Chapter 7: Grandparents Time

Arcturus and the others kids were already out, a few feet ahead of Sirius' group. They'd most likely decided to walk a bit further away, not to encumber the way as they waited for the others, but right now something had caught their attention. Arcturus had his back turned, looking at something Sirius couldn't see through his – gaggle of, damn it, Smith! – children. The kids themselves remained behind their great-grandfather, though Lamia and Nashira had taken a step outside of their queue to stand on both sides of Arcturus, and Marianne was holding back Procyon's curious attempts at joining them.

Sirius didn't like it. It sounded too much like an unexpected meeting was happening, and Arcturus had no way to send whoever it was away as he dealt with the children. Considering what his grandfather thought of most people's right to interrupt him, it meant either a Lord Arcturus actually respected – not that many – or family.

Sirius didn't want to deal with family – ever – right now.

Well.

He looked at the children behind Arcturus, at those around him, and had to reevaluate.

Just like Andromeda and Nymphadora were alright, there was no reason for him to think that he didn't want to deal with family in general now that the kids were here. In fact, if he thought about it... With eighteen positive – he thought, for now, and definitely hoped, too – additions, well. The Black family might have just reached an uncomfortable position on the brink of each side, in terms of numbers.

Bellatrix wouldn't like it, that was for certain.

Mother would probably try to get her hands on the children, to "raise them right", with the excuse that Sirius was irresponsible – not true – inexperienced with taking care of children in such a big number – true – and had a demanding and dangerous job – true. Of course, as her oldest son had run away from home at sixteen and the DMLE had ruled it legitimate, her word wouldn't mean much.

Sirius' group had no choice but to move out of the way as two ministry employees got there to take a lift. With an apprehensive look and a warning to stay with the others, Sirius led the children to their great-grandfather and whatever was happening over there.

They were met with the sight of Pollux and Irma Black standing regaly in the Atrium, the surprise on their faces barely visible.

Oh joy. It was apparently Grandparents Time, and so far Sirius had seen the three he didn't really want to talk to, but not the one he actually liked. Melania was a Macmillan by birth – she still counted as a member of the House of Macmillan, just like Narcissa and Bellatrix were still of the House of Black despite their marriages – and while she had the manners and the pride to go with it, she held none of the blood beliefs inherent to most Houses with a slytherin dominant.

It wasn't that Sirius hated Arcturus, Pollux or Irma – well, Pollux was more vocal about some things Sirius hated hearing about – but he'd never managed to feel at ease with them. There had always been tension, expectations to be met both in skills and attitude, and Sirius didn't think he could get enough positive moments out of an encounter with any of them to counterbalance the bad ones.

What the hell were they doing here? Unlike Arcturus who occasionally came to the Ministry for Wizengamot business, Pollux wasn't Lord of the House of Black. How had this all happened the only day the wizard had an appointment here?

His grandmother was the first to look at him – and the new children he was bringing with him, on top of the ones behind Arcturus – while her husband finished his sentence.

"...remain silent on something like this, Arcturus. You may be our House's Lord, but that doesn't give you the right to hide family from us!"

Before Arcturus could answer, Irma put her hand on Pollux's arm and the seventy-one-year-old wizard turned away to look at his wife, who directed him with a look to their wayward grandson.

A pregnant pause. Pollux most likely had to decide if he should better ignore his daughter's disowned son, or acknowledge his lord's second heir. Considering it seemed obvious enough that Sirius had something to do with the situation – Almaric and Antares were trying to push through from behind him, and one of them looked just like him at that age, and, well, Lamia and Nashira – and that Arcturus himself was here, Pollux seemed to come to the conclusion that for once, he'd acknowledge his grandson.

Sirius knew for a fact that his grandmother would have, at the very least, greeted him politely had her husband not been present. Irma was from the Crabbe family – not a noble house, not one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, but still a pureblooded family with a slytherin dominant – and she'd long learned to keep what she thought on certain matters discreet. Sirius wouldn't hazard a guess that she entirely disagreed with her daughter on the matter of his disownment, but he did know that she was a bit cross with his mother all the same.

"Sirius. Of course you are involved in whatever this is."

Said involved party let out a cold laugh, and stared back at his other grandfather.

"Of course I am. And as far as you are concerned, Lord Black hasn't hidden anything from you. This, in fact, is a recent development."

