Heavy black smog hovers low over London, thick enough to make Dorcas' throat all scratchy and hollow with it. Her lungs feel like hot things, burning inside her ribs, straining out against them, not enough air in them. She crouches with a knee on the cold ground and the other pressed with its side to the wall and hears James come to a kneeling stop behind her, wheezing and gasping with the ash. She can hear his hand scrambling cold blueish fingers across the front of his chest. The smoke in the air has made him like this for weeks.

"Stay quiet," she murmurs back to him.

He heaves another breath and it creaks on the way in. "I can't… help it…" he huffs. "It's in my throat."

Dorcas glances over her shoulder at him very briefly, quickly enough that she catches his face in the moonlight only as a blur, glasses with a hairline crack, big eyes peering through them at her.

She looks back ahead, out towards the dark mouth of the alleyway across the intersecting street, a broad dark dual carriageway on the outskirts of Old Magical London. "Just try," she murmurs. "They're close."

The death eaters' patrol has been spreading out and out since the beginnings of the occupation, casting its grip over the west side of central London. There are a thousand muggles rehomed by now and a few hundred dead or hospitalised, the kettering curse burning great dark born-again gouges into their stomachs and ribs like burrowing worms.

Behind her, James coughs once, a ragged thing. Then he freezes up, a hand landing on her shoulder. "Listen."

Dorcas peers into the darkness ahead, sinking into the wall with her shoulder dug tight against it, pressed almost to her ear. She hears birds, most of them migrating northwest to get away from Newhaven, in great flocks in the night sky above. She hears distant cars, far from this area. She hears the hum of a sparking rioting electrical wire disconnected in a wall nearby, exposed by a ricocheting spell or explosion. Night, that's the sound of it, the murmur of the wind. The approach of—

"Footsteps," she murmurs, hearing them then. Echoing from some intersecting alley nearby, across the street past the empty husks of abandoned nightclubs and restaurants. Distant and drawing closer.

She feels more than hears James nod. He drags in a long breath and it makes a throaty groaning broken-machinery sound right in his airway. "Coming this way."

"Reckon it's him?"

"Only one way to find out."

Dorcas clenches her hand around the brass knuckles in her pocket, fumbling them on. They were from Lily, a hurried parting gift after the raid on the train, before she took the muggleborns back to Rostock. She pressed them into Dorcas' hand with tears in her eyes while James and Remus shouted at each other on the other side of the roof, and then she was gone just like Peter and the train. They don't quite fit Dorcas right, too small for her fingers; she can always feel her pulse when she's wearing them. An inherited reminder that she's still alive.

James slides his bat from the wincing, creaking leather of the back of his jacket, swinging it down to rest against his side. The rounded wooden tip clatters sharp against the wet concrete beneath them. A bit of falling ash gets in Dorcas' nose and she snorts it out, watching the moonlit fleck of it swirl in the dead air.

The footsteps draw closer still, clicking. Expensive shoes and a steady stride. One-two-one-two-one-two. No limp. It's him; it has to be. They can't afford another failed mission, and the Order can't afford for Dorcas and James to die here, not with how many of them have been dying recently.

"Get ready," James murmurs, almost resting upon her. He's taut with tension and he says it right into her ear.

Dorcas resists the urge to shove him off. "Yeah. Shh."

They listen intently, neither of them moving or making any sound (presumably James has figured out that he's less useful breathing than not). The clacking footsteps make their way out of the sidestreet across the way and begin across the dual carriageway; there's the telltale clicking heaviness of a step from the curb into the road, and then concrete-dulled snap, snap, snap, snap. Each footfall echoes.

Whoever it is, Harrods or some other bastard, they're coming right this way.

Twenty feet away. Ten. Dorcas raises herself to her feet exponentially slowly, James a shadow behind her, and raises her fists.

The figure appears around the side of the alleyway and Dorcas launches at him, throwing heavy arms up around his throat and squeezing his jugular in the crook of her elbow as she gets half-behind him. She tries to drive him to his knees; he's taller, stronger; he tries to force her off but his robe gets stuck under one of his feet and James cracks his bat into the side of the death eater's thigh and forces him to the ground. Dorcas wrestles him onto his front and forces her knee against the dark curve of the back of his head, holding it there with a hand in his hair and using her thigh to crack his face down into the pavement with force.

A sharp shout of pain. They can't afford to be overheard. James shoves Dorcas off and rolls the man over; the death eater promptly kicks him in the stomach and he shouts and staggers back against the wall, winded. Dorcas swallows nervous spit and slams her jarred foot once into the ground, trying to set it right. The death eater rises to his feet, stumbling like a drunk, and she swings in from his blind spot and grabs him by the front of his robes. She shoves him up against the wall, knife to his throat.

"Don't move," Dorcas warns. "You're important, but you're not that important."

Darting blue eyes stare back at her. The man — it is Harrods, it is, victory sparks a bushfire inside of Dorcas — looks like he's seen better days. Beneath the bloody nose and broken teeth he looks like he hasn't had a night's sleep in months, more raccoon-eyed than Dorcas and James combined.

He tries to scramble out of her grip, feet kicking at Dorcas' knees. She presses the knife harder to his throat and he seems to realise that it's there.

"I told you not to move," Dorcas warns. "Give us the information we need and we'll let you go."

Against the wall behind her, James is coughing with a sort of panic, like he's trying to get them all out of him. He hacks and spits and heaves loud wheezing breaths one after the other in uniform rapidity, not getting any coherent words out. Dorcas does her best to ignore him, not taking her eyes off the death eater.

Harrods' struggling slows. He looks like he's trying very hard to think of a way to talk his way out of this one. His beady eyes dart from James to Dorcas and back to James.

"Look at me, not him," Dorcas intructs. She raises her chin and tips the point of her knife upwards to rest in the cleft of his neck, the juncture under his jaw. If she drove it upwards it would go up through the bottom of his mouth and skewer his tongue deep into his sinuses. The flat edge of the knife whines against her brass knuckles, a metallic shrieking, faint in the overly-loud nighttime.

