Author's Note: As promised, here is part five!! ( To everyone who reviewed
. . . I love you!! Thanks so much!! I am sitting here thinking about home
while I should be studying for finals, and I thought I'd write a bit of
holiday fluff for the Marauders. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to
everyone!
Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters, and I am not making any money off this story, so please don't sue me! I have no money!!
Sitting at my desk in my office, after building up a roaring blaze in the fireplace, I removed several books from my shelf, thumbing through the index of one particularly worn paperback. It was late, and most of the castle was asleep, but tonight was not a night I wanted to risk closing my eyes. Not with the memories still so close to the surface. Better to work, concentrate on something else.
I came to the index entry I was looking for. Patronus charm. Pages 314-315, 400-420. I had promised Harry I would teach him to ward off the dementors- and if his last Quidditch match was any indication, he was likely to be in at least as much danger from the Azkaban guards as from the prisoner they were supposed to be guarding. If I couldn't protect him from Sirius . . .
Don't go there. Not now.
I hadn't said anything to Dumbledore yet, of course. A bitter laugh escaped me as I turned to the page describing the Patronus charm. Yet. As if it was only a matter of finding time to speak to Dumbledore. I could no longer fool myself like that.
But Dumbledore was asleep by now, and I had work to do, I reminded myself. Such as finding a way to show Harry how to drive off dementors without collapsing or becoming too drained myself. Much as I wanted to help Harry, the idea of reliving my own worst memories again and again was terrifying.
But if it was horrible for me, who knew how to drive them off, how awful must it be for Harry, being forced to listen to the voices of his parents- my friends-as they were murdered by Lord Voldemort?
By their own best friend . . .
"No!" I brought my hand down hard on the book with a thump, then looked up nervously, the exclamation echoing in the silence of the castle. You have to concentrate, I said softly, aloud. You can't fall apart now. You can't.
I could still perform the Patronus charm-I had found that out, unwillingly, on the train. But how to explain to a thirteen-year-old boy what I did mostly by instinct, honed by missions when I was much younger, tracking the few rogue dementors who had followed Voldemort? I didn't think about theory when I raised my wand against a dementor any more than an Auror thinks about the precise technique required for the countercurse when repelling the Avada Kedavra. Either you knew it well enough to do it without thinking, or you were dead before you had a chance to concentrate.
Self-defense reflexes linger long after book-learning and explanations of technique fade away. Instinct, however, as many times as it had saved my life in the past, is useless in teaching. I could not simply tell Harry he must drive away the dementors "by instinct."
Defense Against the Dark Arts had always been one of my best subjects, and while I had never been as powerful as James and Sirius in actual combat, there had been few wizards in my year more knowledgeable about the various kinds of dark creatures that existed and what their most common motivations were. Perhaps it was a sense of empathy, being a so-called subhuman myself, that drove me to try to understand the minds of the dark creatures. Or perhaps it was merely a practical response to having James and Sirius as friends, two of the most powerful wizards of their age-hoping that my knowledge and strategy would made up for what I lacked compared to them in sheer magical strength.
One of the first things I discovered on graduating Hogwarts was that real life is much different from what you read in books, and dark creatures are no exception. (After all, look at everything they say about werewolves.) And nothing you read in a book can possibly prepare you for first meeting a dementor face to face.
Of course, Harry had already faced the dementors more than once, and his reaction, while a source of much embarrassment to him, came as no surprise to me. If only he knew how close I had come to collapsing that day on the train . . .
The Patronus charm is not a part of the curriculum at Hogwarts, and hadn't been since the defeat of Grindelwald, who had been the last dark wizard to incite a mass revolt among the dementors. Since the end of the Second World War the dementors had been confined to remote gulags such as Azkaban, and the chance of encountering a dementor in everyday life was next to impossible. The theory for the charm had been a subject for graduate work at some magical institutions of higher education, and was still part of standard Auror training, but aside from human overseers of Azkaban there are few wizards today who ever use it.
