Your Body’s a Message
Chapter Two, March 27th 1979: Your Body’s a Message
“Who else was injured?” Poppy Pomfrey asked, as she finished carefully wrapping the cotton gauze around Emmaline Vance’s leg.
“Mr. Fenwick got hit by a stray curse,” Minerva McGonagall said, intoning a cooling spell under her breath. “Completely obliviated him. He was unconscious for at least half an hour before he came round. He seems alright now.”
Poppy shook her head with a worried frown.
“That’s as bad as falling from a height, as far as head injuries go. He will need to stay here under obs for at least twenty-four hours. I’ll pop into him now. Can you cover this with your Burn Healing Paste, Lily? I gave her a dreamless sleep potion,” she said, handing the pewter bowl to the younger witch. “Were you able to source the high strength gillyweed?”
Lily Evans nodded, wiping at her forehead with her tattered sleeve.
“It’s good, tried it on myself last week after the Shropshire mission,” she said, exposing her left forearm, a white scar running down the back of it.
“That’s wonderful,” said Poppy, peering down for a better look. “I’d be lost without you.”
Lily grinned back. She was proud of herself, proud of how quickly she had learnt healing spells which trainee healers took years to master. Proud of how much progress she had made in creating complicated potions which had already saved her friends’ lives on numerous occasions. She had been angry and disappointed following rejections by both St Mungo’s Academy and the British Potioneers’ Guild, despite her stellar grades and references. Anti-Muggleborn bigotry. But after a week of bitter seething, she had sought out Pomfrey and Slughorn and demanded an unofficial apprenticeship with both. Now, less than two years since her graduation from Hogwarts, she worked side by side with Poppy and Minerva, and they made one hell of a team. Neither of the older women was officially in the Order itself, but they might as well have been. If it wasn’t for Poppy’s medical interventions, they would all have died by now. If it wasn’t for Minerva’s ever-expanding, cutting-edge transfiguration spells, they would never have beaten Voldemort’s recruits so many times. Lily often thought of her as the Order’s answer to James Bond’s Q – her spells a masterclass in spying on the enemy. And since her own parents’ tragic car accident in Seventh Year, these women weren’t just her mentors, they were her family now.
“Yeah, I know,” she said with a wink.
Poppy laughed. Minerva’s lips twitched.
“I’d call you big-headed, Miss Evans, if you weren’t in fact correct.”
“Don’t call me Evans, Professor.”
“Don’t call me Professor, Lily.”
Lily sent her a muggle salute and Minerva shook her head fondly.
“Alright, I’ll leave you to it,” Poppy said. “Shout if you need anything.”
“And get yourself to bed as soon as you’re done, Lily Evans. You look exhausted,” Minerva’s voice, laced with concern, floated from the doorway.
“Will do.”
She was lucky to have made it out alive this time round. The Death Eaters had been all over them. If Sirius Black hadn’t thrown her out of the way, his cousin’s AK would have found its mark. As things stood, they had both been struggling to cope, duelling veteran Death Eaters two to one, until Remus Lupin joined them, practically getting himself killed in the process. She shuddered at the thought. As luck would have it, a Death-Eater had landed just in front of Remus and taken the hit. Since leaving Hogwarts, and joining the Order, the three of them had gotten much closer. She wasn’t sure why, but after that bastard James Potter had been expelled for trying to murder Severus, the rest of the so-called marauders had fallen apart. She had watched Remus Lupin withdraw from his other two friends completely, refusing all attempts to engage him. Sirius Black seemed to have fallen into a deep depression, and Peter Pettigrew had drifted away from them, like a man washed overboard without a lifebuoy.
She had her friends to keep her going, all staunchly anti- Voldemort like her, and they had been recruited en masse by their ex- headmaster before they even graduated. Which, when she thought about it, sounded ethically dubious. Emma wasn’t a bad fighter, Lily thought, patting the final dollop of paste onto her friend’s arm, but her greatest skill lay in finding Death Eater hide-outs and illegal potions manufacturing units. If it wasn’t for her, they would never have found Bones after his capture by Mulciber and co.
Dorcas Meadows was a better dueller than any of them, probably even better than Remus. She had even duelled Riddle on one occasion, single-handedly, and lived to tell the tale. Her girlfriend Marlene was practically as good, and the best person to have by your side in battle, her protective shields and blasting spells now legendary, she was the only Order member to have emerged unscathed from a solo fight against ten Death Eaters.
The boys had been recruited, or picked off (was there a difference?), one by one. Sirius Black had needed no encouragement, full of a reckless courage that felt tainted with hopelessness. She reckoned Remus Lupin had been harder to entice. In fact, she had no idea how the cunning old man had managed to persuade him. Peter Pettigrew had briefly joined the Order, but after a particularly disastrous mission with Aberforth, where he had royally fucked up, he had never returned. Some said he was living on the outskirts of London with his parents, working for the Ministry in some obscure department, neither sight nor sound of him since. His old friends didn’t talk about him. Just as they avidly avoided all mention of James Potter.
“James Potter.”
“Who?”
“Shush!”
“Careful! Don’t drop him.”
“Put him over here!”
Had she misheard? She looked up. Hushed voices, carrying something heavy, low groans, something solid being dropped onto a bed next door, a cry of pain.
“Lily! A hand please!”
Poppy Pomfrey’s voice sounded agitated, which usually only meant one thing - injuries she didn’t feel fully equipped to treat. That, or somebody dying.
“Fecking hell!” she cursed under her breath, wiping her hands onto the front of her jeans and grabbing her wand as she raced into the adjoining infirmary room. She got as far as the door and stopped, unable to move.
The unconscious man writhing on the bed, whose dark skin was covered in the tell-tale purpuric, pinprick rash of the Cruciatus, sweat dripping down his face and torso; the man whose shirt Poppy was currently cutting off with a careful severing charm, revealing a Dark Mark tattoo on his left forearm; the man who appeared to have been hit by multiple Sectumsempra curses, blood dripping onto the crisp, white sheets and staining the mattress; who was obviously still considered a serious threat, despite his injuries, and currently in the process of being manacled to the iron bed-rails.
“Yes, it’s Mr. Potter. Badly injured on the battlefield. Death-Eaters disapparated and left him there. McKinnon found him. He may be a Death-Eater now, but he was once a good man, a good boy, and we’re not leaving him to die,” Minerva’s stern voice shook with emotion. “We can hand him over to Moody if and when he stabilises.”
James Potter - the boy she had disliked for most of her early years at school. Disliked was the wrong word. She wasn’t sure what the right word was – what did you call someone you always argued with, who you thrived debating against, whose gaze you sought out in a crowd, so you could prepare yourself to engage with in a battle of wits? He had infuriated her. Yet hadn’t they ended up spending an awful lot of time together, arguing, talking (bantering, Remus had called it, but he was wrong!) over the years? The same boy who had finally started to grow on her in Fifth Year, who she had also (suddenly, out of the blue entirely) developed an unwanted and yet maddeningly severe crush on, only to have him exceed her worst expectations. She despised him now.
She walked towards them, reluctantly, unable to look away. The man opened his eyes for a split second, fear and recognition in his gaze. He tried to back away from her and cried out in pain, before losing consciousness once more. She felt tears welling up in her eyes and her throat closing over as she pulled up her sleeves.
“Lily, are you with me?” Poppy asked, wand hovering over the man’s chest. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Healers don’t just save the heroes, they save the villains too,” she said, her lips trembling. “Let’s do this.”