"Okay." Harrods looks at her, swallowing hard. He's trying and failing to regulate his breathing. To look like he's in control here, like this is his deal to strike. "What do you want to know?"

"Not very loyal, is he?" James groans from behind Dorcas, slumped halfway down the wall with his legs a weedy tangle under him.

Dorcas digs the tip of her knife a bit deeper into the underside of Harrods' stubbly chin. "We want to know about the stronghold in Barnet. Where you're keeping captives. Tell us about it."

Harrods eyes her. "You're with the Order?"

Dorcas doesn't nod or shake her head, doesn't offer him anything. "This isn't about us. Tell us about the stronghold."

Harrods' throat flexes. "It's a prison," he says. "For traitors to the Dark Lord."

"No it's not," James wheezes. "Liar."

"Shut up James," Dorcas snaps. She doesn't look away from Harrods' grey-white face. "It's a containment facility, but we know it's not permanent. It's where you keep them before you move them overseas. We've been watching."

Harrods curses under his breath. "We don't move them. We kill them."

"We can hear the apparition cracks from outside."

"That's visitors coming and going."

Dorcas laughs, throaty. She spits out a bit of ash that gets in her mouth, right into Harrods' smug face. "You allow visitors now? How civil. Tell me the truth. Quickly now, before we decide we should find someone more reliable."

As if to make her point, Dorcas digs her blade in a bit deeper again. A droplet of blood drips down the metal, dark in the dim light, and the elastic-taut skin of Harrods' neck audibly tears open in a long, thin line, only surface-deep, threatening something more deadly.

"Slovenia," he says quickly. "We usually take prisoners to Slovenia. We have a stronghold out there."

"That's where you transfer the Barnet captives?"

"Until recently."

"Why?"

"It was burnt down. Destroyed."

Dorcas hesitates. "By who?"

Harrods laughs, nervous and flighty like a bird. "Whoever it is, they've pissed off the Dark Lord mightily. Their days are numbered." And his eyes narrow a bit. "So, it seems, are yours."

James pushes to his feet. "Don't threaten her—"

"James," Dorcas murmurs. She looks around. "We need to go—" She lets go of Harrods and he staggers away, gasping and pressing pale hands to his split-open neck.

James reaches her side, clutching her arm. "Why?"

Dorcas nods across the dual carriageway to the mouth of the opposite alleyway, the end of it fifty feet away. Three dark-robed figures at the mouth of the sidestreet, approaching from the heart of Old Magical London. Striding right for them.

"Oh, fuck," James says. He grabs Dorcas' arm tight and says, "Are we killing Harrods, then?"

"Did he see your face?" Dorcas mutters into his ear.

"Too dark."

"Then we can afford to let him go."

"He saw you—"

"I'm not you," Dorcas says shortly. She tugs James' arm. "Run!"

James takes off down the alleyway the way they came, back north away from Old Magical London. Dorcas sprints after him, fists clenched tight and pounding rushing punching through the air at her sides; each footstep reverberates like a chthonic toll through her, jarring her knees. There is fire and brimstone in her lungs.

They fly through the darkness. James will not be able to run for long. This Dorcas knows with clarity, better than she knows most things these days, because knowing has become something almost as thin-on-the-ground as space and time, both having become limited resources.

Behind them, there are running footsteps and shouting. A sickly yellow burst of light flies over their heads, illuminating swirling clumps of ash on the air like snow in the headlights of a car.

"James!" Dorcas calls. She speeds up and catches his arm, running alongside him. "When I turn off, you follow me!"

He nods, grunting and huffing and unable to get any words out. His face is so taut and tense that he might as well be carved from wood, each footstep staggering and lilting.

Dorcas glances once over her shoulder. The death eaters are crossing the dual carriageway behind them, running across the empty road with heavy smoke-filled nighttime closing in around them. She and James reach the mouth of the alleyway, leading onto the next street, and, thinking fast, Dorcas pulls James around the corner and west up the road, over cracked pavement and leaky drains, an old suitcase flung across the ground, the last remnants of the people who lived and worked here once.

"Where are we going?!" James shouts at her.

"I don't—" And Dorcas spies it at the end of the street; the entrance to a dark, gutted arcade, narrow and winding, which leads between the blocks north, full of unused shops and abandoned little nooks. "There! Come on!"

James is already faltering, hands tearing at the collar of his shirt like it's strangling him. Dorcas grabs him around the bicep and pulls him with her until he's staggering over his own feet; they reach the other side of the road and come upon the entrance to the arcade and just as they skid around its dark entrance, the blackness inside a monolith, a red spell shatters the stained glass over the entryway, which rains down over them.

James shouts out and Dorcas doesn't stop running; she pulls him into the cold, still, dark universe and they pound down the cobbled walkway together. The roof of the arcade is old, grimy glass, stained and blotchy with ash and age, and it lets only the occasional spot of moonlight through, which dapple the floor in hazy bubbles of light. The arcade winds left and then right, dark windows flashing around them.

Every sound echoes. When the death eaters enter the arcade behind them, their shouts and ringing footsteps multiply into a howling chorus around them. Dorcas' throat fills up with panic; she doesn't want to die here, she can't die here, not before… not before…

James locks his hand around her wrist and heaves Dorcas to the left and through a narrow doorway. Stairs. Dorcas almost cries with disbelief, with crashing relief. There are no lights and no moonlight follows them; she and James fumble their way up the thief's-step stairs two at a time, falling over each other and around the corner to the second flight, before coming out at the top, where a narrow overhanging balcony looks down over the arcade floor

Dorcas and James hover there in the dark for a moment, peering around. Flashes of spellfire cast colourful bursts of light up the walkway towards them, but the death eaters are still out of sight. If they linger at the top of the stairs, they're vulnerable, too exposed. One flying spell will light them up.

"Come on," Dorcas murmurs, and hauls James to his feet. She pads as silently as she can across the overhang and towards one of the few shopfronts on the upper level, a narrow music store with broken windows and tipped-over cellos and violins scattered across the floor in the dust, barely illuminated by the glass ceiling above them.