The book I was looking through now was written by a retired Auror, now deceased, who had fought against Grindelwald in the 1940's. I had picked up the book during a trip to Edinburgh during my sixth year, at a university bookstore out of sheer curiosity. I knew that I had no chance to become an Auror myself (the Auror's Bureau does not take werewolves) but I also knew, even then, that Professor Dumbledore had his own network of agents not connected to the Ministry, specifically targeting the Voldemort threat.
Where Dumbledore had found the book I don't know-I had kept few of my magical possession save my wand during my exile, and I had never expected to see any of my collection of books again. But when I had arrived, my books had been in my office along with my class schedules waiting for me. Dumbledore's work, I didn't doubt. Smoothing piece of blank parchment on the desk, I took out a quill and dipped it into an ink bottle, skimming the chapter on dementors, making notes every so often when a point occurred to me that might be useful.
December 24
When I was in my sixth year, I remember, James and Peter and Sirius and I had all stayed at Hogwarts over the Christmas holidays. This had become something of a tradition with the Marauders since the death of my parents, since now neither Sirius nor I had anywhere else to go. But my sixth-year Christmas is one I remember particularly well, for it was the first that Lily stayed with us.
It was the first time she really spent time with us-we were the only Gryffindors left at Hogwarts, and we discovered that the supposedly perfect Lily Evans had a streak of mischief as deep as any Marauder's.
It didn't take James long to fall in love after those weeks.
I remember Christmas Eve, when she made us all sit around the Christmas tree in the common room while she read us Christmas stories by Muggle authors she knew. Besides Sirius, she was the only one of us who was Muggle- born, so she held us spell-bound with a perfect recitation of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas." But the story that lingers in my mind still was one by a nineteenth-century Muggle named Dickens. I had been unable to comprehend the idea, then, of a man who hated Christmas. Not just didn't care, but actually hated it.
We were young then, and took great delight in yelling "Scrooge!" every time Severus Snape passed us in the halls, like it was some great private joke. And indeed, if anyone fit the description of Ebenezer Scrooge, it was Severus.
I never thought that one day the name would be just as applicable to myself.
Harry may not remember his first Christmas, I thought, as I made my way up to my room through halls festooned with holly and evergreen, but I remember it only too well.
It was a somber time, and none of us dared risk going home to see our families . . . those of us that had families. My parents had died when I was very young, and I had lived with foster families over the summer holidays when I couldn't stay with James or Peter. Sirius had never known his parents, and had spent his childhood being shuffled between a collection of aunts, none of whom knew him well or quite approved of him. James' parents and Peter's mother had wanted their sons home for Christmas, but we knew even then that the four of us were at the top of Voldemort's list. We decided it was safer to have Christmas together, just the five of us and Harry, lying low in a safe house provided by Professor Dumbledore.
It was less than a year before James and Lily and Peter died. The five of us were now deeply involved in the war against Voldemort, and had been for some time. We were not afraid for ourselves during those days, as much for Lily and Harry. It is incredibly difficult to work as an undercover spy when you have a wife and infant son, and to this day I cannot imagine how James was able to manage as well as he did.
It had been a bad year for us all. The Prewetts and the McKinnons had both been hunted down and killed, despite our prior knowledge of the enemy's intentions. All four of us had risked death and capture more than once to find out Voldemort's intentions, and it had been for nothing.
It was on the night Harry was born, while Lily was still in labor, that Dumbledore's owl had reached us informing us the Prewetts were dead. James and I had canvassed the streets for months to find out who Voldemort intended to strike at, and all of us had been personally involved in finding a hiding place for the family of six, and in keeping alert for the slightest indication that their security had been compromised.
In the end, it was Sirius and Mary McKinnon who left all at once, in the dead of night, in a desperate attempt to warn the family that the Death Eaters were about to strike.
They were too late. Sirius' broomstick began to behave erratically early in the flight and they were forced to hotwire a Muggle car, memory-charming half a dozen of the Muggle police and leaving the car a smashed wreck. Later I would wonder if Sirius sabotaged his own broomstick and caused the delay.
