The first thing that Orion Black noticed about the room he tumbled into as his son pulled him by the cloak through the heavy metal door was that it was cold. Bitingly cold, in fact. The sudden drop in temperature from the moderately-chilly December air outside the room to the certainly below-freezing temperature inside washed over him as though he'd plunged full-on into an icy river.

Before either father or son had a moment to get their bearings, an ominous creaking noise echoed through the room from behind them.

A loud, heavy crash rang out behind them and both men whirled round just in time to see the metal doors slam shut behind them, followed by an automated locking system clicking shut, leaving them cut off from the warehouse corridor outside.

"Bloody brilliant" Sirius muttered through panted breaths, worn out from the chase through the winding corridors of the building as they'd attempted outrun the pack of unidentified, masked Death Eaters following them. "Bloody Muggles. Why would a door need to be self-locking? What if I'd wanted it unlocked?"

"What in Salazar's name is this place and why have you dragged me in here, of all places?" Orion demanded to know through his own efforts to catch his breath. He gazed around the room curiously, taking in the metal stacking shelves and whirling sound of fans.

"It's a cold storage room" answered Sirius. He spoke snappishly, as though his father were slow for not automatically recognising a place that rang so peculiar to the magical mind.

Orion sniffed and grimaced at the odour that reached him. A mix of food smells - raw meats and other animal-derived perishables.

"I see" he said plainly, wrinkling his nose at the smell.

Clearly this was a room for storing foods. Fair play to the Muggles - without the ability to simply wave a wand to keep a plate of food fresh, they had somehow managed to invent a system capable of containing temperatures within a room that must surely be below freezing, judging by the way the icy air chilled Orion's exposed hands and face.

"And what, pray tell, made you assume that this arctic interior would make a suitable hiding place?"

Sirius's brow furrowed at his father's tone. Despite not having laid eyes on his son for almost two years before this day, Orion recognised that glower in an instant. It was the same look his son had given him almost every other day, many years ago, for offences ranging from the denial of any more sweets to the insistence that he put his toys away before bedtime.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realise we had quite so many options available to us" Sirius shot at his father, his voice practically dripping with sarcasm. "Shall we pop outside and see if any more comfortable hiding spots are available for use? I'm sure the Death Eaters won't deny us a few minutes to look around"

"Hold your tongue, boy"

Orion's voice was low with threat. He burned indignantly. He'd troubled himself to come all this way, out into a Muggle warehouse in the middle on nowhere on a tip-off from his younger son that his estranged elder child was in danger.

Regulus had seemed unusually troubled as he'd entered his father's study earlier that day. He'd stammered his words out as he explained the plot he'd overheard whilst amongst most unsuitable company (Orion had assured his younger son he would deal with this particular matter at a more convenient time), that there was a plot to lure Sirius, his older brother, into a trap, that very evening.

The promise of a hostage exchanged for vital information on Dumbledore's next planned moves, (a missing witch whom had long been suspected of being held by the Dark Lord's followers) would be used to lure him to the agreed meeting place, a barely-inhabited Muggle warehouse, where he would be ambushed by Death Eater with the intention of either bringing him to the Dark Lord, or kill him in the process of trying.

Orion had acted immediately. His estranged eldest son may believe he was above his duty to his family, but Orion, most certainly, was not.

Alas, if it hadn't been for his son's foolhardiness and lack of emotional control, all could have gone smoothly during Orion's rescue plan.

But now here they were, trapped in a below-freezing storeroom full of carcasses hanging on hooks after an almost comical chase through the hallways in which both Orion and Sirius had had their wands blasted from their hands, lost to them.

"If you had simply followed my orders and had come to me when I told you to, we could have Apparated out of here in an instant" Orion snapped at his son, pulling the heavy, fur-lined material of his winter cloak around his shoulders in an effort to shield himself from the cold.

It was working. Almost two-decades into his ownership of this most well-made of winter cloaks and it had yet to leave him shivering. And after all, why replace something that isn't broken?

"Excuse me for being just a little distracted by your presence" Sirius snapped back at his father, his family-famous scowl still firmly plastered across his otherwise admirable features. "It's not every day one's arrogant snake of a father slithers his way back into your business uninvited"

Orion felt his anger flare at his son's words.

"Your business, you might recall, led you into a trap that would have seen you either dead or a hostage of the Dark Lord" he seethed, refusing to entertain his son's attempt to lure him into a shouting match.

Shouting, Orion had long since learned, did nothing to increase one's likelihood to win an argument. So what was the point in wasting one's breath with it?

