Sirius woke Amanda the next morning with a kiss. She groaned. There seemed to be more sunlight than usual leaking in between the gap in the dark curtains. She rolled over, wanting to know what time the clock said. It was late, after 9am already.

As she blinked herself more awake she realized Sirius was already dressed and sitting on top of covers looking like he'd been up for awhile.

"I turned off the alarm and fed the horses already. Thought I'd let you sleep in. You were up late."

She rubbed her eyes then smiled dozily at him. "I was worried?"

"About the kids?"

"Yeah, and Lily, and that darn house, and all the bodies in it, and what Coal’s going to do..." She trailed off with a sigh.

He nodded then leaned over and kissed the top of her chest, just below her collarbone. "Need a distraction?"

She laughed. "No..."

As he shrugged and started to turn away, she grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him back. "Yes," she said right before pulling him into a kiss. It was deep and passionate and it went on for some time.

Sirius’s hand started to wander beneath the bed sheets. He found Amanda’s bare thighs.

She pulled back from his kiss and glanced toward the door. It was open just a crack.

Sirius slid off the bed and closed it. Returning to her side, he asked, “Where were we?”

Amanda pushed herself up on to her elbows and raised her chin enticingly until he leaned down and met her lips with his. “About here,” she replied in a soft whisper and she kissed him again.

Her hands tugged his shirt up towards his head. Her fingers graced the faded scars which lined his muscular back.

They broke apart so she could tug his shirt the rest of the way off. As she threw it to the floor, Sirius pulled the duvet off her, revealing her laying there in her old oversized high school rock band t-shirt and a pair of panties. Her nipples made obvious indents in the loose faded black fabric.

She immediately yanked the covers back up. “It’s cold,” she gasped followed by a soft laugh.

“You just took my shirt off,” he objected.

As he arched his shoulders back in mock indignation, Amanda hungrily eyed every inch of his large, slightly hairy, not-quite as chiseled as it once had been chest. “Well you can always get in under here with me.” She stared him directly in the eyes and poked her tongue out between her teeth.

Sirius wasted no time in accepting the invitation.

As his cold hands tickled her thighs she smothered another gasp. Too loud and the kids would hear. At least they were old enough now to know better than to enter without knocking.

His unshaven chin tickled another part of her. Anything that had previously been on her mind immediately faded away. Her only thought became entirely fixated on what he was doing with his tongue. She lay her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes, just letting that feeling he was inducing in her swirl around and grow.

She was nearing the pinnacle of bliss when somewhere in the next room, a baby started crying. It threatened to tug her mind back to reality. She tried to ignore it. The baby was Gemma’s responsibility. She would help soon, in just a few more seconds. That was all she needed. Just a few more seconds.

Sirius stopped.

Amanda cursed inwardly.

He reached a hand up and pulled the covers back so she could see his green eyes peeking out from beneath the covers. “Do you wanna stop?” he whispered.

She shook her head, trying to hold on to that feeling. “No,” she replied breathlessly. She leaned her head back and with her feet, she tried to pull him closer towards her.

She heard the unzipping of his jeans and the next thing she knew, he was inside her.

Between Sirius’s gentle stroking fingers all over her skin, and his slow consistent thrusts, Amanda was soon back where she had been before the interruption.

At some point the baby stopped crying, attended to by its’ mother, but neither of them registered the change in sound. They were far too focused on the feeling and movement of one another.

Soon they lay together, side by side, exhausted and coated in a thin layer of sweat. They remained that way for almost a full minute of blissful silence.

Then there came a loud crash from somewhere downstairs on the other side of the house, likely the kitchen.

“We should probably go see what that is.” Sirius lay on his belly next to his wife, his butt bare naked, his shirt still off. He made no move to get up.

“Yeah,” Amanda agreed with a sigh.

A moment passed of neither one of them moving.

“It’s quiet now,” Sirius observed.

“Too quiet,” Amanda replied.

Sirius gave a laugh by puffing air through his nose.

Another moment later Amanda remarked, “I’ve been thinking.”

“What, while we were...”

“No, after that.” She laughed at the tone in his voice. It didn’t match the smile on his face or the twinkle in his eye, but she knew which was real and which was fake. “That, was a nice distraction. It did a bloody good job of clearing my mind.” She smiled back at him.

“Thinking about what then?”

“What if we used time travel?”

Sirius’s smile fell away immediately.

Amanda continued quickly before he could dismiss the option out of hand. She sat up and held up a hand. “The kids in that house, Lily, what happened at that facility with the mimics, all of it. What if we just went back and stopped the whole lot from happening.”

