Sirius Black looked up from his Quidditch magazine. He stared hard at the playpen in the corner of the room. Something was different about it. He lowered the magazine slowly.

The baby was gone.

Well, shit, Sirius thought, throwing aside the magazine. I've lost the baby.

He got up from his armchair and went to the bottom of the stairs. He can't have gone far.

"Harry!" he called, taking the stairs two at a time. "Where's the bloody baby, then?"

Sirius heard a happy gurgle from somewhere even farther upstairs.

"Shit," he swore, finding the next staircase and bounding up it. "Why does their house have five bloody floors?"

When he reached the landing, he looked wildly left and right. "Harry!"

He heard a shriek of laughter and glanced up at the ceiling. "Damn it!"

Sirius swung to his left and wrenched open the door to the fourth floor. Breathing heavily now, he clutched his side as he came to the top of the stairs. "Harry!" he wheezed.

There was no answer. Sirius narrowed his eyes at the last rickety staircase at the end of the hall.

"Don't make me come up there."

He caught the sound of a small bottom plopping down on the ground.

"Finally tired, are we?" Sirius muttered.

When he got to the top of the stairs, he looked around the room. It was a small attic that Harry's parents kept as a guest room whenever people came to stay. The baby wasn't there.

There was a window propped open at the opposite end of the room, blue checkered curtains blowing in the breeze.

"You have got to be joking," Sirius groaned, dragging himself to the window.

There was a pole sticking out from under the windowsill that Harry's mother sometimes used to hang the laundry that couldn't be done by magic. The pole was about five feet long and rather unstable.

Baby Harry was hanging upside-down from his diaper on the end of the pole. He looked amusedly at Sirius's face and giggled. The movement jiggled the pole up and down and Sirius clapped his hand to his mouth.
"Merlin, Harry, how in bloody hell did you manage that?" Sirius tested his weight on the pole, which bobbed dangerously.

"Shit, shit, shit," Sirius whispered frantically, biting his lip. He patted his pockets nervously. "Oh, where the hell is my wand?" He turned to go back down the stairs, but before he could get start walking he heard Harry make another noise. The pole bounced the happy baby up and down.

"For Merlin's sake!" The exasperated man looked between the stairs and the window. He tried to take another step toward the stairs, but then Harry made a sound and Sirius spun around in anxiety again.

"Well, that's not going to work." He went to the window again and tried to reach for Harry. His long black hair blew in the wind and smacked him in the face, blocking his eyes.

"Damn it!" He pulled back and swiped it out of his face. "Maybe Padfoot will have more luck."

He transformed himself into his Animagus form of a big black dog and put a paw on the pole. It didn't move. Inspired, Sirius put his full weight on the pole and took two steps. Then he looked down.

Back in the room two seconds later, he silently cursed himself for forgetting his extreme fear of heights.

's okay, he thought, just got to get him out before Lily and James get home.

He heard laughing voices from the front lawn.

Shit.

He reached out of the window with both arms. "C'mon, Harry, there's a good baby, come to Uncle Sirius! There we go, there we - oh, no, don't do that, don't - your blasted diaper is going to bloody come off, you stupid baby - oh, no, no, I didn't mean it, I -"

Harry had started to wail.

"Padfoot! We're home!"

He sighed. At least James would see it first and not Lily.

"Sirius? You up there?" He heard Lily's voice floating up the stairs.

"Er... just a moment!" Sirius glared at the baby. "You're a wizard, bloody magic yourself in here, you twit!" he hissed.

Harry's cries reached a new volume.

"Sirius? Is that Harry? Is he alright?"

"Yeah, Padfoot, is -"

"Not to worry!" Sirius called back. He made a wild swing at the baby, hitting the pole instead.

"Is everything okay?"

"Just bloody peachy!" he bellowed back, grabbing the pole to stop the swinging. Harry began to scream.

"That's it, James. Sirius, I'm coming up!"

He heard the sounds of Lily stomping up the stairs.

Sirius Black was not a desperate man, nor had he ever been. He preferred to take everything in his stride and with astounding aplomb. But when he heard the sounds of his best friend's wife's heels coming up the stairs, his eyes widened alarmingly and he practically threw himself out of the window trying to reach Harry. Falling from a five-story house was a lot better than facing the wrath of Lily Potter.

As he heard Lily reach the second floor landing, he heaved a huge sigh and slid down the wall, face in his hands.
"Well, it's over," he said to the baby. "Your mother's going to castrate me."

Lily came to the third floor.

Sirius took his head off his arms. "And when she castrates me," he told the baby in his lap, "you'll learn a valuable life lesson: don't ever anger your mother. Or your grandmother. Or any Evans woman."

He heard Lily step on to the first step of the last staircase.

"It was a good life," Sirius sighed, looking away from Harry and up at the ceiling. "I dated a lot of women and went to many Quidditch games. What more can a bloke ask for?"

Lily opened the door at the other end of the room.

"Oh!" She looked at Sirius, smiling. "Did you change his nappy or something?"

"Huh?" Sirius looked down at his lap. A grinning baby Harry stared up at him. "Oh, bloody Merlin! The baby!" He swooped down on his godson and gave him a huge hug.

"Sirius, I can't believe you would be so lax!"

"W-what?" Sirius looked at her incredulously. "The baby's right here!"

"Swearing in front of a baby, of all the-"