Archive of Our Own ^beta

The sitting room in the Potter cottage was warm in the way only a well-loved home could be—lived-in, comfortable, the kind of warmth that came from more than just the fire crackling in the hearth. Diora sat curled into the corner of the sofa, cradling a cup of tea she hadn't actually drunk from in several minutes. The porcelain was still hot against her palms, but she barely noticed.

Outside, November rain streaked the windows in slow, meandering paths. The kind of rain that wasn't quite heavy enough to be called a storm but persistent enough to make the world feel smaller, more intimate. Diora had always liked rain—the way it muffled sound, the way it made staying inside feel like a choice rather than a necessity. Today, though, she barely registered it.

Lily was talking about something—nursery colors, maybe, or whether James's mother's old cradle was salvageable—but Diora's attention kept sliding away, caught instead on the way Lily moved. There was a new deliberateness to her now, three months into the pregnancy that everyone seemed to know about and celebrate. She didn't just sit anymore; she settled. Carefully. Her hand drifted to her stomach every few minutes, an unconscious gesture that Diora found herself tracking without meaning to.

It wasn't that Lily was showing much yet. It was far too early for any visible change. But the way she touched herself had changed. Protective. Aware. Like her body wasn't entirely her own anymore.

Diora had noticed it the moment she'd arrived an hour ago. The way Lily had answered the door with one hand resting lightly on her abdomen, the way she'd moved through the cottage with a new kind of carefulness, avoiding sharp corners and reaching for things with more deliberation than usual. Small changes. Subtle. But unmistakable once you saw them.

And Diora kept seeing them.

She looked away, focusing hard on her tea. The nausea rolled through her again, low and insistent, the same queasy discomfort that had been dogging her for the better part of a week. She'd blamed it on the stew Sirius had made three nights ago—he was an excellent cook when he tried, but he had a tendency to experiment with spices in ways that didn't always agree with her. Cardamom in beef stew had seemed inspired at the time. Less so when she'd spent half the night feeling vaguely sick.

Then she'd blamed the toast she'd burned that morning, scraping off the blackened bits and eating it anyway because she'd been too tired to make more. Then stress, because the war had a way of making everyone feel sick eventually, didn't it? The constant low-level anxiety, the sleepless nights, the way every owl that arrived might be carrying terrible news.

But sitting here now, watching Lily's hand rest so naturally against the place where her child was growing, Diora felt something shift uncomfortably in her chest. A creeping awareness she didn't want to examine too closely.

"You're not listening to me at all, are you?"

Diora's head snapped up. Lily was watching her with an expression that was half-amused, half-concerned, her eyebrows raised in that particular way she had when she knew she'd caught someone out. The blanket she'd been folding—pale yellow, hand-knitted by someone's aunt or grandmother, Diora couldn't remember—lay abandoned in her lap.

"Sorry," Diora said quickly, offering what she hoped was an apologetic smile. "I am. I just—" She paused, scrambling for an excuse that wasn't I've been staring at your stomach like a creep for the past ten minutes. "I think I'm still recovering from whatever I ate the other night. I've been feeling a bit off."

Lily's expression shifted immediately, the amusement fading into something more attentive. She set the blanket aside on the arm of the chair and leaned forward slightly, her green eyes sharp with concern.

"Off how?" Lily asked.

Diora shrugged, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to evasive. "Just... queasy. You know. Nothing serious. Probably something I ate that didn't agree with me."

"How long have you been feeling like this?"

"I don't know. A few days? Maybe a week?" Diora took a careful sip of her tea, even though the smell of it—chamomile, which she usually loved—was making her stomach turn. The heat of it didn't help. She set the cup back down. "It's probably just something I ate. Or stress. Everyone's been—well, you know."

She didn't need to finish the sentence. Everyone did know. The war had crept into every corner of their lives, a constant low hum of dread that no one talked about directly but that colored everything they did. Order meetings ran late into the night. People went missing. Funerals were becoming more frequent than weddings. Just last week, they'd lost the Prewetts—Molly Weasley's brothers, good men, killed in their own home. The funeral had been small, quiet, devastating.

Diora had held Sirius's hand through the whole thing and wondered when it would be their turn.

