Author's Note: Happy end of Jilytober, friends.

I first posted about the idea for this fic on Tumblr back in May 2021, and the first several chapters have sat on my hard drive just as long. I didn't expect it to take me this long to share it with you all, but I suppose life is like that sometimes.

Content warning: While this isn't dark!James content, this fic begins and will continue with dystopian themes throughout. If you're triggered by systemic issues of discrimination or sexism or sexual harassment, this might not be for you. The same goes if you're triggered by violence or death. This fic is intended as adult content written by an adult and for adults. I trust that adult readers know their own limitations and understand how to curate their own reading experience in order to maintain healthy boundaries for themselves. Not wanting to read about a dystopian, fucked up world doesn't make you weak; at the same time, wanting to do so—or wanting to write about it, in my case—doesn't mean that you or I are fucked up or want to see these same things play out in real life. I have a healthy respect for the differences between fiction and reality, and I appreciate how reading and writing allows a person to experience things—even unpleasant things—in a safe space that they would never want to encounter in real life. This can be for cathartic reasons, such as coping with trauma of your own, or it can also simply be because it interests you. Basically, I trust you as the reader to know your limitations when it comes to what you want to consume in fiction, and I trust you to make your reading experience a safe space for you because only you know your triggers. You can make the internet at large, and fandom specifically, a safe space for yourself by understanding what you do and do not want to consume. As an author, I'm here to warn you that this fic will have fluffy moments and romantic moments, but it's very much on a backdrop of horror meant to be uncomfortable. It's up to you if you want to consume this or not. Again, if it's not for you, that's okay. Don't read it at all. Click back at any time. Block my content. I support any of those choices that will benefit your mental health. But I don't need to hear about how you think I'm fucked up for writing this, or how other people are fucked up for enjoying it. I've done my due diligence as an author in warning you what will come. The rest, lovingly, is on you, because you know yourself and your limitations and boundaries best.

Thanks for all the love over the past several months. Trust that I've read every comment on every fic I've written and every comment left on Tumblr—the good, the bad, the very ugly, and the intensely sweet. I'm planning to focus on the latter, and it's for that that I'm grateful. Love you all.

LONDON HAS FALLEN

Chapter One

JAMES

On an average Friday in October, at seven in the evening, James Potter's life changes forever.

Further, the blame for all that occurs that day, and all that will occur in the future—good and bad—will lie at the feet of Sirius Black.

Sirius, after all, had refused to step into Diagon Alley to sign for deliveries to Potters' Potions Plus. Like every other day, he'd sent James in his stead. His reasoning had come lamely, a vague muttering under his breath about taking inventory in the stockroom—laughable, really, given his revulsion for bookkeeping—and James had recognized it as just that: an excuse. Sirius, too, had clearly pegged it for what it was. The beginnings of a smirk had formed around the corners of his mouth as he'd turned on his heel from behind the polished counter before he'd disappeared from sight, and he hadn't had to speak his motive aloud. James would have also liked to avoid the upcoming conversation with Alexei, the delivery wizard from Mr. Mulpepper's Apothecary who always attempted an upsell, but he couldn't. It had become his burden to bear almost weekly over the past seven years working in his parents' shop.

The delivery should have gone just as it had every other week—smoothly, if perhaps a bit gratingly, and wrapped up as quickly as possible to conclude yet another ordinary workday. And it does, until suddenly it doesn't.

"Quiet out," Alexei notes as James skims the thick stack of parchment on the clipboard in front of him. Indeed, although they stand on a frequently-used stretch of cobblestone during a popular time of day, no other voices sound. "You ever see the alley this quiet on a Friday?"

James grunts in return, his eyes fixed to the tiny numbers assigned to the prices column. His mum can add the numbers at the speed of magic, but his own mental maths comes along slower.

Alexei persists. "Even the shutters are closed most places." His bald head tips back to stare up towards the towering shops that surround them, some of which surpass six or seven stories. Potters' Potions Plus sits in the middle of it all, comprised of warm red brick and shiny brass fixtures and, at a mere two stories, dwarfed by the buildings around it. The day's dying sun reflects off his shiny forehead. "And the birds aren't making a sound. Have you noticed?"

Truly? No. But after a day passed inside catering to clientele, he'd hardly had a chance to breathe, let alone to stop and contemplate birdsong.

"I passed a great mob of people up near the Cauldron." Alexei scratches at his beard, scraping his short nails against coarse hairs. "Looked like—well, you know how it is, James. Looked like a bit of a rough crowd. Some of it was just Grindel's Gang, but I'd wager there was a mudblood or two or three mixed up there too, and maybe some others. It's so hard to say. People go masked just about everywhere these days, so it's hard to know who fits in where. It's part of the reason people shop at your mum and dad's place—people know who they're doing business with. It's important, that."

Mudblood. Alexei tosses the word out casually, just as most do. Still, it's a term that has never sat comfortably upon James' shoulders. In the back of his mind, trapped somewhere behind the figures that swim before his vision, he can perfectly picture the disapproving frown on his late granddad's face at the very suggestion of the slur.

"Alexei." The sharpness in his tone surprises even James, and he lifts a hand to his glasses, pushing them up so he can rub at the corners of his aching eyes. He takes a breath, intent on tempering his tone, and the specter of his granddad slowly fades. Behind him, the tiny shop bell in the doorway of Potters' Potions Plus tinkles in the cool fall breeze. "Sorry. I'm just trying to concentrate here."

"Oh, sure, sure. Don't let me bother you."

Easier said than done.

"Do you hear that?" Alexei asks a second later, and James' fingers contract painfully around the clipboard in front of him. "No, seriously, James. Do you hear that?" Only the note of sheer panic in Alexei's voice inspires James to look up.

He hears it all a moment later.

Screams. Faint, and echoing fainter still, but screams nonetheless. They've always formed a common fixture in Diagon Alley, and an even more common fixture in nearby Knockturn Alley, but have somehow only increased of late.

"Go," he tells Alexei immediately, thrusting the clipboard into his arms. "Get the delivery inside and then go, get out of here before—"

Alexei all but throws the clipboard back in return. "I can't," he says, his voice cracking. A loud gust of wind bursts through the narrow streets with the force of a hurricane, and the sheets of parchment stand straight up under his hands, straining hard to break free. Over Alexei's head, a huge cloud of smoke—black as coal and reeking of death—joins the wind's ferocious path. "You have—I need you to sign for it to show that I delivered it—otherwise—"

It's all almost laughable, Alexei's insistence and the exchange that follows, those motions of business that they both go through despite the ever-growing closeness of chaos. Together, on the stoop of Potters' Potions Plus, they struggle to hold onto the normalcy of the day, of the situation, of their lives.

They fail, of course.

"I don't have a quill—"

"Here—" Alexei produces a crumpled quill from his pocket—self-inking, praise Godric—with a feathered tip bent painfully to one side. In several short, jerking strokes, James scrawls his signature to the bottom of the final page. The quill flies through the air as he tries to pass it back to Alexei, in his hand one moment and flickering through the air the next. It vanishes as if Disapparating.

Speaking of Disapparating—

"Shit, shit, shit—" Alexei speaks not for the quill that has fled his grasp, but with a glance towards the sky, as if he senses a change in the air that far surpasses the dark storm clouds swiftly overtaking the evening's fading sun. "Shit—do you feel that? It's—"

"Disapparation wards." It washes over James too—that tight squeeze in the very center of his chest, that feeling of imprisonment, that all-consuming helplessness that always accompanies the unmistakable falling of wards. The cloying smell of smoke drifts ever closer, thick enough to choke and followed by screams shrill and piercing. "Yes, just—go. Run. I'll get it all inside. You just—"

Alexei listens without further prompting. Lowering his head, he charges off without another word, his clipboard secured under one arm and his face set into a firm grimace, and he doesn't look back.

Although he flees in the opposite direction of the chaos—of the smoke, of the screams, of the wind, of it all and everything to come—James will never see him again. He isn't the first person in James' life to disappear into the night and never return, and he won't be the last.

Under Grindelwald's regime, things are just like that.

With a simple twist of the knob, the door to the Potters' shop flies open, pushed with such force by the ever-growing wind that the pane in the door shatters. Glass glitters like rain across the polished oak floor. Still, James hardly has time to even register the break before he pulls his wand in hand—and that, too, takes effort thanks to the whipping wind. The slender rod fumbles between his fingers, nearly dropped beyond recovery, before he manages to cast the first of several haphazard Banishing Charms on the brown paper packages left upon the stoop. Thanks to the water in his eyes, the neat stack left by Alexei soon becomes a sprawling, chaotic mess, but one inside, inside, where he should be, where his parents are, where Sirius—

Where is Sirius? Off to check on Euphemia and Fleamont Potter? Holed up in the back of the shop with the radio blaring, oblivious to the pandemonium outside? Off the premises entirely, and without any way back in with Disapparation wards in full effect? There's no way to know, and the absence of any sense of certainty rushes panic through James' nervous system, twists his gut into knots, and boils his blood. Adrenaline races through the far corners of his body until his very skin aches under the pressure of it. He must find Sirius, find his mum, find his dad, find—

Across the street, not ten feet away, the windows of Flourish and Blotts explode.

On instinct alone, he hits the ground with his hands over his head. He comes down hard, so hard that blood fills his mouth as his chin smacks the cobblestones beneath him, and he swears on an exhale that shoots all the breath from his stomach. In the handful of gasps that follow, shop windows shatter around him at random, the violent symphony so ear-splitting that it wouldn't surprise him to find blood trickling from his ears to join what pools in his mouth and runs down his throat.

But what actually follows? That surprises him quite a bit.

"There!" A man's harsh, guttural voice jerks James from his pain, and just in time. Rolling sideways, he barely avoids an onslaught of people rushing down the alley away from the fire, faces young and old alike all nearly identical in bloodless, fearful casts. Wide eyes and wider mouths—he has just enough time to take in a multitude of matching expressions of shock before he scrambles to his feet. The red brick of Potters' Potions Plus presses warmly against his back as he throws himself out of the way of the chaos. "There, just a little further, we have them now—"

A scream follows, high and shrill and undeniably female.