James climbs in first, still wheezing, and Dorcas follows, almost tripping over a cello. They hold each other by the arms and fumble their way through the dark, cramped old shop to the very back, where a desk and till sit tight to the wall.

"Here," James murmurs, kneeling behind the wooden bordeaux. "Come on."

Dorcas crouches beside him, drawing her knees to her chest. They press in back to back. Neither of them makes a sound.

Downstairs, the death eaters get closer and closer and closer, their loud footsteps cracking against the cobblestone. Hazy bursts and lashes of spellfire cast the walls of the broken little instrument shop into planes of red and green light, leaving imprints on Dorcas' eyes. She feels James heaving silently behind her, trying not to cough, trying so hard it lurches through his chest like he's gagging or throwing up. It is almost sobbing.

"Shh," she breathes. "Shhh."

"I'm trying," James hisses, the sound of it going broken in the middle. He pounds his chest with the side of his fist, a low, rhythmic thumping.

Down in the arcade, a shopfront window shatters; there is the sound of a curse whizzing through the darkness and towards the north exit.

"Come on!" one of the death eaters shouts. "They went this way!"

For a heartstopping moment, Dorcas thinks she will hear the pounding of footsteps on the stairs, or the call of hominem revelio. But the death eaters' snapping footsteps crash up the arcade north and away from them, towards the outskirts of Old Magical London.

James is twitching like a dead thing beside her. He coughs pathetically, quietly, once they're far away enough that their voices have dulled. "Fuck," he whispers.

"Good job staying quiet," Dorcas tells him, realising only afterwards that she's not sure whether it's supposed to be sarcastic or not.

He slumps heavily against her back. "Hurts."

"I know."

"Are we making a break for it? They'll come back this way eventually."

"Not the brightest," Dorcas replies. "They'll be a while. Sit still. Get your breath back."

Obediently, James sucks in a few breaths, letting them out a hair too quickly, forced from his lungs one after the other. "You reckon Harrods was telling the truth?"

"Some of it," Dorcas agrees. "The information will be useful enough."

James coughs again, louder. "Hurts," he says again. Thump thump thump of his fist against his hairline fracture chest, hollow and wooden as a barrel.

"We'll go home soon," Dorcas promises. It's a lie, though; it is November and it is the height and heart of the war, and she isn't sure home exists anymore. She rests her head back against James' shoulder and tries not to make it feel like affection. "We'll go home soon."

They linger there in the dark for perhaps too long.

"Nothing new," James tells Moody, leaning against the kitchen doorframe. "A few letters from students to parents. We put them in the muggle mail. But nothing… nothing for the Order. I'm sorry."

Dorcas is already halfway up the stairs, hands dug tightly into the pockets of her jacket. She determinedly does not look at James or Moody, just plods up towards their storage-cupboard bedroom in silence, letting James deal with this great stinking pile of horseshit he has made and is continuing to make taller.

"And you're sure there's nothing wrong with it?" McGonagall asks severely, over Moody.

Dorcas can hear the false sheepishness in how James shakes his head; she doesn't even have to look down at him to see him doing it. "They might be blocking external communications — through the muggle mail system — but they're not stopping messages from inside Hogwarts. We've got a bit to sort through but nothing's come up for you yet. Sorry."

There's a tense silence. Dorcas makes it to the top of the stairs and takes the next flight up, not stopping until she reaches her and James' bedroom. When she gets inside, she flops down onto James' mattress and lies there, breathing in the smell of his pillow and watching morning sunlight filter through the single small window.

James makes it upstairs a few minutes later. He closes the door behind him and collapses onto Dorcas' mattress.

"They tested me for the imperius curse again," he mumbles into the heavy silence between them.

"I'm not surprised," Dorcas snaps. She sits up and unzips her jacket, letting dozens of unopened letters from the PO box fall out into her lap. "James, you're a maniac. I should report you. I should rat you out."

"But you won't."

"One of these days," Dorcas warns. She picks up letters by the handful and throws them at him. They land on his back. "We're killing people."

"It's a few letters."

"If you'd not opened Marlene and Mary's letters last year, they would've died in Ireland."

James is quiet for a while. Dorcas lies back down on his mattress, rolling onto her back and staring at the cracked ceiling. She aches from the mission to find Harrods a few nights ago, still burns with the lingering panic of it. The last few days (weeks, months) have been one long, quiet, humming adrenaline rush; it has settled within her and it's a part of her now, this panic.

Eventually, he says, "I sorted a few the other day."

"Oh, fuck off."

"I did!"

"A few isn't enough," Dorcas snaps.

"I know," James replies, on the edge of a cough. He hacks and hacks again, rolling onto his back, chest jittering with it.

"Then why?!"

He coughs harder, deeper, a loud snapping thing which cracks from him like something breaking.

Dorcas sits up again and leans over to James, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. "Why?!" she demands, louder.

James' head rattles on his shoulders and his glasses slip off his face and land in his lap. Dorcas holds him there for a moment, staring into his unfocused dark eyes, trying to will something into them. Comprehension or tears or something similar. But he just looks at her, doleful and fucking pathetic.

Dorcas shoves him. James hits the wall, sitting with his legs splayed out on the mattress, back to the wallpaper. The impact judders him and he coughs again, one hand fumbling to find his glasses. He shoves them back onto his face.

"Why," Dorcas says again, calmer now. "Can you just try to explain it to me?"

"What is there to explain?" James asks miserably. He rubs his eyes, almost dislodging his glasses again. "I'm fucking up and doing it continually."

"But you can stop."

"Maybe." He shrugs.

Dorcas resists the urge to grab him and shake him again. He looks so small sitting there against the wall. She has a rush of memory, remembers him laughing with Black in the back row of potions, hurling balls of torn-up parchment at the back of Snape's head. How they laughed and laughed together until the whole class was ruined and they had to stay behind to finish the work they hadn't been able to get done because Slughorn had been too busy telling the marauders off.

James might as well be a different person now, the cracked fissure of his sternum poking precariously out of him, shoulders drawn, neck narrow and bruised with the pressure on his throat as he breathes. He's always blue with not-enough-oxygen, especially since the fire spread close enough to London to fill the air with smoke and ash all the time.

