettle whistles differently at different times of day.” Sirius, unexpectedly, said yes. The house exhaled when they left, and Sirius felt the echo of the silence like a stretch he hadn’t attempted in years.

He went to Snape’s shop in Knockturn, because Snape had written stirrers arrived, if collected in person they won’t go missing and because the words won’t go missing had been underlined twice.

The shop smelled of dried mint, ground roots, and the knife-edge metal scent of fresh-bottled potions. Shelves rose in neat, stern ranks, full of jars with Snape’s clean-slanted labels. The bell chimed; two customers drifted out; the room settled.

Sirius did the front without being asked: sold a sleep draught to a harried-looking witch who had dark circles under her eyes and reminded him uncomfortably of his own reflection three weeks ago; scraped drips of sealing wax from the counter; straightened a paper sign that read Wolfsbane Orders - By Arrangement Only . He liked the rhythm of it. Work that started and ended. Work with answers.

The lull after the lunch rush came like a held breath slowly let go. Sirius wandered into the back and found Snape in his workroom, sleeves to the elbow, hair bound back, the careful mechanics of brewing making the air hum.

“Mind if I watch?” Sirius asked, leaning on the frame.

“If you remain silent,” Snape said.

“I can do silence,” Sirius said.

“You cannot,” Snape said, but he didn’t send him away.

It should have been boring. It wasn’t. Snape’s movements were precise without being stiff, each step a quiet conversation with what the liquid wanted to do next. He stirred one direction, paused, reversed, and the color tightened as if in response. He tapped heat into the burner and the surface shivered into a different sheen. Sirius realized, around the sixth minute, that he’d stopped looking for a joke.

“How long until it reduces?” he asked softly.

“Seven and a half minutes,” Snape said, glancing at the sandglass. “You may continue to be silent for that duration if you are ambitious.”

“Ambitious has never been my problem,” Sirius said, and, for once, managed not to fill the quiet with the rest of the sentence.

When the potion reached its precise thickness, Snape decanted it into vials, left-hand steady, right-hand sure. He labeled each one. Sirius watched the ink dry; watched Snape not look at him; found he didn’t mind not being looked at. It felt like trust scaled to the room.

On his way back to the counter, he knocked his hip into a crate. “Oi,” he grunted.

Snape didn’t bother turning. “Graceful as ever.”

“Keep it up and I’ll train Regguh to bring you love letters,” Sirius said.

“Whatever you train it to bring will arrive with blood,” Snape said, and then, very quietly, “I would not open anything it delivers with my bare hands.”

Sirius grinned in spite of himself, because hidden under the bite was an acknowledgment: your owl has become our running joke. He liked their jokes. They were ladders across narrow places.

“Front of house suits you,” Snape remarked as they closed up the store together..

“I like people,” Sirius said.

“I had deduced that,” Snape said. “Which is why you spend your days in a house designed to resent them.”

“Trying something new,” Sirius said. “Seeing if resentment can be trained.”

“Report your findings,” Snape said, and went back to work.

The house was changing. It flinched less when doors slammed. Dust collected more slowly, or else the habit of wiping it away had sunk into Sirius’s hands deep enough that he didn’t notice doing it. The pantry chalkboard, once a list of emergencies ( milk? eggs? how to cook eggs? ), had become a conversation held in neat lines and sarcastic addenda.

TEA (Proper) - low
TEA (Sirius’s Folly) - why?
Apples stewed for Harry - left shelf; test temperature first.
Reg ate label.
Regguh did not : Sirius scratched out the correction because the owl had done it while looking straight at him.

Snape would arrive with groceries the way some men brought flowers: onions, carrots, a paper-wrapped loaf tucked at the bottom of the bag, a jar of something that turned into dinner if he was the one holding the knife. He stocked spices in a rotated order designed to drive Sirius mildly mad until he learned it by muscle memory. He labeled things no one else would have thought to label: Sieves (fine) , Sieves (coarse) , Sieve for reasons that will not be explained .

On days Snape didn’t come, the house felt too still. Sirius found himself pausing in doorways, listening for a voice that would not be there, and then catching his own reflection and telling himself to stop behaving like a widow in a play.

On nights when Snape did stay, rare, careful, always with the word “until morning” folded into the offer, Sirius slept on his back like a man who has finally put down a weight. The first time, Harry was feverish from teething and the rain rattled the panes; Snape untied his cloak, set his case by the stove, and said, “It is more efficient if I am here.” In the morning he drank the coffee Sirius handed him and reminded the chalkboard, not Sirius, Rest today. Both of you.

The second time, Floo went dead in a storm and the Alley was not safe to walk. Snape took the armchair and refused the guest room. He sat reading a ledger while Sirius read fairy tales that ended in strange morality and wolves who spoke. At some dim hour, Sirius woke to the soft sound of paper turning, steady as a tide. He fell asleep again to the thought: someone else is awake if he cries.

Spinner’s End would never apologize for what it was. The row of houses leaned toward each other like men sharing secrets about the weather. The canal lay behind them, water the color of coins no one cared to polish. Snape’s workroom was clean and cold, the hearth providing heat with the reluctant air of a clerk working the end of a shift.

He set a kettle on. It made noises he could not pretend were comforting. He caught himself, twice, listening for small feet in the next room, a creature bashing a cup against the floor, the bright syllabic nonsense of a toddler narrating his conquest of a cushion. The quiet had been his companion long before it had become a condition. Now it sounded, if not hostile, then inhospitable.

At the end of the night, when everything that could be made had been made and the house offered him its chair like a dare, Snape stood looking at the door. He did not go back to Grimmauld Place. But he thought about it long enough to become annoyed with himself for thinking.

On his way to bed, he found a green thread on his sleeve. He did not remember how it got there. He removed it as if it were a hex and left it folded on the mantelpiece, which was not sentimental at all.

Summer sharpens everything: smells, tempers, the angle of light. Diagon Alley glittered and steamed, and Sirius said they needed new jars with better closure charms. Snape said the ones they had were fine. They went anyway. Harry wore a sun-hat he hated and kept removing, which Sirius re-tied with the patience of saints and men who had learned to keep biscuits in their pockets.

At the apothecary, Snape squeezed the hinge on a sample jar and made a small, satisfied noise. “This one.”

“Imagine the joy of all those dried beetle wings,” Sirius said, examining himself in the convex glass of a polished alembic until his face went comic.

“Please do not,” Snape said.

They bought three dozen. “A man with jars is a man with ambitions,” Sirius declared as they left, balancing a box on his hip while Harry tried to put a label in his mouth.

“Ambitions require lids that seal,” Snape said.

They were halfway down the Alley when Harry spotted the pet shop and announced his support for chaos with a single, decisive “Da!” not Dad, not a full word, just a syllable with the force of a spell. Sirius, traitor to the cause of efficiency, changed course. Snape followed with the stoicism of a punished god.

Inside, a toad with the face of a pensioner hissed at Snape and was ignored. Harry made eye contact with the same Kneazle kitten, now more long-legged and suspect. The kitten sniffed, blinked, and then began to purr like a small engine.

“We’re not buying a cat,” Snape said.

“Of course not,” Sirius said, entirely unconvincing.

“It would sleep in your socks,” Snape said. “And then your socks would be universally worse.”

“Many things sleep in my socks,” Sirius said. “Most of them are residual curses.”

A clerk came over and smiled with the weary competence of someone who had seen every kind of family choose every kind of animal. “He’s fond of that one,” she said, nodding at the Kneazle. “Good instincts.”

“His instincts include eating lint,” Snape said, but his voice had softened the way it did when Harry gave him a spoon as if presenting a sword to a general.

They left again without buying anything, because wanting is powerful and delay is a form of savoring. Outside, Sirius caught Snape’s gaze slipping sideways to track the shape of the kitten through the window. He pretended not to notice, and Snape pretended not to be noticed, and between them the subject of later gained weight.

On the days Remus took Harry - Saturdays, mostly, if the moon allowed - Sirius found himself saying “I’ll help at the shop.” 

He scrubbed glass, charmed labels to resist dampness, argued prices with men who assumed Snape’s temper meant he could be bullied and were corrected by Sirius’s smile, which did not reach his eyes. He discovered that he liked closing up: the bell’s final chime, the blinds lowered, the quiet of a room that had done its work. He learned the store’s heartbeat.

He also learned, watching Snape slip into the rhythm of brew and bottle, that there was a way to be alone without being lonely and a way to be together without making a fuss about it.

One slow afternoon, with a rain-lashed light making the room feel underwater, Sirius drifted into the back again. Snape was at the big table with a pile of sliced roots arranged like geometry. Sirius picked up a knife.

“I can help,” he said.

“No,” Snape said automatically.

“I can help,” Sirius repeated, not setting the knife down.

Snape looked up, assessed something that wasn’t the knife, and turned the cutting board ninety degrees. “Thin as paper. Not thinner.”

Sirius grinned. “Bossy.”

“Accurate,” Snape said.

They worked. The rhythm of knife on board, glass clink, the small threaded breaths of two men not trying to fill the room with talk. Halfway through, Snape said, without looking up, “Your wrist turns when you’re tired. Stop before you cut yourself.”

Sirius stopped. “How do you know I’m tired?”

“You stopped making jokes five minutes ago,” Snape said. “And you called the last customer ‘sir.’”

“Maybe I’m becoming polite.”

“Unlikely,” Snape said, and passed him a mug of tea he had brewed at some point without announcing it. It was the proper kind. Sirius sipped and felt something inside him stand down.

At Grimmauld Place, domesticity became less a foreign language and more a dialect. Snape maintained his boundaries with the zeal of a man who had kept worse things out than weather, but the lines softened at the edges: he would step in when Harry’s bedtime pushed past reason; he would take a stirring spoon out of Sirius’s hand and replace it with a whisk without comment; he would, on exactly three nights, remain until morning and leave before dawn with a note on the chalkboard that read, in neat print, Tea left warm. Close the flue. The house will sulk.

Sirius, for his part, pried up a patch of grimy wallpaper in the hallway and discovered plaster good enough to paint. He painted it. When Snape arrived the next day, he stood looking at the cool white and made one face that could have meant acceptable or you’ve ruined my favorite stain. He said, “You’ll have to do the rest now.” Sirius did, swearing affectionately at him the whole time.

There were errors. One afternoon, Sirius attempted to charm the sharp corners off the old dining table and set the thing to weeping sap for six hours. Snape found him with his arms elbow-deep in a bucket of vinegar water. He didn’t say I told you not to meddle with ancient wood under Black house wards. He said, “Move,” and hexed the sap still while muttering something in Latin that made the table shudder and then behave.

“See?” Sirius said. “Teamwork.”

“See,” Snape returned, “why one member of a team should be allowed to veto the other’s experiment.”

“Where’s the fun in that?”

“In not smelling like a distillery’s floor,” Snape said, wringing out the cloth with the resigned competence of a man who has cleaned messes in places no one else will admit exist.

Harry grew in those months the way weeds do when no one tells them to stop: sideways, upward, into new words and habits. He learned the taste of apples stewed with a pinch of cinnamon that Snape pretended he hadn’t added; he learned that if he said “Regguh” in exactly the right tone, Sirius would whistle and the owl would appear from somewhere inappropriate and land, smug, on the back of the chair. He learned that if he lifted his arms toward Snape with ruthless confidence, he would be picked up, eventually, and that while he was in Snape’s arms, spoons behaved, bowls did not jump off tables, and naps were not a negotiation but a fact.

On a blue-edged evening thick with the smell of rain, Remus came to dinner and found Snape already at the stove.

The room went taut and then, as if remembering it had kept worse secrets than this, relaxed. Remus shrugged water from his coat, took in the set table, the silver pot humming at a slow simmer, and said, “If that’s the stew from last time, I’ll even eat mushrooms.”

“It is not the stew from last time,” Snape said. “It is better.”

“Arrogant,” Sirius said.

“Informed,” Snape said.