But Lily wasn't nodding in agreement the way Diora had expected. Instead, she was watching Diora with that look again—the one that made Diora feel like she was being gently, carefully dissected. The look that said Lily had already figured something out before you had.

"What?" Diora said, a little defensively, crossing her arms over her chest.

Lily tilted her head slightly, her expression thoughtful. "Have you been tired?"

"Everyone's tired."

"More than usual, I mean."

Diora hesitated. She had been tired, actually. Exhausted in a way that didn't seem to match the amount of sleep she was getting. She'd fallen asleep on the sofa two nights in a row, waking up disoriented with Sirius shaking her shoulder gently, telling her to come to bed. Both times she'd meant to read for just a few minutes and had woken up an hour later with the book sliding off her chest.

And her breasts had been sore—she'd noticed that this morning when she'd gotten dressed, the fabric of her bra feeling too tight, too constricting. She'd adjusted the straps three times before giving up and just accepting the discomfort.

"Maybe," she admitted reluctantly. "But that could be anything. I haven't been sleeping well."

"Because of the nausea?"

"No. Just... in general." That was true enough. She'd always been a light sleeper, and lately every sound seemed louder, more intrusive. The wind against the windows. The settling of the cottage. Sirius's breathing beside her, deep and even in a way that made her irrationally jealous.

Lily was quiet for a moment, her gaze still fixed on Diora with that unsettling intensity. Then she leaned back against the cushions, one hand still resting on her stomach, and Diora had the sudden, uncomfortable sense that this conversation was heading somewhere she didn't want it to go.

"Diora," Lily said, her voice soft but deliberate, "when was your last cycle?"

The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. Diora opened her mouth to answer—automatically, reflexively, because it was the kind of question you answered without thinking—and then stopped.

When was her last cycle?

She tried to think back. A week ago? Two weeks? Longer? She'd been so busy lately, running between the cottage and Order business and trying to keep some semblance of normalcy in her and Sirius's life. Her cycle had always been irregular anyway, prone to shifting a few days here or there depending on stress or travel or a hundred other factors. She'd never been the type to mark it religiously on a calendar the way some women did.

But now, sitting here with Lily watching her with that gentle, knowing expression, Diora realized she couldn't remember.

"I..." She trailed off, her heart starting to beat a little faster. "I don't know. A few weeks, maybe?"

"More than four?"

Diora's mouth went dry. She tried to count backwards. The last Order meeting had been... when? Two weeks ago? Three? And before that... She couldn't pin it down. The days had been blurring together lately, each one bleeding into the next.

"I'm not sure," she said finally, and her voice came out smaller than she'd intended.

Lily didn't say anything right away. She just sat there, her hand still resting on her stomach, her expression calm and patient in a way that made Diora want to squirm. The silence stretched out between them, filled only by the crackling of the fire and the soft patter of rain against the windows.

"It's probably just stress," Diora said quickly, hearing the edge of defensiveness creeping into her voice. "You know how it gets. With everything going on, my body's probably just... reacting. That happens, doesn't it? When you're under a lot of pressure?"

"It does," Lily agreed. "But Diora—you're nauseated. You're exhausted. Your cycle's late." She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was even gentler. "Have you considered that you might be pregnant?"

The word hung in the air between them, stark and impossible.

Pregnant.

Diora's first instinct was to laugh, to wave it off, to insist that Lily was being ridiculous. But the laugh caught in her throat, and instead she just sat there, staring at her friend, her mind suddenly racing.

She thought of the nausea that hit her at odd times—not just in the morning, but in the afternoon, in the evening, seemingly at random. The exhaustion that made her want to crawl into bed at seven in the evening. The soreness in her breasts that she'd been trying to ignore. The way food had tasted off lately, like everything was too rich or too bland or just wrong. She'd made scrambled eggs two days ago and hadn't been able to eat them because the smell alone had made her gag.

She'd chalked it all up to stress, to the war, to the hundred small anxieties that came with living in a world where people you loved kept dying.

But what if it wasn't?

What if it was something else entirely?

"I can't be," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she'd intended, almost like a plea. "We've been careful."

