With so many family members that made up the Weasley-Potter family, it felt like there was a birthday party or some other type of celebration being thrown every other week, with Roxy's weekends dedicated to finding just the perfect gift for Aunt Fleur or Hugo or her grandparent's anniversary.

Today was no exception, with Lily turning twenty-one as well as officially revealing the gender of her baby, a secret she had kept up until now, well into month seven, despite knowing herself for quite some time.

Lily hadn't even let Aunt Ginny know the truth, insisting that no one else needed to now until Lily was ready to tell them.

Apparently today was that day.

But there was also Granddad's birthday happening on Monday and Aunt Fleur's on Sunday, which were both usually lumped together with Lily's for convenience's sake. This was simply how things worked in the Weasley family—even birthdays could not be special, personal occasions. Not that Roxy was complaining. At least there were presents.

On the Sunday before, Lily had brought up her desire to have her birthday at the Potter home, and that it would meet her liking, which Aunt Ginny and Grandmum hadn't appreciated, but to which Granddad agreed with quickly, giving Lily a pleasant smile.

(Apparently he had decided to be smart and not get into an argument with the great debater that was Lily Potter.)

It was good that, of all the family members, Granddad and Aunt Fleur were the one to share a birthday celebration with Lily, since she loved so very much to be the centre of attention whenever possible and both adults were more than willing to let Lily have the celebrations focus entirely on her so that they could just enjoy being with their family for the day.

"And since this is my party, I get to decide who to invite, right? So, no ex-boyfriends—"

"Well, there goes half of Britain," James said with a chuckle, but Lily only glared at him until her older brother stopped grinning at his attempt at a joke.

"I suppose since I'll be discussing, that it'd be appropriate for Tolkien to be there, but none of the others. And I also don't want to invite any of the Professors this year, either. Or Mum's Quidditch friends or Dad's Auror friends. It's my party." Lily crossed her arms and looked around at her extended family with an intense expression on her face to indicate that there would be absolutely no exceptions to this request—or demand, rather, which was what it really was.

(Roxy thought that Lily was being a bit childish, in all honesty. It was just a birthday party.)

"What about Professor Longbottom, dear? Don't you like to have him at your parties? He's always been so close to our family, it'd be wrong not to invite him, don't you agree?" Aunt Ginny reached across the table to pat her daughter's hand, but Lily only pulled away, rolling her eyes in annoyance.

"Mum, he's your friend, not mine, and besides that, I cannot stand his daughter, Tilly. She's so full of herself just because she was in Ravenclaw and her dad is a professor and he'll probably be the next Headmaster, like all of that somehow makes her better than everyone else."

"And you aren't full of yourself? You don't think you're better than everyone you've ever met?" Albus, who sat to Roxy's left, spoke in such a low tone that she was pretty sure that no one else was able to hear what he had said.

She gave him a grin when Lily wasn't looking and her cousin winked in return.

"But it's my birthday, so we're gonna have the party my way, yeah?" Lily's voice left no room for doubt that she would absolutely through the biggest fit right then and there if anyone dared to continue disagreeing with her.

And that was how they arrived here, six days later, standing in the Potter house while music played and Aunt Ginny kept running around, yelling at Lily's friends to keep their feet off of the sofa and to turn the music down and to slow down on the Butterbeer and Firewhiskey until she finally gave up and headed up to her and Uncle Harry's bedroom with the insistence that absolutely no one wake her up until it was time to cut the cake, disappearing with the threat that anyone who did wake her up would suffer at the hand of her most powerful Bat-Bogey Hex that she could manage.

(It was a pretty frightening idea, to say the least.)

Roxy didn't know even half of the people that Lily had somehow packed into the house, which was much larger than the Diagon Alley flat or even the Burrow, yet was still overflowing with people. Various guests kept walking past to get food and drinks and Roxy's couldn't have guessed a single one of their names or where they would have ever met Lily before now.

Everything felt so differently now that she was more focused on finding out and uncovering what was beginning to feel like all the secrets to the universe. There simply wasn't time to go out and party at all hours with so many other people like Lily seemed to be doing even though she was more than seven months pregnant.

(Lily swore that she didn't drink or do drugs when she went out, but she also swore that she loved Grandmum's Christmas jumpers and then never, ever wore them—in fact, Roxy knew there was a pile of them sitting in the back of Lily's closet right at this very moment.)

Roxy didn't agree with any of it. She didn't really agree with a lot of the things that Lily did, especially recently, but Roxy also didn't think she was in much of a position to say anything about it whenever Lily went farther than was wise. After all, it didn't matter if Lily was the far less mature of the two cousins, she was still older and Roxy wouldn't have felt comfortable telling Lily off anyway.