"I might have expected perhaps just a tad more gratitude for saving you from that band of fanatics, but it seems my time away from you has dimmed my memory of your lack of gratitude towards anything I have ever done for you"

"Gratitude?" Sirius barked with a laugh, throwing his head back dramatically. "You actually expect me to be grateful for getting me into this mess? I was doing fine until you showed up and threw me off!"

"That is nothing but a blatant lie, and you know it" Orion replied, fixing his son with a hard, stern glare from across the room, the sort that was once reserved for the more severe telling-offs of his childhood, following misdemeanours so serious as to warrant the boy being sent to his father's study to be dealt with.

"If I hadn't have been here today, you would be dead. That is the truth. You are too stupidly reckless to handle such situations and quite frankly I am amazed that wily old half-blood Dumbledore allowed you to follow this obvious scent of a trap"

Orion observed his son in the aftermath of his comment.

Sirius's scowl had lessened just a little and his head dropped to allow his hair, longer and more tangled than Orion had ever seen it, to fall in an inky black curtain over his face, as if to hide behind it.

A stark realisation suddenly washed over him.

"Dumbledore doesn't know about any of this, does he?" Orion asked, scarcely able to keep his own bemusement out of his tone.

Sirius's silence and nervous shifting of his weight from one foot to the other told Orion all he needed to know.

"I should have know" said Orion with a small chuckle, shaking his head as he paced across the room as if to examine the hanging carcasses like exhibits in an art museum. "I should have known from the moment I heard of this entire ridiculous scenario that you'd have gone loping into such an obvious trap like an over-excited mongrel chasing after the first whiff of a treat"

"Shut up" Sirius snapped, shooting a furious, yet clearly somewhat embarrassed, look across the room at his father. He kicked out at one of the metal stacking shelves, sending a clanging of metal ringing through the room.

"Oh this is just like you" Orion continued with a hopeless shake of his head and a bemused chuckle. "All action, brave, yes perhaps, but no thought behind it. You hid this entire, ridiculous arrangement from your leader and now you've gotten yourself stuck here with no back up, and landed me in it as well to boot. No wonder that Hat didn't deem you worthy of Slytherin"

"Shut up!" Sirius shouted, his tempter flaring. "I'd rather be a Gryffindor than one of you snakes any day. And anyway, people do know where I am. Friends of mine"

"Oh?" Orion raised an eyebrow in curiosity. "So you did have the sense to inform someone of your intentions this evening, after all?And they did nothing to stop you continuing with this ridiculous plan?"

"Not exactly" Sirius muttered. "I left a note. Before I left. They'll have found it by now. I said to come here if they hadn't heard from me by seven, which it's past now. They'll be on their way soon enough"

Orion couldn't help but shake his head again at his son's own personal dramatic brand of recklessness.

"Well I supposed its better than nothing. It would appear we have nothing else to do but wait"

Sirius wordlessly strode over to the wall of the freezing cold room, the furthest away from his father he could get. He slouched forward, hugging his arms tight around his middle.

Orion observed his son somewhat curiously.

Sirius was visibly stiff in posture, despite his slouch, and the elder Black suddenly noticed that his son was shivering rather intensely. Had he been doing that this whole time? Had Orion been too swept away into his old, long-ago-forged habit of chastising his son to notice how cold he was?

Orion now took the time to examine his son's clothes properly.

He was dressed disgracefully, in a thin, Muggle-style shirt and blue trousers in an odd material he had once heard his son refer to as "denim jeans", in that superior, know-it-all tone he had developed sometime around age fourteen. Neither garment looked particularly insulating, and Orion now realised that, most crucially, his son's attire was not completed with a cloak of any sort, nor it's Muggle counterpart.

The foolish whelp.

Orion was suddenly more aware of how little he felt the effects of the harsh cold of the room that was, for the moment at least, their prison. His faithful winter cloak, a loyal servant of almost twenty years, had not only kept the chill out, but had kept his own body heat in, only aided by his heavy, layered winter robes. By all accounts, he was rather comfortable, even in the undoubtedly below-freezing temperature of the cold storage room.

And there was his son, hunched against the wall, stiff with cold and now obviously shivering. In the extreme cold of the room, his ridiculously ill-planned clothing would only worsen his already uncomfortable state.

Orion sighed. His son was a foolish whelp, an idiotic, reckless boy. A traitor to the name of the family he had been blessed enough to be born into.

But still, his son.

"Come here"

Sirius's head tilted upwards, his tired, grey eyes peering out from behind his black curtail of hair.

"What?"

"I said, come here"

Orion repeated his words firmly, his tone level, expectant.

"Why?"

