The siren’s call of cake was a strong one: impossible, in Sirius’s estimation, for a growing boy of any age to resist. He would have gone to wish little Fred and George a happy day regardless of the presence of sweets, but he might not have dragged Remus along.

Oh, who was he kidding? Yes, he would have.

Either way, they’d Floo’d their way in with a handful of presents (the ideas for which Sirius had mostly stolen from things James was already talking about getting Harry for his fiuture birthdays, toddlers not being anything like his forte when it came to children,) and a cheerfully yelled “hallo!” rather than a request for permission to enter. Molly was expecting company, after all- she had to be, she’d mentioned cake to Sirius Black- and the Burrow’s wards recognized them both as friendly.

None of the Weasleys were in the kitchen, which was mildly surprising: Sirius wasn’t sure when he’d last come over and not found at least one redhead puttering around in here. Still, they’d made enough noise Flooing in that he only had a minute to wonder where everyone had gotten to before Bill poked his head in through the door and grinned at them. “Mum!” the boy yelled, “Remus and Sirius are here!”

Remus grinned, waving a hello to Bill. “Looking good.” Because if he only did one thing today, it would be to reinforce the benefit of long hair (and perhaps even man buns). “Where are the others? Or more importantly, where is the cake?” On his good days, it didn’t take much to convince him to come over to the Burrow. Remus knew he would always be fed well. However, cake was a great motivator.

Somehow Molly always wound up having to wash the twins; this time it was flour they’d spilled while she was working on Sirius’ cake. Bloody menaces. “They know where everything is!” Molly yelled back, before amending the statement, “Don’t touch the cakes until I say so, Sirius!” She wouldn’t have any cake left for the twins if they dug into it without her there to supervise.

Sirius let out a very exaggerated, very loud gasp at that. “I would never!” he yelled back, though he winked at Bill as he said it. Then, quieter, to the boy, “Where are they? I want to poke mine.”

Bill laughed and shook his head, and Sirius wrinkled his nose and glanced at Remus. “Want to help me look?”

“You’re a menace. Isn’t he, Bill?” Bill cautiously nodded and then ran out the back door in search of Charlie. There were lots of kids under foot today. “And if I find them, I’m drawing an age line around the lot.” Remus beamed and walked through the kitchen toward the long table in search of cake. Percy was seated at the table quite seriously focused on a book.

When the twins were finally clean (mostly, anyway), Molly got them dressed and ushered them back down to the kitchen with the other kids who were apparently scattered all over the place. She ran into Remus first and pulled him into a side-hug before waving them both over. “I didn’t have as much time as I had hoped to make your cake,” she said to Sirius before she wrapped her arms around him. There was icing and flour in her hair though she hadn’t noticed, “but I hope you like it. Just don’t complain that the twins have larger ones.” She gave him a hard look.

“I would never,” Sirius gasped as he returned the hug, lingering a little just because he knew Molly would indulge him. At the same time, he glared over her shoulder at Remus before the werewolf could contradict him. “You made me a cake, I'm not going to complain about it. Honestly. Thank you.”

Remus smiled as the two embraced. This was exactly the sort of reprieve they needed from everything else. “Cake is cake, doesn’t so much matter the size. And a Molly Weasley cake? Well, that’s something.” Percy looked up from his book and Remus couldn’t help but gently ruffle his hair. He made a note to bring Percy a few new books next time. “Full nest and all.”

Molly then had to make a second pass to hug Remus again and did her best not to start tearing up, though for how long that would last was up in the air at any given moment these days. “Alright then, let’s get started.” She called out the back door for her eldest two and magicked Sirius’ cake to the center of the table. “We’re just singing for Sirius, yeah?” she said as they all gathered around and the candles were lit by her wand. Fred and George still sang happy birthday to themselves (and Gideon and Fabian because all twins were born on the same day as Fred and George).

