I'm very grateful to my amazing beta Susan M. M., who did a fantastic job spotting stray commas and other errors. Any remaining mistakes are my own. I've drawn heavily on Hippothestrowl's excellent time line for the Battle of Hogwarts, and am indebted to him for sharing it. This story is firmly set in the bookverse, and it's canon-compliant to the best of my ability.
Chapter 1
-oOo-
Justin was quite sure he'd never see Hogwarts again.
Maybe he should have gone to Eton instead. Right now, he would have been fretting about how his exams had gone instead of preparing to go to war. Would his grades have been enough for-
Justin couldn't make his imagination stretch to guessing what he'd want to do at university if he'd been a proper Muggle. If everything had been different. It would never happen, so there was no point in thinking about it.
There were a lot of things Justin avoided thinking about during the summer after his sixth year at Hogwarts. Most of the time, he was quite successful in pretending even to himself that it was a summer like any other. The day of his disappearance from the Muggle world was rapidly approaching, but as long as he didn't acknowledge it he was able to potter around the way he usually did during the holidays without anyone being the wiser.
He only slipped up once.
His cousin Cressida was getting married to some fellow barrister, and she'd invited all the Finch-Fletchleys to the wedding. Justin wasn't very keen on weddings in general, but he liked his cousin. Besides, they'd all want to know why he didn't want to go if he declined. The last thing Justin wanted was to kick up a fuss just before he was leaving, so he dutifully marked the day in his calendar and made sure he had a clean suit.
On the day of the wedding, they all piled into the car and drove down to Oxford. It was hot to the point of suffocation before his father got the air conditioning running, and even then Justin was sweating as soon as he got out at the church.
The service was all right; he even managed an embarrassed sort of prayer, before it all went to pieces at the wedding breakfast
Cressida had seated Justin on his own, with other distant cousin and a couple of slightly weird friends of hers who were much older than him. The wedding guests were dressed in morning grey suits and colourful dresses, and if they weren't calling out to acquaintances at other table, odds were that they were chatting loudly about how late the meal was running.
Justin could have sworn that the ceiling was descending slowly towards him before it suddenly stopped. The elaborate arrangements of lilies and something frothy-looking Cressida had spent ages choosing seemed to be hovering in the air.
The crisp linen tablecloth and the meticulously arranged row of wine glasses suddenly didn't seem real, as if he were watching a film. Or like he was in a film, he wasn't sure.
Surreptitiously, he looked around him. No one else seemed to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Staring at the butter dish in front of him, Justin forced himself to breathe in and out steadily, trying not to make a complete fool of himself.
He thought he had succeeded until he looked up, straight into the eyes of his brother Rupert, who was at the next table with some of Cressida's London friends. They were looking tipsy already.
Rupert tilted his head towards the French doors open to the gardens and slipped out of his seat, leaving his top hat behind perched on his seat. After a minute Justin followed him, mumbling an excuse to cousin Imogen as he squeezed his way past her. She didn't even pause her monologue about her pet alpacas.
Once outside, the spinning slowed down and the world seemed to be revolving gently rather than reeling out of control.
Rupert offered him a cigarette, still without a word.
"No, thanks. Still don't smoke."
"Suit yourself. It helps, though."
Justin didn't ask with what. Instead he let the heat from the afternoon sun lingering in the stone wall behind him settle in his bones, dispelling the feeling of being a spectator to someone else's life.
"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy," he admitted, looking out on the impossibly perfect lawn before them. "I don't know what's real, this or- or what's happening in my world."
It wasn't until he'd already said it that he realised that he'd picked a side without even noticing.
Ever since he'd first got his Hogwarts letter all those years ago, Justin had always insisted that he belonged in the Muggle world as well. He wasn't going to abandon his family just because he could go where they couldn't. Rupert had argued with him then, and Justin knew hadn't changed his mind since.
Fortunately, he didn't bring it up now.
"I know," his older brother said instead. "You think both worlds can't exist at the same time, and yet they do. Only most people are oblivious to what's happening so close to their quiet little lives."
"Yes," Justin replied, a little taken aback. "Yes, that's exactly it. They have no idea, none at all, and now the war's on their doorstep-"
"What, here?"
For the first time Justin saw his brother as a soldier. Rupert had lost the slouch and looked as tense as a coiled spring. His shoulders were squared and there was a fierce look in his eyes as they swept the lawn for any threats.
There was a sharpness to him that Justin recognised from wizards he had met. Mad-Eye Moody had it, and so did Snape. It was a strange thing to see in his own brother, and a little reassuring.
Perhaps Justin would be able to find the same fortitude in himself, too.
"Relax, they're not about to burst in on us," he hastened to reassure Rupert, while hoping very much that he was right. He was a Hufflepuff – Justin didn't think Voldemort was going to hunt him down specially. "Things are – There's a war going on in my world, and it might spill over to the Muggle- normal world."
Quickly, he explained to Rupert in very broad terms what was going on, including the misdirection charms he had wrangled out of Professor Flitwick before leaving Hogwarts. Hopefully he'd be able to protect his family from detection by anyone magical.
"What about you? They can still find you, can't they?" Rupert was frowning, and still hadn't abandoned his soldier's stance.
"I know. That's why I'm leaving the day before I'm due before the Muggle-Born Registration Commission."
"You – No, that's not on. No. Justin, you're seventeen – you're not going off on your own. Not if there is a war on. Forget about it. I won't let you-" Rupert was almost sputtering.
Justin hadn't seen him this animated since before he'd been sent to Bosnia, just after he'd graduated from Sandhurst.
