Ruin

For the next moment or so, everything is silent.

As they stand there, wands still raised and staring at the suddenly empty street, a thousand questions run through Lily’s mind. Where have they gone? Why did they leave so suddenly? Is this part of the plan? In all the roadside scrambles and random attacks she had witnessed, the Death Eaters would not leave until they’d left a few bodies and sufficient destruction behind. But then again, Voldemort had never personally supervised their efforts before…

She can hear James breathing heavily next to her, his hand a solid warmth in hers. Sirius, who stands beside them, begins to lower his wand, but Moody snarls, “Don’t put it away, boy!” and he jerks it back up, shoulders tense and eyes alert.

And so they wait in the midst of the smoking café and ruined cobbled street, watching for any sign of movement. Lily’s not sure how much time passes, but she’s still painfully aware of the bodies that litter the ground, eerily still and fragile.

Suddenly, there is a loud crack! and five wands point at the sound, moments away from uttering a curse. The man that has just appeared raises his arms, terrified, and cries out, “Don’t stun! I’m from the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes!”

A beat, and Lily takes in his dark, formal robes, a ‘MOM’ badge pinned to his lapel. Finally, wands are lowered all around. Caradoc approaches and begins to brief the Ministry employee on the events that occurred and the attention it garnered. Moody lets out a loud harrumph!, barks, “Aurors, with me!” and begins to round up the fallen Death Eaters, with Gideon and Fabian Prewett and other Aurors following suit.

She feels James lets out a harsh breath next to her and turns to him, allowing herself to finally look him over. Apart from a graze on his cheek, she’s relieved to find that he’s completely unharmed. Sirius is worse for wear; they each sport a few cuts along their faces and, she suspects, their bodies, but she can’t see beyond the long coats they wear.

“How did they find us?” Lily asks them quietly as they watch the clean-up commence. “I hadn’t told anyone apart from James and you lot that the society were meeting, or where we would be.”

James shrugs helplessly. “Haven’t the foggiest.”

“That’s comforting,” Sirius mutters, and they all fall silent at the implications of this.

For weeks, now, there had been rumours of a spy within the Order. They were mere whispers, suspicions here and there, but apart from a few narrow run-ins with the enemy, there was no real reason to believe it could be true – until now.

But who? Lily can’t, for the life of her, think of anyone within their ranks who’d willingly give everyone else away. The thought troubles her as she watches them lift Dorcas’s body gently, placing her across a levitating stretcher. Benjy stands beside her, looking down at her limp form with a strange expression, and Lily swallows back a lump in her throat. Dorcas – the witch she’d always admired for her steely resolve, the Auror frequently dotting the pages of The Daily Prophet with stories of daring captures, the woman who’d smiled warmly at her in welcome when she’d first joined the Order… Benjy closes her eyes.

Just then, they hear another crack and five different Aurors turn towards the sound. In dark robes and looking thoroughly dishevelled, Peter emerges, his mousy brown hair sticking up at odd ends, his small eyes wide and terrified.

“Maybe he’ll have word on Remus,” Sirius mutters, raising his hand to catch the shorter man’s attention and beckoning him over. “Bad luck, mate – you’ve missed out on all the action.”

“Sirius,” Peter breathes, “James, Lily. I didn’t know you’d be here – where’s Remus?”

“Well, there’s your question answered, Pads,” James sighs.

Peter has gone white. “He’s not – you mean to say –”

“He wasn’t here with us,” Sirius cuts him off, sounding annoyed. “We’d thought you might know.”

“No, no – I’ve been at the office all day, paperwork, you know –”

“Yes, yes,” Sirius waves him off. “Thought you’d get our message, though.”

If possible, Peter’s face seems to lose the little more colour that it has left. “It’s been mad,” is all he says, but none of them question it. It’s no surprise that Peter would have been too afraid to aid them in a fight, especially after their last scuffle with the Death Eaters. Lily supposes she can’t exactly blame him; he’d nearly lost his arm, then.

“At least you bothered to show up,” Sirius says bitterly.

“Sirius,” James says sharply, and they all fall silent.

Since she had first started dating James, Lily had come to realise that the Marauders not only spent their entire school year together, but their summers and Christmas breaks, too. There’s never one without the other three, and for the first few weeks of her marriage to James, she’d become well accustomed to the fact. But over the past two months, it’s become glaringly obvious that Remus has tended to disappear more often than not. And when he does show up, he’s far more quiet and sullen than usual.

Lily had pinned this down to the war – Merlin knows they’re all exhausted by it. Looking at Sirius’s look of morose expression, however, makes her heart sink a little. She’s glad James, at least, is firm in his convictions.