Pollux squinted slightly, his dark eyes leaving his grandson to once again rove over the Black children Arcturus and Sirius were escorting. No doubt about that, he thought, they were Blacks, all of them. Many had the eyes or the hair, looked much like Sirius – like Orion before him, enough like Arcturus at the same age, too – or even like his granddaughter Bellatrix, he noticed. Some weren't quite as distinctly Black as most of the family – hard to top Sirius on that point, anyway, for all his lackings in other areas – and could have gone unidentified in another crowd, but the fact that all the others were there... Well. It put into light even the slightest bit of resemblance.

Take the blond boy trying to hide behind Arcturus. He looked more like a Rowle or even a Malfoy than a Black, but the way his hair fell on his shoulders was so distinctly Sirius that Pollux would have guessed he was his son, had the child been younger. As it was, Pollux knew for a fact that his grandson was known to leave broken hearts behind him specifically because he didn't take the time to notice anyone at all.

That, and Sirius was much too young.

Which left a big question. Those Black children, who had sired them? If they weren't lying – if nothing had been hidden from the rest of the family – this could be the result of a filiation research.

His son, Alphard, had been uninterested in romance, but certainly not in sexual activities. This could, potentially, be the result of his many nights spent in various beds, though Alphard had assured his father he was always careful, since he didn't wish to be "stuck" with any witch. Though the baby in Sirius' arms looked too young to be Alphard's, who'd died almost two years ago – the baby, in fact, was the only child who could possibly be Sirius'. Maybe the young man had gotten himself a scion, and as he'd gone to officialize their familial link to the Ministry they'd done a magical filiation check-up? Merlin knew the Black family hadn't had a reason to check their blood descendants since Regulus' birth, and all the children here looked younger – if barely – than him.

Orion was much too proper and dedicated to his family for such a thing, and Walburga would have found out and started murdering people had it happened on his part.

Cygnus... Pollux' youngest son might have, maybe, fathered two or three of those children out of wedlock, but certainly not all of them. His marriage with Druella Rosier was more of a friendship than true passion, so a passing fancy could have led him astray and Druella might even have accepted it.

There were a few more possibilities amongst the more distant relatives, but all of them belonged to others Houses, and therefore their children wouldn't be under Arcturus' care – the Prewetts with Lucretia, a branch of the Longbottoms with Callidora, a branch of the Crouchs with Charis, the Potters with Dorea, and let's not talk about Cedrella who'd gotten herself disowned and already had three Weasley sons.

Alphard still seemed the most likely culprit – if not for that baby, and Pollux had already considered the possibility that Sirius was the father for that one – if only because there were eighteen children, and it seemed unlikely that the three middle-aged Black men of the family had all gone and done their part.

In which case, these would be Pollux' grandchildren. He wasn't going to let a blood traitor...

Said blood traitor had something more to say on the matter, apparently, because Sirius blocked his grandfather's line of view.

"Magical accident. They are all mine, somehow. Congrats, you're great-grandparents."

Pollux felt his wife tense by his side, as if waiting for – apprehending something.

Sirius, of course, didn't disappoint.

"Again."

Pollux gritted his teeth, but said nothing.

Acknowledging Sirius' defiance, the facts of his words, would mean accepting that Andromeda's little mistake was truly his great-granddaughter, and that would not happen. If he said something against Sirius' assertion, claimed that he had no other grandchild... Well. For all that his grandson kept disappointing him – at least as to his choices and loyalties, if definitely not for anything else – Pollux knew the young man well enough.

It would only lead to an unpleasant one-sided conversation of Sirius tearing into their beliefs with sharpened teeth. One more thing Pollux couldn't actually begrudge the boy: in Gryffindor he may have been, but he'd still learned everything Slytherin could have taught him amongst the family.

So he kept quiet.

On the matter of Nymphadora Tonks – a muggle surname of the least nobility even amongst its kind, he was sure. Not on what had started this confrontation between Arcturus and him.

"They are all yours?"

"They are."

Pollux noticed Arcturus squinting at him – oh, they all knew the end goal, here, it was obvious, the children were the continuation of the main branch, they were the second heir's children, so one of them was the third heir and the others were as many spares. One of the girls who looked most like her father seemed to be the eldest, and the older boy of African descent was obviously the eldest boy – so either one of them, depending on whether or not the girl would argue to keep the name or not. Either way, all those children, they weren't only Pollux and Arcturus' great-grandchildren.

