Always

It’s been a year.

They keep saying his name. They refuse to let him make them quake in fear. They refuse to give him that power. They should have realized that he would come up with a way to use it against them. He makes his name taboo. They lose four more people before they put it together.

They’re down to seven.

When it had been declared that the British Wizarding World was in a civil war back in early 1972, back when everyone was sure it would stay a civil war, a new task force had been employed by the Ministry to find and relocate as many muggleborns as possible in order to keep them safe.

The Death Eaters had seemingly made it a personal mission to track them all down. She thinks more than the hatred towards muggleborns it had a lot to do with simply sending a message. You think you can keep them safe? You think you can keep any of them safe? You can’t.

There is a town in Cumbria that the Ministry had covered in so many protection spells that it, and the people in it, may as well not exist to the magical community at all. Strange to see the spells getting used that way as opposed to the other way around. The Death Eaters still found it. From the way the Ministry spoke around the issue, Lily suspected they had people on the inside.

A few of the wards around the town prevent anyone with a dark mark from passing the borders without dire consequences, but the way the Death Eaters hammer away at wards mean they can’t be kept out forever.

The children, and those that don’t wish to fight, are smuggled into basements. The anti-apparition and anti-floo wards are both a blessing and a curse. It means the Death Eaters can’t easily get in, but it also means the Order can’t get people out.

Lily and one of the inhabitants of the town, Celia, hand out potions to those not magically trained so that they can help offer back up from above.

“It’s brave of you to help,” Lily says.

Celia spares Lily only a passing glance, before turning back to the potions. “I don’t have a choice”

Lily frowns. “You do. You could stay down in the basement with your children. No one would judge you for it”

Celia huffs a breath out of her nose and shakes her head.

“I would judge me for it,” she says. “My mum was a witch, but she left when I was barely a year old. I don’t know what her heritage was like; my dad didn’t even put together the fact that she was magical until I showed signs. Technically I’m a half-blood, but for all intents and purposes I’m a muggleborn and my children may as well be too. We’ve been in hiding for the last decade because people want to kill us and torture us just because of who we were born to be. If I were to sit back now and do nothing…” she shakes her head again and then appears as though she sorely wishes she could take the little rant back. She gives Lily another quick glance. “You wouldn’t understand”

For a moment Lily is absolutely baffled, before she realizes that Celia thought she was a pureblood because of her last name.

“My parents were both muggles,” Lily says. “Potter was my husband’s name”

For the first time since they had been introduced, Celia looks Lily in the eye without immediately looking away again.

“Was?”

“Was”

The battle is technically no different than any other they’ve had before, but it feels one thousand times more brutal. Lily thinks it’s because of the abundance of innocents. She knows that many of the fights have been like this one, the majority even: innocent people, children, in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she’d never really let herself think about it. Hard to ignore when you’re in the epicenter. Hard to ignore when your husband and son are one statistic amongst thousands.

Only one out of the six basements are breached. That’s enough. Lily can’t bare to listen to what happened down there, so she doesn’t.

When she was little, she used to get angry at her mum. Rosemary Evans was a sweet woman, who spent all her time in the garden and who refused to watch the news because it was ‘too sad.’ She would plaster on a smile and change the subject when anything got too close to a negative topic. In her teenage, angsty years, Lily had hated that about her.

She thinks she understands the temptation now.

Aurors and Ministry officials begin the clean up of the town: repairing the damages, removing the bodies, removing the last remaining protective wards that cover a town to desolate to still require them. They also begin to obliviate the non-magical survivors. Some of them seem grateful to forget, others cry and beg please, please, I’m scared, don’t, I need to remember them, I need to remember.

For a second she imagines having lost James and Harry but not having remembered it.

For the first time the pain of grief feels like a relief and she holds tight to it.

The pain said: they were here; this bleeding empty space is where they once lived.

She and Sirius sit at their kitchen table. They should really have a shower and change their clothes, but they’re hungry, so they sit and eat cereal while covered in blood and dirt.

“Do you remember Emma Brown?” Lily asks.

“Yeah. Pretty, blond hair, always with Dorcas, seemed to have randomly switched from stuck up princess to absolute hippy in our sixth year. She dropped out the beginning of our seventh because she was pregnant, right?”

Lily hums. “That’s her”

Lily thinks of the weekly dinners Dorcas had still been having with Emma the last they spoke. Emma, who was pureblooded and counted on that to keep her and her kid safe as long as she kept her nose out of it. She wonders how she coped with Dorcas’ death. She wonders if anyone told her, or if one week she just didn’t come to dinner.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Lily grimaces, pulling her cloak closer to herself as though it’s the cold that is making her shiver and not the dark foreboding feeling that hangs heavy in the air.

“Keep your head up and don’t let it show, they can smell fear” Sirius says.

Lily shoots him a sharp look, thinking for a moment that he was making fun, but his face is serious.

Lily straightens her spine, tilts her chin up loftily and tries to adopt the ‘don’t fuck with me’ aura that Sirius exudes so well. It’s a trait of his that makes crowds part for him without thinking and it is also the thing that back in school had made her sure he was cruel.

They pass a woman in the street whose skin is mottled and lumpy as through there are rocks beneath her skin. She’s hunched over and her arms are held in front of her not dissimilar to the t-rex skeleton Lily had seen at the museum once. As they pass, the woman bares her teeth and gives a little cackle. She doesn’t seem human. Lily wonders if that’s from overuse of dark magic or if the woman was never human to begin with.

She wants to flinch, but she settles for curling her fingers around the wand in her pocket and keeps walking.

“Don’t let anyone scare you into using magic,” Sirius tells her lowly. “There are magic detection spells everywhere to warn the shop keepers of any errant witch or wizard that could hurt them.” She thinks she must look incredulous because when Sirius gets a look at her face the corner of his lips curl up slightly and he says mockingly, “Honor among thieves and all that”

Finally they reach a tiny little corner store. The outside is painted a slick venomous green and there’s a sign in choppy red letters that says CHINESE WHISPERS. She attempts to look through the window, but all she can see is an obscuring black fog. Some sort of spell, then. It’s only when they go through the door that she sees it had something written on it: a secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

The shop is only made up of one small room, no bigger than Lily’s bedroom. There is no furniture or stock on shelves, only a wooden counter, smoothed by age, on top of which sat a quill, an inkpot, and several large stacks of parchment.

The door didn’t creak and there is no bell to indicate their arrival, but as soon as they step inside a man comes from another door on the other side of the room. He is a small man whose age seemed impossible to place. He could tell her that he is anywhere between thirty five and fifty and Lily would believe him. He is wearing garish robes that probably went out of fashion sometime in the seventeen hundreds, but there’s a name tag that said ‘Mr Rothschild’ on his chest.

“Welcome, welcome,” he says, looking at them hungrily. He has a horribly slick voice. “Who might you two be?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Sirius says. “You have information that we want”

“Names always matter,” Mr Rothschild disagrees. He gives the both of them long once overs. Lily grimaces. His eyes make her feel dirty, like he’s cataloguing everything she is to hoard for himself.

He leans forward slightly and gives a delighted little giggle. “Ah, a Black”

Lily’s head snaps to Sirius and Sirius stiffens.

“You don’t have to tell me, I can feel it,” Mr Rothschild says with a slow grin. He moves a thin hand in the air around Sirius. “Black magic, makes me all tingly” he laughs.

If the man speaks any more about Black magic Lily thinks Sirius is going to snap so she quickly cuts in.

“We heard talk of the Death Eaters guarding something in Cheshire, we heard you know what and where it is,” she says.

“Hmm,” Mr Rothschild’s expression sours; he does not look happy to hear that. “And where did you hear something like that?”