Usually, she was only confrontational when it came to Tilly or her more obnoxious co-workers and even then, there were limits.

Besides that, her head was far too busy bussing with thoughts of what she had found in the archives to properly focus on Lily's out of control behaviour or her party full of people that Roxy didn't know in the slightest. There were far more important things consuming her life at that moment, as condescending as saying such a thing sounded.

Brennan had wanted to take the files to his house, insisting that as the eldest (and the only male, though at least he hadn't had the indecency to say as much out loud) he was the most mature and was capable of taking care of the files, considering that he was the only of one the four of them that even worked in the archives and, therefore, had the most experience in handling papers of a sensitive nature such as these.

The girls, unanimous for once, argued tha this was entirely the wrong thing to do on the grounds that he wasn't actually part of the group and so, Roxy now had a box of stolen Ministry files sitting underneath her bed like a bomb that was just waiting to go off at a moment's notice.

And in another (absolutely terrifying) big change of her life—Jo, Roxy, and her co-worker Aniya would all be moving into a flat together in the recently constructed private housing sector of Diagon Alley. It was a new idea, having people living in the area who didn't own shops below them. In fact, there would be no shops beneath those flats, only more and more flats, more families or individuals or friends occupying the space.

There had been a bit of a backlash from the local store owners, who felt that Diagon Alley was theirs and theirs alone but the houses and flats were built and people like Roxy and her friends were moving in.

they were only on the third day of February and already, Roxy was astounded at how much her life had changed.

"Hey, Roxy!" Lily came over, throwing an arm around her younger cousin. Lily's stomach pushed against the edge of her Weird Sisters shirt, and Roxy couldn't help but wonder how someone so pregnant could move so quickly.

"Hi, Lils." Roxy gave the birthday girl a weak grin, not able to make herself behave as enthusiastically as Lily probably her to be. "This is a fun party, isn't it? Lots of people, lots of food, lots of loud music? So much fun."

Lily didn't look convinced in the slightest.

"So listen, Roxy-Rox, I need your help with something, yeah?" She raised an unsteady hand to pat Roxy's shoulder. "I may have invited Tolkien to my party and he might be around here somewhere but I don't want to talk to him, but I also don't want to make him leave because that'd be a mean thing to do, you get me?"

"So you want me to keep him company and make sure he doesn't get into any trouble, is that what you're asking me?"

Lily clasped her hands around Roxy's neck in an awkward hug before pulling away to nod enthusiastically, looking pleased. "Oh, would you be such a dear? I know Tolkien's always liked you and he's not that bad of a guy except for the bit where he's a tad unreliable about being a dad though I can't really hold that against him since I don't intend on being a mum."

"Did you finally find someone to adopt?"

"No, but Gran agreed to take it off my hands after I give birth. I think she just really misses having a little kid to look after, even if she is pushing eighty."

"She has always done whatever she could to keep us as a close family unit."

Lily nodded, drifting off a few seconds later when someone else called out her name, leaving Roxy to stand by the kitchen door, awkwardly clutching a cup of Butterbeer, with nothing to do. Perhaps she would go talk to Tolkien, for at least he was someone to talk to rather than standing here silently by herself for the rest of the party.

Making up her mind, Roxy wandered throughout the house, waving few people she did know (mostly family members) and flounced into every room she could find to see if Tolkien was around.

It wasn't just that Lily wanted them to talk to each other for some reason (Merlin forbid that Lily was trying to set Roxy up with the father of Lily's child). She actually did want to talk to Tolkien about the events of Mia's New Year's party and his disappearance for the entire month following that, when no one knew where he'd gone off to or why he'd returned.

He ended up being found in the library on the second floor, blankly admiring the wooden finishing of the fireplace and humming quietly to himself.

Tolkien looked differently than he had a month ago; his hair was long and shaggy, with a small clump near the front of his face turned snowy white in contrast to the dark, near-black of the rest of his hair. He had bags under his eyes that made it look like he'd been punched several hundred times and his whole body twitched every few seconds, as though someone was pinching at his sides for their own amusement.

He was now little more than a shell of the Tolkien from a month ago, now turned into a nervous, anxious creature that was ready to jump out of his skin at the slightest provocation.

"Tolkien?" she called quietly, waving at him; Tolkien twitched and looked up at her, opening his mouth widely before letting his face relax into a smile.

"He found you, didn't he?" Tolkien's eyes were wide—she would have almost said they appeared to be vibrating, what with the intensity with which he held her gaze.

"Who did? You mean James Potter?"