Remus crossed to the shelf where the wolfsbane stood with its discreet label. “Thank you,” he said, not looking at either of them, which was sometimes the best way to say the most truthful things.

They ate. The conversation found a track that wasn’t truce and wasn’t contest. Remus asked a question about a binding herb used in wolfsbane; Snape answered. Sirius added a ridiculous story about James attempting to brew a cheering draught and ending up with a cauldron full of effervescence that stained everything within three feet yellow. Snape’s mouth did that almost-laugh again, quick as a moth and gone.

After dinner, Harry took three confident steps along the settee, wobbled, and would have gone down if three adult hands hadn’t shot out at exactly the same time. He crowed, as if he’d meant to stop there all along. The men laughed, a sound with more light in it than the room had started with.

When Remus left, he paused at the threshold and addressed the corridor rather than either man. “If you need an extra pair of hands for the shop deliveries… I’m around.”

Snape, who hated the idea of anyone touching his systems, said, after a small war with himself, “I will consider it.”

After the door shut, Sirius leaned on the table and exhaled. “Well.”

“Well,” Snape echoed, and they stood in the warm, messy peace of a kitchen that had been used for something other than survival.

Months do not announce themselves. They appoint a spokesperson: an object left in the wrong place; a habit that wasn’t, then was. In August, Sirius realized he could tell when Snape was three blocks away because Grimmauld Place, in defiance of its own personality, brightened by half a candle. He realized, too, that Spinner’s End had begun to send Snape to them with a thin impatience that had nothing to do with Sirius and everything to do with the house itself being unfit for a human life.

On a night that started with thunder and ended with the world smelling like pennies, Snape stayed without remark. Harry kept waking at the thunderclaps, crying, not frightened exactly but outraged. Snape brewed hot milk with a whisper of something soporific and read a page from a dry potions treatise in a low drone that turned, by alchemy, into lullaby. He slept in the chair again. Sirius threw a blanket over him at two in the morning and pretended not to notice the way Snape’s head tilted infinitesimally toward the warmth.

In the morning, Snape wrote on the chalkboard: Cast iron skillet procured. Stop setting the potato pan on fire. Beneath it, in letters so small Sirius had to get nose-close to read them: Today will be loud. It will pass.

Sirius left his own reply under that: Stay for lunch? He drew an absurd little owl beside it that made Regguh, upon seeing it, attack the board with gusto. Snape stared at the chalk-scars later and said, “Your art offends,” which Sirius took, correctly, to mean yes.

They ate fried tomatoes and mushrooms on toast while Harry squeezed orange segments into paste and offered them to Snape with the solemn generosity of emperors. Snape took one, ate it like it had been properly prepared, and said, deadpan, “Exquisite.”

Sirius, for reasons he did not examine, had to look down and smile into his plate until the feeling passed.

By the time the leaves decided to go copper at the edges, the house had acquired small proofs of two temperaments choosing, repeatedly, to live in the same sentences. A line of knives hung not by size, Sirius’s method, but by intended use, Snape’s. A green blanket lived permanently over the back of the settee. The chalkboard had sprouted a second column labeled Harry in a handwriting that was larger and loopier: apples, socks, new cup (doesn’t leak), and once, in Sirius’s scrawl, ridiculous hat (refuses to wear). Under it, very primly, Snape had written: enforce hat.

Some nights, after Harry went down easily and the house decided to behave, they would end up on the kitchen steps with cups (Sirius: tea; Snape: something dark and necessary) and listen to the city breathe. They didn’t talk about the war. They didn’t talk about the past as anything other than a shared archive from which you could borrow an anecdote in exchange for a laugh. They didn’t talk about the future. They spoke about onions. About the strange pleasure of a pan properly seasoned. About why Regguh had chosen the mantel as his fortress and whether a Kneazle could be trusted to ignore potion fumes.

“Still don’t see why we need anything beyond an owl,” Snape said one of those nights, purely for the joy of being wrong in advance.

“Imagine the kitten learning to ride Regguh,” Sirius said.

“I refuse,” Snape said.

“You love it,” Sirius said.

“Incorrect,” Snape replied.

Sirius bumped his shoulder against Snape’s. Snape didn’t move away. They sipped. The house, which had been watching, looked down at its own hands and decided to be kind for an evening.

When they went inside, Sirius paused with his palm flat on the chalkboard as if it were a living thing. Tomorrow - market, he wrote. Jam (nutritious if you squint). Mushrooms (fine). Tea (Proper).

Under it, without the flourish of a signature, appeared a neat reply as if the board had written back on its own. Yes. And socks. The child grows.

Sirius read it twice, smiled, and switched off the lamp. The room kept the warmth for them until morning.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place had begun to smell faintly of rosemary.

It wasn’t the stale ghost of Black family meals or the must of old wood. No, this was fresh, green, almost clean. The scent lingered in the corridors some mornings, curling from the half-open door of the spare room on the second floor.

A room that Sirius distinctly remembered as a dusty, storage-choked void when he’d first returned from Azkaban. A room he had, on some entirely hypothetical afternoon, cleared out by hand. He might have even scoured the walls with Scouring Charms until the stone shone and the floorboards stopped groaning. He might have replaced the warped worktable with one sturdy enough to hold cauldrons, glassware, and the small, precise knives Snape favored. But if asked, he’d swear the place had always been like that.

Now, he sometimes found Snape in there, brewing with Harry on one hip.

Harry had taken to Snape in a way Sirius hadn’t expected. Maybe because Snape never spoke to him in the treacly tones other adults did. He talked to him like a person. Told him exactly what he was doing, whether it was crushing valerian root or straining an infusion, as though Harry might offer an informed opinion at any moment. Sometimes he even let the boy hand him a spoon or hold a cork. Always under the kind of watchful gaze that could curdle milk if Sirius so much as leaned in too close.

It was a sight Sirius didn’t think he’d ever get used to. Snape, severe and precise, the sleeves of his robes rolled to the elbow, moving with the kind of care usually reserved for glass vials or volatile ingredients… except the thing in his arms was a giggling toddler reaching gleefully for the stirring rod.

“Keep him away from the valerian root,” Snape would murmur without looking up, and Harry, apparently sensing a game, would stretch his arm further until Sirius appeared in the doorway to rescue both child and potion.

“You’re turning him into your apprentice,” Sirius would accuse.

“And you’d prefer I turn him into yours?” Snape would reply, one brow arched, as if Harry learning how to chase Bludgers in the kitchen was somehow less dangerous than handling a sprig of dried yarrow.

For his part, Sirius had stopped having to ask for anything. The draughts Harry sometimes needed for teething or sniffles, or the sleeping potion that took the edge off Sirius’s worst nights, always appeared in their usual places without him sending a note. The tea, that specific smoky blend Snape liked, never ran out. Neither did the crisp little biscuits he pretended not to favour. Sirius knew why: he was the one buying them. They simply appeared in the cupboard, as dependable as the kettle on the stove.

And it went both ways. The strong black tea Sirius preferred was always topped up, and the pantry never seemed to run out of the unhealthy crisps or sweets he liked to snack on late at night. Sirius never bought those himself. Which meant… someone else did.

Somewhere along the way, they’d started keeping each other’s favourites stocked - a quiet, unspoken habit neither mentioned, but neither broke.

The kitchen had become the unofficial meeting ground. Some mornings, Sirius would wander down to find Snape already there, chopping herbs with precise, even strokes, Harry in his high chair banging a spoon against the tray in time to the rhythm of the knife. Sirius would pour tea without asking if Snape wanted any. Snape would slide a plate toward him without being told Sirius hadn’t eaten yet.

They fell into a rhythm without meaning to. One man stirring porridge while the other kept Harry from flinging half of it onto the floor, trading off washing dishes and sweeping crumbs, the quiet conversation filling spaces that once felt cavernous.

When the weather was good, Snape sometimes moved his work outside. The back garden, long overrun by stubborn weeds and thorny hedges, had been tamed into neat beds of herbs, low glass cloches, and trellises hung with drying sprigs. Sirius had watched one afternoon from the kitchen window as Snape knelt beside a row of mint, letting Harry “help” by handing him leaves one at a time.

Harry had tried to eat the first one.

“Not for chewing,” Snape said mildly, plucking it from his mouth and replacing it with a safer stalk of chamomile.

By midsummer, it had stopped surprising Sirius to find Snape at the table in the evenings, sorting and labeling jars while Harry napped upstairs. Or to realize that the man had stayed the night. Not just once for emergencies, but often enough that Sirius began to expect it on the weeks Harry’s teething was worst.

He never announced it. There was no conversation, no offer of a spare bed. Sirius would simply find a pair of black boots by the kitchen door in the morning, or hear the kettle on before he’d even come downstairs.

One night, Sirius woke to faint movement downstairs. Thinking it was Harry, he padded barefoot to the kitchen and stopped in the doorway. Snape was sitting at the table in shirtsleeves, Harry curled in his arms, the boy’s head tucked under his chin. The cauldron behind them steamed quietly, some midnight brew sending soft, herbal vapors into the air.

Snape didn’t notice him at first. He was watching the boy’s sleeping face with an expression Sirius couldn’t pin down. Not softness, exactly, but a certain depth of attention. The same look he gave a potion at the exact moment it shifted from dangerous to perfect. Sirius almost said something. Instead, he leaned against the doorframe and let the moment stretch, letting the rosemary and chamomile drift over him.

The outings came next.

What had started with one afternoon in the shop now was the normt. When Remus took Harry for the day, Sirius would wander down to help behind the counter; other times, he’d bring Harry along and let the women in the shop coo over the “adorable little lad” while Sirius rang up sales.

The bell above the door would chime, and Snape, already behind the counter, would give Sirius the kind of look that said he’d been expecting him all morning.

“I’m just here to help,” Sirius would say, setting Harry on a cleared section of counter or leaning against the shelves like he belonged there.

To his own surprise, Sirius was useful. He could wrap parcels, charm jars to stay sealed, and even handle customers when the shop grew busy. The regulars quickly learned that the man with the dark hair and irreverent grin would still send them home with exactly what they needed. Though not without a quip.

On quieter days, Sirius found himself in the back room, sleeves rolled up, measuring dried hellebore under Snape’s strict, hawk-eyed watch.

“You’re hovering,” Sirius accused one afternoon as he carefully poured liquid into a simmering cauldron.

“I’m making sure my shop doesn’t explode,” Snape replied.

Despite himself, Sirius liked those afternoons. The steady rhythm of brewing under someone else’s direction, the occasional brush of their shoulders as they passed in the cramped space, the way the shop seemed warmer for the company.

It had been weeks since their last trip to the pet shop. The day Harry had met the little Kneazle-cross with the triangular head and absurdly tender headbutts. Sirius had half-joked at the time about bringing it home, but Snape had dismissed the idea with that long-suffering glare that seemed to come built into his face.

And yet, the image of that kitten had stayed with Sirius. He’d catch himself thinking about it when Harry reached for the owl with the same eager little fists, or when the house felt too quiet even with the both of them rattling around in it.

On a damp Saturday morning, Harry pressed his hands against the kitchen window, watching rain blur the garden into grey. Sirius leaned on the counter, sipping his tea, and felt the thought solidify.

“Prongslet,” he said, setting down his mug, “I think it’s time we go get our friend.”

Harry turned from the window with a grin that had no idea what it was agreeing to, and Sirius found himself grinning back.

They took the Floo to Diagon Alley, ducked under the pet shop’s striped awning, and stepped inside. The air was warm and smelled faintly of hay and something sweet. Sirius headed straight for the kitten’s pen.

It was bigger now, sleeker, but still had that aristocratic way of blinking at you like it was tolerating your presence. Recognition, if cats could feel it, seemed to flicker in those amber eyes when Harry reached out. The kitten headbutted his wrist again, purring loud enough for Sirius to hear over the shop’s hum.

“That settles it,” Sirius murmured. “You’re ours.”