The constellation cake was enough to make a lump form in Sirius’s throat. He really was a remarkably easy touch when it came to visible displays of affection like that; it was clear that Molly had worked hard on the cake, and it was beautiful, and that mattered. He covered it as best he could, playing conductor while the boys sang to him (and to themselves.)

When the song was done Molly glanced around and her heart nearly dropped into her feet. “Where’s Ron?”

Sirius paused in his cutting of the cake- he was going to give the boys very, very big slices if left to his own devices, even if they did have their own cake coming later during the rest of the Weasley family’s celebration- to glance around. He ducked to look under the table, and then stood up. “All right, it’s a Ron-hunt. He’s one, he can’t be far.”

“Well, he is one now. And if he’s anything like Harry…” Remus shook his head. There was something to be said about the determination of infants. It was absolutely mind boggling how far they could wobble off to.

Then from outside, there was a terrible wail. Remus wasn’t sure if it was human or gnome.

“Merlin’s bloody-” Molly didn’t bother finishing, her mind racing through all sorts of terrible possibilities as she ran through the backdoor. She spotted the red hair of Ron in the garden. At her approach a gnome scurried off to her left but she found one standing directly in front of her son screaming into his face while Ron cried and fell back on his bottom in the dirt. “Back off!” she yelled, flicking her wand and not even watching as the gnome went flying over the fence. “Are you alright, love?” Molly cooed and snuggled him to her chest.

“And I’m supposed to have another one,” she said to no one in particular. “How in the hell am I going to keep track?”

Sirius had followed Molly to the back door and paused there when she spotted Ron, but he was close enough to hear the question. “We ought to make her a map,” he said lightly to Remus. “Could make it a mother’s day present.”

“Wonder if garden gnome wrestling counts as mortal peril?” Remus said, bumping Sirius’s shoulder as he watched Molly try to comfort Ron. “At the very least, I can hang around later for de-gnoming. And I haven’t a clue how you do it. I honestly just assumed that all mothers had some super powers that let them know exactly where their children were at all times.”

Molly brushed the muck off the bottom of Ron’s trousers before looking at Remus. “It’s like that sometimes, but I think my lot has managed to circumvent the natural laws of motherhood.” When she set Ron back on the ground he tottered off toward the backdoor. “You don’t need to stay late; I know you want to go celebrate Sirius’ birthday in a little more grown-up atmosphere than this,” she waved around the yard before following the kids back inside.

“I think it depends on the garden gnome,” Sirius suggested as they went back over to the cake, where Fred and George had already stuck their fingers in the cake thanks to the absence of adult supervision for all of thirty seconds. “We could come back over for degnoming later this week, maybe?”

As he handed off a much-poked-at slice to Remus, though, he was still thinking about a map of the Burrow. Which would only help to keep track of the kids inside the Burrow. Damn. “You need an alarm system on them, honestly.”

Remus’s thoughts were also of maps and enchanted totems. Only it was unlikely that children could enchant, but maybe there was something to be said about mothers. “We might actually be able to help there, buffing your motherhood abilities as it were.” He shared a look with Sirius, which apparently was significant enough to cause Charlie to giggle.

The idea of an alarm system for her children was kind of funny but also intriguing. Molly situated Ron in a high chair and handed him a piece of cake to smush under his fingers before looking back at the pair of them. “How would you manage that?” Not that she didn’t believe they could do such a thing, just that she didn’t understand how.

“We've got some experience tracking things,” Sirius said, looking back at Remus. “Problem is, as the kids get older, we'd have to expand the map for it to be any use. Just the Burrow wouldn't be useful for long, Yeah? And not even we can map all of Britain.” He paused, nose wrinkling. “Well, we could, given time.”

He didn't seem to be aware that he wasn't really explaining to Molly, like it didn't occur to him that she wouldn't really know what he was referring to.