Why does he do it? He'll spend weeks—months—years—asking that question to himself, but he'll never know for sure, not then in that moment or in all the moments to come. The door to the shop stands open at his side, a sanctuary since childhood and every bit as warm and beckoning as one of his mum's hugs. How easily he could slip inside and safely shut the door behind him, and the desire to do so beckons more headily still when a siren cuts suddenly through the sky, followed by a further shift in the air that turns the breezy afternoon even colder.

Anti-magic wards. They have a certain feel to them, distinct but impossible to explain, a sensation that seeps like a pool of dread into first his subconscious and then his consciousness. A tingling feeling, sharp and unpleasant, spreads across the skin of his forearms and back and calves. Static, as if pulled from radio waves, fills both the air and his brain. The all-consuming, cloying haze hurtles him into memories of the past, many memories of the past, of late nights in the flat above his parents' shop spent huddling silently with his mates while chaos reigns in the streets outside. On those nights, as now, he clutches his wand with a banal hope that it might once again spark to life, but it never does, just as he knows it won't now. Only special wands, those assigned by the state to certain members of Grindelwald's loyal troops, work with the wards in place. On nights when the static fills his head and the screams fill the streets and his wand hangs uselessly by his side, the shouts and sobs and cruel laughter have always sent him straight to his bed, where a pillow over his head hides some, but not all, of his misery. After years spent that way, anti-magic wards hold a sensation not dissimilar to tangling with a dementor. Their very existence attacks his brain with immobility, with panic, with fear. The chill in the air as the wards settle around him feels entirely like helplessness.

He's sick of that feeling. He's so bloody sick of all of it.

Another scream, closer than before—perhaps only just around the corner of a nearby building—followed by a cacophony of laughter. Goosebumps arise on his skin, and his stomach flips with nausea.

Without another thought—without any thought, really—he runs towards the chaos.

In a matter of minutes, his life changes forever.

xxx

He never makes it to the screaming woman. In fact, he never sees her at all.

There simply isn't time. When he rounds the corner of Potters' Potions Plus, his path set for the main stretch of Diagon Alley and the black smoke that billows from the heart of it, he finds himself abruptly suspended in midair. One moment he runs with his head down, his arms pumping at his sides as he bolts toward pandemonium and fire and raised voices, all the while uncomfortably aware of the utter uselessness of his wand in his pocket. The next, he lurches unexpectedly from his feet, and all gravity flees as his body flies into the air, weightless, suspended like Alexei's quill caught in the wind. Excitement swoops through his stomach, caught somewhere between protest and pleasure, at the familiar feeling of taking off on a broom—only this is different, so different, so out of his control and out of his understanding and out of this world that panic quickly sets in. His body twists sideways, pulling him parallel to the ground, and only instinct accounts for the way his arms extend and his fingers scramble to search desperately along the smooth exterior of the building beside him. In a matter of seconds, he finds relief upon a windowsill on the second floor of a nearby Quidditch supply store, yet his feet continue to rise even after he's secured his grip. Pulled by an unseen force, his body inverts entirely until his feet point toward the darkened sky, and his glasses teether loosely on the bridge of his nose as he stares face-first at the cobblestones below him.

Belatedly—as his torso stretches tighter and tighter, as his grip upon the windowsill loosens with the persistent stretching of his core—he catches sight of something behind him. A fine mist hangs in the air he'd just passed through, twinkling faintly like thousands of minuscule stars. Almost like fog, it swirls slowly all around his body, all around the air below him, and all around the alleyway as far as his eyes can see.

The source of that mist, a slender figure in a hooded black cloak, stands in the center of the alley. Upside down, his heart racing and his mind scrambled, it takes James several seconds to fully comprehend exactly what he sees. At first, the reality before him makes such little sense that his mind refuses to accept it. Yet, eventually, comprehension clicks into his mind, and he can only stare, open-mouthed.

The grounded figure had cast the fog—or summoned it or conjured it, he can't tell—despite the anti-magic wards all around them. They'd managed it with the power of their bare hands, held tense and aloft on either side of their body. And on the other side of the alley—

A whole set of Grindelwald's troops, brilliant in their eye-catching, terror-inspiring crimson robes. He counts six, and each float similarly skyward like slow-moving balloons, swirling up into the stormy sky until they crest over the tops of buildings. Behind them, a whole section of the alley burns.

In twenty-five years on earth, magic has never appeared to him like this—so powerful, so all-consuming, so brilliant. Truly, he hadn't even known that that sort of magic—wandless, not beholden to any wards, terrifyingly powerful in the complexity of several simultaneous casts—could even exist.

The hooded figure flourishes its wrists with no more than the barest flicker, as if shooing away an errant fly. The spell on the suspended bodies breaks, launching all six of Grindelwald's troops through the air with the screaming speed of a bludger across a Quidditch stadium. Their cloaks streak across the sky in crimson flashes, there one moment and gone the next.

He has no moment to wonder after their landing, because he flies too, although with considerably less space to go. His body smacks dully against the Quidditch supply building, a solid collision of head and one shoulder and one hip, and he has a single moment to see stars before gravity takes over. Only a lifetime of broom riding compels his fingers to hold their grip, and he hangs for a moment after his body abruptly drops, the muscles and tendons of his arms stretched to the breaking point, before he lets himself fall the remaining feet to the ground.

Behind him, a woman screams—but a different woman than the one who had started it all, if his ears tell true. It's a different sort of scream, at least, more of an exclamation than a true shout, and he turns to look as soon as the world stops spinning enough for him to right himself on his feet.

Bafflingly—unbelievably—incredibly—the hooded figure is a woman.

What had he expected? Not a man nor a woman, in truth, but perhaps some sort of nonhuman entity—or nonliving entity, not a person or a creature or anything sentient at all. The magic pulsing from her body, suspending him in midair, and coating the alleyway had simply felt too otherworldly for that.

Yet she speaks with a voice distinctly human, and distinctly feminine too. "Fuck," she says, sharp and crisp and clear, and her voice carries down the narrow alley even over the roar of flames. She collapses slightly, no longer a pinnacle of perfect posture and power, but stooped and twisted slightly under her cloak.

Again, he doesn't think. Gryffindor spirit—bold, brave, chivalrous, probably a bit stupid—courses too wildly through his veins. "Are you alright?" he calls, his head throbbing madly, and the woman jumps and whirls to face him for the first time. Her left leg wobbles underneath her, as if threatening to give way, but she doesn't again crumple.

A mask covers her face, as Alexei had first noted a lifetime earlier. Nondescript and pale, it looks not dissimilar to dozens of others he's seen in the alley day and day out. Since childhood, but with increasing regularity throughout his adult years, he's watched more people go about their business masked than unmasked, no doubt soothed by a certain sense of anonymity not at all guaranteed or even vaguely promised by such measures. Grindel's Gang, half-bloods, muggleborns—hell, even purebloods occasionally don a mask or a raised cloak to shield identities from the watchful eyes of the state. He can't see her eyes, but he can feel them. She stares with physical intensity, one that should send him scurrying away after the power he'd just witnessed. He should rush in the opposite direction, should disappear around the corner and into his family's shop and leave her in her own clearly capable hands.

And yet, when she lifts her hands towards him, her slender fingers spread like handfuls of dangerous knives, her palms appear thick with blood, blood he hadn't seen before. And—

Well, again, Gryffindor. Chivalry may end up killing him, but he takes a step forward without thought.

For a second, they stare at each other from the space of several feet, and then the woman drops her hands.

"Fine." Pain filters through her tone and catches the single syllable in her throat. "Fine. I—did I get you? I'm so sorry, I didn't mean—are you alright? I thought everyone else had run—"

The absurdity of the situation, only compounded by the thick sincerity in her voice, threatens to unload a sudden stream of hysterical laughter from his lungs. He chokes on it and then chokes again on the smoke in the air.

"Go," she urges. "Go, before they send more—"

Behind her, one of the burning buildings collapses into a smoldering pile of broken boards and shale shingles and hot ash.

She ducks, her body dropped down to the cobblestones with an arm lifted to shield her head, and—like a broken record in his head, but a true one nonetheless—he doesn't think. For the second time in a matter of minutes, he rushes not away from the danger, but towards it, closing the gap between them.

The temperature of the fire increases with even such a slight variance in distance, so hot that a steady sheen of sweat immediately springs up underneath his button-down. Without a single ounce of hesitation, he secures an arm around the woman—the nonhuman entity who had just performed the most astounding magic he's ever witnessed—and pulls her from the center of the ally and back towards the relative safety of the Quidditch supply wall.

Once there, her body collapses entirely.

She goes down without a noise, on her feet one minute and a loose pile of limbs the next, and he has just enough time to shift his weight, a task done on instinct alone, before he falls with her. "You need to go," she says, her voice a tight ball of pain. In the distance, another building collapses.

"No."

"If anyone sees you—"

"No one looks out their windows when these things happen. Can you walk?"

She doesn't answer. "I made these things happen," she says instead. "Do you know—"

"Did they deserve it? Grindel's Gang?"

Again, she doesn't answer. Really, she doesn't have to. His voice gives away that he assumes that they had, and he doesn't need to see her face to know that her silence confirms his suspicions. Above the silver clasp of her cloak, he can just make out a few inches of the skin of her neck, cast a shade nearly as pale as her mask. Her throat works hard for a moment, as if she struggles to swallow, which again tells him everything he needs to know.

"Do you know what they do to enemies of the state?" she asks.

"Yes. I've seen the executions." She must have too, as every magical man, woman, and child over the age of eleven attends by mandatory order. He'd seen his first at twelve, transported along with his peers from the safe walls of Hogwarts to the center of Diagon Alley. On a cold winter day, they'd watched the slow dismemberment of a convicted terrorist, a muggleborn witch not many years past school age herself. He'd had nightmares for months of her screams and her blood and the absolute silence from the crowd all around him—but also of her pride, of the fierceness in her eyes, of the way she'd refused to beg or plead no matter what the crimson-cloaked executioner had done to her. Afterward, on more than one occasion, he'd woken in their dormitory to Sirius shouting from the bed beside him. Sirius, no doubt, had experienced the same from him. They'd never spoken of it, not even half a lifetime later or after all the executions that had followed. "I also know what they do to women, and—I'm not leaving you to that."

