A/N:
people in the comments of 'Darling, I Might Be a Villain': sequel pls
me: here take tom and harry and their 56 stolen children named after various crimes
technically a sequel to 'Darling, I Might Be a Villain', which can be found on my profile, but you don't need to read that necessarily, it's just recommended!
this is for the love of my life, Sanya, who created each and every one of Harry and Tom's children with me with the sincere intention of turning Tom's hair grey before he hit thirty
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You're Adopted!
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Chapter 1: Stolen Baby
Harry had lived on Grimmauld Street for most of his life.
He had waddled around in animal onesies while the neighbourhood mothers ooo'd and ahhh'd over his messy-haired, bright-eyed toddler form. He had owned a lemonade stand or two, had drawn chalk figures on the pavement outside his house, and had wiped out repeatedly while learning how to ride a bike without training wheels.
However, that did not mean Harry had experienced a wholly normal childhood.
Harry had experienced a normal childhood in the sense that he had grown up loved, well-fed, and encouraged. He had been given all of the essentials that young boys needed to thrive in a modern world.
Things like an entire collection of Nerf guns used specifically for in-house, one-on-one battles and imaginary spy missions. Things like a child-sized model of a Bentley that he'd nearly run over Mrs. Figg's cat with. Things like an entirely too-realistic Halloween costume of the Babadook, the sight of which had scarred several of his classmates for months. Things like lamps in the shape of a human skull and wide bookshelves that bowed in the middle with the weight of all the gritty true crime novels they held. Things like—well, you get the picture.
For you see, this particular Harry Potter had been raised by Sirius Black, and that was the beginning and the end of everything.
Now, Number 12 Grimmauld Place was not Harry's house. It belonged to Sirius. It still belonged to Sirius, Harry was fairly sure, though he knew that his godfather would never bother with taking it back.
Grimmauld Place had become Harry's domain quickly and quietly. One day, Sirius had decided that Harry was old enough to live on his own. There was no discernible reasoning behind this decision, only Sirius' sudden intuition that yes, the little boy he had spent all of his thirties carefully rearing to adulthood was now, in fact, an adult.
Harry was twenty years old and dating Draco Malfoy when Sirius packed up everything and departed without fanfare.
Everyone else had been utterly baffled by this behaviour. First of all, why had Sirius moved out of his own house? Second of all, why had he taken everything with him, including all of the furniture?
Harry had no answers for them. What he did have were requests for people to take him furniture shopping because he could not make a final decision to save his life and his driving skills had not much improved since nearly killing a cat with his toy Bentley at the age of five.
Despite that, Harry hadn't been worried about living on his own. Sirius had been a loving, responsible parental figure for as long as Harry could remember. If Sirius thought he was ready, then he was ready. Even now, Harry was very certain that Sirius had taken all of the furniture to teach a very important life lesson that would someday make sense to him.
If anyone had bothered to ask Sirius why he had absconded with everything in the house that wasn't nailed down or Harry's, his answer would have been something along the lines of—
"I mean. It's my stuff."
So all of this sufficed to say that Harry was well-versed in the process of moving loads of furniture into an empty house.
Therefore, when Harry—twenty-four years old and freshly single (no thanks to Malfoy, that cheating no-good scummy bastard)—learned that his next-door neighbour, snobby old Hepzibah Smith, had passed on and left her house to a handsome young man by the name of Tom Riddle, Harry was prepared to offer some cheerful neighbourly aid.
Today was Hermione's turn for Harry-sitting. The task of Harry-sitting was a job she took very seriously. Sub-tasks of said job included: keeping Harry's fridge stocked with basic nutritional items, making sure Harry had water within arm's reach at all times, and gently reminding Harry when it was time for bed.
Harry had stated multiple times that he was not a child to be minded, which was true to a certain extent. When Harry was not fixated on tracking every movement of the supervillain known as Lord Voldemort, he was reasonably passable as a normal person.
"Hermione," whined Harry, rolling around so that the top half of his body was draped over the back of his couch. The couch that she had driven him to IKEA to pick out nearly three years ago. Frankly, she was surprised it had managed to survive this long.