They had heard it from Mundungus Fletcher: an errant crook who owed Dumbledore enough favors that he was willing to freely trade any information he came across during his dodgy dealings. Say what you want about the man, and Lily has a lot to say, but he is an excellent fly on the wall.

“That doesn’t matter,” Sirius says, flicking a hand carelessly, seeming to have recovered from his quick identification. “What and where is it?”

Mr Rothschild chuckles and looks slowly between them before apparently deciding Sirius is of more interest and settling on him.

“Information like that doesn’t come for free, Black, you know that”

Sirius grits his teeth and glares. Mr Rothschild shifts his weight uncomfortably but he doesn’t flinch back. Sirius pulls a coin purse from his cloak pocket. He had barely dropped it onto the counter before Mr Rothschild is hungrily opening it to peer inside. His dark eyes glitter and he licks his lips.

He looks back up at them.

“Do you know what he will do to me if I answer?”

Sirius and Lily share a look. It’s telling that he says he and not they.

Sirius pulls out another coin purse and hands it over. Mr Rothschild snatches it like they were going to take it back.

He swallows, tapping a finger against the counter, considering, but the tight grip he has on the coin purses tells her that he’s not going to give them back. He’ll tell them.

Sure enough, “I don’t know exactly what it is they’re hiding,” he says. He grabs the quill from atop of the counter and a piece of parchment. He writes down an address before handing it over. Lily takes it gingerly. “I’d warn against going there. He’s not going to hand it over easily”

“Thanks so much for your concern” Sirius says dryly.

The two of them turn to go, but they only manage a single step Mr Rothschild stops them.

He smiles slimily. “If you ever want anymore information I’ll find a way to get it…for the right price, of course”

Lily looks at him in disgust. “You’ve had enough money out of us”

“The price doesn’t always have to be money,” Mr Rothschild says slyly. He cuts a glance at Sirius and then reaches out to touch a bony finger to the vein on the inside of Sirius’ wrist. “Black blood, that’s hard to come by these days”

Sirius moves so fast that Lily gasps. He twists his wrist to grab at Mr Rothschild’s and uses the leverage to pull him half over the counter. He puts something to his throat and at first Lily assumes it’s his wand but at second glance she realizes it’s a knife.

She remembers Sirius’ warning about there being alarms in place for if magic was used against the store owners. She should have realized he would come prepared.

Mr Rothschild goes still and white. He doesn’t seem to dare to take his eyes off of Sirius’ face.

“The only blood you’ll be seeing is your own if you touch me again,” Sirius says conversationally. Lily kind of wishes he sounded angry instead.

She doesn’t dare to touch him when the lines of his body go hard like that so she takes a step back and says, “Come on, we got what we wanted”

For a second she’s worried that he’s going to ignore her; that he’s going to slit the man’s throat right in front of her. There’s something inherently different between this and killing in battle. She thinks there probably shouldn’t be, but there is.

The knife disappears back up Sirius’ sleeve and Mr Rothschild lets out a trembling breath as the distance between them increases.

Lily and Sirius look at each other for a moment and she watches everything about him soften into something more familiar. She holds out her hand and they leave together.

They are prepared to be betrayed. They knew not to trust information that was bought and paid for, especially by the likes of someone like Mr Rothschild. However, with their numbers as decimated as they are, the preparation doesn’t much help.

It’s a shit show from beginning to end.

Whatever it was the Death Eaters were guarding, it had either never been there or had been moved, but the Death Eaters were already there, waiting for them, nonetheless.

The Aurors and the Order members keep themselves at the forefront, protecting those who volunteered to come to get their numbers up, but who weren’t overly skilled in battle. It doesn’t take long for the order to come to fall back. The direction isn’t easy to follow. There are too many spells getting fired at them to be able to apparate without getting killed in the process.

She’s used the killing curse more times in the last half hour than she thought she ever would.

Lily can’t tell how hurt he is, but from behind her she hears Rhys Mathers scream and there’s the wet spray of blood on the back of her bare legs.

Sirius roars and shoots a spell that makes the offending death eater fall back, writhing for a long moment, before going still. Lily had never seen that spell before. She knows it was a dark one.

Sirius crouches to grab at Rhys and apparates away.

When told to fall back Sirius is never the one to gather the injured and bolt, he’s always one of the last left, covering people’s backs before leaving himself.

Except for now.

She thinks she should have seen this coming.

She doesn’t think it would surprise anyone to know that Sirius wasn’t the type of man to sit at someone’s bedside. Even when one of the marauders had been injured, at Hogwarts or during the war, Sirius may visit them but it was always in a sort of tornado-of-boisterous-distractions kind of way than that of comfort.

Seeing him now is an exercise in trying to compromise two completely contradicting views. Like trying to accept that the quiet boy in her classes was a werewolf or that her childhood best friend was someone who could look her in the eye and tell her he was saving her while letting her husband and baby die.

She leans in the doorway, not venturing over the threshold.

Rhys is crying.

Even from the doorway she can see his right hand shake as he hovers it over his bandaged left side, very notably missing his left arm.

Sirius is bent over the bed, pressing his temple against Rhys’ and murmuring to him lowly.

She can’t hear what Sirius is saying, but she hears Rhys cry, “I can’t – I can’t do this, Si – I c-cant-”

Si.

She’d only ever heard Andromeda call him that.

Something ugly sits in her chest and she turns to leave.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sirius is looking at her carefully.

“I don’t know.”

She scoffs

“Really,” he insists. “At first it was just, you know, sex, nothing serious or worth mentioning. Then it was so new and before I knew it…” he shakes his head. “A relationship during the war was never something I wanted. He snuck up on me I guess”

Lily heaves a breath and nods. She’s biting the inside of her lip and looking at their feet.

Contrary to popular opinion, out of the two of them, James had been the one who had a lonely childhood. He had elderly parents and all his cousins were already adults. He had no family his own age and he lived in a large manor out of the way of any neighbors who may have had kids. On the other hand, Sirius grew up with a brother only a year his younger and cousins that Lily had always thought he was closer to than he claimed. It made no sense for Andromeda to still be a part of his life now if he hadn’t been close to her or her sisters. It made sense then that James had been so possessive of his friends once he got them; so protective of their time and attention. While Lily herself had been prone to jealousy when it came to other girls around her boyfriends, she had never gotten James’ same reaction to his friends.

She thinks she gets it now.

The idea of someone in Sirius’ life that could be important enough to take him away from her, it makes possessiveness rise up in her. She almost wants to find Rhys and bare her teeth and say he was mine first, back off.

There’s another envy there too. A darker one. The part of her that’s jealous Sirius is beginning to gain what she already had and lost.

She’s been quiet too long.

Sirius looks uncomfortable.

“I’ll…I’ll break it off…if you want me too”

He would to. For all of Sirius’ faults, no one could deny that he would do anything for his friends. For a horrible, awful moment she wants to say yes; she can feel the agreement clawing at the back of her throat.

She forces herself to shake her head instead.

“Your life shouldn’t end just because mine…”

“Your life isn’t over”

Lily laughs bitterly.

That’s the problem.

Sirius spends a lot of time out of the house, but he starts to visit her more at work. He always looks tired.

“How’s Rhys?” she asks as she cleans glasses.

Sirius takes it as the peace offering it is and gives her a grim smile.

“He’s alive”

Lily nods.

Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for.

He comes out the backroom as soon as they set foot into the shop.

Lily wiggles her fingers in a wave and Sirius grins meanly. “Hello Mr Rothschild, remember us?”

He runs.

Sirius swears.

“You follow, I’ll go around the back!” he shouts.

Lily rounds the counter and runs after the man. The back room is just as small as the front one and it only takes three quick strides to be out the back door. She chases him down the back alley. This would be a lot easier if she could cast a trip jinx.

He grabs a bin and pulls it down and she curses as she almost goes falling over it. She’s falling behind and she pushes herself to go quick. He looks at her over his shoulder. That was a mistake.

