Chapter Text
“Watch that.”
Remus points at the soapy dog in the sink, now playing a vicious game of tug of war with the chain attached to the plug.
“Where are you going?” Sirius asks, then watches as Remus just shakes his head and stalks out of the boot room, tutting loudly at Cecil as he passes him in the doorway.
Sirius turns back to the puppy. It’s still an ugly little thing: it’s just a clean ugly little thing now. It’s all short, stubby legs, and bristly fur, and pointy ears that look too small for its squat, round head, and an angry sort of expression as it glares up at Sirius and grunts at him noisily. Somewhere between a puppy and a particularly irritated bumblebee.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Sirius says, reaching to tip another cup of warm water over its fur and washing away the last of the suds, snatching his hand back every time the puppy tries to latch onto his fingers again. “I don’t mind that you smell.”
He wraps the puppy carefully in two clean hand towels from the pile on the counter, bundling it all against his chest as he follows Remus out into the hallway. He finds him at the foot of the stairs, with one hand clutching the receiver of the house phone to his ear and the other rubbing agitatedly at the back of his neck.
“Hiya, Kelly,” he’s saying into the phone. “It’s Remus over at Beech Hall.”
Sirius settles himself on the bottom step next to the bannister twisted with red tinsel, and hears a soft tip-tapping of cloven feet as Snuffles ambles down the corridor towards them. He pushes his nose against the bundle of towels in Sirius’s arms. There’s a quiet, tired grunt from inside them.
“Listen,” says Remus, running a hand through his hair and making it all stick up at funny angles. “Has your Maggie had another litter?”
Sirius watches Remus’s face as a distant voice crackles down the voice. Remus hums, and then hums again, and says:
“Right,” and then: “Right. We’ve got one of them here.”
There’s a pause, and another crackle of the voice on the other end of the line. Snuffles noses at the towels again. Remus frowns.
“When were that, then?” he says, his eyes fixed on the now-snoozing puppy in Sirius’s lap. “Right,” he says again. And then he sighs, deeply, and says: “Yeah. Alright. Cheers Kelly. Bye.”
He sets the phone back down in its cradle, and — looking a lot like Lyall used to look when James had done something particularly hopeless up on the fell that first summer — turns slowly around to fix Cecil, still standing in the doorway of the boot room, with a bitterly disappointed glare.
“Oh, Cecil,” he sighs. “Cecil, Cecil, Cecil.”
“Who was that?” Sirius asks, nonplussed, nodding back to the phone.
“Kelly,” says Remus. He runs a tired hand over his face. “Girl at one of the farms down near the village. She has a little Jack Russell terrier. Maggie, they call her.”
“Oh.”
“And Maggie went missing a few months back. Kelly says she turned up a couple of days later, looking right pleased with herself. Now she’s had a litter.”
“Okay. And?”
“She went missing the last week of September.”
It’s as dramatic a reveal as Sirius could’ve ever imagined. Straight out of the soap operas. He gasps, and whips his head around to stare at Cecil in the doorway, and then down at the sleeping puppy in his lap. A miniature Cecil. Just as cross; just as horrible.
“Oh, no.”
“Yep,” says Remus shortly, folding his arms over his chest and heaving out another deep sigh. “You,” he says, brandishing a finger at an entirely unbothered Cecil, “are in big trouble.”
Cecil huffs out a matching sigh, and if dogs could roll their eyes, Sirius swears he’d be doing it.
“I suppose he was angry that we’d, you know,” Sirius says quietly, grimacing, “sort of pimped Snuffles out that week.”
He looks up at Remus to find him with his head back in his hands. He sees him rub at his face again, and blow out a resigned breath. And then he watches as his shoulders start to shake gently under the thick, patterned wool of his jumper.
“Are you laughing?”
Remus lets his head fall back against the wall behind him, dimples pulling at his freckles.
“You’re laughing,” Sirius says, feeling his own lips split into a grin. “Cecil has cheated on Snuffles, and you’re laughing?”
“What a player,” Remus says. He chuckles again, and goes to scoop Cecil into his arms, ruffling the wiry fur on the top of his angry little head. “You horrible thing, you.”
Cecil grumbles, and then tips his head up to lap messily at Remus’s jaw.
“How many puppies did she have?” asks Sirius.
“Six,” says Remus. “Five bitches and one dog.” He nods towards the now-snoring bundle of towels in Sirius’s lap. “Cecil’s only son.”
“Continuing his legacy of being smelly and awful.”
“Yep.”
Sirius reaches with a finger to carefully peel back the edge of one of the towels.
“I mean,” he says slowly, cocking his head to peer at the puppy’s sleeping face, “he’s quite sweet, really. Isn’t he? When he isn’t biting us, I mean. He’s only a little thing.”
There’s a long, loaded beat of silence. Remus sets Cecil back down on the wooden floor and folds his arms over his chest again, and Sirius chews on his bottom lip with his front teeth, and then Remus sighs, and leans back against the wall, and says:
“Go on.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what ?” Remus says, his cheek dimpling again despite his raised eyebrows. “Go on. Ask.”
“Can we keep him?”
***
He’s too little to come live with them right away, Remus tells him. They dig out an old bed of Cecil’s from when he was a puppy, all chewed padding and loose threads, and fill it with towels and clean, fluffy blankets and nestle it on the rug in front of the fireplace in the living room, and Remus says:
“Kelly’s down at her grandma’s for Christmas. But she’ll come pick him up on Boxing Day.”
“For how long?”
“Few more weeks,” Remus says, mashing a fork into the little bowl of milk and dog biscuits he’s put together. “He’s only a month and a bit. Needs his mum for a while longer yet.”
“And then,” Sirius says, running a careful finger back and forth over the puppy’s head as it yawns, and grumbles tiredly into its nest of blankets, “he will have two dads.”
Remus glances over his shoulder out into the hallway, still mashing the food in the dish. “Where are the happy couple? Wonder if Cecil’s fessed up yet.”
“I think Snuffles will make a wonderful stepdad, actually,” says Sirius. “And since he’s clearly not interested in reproducing, I suppose this is the only way they could start a family.”
He sees Remus grin out of the corner of his eye. The lights on the Christmas tree in the corner twinkle red and pink and blue and green.
“You are daft,” Remus says softly.
“And you,” Sirius yawns, shuffling down on the rug and stretching himself out in front of the fire, still running the tip of his finger carefully back and forth through the puppy’s wiry fur, “are an irresponsible parent, Remus Lupin. Letting your son run around, getting people pregnant like that.” He tuts. “The little hussy.”
“He gets it from me,” Remus deadpans, and Sirius grins. “Anyway. He’ll need a name when he comes to live with us. Stinky, or Cowpat, or something.”
The puppy raises its little head at that. It yawns again, and stretches itself luxuriously in its pile of blankets, and then grunts and snaps playfully at Sirius’s fingers with its tiny teeth, and grunts once more for good measure.
“Piglet,” says Sirius. “His name is Piglet.”
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