They were the future of the House of Black, after Orion, after Sirius – and provided that Arcturus didn't formally disown Sirius as his heir, but so far Pollux' cousin was being far too lenient with their grandson and it didn't seem likely to stop.

A look at where his wife stood had Pollux noticing that Irma had taken a step towards the children.

The older witch wasn't quite next to them, and she couldn't help but notice the way her grandson's eyes were riveted on her – not on her husband anymore, not on either of his grandfathers.

Irma Black, née Crabbe, was not the most intelligent of witches, and she knew it. Oh, she was certainly the best pick out of her brothers and sisters – Pollux didn't like being talked back to very often, but he also didn't like having to repeat himself – or a Black would never have married her. She had adequate magical power, a good hand in potions and herbology, and, more importantly perhaps, she'd learned to pick her battles and to contradict people without them noticing she was telling them they were wrong about something.

It worked well enough with Pollux and Walburga, but Arcturus and Sirius had always looked at her differently whenever she did that with her husband or her daughter. Like they had a sense of what she was doing, but they weren't sure if she was doing it on purpose. Andromeda had been the same, too, Irma thought, and perhaps she should take a moment to wonder about that, one day. About what it meant, that Arcturus – who stubbornly refrained from taking a side in the current events – Sirius – who stubbornly took a side on the opposite of the rest of their family – and Andromeda – who'd left without a word for a life no one had wanted for her – could look at her like that, like they suspected something but wouldn't say a word – in case they were wrong in their suspicions.

She'd thought that, before, and she hadn't done anything about it.

But, as her eyes went from faces to faces – so many children, all of them Blacks, all of them Sirius', but also descendants of the Crabbes, through herself, of the Macmillans through Melania, and so many, so many other families across the generations – Irma thought that perhaps, this time, it needed to be thought through.

Family was important, of course. Knowing who you were, where you came from – muggleborns had none of that, because they came from nowhere, and they couldn't go back there either, because they had no place amongst muggles, they were in between and that was dangerous – it meant you could do the most with your life, you could be the most efficient in getting where you wanted. It made sense, to Irma, not to mingle with lesser-blooded witches and wizards.

But at the same time – these children, behind Sirius and Arcturus. She could see their blood – so much Black, a little Crabbe and Macmillan, some Rowle, obviously, and Selwyn, too, and Patil, and others, great names in their past but also families she couldn't recognize with only their faces. Maybe they didn't have quite the same blood they all shared in the family – but weren't they still family?

Irma had no idea of what kind of accidents could magically gift you with a dozen and a half children, but it was very possible that some of those children were of mixed blood. And she really couldn't tell which ones were, and which ones weren't, except for those who did resemble their mothers enough that she could tell who they were – and that was, perhaps, five, six of them.

Andromeda's daughter, she remembered, was displaying metamorphmagus talents, and Irma had never seen her in person. All that because she was a halfblood – because her father was muggleborn.

Ted Tonks wasn't who she'd have chosen for her granddaughter, that was for certain. But Andromeda had made her choice, and her daughter – her daughter should be part of the family, but she wasn't, because Irma's son had said so, because Pollux had approved, because Arcturus hadn't said anything on the matter and allowed his cousin to take Irma's granddaughter out of the family.

It wasn't just Andromeda and her daughter, now. The children before her, too – the war with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his followers had truly started almost a decade ago, and now, now... Back then it hadn't been so bad, not saying anything, but perhaps now it was making it all worse.

Irma wanted to know her great-grandchildren.

Nymphadora, and Sirius' children.

Regardless of anything else. Blood was important, of that she was certain, but it wasn't the only thing that was so.

She didn't know how she was going to make Pollux accept that, yet.

Irma's eyes crossed paths with her grandson's, and she took a step back – next to her husband, again. She'd never said anything, before.

Here and now wasn't the right time to change that.

She needed to talk with Arcturus, first. Without Pollux there to breathe down her neck.

"Pollux. We have an appointment."

It wasn't a lie.

Irma saw her husband squint at her – and she returned his look without flinching. She wasn't lying, she wasn't challenging him, she was stating a fact – and if that fact took his attention off the children, well. They'd have time to talk about that. Later.

Pollux huffed, and gave one last look at his cousin and at their grandson.

"I'll come by the manor later in the week, make no mistake. We're not done talking about this, Lord Black."

Arcturus snorted. Trust Pollux to make his title sound like an insult.