Ten minutes later, the paperwork was signed, the adoption fee paid, and the kitten was curled in a small carrier swinging from Sirius’s arm.

As they stepped back out into the drizzle, Sirius glanced down at Harry, who was leaning out of the pram to peek through the mesh at their new passenger.

“Let’s go surprise Severus, huh?”

The name caught him mid-sentence. He blinked. He’d meant to say Snape, he always said Snape, but somewhere in the last few months, the sharp-edged surname had smoothed into something else in his mind. It wasn’t just that the man had been brewing for Harry, or staying over more often than not. It was the image of him in the back garden with sleeves rolled up, showing Harry how to bury seedlings without crushing the roots. It was catching sight of him in the kitchen in the early morning, hair still damp from a shower, making tea like he belonged there.

Snape had become Severus without Sirius noticing the exact moment it happened.

The shop bell chimed when they stepped inside. Severus looked up from behind the counter, quill in hand, eyes narrowing in practiced suspicion.

“You’ve brought a pram into my-” He stopped when the carrier shifted and a small feline nose pushed against the mesh.

“No,” Severus said flatly.

“Yes,” Sirius replied with relish, depositing the carrier on the counter.

“You already have an owl-”

“And now we have a kitten,” Sirius said, unfastening the latch. “Congratulations, you’re an uncle.”

Harry squealed as the kitten climbed out, tail high, and began exploring the jars and parchment rolls on the counter. Severus pinched the bridge of his nose.

“This is a place of business, not a menagerie.”

The kitten ignored him entirely, circling once before curling up on the warm parchment Severus had been working on. Sirius scooped Harry up so he could see.

“Look at that. Already making himself at home.”

Severus gave the smallest of sighs, but Sirius caught the way his hand drifted, almost unconsciously, toward the kitten’s head, scratching behind its ears before pulling back as though remembering himself.

The next few days passed in a blur of paws and purring. The kitten, all sharp ears and silent padding, seemed to absorb Grimmauld Place like it was a territory waiting to be claimed.

Naming him, however, proved less straightforward.

Sirius, sprawled on the kitchen bench one afternoon, tossed out, “How about Puddlemere?”

Severus didn’t even look up from chopping herbs. “That might be the dumbest name I’ve ever heard suggested for a Kneazle.”

“Excuse you, it’s dignified. And sporty.”

“It’s a Quidditch team,” Severus said, with the same tone one might use to point out mildew.

A day later, Severus proposed, “Ealdwine.”

Sirius blinked. “We’re naming a cat, not a future Minister of Magic.”

“Ealdwine means-”

“I don’t care what it means,” Sirius interrupted. “If I have to stand in the garden yelling that at dinnertime, the neighbours will think I’ve been hexed.”

Harry’s contribution,  an enthusiastic “Mow!”,  was met with equal approval from neither adult, though Sirius did admit it had a certain accuracy.

The kitten seemed blissfully unconcerned by the debate. It moved in without asking: winding between Severus’s legs when he brewed in the small potions room, leaping onto his lap when he read in the library, and most tellingly, curling at the foot of the bed that had unofficially become Severus’s. On nights when Severus returned to Spinner’s End, the kitten still went there, stretching out in the exact same spot as if waiting for him to return.

At mealtimes, it was Sirius who fed Harry and kept him from catapulting peas across the table, but the kitten… the kitten was a different story. It stationed itself at Severus’s elbow, staring up with the wide-eyed expression of a creature well aware of its power. Sirius swore he saw Severus slip bits of chicken down with all the subtlety of a career spy.

“Hopeless,” Sirius muttered one evening as the kitten purred and crunched happily at Severus’s feet.

“Efficient,” Severus corrected, without looking away from his plate.

By the end of the week, the name debate was still unresolved but Sirius noticed that, every so often, Severus would murmur something soft when the kitten jumped into his lap. A name, maybe. One he wasn’t yet ready to admit he’d settled on.

It was late, the kind of late where Grimmauld Place went still, even the creaks in the old floorboards giving in to the quiet. Sirius had gone downstairs for a glass of water, padding barefoot toward the kitchen.

The light in the small potions room was still on.

He slowed, careful not to make the floorboards complain, and peeked around the doorframe.

Severus was seated at the worktable, one hand steadying a vial while the other coaxed flame under a small cauldron. The kitten had leapt into his lap, curling itself into the black folds of his robes as if it had been sewn there.

Sirius expected the usual nonchalance Severus wore in the animal’s presence. Instead, he watched as Severus reached down, almost absently, to scratch behind one tufted ear.

“There you are, Zephyr,” Severus murmured, voice low, the syllables curling like smoke. “You’ve been hiding all evening.”

The kitten gave a rumbling purr and kneaded at his leg, utterly content.

Sirius bit back a grin. Zephyr.

He could have stepped in then, teased him about finally choosing a name, made a whole production of it. But there was something in the way Severus’s shoulders had eased, the small, unguarded motion of his hand in the kitten’s fur, that made Sirius just… watch a moment longer.

When he finally went back upstairs, the grin was still tugging at his mouth.

Zephyr. It was actually… a good name.

A few nights later, a storm rolled in.

The kind that rattled the old glass panes in their frames and made the house seem to draw in on itself. Harry was already asleep upstairs, but the wind had a way of finding gaps in the shutters, whistling through the cracks like a ghost. Sirius was sprawled on the sofa in the drawing room, Zephyr purring like a miniature engine on his chest, when the fire in the grate flared.

Severus stepped in from the Floo, brushing a damp sleeve back into place.

“You’re back early,” Sirius said, shifting just enough so Zephyr didn’t roll off him.

“There’s no point brewing in a shop when the customers are all hiding from the rain,” Severus replied, hanging his cloak with deliberate care.

Sirius was half-surprised he’d come here instead of Spinner’s End. Half, but not entirely.

“Tea’s in the kitchen,” Sirius offered. 

They ended up in there together, rain beating a steady rhythm against the windows. The rain had shifted from steady to furious, drumming hard enough on the windows that the sound filled every space between their words.

“You’ve got that look,” Sirius said, pouring the tea and sliding Severus’s mug across.

“What look?”

“The one that means you’ve been thinking too much.”

Severus took a slow sip. “Perhaps I simply prefer the company of my own thoughts to your incessant commentary.”

“Liar.” Sirius leaned back in his chair, cradling his own mug. “If you liked your own company so much, you’d be at Spinner’s End right now, reading something dreary by candlelight instead of sharing my biscuits.”

Severus’s eyes flicked to the plate between them. “You burned these.”

“They’re rustic .”

“They’re charcoal.”

Sirius grinned. “And yet you’ve had three.”

They ate at the kitchen table, the conversation meandering in the way it did when neither of them felt the need to fill every silence. Sirius found himself telling a story about James trying to bake biscuits during sixth year and somehow transfiguring the oven into a small but very angry badger. Severus, against all odds, smirked. A real one, faint but genuine.

The wind howled louder, and Sirius glanced toward the ceiling.

“Storm might wake him,” he said.

“Then it’s fortunate you’re not the only one here to see to him,” Severus replied.

It was so matter-of-fact, so casually spoken, that Sirius had to look away for a moment. Because it wasn’t just the words. It was the truth under them. Harry wasn’t just his anymore. Not entirely.

The wind rattled the kitchen door, and Zephyr abandoned his post by Severus’s feet to hop onto the bench beside Sirius. The cat blinked slowly, curling up as if he’d always belonged there.

For a while they just sat. Two mugs, two plates, the rain battering the shutters like it wanted in. Sirius found himself watching Severus in the lamplight, the sharp angles of his face softened by shadow.

“You know,” Sirius said, quieter now, “I didn’t think you’d stay this long.”

Severus didn’t look up from his tea. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” Sirius said, almost before the question finished. Then, because the word seemed too bare on its own, he added, “I’m just… saying. You’ve done more for us than I ever thought you would.”

Severus’s gaze rose, unreadable. “Lily asked me to.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to actually do it,” Sirius said. “Merlin knows you’ve had reason to walk away.”

The silence after was different. Not empty, but charged, like the air before a thunderclap. Severus’s fingers traced the rim of his mug once before setting it down.

“Perhaps,” he said at last, “I found I preferred not to.”

Sirius wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he didn’t. They finished their tea in companionable quiet, the storm still lashing the windows, and when they finally turned in, Severus didn’t head for the Floo. Didn’t even so much as glance at it. He stayed. They didn’t talk about it. But the next morning, Sirius came downstairs to find an extra mug already set out beside the kettle, and the smell of rosemary drifting from the spare room.

Sirius woke to the smell of frying bacon. Not his bacon, his was always either underdone or charred into oblivion,  but the kind that cooked in an even sizzle, perfectly timed. He padded downstairs to find Severus at the stove, Zephyr perched on the counter as if supervising.

Harry was in his high chair, wearing more porridge than he was eating.

“This your idea of breakfast?” Sirius said, pouring himself coffee.

Severus didn’t look up. “The bacon is for you. The porridge was for him. The mess is… unavoidable.”

Sirius leaned on the counter, coffee warming his hands. “You know, between this and the potions, you’re setting the bar pretty high for godfathers.”

Severus turned just enough to give him a dry look. “Fortunately for me, there’s only one other in contention.”

Harry squealed as if approving the point, flinging a spoon onto the floor. Zephyr immediately leapt down to investigate. Sirius bent to retrieve it, grinning despite himself.

The storm had cleared outside, leaving the garden dripping and bright. For some reason, Sirius thought about the first night Severus had stayed, back when it had felt like a temporary truce. And now… now the sight of him here, cooking in shirtsleeves while Harry laughed, felt almost ordinary .

Chapter Text

The day began like so many others had lately with the gentle rhythm of a house that had quietly learned how to run with three people in it.

The rain had been falling since sometime in the small hours, steady and soft, the kind that blurred the world into greys and silvers. It tapped steadily against the windows, not a summer drizzle but a determined, soaking kind of downpour that made the garden look blurred and watercolour-soft. The air inside was warm by contrast, the smell of brewing tea mixing with the faint green sharpness of rosemary.

In the kitchen, the air was warm, heavy with the scent of toast and something faintly herbal from a pot still steeping on the back of the stove. Harry was in his high chair, a small bowl of porridge in front of him, and more of it currently clinging to his cheeks than in his mouth. He was wielding the spoon like a drumstick, thumping it against the tray in a rhythm only he understood.

“Careful, Prongslet,” Sirius said from where he leaned against the counter, mug in hand. “That’s the finest silver in the house you’re abusing.”

“It’s pewter,” Severus corrected from his post at the stove, turning something in a pan with patient precision. “And the dents are from your generation, not his.”

Sirius grinned into his tea. “I prefer to call them character marks.”

The domesticity of it, Severus cooking, Harry babbling, the steady rain outside, had settled into Sirius’s bones in a way he hadn’t seen coming. There was an ease in the way Severus moved around the kitchen now, not as though he owned the place, but as though he had stopped needing to ask where things were. The kettle was on before Sirius had even walked in, the cupboard doors opening to reveal both of their favourite teas stocked without discussion. It was the sort of unspoken cooperation that felt… permanent.

Harry dropped the spoon with a clatter and lifted his arms toward Severus, making a hopeful noise. Without pausing his stirring, Severus glanced over, assessed the sticky state of the boy’s hands, and gave a single, decisive shake of his head. “Not until you’re less… adhesive.”

Sirius barked a laugh. “Merlin forbid you get porridge on your pristine robes.”

Severus arched an eyebrow but didn’t take the bait. Instead, he slid a plate onto the table in front of Sirius, toast, eggs, and something that smelled rich and savoury before setting another, smaller dish in front of Harry with neatly diced fruit.

Sirius caught the faintest flicker of thought in his own head: This is nice. It wasn’t flashy, wasn’t dramatic, but the image of Severus moving around his kitchen, sleeves rolled up, hair tied back to keep it out of his face… Sirius could get used to that. Too used to it.