That Christmas came barely a week after our last attempt at a rescue. It had been the first mission Lily had participated in since Harry's birth, and had ended with her watching a good friend die in Sirius' arms. The deaths of the McKinnons, after months of work dedicated to protecting them, hit us all hard. A fine team of undercover agents we made, only a few years out of Hogwarts-able to predict the next strike but helpless to avert it, twice in a row in the two most important missions we had ever been assigned. It was a solemn holiday, and none of us felt much like celebrating anything.
We might have thought we were incompetent, but Voldemort obviously thought we were dangerous enough to want us out of the way. Before she died, Mary told us the chilling news-the Marauders, specifically the Potter family, were the next target of the Death Eaters.
On receiving our report on the McKinnons' deaths, Dumbledore had sent his terse condolences and instruction to meet Mundungus Fletcher in south Wales. We had thought we would get another mission, but when we met him he merely escorted us, in a Muggle car with tinted windows, to a small cottage in the Welsh countryside, where we found Harry waiting for us. The baby had been hidden at Hogwarts while his mother was away, but now Fletcher told us Dumbledore wanted us all to take some time off, regroup mentally, lay low for a while.
God knows we needed it. We were all burned out, exhausted emotionally and physically from the ordeals of the past few months. As soon as she saw Harry, Lily swept him into her arms, and for all that day she sat on the floor in a corner of the living room, rocking him slowly and crying.
The place was not particularly fancy-a two-bedroom cottage with a small living room and smaller kitchen. The furniture consisted of a few chairs, a table, and Harry's crib. The rest of us had to sleep on the floor-James and Lily in one bedroom, Sirius, Peter, and I in the other. There was no stove, only a fireplace with a note in the long-cold ashes warning us not to light it lest the smoke be seen by enemies.
We arrived two days after the disastrous conclusion of our last mission, and we hadn't slept at all in that time. Still I couldn't sleep that night. It was Christmas Eve. I stared into the cold, dark fireplace, watching as motes of dust danced in the light of a crescent moon and wondering what was going to happen to the world.
I was only twenty. Three years out of school, and I had spent the better part of the first two drifting between James' and Peter's houses, along with Sirius, who like me had no family. I had no regular job, nor did I expect to find one any time soon. An educated werewolf was still a werewolf, in the eyes of most wizards. But it didn't matter to me then. I had work to do, important work, though it was extremely dangerous and paid next to nothing. I lived with my friends or at Hogwarts when I was in the vicinity, or I could claim sanctuary at any of the designated "safe houses" scattered throughout England's major cities.
Our job description wasn't official, nor was it specific. We had all been called before Dumbledore individually, for "career counseling" as it was officially called, where he had requested that we put aside whatever career plans we had and work directly under him against Voldemort.
We were surprised, to say the least. I agreed instantly-I had no plans to lay aside, as the Ministry would never accept a werewolf as an Auror, and I had longed to contribute to the fight in some way. James and Sirius had vowed to become Aurors since Voldemort's first attack, but their respect for Dumbledore was so great that it didn't take long for them to be convinced. Peter was a different matter. It took a long while for Dumbledore to convince him to give up hopes of a comfy, safe desk job at the Ministry. I was ashamed later that I felt nothing but contempt for what I perceived as his cowardice.
In time of war, old customs and proprieties are set aside. Lily, too, was working for Dumbledore, and practicality as well as love had her and James sharing an apartment barely a year after they graduated Hogwarts. They were married soon afterward, though they were only nineteen-partly to stay away from their families lest Voldemort should come after their parents, and partly to spend as much time as they could in one another's company, in case one or both of them should not live very long.
I glanced up as Harry's cry pierced the still night, and listened in the darkness as Lily's voice murmured unintelligible reassurance. I thought about going to the bedroom where Sirius and Peter were asleep, and trying to get some rest myself. It had been so long since I had slept, but something held me away, drew me toward the window.
