Disclaimer: Not mine. All Jo's.
"LET'S GO!"
Mary Cattermole broke away from her husband long enough to put a face to the voice. Only then did she realize. The effects of the Polyjuice potion were wearing off quick and she watched as the man they called Runcorn started to transform.
She watched as his arms and legs shrunk in size and his body became noticeably…thinner.
Lanky is the word I'm looking for, she thought, suddenly. His black curls straightened out until every strand was pin straight and sticking up in an oddly familiar way.
A melancholy feeling rushed through her and she couldn't quite place it until brown eyes turned to green and the beard disappeared to reveal the face of a man much younger than Albert Runcorn. A face she had seen before.
As Harry Potter apparated out of the Ministry, Mary Cattermole felt as though she couldn't breathe. Her widened eyes refused to close even as Reginald desperately clutched her to himself.
She had seen that face in what seemed like another life but, not so long ago, she had known that face.
"He looks a lot like James, doesn't he?" Reginald would say, later that night.
"Not exactly. Lily's there. But his hair is his father's, no doubt." How many times had she seen James run his hands through a similar monster atop his head? How many times had she heard Lily threaten to slice it all off and tame the beast once and for all?
"His nose is hers, though." She continued. The nose was tricky, yet, undeniably, Lily's. It was smaller than James' and not as sharp. "The eyebrows too." James Potter's eyebrows had had a mind of their own. They danced along with his every word. Lily's were more gentle. When James Potter raised an eyebrow at you, he'd been naughty. When Lily Evans raised an eyebrow, you'd been naughty.
"His lips are James'," she added. "They're shaped the same way." She'd kissed them both. It was a drunken experiment during a particularly brutal game of truth or dare. They were definitely James' lips. Lips that seemed to be smiling even when they weren't.
"His eyes…"
"They're Lily's."
Mary smiled at her husband. They were, indeed.
"You only saw him for a second." Reginald remarked. "How on Earth did you manage to catch all that?"
Silence.
The truth was, she hadn't. The image in her mind was a flurry of black and white and green. But she had seen a similar face in her dreams before. Just as she had seen a little boy with blonde curls reminiscent of Marlene's. Or twins with Dorcas' dimpled cheeks. Or even a baby girl cradled in Sirius's arms, looking up at him with the same dangerously grey eyes. (Though she knew the last one was a long shot, even in her dreams.)
The truth was, Mary Cattermole often wondered what might've been. She would dream up dinner parties and love affairs and beautiful, beautiful children. It was so easy, too. It was like changing the ending to your favorite tragedy so that, somehow, it wasn't a tragedy anymore. The characters were just as close to her heart as they had been almost twenty years ago. She would hold on to them for as long as she could.
-the end-
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