Outside, the rain tapped against the windows, the world beyond reduced to muted shapes and colours. Inside, Sirius felt something he hadn’t felt in years: a sense of being sheltered. Not just from the weather, but from the rest of it. From the noise, the war, the constant sense of running on fumes.

Harry, apparently deciding breakfast was over, began offering bits of fruit to the cat sprawled under his chair. Zephyr batted at them half-heartedly, clearly more interested in curling around Severus’s ankles than in citrus slices.

“You’re going to spoil him,” Sirius said, nodding toward the kitten.

“I could say the same about you,” Severus replied, collecting the empty plates with a precision that somehow made the gesture feel like an act of care rather than criticism.

It was nearly midday before the rain let up enough to make the idea of venturing out seem reasonable. Sirius watched Severus dry his hands on a tea towel, that familiar, measuring look already settling on his face. “We could go to Diagon Alley,” he said finally. “Restock before the weekend rush. You can keep Harry entertained.”

Sirius sipped the last of his tea, considering. A trip to the Alley sounded harmless enough. Just another errand day, like a dozen they’d done before. He didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that by the time they came back, nothing would feel quite so safe again.

The rain eased to a thin mist by the time they stepped from the Leaky Cauldron’s hearth, that grey, pearly sort of weather that made the cobbles shine like fish scales. Sirius adjusted the sling so Harry sat higher on his chest, the boy’s fingers already snagging at the edge of the cloak with proprietary zeal. Severus shook out his sleeves once, checked the small list he’d tucked into his cuff, and gave the Alley the same measuring look he gave an unfamiliar potion, cataloguing, weighing, already planning the most efficient route.

They started at the bootmaker’s. The bell over the door chimed a tired little note and a wave of warm leather-smell rolled over them. Sirius tested half a dozen pairs with theatrical lunges that made Harry squeal; Severus stood with arms folded and the expression of a man watching a slow-motion catastrophe. “Those,” he said finally, indicating a sturdy pair with good stitching. “Not the ones that look like you mugged a Quidditch captain in the dark.”

“They make me look dashing,” Sirius argued, but he was already bending to lace the sensible pair. Harry patted the new boots solemnly as if granting them approval, then tried to stuff a lace into his mouth. Severus plucked it away with two fingers and a look that suggested this day would be one calamity after another unless he personally intervened.

Outside, the Alley hummed. Steam floated up from grates; shopfronts jostled for attention with bright, charmed signs that blinked and scrolled and sighed. A witch flicked her umbrella and shook off a collar of raindrops that hovered like pearls before zipping into the gutter. Somewhere, a busker coaxed a melancholy tune from a self-playing fiddle, the notes slipping around conversations like eels.

They detoured through the stationer’s next because Harry had locked eyes with a display of colour-changing quills and issued an excited “Oh!” that felt like a commandment. Inside, the air smelled of ink and new parchment. Sirius whistled at a quill and it flushed a ridiculous chartreuse; Harry shrieked laughter, small hands windmilling. “You’re teaching him bad habits,” Severus said, but he set a box of them on the counter as they paid, a quiet concession to utility amid nonsense.

On the street again, Sirius fell into that half-amble, half-prowl he slipped into when he was in a good mood. People glanced at him, at the sling, at the boy tucked close, and then away again, softening as if the sight sanded down their edges. Severus walked a pace off his shoulder, the canvas shopping bag folded over one arm, keeping a tidy line through the moving crowd. Sirius knew without looking that if he eased left to avoid a barrel of pickled something, Severus would mirror right and the space between them would hold, an unconscious choreography they’d somehow learned without trying.

They cut past Twilfitt and Tattings, where enchanted mannequins arched their backs in disdain, and paused at a cart that sold roasted chestnuts. The vendor’s hands were stained brown with sugar; steam rose from the paper cones like breath. “Two,” Sirius said, then glanced down. “And a tiny one.” 

The vendor produced a scandalously small cone with the pomp of a priest; Harry immediately attempted to feed one back to Sirius, solemn and generous. “My hero,” Sirius said around a too-hot bite. Severus accepted a chestnut without comment and ate it in exactly three measured bites, which Sirius decided was offensively on brand.

At the apothecary row, the world narrowed into smells: aconite cool and metallic, crushed mint, the clean bitterness of alcohol, the wet-earth comfort of dried roots. Severus’s attention sharpened almost visibly; he drifted toward a shelf like iron to a lodestone, fingertips hovering a fraction above labels as he read.

“Fresh lot of hellebore,” he murmured. “Finally.” Sirius leaned on the counter with Harry and made the baby giggle by pretending to sneeze whenever Severus named an ingredient, each fake sneeze bigger than the last until the apprentice behind the till gave up trying not to smile.

They didn’t hurry. 

That was the indulgence of the day. A deliberate refusal to rush, to let errands be more than boxes ticked. Sirius let Harry direct them by pointing: to a window where sugar quills twirled like ballerinas; to a pet-shop cage where a puffskein snored; to a rack of children’s cloaks stitched with tiny constellations that winked when you touched them. Severus pretended impatience and then quietly charmed the cuff of Harry’s sleeve dry when he slapped a puddle.

Small signs of something coiled at the edges started to collect the way iron filings find a magnet. A pair of Aurors passed at a purposeful clip, cloaks dark with rain, heads together. A notice-board near Flourish and Blotts wore a fresh parchment pinned skew, the ink still black-wet: Report suspicious curses or hexwork; do not engage. A charmed poster advertising a new broom juddered once, failed to loop its animation, then stuttered back to life. None of it meant anything on its own. Together, it made the air feel an inch tighter across the chest.

Harry began to droop in the sling, that drowsy rubber-limbed heaviness that meant they had a window before the nap turned to wail.

“One more,” Severus said, and Sirius nodded.

The last stop was an ingredient specialist with a violent opinion about labelling; every shelf wore tiny brass plaques engraved in crisp script, every jar aligned like soldiers on parade. Severus’s mouth twitched in something that might have been contentment. 

“You two are insufferable,” Sirius told the shelf and the man equally, but he held the basket steady while Severus eased vials into it with a careful hand.

On their way back toward the main thoroughfare, the Alley seemed to have woken up another notch. Voices overlapped with a jittery brightness; someone laughed too loudly and stopped midway. A witch dragged a reluctant Kneazle along on a lead; it skittered when a cartwheel clanged against a loose cobble. The sky had that tin-plate colour that meant more rain was crouched just out of sight, waiting.

They paused beneath an awning while Sirius adjusted the sling. Harry stirred, blinked up, and made a soft questioning sound. “Almost done,” Sirius murmured, brushing a thumb over his cheek. Severus stood very close, close enough that Sirius could feel the heat of him even through two layers of damp wool. The crowd funneled narrower here where a side alley fed into the main street; bodies pressed a little tighter, the ebb and flow of movement briefly muddled.

A man bumped Sirius’s shoulder and muttered an apology that carried too much bite. Another voice rose somewhere behind them, then two, then three, the way a fire catches dried grass. Severus’s head tilted almost imperceptibly. His hand slid along the strap of the shopping bag until his fingers brushed the inside of his sleeve, where his wand waited. “We’ll cut left,” he said quietly, no drama in it, just decision. “Past the owlery. Fewer crowds.”

“Right,” Sirius said, and felt that prickle along the back of his neck that didn’t quite resolve into worry, only alertness; the sense you get when a storm is still beyond the hill but the air has shifted. He kissed the top of Harry’s head without thinking and tasted rain, and rosemary, and the ordinary morning they were still convinced they lived inside.

They eased into the side street, the narrow run between the owlery and an old hat shop whose sign swung with a squeal in the breeze. The cobbles here were slick, the walls close enough that Sirius could trail his fingertips along the damp brick as they walked. Behind them, the sound of raised voices followed. Louder and nearer. A ripple of movement disturbed the few shoppers ahead; a witch in a plum cloak gathered her parcels and hurried in the opposite direction.

“Something’s off,” Sirius said under his breath.

Severus didn’t answer, but the set of his shoulders changed, his gait sharpening. He shifted so that he was a half-step ahead, subtly sheltering Sirius and Harry from the mouth of the alley. The sling felt heavier all at once, Harry’s small weight a living reminder of what couldn’t be risked.

The first figure appeared at the other end of the lane. A wizard in travel-worn robes, his face half-hidden under a hood. Two more followed, flanking him with the kind of casual precision that made Sirius’s teeth set. One of them had his wand in hand, turning it between his fingers like a coin.

Sirius slowed. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“Trouble’s already here,” Severus said quietly. His own wand was in his palm now, the motion smooth as breathing. “Stay behind me.”

The leader’s voice was light, almost conversational. “Black.”

Sirius felt the name like a slap. “Do I know you?”

“Not yet.” The wand-hand rose. “But I know you. And I know the company you keep these days.” His eyes flicked, sharp and deliberate, to Severus.

It happened quickly after that. Too quickly. A flicker of movement from the left, Severus shifting to block, the sudden crack of displaced air as a curse flew. Sirius twisted, already reaching for his wand, but the hex caught him in the ribs before he could finish the turn. It was like being hit with a hammer made of fire; the breath left him in a ragged choke. His knees buckled.

Harry wailed, the sound raw and high. Sirius clutched the sling tight even as his balance gave. Severus’s shield flared between them and the next curse, a shimmer of pale light that sparked at the edges. “Move!” Severus barked, one hand catching Sirius under the arm and shoving them backward toward the wall.

“I’m fine-” Sirius began, but the words tangled in his throat. The heat in his side turned to a searing cold, and the world tilted sickeningly.

“You’re not fine.” Severus’s voice cut through, hard as snapped bone. He adjusted his grip, forcing Sirius to lean into him. Harry’s cries tore at the air, small hands pressing against Sirius’s chest as if to push the hurt away.

Another curse hit the shield; Severus’s wand hand jerked, redirecting it so it burst against the wall with a sharp, stone-splinter crack. A moment later, the alley filled with a different sound. The sharp, clipped commands of approaching Aurors. The three attackers faltered, then vanished in the wrenching twist of disapparition.

The sudden absence of danger left the space ringing with breath and rain. Sirius swayed, his knees threatening to fold entirely. Severus tightened his hold. “We’re going to St. Mungo’s.”

Sirius tried to shake his head, a ghost of his usual stubbornness. “Harry-”

“Harry will be with me,” Severus said, and there was something in his tone, an iron promise, that left no room for argument. “Now move, or I will carry you.”

Sirius managed a weak grin. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“It may well be the last if you don’t shut up.” The words were cold; the grip on Sirius’s arm was not.

They made it to the main street, where the Aurors closed around them, half herding, half guarding. Someone tried to take Harry; Severus’s glare made them think better of it. With one arm locked around Sirius’s waist and the other steadying the sling against his chest, Severus walked them straight to the nearest Floo. The crowd seemed to blur at the edges, sound coming in waves- shop bells, the whoosh of fireplaces, the faint echo of Harry’s sobs against Sirius’s collarbone.

The last thing Sirius saw before the green flare of the Floo swallowed them was the rain starting again, heavier now, washing the cobbles clean as if nothing had happened at all. He was unconscious by the time they staggered out of the Floo at St. Mungo’s.

The reception blurred past in a whirl of white-robed Healers, the smell of antiseptic potions thick in the air. Someone took Sirius from Severus’s side - firm but careful hands guiding him onto a conjured stretcher. The sight of him being rolled toward a ward, pale and still save for the shallow rise of his chest, left something leaden in Severus’s stomach.

“Sir-” A Healer in pale green paused at his elbow. “We need you to wait here.”

Harry was still pressed to him in the sling, small fists clinging to Severus’s robes. The child’s sobs had dulled to wet hiccups, but each one vibrated against Severus’s ribs. He looked toward the doors Sirius had just disappeared through, then down at Harry, then back at the Healer.

“I am not leaving him,” Severus said.