The glass was cold, and fogged with gray frost. I rubbed my hand across the pane, peering through the window as condensation ran down and collected on the wooden sill. Scattered clouds leaked tiny snowflakes, drifting like stardust from the black sky to pile up on the hills in eerie silence. In between the clouds, patches of night sky glittered with tiny stars, brighter for the utter lack of artificial light so far from civilization.
Harry had stopped crying, but I still thought I heard muffled sobs coming from James and Lily's room. Lily had always loved Christmas, I remembered. This must be hardest for her. She was used to spending Christmas with her family, or at Hogwarts among friends, where she knew she and everyone she loved was safe for a little while at least.
Well, I thought. This was getting me nowhere, and it was obvious I would not sleep tonight. I pulled on my boots, opening the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out into the snow.
The soft flakes were still falling, so I had no worries about my footprints still being visible from the air by the time morning arrived. My destination was not far off, in the evergreen grove that stood behind the little house. Wishing I had brought gloves, I batted powdery clumps of snow from heavy branches, inhaling the fresh pine scent with a painful nostalgia. Numbed, reddened hands wrestled with the branches, as I threw my weight against a particularly stubborn specimen. The branch gave a little, then broke suddenly with a snap that echoed in the stillness like a gunshot.
That's more like it, I thought, as I selected the next branch, brushing snow away and wishing for a saw. I finally settled for some ten long, thin branches of evergreen, gathering my harvest in my arms and giving in to a childish urge to step carefully in my own footprints so as not to mar the perfect white blanket that covered the ground.
My fingers were stiff and useless by the time I returned to the house, but all the same I felt inordinately pleased with myself. If we were going to be stuck here for Christmas, I might as well try to make the place cheerful, so that Lily might be able to enjoy herself while we were supposed to be taking a vacation. Letting her decorate the place with greenery might help take her mind off things, and bring back more pleasant memories of how she used to help decorate the common room at Hogwarts. With that thought, I curled up before the cold fireplace and was finally able to go to sleep.
Waking up the next morning I found that I had not managed to get all the snow off of the branches, and my pile of evergreens were now sitting in a puddle of melted snow that was seeping into the wooden floorboards. In the pale new light of dawn, I was not nearly as certain I had done the right thing. What if Lily did not want to remember Christmas as it used to be? What if such memories would only cause her pain?
My fears were unfounded, however. Heading to the tiny kitchen in search of food, I hurried back to the living room at her exclamation of delight. When I entered she had already begun directing James and Peter on where to hang the decorations.
Peter and I obeyed, while James went looking for rocks or wood chips or dustballs he could transfigure into ornaments, and Sirius had great fun tickling Harry with the soft pine needles. For a little while we were able to forget the tension that surrounded us, as Lily quickly took over the decorations.
She soon decided I hadn't brought nearly enough branches, and the resulting foray into the back yard soon became a full-fledged snowball war in which we all ended up drenched and shivering, but more relaxed and happy than we had been in almost a year.
She even insisted that we board up the windows, so that we could light candles and sing carols late into the night, while she managed to find a hot chocolate spell to warm us all up. Sitting on the floor in a circle, sipping hot chocolate in cracked mugs by candlelight, singing carols in five different keys (I don't care what James told you, he couldn't sing a note, and Sirius couldn't either!) while passing Harry around like a tiny kitten to be petted and fussed over, remains the fondest Christmas memory of my life, the brighter since it came during a period of so much darkness.
I wondered if Harry remembered that night, nearly thirteen years later. If he could, as he said, remember the night his parents died, then why not? I shook my head abruptly as I came to the door to my quarters, letting my fingers brush against the soft needles of the evergreen boughs someone- probably Madam Pomfrey-had hung through the Hogwarts halls. Someone someday should tell Harry something of his parents, the good times they had shared.