In a hushed voice Sirius replied, “Ignoring the fact that that is illegal, even here in the Greenstone Valley, it’s also extremely dangerous. You don’t know what side effects you might cause with a change that big. Saving lives with time travel is almost impossible to achieve, especially with spells.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“It doesn’t have to be a big change. Those cocoons in the house, we don’t know for sure what was inside them. We go back and make sure it’s something else that’s down there and no kids can get in, then maybe when we jump back the missing kids turn up somewhere else and everything was fine all along. Nothing really changes, as far as we know.”

“And Lily? That’s not a small change.”

Amanda hesitated. “No,...” She glanced down at the bedspread. Then she raised her eyes back up and met Sirius’s gaze. “But what if she wasn’t necro’d. What if she was just hurt and...”

“And all the people sacrificed in that facility?” Sirius asked. “What if it brings back something worse? Or... Nothing ever works out as you think with time travel.”

“I’m better at it now.”

“Are you? Enough to gamble all our lives on it? Lily’s included, and possibly the other kids as well.”

Amanda pursed her lips. “Alright. Not Lily, you’re right, that’s too big, but those kids in that house, that could be done, if we were careful.”

Sirius rubbed his face. He frowned but he did not argue.

“Let me put it to the others. See what Wolf thinks.”

Sirius’s shoulders relaxed at that suggestion. “You know what he’ll say.”

“Perhaps.”

Sirius nodded and sighed.

“Either way we should organise a meeting, again.”

Sirius nodded. “Come have some breakfast first.”

“I need to chat to Gemma too. She was drinking last night.”

Sirius paused mid-move to get off the bed. “What? Gemma was? I thought she just went out.”

Amanda bit her lip and shook her head.

“Hmm.”

Sirius didn’t say anything more while he pulled on pants but Amanda could guess at what he was thinking.

“And here we thought she always took after you,” she said, voicing what she suspected were his thoughts.

Upon hearing the forced lightheartedness in her tone, Sirius shook his head and took a seat back down on the bed. “Hey, you’ve been doing great lately, no late nights...” He paused and thought that through. “Not so many late nights... out.” He kissed her forehead and pulled some hair back from her eyes.

She smiled at him. She had been doing better. Even the hidden bottles he didn’t know about had been gathering dust in recent months. “It helps having you home.”

His expression fell with the knowledge that that was something that couldn’t last. He’d need to get back to his ship at some point. Then he’d be away for a few weeks, then back for a few weeks. She hated when he was gone but they couldn’t live off just the farm. He changed the subject slightly. “Do you want me to talk to her?”

Amanda shook her head. “I’ll do it.”

Another crash sounded from the kitchen, followed by the sounds of raised voices. Voices that were loud enough to prompt the baby to start crying again.

This time they got up.

Sirius put his t-shirt back on and went to see what all the din was about.

Amanda threw on some clothes and headed for the upstairs bathroom. Finding it occupied by Lily, she used the downstairs one instead.

When she got to the kitchen she found the place was pure chaos. Their youngest, fair-haired Sasha, who looked more like her grandma than either of her parents, was under the kitchen table attempting to uncurl what looked like a large python from around one of the legs of a kitchen chair.

Sirius was standing between Katrina and Salem, who were staring daggers at each other. The pair were the reason for the raised voices.

Salem tried to reach around his father to snatch the pan that Katrina was holding. “I need that pan. She’s getting in the way and she’s not even cooking food!”

“Why can’t you use the other pan?” Sirius asked calmly as he put an arm between Salem and Katrina.

“Because that’s the best pan. She doesn’t need it!”

“I do too!” Katrina yelled back. “I can’t just use any pan to mix this stuff. It has to be stainless steel. That’s our only stainless steel pan.”

“I was cooking here first!”

“You were not! Anyway I got the pan first.”

“Was too! You were just reading your book at the table until you saw me getting stuff out.”

“I was reading a recipe numbnuts!”

Beneath the kitchen table Sasha patted the python’s head comfortingly.

“Guys!” Sirius remarked but his voice was far too soft to make much of an impact.

“You’re the numbnuts!” Salem yelled across his dad’s arm at Katrina.

“Can’t you both use it, just wait a little?” Sirius asked.

“No! She’ll get it all contaminated with her weird shit!” Salem cried.

“I had it first,” Katrina replied.

“OI!” Amanda yelled loudly.

Everyone was immediately quiet.

“About time,” a sleepy-voiced Gemma remarked as she entered the kitchen behind her mother. She was carrying baby Kate. She lay Kate down in a bassinet in one corner of the room and then opened the fridge.

Amanda held out her hand to Katrina. “Give me the pan.”

Wrinkles appeared on Katrina’s forehead as she opened her mouth to object.

Before Katrina could get a word out, Amanda added a firm, “Now!”