"Tell me what's going on in your head," Dorcas begs. "Help me understand."

James stares at her. He looks abruptly like he's going to cry. "I can't," he murmurs.

"We keep lying. Why is it so hard to tell the truth?" And Dorcas says it again. "We keep lying, it's all we do. We've lied ourselves into a hole, we'll never get out of it. Soon they're going to figure us out. Why not come clean?"

"They'll kill me."

"We're not death eaters."

James shrugs.

Dorcas hates him then, hates him with an intensity that feels not at all foreign to her. "I'll tell them. I will."

"No you won't," James mutters. "I'm all you've got. You're on your own if they kick me out."

And it's true. The idea of not having this — this room together, James on the other side of the mattress — of being alone, she has nightmares about it. All the time. And of course he knows that. They know far too much about each other at this point, far more than is normal or healthy. It's been three months since Mary died but it might as well have been years.

Dorcas decides to try a different approach. She shuffles to sit beside James on the mattress, legs out in front of her parallel to his, back to the wall. James is stiff as a board beside her. They sit in silence for a while, shoulders touching.

"Can you really not explain it?" she asks eventually.

James shakes his head once, resolute, like a child. "I try to sort them and it… the thought of it makes me sick."

"Why?"

"Dunno."

"Then let me do it."

"But I should be able to," James says with force. "I should. I just can't. And I don't know why." He rakes his nails down the tops of his arms, leaving angry red trails. "I don't know why."

Dorcas pries his fingernails from his skin and drops his hands back into his lap. "Don't do that."

"What else is there to do?"

"Your fucking job."

James stills. "I know," he whispers. "I know. Please stop telling me."

When Dorcas got so soft, she doesn't know. Maybe it was Mary. Maybe it was Marlene. She looks intently across at James for a moment and then looks away, almost afraid she'll burn her retinas. He is going supernova, a bright white tearful dwarf star within the mess of it. She is watching the death of something distant and burning.

"I can do it with you?" she offers, and reaches across to grab one of the letters off the floor, holding it up. "Look. This one is for…"

James squints at it, held between them. "Caradoc," he murmurs. "He's got a relative in the school. If I remember right."

"Yeah," Dorcas encourages, with a mouth and tone and words that do not feel like hers. "Yeah. So that can go in a pile for Order members. And this next one?"

James takes the next letter off her, squinting at it. His eyes go unfocused and he seems to fall into his own thoughts.

Dorcas snaps her fingers in front of his face. "Who is it for?"

James flinches. "Uh. This one's for… muggle relatives, I think, of someone at Hogwarts. A Davies family. You don't know them?"

"Nah," Dorcas offers. "No, I don't. We can put it in the muggle mail."

"Right," James says, half zoned out.

"James."

"Yeah?"

"Breath?" Dorcas offers.

"Oh," James murmurs, blue in the face by this point. He hefts in a great long breath and a sharp whip-crack cough bursts from his mouth, a bit of blood with it. He curls his legs and arms up tight and sits in a ball, coughing, wheezing, taking these short shallow breaths that Dorcas thinks are probably bad news.

She has no idea how to deal with this. Gingerly, she rests a hand on James' shoulder, rubbing slow circles there. "Hey. You're okay."

James shakes his head frantically. He tears his glasses off and throws them across the room, forcing his hands against his face, digging blunt-nailed fingers into his eyes, hard, too hard, reddening the skin there, harshing deep divots into the flesh of his eyelids.

"James!" Dorcas tries to pull his hands away. "James, stop it— you have to breathe—" There's a lump in her own throat and Dorcas realises with a start that she, too, is almost sobbing. "James, please!"

He digs his nails in deeper and hefts another sharp breath, a groaning, shrieking sort of sound. "Sorry."

"Don't say sorry. Just breathe!" Dorcas grabs him by the face, hands over his. "Look at me. James. Look at me. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe."

James shakes his head back and forth and back and forth again. "I can't," he moans. "I can't. I can't."

"Yes you can," Dorcas promises. "With me. Come on. In… and out…"

James tries to copy her, the air shuddering in and out of his teeth, almost whistling. In. Out. In. Out. He pulls his fingernails out of his eyelids and they're bleeding underneath in thin, deep-pressed crescent moons. He opens his eyes and a vessel has burst in the left one, making the whole sclera blood red.

"In…" Dorcas instructs. "Out… that's it…"

"I don't know what's happening to me," James mumbles, between long, rasping breaths. "I don't know why I'm doing this."

Dorcas wouldn't like to diagnose, and is probably the exact wrong person for it. She thinks it's probably something serious-sounding, though. One of those muggle illnesses with all the letters, the harsh consonant-filled ones. Something that is killing him as quickly as the snapped sternum, perhaps quicker.

"You're okay," she tells him, one of the less egregious lies she has told today. "We're okay."

"We're killing people."

She resists the urge to correct that he's killing people, and she has nothing to do with it. It's not true anyway. They are a double act, the two of them. Aiding and abeting. James might be the murderer, but she is helping him hide the evidence.

"Shh," she says, instead of any of that. "Just breathe."

James coughs again, and then again, and then again. One of his hands comes up to clutch the top of his chest, around his clavicle, and Dorcas watches him rub his palm into the discoloured skin there, as if trying to straighten his own skeleton. He pushes and pushes and there is the faint sound of bones creaking against each other; it's so visceral that Dorcas almost gags.

"I don't know why I'm doing this," James hacks out again, the meaning of it different this time. "I don't know… I don't…"

There is a very bitter part of Marlene that would take great pleasure in informing him that of the two of them, he's the one with the best chance of seeing the people he loves again. She's got absent family, probably out of the country by now, and the body of Mary hanging across her shoulders, and Marlene's ghost haunting her wherever she goes. At least his parents are already dead and out of the way; at least Remus is still alive out there. At least Black is the chosen one, too important to die, too fucking noble for it.

But saying it won't help. And if Dorcas has become anything in the past months, it's older, so she refrains.