Lily's expression softened even further, if that was possible. "Careful isn't foolproof, love."

Diora set her tea down on the table in front of her because her hands were starting to shake. The cup rattled slightly against the saucer, the sound too loud in the quiet room. This was absurd. She wasn't pregnant. She couldn't be pregnant. Not now. Not with everything happening. Not when the world felt like it was crumbling around them and bringing a child into it seemed like the most reckless, irresponsible thing anyone could do.

But even as she thought it, a part of her—the part that had been noticing the nausea, the exhaustion, the strange sense of her body feeling just slightly off—was already starting to believe it.

"I don't..." She swallowed hard, trying to steady herself. Her throat felt tight. "How do I even know for sure? I mean, all of this could just be... coincidence, right? Stress does strange things to the body."

Lily stood, moving with that same careful deliberateness that Diora had been noticing all afternoon, and disappeared down the hallway toward the bedroom. Diora heard the sound of a drawer opening, then closing, the creak of floorboards, and then Lily was back, holding a small rectangular box.

"Muggle pregnancy test," Lily said, sitting back down and holding it out across the coffee table. "I have a few extras. James's mum insisted I keep them on hand, just in case we needed them early on. Before I saw a healer."

Diora stared at the box like it was a live snake. It was so ordinary-looking—white cardboard with neat blue lettering, the kind of thing you'd see in any Muggle chemist's shop. Clearblue, it said. Simple. Clinical. Final.

"You want me to pee on a stick?" she said, and despite everything, there was a hysterical edge to her voice that might have been the beginning of laughter.

Lily's mouth twitched into a small smile. "That's generally how it works, yes."

"This is ridiculous," Diora said, but she reached out and took the box anyway, her fingers closing around it too tightly. The cardboard compressed slightly under her grip. "I'm not pregnant."

"Then the test will say so," Lily said simply, reasonably. "And you'll know for sure. And then you can stop worrying about it."

Diora looked down at the box in her hands. It felt heavier than it should, weighted with implications she wasn't ready to face. She could see the fine print on the side—99% accurate, it claimed. Over 99% accurate from the day of your expected period. She tried to remember when her expected period had been and came up blank again.

"This is absurd," she muttered, but she was already standing, the box clutched in one hand like evidence of something she hadn't yet been accused of.

"Bathroom's down the hall," Lily said gently, settling back into her chair. "Second door on the left. You know where it is."

Diora nodded mutely and made her way down the hallway. The cottage was small enough that she knew the layout by heart—she'd been here dozens of times, for dinners and Order meetings and quiet afternoons like this one. But today everything felt slightly off-kilter, like she was seeing it all through a distorted lens.

The bathroom was small and tidy, decorated in soft greens and whites. A vase of fresh flowers—late-season chrysanthemums, probably from the garden—sat on the counter next to the sink, their petals just beginning to brown at the edges. The mirror above the sink reflected her face back at her, and Diora was startled by how pale she looked. How wide her eyes were.

She locked the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment, eyes closed, trying to catch her breath.

This was absurd. She wasn't pregnant. She would take the test, it would come back negative, and then she could go home and have a proper laugh about the whole thing with Sirius over dinner. They'd open a bottle of wine—the good stuff they'd been saving—and she'd tell him about Lily's pregnancy paranoia rubbing off on her, and he'd tease her gently, and everything would go back to normal.

Except.

Except the nausea. The exhaustion. The late cycle. The way her body had felt just slightly off for days now, weeks maybe, like it was keeping a secret from her that everyone else had already figured out.

She opened the box with shaking hands and pulled out the instruction sheet, unfolding it carefully. The paper crinkled too loudly in the small space. She read the instructions once, then twice, just to make sure she understood. It was simple enough. Almost insultingly simple.

1. Remove test stick from wrapper

2. Hold the absorbent tip in your urine stream for 5 seconds

3. Wait 3 minutes

4. Read result: Two lines = pregnant. One line = not pregnant.

That was it. Three minutes between not knowing and knowing. Three minutes between her life as it was and her life as it might become.