Sirius rounds the corner of the alley and tackles him the ground. By the time Lily catches up Sirius has wrestled him onto his back and once again has his knife to his throat.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you, right now” Sirius snarls.

“It was only a little fib,” Mr Rothschild stutters, “you wouldn’t really kill me over that”

“People died,” Lily snaps, furious.

Mr Rothschild glances at her but he quickly looks back at Sirius, who digs the knife in further. A trickle of blood bubbles at the tip.

“No, no, no, don’t,” he cries. “I can tell you what they’re really after, I can tell you where it is”

Sirius scoffs. “You’re lying”

“No, I promise, I promise. They’ve got Helga Hufflepuff’s cup. I don’t know what they want it for, I swear, but I can give you the address. Let me up and I’ll give it to you”

Sirius looks over his shoulder at Lily and she shrugs.

“How do we know you’re not lying?” she asks.

“I’ll – I’ll do the unbreakable vow!”

Sirius lets him up.

They report back to Dumbledore.

She wishes they hadn’t.

“All that work, for nothing!” Sirius exclaims, slamming the door behind him. “It took us months to find Rothschild. People died because of him, Rhys lost an arm because of him, and we finally get the information and we can’t do anything? Too dangerous? What the fuck does he mean to dangerous? He took the unbreakable vow for Merlin’s sake, there’s no way he can be setting us up this time”

“Maybe we can do something,” Lily says.

Sirius looks at her and the anger seems to drain out of him at once. “Lily, Dumbledore thinks it would be too dangerous”

Lily scoffs. “Oh, like you give a toss what Dumbledore things.” She gets a gleam in her eye and she starts to smile. “We can do this. We’ve got the address, we know what we’re after, what’s stopping us?”

Sirius doesn’t look sure.

Time was the risk would be half the fun for Sirius. Nowadays he cared more about keeping Lily’s feet on the ground that a thrill.

“Look, I’m going to go no matter what,” she says impatiently. She’s not sure if that’s true but right now she believes it enough to know that Sirius won’t think she’s lying. “Are you with me or not?”

Sirius lets out a breath and then grins.

“I’m in.”

Rhys is sat in the kitchen when she wakes up.

One of the sleeves of his robes is rolled and pinned up.

She pauses in the doorway and realizes that despite being in the Order with him for the past year, she’s never actually had a conversation with him.

“Sirius is at work,” he offers.

Lily nods and pours herself a bowl of cereal.

They eat together in silence.

The bell above the Leaky Cauldron’s bar begins to ring independently.

Everyone’s head snaps towards it.

Lily sighs. Someone in Diagon Alley has raised a warning for a Death Eater sighting.

“You know the drill people!” she calls.

There’s a scramble of movement as people put out the candles, lock the doors and cast obscuring charms on the windows. Lily, Tom and Heathrow (the cook), begin to activate the pub’s more complicated wards.

She hasn’t heard from the Order so she assumes the situation is either handled or just Death Eaters passing through. For now she sits on the floor behind the bar with Tom and Heathrow and waits for the all clear sign.

“Wanna play cards?” Heathrow asks, pulling out a deck from his apron pocket.

Lily huffs out a laugh.

“Sure, deal me in”

They attempt to apparate to the address Mr Rothschild gave them.

They jerk back, grasping their stomachs with groans of pain.

They share a grimacing look.

Anti-apparition wards.

“Guess we’re doing this the old fashioned way”

“No, no way,” Lily says when Sirius tries to hand her his spare broom.

“What do you mean ‘no way’? You had flying lessons at school”

“Six months of flying lessons as an eleven year old does not a broom rider make”

“Well how are we meant to fucking get there then?”

They take her dad’s old car.

The novelty of it for Sirius wears off in the first ten minutes.

The journey takes three and a half hours.

“We should be there by now”

“You’re the one with the map, maybe if you gave me the right directions we would be”

“It’s a muggle map, what the fuck are you expecting?”

“Maps are maps! They’re the same! Stop milking the poor-wizard-man-in-muggle-world-what’s-this-button-do thing”

“How was I supposed to know it was for the hazard lights?”

“We almost got pulled over!”

“I told you to turn left”

“I did turn left!”

“If you had turned left we wouldn’t be back where we fucking started, would we?!”

“Fuck you”

“Turn left”

“Give me the map, Sirius”

“No”

“Give me the fucking map!”

“Ow, that’s my fucking rib! Get off!”

“Read the fucking map right then!”

“I’m reading the fucking map! I’ve got a spell on the fucking map! If you would just drive properly!”

“Well, if you know so much why don’t you drive then?”

“I drive a motorbike, I don’t know how to drive a car!”

“Well, great, that’s really useful!”

“Get back in the car, Lily”

“No”

“Get back in the car”

“No”

“Do you want to get the cup or not?!”

It takes them an embarrassingly long time to realize it was a specialized warding off spell that was turning them around.

“The house is another three miles away,” Sirius pouts as he begins dissecting the spell. “Why have wards that spread this far?”

They’re stood at the end of the street, where the next turning takes them down a country lane bordered by trees. Lily has her back to Sirius as he works, just looking in the direction of the warding off spell was making her feel queasy.

Lily groans, tired and frustrated and still hating him a little bit.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Have you finished yet?”

She can’t see him but she can feel him glaring at her back.

“I’ve gotten rid of the spell, but the anti-apparition wards are tricky. They’re time sensitive, they probably won’t wear off themselves until morning” he says.

Lily turns and is grateful when looking in the direction of the road no longer makes her head spin.

“How long do you think it would take us to dismantle them?” she asks. Sirius is a lot more adept at wards than she is.

Sirius shakes his head. “A couple of hours maybe.”

Lily groans and for a minute the two of them just stare forlornly at the road ahead.

“We probably shouldn’t take the car,” Sirius sighs. “It’s too loud”

Lily lip trembles a little bit and she glances over at him. Sirius looks about as happy at the idea of the walk ahead as she feels.

She looks past his shoulder and breathes, “Oh my god”

“What?” she hears Sirius ask, but she’s already jogging past him towards the house at the end of the street: the house that has two bicycles lying on the grass in the front garden. She quickly grabs the smaller of the two and gets on it, getting one of her feet ready on the pedal and the other on the ground, keeping her steady. Sirius comes over to her and she grins at him.

“Come on, there’s another one” she says, nodding towards the second bike.

Sirius stares at her. “Am I supposed to know how to ride that thing?”

Lily frowns.

“You know how to drive a motorbike,” she says.

“Riiight, and you’re telling me that’s the same thing, are you?” he asks incredulously.

Lily huffs impatiently and moves forward so she’s stood astride the bike with both feet on the ground.

“Fine, you sit, I pedal. Keep your feet off the ground”

Sirius looks dubious, but he gets on the bike.

It’s dark by the time they get there and as soon as they dismount Lily groans and throws the bike down.

Sirius stretches and lets out a satisfied sigh when his back cracks. Lily rubs at her burning calves and glares at him.

“I hate you” she says.

Sirius turns and winks.

“Love you too, darling,” he says, before beginning to walk.

It feels so much like being seventeen and strolling down the school corridor from their shared class, friendship new and just beginning to blossom into something that didn’t require James as a buffer, that Lily looses her breath a little and it takes her a moment to follow.

The street didn’t look much different to the one they just left. Except…

It’s empty. Completely quiet, only their echoing footsteps heard. There are no lights, not street lights or any of the house windows. They light the tips of their wands.

“Maybe everyone’s asleep,” Sirius says doubtfully.

