Fatherhood | drarry teen adoptive parents au

thirty six | missing sirius

"Tell me about him, Draco," Harry asked, turning his head to look up at Draco almost shyly. "Sirius."

It was a glorious mid-August afternoon, a few days after Ron and Hermione had left the forest for the Burrow again, and the boys were lying on their stomachs by the brook.

Casper, as ever, was between them, mesmerised by the water and the reflection on it from the light through the trees, and gurgling incessantly as they spoke.

"What do you want to know, sweetheart?" Draco asked. He ran a soft hand down his boyfriend's back, tracing pretty swirling patterns with slender fingers.

Harry shrugged. "Anything. What do you remember?"

Draco turned onto his back, thinking for a minute. He pulled Casper up into a sitting position and poked his squidgy little baby tummy, making him giggle, and then turned back to Harry.

"You know how he used to write to me all through school, right up till he died?" he asked.

Harry nodded. Sirius had been the biggest cheerleader of their relationship that he could imagine.

"You take good care of my godson, you little hooligan," he remembered reading in one of Sirius' letters to Draco at the start. "I know what those of us with blood from the Blacks can be like. Be more like Harry in that regard, and you'll be alright."

"Did you know that apart from you, he's the main reason I didn't become a Death Eater this year?" Draco asked thoughtfully. "He predicted it literally years ago. I remember him talking to my mother about it when I was about six or seven, on our trip here, actually."

"Really?" Harry asked, amazed. "He knew this would happen so soon?"

Draco nodded seriously. "Oh, yeah. I remember the argument. He was yelling at her, really yelling, saying she had to protect me at all costs, that my father would break me if she wasn't careful. And she was saying ...."

He paused and looked away into the distance. A lump grew in his throat which made it hard to speak for a second, but he forced it down.

"She was saying that my father wasn't like that."

Harry laid a gentle hand on Draco's arm and for a minute they were silent, listening to the sound of the brook and the birds and their babbling son.

"I do have happier stories of Sirius too," Draco broke the silence after a while, a slightly brighter note in his voice this time. "He was a very cool older cousin. Or older second-cousin."

"I bet he was," Harry smiled, and he meant it.

"He used to throw me right up onto his shoulders and hold me there as long as i wanted," Draco began. His eyes lost their worried look and began to shine as he spoke.

"And he'd sneak me sweets from that tall cupboard in the kitchen because I couldn't reach it then, and he took me down to the river every day and dunked me in with him."

"Sounds like Sirius," Harry chuckled.

"He thought my dad was a tosser, and he was right," continued Draco. The words were all spilling out on top of one another now.

"He let me go on his broom even though it was far too big for me and I fell off and my mother got cross with him, but I was grinning my head off the whole time. He rode a motorcycle and dressed me in his leather jacket - which was massive on me, I looked like an idiot. Mother used to have the pictures somewhere. God, I wanted to be Sirius Black so badly."

"Me too," Harry smiled sadly. "He was the coolest."

"He's one of the reasons I wasn't as terrified to raise CJ as I could've been," Draco admitted. "It doesn't matter that you have a shit dad if you've got a role model like that. I hope Cassy knows how cool his dads are when he's older."