Green. Up close, her eyes are green, and brilliantly so behind the slits of her mask.

"What's your name?" she asks.

"James Potter."

She reacts suddenly, so suddenly that he jumps a little when her hand flies to her face. Thick, sticky blood smears across each cheek of her mask as she presses inward, and then she clears the mask away entirely.

Ash pours through the air and smoke chokes his lungs and blood seeps into his trousers from an unseen wound underneath the tangled mass of her cloak. Sweat drips down the back of his neck and face and rain threatens to fall from the clouds that have gathered in the sky. Screams still echo, but further away, somewhere deeper in the alley beyond his control. And yet—

Yet, despite all that, he still notices, of course. He notices that she's fucking beautiful, even with bloodless cheeks and lips swollen from the pressure of her teeth. Her lower lip remains trapped there, her mouth a pained grimace, as her brilliant green eyes trace the contours of his face. She searches, although for what he doesn't know, and his throat aches too badly to ask.

In the end, she finds it. "I know Remus Lupin." Underneath his arms, she takes in a breath that makes her whole body tremble. "We're—he's a friend. A good friend. You live together, don't you?"

"Yes." He can do little more than stare. "You—how? How do you—"

"It's complicated. Can you take me to him? He'll—"

"He's not home." The second he speaks, the burgeoning hope on her face—slow, pretty, and achingly sweet—collapses. It's due to the foolish desire to see that hope restored, and to see some of her pain vanish, that his next decision comes. "But I'll take you there. Can you walk?"

"I—" For a second, skepticism flashes across her expressive eyes, present in the tiniest furrow of her brow.

He can't exactly blame her for that. It doesn't matter that they share a friend—and how is that possible, how, when he would have confidently claimed even fifteen seconds earlier that he knew every single facet of Remus' life? He knows as well as she does that Grindel's Gang aren't the only predators that prey on vulnerable women. The fact that he doesn't recognize her, this mystery friend of Remus', can only mean that she places among a more vulnerable side of society than he does. Is she a muggleborn, the lowest of the low only above muggles, kept stratified from the pureblood society in which he lives? Or a half-blood, someone from an unconnected bloodline who hadn't tested into Hogwarts or whose parents hadn't bought their way into an elite education? No matter the answer, he can see himself clearly through her eyes in the same way that he knows most people must see him. He's a man, one of the highest protected classes, and one not too dissimilar from the men who had just hunted her in the streets, even if he'd never willingly wear Grindelwald's colors.

Yet she'd taken down those men. She'd taken them down and almost taken him with them. Really, he should fear her.

But he doesn't, not even for a second, and not just because she can't muster the strength to pull herself to her feet. Maybe it once again comes down to foolish Gryffindor chivalry.

Is that stupid? How can it be anything else?

The second doubt flits into his brain, she speaks. "My leg is shot," she says, her voice rather small. "You'll have to carry me. I'm—fuck, I'm so sorry for all this."

Just like that, at the apology once again rife in her voice, his concerns vanish.

xxx

Sirius calls him out even before he can shut the door behind him.

"What the fuck, Prongs—" he begins, his gray eyes wild and his tone more than a little furious, but he falls silent the second he takes in the entirety of James' person: hair even more askew than usual, blood fresh on his chin, and—

Strange woman clasped in his arms. That too.

With astounding ease, Sirius sidesteps the latter fact entirely.

"You stupid fucking idiot, I can't believe you ran out into that and—no, no, I can. I can believe it." Sirius lifts both hands to run through his hair, which falls back into place instantly. "But I can't believe you fucking left me here to do it. I would have gone with you, mate, but you—"

Warmth, present from the moment James had laid eyes on Sirius, erupts from his aching throat in the form of laughter, and hysterical laughter at that.

"James!"

His heart leaps into his mouth and then beats there, frenzied, as his mum rushes out from the back stockroom. Tears stream down her cheeks just as sweat slides down his, and her lips stretch thin and bloodless behind hands clasped over her mouth. Fleamont Potter follows close behind her, with the Potter house-elf, Kipsy, on his heels. Evidence of Kipsy's magic—the only magic that will work with the wards in place—reads all over the shop, from the fixed front window to the packages he had chucked haphazardly through the door. She's piled them neatly beside the window, and she performs two subsequent important tasks the second James steps through the door. First, she materializes curtains in front of the window with a snap of her long fingers, obscuring the street from view—and the shop from the street, crucially. Second, she shuts the door behind James and locks it with another snap. Her large, lamp-like eyes stare solely at the woman in James' arms, and comprehension dawns there at a much more rapid pace than that of Sirius or his parents.

"Oh, Master James," she whispers, the words just evident over his mum's muffled sobs. "Master James, what has you done?"

Really, he has no way to explain himself. He can't explain himself. His actions don't make sense.

"She knows Remus." He sounds defensive to his own ears, as if he means to prepare for an onslaught of questions and accusations that haven't yet started. "They're friends. I couldn't—I wasn't about to leave her out there."

To his credit, Sirius doesn't so much as blink. Perhaps he has too much Gryffindor in him too, because he nods understandingly behind the counter, his face still rather wan but clearly relieved.

"I'm so sorry," the woman says again, and she lowers the hood of her cloak with a blood-stained, shaking hand. An intricate red plait, as dark and deep as the blood on her hands, spills out across her shoulders. "He insisted. I didn't want—I know the danger this puts you all in—"

When James sets her gently upon the countertop, her voice cuts off with a stifled cry. Immediately, she has her lip between her teeth again, and he sees why a second later. Her cloak falls from her shoulders the second she opens the clasp, and the parting of fabric reveals a large tear in the denim across her upper thigh. Devastation reigns, a disruption in her skin so deep and gaping that the brilliant glint of bone shines against torn tendons and muscles and nerves, before she presses a fistful of her cloak to the wound to mop up a fresh swelling of blood.

James' stomach, still unsteady from his unexpected flight into the air, protests all the further. No matter the many wounds he's experienced in his life—from his fair share of stupid injuries with his mates, from watching Remus tear his flesh apart every full moon for years, and from suffering at Remus' claws and teeth as well—the thick copper scent of blood still affects him just as readily as it had as a child at his first public execution.

Only then, with her face paler than ever, does Euphemia put together what Kipsy clearly already had. "Were you—" she begins, her throat working furiously behind the continued tense hold of her hands. "You were fighting against the state." She doesn't bother to pose it as a question.

"Yes." The woman closes her eyes briefly, and it looks like she does so more due to the watery inhalation from Euphemia than from any physical sensation of pain. Her eyes flicker open again just in time to watch Fleamont clutch his wife's shoulder. "Like I said—I know the danger, and I'm so sorry. If you have something I can bind my leg with, I'll leave as soon as—"

"On that leg?" Sirius snorts humorlessly. "Sure. Let me see it again."

A thick squelching noise carries through the air as she peels back her cloak. Although Sirius leans forward with detached, almost scientific interest, James averts his eyes just in time to see his dad gesture to him with the crook of a single finger.

Fleamont didn't mince words.

"She can't stay here," he says quietly the moment he pulls James off to a not-so-distant corner of the shop. Beneath his salt-and-pepper beard, his mouth thins and pulls down wretchedly at the corners. "Kipsy can heal her, but then she needs to leave. I don't know what you were thinking, bringing her here—"

It's the closest Fleamont has ever come to sounding disappointed in him, and it hurts in the few seconds before righteous anger piques in James' chest.

"I heard a woman screaming." He struggles to keep his voice low. "You know what they do to women, even women that are just out there minding their own business. You would never just stand aside—"

"She wasn't minding her own business, was she?"

For several heartbeats, James stares at his father. Fleamont stares back with matching hazel eyes. Behind them, he can just make out the low murmur of his mum's voice.

"No." It rankles to admit, and for reasons he can't quite comprehend. "But—Dad, aren't you sick of this? The lads and I, we hear it all the time after you and Mum go home for the night. It's just fucking chaos in the streets thanks to Grindel's Gang, and innocent people—"

"Language, Jamie."

"Granddad never would have thrown her back out in the street."

Hot regret floods James' mouth the second the words leave his mouth, but redoubles all over again when he sees the impact hit Fleamont's chest. The accusation packs a physical punch, one that sends him reeling back just the tiniest amount. Fleamont's nostrils flare, his throat bobs, and, for several more heartbeats, they once again stare at each other.

"You're right," Fleamont says quietly. He looks away from James, back towards the woman bleeding atop their counter where, less than an hour earlier, they'd catered to smiling customers. Kipsy has joined her on the counter, so deep in her examination and bent so drastically at the waist that her long nose almost prods the woman's wound. "He wouldn't, and they killed him for that. I'm sorry that I don't want to see that happen to the rest of my family too. I won't put you and your mum and Sirius in harm's way like that."

Upset joins the smoke damage to burn at James' throat. "Dad—"

Fleamont turns away and crosses the few steps to join the others. "Can you heal her, Kipsy?" he asks, and the house-elf stands up.

"Yes." Her eyes flicker toward James, and she snaps her fingers twice in rapid succession. Before he can blink, a cool sensation overcomes the entirety of his face and then washes over his body, no doubt healing whatever damage he'd done to himself and cleaning his clothes to boot. "But—it's a strange break, this. Miss, I will need—your clothes. They're in the way."