Tolkien nodded, letting his head bob from side to side as he spoke, a marionette with limp strings. "He likes to talk to people and he acts like he's just here to help but sometimes people will try to help and it only ends up making things worse and I'm sure he didn't mean to make things worse but that's just what happens sometimes, right?"

"Tolkien, are you alright? Where have you been since January- no one's seen you since the party and now—now you're not making any sense at all and—"

"The dead are just so selfish, you know? They can't forget what it was like to be alive but their brains, if they even still have brains, are also so full of being dead, being able to see all of the time and its infiniteness."

"Tolkien?"

He turned away for a moment, blinking back tears before turning his gaze to her, blue eyes so intense that Roxy was suddenly looking into twin blue suns, far too bright for anyone to focus on for any length of time. She looked away. "I get to see the infinity and everything beyond it. The living aren't supposed to look into the end of everything but I did, didn't I?" He chuckled. "Better than any drug I've ever tried, muggle or magic. It's power drives the spirits insane, those that look too long, so imagine what it must have done to me." Another chuckle. "I'm a nutter now. It's a good thing Lily broke up with me, isn't it, now that I'm crazy?"

"Who says you're crazy, Tolkien?" She reached out to put a hand on his shoulder but Tolkien fell away from her grasp, shaking his head. "Tolkien," she said softly, "you aren't crazy, you just need to let me help you, okay? I'm on your side, I know what's going on."

"After all this time, do you still not believe?!" he snapped her roughly, growling with frustration.

"Considering what I've seen in the last few days?" She felt like laughing. "I believe you when you say that dark forces dragged you off to look at eternity and I believe that we probably shouldn't be looking at stuff like that but I don't think that means you're crazy. I think it means that someone or something is trying to screw you up because you know things and they don't want you to talk about what you know."

"He's visited you before," Tolkien replied, voice dropping back down to empty, devoid of any and all emotion. "He's visited you and he's going to screw you up, too, just like what happened to me. He doesn't like us knowing."

"Tolkien, everything will be fine, I promise—"

"Can you, though? Little Miss Soldier leading all of us into war. I'm standing behind you, always standing behind you, I'm your loyal soldier, but can you promise I'll be fine, that any of us will be fine? Or is it only more empty promises?"

Roxy opened her mouth to respond when there was a knock behind them.

Albus was standing in the doorway, watching them both with an expression of curiosity on his face, looking between his youngest cousin and the man who had gotten his little sister pregnant before unceremoniously agreeing to break up with her. If it had been James up here, punches would have already been swung without a thought, but Albus only waved at them.

"They're finally cutting the cake downstairs if you guys are interested in getting a sliver of a piece." There was an easy grin on his face, a casual slump to his shoulders. "I might stay here, though. Fewer people—fewer indecent people."

Tolkien merely nodded and moved to exit the room, only pausing long enough to clap Albus on the arm and exchange a few words too quietly for Roxy to make out; then he was gone, down the hallway and out of sight.

Albus turned to Roxy, still smiling pleasantly. If it had been nearly anyone else, Roxy might have thought such behaviour was a front to sell her on something—hell, he might be trying to do so, actually. There really was no telling with Albus.

"So I was talking with Miss Longbottom recently," he began and Roxy raised an eyebrow. Al was the only one who wasn't a professor that ever called Tilly 'Miss'. He also (for some strange reason that he wouldn't explain to anyone else) actually did genuinely seem to like Tilly. "She tells me that the two of you have evening hanging out a lot more as of late, growing friendly and such."

He gave her an expectant look when Roxy did not immediately respond.

"I wouldn't say it's all been friendly. I still hate Tilly but...there's a project, a personal project elt's say, that we can't accomplish on our own and since we were both working independently on the same...project, it was smarter to team up regardless of our rocky history."

"'Personal project?'" he repeated, smile widening though not enough to be considered mocking. "Is that what you call breaking into the Department of Mysteries and stealing more than two dozen files from their personal archives? If so, I must be really behind on the slang of today's youth."

"How do you know about that?!"

"Like I said, I talked to Miss Longbottom and she seemed to think I'm the sort of person to whom one can spill all of their secrets to. Perhaps it's my eyes—I've been told they're very inviting." Albus gave her a crooked smile and Roxy couldn't help but crack her own grin at his antics, even as her heart pumped frantically at the thought that Albus might ask for the files or threaten to turn her in to the Ministry.

Albus walked past her and dropped onto one of the couches behind her, settling into his seat as casually as if he owned the place—and, in a way, he kind of did, since this was the Potter's family library and Albus was a Potter.

"You're not going to tell anyone what we did, right, Al? You don't want to see your favourite cousin get tossed in jail, right?"