She followed the instructions mechanically, her mind blank and buzzing all at once, and then set the test on the counter next to the vase of chrysanthemums. She washed her hands—the water too cold, making her fingers ache—and dried them on the hand towel hanging by the sink. Then she stood there, staring at the test, and waited.

Three minutes.

She could hear the clock ticking in the hallway. The faint crackle of the fire in the sitting room. The rain against the window, steady and rhythmic. The sound of her own breathing, too loud in the small space, too fast.

She didn't want to look at it. She wanted to walk out of the bathroom, leave the test sitting there on the counter, and pretend this had never happened. She wanted to go back to five minutes ago when the possibility of being pregnant hadn't even occurred to her, when her biggest concern had been whether she was coming down with something.

But she couldn't.

She stood there and watched the test like it was something dangerous, something that might explode if she looked away. The absorbent tip was still damp, the liquid wicking up into the result window. For the first minute, nothing happened. The window stayed blank, white, empty.

Then, slowly—so slowly she almost missed it—a line began to appear. Pink. Unmistakable.

The control line, she realized. That was normal. That just meant the test was working.

But then, a few seconds later, a second line started to form. Fainter than the first, but there. Definitely there. Pink against white, becoming clearer with each passing second.

Two lines.

Positive.

Diora's knees went weak, and she grabbed the edge of the counter to steady herself. The porcelain was cold under her palms, grounding. She stared at the test, waiting for the lines to disappear, for this to be a mistake, a false positive, anything other than what it so clearly was.

But the lines stayed. If anything, they grew more vivid, more certain.

She was pregnant.

The realization hit her all at once, a tidal wave of feeling she couldn't parse. Shock. Fear. Disbelief. And underneath it all, something she didn't want to name yet—something that might have been joy, or might have been terror, or might have been both tangled together so tightly she couldn't tell them apart.

There was a baby inside her. Right now. Growing. A tiny cluster of cells that would become a person. Her and Sirius's child.

She pressed one hand against her stomach—flat, unchanged, giving no indication of the life taking root there—and felt her eyes start to burn.

She didn't know if she wanted to cry or laugh or scream.

She picked up the test with trembling hands, holding it carefully like it might break, and walked back to the sitting room on autopilot. Her mind was still struggling to catch up with her body, still trying to process the enormity of what she'd just learned.

Lily looked up as she entered, her expression carefully neutral, and Diora held out the test without a word. Her hand was shaking so badly the test trembled in her grip.

Lily took it gently, glanced down at the two clear pink lines, and then looked back up at Diora with a soft, warm smile that somehow made everything feel both more real and more surreal.

"Oh, Diora," Lily said, and there was so much tenderness in her voice that Diora felt something crack inside her chest.

She sank back onto the sofa, her legs giving out, and pressed her palms against her face. Her skin felt hot, feverish.

"I'm pregnant," she said, and the words felt strange in her mouth. Foreign. Impossible. Like she was speaking a language she didn't quite understand.

"You're pregnant," Lily confirmed gently, setting the test down on the coffee table between them.

Diora just sat there, hands over her face, trying to process the fact that her entire world had just shifted on its axis and she hadn't even noticed until now. Everything looked the same—the sitting room, the fire, the rain-streaked windows—but nothing was the same. Nothing would ever be the same again.

"Does Sirius know?" Lily asked after a moment.

Diora shook her head, her hands still pressed against her face. Her palms were damp. "I didn't know. Not until just now. I didn't even—" Her voice cracked. "I didn't even suspect."

"Are you—" Lily hesitated, and Diora could hear the carefulness in her voice, the way she was choosing her words like stepping stones across a river. "How do you feel?"

How did she feel?

Diora lowered her hands slowly and looked at Lily, at her friend who was three months pregnant and glowing with it despite everything, despite the war and the fear and the uncertainty of bringing a child into this broken world. And she tried to find words for the tangled mess of emotions currently warring inside her chest.

"I don't know," she said finally, and it was the truest thing she could say. "I don't know."

Terror, maybe. Because how could they possibly raise a child in the middle of a war? How could they keep a baby safe when they couldn't even guarantee their own safety? Every day people were dying, disappearing, being tortured. Every day the world got a little bit darker.