“You can’t go into the treatment ward with a child.” The Healer’s voice was firm but not unkind. “We’ll send word the moment-”

“Then you will fetch someone to stay with the child.” Severus’s voice came out like ground glass. “Immediately.”

They led him to a small waiting alcove, a dim corner lined with mismatched chairs and a low table scattered with outdated magazines. The ceiling felt low, the air too warm. Harry shifted restlessly in the sling, and Severus adjusted his hold, pressing a hand to the boy’s back as if his own steadiness might somehow bleed through.

The minutes lengthened, stretching into something that felt like hours. Each time footsteps passed the alcove, his head lifted, too fast, too sharp, and each time it wasn’t a Healer for him, the silence that followed seemed heavier.

He didn’t notice Remus until the man was standing in front of him. “I came as soon as I heard.”

Severus didn’t rise. “Stay with him.” He was already sliding the sling straps from his shoulder.

Remus’s hand came down over his own, “Of course.”

For a moment, Severus almost hesitated out of sheer habit. But the thought of Sirius, alone in some sterile room, unseen, gnawed at him. He finished shifting Harry gently into Remus’s arms, ignoring the way the boy whimpered and reached back for him.

“I’ll be back,” Severus murmured, though he wasn’t sure who he was promising it to.

The treatment ward smelled sharper, like brewed metal and herbs boiled too long. A Healer met him halfway, leading him to a narrow bed curtained off from the rest. Sirius lay there, the colour leeched from his skin, his hair a dark spill across the pillow. His side was swathed in bandages that glowed faintly with the slow pulse of healing charms.

“He’s stable,” the Healer said, but Severus barely heard it. He moved closer until the edge of the mattress pressed against his legs.

It was the stillness that unsettled him most. Sirius was never still, even in sleep. There was always a twitch of a hand, a shifting of position, a muttered word. Now there was only the shallow rhythm of his breathing.

Severus sat, careful not to jar the bed. His fingers curled against his knees. He wanted to touch, shoulder, hand, anything, to prove the warmth was still there. But something in him balked at disturbing the fragile quiet.

“You bloody fool,” he said finally, under his breath. It came out more frayed than he intended.

There was no response. No answering twitch of a grin, no half-hearted retort. Only the faint hiss of the monitoring charm.

He stayed longer than he meant to, the hours melting without notice. At some point, a Healer brought a chair; at some point after that, another urged him to rest. He didn’t. He couldn’t. Every time his eyes closed, the image of Sirius crumpling under that curse replayed in vicious detail.

When Harry’s cries echoed faintly from down the hall, Severus’s head snapped up. Remus was there in the doorway, the boy in his arms, looking rumpled and worried.

“He wouldn’t settle,” Remus said. “Thought maybe he needed both of you in the same room.”

Severus took him without thinking. Harry twisted to see Sirius, then leaned into Severus’s shoulder with a small, plaintive sound. Severus stood beside the bed, holding him tightly, and for the first time since the alley, felt something in his chest loosen.

The news came in the clipped, efficient tone Healers seemed to practice: Sirius would remain at St. Mungo’s for a few days. They needed to ensure the hex was fully purged, that no residual curse lay dormant in muscle or marrow.

It was the best possible outcome, they said. There should be no permanent damage. No lingering enchantment. Just time, observation, healing.

It did not feel like the best possible outcome.

Time, in that pale green ward, was not the same creature it was outside. It crawled when Severus was seated beside Sirius’s bed, and it vanished in great, careless swathes when he was at Grimmauld with Harry. And always, there was the invisible tether, tugging between those two places: Harry in the old house that had started to smell faintly of herbs and polished wood, and Sirius in a bed that hummed faintly with monitoring charms.

The first morning after the attack, Severus arrived at the hospital with Harry bundled in his arms. Remus met them in the waiting alcove, holding out a paper bag that smelled faintly of toast.

“You’ll both forget to eat if I don’t,” he said.

Severus did not correct him. He took the bag, passed a piece of toast to Harry, and carried the rest into Sirius’s room.

Harry wriggled in his arms at the sight of the bed, small hand pointing toward Sirius.

“Ba’foo,” he announced, the mangled version of “Padfoot” that Sirius had been unable to shake him from saying.

Severus moved closer, lowering Harry enough for him to peer at the man’s face. Sirius’s lashes lay dark against his skin; his mouth was slack in an unfamiliar way. Harry’s smile faltered.

“He’s sleeping,” Severus said, adjusting his voice into something level, unthreatening. “He’ll wake up when he’s ready.”

He didn’t add that he himself had no idea when that would be.

The days acquired a shape. Mornings in the ward, afternoons at Grimmauld, evenings back at St. Mungo’s until Harry’s bedtime forced Severus home. He brought books from the house, quiet ones, worn at the edges, and read aloud in the hospital chair, his voice a low drone threading through the beeps and murmurs.

Sometimes, he spoke to Sirius without the pretext of a book.

“You’re missing the garden blooming,” he said on the third day, watching a potion drip steadily into a vein in Sirius’s arm. “Your infernal mint is trying to take over the rosemary again. And Zephyr has decided your pillow is now his territory. I think he misses you.”

There was no flicker of response, no twitch of recognition. Severus found himself staring longer than he meant to, as if sheer will could force movement.

Harry adapted faster than Severus did. He would clamber into Severus’s lap in the chair, lean his head against his chest, and chatter quietly about nothing in particular. His words half-formed and his sentences looping into giggles. He would wave solemnly at Sirius before they left, whispering “Ba’foo” as though it were a spell.

On the fourth night, rain battered the high hospital windows. Severus sat in the chair, his knees drawn slightly toward the bed, listening to the storm roll over London. The Healer on duty offered to fetch him tea; he refused, though the weight in his eyes begged for it.

It was not in his nature to pray, but that night, with the storm clawing at the glass and Sirius frighteningly still, Severus found himself making bargains with the air. Just open your eyes. Just one word. I will- 

 He didn’t finish the thought. Promises made in desperation had a way of binding themselves.

When he left that night, Grimmauld Place was silent in a way it hadn’t been in months. Even the creak of the stairs seemed muffled. He carried Harry upstairs, the boy already heavy with sleep, and paused at the doorway to what had become Severus’s own room. The bed looked wrong without Sirius in the house, though Sirius never slept there. Wrong in the way a place can when it is waiting for someone.

He set Harry down in his own cot, turned to leave, and found the cat at the threshold, staring at him with slow, deliberate blinks. It padded inside, leapt onto the bed, and curled exactly where Sirius’s boots had once dropped to the floor.

Severus turned out the light. 

It was the tenth morning.

By now, the routine had burrowed itself into Severus’s bones so deeply that he didn’t even think about it anymore. It simply happened.

Wake before Harry. Pull on a clean shirt, button it all the way up even though no one in the ward would care. Put the kettle on, make the tea strong enough to bite, drink half before it cooled, and set the rest aside for when they returned. Dress Harry in something that wouldn’t make him too warm in the ward but would still keep the draft from nipping at his neck. Shrink a toy or two for the boy to play with.

Then, the Floo to St. Mungo’s. Step out into the bland, too-bright corridor. Walk the seven paces to Sirius’s bed. Sit.

The ward had begun to smell faintly of antiseptic charms, a sort of sharp, lemon-and-mint note, but underneath it was something warmer, sweeter. The Healer on duty told him it was from the calming draughts they kept stocked in the cupboard by the station. Severus had begun to associate that faint sweetness with this strange limbo, the way one learns the smell of a storm before the rain hits.

The chair was unforgiving, the kind meant to discourage lingering. Severus had ignored its design from the first day, shifting his long frame into it with the patience of someone who intended to outwait time itself. He’d bring a book, always, but often found himself staring over the edge of the page, the print blurring as he tracked the subtle rise and fall of Sirius’s chest beneath the thin hospital blanket.

Harry was calmer here than Severus had expected. Some days he would sit quietly in Severus’s lap, cheek pressed to his chest, little fingers idly playing with the buttons on his shirt. Other days, he’d point to things, the glass potion vials on the shelf, the gentle bobbing of the enchanted lantern above the bed, and Severus would explain them in a low murmur, knowing full well Harry didn’t understand every word, but needing to fill the silence.

That morning, Severus was halfway down a page in a worn leather-bound book when he felt Harry shift. The boy’s weight moved against his thigh, his small body straightening.

Harry’s gaze was fixed on the bed.

Severus followed it and froze.

Sirius’s fingers had twitched. A small, almost imperceptible spasm, like a fragment of a dream leaking into the body.

He stared, holding still, as though the smallest movement on his part might shatter whatever had stirred Sirius awake. Then it came again a faint flex of the hand, the slow curl of fingers that looked like they were trying to remember how to make a fist.

The breath came next.

It broke the room’s rhythm a slightly deeper inhale, not the even, shallow tide the monitoring charms had kept time with for nearly a week. Sirius’s chest rose, held, then fell again.

“Ba’foo?” Harry’s voice was soft but sharp with hope.

Sirius’s eyelids moved. The muscles flickered, fluttering like the wing of a trapped moth before they dragged open.

Light hit his eyes, and they closed again immediately, but Severus had already seen the faint, disoriented awareness in their depths.

“Harry?” Sirius’s voice was wrecked. Low and rough, like gravel pulled from the bottom of a stream. The sound scraped across Severus’s nerves in a way that was equal parts relief and something far more dangerous.

Harry wriggled, trying to scramble toward the bed with a single-minded determination that nearly unseated him from Severus’s lap. Severus caught him, holding him steady with one hand under his ribs. “Slowly,” he murmured, and guided Harry forward until the boy’s tiny hand landed squarely in Sirius’s.

Sirius’s gaze followed the warmth of the touch, and then, slowly, he turned his head.

“You’re-” The word broke off into a cough that made him wince, his fingers tightening around Harry’s instinctively. When he tried again, his voice was thinner but clearer. “You’re both… here.”

“We’ve been here every day,” Severus said. He meant for it to come out dry, matter-of-fact but there was a tremor at the edge of the words he couldn’t quite erase.

Sirius’s eyes found him then. They were bleary, unfocused around the edges, but there was intent in them. Recognition. The corner of his mouth curled in the smallest possible smile. “Didn’t… scare you, did I?”

The retort Severus might have made on any other day didn’t come. Instead, the truth slipped out, bare and unvarnished: “Terrified me.”

For a heartbeat, neither of them spoke. Sirius’s expression softened in a way Severus had never seen last more than a second or two at a time. His mouth moved as though he might say something more but the moment was broken by the brisk footsteps of the Healer approaching.

She swept in, wand in hand, scanning the readings on the monitoring charms with the air of someone both relieved and calculating the next steps. “Well, Mr. Black,” she said in a tone that suggested she’d been waiting for this. “Looks like you’ve decided to rejoin us. The hex was powerful, and it clung longer than expected, but your body’s responding well now.”

Sirius blinked at her, clearly only half-listening.

“You’ll need to stay here a few more days” she continued, “just to be certain there’s no lingering damage or trace curse in the bloodstream. But you should make a full recovery.”

Severus nodded in acknowledgment, but his focus was entirely on Sirius’s hand, the way his thumb moved in the laziest, slowest arc over Harry’s knuckles, like he was reacquainting himself with the shape of them.

When Harry was distracted by the small toy the Healer conjured for him, Severus stepped closer to the bed. The space between them felt narrower than it should, the air heavier.

“You’re going to recover,” he said, and it wasn’t a reassurance. It was a fact, solid as stone.

Sirius’s gaze shifted to him again. Tired as he looked, there was still a flicker there, a flash of something warmer beneath the exhaustion. “Wouldn’t want to leave you stuck with my house forever,” he rasped.

Severus didn’t even think before answering. “I no longer think that would be the worst thing to happen.”

The smallest of smiles ghosted Sirius’s lips. It didn’t fade even as his eyelids grew heavy again, the weight of healing pulling him back toward sleep.

Severus stayed until his breathing evened out, and then a little longer.

