You like to preach with a vodka in your mug

Chapter six

"Mummy, can I light the Christmas pudding?" Fizzy asks softly. Louis doesn't think he can do much apart from lay a motionless blob on the sofa with the King's speech on the TV and his sisters complaining that the rest of the royal family aren't wearing princess dresses. His mum sensibly suggests that they wait until the evening.

It seems like every fifteen minutes one of his sisters asks if it's the evening yet and at about six o'clock Jay finally stops their whining and lets them have pudding. She deals with heating up the brandy and gets Fizzy to tie her hair up before she lights the match. Louis encourages Ernest to stay awake to watch the pudding go on fire (he'd curled up on Louis' lap about an hour ago and refused to detach himself) and they cheer when the thing goes up in blue flames.

"Again!" Ernest squeals delightedly. It seems the promise of pudding had gotten him awake.

"If they've got Christmas puddings on sale then we can get another for a different day," Jay promises as she kisses the top of Ernest's head. She divvies up the pudding and gets some to everyone and Louis beats her to it when he offers to wash the dishes.

"Mum, you can sit down," Louis says softly as he goes around collecting people's bowls, Ernest still on his hip. Lottie tries to stack her spoon somewhere in the middle and Louis gets lamented for calling her a dipshit, "there's only so many times I can watch Phoebe and Daisy marry their Barbies."

Jay smiles and blows Louis a kiss. Louis manages to pass on drying duty to Ernest, who seems way too eager to help out. If he could reach the sink by himself, Louis would happily offload every chore onto him but he'd probably get a bollocking for exploiting his younger brother.

By the time Doris and Ernest have finished their pudding, it's about their bedtime and, with his mum falling asleep on the sofa, Louis takes it upon himself to get them in their new pyjamas (they match and it's possibly the most adorable thing Louis has ever seen) and get them ready for bed. He reads them a new story book that Doris had gotten from her friend and changes the main light for the night lights once they're asleep.

"Did you get Harry pregnant or something?"

Louis nearly shits himself when he sees Lottie's face poking through the door.

"I don't think that's how it works," Louis whispers, slipping out of Doris and Ernest's room and silently shutting the door. "Why?"

"You're acting parent-y today," she teases, poking Louis' arm, "and everything you do is suspicious but this is especially."

"It's Christmas," Louis shrugs, "am I not allowed to spend time with my family?"

"No just," Lottie narrows her eyes, "it's weird."

Louis doesn't get it. He just tucked his siblings in and read them a bedtime story but he suspects that Lottie is looking for something else to blackmail him about. Louis smacks her in the back of the head, just hard enough to mess up her hair, and snorts when she glares at him.

"Cry about it," Louis snickers before heading back down the stairs. His mum is completely out cold on the sofa but Louis reckons she'll wake up as soon as someone whines give it back because it's inevitable and Louis is convinced his mum's ears are trained to hear arguments better than normal conversations.

When Louis checks his phone, he has a video from Harry. He's singing ABBA on a cheap karaoke machine that really does nothing for his voice but he looks like he's having fun until someone – Louis recognises them as a younger cousin the two of them had been babysitters for once – stomps over and demands her karaoke machine back.

The video cuts off when Harry starts laughing and Lottie says something about how he has his dumb Harry face on. Louis sticks his middle finger up at her and captures her reaction to it in a photo that he sends back to Harry.