But also—and this was the part that scared her almost as much as the terror—there was something else. Something warm and fragile and cautiously, impossibly hopeful. Because this was her and Sirius's child. A life they'd created together. A future, however uncertain.

"That's okay," Lily said softly, reaching over to take Diora's hand. Her fingers were warm, steady. "You don't have to know yet. You just found out. Give yourself time to feel whatever you need to feel."

Diora nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her throat felt too tight, like there were words trapped there that she couldn't quite get out.

They sat like that for a long moment, hands clasped, the fire crackling softly in the background, the weight of the revelation settling over them both like a blanket.

Diora was pregnant.

She was going to have a baby.

She and Sirius were going to be parents.

The thought was so enormous, so all-encompassing, that she couldn't quite wrap her mind around it. A baby. A tiny, fragile life growing inside her right now, even as she sat here trying to make sense of it all. Cells dividing, forming, becoming. A heart that would soon beat. Fingers and toes that would eventually curl and flex. A person.

"What do I do now?" she asked quietly, looking at Lily with something close to desperation. "I don't—I don't know what to do."

Lily smiled, that same gentle, knowing smile she'd been giving Diora all afternoon. The smile of someone who'd already walked this path and knew what lay ahead.

"Now you go home," she said simply. "And you tell Sirius. And then you figure it out together. One step at a time."

Together.

Right.

Of course.

Diora nodded slowly, trying to imagine the conversation. Trying to imagine Sirius's face when she told him. Would he be happy? Terrified? Both? Would he pull her close and whisper reassurances, or would he go pale and quiet the way he sometimes did when things felt too big to process?

She didn't know. She couldn't predict it. And that uncertainty felt almost as overwhelming as the pregnancy itself.

"I'm scared," she admitted, the words tumbling out before she could stop them. "Lily, I'm so scared."

"I know," Lily said, squeezing her hand. "I was too. I still am, sometimes. But you're not alone in this, Diora. You have Sirius. You have me. You have all of us."

All of us, Diora thought. The Order. Their friends. The makeshift family they'd cobbled together in the midst of chaos and violence. It should have been comforting. And in a way it was.

But it also made her think of how many of them wouldn't survive to meet this child. How many empty chairs there would be by the time her baby was born.

She pushed the thought away. She couldn't think about that right now. If she started down that path, she'd never come back.

"Thank you," she said instead, looking at Lily with eyes that were starting to burn again. "For... for this. For figuring it out when I didn't. For being here."

"That's what friends are for," Lily said warmly. Then, more seriously: "Are you going to be alright getting home? I can have James walk you, or—"

"No," Diora said quickly, already standing. She needed to move, to do something with the nervous energy suddenly coursing through her. "No, I'll be fine. I just need... I need to go tell Sirius."

Lily stood as well, slower, more careful. She pulled Diora into a hug—gentle, mindful —and Diora held on tighter than she probably should have.

"It's going to be okay," Lily murmured against her hair. "I promise. It's going to be okay."

Diora wanted desperately to believe her.

She left the Potter cottage a few minutes later, the used pregnancy test wrapped carefully in tissue and tucked into her pocket—evidence, proof, something tangible to show Sirius when she told him. The rain had lightened to a drizzle, fine and misting, the kind that soaked through your clothes without you noticing.

The walk back to her own cottage felt surreal, like she was moving through a dream. Everything looked the same—the trees bare and dripping, the path muddy from days of rain, the wards shimmering faintly at the edge of the property, visible only if you knew to look for them—but everything felt different.

She was pregnant.

The words kept repeating in her mind, over and over, a mantra she couldn't escape. With each step, they became more real. More undeniable.

By the time she reached the front door, her hands were shaking again and her clothes were damp from the drizzle. She stood there for a moment, key in hand, trying to steady herself. Trying to prepare for what came next.

But there was no preparing for this. No script to follow. No right way to tell your husband that your entire lives were about to change.

She unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the cottage wrapped around her like a familiar embrace. It smelled like home—woodsmoke and tea and the faint, lingering scent of whatever Sirius had been cooking earlier. Something with garlic and rosemary, warm and savory. She could hear him moving around in the kitchen, the sound of cupboards opening and closing, the clink of dishes being set out.