Two days later when Sirius was finally discharged, they left St. Mungo’s long after the streetlamps had burned themselves into bright halos against the fog. The Healer had signed the discharge parchment with a clipped nod, and Sirius had signed his own name with a hand that still trembled faintly. Severus had stood beside him the entire time, Harry in his other arm leaning against his shoulder, fighting sleep with small, stubborn blinks.

The Floo home was mercifully short. Grimmauld Place’s hearth spat them out into the kitchen with a rush of heat and the faint smell of ash. For a long moment, no one moved. Sirius was pale in the flickering light, his shoulders hunched in that particular way people carried themselves when they’d been knocked flat and hadn’t quite remembered how to stand up yet.

Severus set Harry down gently. “Upstairs with you,” he murmured, but the boy’s eyes were fixed on Sirius. He crossed the space without hesitation and pressed his face into Sirius’s leg.

Sirius’s hand found its way into Harry’s hair without conscious thought, fingers curling there, holding. “Hey, Prongslet,” he said softly. His voice was tired but warmer than it had been all week. “Go on. Bed. I’ll be here in the morning.”

Harry obeyed only because Severus scooped him up and carried him upstairs, returning a few minutes later to find Sirius lowering himself carefully into one of the kitchen chairs.

Without a word, Severus filled the kettle, the sound of water on metal filling the space. The stove clicked, caught, and soon the faint hiss of flame joined it. Sirius didn’t protest which told Severus more about his state than anything else could have.

When the tea was ready, Severus slid the mug toward him. “Careful. It’s hot.”

Sirius curled his hands around it anyway, as though the heat might anchor him to the here and now.

Severus made him a sandwich. Nothing complicated. Just bread and sliced roast chicken, with enough mustard to cut through the lingering taste of hospital potions. Sirius ate without comment, chewing slowly, gaze fixed somewhere just past Severus’s shoulder.

They didn’t speak much. The house was quiet except for the occasional shift of old timbers in the walls, the tick of the clock in the hall, the scrape of cutlery against the plate. It wasn’t an awkward silence. It was something heavier, the kind that meant both of them were holding back more words than they were ready to give voice to.

When the plate was empty and the tea gone, Severus rose. “Bed,” he said simply. “You’ll be stronger for it.”

Sirius didn’t argue. He followed him upstairs, moving more slowly than usual, one hand grazing the banister as though he wasn’t entirely certain it wouldn’t disappear if he let go. Severus pulled back the covers ion his bed and waited until Sirius had lowered himself into the mattress.

“Anything else?” Severus asked.

Sirius shook his head. “You’ve already done more than I-” He broke off, pressing his lips together, and simply settled against the pillow.

Severus left only when his breathing evened out, closing the door with the quiet precision of someone who’d learned the art in places where noise meant danger.

Morning came slow. A pale, early light filtered through the curtains, dust motes drifting in it like slow-falling snow. Severus had risen first, as usual, but he hadn’t gone far, just to the kitchen to make tea and check that Harry was still asleep.

When Sirius appeared in the doorway, hair a little wild, wearing one of the softer shirts Severus had left in the laundry at Grimmauld weeks ago, he looked… not well, exactly, but alive in a way he hadn’t in days.

“You’re up,” Severus said, keeping his tone neutral.

“Didn’t want to waste the day,” Sirius murmured, easing into a chair. His hand brushed over the wood as though he was reacquainting himself with the feel of it.

They drank tea without speaking for a while. The quiet felt different this morning. Less like a weight and more like the kind of stillness you didn’t want to break in case it fled.

It was Sirius who finally did. He set his cup down, fingers drumming once against the ceramic, and didn’t quite meet Severus’s eyes.

“I was thinking,” he began, the hesitation in his voice enough to make Severus set his own cup down, listening. “About… how much time you’ve been here. With Harry. With me.” He huffed a breath, half a laugh without any real humour in it. “Feels strange, going back to how things were before. Stranger than it should.”

Severus said nothing, letting the silence pull the truth out of him.

“I don’t want it to,” Sirius admitted finally. His gaze lifted, met Severus’s. There was no grin to soften the words, no flippancy to make them safe. Just the unguarded sincerity that Sirius rarely let out into daylight. “I was wondering if you’d ever consider… staying. Here. Not just when Harry’s sick. Not just when-” He cut himself off, swallowing. “All the time.”

Severus felt the smallest shift in his own chest, the sort that came with an idea you’d already thought about in the privacy of your own mind but never intended to voice.

He let the question hang there, not to be cruel, but because it deserved more than an instinctive answer.

Finally, he said, “It’s… not a decision I’d make lightly.” His gaze flicked toward the ceiling, toward where Harry was still sleeping, no doubt curled into the middle of the bed. “But I will consider it.”

Sirius’s mouth curved, just slightly, in something that wasn’t quite a smile but carried the same warmth. “That’s all I’m asking.”

The kettle hissed behind them, steam curling into the air, and neither of them moved to refill their cups.

The moment didn’t need anything else.

Chapter Text

The first weeks after Sirius came home were made of smaller circles. Days looped back on themselves in gentle patterns: the kettle at seven, Harry’s babble at half past, the soft thump of Zephyr vaulting onto a chair he wasn’t meant to. 

Severus found, to his faint annoyance, that his body had learned the map of the house as surely as it knew a well-worn recipe. His feet took him to the same check-points each morning, Harry’s cot; the window with the view of the rosemary; the kettle; the cupboard with Sirius’s preferred tea, before he had consciously decided to move at all.

He told himself he was simply observing Sirius’s recovery. The hex had been vicious; it would be irresponsible not to check his colour, the tightness of his breath, the way he stood from a chair. He hovered with clinical precision: not so close as to irritate, never far enough to miss a wince. 

When Sirius bent to lift Harry and paused with a small intake of breath, Severus crossed the distance without thinking and took the child with a smooth, practiced scoop. “I’ve got him.” The words were nothing. The way his hand stayed for a second longer on Sirius’s forearm was not nothing at all.

Sirius didn’t bristle. That was new. He accepted the help with a crooked mouth and a quip that didn’t find much purchase, then leaned into the chair Severus had quietly Banished closer. He was thinner than Severus liked and paler in the mornings, but the wild-dog light was back behind his eyes, wary and bright. Sometimes Severus found himself looking up from a pan or a page and colliding with that light; sometimes Sirius looked away first.

Harry stitched himself between them like thread. He took his first wobbly steps from Severus’s knee to Sirius’s knee, looked astonished at his success, then immediately demanded to be picked up. Severus let himself be climbed in a way he’d never allowed any creature to climb him; it was strangely simple to rearrange his limbs around a small human’s insistence. Sirius would watch from the opposite chair, smiling the kind of smile that was almost private.

They were quieter, both of them. The barbs still flashed, but their edges were buffed by recent fear. When Severus found a bottle of Fever Draught half-empty on the wrong shelf, he only raised a brow and moved it; Sirius only said, “Yes, Professor,” without heat. When Sirius reached for the heavy pot in the back of the cupboard, Severus’s hand was already there; Sirius’s mouth tipped sideways in thanks he didn’t say out loud.

At night, Grimmauld grew smaller. The rooms they didn’t need receded to shadows and closed doors. The rooms they kept were lit deliberately: the kitchen with its low lamps; the small library with its fire; the back room with Severus’s angled work light, where steam curled and glass clicked softly against stone. Sirius appeared at the threshold of that room more often than not, not to talk, only to stand and watch the motion at the cauldron with a face that had learned patience the hard way.

Severus slept poorly for a while after Sirius came home. His mind manufactured new catastrophes in the last minutes before sleep: the sound of a fall; the burnt-metal smell of hex residue; the weight of Sirius’s body tipping too far forward again, his own hands too slow. 

On those nights, he would get up without lighting a lamp and walk the narrow corridor until his breathing matched the house’s. More than once he pushed Sirius’s door open with two fingers and checked nothing obvious, breath, bandage, the line of a shoulder under a blanket, before shutting it again with the same care he gave stoppered poisons.

Small repairs advanced without announcement. The threadbare cuff on Sirius’s coat silently mended itself. The broken latch on the back door suddenly held. Books that Sirius left open face-down returned upright with markers slid between pages that Severus refused to crease. Sirius noticed. He didn’t say so; he let it add up.

It worked in the other direction too. The smoked tea Severus liked was in the tin every time he reached for it. The exact biscuits he pretended to disdain but always ate last were stacked in a new box in the pantry. The spare set of knives he preferred drifted to the left-hand drawer where his hand always went first. No one moved them. They simply arrived where they belonged.

On the third Thursday, Severus watched Sirius from the sink while he dried the last of the clean vials. Sirius sat at the table with Harry asleep sprawled face-down across his thigh, one palm splayed, gentle, on the boy’s back. His head was tipped against the chair back, eyes closed, mouth soft. It was a view a person might guard jealously if they were made that way.

Severus had never thought of himself as someone who guarded anything. He jostled the tray in his hands purposely and Sirius’s eyes opened. For a heartbeat, neither of them spoke. Then Sirius’s mouth tilted wry. “Caught you staring, didn’t I?”

Severus lifted his chin a fraction. “No. I caught you sleeping.” He set the tray aside and crossed to lift Harry, moving slowly enough that the child never stirred. His hands were careful with the small weight; Sirius watched that, too.

Sirius discovered that Grimmauld was easiest when it was full. When Severus was at the shop and Harry was with Remus for an afternoon, the house felt too large for its own bones and Sirius had to make noise on purpose. Whistling off-key, letting the wireless mutter nonsense, banging cupboard doors harder than necessary. He did not like being alone with the sudden thought; that was a school he had already graduated from.

So he took to appearing at Severus’s shop on Wednesdays and every other Friday, on the pretext of delivering some nonsense or other. The bell over the door always told on him too loudly; Severus never looked surprised. “You have the look of a man who has outrun his house,” he’d say without glancing up from the counter ledger. “Don’t touch the ground nettle.”

Sirius would touch the ground nettle purely to be contrary and then wash his hands when Severus raised a single brow. He learned quickly which jars he was permitted to fetch and which he was not allowed within ten feet of. (Allowed: dried peppermint, scouring grit, cork stoppers. Absolutely forbidden: flobberworm mucous, powdered bicorn horn, anything Severus called volatile with that particular relish in the word.)

Sirius took his place as if installed by some invisible appointment: behind the counter when the midday rush pushed a trickle of regulars to a brief stream; at the shelves when there were gaps to be filled; on the high stool when there was nothing to do but be a body in a room so it didn’t look so much like a temple. He was good at this. He met eyes easily, remembered faces, made the kind of joke that let a nervous witch breathe before she admitted what she needed.

Severus was good at this too, but in a different key. His voice carried in a way that made people listen without noticing they’d stopped talking. He never over-explained; he never sold up. He handled brass weights as if they were domesticated creatures; when Sirius watched him tip a draught from pipette to vial with a steadiness that put surgeons to shame, he had to put his hands in his pockets to keep from fidgeting.

On a glum afternoon, two women near the back argued quietly about a cousin’s wedding; their voices bled into one another in the way of people too used to sharing a kitchen. Severus pretended not to listen and adjusted the angle of a small display by half an inch while the conversation arrived at itself. Sirius caught the glancing look Severus gave the shelf corner, the world exactly square again, and wanted, inexplicably, to laugh.

“Tea?” Sirius asked when the wave passed, already halfway to the curtained doorway. He didn’t wait for permission. The back room smelled like boiled metal and mint and Severus’s skin. The kettle sat where it always sat; the tin of tea waited where Sirius’s hands had put it that morning while Severus sorted an order. It was a small ritual, performed without choreography and through force of habit; Sirius was surprised by the soft ache it put in his throat.

He carried two mugs out. Severus took his without looking up. They drank in silence for twenty seconds, then thirty. People came and went. The bell did its little job and then rested again with a low click.

“You’re hovering,” Sirius said idly, when Severus stepped a half-step nearer as a young man with a nervous wand hand set a heavy jar down a little too close to the edge.