But not me, I thought, entering my room and dropping my books on my bed, noting absently that my room was probably the only one in the school that was not decorated for Christmas. Not yet. There are some things I still cannot speak of, not to him. Not to anyone.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters, and I am not making any money off this story, so please don't sue me! I have no money!!
Sitting at my desk in my office, after building up a roaring blaze in the fireplace, I removed several books from my shelf, thumbing through the index of one particularly worn paperback. It was late, and most of the castle was asleep, but tonight was not a night I wanted to risk closing my eyes. Not with the memories still so close to the surface. Better to work, concentrate on something else.
I came to the index entry I was looking for. Patronus charm. Pages 314-315, 400-420. I had promised Harry I would teach him to ward off the dementors- and if his last Quidditch match was any indication, he was likely to be in at least as much danger from the Azkaban guards as from the prisoner they were supposed to be guarding. If I couldn't protect him from Sirius . . .
Don't go there. Not now.
I hadn't said anything to Dumbledore yet, of course. A bitter laugh escaped me as I turned to the page describing the Patronus charm. Yet. As if it was only a matter of finding time to speak to Dumbledore. I could no longer fool myself like that.
But Dumbledore was asleep by now, and I had work to do, I reminded myself. Such as finding a way to show Harry how to drive off dementors without collapsing or becoming too drained myself. Much as I wanted to help Harry, the idea of reliving my own worst memories again and again was terrifying.
But if it was horrible for me, who knew how to drive them off, how awful must it be for Harry, being forced to listen to the voices of his parents- my friends-as they were murdered by Lord Voldemort?
By their own best friend . . .
"No!" I brought my hand down hard on the book with a thump, then looked up nervously, the exclamation echoing in the silence of the castle. You have to concentrate, I said softly, aloud. You can't fall apart now. You can't.
I could still perform the Patronus charm-I had found that out, unwillingly, on the train. But how to explain to a thirteen-year-old boy what I did mostly by instinct, honed by missions when I was much younger, tracking the few rogue dementors who had followed Voldemort? I didn't think about theory when I raised my wand against a dementor any more than an Auror thinks about the precise technique required for the countercurse when repelling the Avada Kedavra. Either you knew it well enough to do it without thinking, or you were dead before you had a chance to concentrate.
Self-defense reflexes linger long after book-learning and explanations of technique fade away. Instinct, however, as many times as it had saved my life in the past, is useless in teaching. I could not simply tell Harry he must drive away the dementors "by instinct."
Defense Against the Dark Arts had always been one of my best subjects, and while I had never been as powerful as James and Sirius in actual combat, there had been few wizards in my year more knowledgeable about the various kinds of dark creatures that existed and what their most common motivations were. Perhaps it was a sense of empathy, being a so-called subhuman myself, that drove me to try to understand the minds of the dark creatures. Or perhaps it was merely a practical response to having James and Sirius as friends, two of the most powerful wizards of their age-hoping that my knowledge and strategy would made up for what I lacked compared to them in sheer magical strength.
One of the first things I discovered on graduating Hogwarts was that real life is much different from what you read in books, and dark creatures are no exception. (After all, look at everything they say about werewolves.) And nothing you read in a book can possibly prepare you for first meeting a dementor face to face.
Of course, Harry had already faced the dementors more than once, and his reaction, while a source of much embarrassment to him, came as no surprise to me. If only he knew how close I had come to collapsing that day on the train . . .
The Patronus charm is not a part of the curriculum at Hogwarts, and hadn't been since the defeat of Grindelwald, who had been the last dark wizard to incite a mass revolt among the dementors. Since the end of the Second World War the dementors had been confined to remote gulags such as Azkaban, and the chance of encountering a dementor in everyday life was next to impossible. The theory for the charm had been a subject for graduate work at some magical institutions of higher education, and was still part of standard Auror training, but aside from human overseers of Azkaban there are few wizards today who ever use it.
