AN: I'm really sorry this is short and that it took me so long to get out. But there will be lots more! Oh hohoho I cannot wait for you guys to see what I've planned for these guys.

Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed, you have made me giddy with joy (figuratively, although I did giggle and do a little jig!).

This is completely un-betad and fresh off my brain. I don't own diddly squat except Alexis, Freya and Terrence (AKA Terry).


He had to understand the man's research. He was trying to do something. There were moments of excitement where his notes were merely squiggling lines on the page from haste. It had to have been something great. It had to be something incredible.

He would finish it and take that greatness for himself.

The door creaked open and footsteps tapped the stairs. Alexis carried a full dinner tray into the laboratory. It was some kind of bread wrap around salad and strips of beef. Beside that was a bowl of freshly cut fruit with a blot of yoghurt on top, and a little snifter of some kind of dark alcohol.

The little girl was standing in the hallway outside the door, peering in. "Why is Daddy having dinner down there?" she asked. Alexis gave him a cutting look.

"Daddy is very busy with research right now." The put the tray down a little more forcefully than before. "Go wash your hands and sit at the table, we'll be eating shortly."

"Okay Mummy!" the little girl galloped off to do as she was bade. Alexis fixed him with another quelling look – his eyebrow raising with his sneer in response – and left, taking the lunch tray with her. She did not close the door behind her.

He heard the scraping of chairs as the child and her mother settled for dinner. The child was excitedly regaling her adventures with 'Aunty Minnie and Unka Alby' earlier that day. He must have, some time after finishing Hogwarts and returning to Spinners end, introduced Alexis to them. She was remarkably comfortable with the wizarding world, given her late introduction to it.

She couldn't be a squib. She had to much confidence in her self for that.

But what of the child? She would be powerful – his Prince blood would guarantee that. He himself had been relatively late to show incidents of magic, something that relieved his mother to no end. By that age she could instruct him to hide it from his father. But this girl would not have that disadvantaged start in life. She was already deeply entrenched in the wizarding world, mind alight to the beauty of magic.

He could be glad for that, at least. He could be glad that, somehow, the Prince line was continuing. He would just have to accept that it was not his Prince line. He had no aspirations towards fatherhood, not once Lily had gone.

The clinking of utensils continued, conversation going quiet as they ate.

He closed his eyes, and for a moment, he let the sounds of a family wash over him. Someone else's family. He took a slow breath in and returned his focus to the notes in front of him.


Please review! I will less than three you!