Lily shakes her head. “There aren’t even any cars in the driveways. Everyone has cars these days”

They have to get close to the doors in order to see the numbers, but they don’t want to have lit wands too close to the guarded house. They get to number fifteen and then extinguish the lights, working out how to get to number thirty two by counting the houses on the even side of the street as they pass. They keep close, their arms brushing. By the time they reach number twenty two, it’s clear they needn’t have counted. Number thirty two is the only house in the entire street with any sign of life. The downstairs window flickers amber with signs of candles lit from within.

They share a look. Sirius’ face is shadowed, only his eyes clearly visible.

“Let’s go around the back,” he suggests in a whisper.

Lily doubts that whoever is in the house will be able to hear them from outside, but there’s something about the eerily empty street that just urges you to be just as quiet.

Lily nods, though she’s not sure he sees it. They go through the back gate of number thirty and cut across to thirty two’s garden. They sit among the hedges. None of the back windows are lit.

Lily points her wand at the house. “Homenum Revelio.” Instead of the sweeping feeling of people discovered by the spell, she feels the sink of a spell failing.

Lily frowns. “Homenum Revelio.”

Nothing.

“More wards? What’s so special about this damn goblet?” Lily hisses incredulously.

“Hey,” Sirius whispers.

She looks towards him and sees him pointing. Following his finger, she smiles a little. There’s a doggy door.

She only has to wait five minutes before Padfoot’s back, gold cup held between his jaws.

“How was it?” she asks.

He transforms back and the goblet falls onto his lap.

“Very easy”

He gestures for them to get up, but just as they begin to cut across to number thirty’s garden, a loud bang cuts through the silence and they whirl around, dropping low. The windows on all the shutters had slammed themselves shut.

“What are they doing?” Lily whispers frantically. “Do they know it’s gone?”

Sirius shakes his head. “I don’t think so, they’d come running out to get it not shut themselves in”

He jerks his wrist and his wand falls from its holster on his arm and into his hand. He performs a silent spell that she only recognizes as one of detection from the familiar wand movement.

“They’re putting more wards up. Powerful ones,” he sounds as bewildered as Lily feels.

“But…why?”

They share a confused look.

“Are they leaving for the night?” she wonders aloud before answering her own question. “They can’t be. What would be the point of guards at all?”

The cup was in one of the upstairs bedrooms,” Sirius says quietly. “When I was walking up the stairs I heard them complaining from the living room. They said that they couldn’t wait for goblet to get moved to the Lestrange’s bank vault”

“You mean-”

“Bellatrix,” Sirius nods.

“But why isn’t it already in there? The Goblins refused to pick a side one way or another, they’re not going to stop any death eater from accessing their vault”

“They said something about some sort of spell they want to get past the goblins, they didn’t seem to know much of anything either.”

Lily shakes her head. “All this for a cup?”

Sirius looks at her curiously. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

Sirius hands her the goblet. It’s small and gold with a badger engraved on it. Other than the fact it was owned by a Hogwarts founder there doesn’t appear to be anything special about it at all. It takes a minute, but then she feels it. Magic. Dark magic. Very Dark magic.

She thrusts the cup back at Sirius.

“What is that?” she hisses, looking at the cup in disgust.

Sirius shakes his head. “I don’t know. Come on,” he said, gesturing to next door’s garden. “Let’s get out of here before they really do realize it’s missing”

They wait until they’re ten houses down before they light their wands again. They walk in silence. Lily sneaks glances at Sirius as he studies the cup.

“Why would Helga Hufflepuff have something that dark?” she asks finally.

“I don’t think she did,” Sirius says slowly.

“You think Vol – You-know-who put the spell on it?”

Sirius shrugs. “More than likely. If not him, than some other dark wizard. I’ve never felt anything like it”

Neither has Lily, but she figures it means more coming from him.

“What do you think-”

They hear howling.

They stop.

They look up.

It’s a full moon.

“Oh fuck,” Sirius breathes.

They whirl around so they’re back to back, brandishing their wands to look down the street. Lily can only see about four houses down.

“I don’t see it,” she says, harried.

“Me neither,” Sirius replies breathlessly. “Get in one of the houses, away from the windows and doors”

She rushes to the house closest and unlocks the door with her wand. She stops when she notices he’s still in the street.

“What are you doing?” she calls as loud as she dares. “Come on”

“We don’t have time to cast the wards. It’ll smell us and break in unless something distracts it”

She thinks she knows where he’s going with this and her heart pounds. She starts back down the garden path towards him, “Then I’ll stay with you”

He whirls on her. “What good will that do?!”

There’s a growl.

It’s close.

“Go!” Sirius shouts.

There’s a lump in her throat and she wants desperately to refuse, but she turns and runs into the house. She locks the door behind her with a spell and takes the stairs two at a time. Once she’s in the back bedroom, she falls back against the closed door and slides down until she’s sat. She hugs her knees to her chest, squeezes her eyes shut and tries to relearn how to breathe.

She’s been staring at the stain on the carpet for hours. Her tears have dried up and her cheeks feel rubbed raw. It’s only when she hears the birds that she blinks and looks up to the window. It’s not yet completely light, but it’s morning.

It takes her a moment to register it. Her head feels stuffed full of cotton wool and her legs had gone numb without her noticing.

Then, all at once, she scrambles to her feet and throws the door open, thundering down the stairs. The blood returns painfully to her legs but she powers through it. Her shoulder wrenches when she tries to open the front door, having forgot she locked it and she fumbles for her wand so she can get out.

She daren’t shout for him. She doesn’t know if the death eaters or the werewolf, no doubt now human, are close by. She hopes they’re not close by.

As soon as she’s leaves the garden gate and steps out onto the pavement, she spots a prone form. A gust of air concaves her chest and she rushes forward. She doesn’t recognize the man lying in the street, but he’s nude. It’s the werewolf. There are bites and deep, gauging scratches marring his skin, but most noticeable was his throat. It had been torn out. The man’s eyes were grey and glassy, staring up at the sky vacant.

She looks around frantically. She hadn’t been able to spot him before, but now she was in the middle of the street she could see his legs popping out from the garden next door.

She rushes forward.

When she catches sight of him, she can’t help it, she turns and heaves, throwing up beside the garden gate.

It’s like he’s been turned inside out. His stomach has been torn open, flaps of skin missing and splayed to reveal the trembling guts within. She falls to her knees and scrambles closer. Her robes are drenched through immediately.

She wants to scream, but she’s present enough to bite down viciously on her own arm to smother it. She makes a weird keening noise she didn’t even know she could make.

She doesn’t dare touch his shoulder, where there’s a deep, bloody bite, and she can’t look at his stomach without fear of throwing up again, so she grabs at his face.

Please please please please.

She can’t.

He gives a rattling breath and she lets out a gasping sob.

He’s alive.

He’s alive. He’s breathing. He’s alive.

She grabs at his arm.

It’s morning. Please let this work.

Please work.

She apparates them. She sobs in relief as they slam into a new concrete pavement. The cry she lets out is loud, but she quickly reigns it in, if she starts crying now, she’ll never stop.

They’re in the street outside St Mungos and she screams, uncaring of any muggles who may hear.

“Hee-elp! Please! Someone help me! Please! Please! Someone! Ple-ee-ase!”

There are gasps and shouts as people coming running. Lily is pulled back and can only watch as Sirius is levitated onto a stretcher to be taken inside. She fights the grip of whoever has her so that she can follow.

“Stop,” a firm voice snaps and they grab at her chin and force her to face them. “Miss, you need to tell us what happened. You need to tell us so we can help him”

Lily can’t breathe.

She refuses to leave the hospital to clean up so she’s given Healer robes to change into while she waits.

“We’ve done all we can for him,” the Healer says when she directs Lily to Sirius’ room.

Lily glares at her.

Screw her ‘all we can do’ bullshit.

Lily wants to ring her neck.

An hour after Lily is allowed in the room to see Sirius, Rhys storms in. Lily is too tired to do much more than raise her head.

“Is he-?”

Lily nods.