The book I was looking through now was written by a retired Auror, now deceased, who had fought against Grindelwald in the 1940's. I had picked up the book during a trip to Edinburgh during my sixth year, at a university bookstore out of sheer curiosity. I knew that I had no chance to become an Auror myself (the Auror's Bureau does not take werewolves) but I also knew, even then, that Professor Dumbledore had his own network of agents not connected to the Ministry, specifically targeting the Voldemort threat.
Where Dumbledore had found the book I don't know-I had kept few of my magical possession save my wand during my exile, and I had never expected to see any of my collection of books again. But when I had arrived, my books had been in my office along with my class schedules waiting for me. Dumbledore's work, I didn't doubt. Smoothing piece of blank parchment on the desk, I took out a quill and dipped it into an ink bottle, skimming the chapter on dementors, making notes every so often when a point occurred to me that might be useful.
December 24
When I was in my sixth year, I remember, James and Peter and Sirius and I had all stayed at Hogwarts over the Christmas holidays. This had become something of a tradition with the Marauders since the death of my parents, since now neither Sirius nor I had anywhere else to go. But my sixth-year Christmas is one I remember particularly well, for it was the first that Lily stayed with us.
It was the first time she really spent time with us-we were the only Gryffindors left at Hogwarts, and we discovered that the supposedly perfect Lily Evans had a streak of mischief as deep as any Marauder's.
It didn't take James long to fall in love after those weeks.
I remember Christmas Eve, when she made us all sit around the Christmas tree in the common room while she read us Christmas stories by Muggle authors she knew. Besides Sirius, she was the only one of us who was Muggle- born, so she held us spell-bound with a perfect recitation of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas." But the story that lingers in my mind still was one by a nineteenth-century Muggle named Dickens. I had been unable to comprehend the idea, then, of a man who hated Christmas. Not just didn't care, but actually hated it.
We were young then, and took great delight in yelling "Scrooge!" every time Severus Snape passed us in the halls, like it was some great private joke. And indeed, if anyone fit the description of Ebenezer Scrooge, it was Severus.
I never thought that one day the name would be just as applicable to myself.
Harry may not remember his first Christmas, I thought, as I made my way up to my room through halls festooned with holly and evergreen, but I remember it only too well.
It was a somber time, and none of us dared risk going home to see our families . . . those of us that had families. My parents had died when I was very young, and I had lived with foster families over the summer holidays when I couldn't stay with James or Peter. Sirius had never known his parents, and had spent his childhood being shuffled between a collection of aunts, none of whom knew him well or quite approved of him. James' parents and Peter's mother had wanted their sons home for Christmas, but we knew even then that the four of us were at the top of Voldemort's list. We decided it was safer to have Christmas together, just the five of us and Harry, lying low in a safe house provided by Professor Dumbledore.
It was less than a year before James and Lily and Peter died. The five of us were now deeply involved in the war against Voldemort, and had been for some time. We were not afraid for ourselves during those days, as much for Lily and Harry. It is incredibly difficult to work as an undercover spy when you have a wife and infant son, and to this day I cannot imagine how James was able to manage as well as he did.
It had been a bad year for us all. The Prewetts and the McKinnons had both been hunted down and killed, despite our prior knowledge of the enemy's intentions. All four of us had risked death and capture more than once to find out Voldemort's intentions, and it had been for nothing.
It was on the night Harry was born, while Lily was still in labor, that Dumbledore's owl had reached us informing us the Prewetts were dead. James and I had canvassed the streets for months to find out who Voldemort intended to strike at, and all of us had been personally involved in finding a hiding place for the family of six, and in keeping alert for the slightest indication that their security had been compromised.
In the end, it was Sirius and Mary McKinnon who left all at once, in the dead of night, in a desperate attempt to warn the family that the Death Eaters were about to strike.
They were too late. Sirius' broomstick began to behave erratically early in the flight and they were forced to hotwire a Muggle car, memory-charming half a dozen of the Muggle police and leaving the car a smashed wreck. Later I would wonder if Sirius sabotaged his own broomstick and caused the delay.