“I am preventing your death by clumsiness,” Severus said back.

“And here I thought it was because you liked me.”

Severus flicked him a sideways look that would have burned at higher proof. “Don’t worry. I don’t.”

Something under Sirius’s ribs loosened. He should have needled harder. He didn’t. It was enough, sometimes, to stand in the same space and know where the other man would be when he moved.

When the afternoon thinned to a thread of custom and the light slid to a pewter tone, Sirius leaned on the counter and watched Severus count. His hands did what they always did when someone else talked, fell idle and ready, waiting for work. “Healer says I’m allowed to fly again at the end of the month.”

Severus did not look up from his ledger. “She is misinformed.”

“You’re going to ground me? I’m not some student you can give detention to.”

“I wouldn’t waste my detentions on you.” The corner of Severus’s mouth bent. “I would waste them on your friends.”

“My friends are all dead,” Sirius said lightly. It slipped out of him like water, and for an instant he wished the words back. The room swallowed them without echo. Severus’s quill paused above the page. He didn’t say I know. He didn’t say anything. He counted the last of the coin and put the ledger away.

“Come on,” Severus said simply, in the tone a person uses with an animal that has decided to live in their yard: as if there were never any question where it belonged at dusk.

Sirius took his coat without comment. On the walk back, their shoulders brushed twice and neither stepped aside.

The night they drank, the weather was in one of those moods that never decided on a single season. Rain rattled, then sulked, then thinned to a mist that turned to frost on the upper flights of windows. The small library was the warmest room by default and by intention; Sirius had built the fire with a care that might have embarrassed him to describe.

He arrived in the doorway with two glasses and the bottle held loose and familiar in his left hand. Severus looked up from a paper he wasn’t actually reading. “Do we have a reason?”

“We survived,” Sirius said, and that seemed sufficient.

The first glass burned in all the right places. The second softened the borders of the room. They sat on the old sofa with their knees not quite touching and watched flames answer their own questions. The bottle stood between them, squat and reassuring; the cat staked himself on the hearth and took a side.

Ordinarily, the second glass would have slowed Sirius’s mouth. That night it seemed to make it easier to say nothing. He listened to the fire and the faint rasp of Severus’s sleeve when he lifted his drink. They spoke as if the room were a boat and they were balancing it carefully:a remark about Harry’s new habit of offering Zephyr his peas; a note about the rosemary suddenly thriving in the cold; a single complaint about the neighbour at Number Twelve who had discovered bagpipes.

The third poured itself. Sirius leaned his head back. The ceiling was the colour of old paper. Words roosted in his throat and refused to fly. He forced one down, then another. “You ever think about the ghosts?” It came out low, so the room wouldn’t startle.

Severus didn’t answer for a long ten-count. His face did something rare: it forgot to wear an expression. “Every day,” he said finally. “Lily.”

Sirius had been ready for it, of course he had, even so, the name landed in his chest with the careful weight of a beaker placed just so. Severus did not look at him; he was watching the space above the fire as if the heat would turn to text if he focused hard enough.

“I loved her,” Severus said. The words were unadorned; they didn’t want for any more decoration. “In several fashions. Three of them were unwise. One of them was… perhaps the best thing I ever did.”

Sirius’s throat flexed once around the drink. “You still do.”

Severus’s mouth tightened; the line held, then eased. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Some loves don’t leave. They simply take up a different part of the room. You learn to walk around them.”

Sirius nodded as if the answer belonged to both of them. He let his glass sit on his knee until the heat went out of it. He thought of the shape of James’s laugh in the Quidditch showers. He thought of the way his own hands had known where to go on a broom because James’s had taught them. He thought of a dozen jokes he’d made instead of speaking aloud the thing thudding under his sternum like a trapped animal.

“I had feelings for James,” he said, and the sentence hit the air like a glass thrown into the sea; it shattered far away instead of at their feet. He didn’t look at Severus. He looked at the fireplace and saw Gryffindor rugs and mud off boots and James half-smiling around a dare. “I didn’t do anything idiotic. He had Lily. He had the whole world. It was…” He stopped and exhaled, a quiet-falling, helpless laugh. “It was so simple, being next to him.”

Severus did turn then. The fire read his profile in copper. His eyes were empty of ridicule; there was a steadiness in them that made Sirius hurt somewhere strange. “You could have told him.”

“No,” Sirius said. “He would’ve tried to fix it.”

“He wasn’t good at leaving a thing alone when it belonged to someone he loved,” Severus said, and there was a half-smile under the words that had nothing to do with James and everything to do with the simple accuracy of the observation.

They drank again, not as ritual now but as punctuation. Silence did the work between them that people tried and failed to do with speeches. The fire sank and was fed and rose again. Half an hour later, Sirius let his head tip sideways until it touched the back of the sofa at the exact place Severus’s shoulder wasn’t, and Severus did not move away, and no one announced that this was happening.

It wasn’t absolution. 

It wasn’t a cure. 

But it was a room where two names could sit without knocking the furniture out of place. The bottle lowered in the same measure as the weather. Zephyr dreamed, paws twitching; the clock in the hall made a single, unobtrusive click each minute. 

When Sirius finally said, “Thank you,” he meant it with a gravity that surprised him.

“For what?” Severus said, as if there were a list and he needed a number to write it beside.

“For staying,” Sirius said, and that was enough.

Once, on a cold night, Sirius came down to the kitchen and found Severus asleep at the table with a book open under his hand and his neck at a painful angle. He stood there for a long second and stared. Stared at the line of Severus’s mouth slackened by sleep, at the hair pulled untidily back, at the chalk-pale underside of his wrist where it rested on the page. Then he summoned a blanket, shook it out with the same gentleness he used on Harry, and put it around Severus’s shoulders. When he turned to go, Severus’s eyes were open. Neither of them moved. “You’ll crick your neck,” Sirius said. “I already have,” Severus murmured, and let his eyes close again.

In the evenings, Sirius gravitated to whatever room Severus had chosen. He did not announce his reasons, and the reasons were all ridiculous anyway. He liked the particular scratch Severus’s pen made. He liked the way the light struck his cheekbone at the desk. He liked the silence that was not empty. Severus tolerated this invasion with a composure that would have offended Sirius a year ago; now it made something low between his shoulder blades uncoil in relief.

They argued about three things with old energy: Quidditch (Sirius liked the spectacle; Severus called it performative concussion); slugs in the garden (Severus advocated for charms; Sirius for an extremely reckless Kneazle); and whether Harry’s hair should ever be cut (no). 

The arguments were not about the topics; they were about keeping their hands in, like musicians practicing scales to confirm the instrument was still in tune. Afterward, the tea was passed without being asked for and the plate of biscuits found its way to the centre of the table and life continued.

Remus came twice in those weeks and stood in the kitchen like a man taking a reading. He looked at Severus, then at Sirius, and then at the place between them that hummed a little differently now. He said nothing. He sat down and let Sirius pour him tea and thanked Severus for the proper Wolfsbane with a quiet that belonged to two men who had bled in different rooms because of the same war.

They went to Diagon one afternoon and returned with nothing either of them had put on the list: a small brass bell Sirius pretended was for the garden gate and actually hung on the back door so he would know when Severus came in; a stack of stiff paper envelopes Severus later used to file nothing in particular labeled with Sirius’s chaotic script. In the pet shop, Sirius reached for a ridiculous toy with feathers; Severus reached at the same time; their fingers knocked and both withdrew. They both said, “No,” and bought it anyway.

Some nights, they got as far as the top of the stairs and paused there because stepping off meant their paths diverging until morning. When they parted, they did it with the idiotic formality of people testing a bridge. “Good night,” Severus would say, precise as a seal on a letter. “Night,” Sirius would say, too casual, too late. Doors would shut. The house would take a breath and hold it.

The week it snowed, Sirius caught Severus looking at him for longer than was decent while he wrestled Harry into boots, and Sirius’s ribcage did a series of idiotic things. He put it down to recovery, to winter, to hunger. He took a biscuit he did not want. Later he went to the window and stared at the rosemary like it might offer a statement from the jury.

That same afternoon, Severus came upon Sirius asleep on the rug with Harry sprawled across his chest and Zephyr wedged into the crook of his knee. The sight struck him in a way that felt like harm. He watched for a span of seconds that made him ashamed and then he made a small noise on purpose so the scene would turn back into the world.

Sirius woke with a start and smiled, unarmed. “You hover,” he said. 

“Someone must,” Severus said.

He turned away before the sentence said something else with his mouth.

They both came close to saying the thing twice. Once in the garden, Sirius with cold fingers jammed up sleeves, Severus in a scarf that had clearly been purchased by someone else; the light went a wrenching amber and they looked at each other with the expression you save for a person who has come home without telling you they were coming. Sirius cleared his throat and said, “Storm tomorrow.” Severus said, “Yes,” like it meant the opposite.

The second time was at the top of the stairs where they always paused like conspirators dividing up a night. Sirius reached without meaning to and put two fingers on Severus’s wrist; he left them there just long enough to feel the beat answer. “Night,” he said, no theatre in it at all. Severus inhaled like a diver and said, “Good night,” in a tone that could have been an invitation if you cracked the word along a different seam. They went to separate rooms and leaned their heads on the wrong side of the door for the same ten seconds and then straightened as if the house had caught them out.

When Remus closed the front door behind him at the end of a visit in midweek, he stood a moment on the step with snow thrumming silently down and looked up at the brick. “For Merlin’s sake,” he said to no one, fond and exasperated and a little heartsore. Inside, Sirius refilled Severus’s mug and Severus pretended not to check whether Sirius’s hand was shaking. The kettle sang. The room stayed small so they would not have to shout.

They were, both of them, wrong about the other man’s heart. They were, both of them, correct about the dangers of their own. Neither of them would have thanked you for explaining this. They would have ushered you to the door with exquisite politeness and then sat down at the kitchen table and said nothing for a while and then, eventually, one of them would have put a plate between them and the other would have reached without looking and the world would have gone on doing what it does before the moment that changes it.

Chapter Text

Snow had begun to crust along the window ledges by late afternoon, a brittle lace that melted and reformed with the rhythm of the draughts. Grimmauld Place wore winter well; the old house liked any excuse to be smaller. The kitchen kept to its pools of light, the library held its breath, and the stairwell learned the language of wool socks and quiet voices.

Sirius stood at the stove with Harry on his hip and a wooden spoon between his teeth, stirring with his free hand. The soup was more vegetables than sense, but it had the virtue of making the room smell like thyme and something homely. Harry “helped” by attempting to add a wooden block to the pot every few minutes and declaring “Hot!” in triumph when Sirius intercepted him.

From the doorway: “That is an unconscionable amount of parsnip.”

Sirius didn’t turn. “And that is an unconscionable amount of you in my kitchen when you promised you’d only be five minutes reorganising your - what did you call it - ‘hazardous assortment’?”

“‘Hazard inventory,’” Severus corrected, dry. “And I’m nearly done. A person would think you wanted me out from under your feet.”

“A person would be wrong.” Sirius tasted the soup, made a face, added a scandalous amount of salt, then kissed the top of Harry’s head to make up for the language he’d just used in front of a small person. “You’re hoarding books again, aren’t you?”

“Reorganising,” Severus said, which was often the same thing. “I found a safer containment box for the Black family trifles you refuse to let me incinerate.”

Sirius rolled his eyes and lifted Harry higher on his hip. “They’re historically significant.”

“They are pernicious rubbish,” Severus said, the warmth in his voice giving the words no teeth at all. “Two more minutes.”

“Fine. But if you die under an avalanche of your own superior filing, I’m telling everyone you did it for a jar label.”

Severus’s mouth flicked, near-smile then gone. He vanished toward the library with that measured, unhurried gait that always made Sirius think of knives sheathed correctly.