The woman nods. "Is there somewhere we can go?" she asked, and she begins the laborious process of edging her way toward the end of the counter. What color had returned to her face vanishes in an instant, and Euphemia reaches out a ringed hand to steady her. "I'll leave right after. I promise. This is—honestly, this is already far too much help, and my sisters are still out there. I need to find—"

"Sisters?" Something shifts in Euphemia's face, something James nearly misses in the gentle exhalation of pain that leaves the woman's throat. "Are you—"

The woman meets Euphemia's eyes, and his mum's face shifts further. The way they look at each other leaves James certain that he's missing out on a wordless conversation, one so blatant that he can almost hear it. The unspoken words tickle his brain like an itch he can't scratch.

Sirius hears it too—or almost hears it, rather. He catches James' eye and holds it, his mouth twisted with a question that he clearly doesn't dare voice.

"Are you—" Hope blossoms on Euphemia's face, so blatant that it overcomes her body entirely, from the tilt of her eyebrows to the shift of her weight between her feet. "Your sisters. Are you part of a coven?"

Confusion reigns on Sirius' face, the same confusion that continues to tickle James' brain, but sudden comprehension washes over Fleamont's. He grips Euphemia's arm a second time, and so tightly that it must certainly hurt.

"Yes." The woman hesitates, her mouth open and clearly teetering on the brink of something. She lifts a shaking hand to her hair and hooks her escaping fringe behind her ear. "My name is Lily, and—you're Euphemia Potter, but your favorite people call you Effie."

"Yes. Yes." Euphemia steps closer to her, and she takes both of Lily's hands between her own, blood be damned. Her words come out quickly, the pressure of her hands intense. "Do you know—"

The woman cuts her off. "I do, and Marlene's with me—"

In turn, Euphemia stops her short with a sharp gasp. "Oh." The pressure of her hands increases until Lily's fingertips turn white. "Where? I haven't seen her or her siblings since—after their mother died—"

"She has to hide because they know—they're after her too, her whole family—"

"Those bastards. Those bastards. And—Ezra? Lavinia? Are they—"

"Fine. They're all fine." Lily wrenches her hand from Euphemia's grasp abruptly, but she takes the free hand and places it upon her arm, as if to steady the relieved sway that overcomes Euphemia's body. "Only Marley was with me, her and another girl, but I lost them. They—" She pauses for a second, hesitation evident all over the furrowed hold of her brow, before she licks her swollen lips and plunges onwards. "Grindelwald's enforcers—they hit Marley with something after the Disapparation wards went down. I think—she and Mary must still be here, but I don't know where they went. I—I drew the troops to me to try to give them the space to run, and I didn't see them after that. I sent the troops away and hurt myself in the process—"

'Sent the troops away'doesn't truly sum up the surreal way she'd blasted bodies through the air like weightless dolls, but James doesn't correct her. Understanding smacks him in the face abruptly, and he sees that understanding wash over Sirius at the exact same moment. "Marlene?" he repeats, and Lily turns her head to look at him. Despite the frantic pace of his heart, he can't help but admire the perfect oval of her face. He swallows thickly before rushing on. "You never said—you mentioned Remus, but—"

But who is this renegade who had sat just outside his circle of knowledge through not just one of his best mates, but his cousin too?

"I couldn't," she says. Uncertainty weighs deeply on her tone. "I shouldn't have even said anything—we're not meant to speak about the coven at all, because—you know what the state would do if they found out. But—" Her eyes flit back to his mum's face, where more tears have collected in Euphemia's eyes, although they remain unshed. "I didn't know Matilda well," she says, trepidation coating each word. "She—they killed her not long after I joined the family." Her chin tilts up determinedly, as if she has a point to prove, before her expression once again goes soft. "But—she spoke of you often. 'My favorite cousin, Effie,' she'd say, and—oh, she could talk about you for hours. I know—Mrs. Potter, I know so much about you because she loved you so much."

Surreal. Surrealness hangs heavy over the room, a surrealness only rendered all the more intense by the smattering of raised voices and shrill screams that echo through the street outside the locked door. James flinches with each one, something he sees replicated in the subtle shift of Sirius' shoulders, but Lily and his mum never move. They stare at each other, seemingly suspended in time, and Fleamont looks just about right there with them. His mouth opens wordlessly, his eyes rather misty, as he stares at Lily as if with disbelief at her very existence.

Truly, for a moment, James wonders if she does exist. Perhaps he's carried not a beautiful woman into his family's shop, but some sort of mysterious creature that looks into the souls of those around her and speaks their deepest heartaches. Matilda McKinnon's death certainly qualifies as Euphemia's, even past the death of Henry Potter, Fleamont's father, that had nearly hurtled their family into complete ruin.

"You can call her." The words sound harshly torn from his mum's throat. "Marlene. I—Tillie, she told me more than she should have about the way things worked in the family. I know you can call her, even with the anti-magic wards in place."

"I can't cast anymore, not without—" Lily pulls the hand from Euphemia's arm to gesture at her leg. "I pushed myself further than I should have to get the troops away, and—this is what happened. I'm—my magic is depleted. But—" The unique almond shape of her eyes widens as she looks toward Kipsy. "It's—it's Kipsy, isn't it?"

Kipsy twists the tea towel that drapes across her lap. "Yes, miss."

"Your magic—could you—" Without hesitation, Lily pulls upwards at the hem of her sleeveless blouse until she reveals the entire length of one side. James has just enough time to take in a stretch of pale skin glittering with a faint sheen of sweat, and a swath of dark lace that covers the very bottom of one breast, before he looks away. "This mark here, on my ribs—can you activate it? When I do it—" The falter in her voice sends James' eyes back to her face, and she bites her lower lip again, but in thought rather than pain. Unwillingly, his gaze drifts downwards, to where she fingers a black mark the size of a galleon that sits just below the line of her bra. Try as he might, he can't make out the shape beneath the slow stroke of her fingers. "I don't know how to describe it. It's not hard, it's just—it's a surge of magic, almost. I touch it and I push the magic into it. Can you try?"

Kipsy doesn't answer. She looks to Fleamont, a question unspoken in the twist of her face.

Fleamont takes exactly one look at the pleading in Euphemia's eyes and capitulates instantly.

"Please try, Kipsy." Quiet resignation hangs thick over his shoulders, and he pulls his glasses from his eyes to cradle the bridge of his nose between his fingers.

"Thank you, darling, thank you—" Euphemia whispers, reaching for his free hand, and a smudge of Lily's blood transfers from her skin to his. The brilliant red streak contrasts so totally with Fleamont's exquisitely-tailored three-piece suit, and with Euphemia's many rings and wide-set skirt, that James can only stare, transfixed and more than a little dumbfounded.

In this cruel, vicious, bloody world, has he ever seen them bleed before?

Kipsy steps forward, her long fingers held aloft. Concentration screws up her mouth for a moment before she snaps her fingers, and that deep concentration joins her brow when nothing happens. "Strange," she mutters, and she steps closer with another snap. . "Very strange. Kipsy will—" One of her long fingers presses to Lily's side, a meeting of flesh atop the mark under Lily's still fingers, and—

Magic happens.

Lily's body jumps like an uncoiled spring. The symbol burned into her skin—and it looks truly burned, like embers of coal twisted into something runic, although the meaning of the rune remains lost on him somewhere in old Ancient Runes textbooks—glows a brief, hot white.

Again, it is a magic unlike any he's ever seen before. Based on the loose hold of Sirius' jaw and the wide pull of his eyes, he feels rather the same.

Lily beams. "Brilliant," she breathes, the word low and sweet. "You're brilliant, Kipsy. I can't believe you could do that when my explanation was just such utter rubbish, but—you're brilliant. They'll come now." She speaks the final sentence to Euphemia, and her voice wobbles a little as her smile vanishes. She sounds as if she means to speak the situation into existence. "They'll be able to feel where I am, and—they'll come. They will."

"Kipsy." The room turns at the sound of Fleamont's voice, and not just because he speaks. Reluctance oozes through his voice, reluctance and determination both. "She'll stay. Take her downstairs and heal her, will you?"

The room freezes in its entirety.

Even Lily looks like she understands the severity of his request, although she can't. "I—Mr. Potter, I appreciate it, truly, but—they'll come door to door looking for us. I can't—I won't let you all put yourselves in danger. Not when—"

"They'll never find you." Fleamont places his glasses back upon his nose. "We have an area that's entirely hidden, but—you can never tell anyone of its existence or what you find down there." A grim smile creeps across his face. "You're not the only one hiding things from Grindel's Gang, although it's a bit different."

She meets his gaze, but only for a moment. She looks to Euphemia the next—for reassurance, perhaps?—and whatever she sees in her face suffices. The uncertainty vanishes from the puckered pinch of her forehead. "Of course. If it would make you feel better, once the wards lift I'll swear an Unbreakable Vow to never speak of all this to anyone outside this room—your help, whatever I see downstairs, all of it."

Fleamont doesn't answer, at least not right away. He watches as she edges towards the end of the counter, his expression inscrutable. Is it strictly resignation that he wears openly, or is there a hint of impressed seriousness in the words that follow? "We can talk on that then. Kipsy, will you take her? The rest of us, we'll wait here for Marlene." Like Lily, he sounds as if he means to speak the very reality of the words into existence.

Kipsy nods, and she gives a wordless snap of her fingers. Without warning, it's Lily's turn to float magically through the air. "Ready, miss?" Kipsy asks as Lily fumbles to pick up the bundle of her cloak.

"Yes. Yes, I—thank you. Thank you." The first expression of gratitude comes out generally; the second, she directs entirely towards James. Her throat works overtime for several seconds, as if she means to impart more, as if deeper thoughts lie between the gentle curve of her mouth and the soft slant of her brows, as if she holds tightly onto a plethora of secrets meant for his ears and his alone—

She says none of it.

"When they get here, say 'Cokeworth,'" she instructs as Kipsy floats her slowly, carefully towards the open awning that leads to the back of the shop. "They'll know what it means."

What more can he do besides nod? The desire to just watch her, watch her speak and move and even just breathe, weighs heavily on his body.