Normal. Ordinary. The same as it had been this morning when she'd left to visit Lily.

Except nothing was the same anymore.

Everything had changed, and he didn't even know it yet.

Diora set her bag down by the door, her fingers fumbling with the clasp. She shrugged out of her damp coat and hung it on the hook, watching water drip from the hem onto the floor. She should probably do something about her wet hair, about her rain-spotted dress, but she couldn't seem to make herself care.

She walked slowly toward the kitchen, her heart pounding so hard she was sure Sirius would be able to hear it. Each step felt weighted, significant. The last few steps before everything changed.

He looked up as she entered, and his face broke into an easy smile—the kind of smile that still made her heart skip even after years together. Open. Unguarded. Happy to see her.

"Hey," he said, setting down the wooden spoon he'd been holding. "How was Lily? Is she—" He stopped, his smile fading as he got a better look at her. "Diora? You look pale. Are you still feeling sick?"

"A bit," she said automatically, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Distant. Detached. Like it was coming from someone else entirely.

Sirius frowned, pushing off the counter where he'd been leaning and crossing the kitchen to her in three long strides. He was still wearing the old jumper he'd had on this morning, the dark green one with the hole in the left elbow that he refused to throw away. His hair was tied back messily, a few strands escaping to frame his face.

He reached up to brush a damp strand of hair away from her face, his touch gentle, and Diora felt something inside her chest crack open.

"You're soaked," he said, concern sharpening his voice. "Did you walk back in the rain? You should have waited for it to stop, or sent your Patronus and I would have come to get you. Come on, let's get you dried off—"

"Sirius," she interrupted, and her voice came out steadier than she'd expected. Stronger. "I need to tell you something."

He went still, his hand dropping away from her face. His expression shifted immediately from concern to something more alert, more cautious. She'd seen that look before—the way he went from relaxed to ready in an instant, a product of too many years watching his back.

"Okay," he said slowly, carefully. "What is it? Is something wrong? Is Lily—"

"Lily's fine," Diora said quickly. "It's not—it's not about her."

"Then what?" His grey eyes searched her face, trying to read her expression. "You're worrying me. What happened?"

Diora reached into her pocket with trembling fingers and pulled out the tissue-wrapped pregnancy test. She'd been holding onto it so tightly that the tissue had started to come apart, soft and damp from her sweaty palm. She held it out to him wordlessly, watching his face.

Sirius took it, confusion flickering across his features. He unwrapped it carefully, like he was afraid it might break, and stared down at the white plastic stick with its two clear pink lines.

For a moment, he just looked at it, his expression unreadable. Diora watched him process it—the confusion giving way to comprehension, comprehension to something that might have been shock.

"This is..." He looked up at her, his eyes wide. "This is a pregnancy test."

"Yes," Diora said.

"And it's..." He looked back down at the two lines, then back up at her. "It's positive."

"Yes."

"You're pregnant?" His voice cracked slightly on the last word.

"Yes," Diora said again, and saying it out loud to him, watching him hear it, made it real in a way it hadn't been before. Real in a way that made her knees feel weak all over again. "I'm pregnant."

For a long moment—it could have been seconds or minutes, Diora couldn't tell—Sirius just stared at her. The test was still in his hands, gripped so tightly his knuckles had gone white. His face was a war of emotions she couldn't quite parse: shock, definitely, but underneath that something else. Fear? Joy? Disbelief?

All of it, maybe.

And then, slowly, carefully, he set the test down on the kitchen counter next to the cutting board where he'd been chopping vegetables. His hands were shaking slightly. She could see them trembling as he turned back to her.

"You're pregnant," he said again, like he was testing the words, trying them out to see if they felt true.

"I'm pregnant," Diora confirmed, and her voice broke on the words. "We're going to have a baby."

And that was what did it. That was what broke through whatever shock had been holding him frozen.

Sirius crossed the distance between them in one step and pulled her into his arms, crushing her against his chest so tightly she almost couldn't breathe. One hand came up to cradle the back of her head, fingers threading through her damp hair, and she felt him press his face against the top of her head.

Diora buried her face against his chest and finally, finally let herself cry.