Harry leaned sideways for the spoon with the single-minded focus of a man half his height and infinitely more determined. “No, General Parsnip,” Sirius murmured, swapping spoon for a slice of bread. “Mutiny’s a winter sport and you’re out of season.”

Zephyr materialised to coil around Sirius’s ankles like smoke. Regguh hooted once from the perch beside the pantry, a small sound that always felt like punctuation.

The kitchen went on humming to itself. The soup did its small alchemy. The light shifted toward pewter. Somewhere down the hall, Severus’s footfalls thinned to the hush he wore when he was thinking.

Sirius ladled soup into bowls and set them to cool, carried Harry toward the library to fetch Severus with a line he’d already prepared, something about parsnip being the moral test of a man. He was smiling when he turned the corner.

The shelf announced itself with a noise like a groan dragged up from deep wood. The sound was old-house ordinary and wrong at once, a complaint Sirius had never heard in this room. His smile vanished. He took one step in, then another.

The highest shelf, one of the set Severus had anchored with charms, had shifted. A heavy, silver-edged case at its centre slid forward that fraction of an inch that means gravity has started thinking. It teetered, hesitated, and tipped.

“Severus-” Sirius didn’t know if he meant to call out or swear. He didn’t get to find out. He had Harry. He had no wand in his hand. He had just enough time to pivot, to put his body between the falling thing and the little boy on his hip.

The world narrowed to the edge of a case glinting as it fell and the way a room swallows sound right before something hits.

Harry’s magic broke like a note you didn’t know a child could sing.

It wasn’t the wild backlash of a tantrum, not the explosive crackle Sirius had learned to feel in the air before a toy levitated at an inconvenient angle. It was a pressure - clean and decisive - as if invisible hands reached up, caught the case mid-fall, and shoved it aside with offended precision. The thing skidded sideways in the air, smacked into the opposite bookcase, and dropped to the carpet with a subdued thump that felt wildly insufficient.

Severus was there on that same breath. He must have been moving before the shelf complained. One hand caught Sirius’s elbow, the other already drawing his wand. He flung a containment charm over the case with a gesture so crisp it split the air. The silver edges flared blue and went dull.

For a moment they stayed as they were: Sirius half-turned, Harry plastered to his chest, Severus’s grip an iron heat on his arm. A long, taut second, the three of them strung on the same thread.

Harry started to cry then. The late, startled wail of a child who has just been told the world can tip without warning. Sirius made a sound that might have been meant to soothe and came out as breath through his teeth.

Severus kept his voice low and level, the way he spoke to ruinous potions and frightened boys. “Harry.” He moved the lip of the sling so he could see the child’s face. “You did that. You saved him.” He didn’t look at Sirius when he said it. He didn’t have to.

Sirius heard his own heartbeat in his ears. He put his free hand over the small, sweating back pressed to his chest and repeated because it was suddenly the only sentence available, “You’re all right. You’re all right.”

The case sat in its faint shimmer of containment, very ordinary and very not. The shelf righted itself, affronted at its own lapse. The house exhaled in the way old houses do when a storm passes through a room.

Severus released Sirius’s arm only to touch his side, quick and professional, where the St. Mungo’s bandaging had been. “Any pain?” The question came out sharper than the cut of his words allowed.

Sirius shook his head. “Just-” He couldn’t find a unit of measure for what he’d almost been. He swallowed and tried again. “No. He did it. He-” He looked down at the small damp curls against his shirt and felt something tilt inside him, a plate under everything else settling into its correct place.

“Sit,” Severus said, not an order so much as a prescription. He guided Sirius backward to the nearest chair, crouched, and checked Harry for harm with the same thoroughness he gave a new ingredient. “He’s fine,” he announced to the air, to Sirius, to the panicked part of himself he’d never admit aloud. “He’s fine.”

Regguh hooted once, twice, agitated. Zephyr’s fur stood, then smoothed; he jumped to the arm of the chair and pressed himself into Sirius’s thigh with the entitledness of the forgiven.

When everyone had a little less shake to them, Severus stood and approached the case. Even sealed, it seemed to absorb light. Up close, the silver showed its true nature: not clean edges but the dull sheen of something that had liked hurting people for a long time.

“Black?” Sirius asked, softer now.

“Of course.” Severus flicked his wand; the runes on the containment shimmered as he layered a second confinement. “One of your relatives was very proud of their knack for curse-chaining. I should have stored this at the shop.” 

He didn’t excuse himself. He didn’t need to. He bent, examined the shelf brackets, and muttered a charm that set the whole case to rights with a faint, humming click. When he stood, the line of his shoulders had shifted from triage to aftermath.

Sirius had not let go of Harry. Harry had not let go of Sirius. Severus looked at them both for a long breath, then went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of water for Sirius and a clean, cool cloth for Harry’s forehead. He did it without fuss, the way he did all useful things.

They ate soup together in the library rather than the kitchen. Severus sitting on the floor like an unrepentant schoolboy, back to the arm of Sirius’s chair; Sirius with the bowl balanced in one hand, the other palm splayed over Harry’s small ribs. No one mentioned parsnip. No one left the room alone. 

Harry wore himself out and fell asleep with his face in Sirius’s shoulder, one fist still locked in his shirt. The house resumed its winter sound, a ticking clock, a low wind testing the windows.

Severus cleaned up the last of the sawdust with a charm and sat on the rug again, closer than he needed to be. He stayed where he could see both of them if he turned his head a fraction. He didn’t say as much. He didn’t have to.

They kept the rest of the evening small. The three of them migrated to the kitchen as though connected by invisible thread. Severus made tea without asking what kind; Sirius handed him the good mug without thinking; Harry slept on, an entire person’s weight making one adult clumsy and the other careful. Every so often, Sirius caught Severus watching Harry’s chest rise and fall, his own breath unconsciously matching it. He tried to make a joke and found none he wanted. The silence that held them was not empty, not anymore.

When Harry had been carried upstairs and tucked into his cot with ridiculous care, when Zephyr had been bribed out of his vigilance with two scraps he pretended not to want, when the house had shut all its eyes, they ended up at the kitchen table with two cups cooling between them and no performance left.

The days that followed seemed stretched thin, delicate as spun glass.

Sirius caught himself watching Severus more than he meant to: the efficient way he cleaned jars and cauldrons, the way he stood at the stove always with a straight back and hair tied neatly back while he cooked, the ease with which he smoothed Harry’s hair when the boy fussed, the measured way he pretended Spinner’s End still demanded his time even though neither could now remember the last time Severus actually returned there.

One evening, Sirius came down to find Severus asleep in an armchair, Harry sprawled across his chest, both of them breathing in the same slow rhythm. For a long moment, Sirius simply stood there, the sight striking something deep in him he’d never dared name.

He went back upstairs without waking them. But he didn’t sleep for hours.

It was three days later when the storm rolled in.

A mix of snow and rain lashed the windows, thunder shaking Grimmauld’s old bones. Harry was already asleep, tucked safely away. Sirius lit the hearth in the drawing room, the flames painting gold across Severus’s face as he settled into the armchair opposite. A bottle of firewhisky sat between them. 

Severus looked at Sirius’s hands instead. The small scald on the thumb from a week ago, the faint line on the forefinger from a bottle opened badly at the shop, a constellation of proof that living left marks. “It shouldn’t have been in this house,” he said, because something in him always started from failure. “I misjudged the bracket.”

“You fixed it.” Sirius’s voice was very quiet now. “And he-” He exhaled, looked at the doorway as if Harry’s breath were a light he could see from here. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so… I thought-” He stopped, swallowed, and did not look away. “I don’t want to do any of this without you.”

The words did not echo. They did not need to. Severus felt them arrive where they were meant for and take up residence like furniture.

He could have said a dozen careful things. He could have pointed to the boy upstairs. He could have stacked utility between them like a wall. He didn’t. “I don’t want to be anywhere else,” he said, and the truth of it felt like a coin finally set down where it belonged. “This house-” Severus glanced at the ceiling, at the corridor that had learned his footfall, at the kettle that had learned his timing. “-feels like home.”

Sirius made a sound that wasn’t a laugh, though it borrowed the shape of one. “Not Spinner’s End?”

“Spinner’s End is a history.” Severus folded his fingers around his cup. “This is… now.”

Sirius let his head tip, those dark eyes suddenly unguarded in a way that still surprised Severus when it happened. “Not just for him,” he said, and the pronoun hung there like a dare, gentle and absolute. “Not only for Harry?”

“No,” Severus said. No hedge, no rescue. Just the word he meant.

A long quiet unspooled between them. The kind you learn when you’ve both run out of pretending to be clever.

Sirius moved first, not dramatically or with a flourish. He only reached across the table and set his hand, palm up, in Severus’s line. The invitation was public in a private way; it felt the way a door feels when a lock clicks open behind it.

Severus put his hand in Sirius’s. His fingers were cool from the cup. The grip neither tightened nor trembled. It simply held.

They sat like that long enough for the storm to start lighting up and the house to shift into the deeper blue of night. The relief of having said it did odd things to Sirius’s posture; he learned a new way to inhabit his own chair. Severus felt it in his own body, a slackening in the place where vigilance had grown vines.

“You matter to me,” Sirius said eventually, not as a confession but as a description, like telling someone the weather.

Severus had made a life out of not reaching. He set the cup aside with care, stood, and walked around the table as if the floor had remembered his weight. He stopped beside Sirius’s chair and rested two fingers against his jaw, the way you do when you’re calibrating something delicate.

Sirius didn’t move away. He held still the way a dog holds still when it has finally been told it is allowed to come in from the rain. But only for a moment. And then Sirius leaned in and kissed him.

It wasn’t dramatic. It was a learned precision applied to a new thing. Lips, the soft place at the corner where a smile starts, the better angle found after a breath. Sirius inhaled through his nose like a man who’d stepped through a door he’d been leaning against for months. His hand came up, palm to the nape of Severus’s neck, careful even now, thumb brushing that small spot that makes the whole spine pay attention.

They didn’t rush. They tested a language that had been written in other exchanges, tea tins refilled, coats mended, a hand on a wrist at the top of the stairs, and found, to no one’s surprise, that they were both fluent.

When they parted, it was only far enough to look. Their foreheads touched. Sirius’s mouth was curved, barely. Severus’s eyes were very dark.

“Stay,” Sirius said, the same word he had used in a hospital, now stripped of fear and carrying only what it meant. “Not in the spare room.”

They turned off lights like a ritual. The library lamp first, Severus’s precise fingers to the switch, then the kitchen, Sirius’s hand lingering briefly on the back of the chair where Severus had sat. The stairwell listened without creaking. Zephyr followed as far as the landing, yawned, and conceded the night to humans.

In Sirius’s room, everything was familiar and altered by degree. The bed held its shape the way good furniture does when asked to do something it was built for. Sirius peeled his shirt off without self-consciousness; the band of pale skin where a bandage had been made Severus’s hands slow with care he did not perform for anyone else. Severus undid his buttons like someone untying a knot he intended to keep.

They slid under the covers with the gracelessness of tired people learning proximity. There was no choreography, and that felt right. Sirius rolled, found the warm line of Severus’s body, and settled there with a sigh he would deny in the morning. Severus lay on his side, one arm loose across Sirius’s ribs, the exact weight of it a revelation. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, then let his eyes close. 

Down the hall, Harry’s breathing abided, soft, even, the metronome that had ordered their days. Regguh shifted on his perch and went back to one-legged owl sleep. The house did what old houses do when someone has finally said yes inside them: it settled, redistributing air and silence, giving up a last pocket of cold and accepting the new weight as correct.

And when morning came, there was no new alarm to raise, no crisis to solve before tea. There was just the quiet astonishment of waking in the same bed and finding nothing in the world had cracked under the weight of it.

There was of course one small boy calling “Ba’foo!” from his cot, a cat stretching at the foot of the bed that had acquired two occupants, and a house that, for the first time in its long memory, felt like it had been used as intended.

And in that stillness, it was possible to believe it might go on this way.