That Christmas came barely a week after our last attempt at a rescue. It had been the first mission Lily had participated in since Harry's birth, and had ended with her watching a good friend die in Sirius' arms. The deaths of the McKinnons, after months of work dedicated to protecting them, hit us all hard. A fine team of undercover agents we made, only a few years out of Hogwarts-able to predict the next strike but helpless to avert it, twice in a row in the two most important missions we had ever been assigned. It was a solemn holiday, and none of us felt much like celebrating anything.
We might have thought we were incompetent, but Voldemort obviously thought we were dangerous enough to want us out of the way. Before she died, Mary told us the chilling news-the Marauders, specifically the Potter family, were the next target of the Death Eaters.
On receiving our report on the McKinnons' deaths, Dumbledore had sent his terse condolences and instruction to meet Mundungus Fletcher in south Wales. We had thought we would get another mission, but when we met him he merely escorted us, in a Muggle car with tinted windows, to a small cottage in the Welsh countryside, where we found Harry waiting for us. The baby had been hidden at Hogwarts while his mother was away, but now Fletcher told us Dumbledore wanted us all to take some time off, regroup mentally, lay low for a while.
God knows we needed it. We were all burned out, exhausted emotionally and physically from the ordeals of the past few months. As soon as she saw Harry, Lily swept him into her arms, and for all that day she sat on the floor in a corner of the living room, rocking him slowly and crying.
The place was not particularly fancy-a two-bedroom cottage with a small living room and smaller kitchen. The furniture consisted of a few chairs, a table, and Harry's crib. The rest of us had to sleep on the floor-James and Lily in one bedroom, Sirius, Peter, and I in the other. There was no stove, only a fireplace with a note in the long-cold ashes warning us not to light it lest the smoke be seen by enemies.
We arrived two days after the disastrous conclusion of our last mission, and we hadn't slept at all in that time. Still I couldn't sleep that night. It was Christmas Eve. I stared into the cold, dark fireplace, watching as motes of dust danced in the light of a crescent moon and wondering what was going to happen to the world.
I was only twenty. Three years out of school, and I had spent the better part of the first two drifting between James' and Peter's houses, along with Sirius, who like me had no family. I had no regular job, nor did I expect to find one any time soon. An educated werewolf was still a werewolf, in the eyes of most wizards. But it didn't matter to me then. I had work to do, important work, though it was extremely dangerous and paid next to nothing. I lived with my friends or at Hogwarts when I was in the vicinity, or I could claim sanctuary at any of the designated "safe houses" scattered throughout England's major cities.
Our job description wasn't official, nor was it specific. We had all been called before Dumbledore individually, for "career counseling" as it was officially called, where he had requested that we put aside whatever career plans we had and work directly under him against Voldemort.
We were surprised, to say the least. I agreed instantly-I had no plans to lay aside, as the Ministry would never accept a werewolf as an Auror, and I had longed to contribute to the fight in some way. James and Sirius had vowed to become Aurors since Voldemort's first attack, but their respect for Dumbledore was so great that it didn't take long for them to be convinced. Peter was a different matter. It took a long while for Dumbledore to convince him to give up hopes of a comfy, safe desk job at the Ministry. I was ashamed later that I felt nothing but contempt for what I perceived as his cowardice.
In time of war, old customs and proprieties are set aside. Lily, too, was working for Dumbledore, and practicality as well as love had her and James sharing an apartment barely a year after they graduated Hogwarts. They were married soon afterward, though they were only nineteen-partly to stay away from their families lest Voldemort should come after their parents, and partly to spend as much time as they could in one another's company, in case one or both of them should not live very long.
I glanced up as Harry's cry pierced the still night, and listened in the darkness as Lily's voice murmured unintelligible reassurance. I thought about going to the bedroom where Sirius and Peter were asleep, and trying to get some rest myself. It had been so long since I had slept, but something held me away, drew me toward the window.