"Just breathe," she instructs. "And we'll finish them. And then we'll have something to show the Order. Okay? And then we can sort more tomorrow."

She nods towards the far wall, the cabinet, behind and within which are stored bags and bags of old mail.

James looks at her like she's just said the scariest thing in the world to him. "Tomorrow?"

"Or the day after. If you can't handle it."

"Of course I can handle it." He wheezes in a tight breath. "I can't breathe— I can't—"

"Fuck you," Dorcas mutters. She feels Marlene's ghost hanging over her, urging her on; she says with a mouth not her own, "Fuck you. I hate you. Come on, breathe with me. In… out…"

In the end, they have little to show for it. A letter for Dearborn and two for Moody and McGonagall, and half a dozen for the muggle mail. There's a letter addressed to a student's family in Kent, in a village now evacuated from the path of the rapidly spreading fire. Wherever they're living now, the letter won't be reaching them. It makes the whole effort feel quite pointless.

"We're sorting more tomorrow," Dorcas says to James once they're done, more threat than promise. "Understood?"

James nods, staring off into the distance tucked under the quilt on her mattress. He looks too haunted to panic. "Yeah."

"Hey. Look at me."

He looks up at her. "What?"

Dorcas clears her throat. "Try not to think about it too hard. Whatever it is you're thinking about. Remus or Lily or Black or… or something. Whatever. If you think about it you won't be able to stop."

James blinks at her. "Okay," he agrees, sounding very hazy.

Dorcas pats his shoulder once. "I'll take these down to Moody."

"Yeah."

"He'll be pleased."

James clears his throat. "Yeah."

Dorcas gets up and makes her way towards the door, leaving James in a bomb's-hit-it mess of scattered paper and blankets.

"Wait," he calls after her.

She pauses, looking back. "What?"

James coughs once. "Thanks."

It is entirely inadequate. "No need," Dorcas says, waving him off. "Stay put."

Downstairs, Moody and a handful of ex-aurors are gathered around a map at the kitchen table, looking drawn and unwell under the sallow yellow overhead light. Dorcas coughs to announce her entrance and stumbles to the table, handing Moody the two letters addressed to the Order.

"Found these in the PO box," she mumbles. "James misread them at first, but they're for you."

Moody takes them from her, scanning the envelopes. The aurors sitting around him give Dorcas strange looks, like she's not supposed to be here; perhaps she's not.

"This is the first mail we've gotten in weeks," he grunts. "It'd better be good."

"Let's hope so," Dorcas agrees, in what she hopes is a level, neutral voice. She doesn't know whether to stay while he opens them or leave. But she's been here for a few too many extra seconds. The decisions has been made for her. She leans a hip against the table and folds her arms, watching with mild interest as Moody slits a jagged thumbnail under the edge of the first envelope, cutting it open and peering inside before he pulls out the letter.

There is heavy silence as he reads, eyes flitting from the page to Dorcas and then back down every few seconds. After a few minutes, Moody puts the letter down.

"Who's it from?" Dorcas asks.

"An ally in Scotland." He narrows dark eyes at her. "Tell Potter he'd better figure out what's going on, and soon."

"Why?"

"She's been writing for weeks." Moody rubs his lower face with one hand, looking at Dorcas intently. She put that jaw together weeks ago. It feels like it's been years.

"Oh," Dorcas murmurs. "I'll tell him. He's not sure what's going on."

Moody slams a hand on the desk. "This is a war," he snaps. "I don't care what he doesn't know. Tell him to fix this, or we will!"

Dorcas stumbles back. She feels very brave around James and often forgets, as a consequence, that she is a coward around almost everybody else.

"Right," she mutters. "Sorry." And she turns and steps out of the kitchen and onto the stairs, jogging up them two at a time, hands prickly with tingles and the ominous rattle of dread.

DANGEROUS ANTI-MAGICAL INSURGENT ON THE LOOSE

Daily Prophet, Morning Edition, November 13th, 1977.

Ministry official and respected member of London's magical community Nikolai Harrods has been hospitalised at St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries after an attack on Thursday night by known anti-magical agitator James Potter, leaving Harrods comatose and under medical supervision.

"It makes the world feel like it's against us," Harrods' wife told The Prophet last night, in a press conference at the Ministry of Magic. "The streets feel unsafe with criminals like the man who hurt my husband on them. If anybody has any information, we're begging you… for my husband, please come forward. We're trying to make the world safer for our kind, and all we have faced is hardship for it. When does it end? When will we know peace?"

The attack occurred during one of Harrod's watch patrols along the north end of Old Magical London. Volunteering to help his community, Harrod was beaten bloody and left to die in an alleyway, where he was found hours later by other patrolmen, on the verge of death. In the early hours of the morning, he was admitted to St. Mungo's, where he will remain for the foreseeable future.

In a statement the morning following the attack, the Minister for Magic has reassured the public that despite the brutality of this attack, his new legislation will not be held hostage. "If we return to derelict old magical laws," he told an interviewer for The Prophet, "we will be giving these anarchists what they want. We must remain strong and show solidarity and trust in these difficult times. Only then shall we prevail."

An unnamed worker at St. Mungo's has supplied additional information on Harrods' condition. "It was animalistic," they have been quoted. "Just… senseless. The attack was with a muggle baseball bat, no magic involved. The mutiny of it… it made us sick. Me and my family feel unsafe knowing figures like the attacker are still out there."

James Potter (pictured above), twenty-one, is an unregistered, unstable and dangerous criminal at large in Britain. Responsible for a plethora of other attacks on wizards and witches around the country, he is the Auror Office's highest priority criminal to capture after dangerous outlaw Sirius Black.

"Until he is captured," head Auror Grimsby has stated, "we will not rest. His anti-magic ideology, it's dangerous. Rebels and mutineers like Potter are trying to take us back to the Dark Ages. Rest assured, we will find him."

"They give him too much credit," Aves tells Dorcas over breakfast the following morning, pointing to the Prophet on the table between them. "He doesn't look his age though, does he?"

"That's because that's not his age," Dorcas replies, a bit sourly. "He's seventeen."