It came out in great, shuddering sobs that she couldn't control, couldn't contain. All the fear and shock and overwhelming emotion of the last hour poured out of her in waves, and Sirius just held her through it, one hand stroking her hair, the other wrapped firmly around her waist.

"I've got you," he murmured against her hair. "I've got you. It's okay. We're okay."

But his voice was shaking too, and when Diora pulled back enough to look at his face, she saw that his eyes were bright with unshed tears.

"Sirius," she said, and her voice was hoarse from crying. "I'm so scared."

"I know," he said, and one hand came up to cup her face, his thumb brushing away the tears on her cheek. "I know. Me too."

"How are we supposed to do this?" The words tumbled out in a rush, all the fears she'd been holding back since she'd seen those two pink lines. "How are we supposed to raise a child when we don't even know if we'll survive the war? When people are dying every day? When—"

"Hey," Sirius said firmly, both hands on her face now, making her look at him. "Hey. Look at me."

She did. His grey eyes were intense, fierce with something that might have been determination.

"We'll figure it out," he said. "Together. The same way we figure everything else out. One day at a time."

"But—"

"No buts," he said, and then he was kissing her. Soft and gentle and so full of emotion that Diora felt fresh tears spring to her eyes. When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against hers. "We're going to be parents, Diora. We're going to have a baby. Our baby."

"Our baby," she repeated, and saying it like that—like it was something they were doing together, not something that was happening to her alone—made it feel slightly less terrifying.

Only slightly.

"When did you find out?" Sirius asked, pulling back just enough to look at her properly.

"Today. An hour ago, maybe? At Lily's. I was complaining about feeling sick and she..." Diora let out a shaky laugh. "She asked when my last cycle was and I realized I couldn't remember."

"And you're sure?" His eyes dropped to her stomach, still flat beneath her dress. "The test is accurate?"

"Lily said they're over ninety-nine percent accurate. I'll need to see a healer to confirm, but..." She pressed one hand against her own stomach, mirroring the gesture she'd been watching Lily make all afternoon. "I think I knew. Or part of me knew, anyway. I just didn't want to believe it."

Sirius's hand covered hers, both of them resting against her abdomen now. "There's really a baby in there?"

"Too small to see or feel yet," Diora said. "But yes. According to the test, yes."

"Merlin," Sirius breathed, and then he dropped to his knees in front of her.

Diora gasped. "Sirius, what are you—"

But he wasn't listening. He'd pushed up the hem of her dress slightly—respectfully, carefully—and pressed his forehead against her stomach, his hands coming to rest on her hips.

"Hello," he said softly, speaking to her abdomen like there was actually someone in there who could hear him. Maybe there was. Maybe some part of that tiny cluster of cells could sense his presence, could feel the warmth of his breath through the fabric of her dress. "Hello, little one. I'm your dad."

Diora's breath caught in her throat. She brought one hand up to touch his hair, dark and silky beneath her fingers, and felt the tears start again.

"I don't know how to do this," Sirius admitted, his voice muffled against her stomach. "I don't know how to be a father. My own father was..." He trailed off, and Diora knew he was thinking of Orion Black—cold, cruel, everything Sirius had spent his life running from.

"You'll be nothing like him," Diora said fiercely, her fingers tightening in his hair. "Nothing like him, do you hear me? You're going to be wonderful."

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do." She tugged gently until he looked up at her, his grey eyes bright and vulnerable in a way that made her chest ache. "I know you, Sirius Black. I know your heart. And I know you're going to love this baby with everything you have."

He stood slowly, and when he pulled her back into his arms, she could feel him shaking.

"I'm terrified," he admitted against her hair.

"Me too," she whispered back.

They stood like that for a long time, wrapped around each other in the middle of the kitchen, the dinner Sirius had been making forgotten on the stove. Outside, the rain picked up again, drumming steadily against the windows. Inside, everything had changed.

They were going to be parents.

Against all odds, in the middle of a war, with no guarantee of tomorrow—they were going to bring a life into this world.

And somehow, standing there in Sirius's arms with his hand resting protectively over her stomach, Diora thought maybe—just maybe—it might actually be okay.