Rhys makes a choked noise.

He moves to his bedside, puts his hand on Sirius’ right cheek and leans forward until he can rest their foreheads together, the tips of their noses just barely touching.

He whispers something to him that she’s not meant to hear.

She hears it anyway.

Don’t you dare leave me.

There’s nothing to do but wait.

So they wait.

“You know, I’m a muggleborn” Rhys says. She blinks. “That surprises you”

Lily nods carefully. She doesn’t know why, but it does.

“I was in Hufflepuff at school, one year ahead of you,” he says. “I knew Sirius’ name…and James’,” he shoots her a furtive glance like he’s expecting her to flinch at the sound of his name. It’s been over a year, all her flinches had been internalized by now. “I never met them though. I was a quiet kid, didn’t really have any friends, but I loved magic. There was just something about it,” he shakes his head like he can’t put it into words but she knows exactly what he means anyway. She thinks all muggleborns do. “I started working at the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office straight out of school. Maybe it might seem boring, but the way witches and wizards manipulated muggle items with magic, changed them…I found it fascinating, like the merging of worlds”

Lily looks at him. She can see the passion he has for his job on his face. When was the last time she had felt anything resembling passion? Not since before they heard about the prophecy surely.

“I was considering going back to the muggle world”

The statement is so out of place with everything else he says that Lily can only blink again.

She looks at him incredulously, “why?”

For all the pain the magical world has brought her, she can’t ever, ever imagine wanting to give it up.

Rhys gives her a wry smile like he can tell what she’s thinking.

“My family, mainly. We’d always been close, but I hardly ever saw them what with boarding school and work, but then when I did visit, it was like I couldn’t talk to them about anything. They didn’t get it. We started to argue all the time; I still hadn’t really made friends, we were at fucking war, so I thought, why not? Then Professor Flitwick approached me about the Order. I’d always done well in dueling club, I guess he remembered that. It was a lot of stake-outs and back up work at first, but then Sirius and I got sent to do some recruitment work in France”

He smiles now as if remembering. Lily watches him, interested, no one ever told her much about what happened while she was in hiding.

“We got a lot of doors slammed in our faces, but we got a lot of names willing to lend a hand too. You-know-who hadn’t really affected France much, but there were plenty of people who were willing to stand up to him anyway. Then things went wrong, the Death Eaters seemed to know where we were going to go and a lot of contacts were dead before we got there. Looking back I’d wager it was Pettigrew’s doing”

The burning rage she once felt at the sound of his name was gone. Now she just feels hollow.

“We missed the port key home, we ended up getting arrested for trying to apparate without a French license. Escaped the French holding cells,” he laughs here. “We ended up having to steal a muggle car and make our way to one of Sirius’ family homes that had an untraceable floo system. I know it didn’t mean much to him back then, how close we were getting…but he’s the only one I ever-”

His eyes are wet and he swallows, hard. He’s looking at Sirius like he’s the best thing in the world. She can remember when she got looked at like that.

No wonder Sirius fell hard.

She hasn’t taken her eyes off of his face for hours.

His dark curls are fanned out across the pillow. There are purple smudges under his eyes. Sirius’ skin had always been clear and soft, a source of jealousy during puberty. It was an unnatural thing, like the inhuman shade of silver his eyes are. Now it felt unnatural to see it so drawn and pallor.

She and Rhys had spent the night at the hospital. He’d only left now to go and get some food. She suspects he really wanted to withdraw somewhere to break down for a while. He doesn’t seem like the type that liked crying in front of others. Perhaps if she was less selfish she’d let him have a moment alone with Sirius.

She looks up when the door opens.

It’s Remus.

His eyes go instantly to Sirius’ prone form.

“I can’t stay for long,” he says as he comes to Sirius’ bedside.

He places a gift on the little wheeled table. It’s a beautifully carved statue depicting a werewolf with a stag and a dog at its side. There’s a rat notably missing. He must have made it himself. It had been Sirius’ birthday two days ago. She wonders if this was the late gift.

“How is he?” he asks.

Lily looks up at him, but his eyes are carefully fixed to Sirius.

“The Healers say he should make a full recovery. They’ve got him in a medically induced coma. They’re hoping he can be woken in a couple of days, but they’re worried that the bites have turned him. I don’t really know how to tell them that it won’t happen”

Remus grits his teeth and he holds tight to the blankets beside Sirius’ hand.

Remus eyes the exposed bandage on his shoulder. A few specks of blood had soaked through, but the Healer has assured her that it was normal.

She clears her throat. Remus pointedly keeps looking at Sirius and doesn’t react.

Lily swallows.

“You’re mad at me,” she says. Her voice is meek.

“I’m not mad” his voice is terse.

“I understand why you are,” she continues. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have asked-”

“You’re right, you shouldn’t have,” Remus bursts, finally looking at her.

His face is pale, jaw set and eyes hard. Lily pauses, her hand going tense where she had it wrapped around Sirius’. Remus was endlessly patient. Other than the incident with Sirius and Snape in their fifth year she’d never even heard him raise his voice.

“My best friend almost died, because of you! He’s all I –“ he shakes his head.

She knows he’s about to say that he’s all he has left, knows because the words are her own.

“James was my best friend,” he’s stopped shouting. “I miss him every day and it always hurts. I get it. I do. But the next time you come up with some reckless plan that you think will make it hurt a little less, don’t ask Sirius for help”

Her eyes are wet and blurry when he meets her gaze. He holds it until she nods.

She waits until he leaves to let the tears fall.

She leans forward and rests her forehead against the hand she has clasped with Sirius’. His fingers still smell a bit like cigarette smoke. Her tears wet the bedspread.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out. “I never…I never got the chance to meet James’ parents, you were his only family and now…now you’re mine, you’ve been mine.” She doesn’t know why it’s easier to say this when her head is down and she’s not looking at him, he’s unconscious after all, but it is. “You’re my best fucking friend.”

It takes three and a half days for him to wake up.

Lily starts to cry and it takes her almost an hour to stop.

Rhys looks ready to punch him when he says, “Hey, baby, we’ve got to stop meeting like this,” upon noticing him.

The Healers start spells to check on the spread of the werewolf curse. They try to determine if he’ll first turn this month or next. They’re dumbfounded when they realize he has no sign of the curse at all.

He’s not happy about it, but he has to register as an animagus.

He lies and says he did it only last year, an extra weapon in his arsenal during the war. It’s an understandable and, most importantly, excusable explanation.

Surprising no one, Sirius is terrible at bed rest.

Sirius takes her with him to Andromeda’s for Christmas dinner.

Other than a quick hello on the few occasions she came to see Sirius, Lily had never spoken to her. She’s sharp in all the ways Sirius is sharp and seeing them snipe at each other is savagely funny.

Ted is a sweet man, who so very clearly adores his wife and worships the ground his daughter walks on. He’s also a muggleborn, which means there are Christmas crackers like Lily hasn’t had in years. Andromeda looks bewildered by the tiny screwdriver set that falls into her lap (“What are they?”) and Sirius looks dubiously at the curling film fish in the palm of his hand. Lily and Ted laugh and then laugh harder at the identical look of offense on the two cousins’ faces.

Nymphadora gets a little plastic frog that Lily attempts to teach her how to flick into the glasses. The little girl quickly gets board and entertains herself by morphing her face into that of a frog as Sirius eggs her on instead.

It’s a good day.

Lily hasn’t laughed that much in ages.

She doesn’t leave her room for a week after.

It takes that long for her to realize what it had been that had really upset her. It wasn’t that she had the audacity to have a good time when James and Harry were dead and buried; it was Andromeda, Ted and Nymphadora themselves. A happy little family made up of a pureblood, a muggleborn and a kid.

That was everything she was meant to have.

Their numbers were dwindling. Every fight they got called to they were outnumbered at least 3 – 1. It doesn’t need saying, but she says it anyway.