"Oh. That makes more sense." Aves chews on a stale muffin for a few seconds, swallowing. "Comatose. Give me a break. He whacked the man with a bat a few times."

"I did most of the whacking," Dorcas puts in. "I put his face into the ground."

Aves glances up at her, appraising. "Good job."

"Thanks." Dorcas looks away. "The whole thing is a lie anyway. They didn't even see his face. Could've been anybody."

They fall into awkward silence again.

"The fire's getting mad," remarks a defected auror from down the table a few seats. He's got a bloody bandage wrapped tight around one side of his face. A magical injury that won't heal. "It's reached Crawley. A few thousand more muggles evacuated this morning."

"Their authorities don't know what's going on," Aves adds, nodding. "Think it's some freak bio-weapon something-or-other. The Russians. Little do they know, I suppose."

"It's been all over the muggle news," someone else puts in, from Dorcas' side of the table. "A few muggles with asthma have died already. Since the smoke is so potent."

Dorcas drops her hands into her lap and pulls and tugs at the edge of a nail until it comes loose, poking at the flesh of her thumb. "Are the death eaters still guarding it? Against us, I mean."

"Apparently they're going to ward it," the auror tells her. "Keep it protected so foreign wizards can't put it out. It's leverage, right? The longer it burns, the closer the muggles get to finding out about us. They get to hold it over other countries' heads."

"That's stupid," Dorcas says. "It'll reach London."

"Good for them," Aves says. "Drives the muggles out so they can take the whole city."

Beside her, Mullholand nods. They clear their throat. "Cards are all in their hands right now, I suppose. Doesn't do to dwell on it."

"Not much else to talk about," the auror mutters.

Dorcas stands up. "I've got a watch shift," she says to nobody in particular, even though she doesn't until tonight.

"Are you alright?" Aves asks her, raising an eyebrow. "You look…"

"I'm fine," Dorcas assures. She pauses, raising a hand to rub at her left eye until it hurts. "I'm… I'm just stressed. That's all."

"I think we're all a bit stressed right now," Aves says, a bit snappily.

"Never said you weren't." Dorcas bites her lip hard enough that it makes her eyes burn. "Sorry." She turns around and makes for the door.

Nobody stops her. They've all got their own shit to deal with, but it does kind of hurt, she supposes. Mostly that James was right. That they really do only have each other now.

A few nights later, a handful of Order members set off north towards Barnet, dressed in heavy dark clothing and holding their wands ready for when they have to give up stealth's ghost. None of Lily's potions lie in their pockets and coats this time, and they all look grim.

"I'm seventeen!" Dorcas shouts right into Dearborn's face, standing at the bottom of the stairs with her hand wrapped tight around the banister. She's in James' heavy leather jacket and she shaved her hair down again this morning. She feels armoured. She's ready.

"I don't care," Dearborn replies, very tirely. "Meadowes, please. Just… get out of my hair. Just this once."

Dorcas is ten seconds from stamping her foot and saying it isn't fair. "I can fight just as well as the rest of you. I was the one that took down Harrods, if you've forgotten, this is my information you're working with, not James'—"

"And Potter isn't coming either, is he?" Dearborn snaps, very harried now.

One of the other Order members standing in the entrance hall, ready to leave, grabs Dearborn by the arm. "Let me."

Dorcas squints at him. "Frank, tell him I can fight. Tell him!"

Frank Longbottom sighs very heavily. He puts a hand on Dorcas' shoulder and pushes her down gently until she's sitting on the stairs. He kneels in front of her with one knee on the first step.

"I know you want to be in the thick of it right now," he says without much bite. "I know how you feel."

"Then let me go."

He shakes his head once. "It's dangerous out there. More dangerous by the day. This won't be like the raid on the train; it's not children they're guarding."

"Then what's the harm if one more person goes with you?" Dorcas demands.

Frank stares from Dorcas to the ground, and then exchanges a look with Dearborn. "We need stealth on our side."

"And?"

"And some of the jobs you've gone on have…" Frank winces. "We don't think it's the job for you."

Dorcas is sure she will either cry or start shouting. Instead of doing either, she stares at Frank hard for so long her eyes start to hurt.

"I'm sorry," he tells her awkwardly.

"You're not taking James either?" she manages eventually.

"You two are a package deal," Dearborn puts in, zipping up his dark canvas jacket. "Alright! Is everybody ready?"

There's a general murmur of assent. Frank squeezes Dorcas' shoulder in his hand and murmurs, "Sorry," before standing up.

Dorcas stays there on the step as the Order members file out, their dark-clothed backs disappearing out into the night. Dearborn is the last out of the door, and he nods at Dorcas once before he slams it shut, leaving her alone in the hallway.

"Fuck," she whispers, mostly to herself. And then, more angrily this time, "Fuck!"

Nobody answers her; her own voice echoes in the silence. Dorcas slips off the stairs and to her feet in the hallway, peering around the kitchen door. There's nobody in there; nobody downstairs at all, by the sound of it.

An idea forms in her mind.

Perhaps not the smartest idea. But not the stupidest thing she's done yet either. Dorcas straightens James' jacket on her shoulders and fumbles in the pockets, feeling for her brass knuckles, which are a cold, steady pressure against her ribs. She's got her wand stashed in there too, the solid wooden weight of it a sort of anchor. She feels her heart speed up, pounding loud and obtrusive in her ears. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Nodding to herself once, Dorcas glances into the kitchen one more time before starting for the door.

There is a cough behind her.

Dorcas whirls around. Professor McGonagall is standing at the top of the stairs, pristine and unbothered like usual, her dark hair secured above her head in a tight bun. She looks down at Dorcas, one eyebrow raised imperiously. Dorcas looks back, a deer in the headlights.

"Going out for a walk so late?" McGonagall asks, after the ugly silence has passed. She walks down the stairs at a leisurely pace, each footstep clicking.

"Uh," Dorcas says. And then, figuring she can't lie her way through this one, "I… I wasn't going to fight. I just wanted to be there in case it went wrong."