He's fancied women before. Of course he has. He's felt a similar grip of immediate attraction and thick curiosity upon meeting a woman, although—

Not in ages, so long that a mere flicker of her eyes nearly bowls him over. And never under such circumstances, with the world literally burning around him, and danger pumping through his veins and enveloping the very air around him, and the possibility of death or devastation lingering just out of sight around every corner. And, maybe, that attraction has never come so intensely or innately, formed and then focused from the very first moment he'd seen her, a lone figure single-handedly fighting off half a dozen men with the complex magic of her bare hands. Her power, her mission—not to mention, Merlin, her eyes—it's all enough to leave him staring even after the long rope of her plait disappears from view.

Silence descends over the shop.

Wind whips past Potters' Potions Plus with increased intensity, and a far-off explosion bursts with enough strength to lightly rattle the potion bottles that litter shelves all around them. Sirius starts a little, as if broken abruptly from a daydream or spell, and then leaves the room. He returns with a bucket of water and a sponge, and he rolls up his shirtsleeves before starting the methodical work of removing Lily's blood from the woodgrain.

For a lifetime, no one speaks.

"What were you thinking?" Euphemia asks finally, long after Sirius has cleaned the counter entirely and then buffed it back to a gleaming shine. "Going out into the fighting like that? Putting your life on the line? Bringing her back here?" No accusation rings in her voice. She sounds wan instead, weary and tired, and James can't blame her for that.

"I don't know." Quietly, Sirius snorts; James does his best to ignore it. "I wasn't thinking, really. I just—"

How can he properly explain it all to two people who have rarely experienced the things he and his friends have witnessed after hours for years? After closing the shop each day, Euphemia and Fleamont Potter get to Disapparate home, out of the hustle and bustle of Diagon Alley and to their lavish, peaceful country estate. To his knowledge, they've never once experienced the way things often change once night falls—the violence that reigns just outside their doorstep, the suffering and screams that complement it, the accompanying sense of helplessness that follows his every move. On those nights, no amount of radio chatter or forced joviality with his mates can cover the reality that borders the normalcy of their lives. And guilt festers deeper and deeper each night, guilt borne of a privilege he's never earned, but simply fallen into by the grace of his blood.

It's not fair, he could say, and he'd mean it, but it would fall woefully short. It's not fair, none of this is fair, how can we live like this, how can they live like this, how can anyone—

His mum's voice halts the frantic wheels twisting and turning inside his head. "Jamie?"

A hand through his hair does little to help matters. He can feel Sirius watching him and doesn't trust himself to look back. "I heard a scream, and I just…went. And she—" Again, words fail him briefly. "I've never seen magic like what she did to Grindel's Gang, and she did it without a wand and with the wards already in place. It was—fuck, it was incredible."

Hunger. Hunger infuses the words, the same hunger he'd once felt in the depths of Hogwarts' library when seeking out knowledge that had surpassed the simplicity of their instructions in the classroom. Hadn't he always known that deeper magic existed—or at least suspected, hoped, dreamed? Hadn't that very inclination pushed him towards so many of his exploits at Hogwarts with Sirius at his side, first exploring the castle and then mapping every last unplottable inch? Hadn't that, perhaps even more than a desire to help Remus, led to his illegal Animagus aspirations before he'd even come of age? And to see it presented before him—reckless, bold, chaotic, untamed—

"Language." The reprimand echoes Fleamont entirely, down to the automatic way Euphemia speaks. . "Matilda always said—" Her throat sticks as she swallows, and dark eyes zero in on the front door, which rattles with another far-off explosion. "They do magic differently in their coven. She never said much more, but…I always figured they must manage some incredible things."

Sirius follows her gaze, and he closes the gap between the countertop and the door in a handful of neat steps. Carefully, no more than an inch, he pulls back the shades that Kipsy had materialized over the windowpane. "You never told us she was involved in the anti-Grindel movement." A third explosion sounds, one closer than before, and he winces a little as the window rattles inches from his face. "I knew she got tangled up in something, but—well, they didn't…do it publicly, so—"

He doesn't finish, but he doesn't need to. There's no reproach in his tone, but guilt colors Euphemia's response nonetheless. "It was done quietly," she says, and she's quiet too. "I'm not sure why, but—" She looks towards Fleamont—for guidance, for support, for strength, for all of it—who gives the subtlest of nods for her to continue. "They came to our house after, some agents of the state. Tilley and I were so close for so long that they thought I must have been involved too, and it was so soon after everything happened with Granddad that—"

Strength. She'd looked to Fleamont for strength, and he gives her that with an arm around her shoulders. Instantly, she turns inwards, pressing her face into the crook of his shoulder. "We convinced them we knew nothing," he says. Something claws strangely at his voice, something he doesn't even try to hide. "It wasn't easy, and it cost a lot of coin, but we managed. We thought about warning you two, and maybe we should have, but—" He sighs, deep and heavy, and presses a cheek briefly against the top of Euphemia's dark head. "Well, if either of you got hauled in for questioning, knowing nothing would have worked in your favor, so we didn't tell you. It's—it's hard to know what's the right thing to do most days, and it seems to get harder every day. I'm sorry."

The apology lingers, cast generally but then directed intimately. I'm sorry, he might as well repeat entirely for James' ears, and James can hear it no other way. Apparently, even the gentlest of earlier rebukes continues to weigh heavily on his mind.

The strangeness in Fleamont's throat somehow transfers to James, where it swells like a cancer. "Dad—" he tries, his own apology on the tip of his tongue, but the words won't come. His granddad's image—all messy gray hair and knobby knees and radiant strength even past his one hundredth birthday—floats before his eyes. For a moment, it becomes superimposed over his father's face, before he pushes the memory away violently. "I—"

"I love you, Jamie." Fleamont squeezes Euphemia's body closer. "And you, Effie. And you, Sirius."

Raised on declarations of love multiple times a day from both parents, the words should wash over James' shoulders with ease, but they don't. The thickness in the air, only compounded by the unseen force of the wards outside, doesn't help. His throat tightens until he nearly chokes.

Sirius comes to his rescue, as if he, too, had also grown up surrounded by such love, although he hadn't. "Love you too, Monty," he says easily, far more easily than James could ever manage, and he stretches an arm to the door's lock. "Incoming."

The warning prepares none of them.

The moment Sirius swings open the door, wind bursts into the shop at such a rate that potions no longer rattle upon the shelves. Crystalline bottles rock fully, those as minute as a pinky nail and as tall as a forearm and every size in between, and then tumble wildly to the ground, large and small, smashing into smithereens upon the floor as the door flies backwards until it rebounds against the wall. Fumes rise from hundreds of broken bottles, rising mists of different colors and spurts of liquid and a plethora of different smells, those sharp and musty and sweet and acidic all mixing together. Smoke joins, smoke and ash and heat carried on the same gust of wind that blows harshly enough to bring tears. Two figures, masked and cloaked identically to Lily, dart through the door. One fully supports the other's weight, her shorter, slighter frame nearly bowed in half, and James has only one horrible, wretched thought as Sirius struggles to close the door behind them.

Dead. One of the women, one of Lily's sisters, is dead.

Beyond that, he can only hope that it's not Marlene.

"What—" the standing woman begins, and her voice sounds even rougher and rawer than his throat feels.

In his chest, his heart backflips and then sinks entirely. It doesn't matter that he hasn't heard Marlene's voice in three years. He still remembers her teasing tone, loud laughter, and quick anger well enough to know that it's not her who speaks.

"Lily's downstairs," he says, and he alone lifts his hands in submission when she shifts her grip on the body clutched to her side to show him her palm.

A heartbeat passes, one in which he expects some flash of the same brilliant, wild magic that had burst from Lily.

It doesn't come.

"Cokeworth," he blurts out belatedly, and the woman's hand twitches but doesn't lower. "She said to say that. She said you'd know what it meant. And—"

Euphemia's voice cuts through the air, the sound as sharp as the glass from that litters the floor. "Is that Marlene?" she demands, and James' head swims a little when he turns to look at her.

The figure's hand drops then, but only for a second. It lifts in the next moment, and the woman removes her mask to reveal a warm brown complexion gone gray with stress. Dark, bloodshot eyes scan the room for the briefest second, her mouth twisted inwards and lips gone even paler than her complexion, before she answers. "It—yes." She sounds too stunned to deny it. "She's—she got hit with something, but—"

It's Sirius who takes charge. "Downstairs," he instructs firmly, snapping closed the lock on the door. "Come on. There's time for this later. They could be in the alley right outside, they could be just down the street, they could—"

Uncertainty clears from James' head; action takes precedence. Glass crunches and liquid sloshes under his feet as he steps towards the woman—Mary, presumably—to offer her a hand. He gets exactly one arm underneath Marlene's loose, lolling shoulder before Mary pulls her backwards, nearly stumbling over the hem of her long cloak.

"Don't," she snaps. Her grip tightens; Marlene's masked head rolls limply upon her neck. "Don't touch her. I have her. I'm not letting her go. I—"

"Downstairs," Sirius repeats. Impatience—and disbelief, heady disbelief—creeps into his tone. "Do you really think this is the time to argue about who carries Marlene? Do you think Grindel's Gang will care about that when they barge in here? Just give her to James so we can—"

Mary catches herself. Close up, James can almost peg the moment that a little of the wildness leaves her eyes. Like a cornered animal, her attention darts to the far corners of the room. Her breathing, already labored, quickens further. And then—

Without warning, she capitulates.

"Okay," she agrees. It sounds like defeat. Gingerly, tenderly, she releases her hold on Marlene until the taller woman's frame rests entirely in James' arms. "Alright. Just—take me to Lily."

And so they do.

xxx

Lily doesn't cry.

She exclaims the second she sees Mary, a strangled sound given in the back of her throat, and leaps to her feet immediately. "Miss, miss, your leg!" Kipsy squeaks, but she might as well speak to the air. The wound on Lily's leg has already vanished, anyway, down to the tear of her jeans neatly mended and the blood removed from her clothes and skin. She looks altogether different, altogether normal, as she rushes Mary as quickly as her feet will allow, although she favors her right leg significantly.

"I knew you'd be fine—I knew you'd be fine—" Lily says, words spoken breathlessly, as she throws her arms around Mary's neck with a vice-like grip.