"I suspect you won't be the only one. In fact, I think I shall organize a family reunion. After all, you never knew how to keep your mouth shut around the family."

The Black lord relished when his cousin glared at him.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Well, I'm not the one who told Grandmother Ursula about Lycoris' ladylove."

They had all known how well – that was, not at all – Ursula Black, née Flint, would take the news about Arcturus' sister and her preferences, and yet Pollux had had to run his gob and ruin the Christmas of 1921. In the end, Lycoris had left the country after graduation, to go on a world tour with Theresa Rosier, and hadn't come back until Grandmother Ursula had written to her herself – something insipid about Theresa Rosier being a girl of very good background and therefore it could be tolerated, but there hadn't been any more comments on the matter after that.

One of the kids behind Arcuturus snorted, and Pollux looked like he'd swallowed a lemon. Two minutes later, him and Irma had disappeared into a lift, and Arcturus exchanged a look with his grandson.

"We need to get to the manor before anyone else tries to get in our way."

"With our current luck, it would be Bellatrix."

Arcturus didn't argue with that.

The old wizard directed the children to the nearest chimney while his grandson kept an eye out for any kind of threat – Sirius was both, Arcturus guessed, hypervigilant because of his job, and not particularly willing to meet more of the family, even distantly related. A few steps, and he took the nearest floo to Black Manor. He needed to change the wards to accept the children, before Sirius could usher them in.

So he ended up alone in the manor – Melania had to be somewhere, but they hadn't crossed path as he went to the basement – as he did the necessary steps to let them all in, and that gave him some time to think back on Sirius' last words – and other, tangentially connected things.

Arcturus had suspicions about Bellatrix, and he didn't like where most of them were going. While he had some kind of sympathy for her cause, well. He particularly didn't appreciate the means employed – both because of morals, and because you couldn't be at the top of the food chain if you took out everyone under you. At some point, either the crowd would end up getting one better on you, or there would be no food chain left for you to be at the top of.

Bellatrix would know soon enough – again, Pollux, and even if not, word would soon reach all corners of the wizarding community.

Another reason Arcturus really didn't like the war happening out there was that, in the end, it would all end up in only one result: blood spilled on the streets and in their homes. People were dying on both sides, and outside of both sides, outside of battle and outside of justified circumstances. At least twenty purebloods had ended up in Azkaban over the last nine years because of this, thirty or forty were dead fighting for the dark lord, twenty more had been killed because they stood on the other side, thirty at least had died as collateral damage, and the oldest families were wasting their blood in this struggle for something which would ultimately change nothing.

Muggleborns would continue to be born – Arcturus' son, Orion, had a thing for genealogy, and he'd discreetly inquired in the descendants of some of the family's squibs. Capella Black, who'd been thrown out in the 1830's for her lack of magical powers, happened to have a muggleborn descendant who'd joined Hogwarts three years before Sirius, Laura Campbell. She'd gone to Slytherin, too. Arcturus wondered if his cousin Marius would one day have a descendant like that, too. If all muggleborns were distant relatives of squibs, and therefore of the oldest families – about eighty percents of squibs came from the purest families, he knew that too, and the twenty other percents came from old families all the same, though perhaps with a tad more mixed blood thrown in. He'd never heard of muggleborns or halfbloods having squib children.

Arcturus wasn't quite sure of what it all meant, of what it implied, but what was certain was that facts were facts – and you could interpret them in different ways, to support different theories, but in the end, they were still facts, and they belonged to only one truth.

Whether you knew that truth or not changed nothing to the facts.

So yes, Arcturus was distrustful of muggleborns – they knew nothing of the world they had no choice but to walk in, they thought they knew better than wizards who'd lived there for generations, and they could so easily endanger the whole wizarding population just because they still had ties to the other side. He also couldn't quite caution wizards and witches who took the risk of opening up about their common secrets to muggles for something as fickle of love. He didn't doubt that sometimes it ended well – but the risks that it may not brought terrible consequences.

But overall, Arcturus also knew that because muggles and muggleborns didn't know better, it didn't necessarily mean old families did. You could be stupid no matter your blood, he'd learned through the years. The other way around, too. Muggleborns could be smart, too – he just wasn't certain they were so quite as often as purebloods were, but that was more a matter of lack of exposure.

Without He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Arcturus Black wouldn't have needed to think about it.

Without Sirius and his happy accident, Arcturus Black wouldn't have needed to make plans about it quite so soon, either.