The Werewolf's Child

Sono, Doe and Sword

On a sunny Saturday in January Oxford Circus was crowded with shoppers. The air was crisp and cold, the sunshine, slanting between the tall buildings, was bright. Sev and Remus were walking close together, not touching, but almost. Remus caught their reflection in the plate glass window of a shoe shop as they passed by.

Sev, wearing black jeans and a black jacket was looking very handsome, Remus thought. He had transfigured his new, short hair to a bleached blond and was wearing dark mirrored sunglasses. He hurried along, looking straight ahead, although Remus knew that behind the glasses his eyes were surveying the crowd warily.

Remus had transfigured his hair long and black, transformed a set of Sev's old robes to a calf length black dress and put on a glamour that made him look like Sev's somewhat too tall pregnant girlfriend. An ancient lipstick deep in the medicine cabinet at Spinner's End had completed the look, and Remus was rather pleased. He felt that they were indistinguishable from any one of a hundred Muggle couples, out for a bit of shopping.

Remus was enjoying the outing thoroughly. He had been cooped up at Spinner's End by now for over two months. The street was bright and bustling with people. Remus had lived in Muggle London most of his adult life. It was his city, and it felt great to be back.

The sexual health clinic was drab and dreary, with a basket of condoms on a table by the front door and bright posters advertising the joys of contraception and STD prevention. They sat and held hands in a stuffy overheated room while they watched a mandatory informational video. Then they watched each other have tubes of blood drawn from their arms by a cheerful nurse in blue scrubs, first Severus, then Remus. As she was labeling his sample the nurse looked right at Remus and asked him, "Are you going to your prenatal visits, then?"

Startled, Remus didn't know what to say. "Er....no....I haven't started, no."

She looked at him oddly. Remus hadn't done anything to disguise his voice and he knew it was too deep, the inflection too male, to match the glamour he was wearing.

"How far along are you?" she asked, all clinical efficiency.

"Erm....." he looked over at Sev for help but he looked even more uncomfortable than Remus himself felt. "Four months probably. Maybe five." he tried to raise the pitch of his voice, but it just came out sounding odd.

"You must make an appointment," she declared. "You should have a proper prenatal visit. Are you taking vitamins?'''

"Yes," Remus said. He had been, every day, from the bottle Poppy had left him.

"I can do a sono now if you like," the nurse offered, and before he quite knew what was happening Remus was up on an exam table, in a darkened room, with Sev sitting nervously beside him and a probe smeared with cold wet gel on his belly. And there, in the grainy black and white images on the screen, he saw the baby.

"That's his face," said the nurse, kindly. Sev reached for Remus' hand and grasped it. "There look, he's sucking his thumb, you see? That's a hand, an arm, a foot," she said, moving the probe around. Remus couldn't stop watching the images. "It's.....there it's a boy," she pronounced, though Remus, staring at the screen, wasn't sure how she'd determined that. She sounded certain, however. "There's his face again," she said. She pressed a button and a grainy black and white paper printed. She handed it solemnly to Remus. In it, you could clearly make out the baby's face.

Then they got a lecture on the importance of prenatal care, a list of clinics to call, and they were out on the street, holding hands, both of them looking at the world as if they were seeing it for the very first time.

                                                                                          *********

Late that night Remus lay alone in the bed at Spinner's End. He had an ancient tome called The Moste Evil Artes open before him, but mostly he was thinking contentedly about the day he'd just spent with Sev. After the sexual health clinic they'd gone into a maternity shop called The Peapod, where Sev had insisted that they buy Remus some clothes. They'd come away with several pairs of black stretch pants, some big loose cotton shirts, and a grey jumper that wasn't too girly.They'd gone to lunch in a Muggle pub, come back to Spinner's End to make love, and then Sev had gone through the floo back to Hogwarts.