There was definitely even more of a look between the two. Sirius wasn’t saying everything, but Remus was hearing it all. “We’d have to change our approach. Make it less based on a physical place, and maybe more on a state of people?” That might even work on the horcruxes, if they might even a little bit count as people. “Then we could know if Ron was say in mortal peril or just sleeping.”

There was nothing but a blank stare on Molly’s face as the two conversed. She’d not ever heard of this ‘map’ nor how it was supposed to track children - her children. It was obvious though that they weren’t really talking to her, not that she wasn’t keen to listen. The only bit that caught her off guard was Remus’ comment. “Did you just -- mortal peril?” She glanced over at Ron as if she needed to affirm that he was still shoveling cake into his face and not bleeding out on her kitchen floor.

“Well,” Sirius said, glancing quickly away from the other young man to smile distractedly at Molly, “You will want to know on the off chance one of ‘em's actually in mortal peril, yeah? Kids get up to the maddest things, or so I hear.”

He was already looking at Remus again before Molly could reply. “So more like a list. Common places, common states? How abstract do you think we could go with it? Sleeping is pretty concrete, mortal peril is, y'know, subjective. We're all in mortal peril to some degree. Making the spell define it usefully but with wiggle room, that'll be fun.”

Remus nodded. “We’d need to set parameters, define terms.” He was already running a list in his head. “We’d also need to figure out what went wrong with that enchantment we used. And then modify it to allow for maybe Molly or Arthur to bestow a likeness of their sprogs -- children onto an object.” He paused, remembering Peter’s initial hesitance and grinned. “But hey at least we know that no one’s brain liquified.”

Obviously they had something big in mind, but that was far less important when hearing about her children and melting brains. Molly lifted her hands and clapped them hard in front of the two, similar to how she would redirect the twins’ focus back to her. “What are you bloody on about? No one is liquifying my children’s brains.”

The clap made Sirius startle, and he turned again to blink at Molly with the air of someone just waking up. “Huh? Of course not! Everyone's brains are fine, we can do this. He's joking. Peter was worried, last time, but it worked out fine.”

It occurred to him, then, from the look that Molly was giving the two of them that she had no idea what they were talking about, and he gave a sheepish little cough. “Oh. Right. We're designing a tracking system anyway. It's a...passion project. We'd been trying to track ourselves, more or less, but we could do it with the boys instead and then it would help you out, too. If you like.”

His grin, turned a bit more bashful. It was almost too easy to forget there was an audience who wasn’t used to their interactions. “We’d make sure it was safe. Full stop. And it might also help us figure out…” Remus motioned, not quite knowing exactly what to say with all the tiny pincers, “other projects we’ve been working on.”

Molly’s suspicion of Sirius’ use of ‘passion project’ only seemed to be confirmed by Remus’ vague motion. It was obviously Order business, but that wasn’t something she would be pressing them about. “You would do that? For me?” It was a surprise to no one (as the tiny groans indicated) that Molly started to tear up.

Sirius’s forehead wrinkled as he watched Molly get emotional. “Of course we would,” he said, frowning. “You made me a cake.”

He’d have offered anyway- projects like this were one of his favourite things in the world, and it would help them with their work for the Order to have to work on tracking people they were less intimately familiar with than themselves- but the cake was a brilliant motivator as well.

“A cake which you haven’t even eaten yet.” There were options here, obviously. Remus just decided to go for the one that offered Sirius a bit of grace. “So, let me help with that.” He proceed to smash a scoop of cake into Sirius’s face, intent to make quite the mess. It played well to his audience.

Sirius was not expecting that, and he’d just opened his mouth to bicker back at Remus when the cake was smashed unceremoniously into his face.

At least it was delicious.

He spluttered a bit, torn between indignation and laughter as he wiped at the glob of icing on his nose. “Oh, I’m going to get you for that.”

The children were laughing and pointing at Sirius while Molly watched the two of them with raised eyebrows, though she didn’t comment. Instead she motioned at the mess on the floor that they’d made. “You two are cleaning that up, by the way.”