McGonagall reaches the bottom of the stairs and walks to Dorcas' side. She watches the front door intently for a moment, before looking down at her.

"I understand your frustration," she says, heaviness to it.

Dorcas clears her throat. "I really wasn't going to fight. I swear."

McGonagall waves a hand at her. "I may no longer be your professor, but I can tell when you're lying, Miss Meadowes."

Feeling herself flush, Dorcas looks away. "I'm just as good a fighter as them. I can help. I can."

"You can," McGonagall concedes. She puts her hand on Dorcas' shoulder and pats once before dropping it. "But not tonight."

"I don't care if I die," Dorcas says. She's not sure why, she just does. "I really don't."

McGonagall stares at her for a wide-eyed moment, looking caught off-guard. She opens her mouth and then closes it again, before shaking her head and looking away.

"I expect you believe that," she says, like it's simple.

"I don't just believe it," Dorcas protests. "I know it. I'm not afraid of death. Not anymore."

"You've spent too much time around Potter, I suspect."

Dorcas shakes her head furiously. "You know I want to win this war."

McGonagall offers her an appraising look. "I don't think," she sighs, and looks away. "I don't think it's about wanting anymore, Meadowes, so much as it is about needing."

"Then I need to win this war. So let me fight in it. They won't be too far away by now, I can—"

"No," McGonagall cuts in, and sounds even more exhausted. "Meadows, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but please do not test me tonight." Then, slightly stilted, "We don't need to lose you. You are still a seventh-year."

"Hogwarts is dead in the water."

McGonagall hesitates. Her eyes seem to change. "Perhaps it is," she says. "But I am still your head of house. Now, to bed with you, Meadowes."

"Or what?" Dorcas asks. "You'll keep me from going to Hogsmeade weekends?"

McGonagall blinks at her, an odd reminiscence in her face. She laughs and it's a bewildered sounding thing. "Go to bed."

"Right." Dorcas clears her throat. "Sorry, uh. Professor."

McGonagall waves her off, stepping away and disappearing into the kitchen. Dorcas watches the front door for a bit longer before sighing and starting up the stairs, which creak at every footfall, none of them quite adjoined right to the wall. They need replacing but nobody will bother.

She makes it to her and James' cupboard room and pauses outside, leaning her forehead against the door. James is silent in there, the sound of his incessant repairing spells not present for once. Maybe he, too, is tired of the repetition of it all; of thinking that this'll be the worst it gets and then before your eyes seeing it get worse in an instant. He might be just as used to it as her. He's always saying he thinks the Old War really started in 1975, when Sirius Black first disappeared. Before the ministry takeover but even then, he says, they were waging a smaller war.

Dorcas doesn't know how much she believes that. She doesn't know how much she believes anything he says anymore.

Sighing, she opens the door and flicks the light on. It flutters on and illuminates their grubby, pressed-together mattresses, and the letters bulging out of the cabinet, too many in there for it to hold.

And James isn't in there.

"Oh," Dorcas murmurs to herself. She steps inside and closes the door behind her. The window is open, cold, ashy air breezing through. She crosses the room and closes it to keep the smog out.

She hasn't the foggiest where he is. Maybe he's snuck out too, off on the mission after Longbottom and the rest, and he was just smarter about it than her. But Dorcas knows it would take a lot for him to go out there without her. It's unlikely he built up the nerve.

Dorcas spies something on his mattress. A half written letter. She sits on his bed and picks it up.

Pads,

Writing to you the other day helped me clear my head a lot. It didn't. I promised myself I wouldn't lie to you and I've done it already. It didn't clear my head, I'm feeling worse. A lot worse. And it's sort of scaring me.

I can't describe what it's like. I'm not ever comfortable anymore, not even for a second. This… weight, it sits on me, makes me off-kilter. I mostly want to sleep but I can't and most of the time lying down with my eyes closed doesn't help. I take a lot of showers to try to wash this horrible something-nothing feeling off. It never helps and I don't know how. I don't know how to. Get rid of it. This constant… it's like an itch. You know? This itch and it never goes away. Like my time is limited.

Dorcas is worried about me. She hates me too. I can tell. Wishes I wasn't here. As much as she's scared I'll go. I think I know how she feels, but I don't really, because I don't really know how to hate things. Not anymore, anyway. I don't know what I'm saying. She'd be lonely for a bit but.

Anyway. I guess I'm trying to say that I

It ends there.

Dorcas stares at it for a while, trying to piece it together in her head. James sitting here with the window open, breathing in the ash, coughing like he's dying. Hacking up spit over his morose letter to a dead man.

She gets a very uncomfortable feeling, all in a rush. It creeps up on her and wraps its fingers around her throat. Dorcas stands up and drops the letter onto the bed, striding across the room and out into the hallway.

Something's wrong. She knows it on an almost molecular level.

Down in the kitchen, McGonagall is sitting close to the fire, a hand raking through her tight-knotted hair as she peers down at a letter. She looks up as Dorcas enters.

"Have you seen James?" Dorcas asks, cutting to the point. "He's not in our room."

McGonagall blinks. "Unless he had the same plan as you, no, Meadowes, I haven't the faintest where he might be."

Dorcas stares. "Right. Uh. Keep an eye open for him, please?"

"Are you concerned for him?"

Yes. "No. Uh. He might have just… gone to clear his head. I dunno." Dorcas glances at the front door again, still obstinately shut. Her pulse pounds furiously in her wrist. "You're sure you didn't hear him come down the stairs or anything? He wouldn't have... he wouldn't've gone out without telling me."

McGonagall's piercing stare impales her. "Do I have reason to be concerned?" she asks, surprisingly gently.

Dorcas shakes her head once. "No. I'll… I'll find him. Sorry for bothering you."

She turns to leave, resolving herself to look upstairs again. But McGonagall calls after her.

"Meadowes," she says. "Wait a moment."

Dorcas steps back into the doorway. "Yes?"

"There's a hatch that leads to the roof," McGonagall says neutrally. "On the top floor, to the east end of the house. You can't miss it."

"Oh," Dorcas murmurs. Her whole body goes cold. "Thanks."

