Chapter Text
“Apparently she called him a wazzock,” Sirius says, stumbling on the icy pitch of the hill. “He said he didn’t know what that meant.”
Remus huffs out a laugh through his nose; a little plume of silver in the cold air.
“Means he were being a daft ‘apeth,” he says. He steadies Sirius with a hand at his elbow, and adds: “Which he probably was.”
“I don’t think he’d know what that was either.”
“Pillock.”
“Ah.”
“She’ll come round,” Remus says, slipping his bare right hand into Sirius’s mittened left and swinging their arms gently between them. “They’ll be back on by January.”
The gentle, dependable rhythm of James and Lily’s on-again-off-again relationship has become something of a comfort to Sirius in the past year. Something about the inevitability of it all: how James will appear in the barn on a Monday, usually with a flustered Peter in tow, and spend an hour or two muttering hotly about Lily being impossible, and a drama queen, and how Sirius will know that Lily’s up on the fell saying the same thing to Remus about James. And then, by the following Monday, Sirius’s phone buzzing with a message from James letting him know that the two of them are going camping up at Helmsley, and can Sirius ask Hope if Lily can borrow the spare sleeping bag? The steadiness of it all has, Sirius thinks, proven itself the happiest background noise to his first year on the farm: a reliable little beat that ticks over amusingly and keeps them all in one another’s orbit.
“Any road,” Remus is saying, wiping his nose with the back of his other hand. The tip of it’s gone all pink with the cold. “I’m sure we’ll both get an earful tomorrow. You’ll have to fill me in on his side.”
“He said he’s not feeling Christmassy now, because of it all,” Sirius says. “He’s sulking.”
Remus chuckles. “Get a paper hat on him. Few drinks. He’ll be reet.”
They follow the track up the hillside, up onto the fell, and the dale behind them turns itself into a Christmas snowglobe: houses and lanes and farms all white and soft and faraway, and the whole valley so wonderfully quiet and still, the only sounds their own crunching footsteps and the creaking of the icy puddles beneath their boots.
“I do like Christmas Eve,” Sirius says, pulling in a happy breath of the frosty air. “It’s so exciting, isn’t it?”
“Suppose it is, yeah.”
“Thinking about all that food tomorrow. Mince pies. Christmas goose. And the music; the carols and everything. All that good stuff on telly.”
“What about presents?”
“Well,” Sirius says, sidestepping away from Remus to avoid a particularly slippery-looking puddle, their fingers still clasped together as he stretches their arms out between them, “you’ll have to wait and see. Maybe I didn’t get you anything.”
Remus tuts, and tugs Sirius gently back towards him. “Wazzock,” he says.
“Daft ‘apeth.”
They round the curve of the hillside, the track winding its way between the deep, powdery drifts banked up against the dry stone walls as they climb a stile into the next field. Sirius grins to himself as they pass a frozen-over trough.
“This was Snuffles’s field,” he says.
“Waste of bloody time, that.”
“I told you he wouldn’t be interested,” Sirius says. “It was your dad who insisted.”
It had been a grey morning in late September when Lyall had appeared at the door of their cottage and told Sirius, who was still in his pyjamas, that he ought to try putting Snuffles out on the fell with the ewes before the flock moved down into the valley for the winter.
“Why would we do that?” Sirius had asked, tugging on one of Remus’s jumpers and following Lyall outside into the blustery yard to find Snuffles and Cecil nosing an old tennis ball back and forth between them.
“Tupping,” said Lyall, and then: “He’s old enough now.”
Snuffles, rather predictably in Sirius’s opinion, had proven himself utterly useless.
“Maybe he’s gay,” Sirius had shrugged as he leant against the fence with Remus, watching Snuffles chewing contentedly on a mouthful of grass, appearing entirely oblivious to the gaggle of young ewes on the other side of the green field.
“Like father, like son?”
They’d kept him up on the fell for a week until Lyall gruffly agreed that he wasn’t “getting the job done,” and around the same time Cecil had taken it upon himself to wander off the farm in the opposite direction, disappearing off into the woods and turning up, a few days later, to watch as a still-very-virginal Snuffles was led unceremoniously back into the yard. And if Remus had been quietly distracted all week and all out of sorts until Cecil returned, Sirius didn’t mention it.
“Anyway,” Sirius says now, “at least he agreed there’d be no point trying again next season. I don’t think Cecil could bear it.”
The sky is a comforting, flat sort of grey today: a fluffy blanket pressing down on them and quieting the world further still, the occasional flurry drifting down to settle on the big, white fields. The track turns into a trail, and then a path, and then a half-path over the rolling fell, the ground littered with loose scree and little boulders iced with snow that they pick their way carefully over in their winter boots.
And then Sirius frowns, and stops, and says:
“What’s that?”
He’s looking at one of the boulders up ahead. It’s just a craggy bit of rock, tumbled down from further up the fell and now lodged haphazardly in the earth at the side of the path, and half-covered over by its own miniature snow drift.
“What’s what?”