"Yes?" Hermione asked snidely, dangling the remote in front of her.
"I'm not done with the Channel 4 news yet," he told her, pouting. "You can't turn it off! What if there are more photographs?"
"Then they will be posted on the website," Hermione said, unamused. "But you've been putting off dinner for three hours, Harry. You've got to eat something!"
"Sometimes they don't post them on the website," Harry grumbled. His arms folded over his chest, a displeased expression settling on his face.
Hermione braced herself for an argument, one that she would remorselessly end with dropping the remote for the telly into a cup of ice water if necessary, but then there was the lovely announcement of 'BREAKING NEWS' blaring from the telly, and she knew all hope was lost.
Harry's attention span was now the unfortunate prisoner of the latest and greatest Channel 4 news update.
Hermione set the remote aside and blew out a frustrated gust of air. "What is it now?"
According to Channel 4, Lord Voldemort and his associates had successfully robbed a train of some extremely valuable cargo. An important feature of this robbery appeared to be that the cargo train had contained two other compartments: one full of several thousand dollars worth of goose-down pillows, and another with several hundred gallons of paint in varying colours.
What followed was a very entertaining video, one likely taken by a civilian given how blurry the footage was, of grown men wearing skull masks and black capes fleeing a smoking train. All of the men were also covered in white feathers and neon pink splotches of paint.
Hermione sighed and sat down on the couch next to Harry. Harry's eyes were glued to the screen. He would not be moving away from the telly any time soon. Truly, Harry would not move from where he was sitting for anything less than Lord Voldemort himself knocking on his front door.
Forgotten was the scatter of sticky notes on the table. Forgotten was the pizza Hermione had left sitting in the microwave for the past three hours. Harry only had eyes for one man, and that man currently had a large pink handprint spread over his derriere while he sprinted headlong towards a non-descriptive black van.
This was going to take a while.
PRESENT DAY
Harry did not support crime. He was not a crime-supporter. That was, he did not strictly advocate for crime to happen. More often than not, he was simply a passive bystander to the many, many crimes committed by his husband—previously boyfriend, previously fiancée—Tom Marvolo Riddle. Which was fine, because Harry prided himself on knowing all of the sordid details that came with Tom's gallivanting about, stealing shiny things and toppling corrupt governments for fun.
'Crime bad' was one of the many thrilling disagreements that kept their marriage fun and exciting. If Harry truly wanted to win all of their arguments, he had more than enough dirt to put Tom in jail for life. Putting a ring on Tom was safer, saner, and more consensual. It also meant that Harry would get to keep half of everything if things went disappointingly south.
Now, given that Tom was of the 'crime good' opinion, Harry had often found himself making questionable decisions over the course of their relationship. Was it moral to ambush your boyfriend with Nerf gun darts after a long, hard day of committing crime? Maybe not. Was it fucking hilarious though? Hell yeah.
Tom gave as good as he got, which mostly consisted of tying Harry to one of their dining room chairs and threatening to dismember him. Usually those arguments started with Harry blindfolded in the sad, unable-to-wink way, and ended with Harry blindfolded in the sexy, bedroom activity way.
So everything was great. Harry was married to a supervillain who sometimes came home with stab wounds, sometimes came home with several thousand pounds in laundered cash.
On one particular Saturday, however, the two of them would be coming home with neither of those things.
It started when Tom had called him in a panic. Harry had recognized Tom's civilian number and picked up immediately, only to be greeted with Tom's frenzied plea for Harry to pack an emergency kit, an entire package of biscuits, and several stuffed animals before coming to a random address in West Sussex.
Harry had left work straight away and packed everything without question. He had arrived at said address, wishing he'd thought to ask if the situation would be dangerous, and knocked on the front door. Tom had opened the door, pale as a ghost, eyed the bundle of items in Harry's arms, and then frog-marched his husband through the house, up the stairs, and into a child's nursery.
Where there was a child. Because of course, a nursery was meant to contain a child. The baby in the crib could not have been more than two years old. Harry stared down at it.