"You idiot—" Mary kisses the side of her face, and then remains there with her nose pressed against Lily's cheek. She exhales a shaky laugh. "You absolute idiot—I saw you. I saw you try to take them all down, and I thought—I figured you were out there broken and bleeding somewhere, because there's no way your body could have taken that—"

"I had to. I saw them hit Marley, and I had to—oh, Marley—" Lily peels her arms away from Mary's neck with no small amount of regret, and she gestures to James with a delicate hand. "Here, James, here—Kipsy conjured a couch—"

In the pandemonium that follows—as James rushes Marlene's loose, limp body across stone floors; as he rests her gently upon the plush couch where Kipsy hovers; as Sirius' and his parents' footsteps echo down the staircase behind him—neither Lily nor Mary look away from Marlene long enough to take in their surroundings. Still, they will. And, when they do, he knows what they'll see: hundreds of thousands of galleons worth of illegal contraband that line the long, narrow room, all organized into neat shelves.

Dangerous potion ingredients dominate one area, banned artifacts another, illegal weaponry a third. Near the couch Kipsy has conjured, bones of all shapes and sizes—human, animal, giant, and more—sit in neat piles near the staircase. Several bookshelves stand in between two matching doors, which lead to his dad's brewing lab and a small attached bathroom, the products of authors banned under Grindelwald's regime. Jewelry, clothing, potion bottles, glittering glass and brass and golden instruments—and on and on the products, goods, and items stretch, each more illegal than the last, those James can recognize by sight only because he himself has taken careful inventory of them over the years.

As he lowers her down, very muscle and joint in Marlene's body dangles loosely under his hands, like a band stretched out beyond elasticity. Helplessness, hopelessness, uselessness—all of the familiar emotions that accompany each nighttime raid—washes over him again like a rainstorm, only intensified by the millions, as her arm drops lifelessly over the side of the couch. Her fingers twitch, the first true sign of life, as though she means to pick herself back up but can't.

Mary bustles forward, her petite frame like iron as she pushes by James. Quickly, efficiently, she strips off Marlene's cloak. Kneeling by Marlene's feet, Lily unlaces her boots. Both meet at her head, which Mary takes carefully into her lap, so Lily can remove her mask.

Euphemia gasps from somewhere near the stairs, the sound barely audible. Sirius' quiet swear comes much clearer as he steps forward to pull James back, away from the trio of women and towards the relative safety of a series of spiked instruments carefully packaged in crates upon the floor, to allow more room to work. They stumble together, the two of them, and it's Sirius who rights them upon wooden feet, his grip on James' arm tightening at the sight of Marlene's face. With her rosy cheeks tinged green, a slow path of blood trickles from every orifice—from her mouth; from her nose; from her ears; even from her eyes, which slowly weep with tears and blood both. The rivers run freely, cascading down towards blonde hair already dirty with soot, until the area around her ears and hairline and neck matches the dark red plait that trails over Lily's shoulder almost exact.

Words pass back and forth between Mary and Lily quickly, each one spoken with more haste than the last.

"What was it?" Lily bends, her fingers swiping at Marlene's open mouth. "Did you see? Did you hear?"

"No—between the shouting and the crowd and the explosions I couldn't hear a thing. My ears are still ringing." Mary smooths Marlene's hair back with shaking palms, coating her hands liberally in blood. She doesn't appear to notice. "It just glanced her, though. She almost got out of the way. Can you tell?"

"This isn't my area of expertise. Like, at all. Fuck, I wish—Frank would know. He'd know exactly what to do."

No one calls Lily on her language.

Mary calls her on something else. "Careful," she says, the single word spoken low and warily. For the first time, her attention turns away from her friends—not toward the surplus of wildly illegal materials that surround them all, but first toward Euphemia and Fleamont, who continue to stand frozen by the stairs, and then to Sirius and James, where her gaze lingers. Distrust reads all over the tight hold of her mouth.

Somehow, Lily knows precisely what she means. "They're family," she says as she uses a fistful of Marlene's cloak to wipe at the blood underneath her nose. Try as she might, the steady stream refuses to stop flowing. "Marley's family. That's Effie Potter." Mary's mouth opens and hangs that way, the faint furrow of her brow lessening, but Lily doesn't give her a chance to respond. "Kipsy, do you—can you heal her?"

Kipsy doesn't wait for an affirmative word from any Potter. Her back straightens with purpose, and determination emanates from every tiny, tea-toweled inch as she steps forward with her long fingers held aloft. Mary scoots back slightly, although her grip on Marlene's head doesn't falter, and James realizes why a second later. Marlene chokes a little at the shift in position, and Mary tilts her chin higher upon her knees, a quiet apology voiced under her breath.

Choking. Marlene chokes on her own blood before their eyes.

Kipsy pokes. Kipsy prods. She snaps her fingers repeatedly, first with determination, but with growing uncertainty. She places her hands on Marlene's face, on her chest, on her wrists. Her tiny body jolts, then shakes, then trembles, and finally pulls away with pain written all over the sweat on her brow.

"It's Dark, this," she says, wiping her blood-stained fingers upon her tea towel. They shake slightly, like James has never before seen. "I—Kipsy can't—I feel it, but—"

"It's fine." Lily speaks firmly, and she reaches out. She grasps Kipsy's hand briefly in her own, and their fingers stick together, the blood tacky, when she pulls away. A sound, like Velcro ripping, lifts the hairs on the back of James' neck. "Thank you for trying. We'll take it from here."

Without another word, she and Mary get to work.

They look confident, their actions and words and motions all careful and considered and clearly practiced. There's no indecision in the way that Lily bends to smell the blood dripping from Marlene's ear, or in Mary's vigilant counting of the pulse in Marlene's neck. They speak in low voices, murmuring back and forth to each other, and—

And they speak to Marlene too. They ask her questions, and it hits James belatedly that she understands it all. Despite the glassiness in her eyes, she remains present in the moment, not passed out with her eyes open as he'd assumed. Her chest rattles wetly with each breath, blood bubbling from her nose and lips, as she stares at each friend for long intervals—or, occasionally, at nothing at all, her attention focused entirely on the ceiling above her head.

Conscious. Aware. Helpless. Even more helpless than all the nights James has spent with his pillows over his head in bed, trying to shut out the screams from the street outside.

And, somehow, it works and communication fosters. "Marley, does it sting?" Mary asks, and she waits for whatever tiny indication Marlene apparently gives her. "Burn? Ache? Where? Is it just your head? Your chest? Your entire body?" She pauses after each question, searching for an answer that apparently comes outside of speaking.

"Sweet, almost," Lily murmurs, her brilliant red plait gleaming in the yellow overhead light, as her head lingers near Marlene's. "Like—rot, maybe. Here, Mac, smell—"

"You're right," Mary says after a pause. "Is it—poison, you think? What could—"

"Plenty of different things—Alice has started trying to teach me, but I can't keep them all straight—"

Alice. The name tickles something in the back of James' head, some far-flung, distant memory that panic won't allow him to place.

Mary adds another name to the mix. "What's that one—Fabian mentioned it, the one that—organs—" The jerky pattern of speech clearly imparts some sort of code, as if she can't bear to put the thoughts to words.

Lily picks up on it immediately. "Oh," she breathes. "Oh, that might—Marley, does this hurt?" She places her hands onto Marlene's stomach, littering Marlene's dark red sweater with deeper patches of blood as she massages slowly, her fingers dipping into soft flesh.

Marlene doesn't answer, but Mary does for her. "No," she says, her disappointment thick. "No, that's not it—"

It continues that way for what feels like hours, a morbid game of questions with no audible answers but visible failings, although it's almost certainly not more than a handful of minutes, no more than ten or fifteen. Eventually, just as the feeling begins to return to James' legs and the panic clears a little from his mind, a new sound breaks the air: a sniffle, subdued but audible, and perhaps especially audible to him. He could recognize the sound of his mum's crying blindfolded, and his reaction—to go to where she lingers near the stairs, to open his mouth to try to speak, to fail to come up with any proper words of comfort—comes just as naturally.

Euphemia extracts herself out from underneath Fleamont's gentle hold. With one look at James' face, she wraps her arms around him, her fists encircling around his back and her grip tight, almost furious, just as she'd once held him when he'd broken rules as a child.

"That could have been you," she says, the words just barely a whisper. "You—you never should have gone out there, Jamie—"

Guilt should come, but it doesn't. Her hair, straight and smooth and the total antithesis of him and his dad's unruly curls, catches on the stubble of his cheeks. "Mum, if I hadn't—" He struggles to keep his voice as low as hers. "Marlene—we wouldn't have—"

"I know, I know—" She sounds wretched, utterly wrecked, as she presses a sob into his shoulder. "And Tillie would—oh, if she had to see Marley like this—"

She'd said many of the same things in the months that had followed Matilda McKinnon's abrupt death. "If Tillie were here—" she'd say, or, "Tillie would have—" or, "Tillie would say—" Yet, as the years have trickled by, those tender mentions have all but halted completely. When had she last spoken her favorite cousin's name? Weeks? Months? Years?

Sirius utters a quiet noise, one James somehow hears from across the room. Shock dominates the handsome features of his face, shock mingled with a faint sense of revulsion that James understands a moment later when he follows the path of Sirius' eyes.

Lily has taken her fingers into her mouth, those coated with Marlene's blood, and she holds them there. A faint smudge of blood, as brilliantly red as her hair, lingers near the corner of her lips when she pulls them free.

"It's sweet, Mac—" he just barely hears her say. "Taste it. Taste it and—"

Mary doesn't hesitate. She swipes up a line of blood trickling from Marlene's ear and licks it from her fingertips.

Fleamont's face whitens entirely. He clears his throat roughly, his own sense of revulsion evident just under the surface of his twisted mouth.

"You're right." Mary wipes her mouth on her shoulder. For the first time, she lowers the black hood of her cloak. A multitude of long braids cascade down her back, tied at the nape of her neck with a thin band. "Do you think—a bezoar then, and—can you brew? Your magic—there's no way you're okay after that. I could try, but I'm not much better—"

"Kipsy."