“That,” Sirius says, nodding towards the rock. “There’s something moving there.”
“You sure?” Remus asks, and lets himself be led closer.
And Sirius is sure. Because, when they come upon the boulder and Sirius stoops to prod carefully at the clump of snow at its base, the snow moves again, and Remus says:
“Huh.”
“Oh my god,” Sirius breathes, nudging gingerly at the snow again. “What is it?”
And then he hears it. A funny, grunting little sound: quite an ugly thing, really, like the sound the pigs behind the barn make when they’re searching through the mud for bits of apple they’ve dropped.
Sirius tugs off a mitten.
“Is it…” he says, carefully brushing at the mound as a small, dark snout pokes its way to the surface, “is it a… piglet?”
The thing grunts again, and then — when Sirius makes to scoop a hand under it to free it from the drift — latches right onto the side of his thumb with sharp, pointy teeth.
“Ow!”
“That’s not a piglet,” Remus is saying, reaching to gently detach the animal from Sirius’s hand. It leaves two rows of little red indentations behind. “That,” Remus says, as he wraps his own hand around the thing and lifts it, snapping and snarling, into the air, “is a puppy.”
It’s a tiny thing: a bundle of snowy fur, barely bigger than two tennis balls. It could be black or brown or grey or any colour at all: Sirius can’t tell, because whatever parts of the dog aren’t covered in white are covered in a horrible, fetid-smelling mud. As if it might’ve found a fresh bit of dung somewhere, and had a good roll around in it.
“Horrible little thing,” Remus says, the puppy still growling and twisting itself in Remus’s hand as it searches for something else to sink its tiny teeth into.
“What’s a puppy doing all the way up here?”
“Maybe its mum’s around,” says Remus. He casts his eyes about the path, and then stands, the dog still writhing in his hand. “See if you can see owt.”
They search for almost an hour. They walk right up to the edge of the trail where it meets a stile to the next field, and then all the way around the perimeter of the field they’re already in. Sirius checks under every boulder and in the entrances to all the rabbit holes, digging the snow out with his bare hands and shining the torch from his phone down into the dens. Another flurry falls, and then another, and then the flurries turn heavy and thick, and Remus calls to Sirius over the wind:
“There’s nowt here.”
“Well, what shall we do with it?” Sirius asks, hurrying back over and pulling his hat lower over his ears before stuffing his now-frozen hands deep into the pockets of his coat. “We can’t just leave it here, can we?”
Remus is already tugging off his own scarf. “Nope,” he says, wrapping the puppy in the length of it and swaddling it until only its dirty little face is poking out from the wool. It grunts, and bares its tiny teeth. “Come on,” Remus says, gathering the bundle to his chest with one hand and offering his other back out to Sirius. “Let’s get it home.”
***
Hope looks up from the counter when they amble into the low-ceilinged kitchen, stamping wet boots on the mat and shaking the snow from their hair. There are carols playing quietly on the radio by the window; Hope is wearing dangly earrings shaped like little Brussels sprouts.
“What’s that?” she asks, stilling her knife from slicing carrots. Cecil, standing to Hope’s right and peering up hopefully at the chopping board, stamps one angry foot on the tiles. Snuffles, standing to her left, does the same.
“Puppy,” says Remus. He stuffs the bundled scarf into Sirius’s waiting hands as he takes off his coat, and says: “Found it.”
“How nice,” Hope says, wiping her hands on her apron and coming over to peer at the dog. It growls up at her from where Sirius is holding it in his arms like a baby. “Horrible little thing,” she says brightly, smiling down at it. “Are we keeping it?”
“Don’t put ideas into his head, mum,” Remus says darkly, motioning to Sirius. “Come on.”
They deposit the puppy in the wide, ceramic sink in the boot room off the kitchen. The scarf is ruined, entirely — all suspicious green-black sludge that makes Sirius’s eyes water, and little holes punched into the wool where the dog’s been chewing crossly at it.
“You stink,” says Remus.
“He can’t help it,” Sirius says, reaching to turn the tap on and holding a hand under the water until it’s a pleasant, lukewarm temperature. “He probably didn’t mean to roll in poo.”
“Smells worse than Cecil did when I pulled him out of that bin.”
“Looks a bit like Cecil, actually,” says Sirius as Remus carefully tips a cup of water over the dog’s fur, using his thumb to work the grime and the dung from the wiry hair on the top of its tiny head. “Doesn’t it?”
Remus hums. The dog bites him, and he swears gently at it.
“Sort of… Cecil, crossed with a Jack Russell, or something.”
At that, Remus’s hands still. The now-soapy puppy twists itself awkwardly around in his loose grip and starts gnawing at an old dish cloth that’s been left in the bottom of the sink.
“What?” Sirius asks.
There’s a noise from behind them. They turn — Remus rather slowly — and find Cecil hovering at the entrance to the boot room, scowling over at the pair of them.
And then Sirius watches as Remus closes his eyes, lets out a deep sigh, and says, in a resigned and thoroughly disappointed voice:
“Oh, Cecil.”