"Did you kill its parents?" Harry demanded in a hiss.
"No," Tom hissed back. "Why would I do that? Why would I do that?"
"Because you're, I dunno, a criminal?"
"Then who would look after the child?" Tom said, pointing.
Harry didn't know what to make of that statement, so he asked, "Then where are the parents?"
"Obviously someone else killed the parents," Tom said scathingly. "I found the child locked away under the stairs." As Harry's brows rose, Tom continued, "There's brompheniramine in the cabinet downstairs. I think they must have put the baby to sleep so no one would harm it."
Harry sorely wanted to protest everything that had come out of Tom's mouth because there was nothing about this situation that was normal or not-suspicious in the slightest, but Tom looked so... worried... about the child sleeping in the baby bed that Harry couldn't help but feel a little bad. Even if Tom had done something highly illegal that rhymed with schmurder, he didn't want the baby to come to harm, and that was something.
"Okay," Harry said. "Are we taking the baby to the hospital?" People did that, right? They left babies at hospitals.
"Why? Is it hurt?" Tom narrowed his eyes at Harry, who rather felt the scrutiny was uncalled for. "Is there something wrong with it? Where's that first aid kit I told you to bring?" Tom stepped over to the crib and scooped the baby into his arms with a surprising amount of gentleness.
Now, Harry had never seen Tom around children before. He had certainly never seen Tom holding a baby before. Seeing Tom holding a baby while looking worried and mildly disheveled unlocked some hitherto unknown inner voice inside of Harry's brain that was now telling him, in no uncertain terms, 'husband sexy'.
"What—" Harry began at normal volume, only then Tom angrily shushed him, and Harry realized that there was one solution and one solution only for this unfortunately parentless child.
'Crime bad,' Harry thought solemnly. Then he said, in a low, low whisper so Tom wouldn't shush him again, "We'll take the baby home."
They took the baby home.
Well, not quite. Harry took the baby home while Tom scrubbed the house down and removed all evidence of their existence from the floors and the doorknobs.
Then Harry sat at home with a sleeping one (?) or two (?) year old wrapped in blankets on his lap while he waited for Tom to show up.
When Tom did come home, it was with a stab wound and a bag of cash. Harry did not yell because there was a small child sleeping on his lap, but he did glare in a way that conveyed that there would be no bedroom activities tonight, not in the least because they were now parents. Temporary parents. Maybe.
Tom glanced down at the baby they had stolen and said, "That must have been a lot of brompheniramine," before collapsing on the couch and shutting his eyes.
Harry normally would have gone over to check if Tom was alright and not bleeding to death on their expensive furniture, but right now there were more important things to worry about. Harry dipped his head to look at their new (temporary) child and whispered, "Your dad is an idiot, Stolen Baby."
"I can hear you," Tom complained. "And clearly you would be 'dad'. I am 'father'."
"That's not what you said last night."
Tom muttered something unintelligible and fumbled blindly at the side table, where one of Harry's many emergency first-aid kits was stored.
On Harry's lap, Stolen Baby started snoring. "So what did happen to the parents?" Harry asked quietly while Tom tended to his stab wound.
"Murdered," Tom said simply. Then his brows furrowed and he added, "If we hadn't taken the child, it would have been in danger, not only because it had been knocked out and left in a cupboard."
"So the parents were criminals?"
A pause. "One of them was." Tom winced, but whether it was from the alcohol he was applying or the words he was saying, was unclear.
Harry sighed. "We can keep Stolen here until we figure out what to do."
"Are you really going to call this child Stolen Baby?" Tom asked wearily.
"Unless you know the baby's real name, yes I am," Harry retorted. "If you name things, you get attached. Everyone knows that."
And that was that.
The next day, Tom swore up and down that he would find out the next of kin so they could drop Stolen off with its proper relatives. Harry took time off work for a 'family emergency' and spent the following week minding Stolen Baby both with and without Tom.
Stolen was a blonde-haired, cherub-faced little bugger with lungs larger and louder than all of London. Harry was feeling dangerously fond of the tiny tyke, even more so when Stolen actually started talking to them and took to shrieking "STOLEN!" over and over whenever they were in public.