"Your place is not to question me, simply to do as I say"

"Oh give it a rest, will you" Sirius hunched over further, his knuckles turning white with effort as they gripped his elbows in an attempt to hug what little body warmth he still possessed tight inside his body.

Orion gritted his teeth determinedly.

"Why must you always be so wilfully disobedient?" he sighed in annoyance.

"Because despite what you seem to think, I'm not actually a mongrel, you know. I don't just come when called on demand"

"You do when the person calling you happens to be your father" Orion replied, in a voice as icy as the air around them. "Now do as I say, and come here"

Those words, spoken with such authoritarian demanding, seemed to do the trick. Perhaps it was the memory of the after-effects of disobeying that tone, or perhaps the cold had eroded the last of his son's will to defy him, but for whichever reason, Sirius slowly dropped his clasped arms to his side and walked (or skulked, rather) across the white, tiled floor to fill the spot his father pointed to, directly in front of him.

Orion's eyes, identical in their shade of grey to his son's, observed Sirius for a moment as he stood before him, gaze cast down to the floor sullenly. He was stiff in his posture and gait, as though desperately trying to suppress the urge to shiver. His face, from what Orion could see of him from behind his untamed black mane, was pale and somewhat draw, with tired, dark circles under his eyes.

He looked worn out. He looked far more weary and troubled than any youth barely into his nineteenth year had any right to be.

Orion wondered, briefly, what work that old fool Dumbledore had his young recruits doing that denied them a decent night's rest and recuperation.

But then, he reconsidered to himself, knowing Sirius, he was unlikely to waste his free time on such sensible pursuits anyway.

Silly, reckless boy, Orion thought to himself. He was a law unto himself, a danger to his own health and well-being.

His son was still shivering.

In a movement that felt almost as stiff as Sirius looked, Orion reached out an arm, draped in the heavy material of his cloak, and draped it across his son's shoulders.

Sirius flinched slightly at the touch, so unfamiliar and unexpected from a man who considered anything more than a brisk handshake to be inappropriate contact, but he did not resist as he was drawn, gently but firmly, to stand closer to his father, pressed right up against him.

Orion wrapped his other arm around Sirius's shoulders, securing his son inside the warm, protective embrace of his heavy cloak. Though Sirius had clearly grown since Orion had last laid eyes on him at sixteen, he was yet to match his father in height by several inches, meaning that he fit rather snugly inside his father's most unexpected, but undeniably warm, embrace.

A heavy silence hung between them both as they stood awkwardly pressed together, broken only by the whirling of the motors that kept up the room's bitingly frigid temperature.

Orion could feel Sirius standing stiff as a board against him. Perhaps it was simply from the uncontrollable shivering of his body as it attempted to fight off the onslaught of hypothermia, perhaps it was fear that this was somehow a part of yet another trap that he had "loped" right into on a whim.

Or, more likely, it was a combination of both.

"Why on Earth didn't you think to wear a cloak?" Orion asked with a sigh, less out of malice and more simply to break the icy silence between himself and his son. "It's the middle of December"

Orion felt Sirius shift away from him slightly - still enveloped within his grasp, but as far away as his father's arms would allow him.

"Not that I expect you to have much of a grasp of Muggle fashion but I'd have thought even you could tell that a whacking great cloak wouldn't exactly match these clothes"

Sirius's tone was far too spiteful for one currently in receipt of such vital warmth donation.

"Even under the threat of hypothermia you see fit to make smart remarks, I see" said Orion, bemused. "If you'd only recover the brain I know for a fact you posses somewhere, you'd see that robes are a far more practical option for such a climate than those thin strips of nothing"

"For such a climate?!" Sirius snapped, jerking his head up to glare at his father. "I didn't exactly plan to get stuck in a fridge with you!"

He attempted to tug himself free from Orion's grip, but the elder Black's hold on his errant son remained firm.

Orion tugged Sirius back, hard, pulling him tighter against his chest than he had before.

Sirius stumbled as he was made to lean back against his father's body, but surprisingly, did not resist.

"I meant for an English winter, you little fool" Orion quipped. "Believe me, this most absurd predicament no more featured in my plans for the day than it did yours"

Shockingly, Sirius did not see fit to offer a retort, his jaw remaining clenched shut in an obvious effort to stop his teeth from chattering.

Orion, however, found his desire to feel triumphant at this rare outright winning of an argument against his elder son overruled by concern regarding his sudden realisation that Sirius's legs, pressed against his side, were trembling.

In spite of the warmth provided by his father, the boy was still shivering in the extreme cold, his legs shaking to a degree that Orion feared he might topple over at any moment.

"Sit down" Orion found himself saying.

"What?" Sirius asked, a crude replacement for the more polite "pardon" he had been raised to offer in such circumstances.