“We’re losing”

Sirius doesn’t answer. His fingers are tapping idly on the table.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Weirdly enough, something Bellatrix once told me. She said: it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” He turns to look at her. “I’m going to die on my feet. What about you?”

“On my feet with a fucking wand in my hand”

They exchange fierce grins.

It is meant to be an Order meeting, but they sit in silence. Professor Flitwick has his head in his hands. There are a lot of empty chairs.

“We can’t go on like this,” Professor McGonagall says finally. “We can’t keep putting out fires as they come, we need a plan”

Silence.

“…we could plant some exploding runes,” Elphias says finally.

“That would require us to a) know whether the head quarters are, b) get into the headquarters unnoticed, c) know when to set the runes off, d) Have the ability to set the runes of remotely, e)-“ Lyle says.

“Okay, I get it, it was just a suggestion,” Elphias huffs.

Silence.

“I think I know of a way to solve two of those problems,” Sirius says. Lily eyes him curiously. Whatever he’s about to suggest, it makes him uncomfortable. “There’s a spell I know that will activate when someone of the same blood is near. I think I could modify to make it time sensitive so that it would go off for another five minutes after that”

A few of the members look confused. Lily knows he means his cousin. By the time she had started to really make a name for herself, her surname had already been changed to Lestrange so it made sense that not many were aware of their relation.

“Bellatrix Lestrange,” Moody says.

Sirius gives a halting nod. Lyle and Nora look at Sirius like they’ve never seen him before. Maybe they’re just now seeing the stark resemblance that has always been there, but they overlooked.

“This spell wouldn’t happen to be Black magic, would it?” Elphias asks skepticlaly.

Sirius clenches his jaw and keeps his back ramrod straight. “It is” he says reluctantly.

A few people starts to mutter.

“Enough,” Dumbledore cuts in, speaking for the first time. Everyone goes quiet. “Do you think it would work?” he asks Sirius.

Sirius nods.

“Well, that solves two issues,” Rhys says hesitantly. “But how are we meant to get the runes in there? For that matter, how are we going to stop them from detecting them when they are?”

“There’s an unspeakable that I know,” Moody says. “She’s only young, about Black’s age, but she knows her stuff. I think she’d be able to make them undetectable”

“Can we trust her?” Dumbledore asks.

Moody thinks hard on this. “We’d have to verify it before we told her anything significant, but I think we could.”

From Mad-Eye that was practically a reigning endorsement.

“And I believe I have an idea of how to get in unnoticed,” Dumbledore says. “The use of Black magic makes me wonder. There are many different types of magic, some I believe that many witches and wizards underestimate, even overlook.”

“And what’s that?” Professor Flitwick asks.

“House Elves have their own magic that does not follow our own” Dumbledore says, folding his hands together in front of him.

For a second everyone is quiet as they think about this.

“They can apparate even somewhere like Hogwarts. And they wouldn’t be revealed by the homenum revelio spell because they’re not human,” Remus says.

The atmosphere in the room begins to pick up. Adrenaline surging as they all seem to come to the same conclusion. This could work. They could do it.

“We still have one problem,” Professor McGonagall says. “How do we find out where their Headquarters is?”

Sirius has to root the bank vault key out of the bottom of his old school trunk. Lily sits on his bed and handles gently the school notes filled with doodles and scrawled messages from James. There’s one that has L+J written in a little heart that she keeps sat on her knee.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Lily asks.

She knows Sirius hasn’t gone near anything to do with his family since he and James had gone to Regulus’ funeral beneath the invisibility cloak.

Sirius looks for a second like he’s actual considering it but then shakes his head. He smiles at her wryly.

“I’m not totally certain there aren’t things in there that won’t eviscerate you if you get close”

“Because I’m a muggleborn?”

“Because you’re not a Black”

Lily forgets sometimes that the Blacks had been much more like a coven of old than they had been a family.

The Black grimoire Sirius had retrieved from his family vault lies open on the table. Lily eyes it curiously, but when she reaches out to have a look she feels sick and there’s something about it that makes her recoil so violently that she snaps her hand back. It was not dissimilar to how she felt when looking at the warding off spell they had encountered when looking for Hufflepuff’s Cup, but it’s a thousand times more intense. Like something is reaching down inside of her and squeezing, saying not for you.

Black magic had once been widely practiced but as Dark magic slowly became outlawed, so did the Black, but it got wiped out much more thoroughly simply because it was so much more difficult to practice. You would be hard pressed to find someone familiar with Black magic nowadays.

For all that people accused the Blacks of being dark and rotten, some even in this room accusing Sirius of just that, she doesn’t think anybody truly believed they still practiced Black magic.

She guesses they know better now.

Sirius drips his blood across the runes that Elphias had carefully carved, he speaks words of the old religion infused with the French that more recent family members adapted the spells to, the blue veins on his wrists seem to darken and writhe and the air in the room seems to quake.

Lily’s skin is crawling. She can’t tell if it’s the deep set stereotype making her imagine things or if she really can just feel the magic in the air.

The spell ends all at once.

Lily looks about the room and she can see on everyone’s faces that they too had expected more screaming and grotesque writhing like they had seen in text books during school, but none of that had happened.

She had always meant to talk to Sirius about his opinions on Dark magic, but she never had, too worried at poking at what was obviously a sore topic. There are a lot of witches and wizards that claimed Dark magic was not inherently bad. They believed that somewhere along the way Old magic because synonymous with Dark magic. They believed it was fear mongering done by the muggles during the time of witch burnings, trying to weaken wizards and further force them into hiding by making them hate and fear their own kind. It was exacerbated by those who could only do magic with wands, wanting to level the playing field. Lily had always thought it was just something the death eaters made up to further their cause, but people had believed that long before Voldemort.

The Order members look uncomfortable.

Sirius avoids their eyes, but there’s a stubborn clench to his jaw.

Verity Chamberlain, the unspeakable Moody recruited in order to make the magic in the stones undetectable doesn’t look to be in a hurry to retrieve them. As though touching them would cause that frightening magic to poison and fester inside her too.

Rhys reaches out and grabs his hand and Sirius leans into his side.

“Can we get a spy in?” Lyle Alderton asks.

Various Order members shake their heads.

“Unfortunately we’ve tried that route before,” Dumbledore says. “None of them managed to make it more than a few weeks before You-Know-Who caught on”

“As horrible as it sounds,” Verity says, “we don’t need them to last a couple of weeks”

Most of the Order look uncomfortable at the statement, but only Nora looks like she didn’t agree.

“It doesn’t matter,” Moody says gruffly. “All our current spies are lower level and it will take months at least for them to work their way up”

“There’s no way around it, we’re going to have to capture someone from his inner circle,” Professor McGonagall says.

Lily has been out of Hogwarts for years now but she doesn’t think she will ever stop being Professor McGonagall.

“We tried tha’ before too,” Hagrid says. “’E changes ‘is location as soon as ‘e spots someone missin’”

Lily scrubs a hand tiredly at her face. They’ve been talking in circles for hours now.

“So we don’t let him notice,” Rhys says. Everyone turns to him. “We draw them out, grab someone and have a couple of us interrogate them while the rest are fighting. When we’re done we kill them and you-know-who will just assume they were killed in a duel”

Everybody goes still as they think it over.

“It could work,” Remus says.

“There’s no way he could be changing locations every time a death eater dies,” Sirius says. “He’d never be able to settle”

“…Let’s say we find the location,” Sturgis says. “How do we draw everyone out so that the runes can be planted?”

“Yeah,” Nora agrees. “What’s important enough that we could guarantee that none of his inner circle will be inside?”

“There’s one thing” Lily says.

“Abso-fucking-lutely not!” Alice Longbottom shouts.

“Alice,” Professor McGonagall says.