Understandably, Tom did not enjoy that part of temporary parenthood as much as he did the rest.
Weeks turned into months. Harry bugged Tom less and less about finding Stolen's relatives and instead asked his friends to help out with the occasional bout of babysitting. According to Hermione, "Looking after Stolen is much easier than looking after Harry", whatever that was supposed to mean.
Before Harry knew it, a year had passed and Tom was planning a 'one-year anniversary birthday party' for their kidnapped-adopted firstborn child. There was something to be said for the fact that no one around them had questioned why the word 'anniversary' was involved with the words 'birthday party'.
Harry liked to think it was because they had really great friends, but maybe it was simply for the best. People typically did not question why two married men had a child that looked nothing like them, but people also did not expect said different-looking child to have been kidnapped from a crime scene.
Aside from that, two thoughts Harry kept coming back to were:
Stolen was turning three (?)
and
He and Tom should have taken their illegal child to the hospital instead of trusting the "doctors" that Tom had access to, so they could figure out if their child was actually turning three.
Harry could admit that he had been thinking of Stolen as 'theirs' since the very first day. He could also admit that Stolen calling him and Tom 'da' and 'pa' was absolutely heart-meltingly adorable.
So when Tom announced the night before Stolen's kidnapping anniversary that he had, truthfully, located Stolen's relatives over six months ago, Harry couldn't bring himself to be mad about it.
"Are they terrible people?" Harry asked. The two of them were lying in bed, side by side, utterly exhausted after a long day of running around in the park followed by a long evening of trying to wrangle Stolen into the bath.
Tom said, without hesitation, "I had Rodolphus tail them for a week. I know that they litter. I made sure to ask about that. They're litterers, Harry. They hate the environment."
"Great. So they're awful. No child for them."
The two of them lapsed into silence. Harry stared at the ceiling, thinking, then rolled over and flopped an arm across Tom's stomach. "What if there are still people who want revenge on Stolen's parents?"
"That's a very good point," Tom said. "A very good point."
"Really, we're doing them a favour. Keeping Stolen safe, keeping them safe..."
"I bought Stolen a Bentley," Tom blurted out.
"A toy one?" Harry asked, utterly confused.
"A... a real one. An adult one."
"Oh." Harry thought about that. "I bought Nerf guns."
"That's worse than a car," Tom said accusingly, sitting up. "I know you'll only use them to gang up on me."
That was the plan, but Harry wasn't going to fess up to it. "Should we get more?"
"Nerf guns?" Tom asked. "No."
"I meant children."
"More children?" Tom said in a distant tone. Then Tom laid back down, and so Harry let the words drift off into the night, let the idea settle over them both like a soft, well-worn blanket.
Minutes passed. Harry couldn't shake away his thoughts and the lack of response was getting to him, so he said, "Not right away, I mean. It doesn't have to be right away. Just... maybe in the future. If it happens."
"If it happens," Tom repeated. "If it happens, then it happens."
If it happened, then it happened. They were just two married men accidentally having... acquiring... children. As gay men sometimes, albeit not very often, tended to do.
"We should go to sleep," Harry decided. He sat up to switch off the lamp, then yawned and laid his head to rest on Tom's chest. "Busy day tomorrow. I also promised Stolen you'd wear the hat with the floppy dog ears, so you have to do that."
"You're insane if you think I'm going to wear that thing."
"You already told Stolen it's their birthday. And I already told Stolen that having a birthday means they can have almost anything they want. Maybe I'm spoiling them, but at least I'm not lying."
"I clearly informed everyone that this was an anniversary birthday. Very different from a regular birthday."
"Then you better tell them tomorrow," Harry said sleepily. "Because they were looking forward to it." Ever since Stolen had rolled into their lives, Harry's repertoire of dirty tricks had expanded to include child-related tactics. Tom was a sucker for declarations of love from their darling little Stolen Baby.
Tom grunted, which Harry took to mean yes, he would wear the doggy hat, and then they went to bed.