The house-elf still hesitates near the head of the couch, her attention trained on the top of Marlene's head, where she continues to twist her tea towel in her hands. Her own helplessness emanates with every breath from her long nose, and with good reason. To James' knowledge, her magic has never failed her before. Her head snaps up, alert at once, at Lily's use of her name. "Miss?"

"Can you brew? I'll tell you everything to do, but—I can't do the actual magic to get it done. Will you help me?"

Again, Kipsy doesn't look to Fleamont or Euphemia. "Yes," she says immediately, and only then does she seem to think it through. Her wide eyes seek Fleamont. "Sir—"

Lily cuts her off. "Mr. Potter, I'll pay you back for everything I use. I'll pay you back double, or—name your price. Coin, favors, debt—I don't care. Name it. It's yours."

Fleamont doesn't have the time to respond. Euphemia pulls away from James sharply, and she mops underneath her eyes with shaking fingers. "Nonsense," she says with a sharpness that falters under the watery tone of her voice. "Nonsense. Take what you need. Darling—"

Fleamont disappears at the plea, off to the dark cavern of his brewing room. A brief shuffling noise emanates from the open door, and then he returns with mottled brown stone. "Here," he says, pressing the bezoar into Lily's hand.

It takes four hands to unwind Marlene's jaw long enough to force the bezoar down her throat. Lily pushes and pries at the hinges of Marlene's jaw and the tight hold of her teeth; Mary tenses nimble fingers to push at the exact right moment. When Marlene's mouth finally opens, wrenching apart with an inhuman snap, Mary forces the stone home.

Mere seconds after Marlene's teeth clamp down once again, the blood abruptly ceases to stream from her face. With a snap of her fingers, Kipsy clears what remains.

Face free of blood, Marlene looks more like the cousin James had grown up with, and the Hufflepuff who had played Quidditch against him at Hogwarts, and the woman who had often stopped by Potters' Potions Plus to shoot the shit with him until—

Until her mum had died, there one day and gone the next. With her death, Marlene and her siblings had disappeared too.

After a deep breath, one that rattles so severely that he can hear it from across the room, she speaks.

"Idiot," she whispers, her glassy eyes exclusively on Lily. "You fucking idiot."

A heavy pause falls over the room, and then Lily begins to laugh.

She laughs wildly, throatily, and a little crazily, and her head rocks back with it seemingly outside her control. "Jesus, Marley—" she begins, words spoken toward the ceiling. Tears slip down the side of her face, first one and then another, before she dashes them away. "You—you're—"

"That's what I said." Mary's voice shakes a little. Tears have gathered in her eyes, too, although she doesn't allow hers to fall. "The magic you did—you shouldn't even be talking right now, Lil, let alone—"

"I'm fine." Lily sniffs, wipes her eyes a second time, and rises to her feet. As if on instinct, her weight shifts to favor her right leg. "Honestly. I'll sleep for a week after we get home, but—not yet. Mr. Potter, where can Kipsy and I brew?"

xxx

Time passes even more strangely after that.

Then again, time has always passed strangely in the cellar of Potters' Potions Plus, ever since James had turned seventeen, received his welcome-to-manhood watch from his parents, and then gotten his welcome-to-the-real-family-business talk from his granddad. With a twinkle in his eye and an air of secrecy, Henry Potter had taken him to the store's stockroom and revealed a whole new world beneath a secret entrance.

"It'll recognize your blood," he'd explained, still straight-backed despite his age, as he'd pressed James' hand against an inconspicuous knot in one wood-paneled wall. A staircase had materialized almost immediately beside his feet, and Henry had let out a loud, booming laugh at the precarious way James' toes had nearly stumbled past them. "Your dad and I, we've talked about adding Sirius eventually, but—mum's the word for now, okay?"

Really, his favorite birthday present that year? That his family had considered Sirius such a member of their family that they had wanted to trust him with a secret worthy of Azkaban: that the "plus" in Potters' Potions Plus apparently came from smuggling and the sale of contraband and illegal goods that had dated back to well before Grindelwald's takeover of Britain, but that had only boomed since.

True to their word, two years later, after Sirius had lived with the Potters for nearly half a decade, he'd gotten his own introduction to the secrets of the stockroom. Watching the excitement on his best friend's face, which had echoed the expression he'd worn when breaking rules at Hogwarts—except undoubtedly more intense—it had felt like James' birthday all over again.

They'd spent innumerable hours in the cellar ever since, hours carefully hidden from roommates Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew, something James had grappled with often and painfully in the years that had passed. Sirius had had a much easier time with it. "They're still family, but…more like cousins than brothers, you know?" he'd once said as hours had flitted by in the windowless cellar while they'd debated over pricing and tallied inventory and tracked incoming packages from around the globe. "In this way," he'd amended immediately at the horrified look on James' face. "Just in this way. C'mon, Prongs, don't beat yourself up like this."

Yet James had beaten himself up over it, and frequently. And, really—

He has no leg to stand on when it comes to any amount of disbelief or betrayal over Remus hiding some facet of his life from him, a facet that includes the redhead who works hard at brewing in his dad's private cauldron with Fleamont at her side. Beyond that—

There's something almost poetic about Sirius' comparison of cousins and brothers, something his weary mind can't even begin to comprehend, as he attempts strands of casual conversation with his own cousin who dies before his eyes.

No matter the bezoar, he recognizes death lingering around the yellowing whites of Marlene's eyes; around the pained twist of her mouth; around the fingers that spasm with pain at increased intervals as time trickles by oddly, fast and slow all at once. He's seen people die before—everyone in Grindelwald's Britain has—but never so slowly, never with such brutal recesses between the ability to speak and all-encompassing pain, never—

Well, never someone he knows, at least not like he knows Marlene.

Mary keeps a careful hold on her head, her hands stroking protectively over the furrow of Marlene's brow, and James catches the increasing worry that she tries repeatedly to wipe from her expression. She does her best to smile, and often, although her cheeks remain the same ashy color that he had first witnessed in the shop upstairs. Still, she speaks with a fondness that seems to warm the air around them, her voice a soft, rich melody unlike anything James has ever heard before, and it seems to do Marlene almost as much good as the bezoar.

Euphemia does similar good, although a sense of sadness and intermingled worry color her tone at all times. Unlike Mary, she seems incapable of letting it go entirely. "It's been so long," she murmurs the second she settles at Marlene's side. She slips one of Marlene's hands in between her own, and James watches Marlene's fingers contract the barest amount. "I wish—oh, I wish you'd at least written. I've worried over you so much, and Ezra and Lavinia too. They're—they're truly fine? Your friend—Lily—she said, but I can't—"

"They're fine. I promise." Marlene attempts a smile, one that looks closer to a grimace. "Spare me the lecture, at least for now. You can give it to me when I can actually fight back."

"Sounds like you, alright," Sirius says. Like Mary, he seems intent on injecting a familiar jovialness to his tone. "You always did appreciate a fair fight."

Marlene's smile slides a touch more genuine. "Only because you never did."

James' throat swells, tender with something close to tears, but not quite. "He cares more about winning than fairness. There's a reason you're a Hufflepuff and he's not."

"You're a Gryffindor too, you know."

The air feels strange, false, heady. "I never denied that."

Mary sweeps a hand over Marlene's hair. "Rest, Marley." She shoots a look split between Sirius and James that hits with the force of several hurled daggers. "You don't have to act like you're okay."

For them goes unsaid, but James hears it just the same.

Marlene ignores her. "I couldn't write," she says, her eyes locked once again on Euphemia's face. A hint of strain overcomes her jaw, her teeth clenched and then unclenched. "I—not after Mum, and the warrants out for me and Ezra and Vinnie, and—Granddad too."

It had never mattered that they hadn't shared blood. Marlene had called Henry Potter 'Granddad' from a young age just the same. Just hearing the word fall from her mouth immediately hurtles James far back into the past, to warm summer days spent exploring the crowded confines of Potters' Potions Plus with Marlene at his side, all while Henry had chided at them to behave with a face-splitting grin that had encouraged the exact opposite.

"They watch your mail," Marlene continues. She doesn't need to specify who. "I don't know how you got out of all of that in one piece. Although—" She scans the room, for the first time taking in as much of the secrets around her as she can without twisting her neck too far. Even then, at the most minuscule movement, she winces a little. "You must have ways to communicate without the state knowing, since you have…all this."

Euphemia pauses for the barest of breaths, the silence delicate in the cavernous room. "We do. As do you and your sisters, it seems."

Marlene licks cracked lips. "Yes."

Secrets. Secrets leak out between them, as hot and thick as poisonous gas.

The urge to run frays at the nerves in James' legs, pricking muscles and tendons in a way not dissimilar to anticipation borne from the full moon. "Rest," he says, echoing Mary's words, as he takes a step back. "Sirius and I, we'll—you know, we'll get out of your way."

Mary, at least, looks grateful for that.

Sirius doesn't disagree. "Give a shout if you need a laugh," he says, and he allows James to lead him toward the long table beside the stairs where, the night before but a lifetime prior, they had spent a good hour cataloging illegal amulets. "You alright, Prongs?" he mutters as he sinks into one of two chairs. He pulls a thick binder towards him, but he doesn't look at the figures copied in hands that alternate between Euphemia's neat penmanship and James' messier scrawl. "You're looking a little…green."

He feels a little green, the outcome of some cluster of emotions that he can't quite articulate in the nauseous ball that has formed in the pit of his stomach. "Smoke inhalation." It's not at all the truth. "It was a right mess out there."

Sirius lifts one neat eyebrow in a look of abject skepticism, although he allows the excuse to pass without comment. Instead, he pushes the binder toward James. "We can actually work or we can pretend to work. Your call."

And so, absurdly—just to keep his mind from spinning out entirely—they work.

