Hi everyone! Thanks so much for all the kind reviews and excitement! I'm sorry it took me so long to update again - I've written a lot of this story, but I left the beginning as a problem for future!Hope. So some of this has been written for ages, and some was a case of filling it in between the bits I had written. Hopefully it reads OK and it won't be so long until I update next (although I'm still catching up to myself, so please bear with me.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

"We're too late."

Bertrand didn't seem to hear him, staring down as if his eyes were glued to something Robin couldn't see, behind a pile of rubble. Robin approached, curious. Just as his gaze finally fell on the bundle safely preserved in a shaft of sunlight... the baby began to cry.

His eyes snapped up to his lover's, but Bertrand wasn't even looking at him, he wasn't even blinking, just staring down at the infant with an expression Robin couldn't immediately place. He frowned; there was sorrow there, sympathy for this lost child whose family, if Robin wasn't very much mistaken, lay in forlorn little piles around the room. But there was something else, and as Bertrand suddenly lunged forward and lifted the child carefully into his now-smoking arms, Robin realised it was something akin to longing.

He yanked Bertrand further into the shadows and began patting out the flames, reaching around the baby to do it.
"Shhh, you're safe," he soothed gently, and he didn't really know whether he was talking to the little foundling or the smouldering vampire, "you're safe." The baby quieted for a moment, staring up at him with big, dark eyes, before thumping a tiny fist against Bertrand's chest and beginning to whimper again.
"What do we do?" He hadn't heard Bertrand sound so utterly bewildered in a long while, but the infant cradled in his arms was now tangling a hand into his jacket, apparently content to cling there.
"I... I guess sweep the place for survivors – more survivors – and head home to report to Vlad when it gets dark?" The older vampire nodded.

Not for the first time in recent hours, Robin cursed. They'd had to do a lightning-speed dash between the homes of about thirty of Vlad's allies after a threat was called in, but of course they'd only landed at the scene of this dustbath a scarce few minutes before dawn. This family hadn't even been on their danger list, their home just a convenient place to wait out the sun; Vlad had thought they were anonymous enough to be left unharmed. Vlad had been wrong.

Bertrand explained the discrepancy easily enough, once they were settled in the cellar. It had been locked, but Robin had managed to kick it in while Bertrand hung back with the baby.

"We should have known, really. No vampire calls in a threat in advance. You saw the damaged ceiling, the piles of dust - they were all killed yesterday, long before we got here. They probably never even had a chance to realise the roof was being destroyed. And this... child, this child can't be very old at all. I expect the mother, at least, couldn't have run far if she'd tried."

Robin reached out to touch the child's cheek - she'd stopped crying, thankfully, settling down to the occasional whimper - and sighed. "You saw the mirror in that little room? The smashed one?"

"Yeah. It was the Capello Blood Mirror, I'm afraid. This child must be the first Capello to be born in 300 years... they'd all have been killed. We need to get it back to Vlad."

"It?"

"I'm not checking inside its nappy." He sniffed and pulled a face. "Oh, no. Somebody probably should, shouldn't they?"

Between them, they managed to work out a kind of temporary nappy changing solution using the contents of their first aid kit - something Robin insisted on carrying if only because his mum would want him to, and which had turned out to be surprisingly useful in a variety of situations - and settled back down to wait out the sun.

"At least it's winter," Bertrand tried, shifting the newly-clean baby in his arms slightly, "shorter days."

"Do you want me to hold her?" They'd discovered that much about her, at least, which made things a bit less awkward. They couldn't keep calling her 'it', after all. "Your arms must be tired."

"I'm not that old and feeble yet," Bertrand protested, and then sighed. "But I wouldn't mind the chance to stretch a bit, if you're sure."

"Yeah. Just... make sure I've got her before you let go."

The child felt surprisingly heavy as her weight finally settled in his arms, yet so tiny and light that it boggled the mind. How could something so small possibly be alive, and human? Well, vampire, anyway. Little as she was, this child was a person. That was just too much to take in, for a moment. Robin stared down at the baby, watching her breathe, reluctant to take his eyes off her. She was the only survivor of this blasted, pointless, exhausting mission, and she had to make it out of here. Saving her was quite literally the least he and Bertrand could do, and now also the most.

Bertrand probably thought he didn't notice him slipping out of the door, but Robin noticed. He trusted Bertrand to cling to the shadows - it was, after all, one of the many things he did best. Meanwhile, Robin was on guard.

Bertrand should have realised earlier that the child would need basic care. He'd been stunned, distracted by the sheer enormity of his discovery, the almost unbelievable chance that had brought them to the infant's aid just at the moment that she most needed rescue. The way he felt about it all. Stunned, yes; but that was no excuse. He needed to pull himself together, or the baby would be no better off with them than she would have been alone in her patch of sunlight among the wreckage of her home.

It was safer to wander through the house now, in daylight, than it would have been at night - just as long as he stuck to the shadows. In places, that was impossible, so he had to try a couple of different routes before he finally found a clear way to the kitchens. He just had to hope that this family had stuck to vampiric tradition - noblewomen had never been much for feeding their children from their own bodies, and vampiric custom eschewed wet-nursing, so there should be some kind of milk substitute in storage for the little Capello child. It took a few minutes, but at last he came across some kind of formula, thankfully labelled with instructions for making it all up, and handily situated next to a collection of empty feeding bottles. Bertrand could follow instructions.

It took him considerably less time to get back to the cellar, now that he knew the route. Before long, he had an arm back around his beloved Robin, reaching to offer the bottle to their newfound temporary charge. The baby seemed to know what she was doing, which was a relief, her little hands flailing as she took the bottle into her mouth and began to feed. Within moments, her face had unscrunched a little bit and she looked almost peaceful.

"Poor thing," Bertrand murmured and moved closer to Robin. "She must have been starving."

"But she stopped crying," Robin pointed out, "surely if she'd been that hungry, she'd have kept crying."

"Maybe she was too tired, or..." Too weak. Bertrand couldn't quite bring himself to say that, somehow. "We were nearly too late."

"I didn't even think of getting her food. Blood, if it had just been me, she'd be dead."

"Well, she's not." Bertrand took the child out of Robin's unresisting arms and held her up so he could see her properly. "See?" As if to prove his point, the baby started making noises of complaint as the bottle fell from her mouth, and Robin grabbed it to give it back to her.

"OK, OK. Sure. Let's just... sit this out, and we'll get her to Vlad as soon as possible. He's got to know someone who can do babies, right?"

"Some kind of nurse, probably, yeah. It'll be fine, won't it, little one?"

They sat, curled together around the child, to wait for several more long hours - and a couple of nappy changes - until finally, at long last, they felt the sun beginning to set.