"'Course not," he replied, tapping his fingers on the armrest of his chair. "In fact, I want to help you guys out. You, Tilly, Tolkien, and anyone else in the newest little Scooby Gang."

"I'm sorry?" Roxy, taking a seat across from Al, furrowed her brow in confusion. What was a Scooby?

"That's...probably not something I can explain without making you even more confused." He shook his head. "Too much time spent obsessing over Muggle culture, that's me. But back to the fact that I want to join the little club of ghost hunters you've apparently started. Whatever's going on has already claimed one of my family members; I don't really want to lose anyone else."

"Lucy's not lost. She's still alive, we can still save her and wake her up."

Albus didn't look convinced, giving a small shake of his head. "I have faith in Lucy and in our medical capabilities but I worry that whatever's been going, claiming all of these young people that could have just as easily been me, I can't help but think that it's a force that we cannot comprehend and, therefore, cannot defeat."

Roxy had never seen Albus act this way, almost verging on hopelessness. "If you don't think we can defeat it, then why are you signing up to help? If there's no point in fighting, then why fight at all?" It didn't make any sense to her.

"I'm not saying not to fight." He shook his head, still tapping his fingers on the armrest. His expression was tense, focused—Roxy would almost say he looked angry, though why that would be, she could not say.

"What do you mean, then, if you're not saying we shouldn't fight?"

"We can't fight whatever this is, as shown by the fact that people like Lucy are falling victim to it. But giving up the fight altogether isn't the answer, either. Someone, someday, will come along who can figure out how to win and if we give in and give up now, they'll never even have the chance to figure everything out and save us."

"So we keep fighting for the sake of a future generation, is that it?"

"Just like every generation before us, just doing what we were made to do. It's the whole point of humanity, to fight for infinity and then push past that, beyond it."

Tolkien had mentioned infinity earlier before Albus showed up. Was it possible that these two similar word choices weren't a coincidence? That they were already working together and had chosen to approach Roxy individually to ask the same questions—are you fighting and can I fight with you?

Roxy sighed, rubbing her hands over her face. She'd been running near empty for—for almost the last decade, it felt like, but definitely since this year had begun and Roxy just wanted a moment to herself to sit silently and think everything over.

Was this how their parents had felt thirty years ago, steeling themselves to fight against Voldemort and all those Death Eaters, many of whom were classmates or the parents of classmates? What was that like, standing up to fight and knowing that you may never come back?

(And at least, when it had been Voldemort, people knew what they were fighting. Roxy had no clue what she was up against.)

"Are people going to die, Al?" she asked quietly, looking down at her hands.

"I think that's sort of a given when it comes to war, Roxy."

"Yeah, but are they going to die because of me? Am I going to lead us all to our deaths if I keep pushing at whatever it is that hurt Lucy and Kieran and all the others?"

Al stood up, walking over to where she was sitting and gave her a hug before dropping to his knees so that they would be at the same height. "Don't be so self-centred, Rox."

She looked up at him, shocked, but Al was smiling teasingly at her before his face grew serious once more.

"It won't be your fault if people die. Like I said, people die in war, that's just what happens, as hard as we will try to limit the number. But for some, death will be inevitable. You just have to prepare yourself for that, okay?"

she leaned into her cousin's chest, determined not to cry. The idea of a war going on during her lifetime—a war involving her—was absolutely terrifying.

"I don't want to lose anyone else," she whispered into Al's shirt, mentally running through the long list of those who could be lost if this unknown dark force truly did rear its ugly head against them all. She thought of those who had already been lost—her father, her brother.

Who else would have to die?

"Hey!"

They both looked up to see some random brunette that Roxy had never met before in her life, standing in the doorway with a kooky grin on her face.

"Did you want something, ma'am?" Albus asked politely, pulling away from Roxy as though she had not just soaked it with tears. A switch had been turned on inside of him, gone from comforting cousin to casually calm.

"Potter's just announced 'bout the baby, you missed i'," replied the brunette, holding onto the doorframe to keep herself steady, her whole demeanor reeking of someone who had had far too much to drink.

"And the gender?"

"A girl. She's havin' a baby girl, how cool is tha'? Maybe I should' have a little baby girl and be jus' like Potter." With that, she dropped to the floor, unconscious.

Albus got to his feet, gently scooping the girl up and moving her to the couch which he had vacated, making sure she wasn't about to throw up. "Perhaps not, I think," he said softly before looking back at Roxy, whose head was spinning.

Lily was having a girl?

"So how about that, huh? I'm going to have a pretty little niece to fight for. I wonder what they'll name her."

Lily was having a girl. Merlin save them all.