“No! Do you have any idea what you’re asking us here? You’re asking us to put our son at risk. Our baby”

“This is the only way we can think of to-”

“Screw your only way! Find another fucking way because we’re not fucking doing it!”

“Alice,” it is Frank who cuts in this time.

Lily watches the way he touches her arm, the way Alice holds Neville close to her, rocking him when her raised voice makes him cry. He’s bigger than Harry ever got to grow to be. Her insides hurt. They’re hurting. This is looking at everything she had. This is looking at people that could have been her.

“You can’t be considering this, Frank,” she says. She’s crying. All the fight seems to have been drained out of her at her husband’s gentle touch.

“What if this is the only way?” he asks quietly. “We’ve been in hiding for two years. We’ll keep hiding until he finds us. Is that the life you want for Neville? He’ll never be able to leave this house”

Alice is shaking her head and crying. She has her face pressed into the top of Neville’s head. Frank gathers her into his arms. His face is drawn and tight.

Lily shares a grim look with McGonagall. They know they’re going to say yes.

Sirius and Moody do the interrogating.

Lily leads the fight.

They levitate Rabastan Lestrange’s body back out with them when they return to the fight and dump him among the rubble.

Lily shoots Sirius a look when he catches her eye and he gives a sharp nod.

“Fall back!” she shouts.

The house doesn’t look like much. It’s more than twice the size of the house Lily grew up in but it’s undeniably muggle and as such a strange place for a Death Eater headquarters. Though she supposes that is quite the point. No one would expect them to be there. It’s tall with red bricks and white windows and a green front door. The adjoining houses look the same.

“We should stake out for longer,” Emmeline says, she’s chewing her thumb nail and doesn’t take her eyes off of the house.

“We can’t,” Lily says. “We can’t risk losing the advantage. We’ve got no idea how long they stay in any one place, we’ve got no idea how long they’ve been here already”

Emmeline nods, but keeps chewing.

“What about the muggles?” Emmeline bursts out quite suddenly, pulling her hand from her mouth. It’s clearly the question that’s really been playing on her mind since they got here hours before. “We have no idea how big the blast is going to be, but its exploding runes and Black magic, its not going to be small, or quiet”

Lily had thought the same thing as soon as they’d driven up the street. The houses were big but closely packed. The back gardens were small so even the houses behind wouldn’t be safe.

Lily is pale and her hands were shaking but the set of her mouth is hard.

Lily can remember getting told about what they had dubbed ‘the Whomping Willow incident’. She can remember Sirius telling her how absolutely; atrociously horrible he had felt for months after. Nothing like the depressive lows he got after his mania. He said it was because he had lost respect for himself. He had done something he thought he never would, broken his own morals. He had thought he had been better than that. She hadn’t really understood then. She thinks she does now.

“We can’t evacuate them,” she says quietly. “He’d know”

They stare at the house.

Emmeline starts chewing again.

Sirius had once read their tea leaves everyday.

He had stopped when all he saw was doom and death.

They hadn’t needed tea leaves to tell them that.

He reads hers again now.

She peers over his shoulder to look.

It looks like a soldier, right in the middle of her cup.

She never took divination. He hadn’t either, but reading tea leaves had been a habit he had picked up from his Great Aunt Cassiopeia, or Great Uncle Cass depending on how the metamorphagous most identified that day.

“What does it mean?” she asks.

“If this were you,” Alice starts, she’s looking down at Neville’s sleeping face as Lily, Sirius and Verity put up more wards, “would you have said yes?”

Sirius and Verity share awkward looks but keep working; they know the question isn’t for them.

Lily meets Alice’s eyes.

She turns away.

It’s the first time she’s seen Voldemort since the Halloween before last.

It’s also the most vicious fight yet.

Lily’s stomach is bleeding heavily. Sirius is temporarily blind and Remus has some sort of curse that causes pain with each step. Sturgis, Verity and Moody had been killed, but God, Mad-eye, he’d always seemed immortal. It seems impossible that he’s…

And Frank…Frank had been killed too. Alice and Neville got away. ThankMerlin Alice and Neville got away.

They retreat before Voldemort and his Death Eaters could kill the rest of them. They reconvene at St Mungos. Every single one of them needed the aid of a Healer.

As soon as they have been seen to, Lily, Sirius, Remus, and Rhys apparate three streets over from the Death Eater’s headquarters. McGonagall, Flitwick and Dumbledore join them soon after. The others aren’t far behind. Soon all the remaining members of the Order are gathered. All they can do now is wait and see if their plan was worth it.

Please let it be worth it.

Sirius and Remus flank her, her hands hold tight to them.

They watch the sliver of roof, the only part of the house they can see at this distance.

Please.

Please, please, please.

Let this work.

Just let it work.

It works.

The war is over.

This is the part where everyone is happy and where they are all forgiven, even though they don’t deserve it. And they don’t deserve it.

They throw a party.

There’s booze and cheering: everyone basking in a moment of pure victory. Sure there’s losses, too many to count, bigger than they ever thought they could cope with, but for one night, just one, none of that matters.

Dedalus Diggle lets off fire works and Lily woops and cheers with Sirius as McGonagall shouts herself hoarse. “You stupid, man! What about the muggles?!”

She let’s Sirius twirl her around to the music, laughs merrily when Elphias grabs her in a theatrical dip. She shares a drink with Remus and watches fondly as Sirius and Rhys get a little too fresh in the corner.

For just one night, everything is good.

It doesn’t last of course. There’s still work to be done. The Ministry is overrun. There are trials to be had for the Death Eaters and their supporters, Sirius works so much over time that she scarcely ever sees him. Some civilians take it upon themselves to become Death Eater hunters and deliver justice themselves. Lily would be lying if she says she didn’t consider doing the same. After so long at war, she’s not sure she remembers how to live while doing anything else.

Lily sits at James and Harry’s grave: tries to imagine a life, a whole life, without them. She never thought she would live this long. She never thought…

She doesn’t know how he knew she was here, maybe he was coming anyway, but Sirius drops down beside her, wrapping an arm around her trembling shoulders, and he tucks her close into his side.

He’s got Alphard Black’s special mead in his hand. He uses his teeth to remove the cork since his other hand is on her shoulder and spits it off to the side. He takes a swig and then offers it to her. She takes several long pulls. It’s smooth going down. Sirius’ uncle sure did have the good stuff. She hands the bottle back and Sirius tips a large splash onto the fresh grass between their legs.

“We did it, Prongs,” he says gruffly. “We won”

Lily gets her old job back at St Mungos.

“It’s good to have you back, Lily,” Xiang, the Potions Master tells her as he leads her to the labs at the back of the hospital.

“It’ll be good to be back,” she says, her lips twitching up in a small smile.

She hopes that she’s not lying. She can remember how thrilled she had been to get the job when she finished Hogwarts. She can remember how much she enjoyed going to work every day. She really hopes she can at least get that back.

Xiang raps twice on the lab door before letting himself in. There is only one person in the lab. He’s wearing the same sage green work robes as Lily and he is perched on a stool next to several steaming cauldrons, carefully ladling a viscous blue mixture into a clear bowl.

“Kae,” Xiang says.

He apparently hadn’t heard the knock because Kae jumps violently, spilling the blue mixture onto the bench as he whirls around. The mixture immediately begins to fizzle and pop, eating away at the counter. Seemingly all to used to this, Xiang sighs and cleans up the spill with a wave of his wand.

Kae gives them a sheepish smile. His bottom teeth are a little crooked and his hair is in lots of little black twists, the beginning of dreads, but not quite long enough to get there.

“Kae, this is Lily Potter,” Xiang says. She’s glad he never asked her if she’s changing her name back to Evans. “She’ll be sharing the lab with you”

Kae looks a little surprised at this, but he rallies well with a wide smile.

