Previously in the Darklyverse: Death Eaters raided the Order's prison, but the Order won the battle. The Canadian Ministry agreed to drop the charges against the members of the Order if they agreed to return to Britain.

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February 10th, 1983: Remus Lupin

Interlude

At first, Remus thinks it's the deaths in the Order that Sirius is so torn up about. He can relate: he's torn up about them, too. They may not have lost Lily or Alice, for example, but the Order has been living like a family for years now, and it's hard to lose family—especially Tonks, who was inexcusably young to be murdered at Death Eaters' hands. So Remus feels like an idiot when he realizes which death has Sirius reeling—when Remus mentions how sorry he feels for Draco Malfoy, who's now an orphan, and Sirius finally, finally breaks down in tears.

"I know it's stupid," Sirius tells him after getting himself under control a few minutes later. They're sitting side by side at the kitchen table at Grimmauld Place for lack of anywhere else to go in Britain that they know is safe for them. The new interim Minister, Ogden, and the Wizengamot may have agreed to pardon everyone in the Order, but that doesn't make them welcome in Britain, not when they can't show their faces in wizarding society without attracting stares and whispers and even outright insults.

Sirius continues, "We were never close to begin with, and I was dead to her the moment my mum decided that the Blacks were done with me. Her husband murdered my best mate and the only two girls I ever loved, and she was loyal to him to the end, up to and including when he killed her himself. I've got no good reason to mourn her. I feel like a faker."

"She was still your family," Remus points out while he rubs Sirius's forearm in what he hopes is a soothing way, "and she risked everything to help us in the end, even if she didn't quite share all of our values."

"She shared enough of them to betray her husband—or try to, anyway. You know, before my duel with Malfoy when he said he'd killed her, I thought she'd sold us out to him? I thought she'd had them ambush us on purpose, and I thought it was Regulus setting up the Order when we were sixth years all over again, and I hated her for it. I hated her, and meanwhile, she'd already died for us."

Remus sighs. "You can't blame yourself for that, Padfoot. What were you supposed to think? None of us really trusted Narcissa—none of us but Andromeda, anyway."

They're quiet for a moment, listening to the clock tick and the leaky faucet drip. "I know it hurts right now," Remus finally says, "but we don't have to live our lives like the Death Eaters won. They didn't win, and all the people who would have continued to die—"

"Look, Remus, I know you're trying to help, but that's easy to say when—"

"We could adopt him."

Sirius freezes. When he speaks, his voice is raspy. "We could what?"

"Adopt Draco Malfoy. Lily says that the Ministry hasn't yet sorted out what to do with him. Malfoy dropped him off with Viola Nott before he and her husband raided us yesterday, but Draco can't stay there much longer; Viola's almost certainly going to Azkaban for her involvement by proxy in the Death Eaters. And—well—we talked about wanting kids, didn't we?"

"Yeah, someday, after we got married. I dunno about you, but the last thing I want right now is a wedding—no offense."

Remus smiles wryly. "None taken. I feel the same way; it's not the right time." He pauses, then adds, "But that doesn't mean we can't do things out of order. Draco needs a home, and we have one to give him now that we're back in Britain and legally in the clear. It could be—I dunno—your way to honor Narcissa or something, make sure her son is raised right."

Sirius doesn't answer right away, but he's not immediately shooting the idea down, so Remus takes that as a good sign. Finally, he says, "Malfoy and Narcissa probably have already started drilling their anti-Muggle crap into his head. We might have a lot of damage to undo to get him to bond with one dad who's an excommunicated blood traitor and another who's a werewolf."

Shrugging, Remus replies, "He's two years old, Sirius. He's young enough that he won't even remember the Malfoys, let alone what they might have tried to teach him, as he grows up."

Sirius bites his lip. "He's the same age as Harry and Ron and Neville, isn't he?"

"Yeah, he is. It could be really good for him to have some friends his own age, especially since he's just lost both his parents. If we adopt him, we can give him that—make sure to schedule lots of playdates. It'll give us a reason to keep in touch with Lily and Alice, too."

"I'm sure Lily and Alice aren't going anywhere. For one thing, the whole Order is still living in this house until everybody can get jobs again and make other arrangements," Sirius points out.

"Yeah, but that's not permanent, is it? They'll move out soon, and—"

"And having a kid is very permanent," Sirius reminds him. "Are you sure we're ready for that? You were pretty adamant before that we weren't ready to get married, and marriage can be undone—kids can't."

"We don't have to commit right away," Remus argues. "We could offer to foster him for a while and see how it goes? Look into the adoption process later if we decide we can handle it?"

Sirius gives him a long look. "I doubt that very many good families would be willing to foster, let alone adopt, a child of the Malfoys."

"We'll make sure his mind isn't poisoned," Remus encourages him.

Sirius's lips twitch. "I'm not talking my way out of this one, am I?"

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So they take Draco in. Some Ministry witch delivers him to the front hall of Grimmauld Place the next day, after they have time to tear down most of the enchantments making the house impenetrable. Draco is tiny and blonde and scowling when Remus crouches down to his level and says evenly, "Hello, Draco. My name is Remus, and this is my friend Sirius—"

"Moony, us being gay isn't something you have to shelter him from," says Sirius with a roll of his eyes. "It's not like it's incest or something."

Remus rolls his eyes right back. "Fine—this is my boyfriend, Sirius. You're going to be staying with us for…"

He falters and glances back up at Sirius. They hadn't exactly settled on a timeframe for how long to keep Draco before deciding whether to move forward with an adoption.