Rupert had come home for good after a year and a half, but the easy-going elder brother with the ready smile seemed to have been left in Bosnia. They'd got a stranger with flat eyes and curt words instead, and now it suddenly occurred to Justin that Rupert mightn't want the same thing to happen to his younger brother.
Justin had made his mind up long ago, though.
"It's no use. You can't stop me," he said, trying to sound confident. "Even if you could, would you really want me to hide away? Don't get me wrong, I'll go underground but I will fight."
He jutted out his jaw and tried to stretch an extra inch to match Rupert's height. It was equally useless now as when he had been ten years old and a foot had separated them, but it seemed to work anyway.
"No. I want you to promise me you'll be careful, though," Rupert said eventually.
"As careful as I can," Justin promised. He didn't particularly want to die, so it was an easy promise to make. It wasn't until later that he realised that keeping it might be a different matter.
In the beginning, it was almost a bit of a lark.
Justin had known he wouldn't come back to Hogwarts after Dumbledore's death, so he had asked around the DA before leaving after the funeral. Out of the names Nigel from the DA had whispered to him, Tonks had been the only familiar one.
She'd visited her old house when she had been stationed at Hogwarts the year of the Dementors, and Justin remembered her well. It was hard not to – he'd never met anyone else who could change the colour of their hair at will, never mind all the other stuff she could do.
Justin became a member of the Muggle-born Clean-up Operation, together with Penelope Clearwater.
Tonks was their link to the Order of the Phoenix, but her involvement only stretched to teaching them a few handy charms and passing on names and addresses of Muggle-born Hogwarts students and others who may be targeted. Penelope and Justin travelled around Britain, laying protective charms and warding the homes of their old school friends as best they could.
Some names were a surprise: Justin hadn't known Tracey Davis' family was Muggle. It only went to show that Gryffindor and Slytherin were labels stuck on you, not shorthand for what you really were.
Some of the people he'd gone to school with would do well to remember that.
Penelope turned out to be a good sort, even if she was a bit stiff in the beginning. She hadn't been too impressed with being assigned to someone who was only seventeen, but Justin liked to think he'd won her over eventually.
For months they worked together without incident, mostly creeping around suburban neighbourhoods in the dark where the biggest challenge was not to set off any dogs.
Hiding under a hedge for several hours in the pouring rain while waiting for the Creeveys to go to sleep wasn't too bad – not when they took turns imagining more and more outrageous reasons why the next-door neighbour still had a Christmas tree up in August.
"She's been dead since January, and no one's come to see her."
"Idiot. She's sitting there, watching Coronation Street."
"That's her ghost, of course. Are you a witch or not?"
"What's that?" Penelope craned her neck to see across the neat hedge into the Creeveys' house.
"It's-" Justin cut himself off and grabbed Penelope's arm. Her muffled squeak made him loosen his grip a little, but he didn't apologise. He was busy staring at the figure in dark robes moving silently across the Creeveys' lawn, blond hair shining in the orange streetlight.
Somehow, Justin had been expecting two of them. His mind seemed to be stuck in a curious loop, wondering who it was and why the single Death Eater wasn't wearing a mask.
"STUPEFY!" Fortunately, he didn't need to think to act: hours upon hours of DA training had the spell on the tip of his tongue before he knew it.
"Petrificus Totalus." Penelope looked pale, but her wand was steady.
They cautiously advanced to the lawn and the lifeless man on the ground. No one else seemed to have noticed anything amiss; the restless flickering of the TV screen next door was the only sign that anyone else was still awake.
Justin kicked the fallen man's cloak aside, revealing nondescript clothing underneath – he couldn't even tell if it were wizarding or Muggle.
"Recognise him?"
"No. Do you?"
Tonks had given them a list of known Death Eaters. The only ones Justin had met were Snape and the two Malfoys, and this wasn't any of them.
"No. What do we do now?"
They looked at each other.
Justin was fairly sure that Penelope would agree if he suggested sending a Patronus to Tonks to ask for help. She looked as lost as he was feeling.
He didn't say anything.
This was their job – they were fighting in a war, they couldn't run to the teacher and ask for help when something finally happened.
Standing on the suburban lawn somewhere in Shropshire, he felt entirely cut off from all the normal people around them, who slept and watched TV and ate dinner without knowing that there was a war being fought in the shadows outside.
He could still be one of them: if he hid his wand and went somewhere no one knew him, no one would know he was a wizard...
That would be the act of a coward: Finch-Fletchleys didn't run and hide when they were needed. Justin squeezed his wand tighter and stretched his back a little, just like when he tried to look taller next to his brother, and tried to solve the problem at hand.
"Can't we Obliviate him?" he suggested, trying to ignore how dry his mouth felt. .
"Won't he just come back later, then? Besides, I don't know how to do it."
"Me neither," Justin admitted. He'd thought Penelope would, but perhaps it was unfair to expect a witch who'd only been out of Hogwarts a few years to know all the spells he didn't. "We need to get the Creeveys out of here, anyway – otherwise they might send someone else."
It was very tempting to give the unconscious Death Eater a good kick, but Justin restrained himself to pocketing the man's wand. Tonks could pass it on to someone who needed it.
"Penelope, what's the furthest from civilisation you've ever been?"
They left the nameless Death Eater on a rocky island north of Skye. Justin had gone sailing around Scotland one wet summer with his uncle, and he remembered the place well, since they'd spent two miserable days there waiting for a storm to die down.
There were no Muggles here, just rocks and seagulls and green grass. The coastline was visible, so if the Death Eater were a strong swimmer he'd be able to get to the mainland. If not, there was a shipping route nearby, so he would be spotted before he could starve. Maybe he'd even be grateful to the Muggles for saving him.
It wasn't ideal, but short of murder it was the best they could think of.