“I’m Kae Jordon,” he says, holding out his hand to shake.

Lily looks down at the green mush on his fingers and purses her lips. “I’m not going to shake that,” she says.

He, too, looks down at his hand and quickly drops it back to his side. If his skin weren’t so dark she suspects she would be able to see him blushing.

“Understandable”

She likes Kae, she thinks, but weirdly enough, as she begins to get to know him, her first thought is: James would hate you. And he would have. James had been very smart, he read and researched a lot more to pull off his pranks than he would ever let people know, but Kae’s nerdy disposition, Lily knew, was not something James would know how to deal with. Coupled with the fact the man had little to no interest in sport (she doubted he knew one end of a broom from the other) and the way he stumbled over his own words as often as he stumbled over his own feet, James would have had little to no patience dealing with him. It was remarkable that he had been friends with Pettigrew for as long as he had. Lily had long since suspected that if they had met any later than when James was an eleven year old desperate for friends, it never would have happened.

They’re only going to the Leaky Cauldron, but Lily uses the excuse to dress up regardless. It’s been a long time since she’s had the chance. She puts on make up and curls her hair and wears a sparkly top that she had bought simply because she felt like it for the first time in years. They’ve been talking about making a standing dinner date for months now, but this will be the first night they’re putting it into practice. She still lives with Sirius, and Rhys is there more often or not, but it will be nice to see Remus. It will be nice to catch up. It’s nice to actually have things to catch up on that don’t include a list of dead acquaintances.

“-I mean, the man is brilliant, but I just wish the results of his brilliance wouldn’t end up on my shoes so much,” Lily laughs before taking a sip of wine.

“You mention him a lot,” Rhys says with a smile.

She knows he didn’t mean anything by it, that it was a simple observation, but her stomach bottoms out anyway.

Her face must do something complicated because Sirius says, “Hey, babe, would you mind going to get us some more drinks?”

Rhys looks confused at their still half-full drinks for a second before he looks at Lily and says, “Ah, gotcha.” He gives Sirius a quick peck on the lips and goes over to the bar to chat with Tom.

“Are you okay?” Remus asks at the same time Sirius says, “Okay, what’s the matter with you?” Remus elbows Sirius in the side and Sirius sucks his finger and stick it in his ear.

“Ugh, gross, Sirius,” Remus snaps, shoving Sirius, who barks out a laugh, back and scrubs at his ear.

Lily doesn’t even crack a smile.

“I’m a terrible person,” she says.

Remus and Sirius look at her, then each other, and then back at her.

“What the fuck?” is what Sirius says.

“I think we’re going to need some context on that one,” is what Remus says.

“I do mention Kae a lot,” she says.

They share another look. Lily doesn’t even have it in her to glare at them. She’s always hated it when they do that.

“Well,” Remus says carefully. “It’s understandable. He’s practically the only one you work with. You’re with him twelve hours a day sometimes”

Lily considers this, before she shakes her head. She feels like she might cry.

“It’s not just that. I like him. I know I like him,” her head snaps up then and she leans forward. “But I loved James. I do love James. I’ll always love James” she says this hurriedly and she looks rather desperately over their faces as though she needs to make sure they know this.

“Yeah, Lil, we know,” Sirius says quietly, looking a little disturbed.

“I can’t just move on. I can’t just – I mean James and Harry, they are – I’m not moving on, I can’t be moving on. I’m not moving on, am I?” a tear rolls down her cheek and she quickly swipes it.

“Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting them,” Sirius says solemnly. “The people we love never truly leave us, not really”

“…It wouldn’t be so bad, if you did move on that is,” Remus says. “It’s healthy to keep living your life.”

Sirius nods. “James would have wanted you to”

Lily scoffs wetly. “No, he wouldn’t”

Sirius pauses and then laughs, conceding her point.

James had always been possessive and selfish of his friends and wife, disliking when their attention was elsewhere.

Lily had often wondered if that was not the reason why Sirius hadn’t had a long term relationship before. Hell, before she had fully been accepted into the folds, James had gotten jealous when Lily and Sirius first started to hang out without him and got testy at their inside jokes. It had struck her as weird as out of the two of them she was the one prone to jealousy. It had only been when he had gotten annoyed at Pettigrew and Remus for hanging out with a couple of hufflepuffs without them that Lily really understood.

“Maybe you’re right about that,” Sirius says. “But he would have wanted you to be happy”

It’s Emmeline’s first birthday since the war and she’s apparently decided the best way to celebrate is to get so drunk that the bartender had to stop her from climbing up on top of the counter. Twice.

Finally realising she was not going to be able to wrangle her friend, Lily returns to the table where Sirius is sat, nursing a beer.

“Where’s Rhys?” she asks.

Sirius gestures over to the bar with his beer bottle. Rhys has been accosted by a pretty blonde girl at the bar. She’s trailing fingers over his one arm and looking up at him, wide-eyed, seemingly not picking up on the stiff set to his shoulders as he all but physically leans away from her. Since the war, and Rhys’ obvious resultant handicap, various people have been thanking him for his service, commenting on how brave he must be. For Rhys, who had no notable friends bar surviving Order members and those he knows through Sirius, the entire thing was jarring and he never seemed to know what to say.

Lily snorts. “Are you not going to go save him?”

Unlike Rhys, Sirius has no issue telling people to fuck off with their thanks.

“Nah,” Sirius says, taking a drink. “He needs to learn eventually”

Lily laughs and then looks over towards Kae, who is speaking earnestly to Remus, not seeming to notice the way he is spilling the majority of the beer in his glass as he makes sweeping hand gestures. Remus grimaces and sends apologetic looks to those closest. Lily smiles and smothers a laugh.

She looks back to Sirius and see that his eyes are also on the two men. She doesn’t bother to say anything, Sirius’ opinion was rarely something you had to ask for, so she just waited.

“James would have hated him,” is what he eventually says.

“Oh, definitely,” Lily agrees readily. She hesitates. “…and what do you think?”

Sirius turns to look at her. He doesn’t smile but his eyes are soft. “I think he’s good for you”

“I think so to,” she says quietly.

They both look back over to Kae and Remus just in time to see Remus steadying Kae with a rather alarm expression as Kae almost trips and falls over nothing at all.

Sirius snorts.

“I can hear him now, ‘Can’t even stand up straight, maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t like sports, the guy would be a fucking hazard’” Sirius affects James’ Scottish accent perfectly.

Not having expected it, Lily laughs hard enough for beer to come out of her nose. Sirius barks out a laugh as she grabs a napkin to mop at her face.

“’And his stupid glasses-‘” he continues.

Lily dons an innocent incredulity. “-but, James, you where glasses”

Sirius gives an approximation of what James’ sputtering response would be, though he doesn’t pull it off nearly as well as he does the accent. “’W – w – well that’s just – that’s different, isn’t it? Mine don’t make me look like a twat!’”

Lily's shrieking laughter blends with Sirius’ and they lean against each other until they can get their breath back. Lily swipes under her eyes with her thumbs to get rid of the tears.

“God, he was such a bastard,” Sirius is grinning.

Lily’s smile turns into something soft. She’s glad they can share a laugh at his memory. James deserves that.

“To surviving the war” she says, tipping her glass towards him.

“To James” he says back.

He clinks the neck of his bottle against her glass.

“Always”

In love stories the ending would have the Prince victorious, the gruesome details left out, and the Princess falling into his arms.

This wasn’t a love story. This story tells of a Princess watching from her tower, too high up to see the details, but close enough to see the bodies lying still and the red painting the ground. Maybe the Princess was screaming, but no one was there to hear, so maybe she didn’t make a sound at all. Grief could be like that sometimes.

“She doesn’t need to hear that sort of thing, Dad”

“It could come in useful one day, Rosie”

“When will she ever need to know that?”