A baby. A baby. A baby. Dora was going to have a baby. They were going to have a baby. It had only been two days but Remus still couldn't wrap his head around it. Dora couldn't either. What a pair were they?

He was sure that they were supposed to be happy about this announcement but all there had been so far was confusion and shock. And thinking. A lot of thinking. Maybe too much thinking.

But there was no disappointment from either of them. They just couldn't be disappointed about a baby, after all. And he was sure that the happiness was there somewhere, just buried under the other emotions. They would just have to work through them.

"I feel like we shouldn't be so confused about this," Dora had said to him. "We both know how babies are made, after all. And we know protection can fail. Nothing is a hundred percent."

Though Remus felt like he had to point out that it wasn't that they were confused about how the baby came to be, they were extremely aware of that, thank you very much, but it was more that they were confused about what to do. Like it had been very plainly put before, neither of them knew how to care for a baby - he had never looked after Harry, just held him and played with him. And how were they supposed to raise a baby in a world where they were in hiding and were constantly going to have to stay on the alert? He was sure it was possible; they weren't exactly the first people in the world that had to go through this. But how were they supposed to do it?

A baby.

A baby. A baby. A baby.

No matter how many times they said it they couldn't get rid of that surreal feeling. This. This couldn't be right. Couldn't be normal. Him? Them? Having a baby? No. Just, no. It was such a strange thought. He couldn't wrap his head around it.

A baby.

A small human. A tiny thing that probably wasn't even fully formed yet. Remus wasn't sure. A baby's development in the womb wasn't exactly something he had read much into. James had, when Lily was pregnant and had proceeded to quote said books at every opportunity until Lily kept a silencing charm on him for three straight days just to shut him up. In her defence, she had been heavily pregnant at that point and she had warned him. James just hadn't listened. Which was typical.

Either way, he was unsure what the baby even looked like right now. She was only a few weeks as far as they both determined and from what Andromeda told them of the spell, she had cast on her daughter's stomach. What did that mean? Was it even person shaped? A blob? Limbs? Remus didn't know. Did he want to know? Would that be weird?

A baby.

Just wow. A whole other life that they would be responsible for. When they couldn't even guarantee their own. Which was an extremely depressing thought but it was the grim truth.

Too grim even for Remis to focus on now. That would just make him spiral into a depression and there just wasn't any time for that. It wouldn't be useful at all. Not that low feelings ever took into account when it would be okay to have them but still. Remus liked to pretend they did.

Not the best of coping mechanisms but je made it work. Kind of.

What would the baby even be like? Would it be like him like Dora said? Or her? A boy or a girl? Big or small? So many questions and absolutely no way of getting answers right now. Or even find out if there was a way to get those answers. Dora was at work, you see.

Neither of them had been sure about what she should do in this situation. One, Death Eaters were obviously running the place which wasn't safe at all but two, the Aurors very obviously weren't doing their duties because their point was to stop the Death Eaters. Which they couldn't do now.

Eventually Dora decided that it was low risk for her to go in.

"We aren't doing any work, the Death Eaters are currently not bothering us and I don't want to draw attention to us by staying away," she had explained. "There's no point in putting even bigger targets on our back right now until we can figure out what we should be doing."

All very sound points, which Remus agreed with, though he did persuade her to wear one of Fred and George's shielding clothes - they had branched out into shirts and the like now. Not that he doubted her abilities at all (he had to reassure her of that several times) but this was to give her an edge if anyone in the office decided to surprise her from behind.

She had agreed, though not before fondly telling him that he was overprotective. At least she could see the sense in it. It eased his mind a bit. Not by a lot but by a tiny bit and he would take what he would get these days.

Which left him alone in the house. With only his own thoughts for company. Because there was no way that that wouldn't go well.

At least his sarcasm hadn't left him. Now that would have been worrying.

Speaking of his thoughts, one just struck him. Abilities. Never mind physical traits that the baby could inherit what about abilities? Sure, from Dora it could inherit her Metamorphmagus abilities but what about from him? Could the lycanthropy curse be inherited? That was something he definitely didn't want. He didn't even know if it was possible. Was it possible?

Remus could feel himself start to panic so he took several deep breaths to calm himself down.

He had to calm down or else he wouldn't be able to think this through and he needed to think this through.

Werewolf. Him. Yes. He was a werewolf. More deep breaths. Right. Let's try that again. He was a werewolf. You became one through a bite. It was a curse that went through your blood and change the very makeup of your cells and how they interacted with each other. And gave them a trigger. The moon.

Right. He already knew all that. Had done for years. Back to that being carried through your blood. Did that mean that he could give his unborn child the curse? Did it run through his very DNA? DNA that he would share with this child? What would that even mean? Could an unborn child even survive such a thing? A new-born? An infant? If babies were bitten, they, unfortunately, usually just died. A werewolf bite was very strong and babies were very fragile.

Remus didn't think he had ever heard of a case of a baby surviving a bite to their first full moon.

But his child hadn't been bitten. It just had a part of him. He was a werewolf.

Oh, what had he done?