Author's note: I hope everyone had a good Mother's Day, no matter what that looks like for you. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights

Content Warnings: NA

Stretch

She'd crawled into a sweatshirt last night but by the time he woke up the following morning, she'd kicked off most of her blankets and the lumpy red sweatshirt had risen up past her belly button. Remus was used to waking up with the bedding a mess and he didn't mind—it usually meant that Dora had slept through the night, which was highly contingent on her nightmares staying in check. So he took some comfort in the mess as he watched his wife sleep, hoping that she'd had a night as peaceful as she was now. Her chest rose and fell nicely and evenly, and her lips had parted just a bit. He was tempted to lean over and kiss her cheek, but sleep was a rare commodity with a one-year-old in the house so he didn't risk waking her up. But he did notice the marks on her stomach—pale, faded squiggles undulating over her lower belly.

He lied down next to her and pondered the stretch marks. He felt like he should have noticed them sooner, since Teddy was just about a year old now, but he hadn't. Maybe when she morphed and changed, they changed with her. Either way, they were quite delicate. The colour on them was much softer, much nicer, than those of the many scars and marks he had on his own body. Not to mention that these had a much nicer origin story.

He kissed her cheek then and she muttered something that sounded vaguely like a Weird Sisters lyric before snuggling into him some more, burying herself in her red sweater. Then when she seemed to realize she bumped against him in bed she woke up slowly and groggily.

"Good morning," he said and kissed her forehead.

"Morning," she mumbled with a yawn. Then she frowned. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like I might get lucky before I even brush my teeth," she said bluntly. Remus laughed.

"Nothing," he said. "Maybe I just like you."

"And maybe I'm part troll," she said.

"I do," Remus defended "And I think you're beautiful."

She morphed into a disturbingly close portrait of Severus Snape.

"What about now?"

"We're burning these sheets and moving out of this flat."

She roared in laughter and her features melted back to their usual selves. She sat up so she could swing one leg over him and straddle him, leaning down to kiss him. Remus's hands went to her hips because he wasn't born yesterday, this wasn't their first time doing this, and he knew that she needed all the help she could get in the "balance" department.

"Really," she said. "What do you have that face on for?"

"What face?"

"Your 'I'm going to be stupidly thoughtful and sweet' face," she said.

"I just saw your stretch marks this morning," Remus said. "The ones from having Teddy."

"Yes, I do remember the process of getting those," Dora said rolling her eyes. Then she frowned, as if they hadn't crossed her mind either. "They're not usually there, are there?"

"No," Remus said.

"Huh," she said. "Interesting… Maybe they naturally go away when I morph a part of myself the same way that scars or bruises do. A lot of that sort of subconscious morphing or whatever drops away when I'm sleeping too."

"Maybe," Remus said. When they'd first met, back in Grimmauld Place, he'd gone on a bit of a reading streak about Metamorphmagi—until a real one had started taking up more of his time, that was. He'd started reading some more now that he was surrounded by Metamorphmagi, but there was very little known about how their magic worked.

She hiked up the bottom of her sweatshirt to ponder the marks there.

"I don't think I mind them," she said after some deliberation. "You know, that's the thing about having a body that changes all the time and grows and shrinks and never has the same colours to it; sometimes you forget that it's the same one that's carried you through so much. I'm never quite the same size and weight and shape, so I'm always stumbling about like I'm trying on the wrong pair of shoes and discovering my centre of balance by the moment. But I do only have the one body and it's done so much. Making Teddy was probably the best thing."

"I'd say it's up there," Remus said.

"Oh, just 'up there'?" Dora asked, arching an eyebrow.

Remus felt himself blush.

"I don't like commenting on bodies that aren't mine," he tried to explain.

"Even when you're on the receiving end of so many of the other nice things it does?" Dora grinned, leaning down to kiss him—which Remus was thankful for since this was much better than any response he could possibly have fabricated. At least it was until Teddy started wailing from his nursery.

Dora sighed against his lips. Remus twisted around to flip them and Dora gasped in surprise.

"Don't start making it interesting just as the baby wakes up," she said.

"No problem," Remus said, peeling himself off of her and grabbing a t-shirt off the ground. "I'm going to go attend to said baby's tears."

"Oh, can you bring him here?" Dora asked, nudging into her pillow. "For snuggling purposes?"

"Immediately or would you rather I change him first?"

"Yes please," Dora said with a smile.

WC: 901