The glass was cold, and fogged with gray frost. I rubbed my hand across the pane, peering through the window as condensation ran down and collected on the wooden sill. Scattered clouds leaked tiny snowflakes, drifting like stardust from the black sky to pile up on the hills in eerie silence. In between the clouds, patches of night sky glittered with tiny stars, brighter for the utter lack of artificial light so far from civilization.
Harry had stopped crying, but I still thought I heard muffled sobs coming from James and Lily's room. Lily had always loved Christmas, I remembered. This must be hardest for her. She was used to spending Christmas with her family, or at Hogwarts among friends, where she knew she and everyone she loved was safe for a little while at least.
Well, I thought. This was getting me nowhere, and it was obvious I would not sleep tonight. I pulled on my boots, opening the door as quietly as I could, and stepped out into the snow.
The soft flakes were still falling, so I had no worries about my footprints still being visible from the air by the time morning arrived. My destination was not far off, in the evergreen grove that stood behind the little house. Wishing I had brought gloves, I batted powdery clumps of snow from heavy branches, inhaling the fresh pine scent with a painful nostalgia. Numbed, reddened hands wrestled with the branches, as I threw my weight against a particularly stubborn specimen. The branch gave a little, then broke suddenly with a snap that echoed in the stillness like a gunshot.
That's more like it, I thought, as I selected the next branch, brushing snow away and wishing for a saw. I finally settled for some ten long, thin branches of evergreen, gathering my harvest in my arms and giving in to a childish urge to step carefully in my own footprints so as not to mar the perfect white blanket that covered the ground.
My fingers were stiff and useless by the time I returned to the house, but all the same I felt inordinately pleased with myself. If we were going to be stuck here for Christmas, I might as well try to make the place cheerful, so that Lily might be able to enjoy herself while we were supposed to be taking a vacation. Letting her decorate the place with greenery might help take her mind off things, and bring back more pleasant memories of how she used to help decorate the common room at Hogwarts. With that thought, I curled up before the cold fireplace and was finally able to go to sleep.
Waking up the next morning I found that I had not managed to get all the snow off of the branches, and my pile of evergreens were now sitting in a puddle of melted snow that was seeping into the wooden floorboards. In the pale new light of dawn, I was not nearly as certain I had done the right thing. What if Lily did not want to remember Christmas as it used to be? What if such memories would only cause her pain?
My fears were unfounded, however. Heading to the tiny kitchen in search of food, I hurried back to the living room at her exclamation of delight. When I entered she had already begun directing James and Peter on where to hang the decorations.
Peter and I obeyed, while James went looking for rocks or wood chips or dustballs he could transfigure into ornaments, and Sirius had great fun tickling Harry with the soft pine needles. For a little while we were able to forget the tension that surrounded us, as Lily quickly took over the decorations.
She soon decided I hadn't brought nearly enough branches, and the resulting foray into the back yard soon became a full-fledged snowball war in which we all ended up drenched and shivering, but more relaxed and happy than we had been in almost a year.
She even insisted that we board up the windows, so that we could light candles and sing carols late into the night, while she managed to find a hot chocolate spell to warm us all up. Sitting on the floor in a circle, sipping hot chocolate in cracked mugs by candlelight, singing carols in five different keys (I don't care what James told you, he couldn't sing a note, and Sirius couldn't either!) while passing Harry around like a tiny kitten to be petted and fussed over, remains the fondest Christmas memory of my life, the brighter since it came during a period of so much darkness.
I wondered if Harry remembered that night, nearly thirteen years later. If he could, as he said, remember the night his parents died, then why not? I shook my head abruptly as I came to the door to my quarters, letting my fingers brush against the soft needles of the evergreen boughs someone- probably Madam Pomfrey-had hung through the Hogwarts halls. Someone someday should tell Harry something of his parents, the good times they had shared.
But not me, I thought, entering my room and dropping my books on my bed, noting absently that my room was probably the only one in the school that was not decorated for Christmas. Not yet. There are some things I still cannot speak of, not to him. Not to anyone.