With this in mind, she reaches out and catches Sirius’s hand; he looks up sharply at her. “We have to trust each other,” she says quietly. He glances down at their joint hands and looks up again, grey eyes searching green. Slowly, he nods.

A voice calls out her name and they break out of their reverie. She turns to see Benjy and Caradoc jogging towards their little group, both looking a little worse for wear but ultimately unharmed. “Are you all right?” Caradoc asks, looking at all of them in turn.

“No serious injuries, Doc,” James shakes his head, smiling without mirth.

“Good,” the older man says, shifting into a businesslike tone. “We’ll have to take your statements.”

They nod; of course, Caradoc, as a Senior Auror, would need an account of everything that had happened here today to report back to the Auror department. James and Sirius gesture for her to go first, so briefly, but with as much detail as she could remember, she recounts her version of the event: being thrown back by the blast, overhearing them speaking of a plan, realising he’d known Benjy and Caradoc would be here, and – James runs a stressed hand through his hair at this – her encounter with Voldemort. Both Aurors are gobsmacked when she tells them that he’d heard of her exploits in school and tried to recruit her.

“Well, of course, most of his Death Eaters are Hogwarts graduates,” Caradoc mutters, shaking her head. “But – forgive me, Lily, but you’re not exactly his… type, are you?”

She thinks about how he’d formulated his plan today around killing Muggles and Muggleborns, and how he’d probably consider her blood just as filthy. “No, not exactly,” she says dryly.

“Do you have any idea why he’d ask Lily to join him?” James cuts in.

Caradoc and Benjy exchange a brief look. “Well,” the latter says slowly, “all the Death Eaters we know of are intelligent, highly capable witches and wizards. If not academically gifted, they tend to excel in one field or another. Maybe he thought you’d… sympathise?”

Lily snorts. “Fat chance.”

Benjy shrugs. “I don’t claim to understand the madman’s actions. It’s why we’re fighting this war in the first place. Anyway…” He turns back to Sirius. “What happened with you?”

“We were trying to get them to stop killing the Muggles,” Sirius says immediately. “James and I came as soon as we heard, and – it was chaos, and Muggles were running about and getting hit everywhere. James had gone off to look for Lily, so I tried to get them out of the way while the others handled the Death Eaters. Then, the top of the café exploded, and You Know Who gets thrown into the fray – it was mad. I reckon he was really angry about your stunner, James, because he turned on the rest of us. Started duelling the Prewetts and Dorcas. And, well – you know how that ended. He disapparated after that.”

Caradoc purses his lips, nodding. “Thank you. That’s all I need from you, I should think. If you’d all rather return to your homes…”

At the mention of home, Lily becomes suddenly aware of the weariness in her bones, the exhaustion of another fight. She forces herself to push this back, saying, “Thanks, Doc. Take care of yourself too, alright?”

“Yeah…” Caradoc mutters, running a hand through sandy brown hair. “We’ll – we should have a drink, for Dorcas. Tomorrow, perhaps. I’ll send an owl.”

With that, they watch as he turns and walks back towards Moody, speaking to the burlier man in low undertones.

“Any idea what he meant by his ‘plan’?” James asks, fixing his gaze on the remaining Auror.

Benjy sighs. “Not that we know of. They seem to come up with new plans every other day. Doc’s been swamped, lately,” he tells them quietly. “There’s been an attempted attack at the Prophet offices. Of course, the Ministry’s been trying to keep it quiet, but can you imagine if word had gotten out? There’s enough panic as it is without his lot writing the headlines.” He shakes his head. “Anyway – we’ll call a meeting once we get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, just… be careful.”

He gives Lily a short squeeze, shakes hands with James, Sirius and Peter, and jogs back towards the other Aurors.

“Be careful.” Sirius snorts. “Like that’s new.”

“It’s worth a listen,” Peter says quietly.

“But quite impossible, with the war going on,” James says shortly. “Doc’s right, we should be off – coming, Pads, Pete?”

Sirius nods but Peter shakes his head, so they bid him goodbye and apparate back to Godric’s Hollow. Lily sends an owl to James’s parents to let them know they're safe while James heats up their leftover chicken, and Sirius brings out some Butterbeer for them as they seat themselves on the small dining table. They eat silently, at first, but then Sirius cracks a joke and Lily can’t help the small smile, and James gives them both a look of such tenderness that warmth spreads through her chest.

And, she thinks, even if there’s a war going on, even if everyone around them is slowly dying, at least she still has James. She has James, and Sirius, and Peter and Remus – wherever he is. They descend into laughter as the night wears on, the conversation flowing easily, and she leans into James’s arms around her, his palm curling around her waist to rest protectively over her still flat stomach. The world around them burns, but tonight, her world is right here.

Their moment of bliss is interrupted by a grey owl, tapping at their window.

Caradoc had never made it home that night.