One for the road
By
IllusiveBirds
RATED M FOR LANGUAGE AND MENTIONS OF SEX
They were the next generation, brought up on war and rebellion. Taught to live fast and die young.
At the age of ten you can remember seeing your father come home from work one day, face sagging with bruise like marks staining underneath his eyes. Your mum fixes him a drink and rubs his back soothingly as you stare quietly from behind the kitchen door. It's your bedtime and you're hankering to stay up and just finish this chapter because it's really getting interesting.
Yet the book lays forgotten on the sofa, because as your father lifts the glass his lips to drain it in one gulp, he says with closed eyes, just one for the road.
At the time you didn't understand and thought he was going away on a journey on a physical road, but now at the age of seventeen, as you stagger off the Scarlett train at hogsmeade station, slytherins laughing at your stumble, and stare at Hogwarts before you, you finally understand.
He died a week later from lung cancer which, the neighbours would remark, wasn't surprising seeing as he smoked like a train every day.
And as you push past the still sniggering slytherins you think to yourself that life is just a really long sucky road and only ends when the pavement stops and you're walking on air wondering how the fuck you ended up here.
There are no subtle warnings nor blaring signs, suddenly it happens until it's all you can see; death and a lot of it. At the age of 17 you keep thinking you're too young; too young to fight, too young to fall in love, too young to die.
You've had to grow up fast. Seeing the gaunt, stress lined faces on the platform that September at kings cross told you all you had missed whilst at home in a blissfully unaware Cokeworth.
Few students return to school, but you try to ignore the gaping benches at the end of the tables, even after the firsts years are sorted and the whispers travel down towards you like a forest fire. Fifth and seventh years are in the many that do return but all show the effects of the looming war in their red rimmed eyes and solemn expressions. The rest deem home safer than Hogwarts – which you remark as stupid because Dumbledore is the only person Voldemort fears. Others merely would rather be with their family when the war looms to its peak.
By Christmas there's even less. You stay at school; lying to your parents with the excuse of strenuous head duty's and school work. Returning home is just too risky and you know it - as well as all the others who wade through the thick snow on Christmas morning, straining to lighten the bleak mood that hangs around the castle like London smog - Hogwarts is the safest place you could be right now.
You surround yourself in work and… him.
Like alcohol he is intoxicating and beautifully mind numbing and he tells you the same in between whispered sighs on those darkened winter nights. You kiss and you can almost forget that there is a war going on outside, almost.
But when they come that late Friday night in February, fear grips your heart and dread starts to pool in your stomach, because it was wrong to pretend.
You can do nothing, and you sit helplessly holding that tiny first years hand as she lies broken on the floor. It's alright, you're okay you say, praying that James hurry's up, but it is in vain and she becomes another casualty that haunts the corners of your mind.
Later, you find each other, because that's all you can do. And you blindly stumble into his bedroom, clawing at each other's clothes, impatient to feel something, desperate for skin on skin, flesh moulding together. You end up drunk on his scent as he trails kisses along your stomach, left reeling as stars pepper your vision.
You forget for a little while because you know as long as you're together you'll be fine and he takes a drink and you whisper just one for the road as your glasses clink together.
A fateful Hogsmeade trip fixes your future firmly in your mind as you are left struggling, watching Mary scream in agony. You feel the sharp gleeful tug of the death eater that grips your hair in an iron fist as she disappears in a flare of green light. You shriek her name and the death eater is forced away to be replaced by a dirt-ridden Sirius who is pulling you back forcibly as you try to writhe out of his grip, to get to the lifeless body of your friend that lay's before you.
Mismatched cracks of apparition surround you as aurors appear and Sirius pulls you in as you sob into his shoulder.
When you see him, you run and he captures you in his arms and you feel more at home than anywhere else.
They only capture two death eaters and it's not enough compensation as you cling to your last friend left at Hogwarts, Marlene who holds on to you with equal force, watching as the wood panelled coffin drops into the ground with a heavy, final thud.
Not even the thought of how it was what she wanted helps. Even though you can hear her voice in your head from nearly nine months before saying, "That's how I'll go; fighting, young and beautiful." Smiling as she follows with, "well, semi-beautiful." And you reminisce that night in September and just how right she was.
You can't help thinking that's how you'll all go.
It hurts the most when you wake up screaming, but his arms are already wrapped around you warm, strong and soothing as you whisper, "James?" even though it could be no one else but him.
Come graduation you're both orphans and unprepared to fight but you're willing and as Mad-eye says, that's all that matters in war.
Auror training takes less than 6 months and the time is both a blessing and a curse. He is always by your side and when you spend the first night in your new flat, you think it's the first time you've seen his beaming smile in a while. You clink glasses with the thought; just one for the road.
However you are far from happy. You can trust no one. Marlene goes out burning in flames a day after your and James' two year anniversary with a shining, glimmering ring on your finger.
You're married by August and spend a heat filled weekend in Scotland before you are rushed back to London for a battle of extreme proportions. It start and ends in less than 3 hours but the injuries are severe but luck seems to be on your side as you walk away with only a fractured arm, thanking a God that your no longer sure exists that James survived with no more than mottled bruises painted on his skin.
Soon Gideon and Fabien Prewett fall next after a line of friends and acquaintances that no one had the strength to bury properly.
Then Christmas comes bringing anxiety. Peter goes missing and returns with a furtive, hurried look in his eyes, as he collapses at the door of an order meeting, waking up with no recollection of the days he missed.
And then you're ill and he is worried, standing behind you morning after morning as you heave over the toilet, searching your face as you tell him you're fine but you're not because all of a sudden you know. You're pregnant. There is a thing inside of you, not yet a baby and you're bringing it into a world marred by hatred and thousands surrendering to blindly follow a leader who wants nothing more than death. Stupid, stupid, you think as the 3rd test comes back positive again. And you cry for the innocence you lost, for baring a child at 20 into this crap world and you hate yourself for it. You pour a drink into a glass with shaking hands and raise it to your chapped lips.
One for the road and a fucking crap road it shall be.