They work in silence, completely at odds to the usual music Sirius blasts in the daily hours they put in side by side, or nearly silence. Periodically—when James stands to retrieve a fresh stack of parchment or a crate full of vials of dark green Acromantula venom or a basket full of cursed, leering masks—other sounds filter in. The dulcet tones of Mary's voice; the staccato, responding cadence of Marlene's; his mum's footsteps; a steady stream of conversation in the next room between his father and Lily—reality resumes when he steps away and allows his brain to comprehend precisely what goes on around him.

And all because he'd rushed into the streets without a plan in mind and with only chivalry and bravery and stupidity on his mind. The fault for the continued worried twist of his mum's fingers, which never seems to cease, is his and his alone.

Occasionally, he catches direct snatches of conversation from his dad's brewing lab. "The bloodmoss, you think?" "Foxglove, to counteract—" "Is the color of this right?" "Have you any Hellebore?" "Stir this twelve times counter-clockwise—no, go for thirteen, that seems right—" "What about Tincture of Demiguise?" It's all language James recognizes, both from his Hogwarts days in Horace Slughorn's classroom as well as from his father in time spent around the shop, but it has always meant little to him. Brewing has always held his interest to the same extent as wizard's chess—meaning not at all, really, no matter a natural inclination at both.

But now it matters. For the first time in his life, nothing matters more than whatever bubbles in the cauldron beyond the open doorway, and he can't do a thing to help.

"How do you know this is right?" he hears Fleamont ask several minutes or hours or days later. The watch upon his wrist has ceased to make sense of time.

Lily answers immediately. "I don't. Do we ever know if our experiments will work out?"

Fleamont doesn't answer, but James can guess precisely what he must think.

They experiment without the outcome of Marlene's life—and it's the best they can do.

How long does the experiment last? He doesn't know. Eventually, he and Sirius run out of things to count. Without question or comment, Sirius returns to the beginning of the heavy tome of figures and passes it across the table toward James. "Check my maths," he demands, and then he exhales a long breath. The clearest passage of time reads upon his face, where wan, purple bags have sprouted underneath eyes James knows as well as his own. Rarely, in all their years of friendship, has he ever looked so tired.

And so James does. Figures swim before his gaze as he treads over ground Sirius has already walked, that of some of the first attempts at accounting he's ever done, until—

He nearly misses it. So wrapped up in numbers—and determined to stay that way in no small part for the sake of his own sanity—he doesn't hear Lily's soft footsteps pad across the room. He only looks up when he hears Marlene gasp, and his heart lurches in the seconds before he realizes that the sound comes from the careful propping of her torso underneath Mary's gentle hold.

Lily kneels by her side with an iron goblet in her hand, her face partially obscured by a heavy swath of fringe. "I don't know if this will do it," she says quietly. Euphemia stops pacing. From the corner of his eye, James notes his dad's presence in the doorway of his lab. Even Sirius, who had picked almost casually at his cuticles, goes entirely still. "I think it is—based on what Alice has taught me, based on observing Frank, based on what Fabian has said, based on things Helena has talked about before—but—"

Marlene's lips have started to bleed again, and dark crimson weeps from the cracks as she lifts a listless hand no more than an inch or two off her lap. Underneath her fingernails, fresh blood also pours. She says nothing.

Yet Mary understands. Without hesitation, she takes the goblet from Lily's grasp and tips the contents past the blood on Marlene's chin.

Marlene gasps again, harsher and more guttural than before. Her body jerks—all of her body, every muscle and nerve and inch suddenly pulled taut and flat as a board. The potion runs down her cheeks in rivers, the vivid violet a direct contrast to the dull, green tinge that has only spread in whatever time has passed. Over the faint pounding in his ears, James hears his mum cry out.

Again, Mary doesn't hesitate. With a sudden burst of strength, she pushes Marlene flat onto her back, and she holds her there with such force that the tendons of her forearms nearly pierce through her skin. "Breathe, Marley, breathe," she says, her cheeks grayer than ever, as a strange, pearlescent foam bubbles up from Marlene's throat. "Breathe—careful—just—"

Euphemia rushes forward in a flurry of full skirts. She makes it several steps and nearly to Marlene's side before Marlene turns, her body wrenched uncontrollably from Mary's grasp, and vomits onto the floor.

Lily dodges the splatter just in time, flown to her feet in a flash, and it's to her that James looks for answers.

To his complete disbelief, she once again begins to laugh.

"Good," she breathes, the word just audible under a shrill, almost panicked giggle that echoes entirely of relief. "Oh, good, good—here, here—" It's her hands that gather Marlene's hair back from her face, her hands that lean Marlene further over the edge of the sofa, her hands that smooth down the back of Marlene's sweater as Marlene expels a thick, viscous liquid the same shade of sickly green as her skin. After the first few heaves, a bucket appears directly in the line of fire, no doubt conjured by Kipsy's fingers, and Marlene reaches down to grip one silver side with far greater coordination than anything evidenced that night.

Before James' eyes—slowly, dreadfully slowly, slowly and painfully both—the poisoned color drains from Marlene's face, replaced by a stark white sheen.

It is, without a doubt, the greatest thing he's ever seen.

Euphemia sways a little on her feet, and Fleamont crosses the room to steady her before James can even move. "Is she—" she begins, her voice dry and rather reedy, as the heaving in Marlene's shoulders slowly subsides. "Marlene, darling, are you—"

Marlene clears her throat with a deep, hacking cough. She spits. When she leans back onto the sofa once again, she does so breathlessly, her chest rising and falling as if recovering from a long run. Yet, when she clears the blood and sick from the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand, she looks almost like the cousin who had often shaken off a bloody lip or nose from a bludger on the Quidditch field. "Foul," she says, her throat scrubbed raw. "Absolutely foul, Lil. What the fuck did you just give me?"

No one rebukes her for her language.

Fleamont answers. "An emetic, mostly." Despite the cellar's cool temperatures, sweat of his own beads just below his hairline. "And something for the rot that Lily thought she sensed. Do you feel—"

Kipsy vanishes all traces of sick just in time, right as Euphemia crosses the room with such speed that she nearly barrels into the bucket. When she falls to her knees by Marlene's side, Lily steps back, her laughter a thing of the past.

"I'm tired." Marlene's eyelashes flutter, but her mouth twists with something of a smile when Euphemia pulls a white handkerchief from her pocket and presses it to the ruined mess of Marlene's fingertips. Although blood transfers to the delicate lace, it doesn't blossom as it might with a fresh, active wound. "I'm tired, but…I'm fine. I'll be fine, anyway." Blood stains her teeth, too, evident when her smile widens bravely in Euphemia's direction. "Relax, Effie. It's not like we haven't all been through worse."

And they have, except they haven't, a strange contradiction and conundrum that eats at the anxious pulsing of James' heart while Marlene drifts slowly to sleep.

"Should we wake her?" Sirius asks eventually. James turns to find him risen from his seat, his hands in neat fists upon the tabletop. "I mean—she isn't—she won't—"

—die. It goes unspoken.

"I don't think so." Lily has her arms wrapped firmly around herself in something akin to an embrace, as if she means to hold herself together. "I think she needed to purge. She might need another bezoar. When they lift the wards, I'll need to get her to people with more expertise. They'll know what to do. But, for now, I think we just…let her rest."

It's easier said than done, no matter the improved rate of Marlene's breaths.

An uncertain moment passes, one in which James catches the barest indication of something in Lily's trembling hands as she brushes back her fringe.

Run. He sees his own sudden urge to run somehow echoed back in the tense hold of her shoulders, so evidently that he could swear he can read the desire in legible script across her body.

"Do you need—" At the sound of his voice, she looks away from Marlene, and his offer falters in the intense green of her eyes. It takes a breath, one in which he also clears his throat, to conjure the ability to speak again. "You should eat or at least drink something. We live above here; I'll go throw something together. Do you want to come with me?"

Distrust crashes over Mary's features like a runaway freight train. "No," she says flatly. Once again, she cradles Marlene's head between her hands with the utmost care. "Absolutely not. There's no way they're not going door to door by this point. If you leave, who's to say—"

"Mac." Lily shakes her hands as if to clear them from some unseen source of agitation. "Please. I'm—"

"I know, and I feel trapped too, but—think. At least we're safehere, and if you can't put the rest of us above yourself until they lift the anti-Apparation wards in the morning, then—"

"Then I'm a selfish bint. I get it."

Mary's mouth snaps shut abruptly. "I—" she tries in the next breath, and then she shakes her head. The long braids at the nape of her neck swing slowly with the movement. "We got out of there by the skin of our teeth. We—muggle saying." She adds the latter towards Sirius, who wears a look of bemusement that James knows must match his exact. "Look, Lil, just—take a minute. Go in the other room. If you need to lose it, I understand. We can take shifts. But you can't—"

Where would the Sorting Hat have put Mary if she'd gone to Hogwarts? Maybe Hufflepuff alongside Marlene, because the stubborn cast of her jaw and heavy hold of her eyebrows reminds James suddenly, irrefutably of his cousin's strong convictions. Not Gryffindor, almost certainly. Her desire to stick to the rules rings true in every word she speaks, as if she's never broken one before in her life.

Yet Lily has that rule-breaking streak, and in spades. "Fifteen minutes," she says, her spine straightening as if she steps towards an impossible fight, and one she intends to face head-on. She reaches for her cloak and bunches the fabric between her hands. "I just need to breathe, Mac, and I'll be right back. That is—" She glances sideways, towards where Euphemia continues to stroke the back of Marlene's hand like one might caress a favorite pet. Fleamont stands behind her, his wrinkled hands upon her shoulders. "I'm sorry. It's your business and your call. I don't want to put you in more jeopardy than I already have."

Fleamont squeezes Euphemia's shoulder for the briefest of seconds, and James doesn't need him to speak in order to know what he means to say. Truly, it reads all over the gratitude that hasn't washed from his brow. Ever permissive, ever empathetic, ever kind—Fleamont hesitates for barely a fraction of a second before he speaks.

"Fifteen minutes," Fleamont echoes. "Jamie, stay with her."

James has no way of knowing, of course, that it will end up taking quite a bit longer than that.