She turns and takes off up the stairs, taking them three at a time now. The stained walls flash past, lightened where they used to hold portraits, long-since taken down. The stubs of hacked-off nails leer out at her at intervals.

Get to the roof. Now.

Dorcas hurtles up the second flight of stairs and then the third, right to the top floor. In the murky darkness of the east side, she squints along the ceiling until she spies the hatch; someone has pushed an old book-filled cardboard box under it, stuffed with stolen copies of Hogwarts: A History.

"Oh, fuck you, James," Dorcas mutters to herself. She clambers atop the box and reaches up to push the hatch; it takes her a few tries, but eventually she manages to shove it hard enough that it swings all the way open, and the ashy night sky opens up above her, devoid of stars.

Dorcas hooks her hands over the sides of the opening and pulls herself up, scrambling to pull her knees over onto the rooftop. Once up there, she pants for a few moments, before closing the hatch behind her and straightening and looking around.

The rooftop is flat and broad, all concrete with a blocky stone chimney sticking out of the far side, pouring smoke into the sky. The city stretches low all around, her lights hazy and blurred with the hanging smoke. Ash falls from the sky like snow, thin and swirling with the dulled wind.

James is sitting on the side of the roof ten feet away, overlooking Hackney Terrace below. His legs are dangling over the side, his hands planted on the concrete ledge on either side of him.

Dorcas watches him for a while, trying to understand what he must be thinking. But in the end she doesn't understand, she doesn't think she ever will, not fully. Their traumas have affected them differently. They made Dorcas into a monster; they have made James into this rattling, empty thing.

She clears her throat. "You okay?"

James startles a bit and for a terrifying moment, Dorcas thinks he's going to slip and fall off the edge. But he keeps his grip. He looks over his shoulder at her and she sees his chest convulse with a stifled retch.

"Fine," he rasps. "Wanted some fresh air."

"The air up here is many things." Dorcas doesn't approach. She feels rooted to the spot, like she's facing down a frightened animal. "I don't think it's fresh."

James shrugs, looking back out over the city. He coughs once, then again. "I dunno."

The wind sighs around them. Dorcas shrugs the jacket off and approaches, holding it by its shoulders in both of her hands. It suddenly feels wrong to be the one with it. She gets within a few feet of James and hesitates before dropping it around his shoulders.

"Sorry I took it," she tells him, taking a seat at his side. The three-storey drop looms up towards her, nauseatingly far from up here.

He doesn't look at her. "It's fine."

Dorcas watches the city lights sway through the smoke for a while. They're bronzed by it, cast so dim it makes the world look filtered. Like no proper light may exist again inside it.

James rubs at his watering eyes. "Smoke," he says, in explanation. He coughs and then coughs again, rasping in a few quick, pragmatic breaths as if he intends to store them inside of him and hibernate with them.

"Right," Dorcas says. For effect, for the illusion, she rubs her own eyes too.

The unspoken weight of James' letter to Sirius hangs between them. Dorcas wants to mention it, and she wants not to. She wants to shake James so hard it knocks some sense into him; she wants to shake him so hard he falls off. She doesn't know what she wants. Peace. Peace and a good night's sleep. Quiet — true and proper quiet. Not illusory like it has been for months.

"I wasn't going to jump," James says after a while. He taps his heels against the wall.

Dorcas hums. "Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

James leans against her shoulder, pressing his to hers. He rests his shaven head there, too tentative for it to mean much.

"Sorry," he murmurs. "About…" And he trails off. Perhaps meaning to say about this or about me or about everything.

Dorcas gets it. He's got far too much to apologise for, and most of it isn't to her.

Still. "I accept your apology," she tells him. "I read your letter."

"I guessed you had."

"You still write to him?"

He shrugs. "Sometimes. When I can."

Dorcas nods. She feels the leather of James' jacket wince against her as he shuffles a little ways back from the edge; not far enough away, but an inch or two. The drop becomes just a bit less dizzying.

"Did you tell him, then?" she asks. "In the letter. About the fire. How it was us."

James coughs. "I dunno," he says. "Don't remember."

"Right."

"I never send them anyway."

"Nobody to send them to," Dorcas agrees.

James is quiet for a while. Even the rasp of his chest seems to slow. "Are you guilty? Do you feel guilty, I mean?" he asks. Nods around at the fiendfyre smoke. "About this."

Dorcas doesn't hesitate. "Yes."

"Oh." James nods slowly. Then he looks across at her. "Me too. But you shouldn't be. It wasn't you."

Dorcas shrugs. "We're a package deal. Nobody else left, is there? We'll take the fall together."

"You think they'll figure it out?"

"Yeah."

"Me too," James agrees. "They'll figure out the mailing service soon, too."

"Is that why—" Dorcas gestures to him, his dangling legs, the precarity of it all. How James is sitting inches from having to be scraped off the pavement tomorrow morning, a fine anti-magical insurgent paste.

"I wasn't going to jump," James repeats, mostly on principle. "I'm not… I'm…"

"You're not suicidal," Dorcas prompts, like it's scripted. Like it's written.

He nods. "Yeah. 'Course not."

"Yeah."

"Yeah." James digs his chin into her. "Yeah."

Dorcas hesitates, then drops an arm around his shoulders. It feels like too much, and it's certainly far more than he's earned, throwing her life around with as much veracity as he hurls his own, hurtling each and every one of his friends headfirst into tailspinning poisonous James Potter-related frenzies from which most never recover. Brightest and most terrible thing in most rooms he exists in. She hates him for that; for being what Sirius Black left behind when he vanished, for being just like her. Lonely and wretched and stuck that way.

"You can't come up here again," she murmurs into his ear.

James nods, not seeming to mean it much. "We're running out of time," he tells her.

"That doesn't mean you get to throw away what's left."

He coughs. "I won't."

Dorcas rests her chin on the top of his head. She breathes in the blackening ash and on the horizon, she imagines she can see the fire, burning closer by the minute. Somewhere deep inside Order HQ, an alarm goes off.

"Right," she murmurs. "Of course you won't. I'm not going to let you."