Sirius doesn't offer up anything helpful, so Remus repeats more firmly, "Well, you're going to be staying with us, anyway. There are a lot of people staying at our house for the next few days, including a few boys and a girl around your age, but they'll clear out of here soon enough, and then it'll just be the three of us and our house-elf, Kreacher."

"Where's Mummy and Daddy?" Draco pouts. He folds his arms and stares Remus down like he already mistrusts him, and why shouldn't he? He's been uprooted from everything he knows and thrust in with strangers; he's got no reason yet to feel safe here.

Remus hopes they can change that. He really, really hopes that they can make this Draco's home.

Or—he hopes they can make someplace Draco's home, since Sirius is positively gunning to move out of Grimmauld Place as soon as they can justify the expense. The current plan is for Remus, who still can't really work with the anti-werewolf legislation on the books, to stay at home with Draco while Sirius goes out and works—somewhere. He's talked a few times in the last couple of days about pursuing a job as a Hit Wizard, like he'd intended to do before everything went to hell and he had to go into hiding, but Remus can't imagine that the Ministry is very pleased with anybody in the Order right now, even if they did rescue the wizarding world from the Death Eaters' clutches.

For one thing, they haven't really made a public statement. They've relied on secondhand reporting and hearsay to circulate the news that Malfoy's people are dead because of them, and there are still plenty of people out there, apparently, who don't believe that those people were Death Eaters in the first place. Remus imagines it's going to take a long time for trust to build again—for anything to get back close to normal. Hogwarts, for one thing, is apparently totally locked down until Easter; McGonagall doesn't even have any way of letting Vicky know that she's out of hiding and the castle is safe to reopen.

They end up doing an interview with the Prophet a few days later. Lily arranges the whole thing—quite grudgingly, Remus notices, because she still doesn't trust them after all the reporting they've done that's been biased in Malfoy's favor and against the Order's for months if not years now. There's no guarantee that the Prophet won't paint the Order in an awful light in this feature, of course. Then again, with Malfoy's people all dead—and the Ministry has confirmed that they are all dead—and Ogden running the Ministry for now, there's no reason for the Prophet to skew in the Death Eaters' favor anymore.

It's not until a week after the interview hits the papers that Remus really feels safe to leave the house, even just to go grocery shopping and look into nearby properties for sale in the Muggle world. He attracts a lot of stares as he walks down the lane at Diagon Alley, but he holds tight to Draco's little hand and keeps his chin up. He's done nothing wrong, he reminds himself. Everything they did—everything they became—was to save the world, and save it they have.

xx

It's maybe a month before Draco really starts to warm up to Remus and Sirius. He still asks about his parents a lot, and they haven't quite figured out what to tell him about them. They don't want him to grow up knowing nothing and then be in for a shock when he goes to Hogwarts and surely finds out from History of Magic who his real parents were, but not quite three years old is definitely too young to talk to him about war and murder. He seems to be happy in the little two-bedroom house they buy for themselves, though, and makes fast friends with Neville, Harry, and Ron.

Even in Draco's short lifespan, it's clear that Malfoy and Narcissa did their fair share of damage to his personality. He seems like a proud little kid—always complains when Remus and Sirius ask him to share his toys with the other kids or to put them down to come to meals or go to bed. Remus also doesn't fail to notice the way Draco treats Ginny, whom he seems to have decided he doesn't like on the basis that she's too little and too stupid to play with him.

It makes Sirius impatient, so Remus tries to take it into his own hands as much as possible. After one particularly harrowing playdate, Remus sits Draco down in the nursery after they get back from the Weasleys' house and says, "Listen, Draco, there's something we need to talk about."

Draco looks down, so Remus gently tilts his chin up and says, "Hey. Can you look at me when I'm talking to you?"

The kid does so.

"That's great, sweetie, thanks. Now, listen to me, okay? You grew up a Malfoy, and that means you learned to expect certain things at home, but you're me and Sirius's responsibility now, and that means we're going to have to teach you to do things a little differently. We don't hit people, and we don't insult them, and we don't laugh at them. Do you understand?"

Draco just pouts. "You're not my family."

It stings, even though it's true. "Not yet, but I hope I will be someday. In the meantime, I need you to trust us, okay? I need you to trust that we want what's best for you, even when what's best for you isn't the same thing as what you want or think that you deserve. I know you might not understand that now, but I hope you'll understand it someday."

Draco crosses his arms. Remus gives a long look to this child they're trying so hard to save and adds, "Draco, I love you, and so does Sirius. I know you don't know us very well yet, but I hope that someday we can… we can be a real family, like you and your mum and dad used to be."

Draco hesitates. "Are they coming back?"

There it is—the question Remus has been dreading. "No," he says carefully. "I'm sure they loved you very much, but no, they're never coming back. We're all each other's got now, us and Sirius."

He wants it to be enough—hopes it'll someday be enough.

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When he proposes to Sirius, it's nothing fancy. Remus hasn't got rings, for one thing, and he didn't plan any kind of elaborate buildup to it. They're just lying in bed one night, Draco snuggled between the two of them, when Remus nestles in closer with his head on Sirius's shoulder and says, "Marry me."

Sirius's pause drags on long enough that Remus is sure he's composing a long list of reasons they can't do it—but then Sirius says, "Okay," his voice breaking, and Remus has everything he ever needed right here in this room.

END OF BOOK FIVE

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A/N: Just the epilogue left!