"Sit down" Orion repeated, more firmly this time.

"No thanks"

"It was not a suggestion"

"I'm sure. My answer, however, remains unchanged"

"For heaven's sake, will you just do as you are told for once in your life and sit down before you collapse"

Fed up with waiting for Sirius to obey willingly, and leaving him with no time to spit out any further argument, Orion grasped his son by the arms and pulled him downwards, until the pair of them were both sitting on the (thankfully clean, Orion remarked to himself) tiled floor.

Orion kept Sirius clasped tight to him as he leaned back against the wall, finding, again, surprisingly little resistance from his son.

His body still shrouded snugly within the warmth of his father's cloak, Sirius wriggled himself into a more comfortable position from the one he had landed in - his weak legs had all but collapsed under him at his father's handling and he's landed in a tangled mess.

Orion observed silently as Sirius settled himself into as tightly a curled-up position as he could manage, tucking he entire body under the generous material of his fur-trimmed cloak.

In spite of his son's feeble protests, Orion could not deny that the arrangement was working. He could feel Sirius's shivering beginning to subside as their shared body warmth under the heavy cloak began to ease his descent into a dangerously cold state.

It would hardly do to go to such effort to recover the boy from danger only to lose him to hypothermia, brought on by his own foolish actions, would it?

Orion could feel an ever-so-slight pressure against his chest, only for few fleeting moments before it was quickly removed, before the gentle pressure was applied once again.

He glanced down to see Sirius's head drifting to a tilt to wearily lean against his father's chest. His cheek seemed to linger against Orion before he seemed to catch himself and pull away again. Fatigue was attempting to claim him, and he was stubbornly denying himself the most comfortable position available to him.

Orion sighed. The boy truly was a glutton for martyrdom.

He raised a hand up from inside the depths of the cloak and pressed it to the side of his son's head, guiding him to lean against his chest.

Sirius did not resist. He silently submitted to the touch and at last allowed himself to rest his head against his father's chest, too worn out to fight the urge any longer.

Orion suddenly noticed that Sirius's whole form had relaxed a bit further into his hold. He no longer felt stiff and his shivering had lessened to just a slight tremble. A vast improvement on the previous stare of affairs.

"I don't believe I can recall the last time you submitted to being held" Orion couldn't help but remark with a bemused smile as he observed his son resting against him.

He'd expected a sarcastic comment, flared with annoyance, the sort of hot emotion that would keep his foolish boy safely awake.

The response he got, however was surprisingly meek.

"I don't believe I can recall the last time you saw fit to offer such a gesture"

Sirius's remark struck Orion harder than he could ever have expected. And what was even less expected was the response he was instinctively urged to respond with.

He hugged his son tighter to him.

Sirius, as though in response to the tightening of the arms around him, nuzzled his father's chest sleepily.

Orion was taken aback. This most intimate of gestures felt unfamiliar. Inappropriately unfamiliar. He looked down at his son curled up against his chest. He seemed relaxed. One would almost go so far as to say... at peace.

Orion found himself in the grip of a sudden surge of protective instinct over his son, whom he had allowed to stray from his protective grasp for far too long. A mistake he was determined not allow to be repeated now that he had hold of him again.

All too soon, the moment was broken as Sirius suddenly regained the energy to return to his usual, humorous tone.

"Y'know, Dad, if we actually get out of here alive maybe we should make this more of a regular thing, eh?"

His voice was cheeky, even when weakened with cold and fatigue. Orion looked down to see Sirius smirking, even with his eyes drifted closed.

"If you speak to women half as cockily as you speak to your father, its no wonder you've yet to dirty the family line with any ill-begotten half-blood offspring" Orion chided in retort.

Sirius lets out a tired laugh as he mumbled a response into his father's chest.

"Now that's just rude"

"You started it"

Sirius sighed sleepily and nuzzled Orion's chest again.

For a moment, Orion considered jostling him awake from the slumber that seemed about to overcome the boy, aware of the dangers associated with hypothermia and sleep. But his actions were halted when he became aware that Sirius had now completely stopped shivering.

He moved a hand under the cloak to press against Sirius's side. The boy felt dramatically warmer than before, in fact he was practically toasty under the cloak.

It seems his strategy has worked. Perhaps the boy could be allowed to sleep a little. After all, he had looked so tired, even before the cold had set in.

For the sake of wanting to get his Sirius out of this accursed freezer and into a more suitable place to sleep, Orion rather hoped that Dumbledore's gaggle of young upstarts would find them soon.

But perhaps, he thought to himself as he lowered his head to rest the side of his face atop his dozing son's head, not too soon, either.