Katrina handed it over with a sulky look. Behind her on the kitchen table, a handful of mixing bowls were filled to varying levels with various substances. There was a bright blue looking liquid in one, powdery green paste in another, one contained an unappealing lumpy brown concoction, and another a pale pink powder.

“What are you making?” Amanda asked her daughter.

“Makeup,” Katrina replied. She sucked momentarily on her bottom lip.

Amanda raised an eyebrow.

“Shapeshifting makeup,” Katrina admitted slowly. Then with dosing of pride and more speed she added, “You put it on your skin, do the makeup you want, let it dry, peel it off, put it in a container, it relaxes back into a cream, and then later when you want the same look you just put the cream on, it takes like 5 seconds and voila!”

Amanda turned to Salem. “And what were you cooking?”

“Pancakes,” he grumbled.

“Right.” She turned back to Katrina. “I’m pretty sure we have a dedicated sorcery pan in one of the cupboards downstairs somewhere.”

“But...”

“It’s non-reactive to most things. Now I’m going to make us all some pancakes but probably not with this pan.” She glanced sideways at Salem.

He shrugged. “I just didn’t want her messing up the food pans. Or the food bowls.” He scowled at the concoctions on the kitchen table.

“We can clean them.” Amanda turned to Katrina again. “Although there are bowls downstairs too. Maybe hold off on the sorcery until after everyone’s had breakfast yeah? Is that one of your adapted spells?”

Katrina took a seat. “Maybe just a little.”

“Go over the ratios again then. I don’t want a repeat of last time.”

Katrina rolled her eyes and nodded.

At the other end of the table Gemma finished off feeding Kate her bottle. She pulled her long red hair to the side and threw a cloth over her shoulder. As she lifted the baby up, it yawned, opening its’ mouth wide.

Salem peered over at the yawning infant. “It’s weird that she has those two teeth.”

Katrina looked up from her bowls. “Three weeks ago you thought all babies had teeth.”

“Yeah, well now I know that babies aren’t supposed to be born with teeth it’s weird. And once you see what their mouths look like. I don’t know, babies are weird,” Salem decided.

Gemma, gave her younger siblings a cursory narrow-eyed glance but was otherwise too tired to say much.

Amanda reached the other side of the stove, near where Sasha was sitting, still partially under the table, still trying to extract the python. She looked down at her youngest. “Sasha.”

“Yes.”

“Why is there a python under the table?”

“Um, well...”

“That’s Fred.” Bobby answered as he entered the kitchen. “That’s my fault. Sorry Sasha, I left the heat on. She probably came out here to cool down.”

“She likes the tiles,” Sasha replied and stroked the python some more. It slowly seemed to be uncurling itself from the chair leg.

“Use your ice, Sash,” Bobby told her.

But Sasha shook her head. “I don’t want to cool her down too much. She’ll come loose when she wants to.”

“How long has she been here? And where has she been sleeping?” Amanda asked, as she got started on pancakes. Sirius helpfully piled the last of the ingredients onto the bench.

“You named a female python Fred?” inquired Salem.

Sasha lifted her head up so just her light blue eyes were peering over the table. “She suited it.”

Bobby answered his mother’s questions. “She’s a rescue, and just few weeks. She’s been sleeping in the laundry closet,”

Amanda frowned and thought back over the last few weeks, suddenly very aware of the number of times Bobby had offered to do all the laundry.

“She’s not poisonous,” Sasha answered.

“I know,” Amanda replied. “But they do have a tendency to eat small animals you know. Like that barn cat you rescued last month.”

“And babies,” added Gemma between yawns.

“Not if you keep them well fed,” Sasha replied.

“What have you been feeding it?” Amanda asked.

“Venison,” came Bobby’s reply.

“It doesn’t really like it much though,” Sasha added.

Amanda gave Bobby a meaningful glance over the table.

“We’re just keeping it until my mate’s friend from Mercy can come pick it up. He’s got the proper enclosures and stuff. I’ll try find some rats or something live to feed it before then.”

Katrina screwed up her face in disgust at the mention of live food.

Sasha poked her face up over the table again and gave Bobby a sad look.

“I did say it was just temporary Sash. We don’t have a proper enclosure,” Bobby told her as he took a seat at the table between Katrina and Gemma.

“We could get one.”

“Not with the baby in the house,” Amanda answered and that was the end of that conversation.

Lily still hadn’t come down to breakfast even after one very large pile of pancakes had been quickly devoured. So Sirius took over making a second batch while Amanda went upstairs to check on her. The bathroom door was still shut when she got there.

“Lily, are you alright?” Amanda asked gently through the door.

“I’m fine,” Lily lied.