After Malfoy, Lily became very subdued. She barely spoke, to anyone. She ate late in the Great Hall so as to avoid people and spent little to no time in the Gryffindor Common Room.
Occasionally I'd find her; curled up on the sofa in the Head Students Lounges, fresh tear tracks on her cheeks and her fingers blue with cold. Those times I just covered her up with a blanket and left.
I didn't want to have to think about what Malfoy had said. I didn't want to believe it. How could anyone…? Anyone do something so terrible to her? To my Lily. Mine.
It killed me each time we had a lesson with the Slytherins. The things they said about her made me want to either burst into floods of tears or beat the living daylights out of each and every one of them. They were relentlessly spiteful. All the words they said dripped thick and greasy with malice and every loud burst of laughter had hard jagged edges.
And still the same reoccurring question: Why? Why, why, why? Life is full of constant 'why's, yet I still never understand; never truly know, just, why?
***
It was in January when news of the first attack came.
The whole of the school had been on tenterhooks for months, just waiting... waiting... Subscriptions to the Daily Prophet among the student body had never been higher and every morning a deathly hush would fall over the Great Hall. The owls would swoop down in droves and then would come the shuffling of paper and an audible sigh of relief from the Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables.
Popularity for the Slytherins was terrible, duels in the corridors took place after nearly every lesson and Quidditch matches with them were some of the bloodiest and most aggressive I had ever seen. I was dreading the day Gryffindor was to play them.
It was a Wednesday and I could tell something was up when McGonagall stepped into the Common Room after dinner. As the portrait door swung open, a chilling silence fell over the whole House. Me and Sirius had been playing chess, me losing as normal, and even the chess pieces had stopped grinding each other into dust to look up at the Deputy Headmistress.
"I'm afraid, Gryffindor, that I have some rather disturbing news for you. There has been an incident in Diagon Alley -"
"What kind of incident?" called out Remus urgently. McGonagall sighed shakily, whipping out a large white handkerchief to blow her nose with a large honk. It would've been comical had the timing been different, but even Padfoot looked fearful.
"As you all know, a powerful Dark Wizard known as Vol... Vol..." another shuddering breath this time not only from her but from the whole House, "You-Know-Who has been gaining followers over some time now, and this afternoon several hundreds of his supporters stormed the main street of Diagon Alley."
A horrified gasp went round the room. Lily, who was sitting next to me, was shaking violently and her face was paler than ever. Sirius was staring eyes wide at the floor, showing no obvious sign of panic, but I could see his fist clenched on the table - his knuckles bunched and white.
"Professor?" a nervous first year prompted.
"I'm afraid, that there have been some casualties," our teacher continued blinking back tears, "And... a number of deaths." The words reverberated off the walls echoing deep into my head yet every person in that room remained still.
Time seemed to be suspended as every just stared in disbelief. Silence crept back into every corner, clogging the air as it hung heavily around us. The words had barely sunken in when McGonagall opened her mouth to speak once more and she fixed her eyes with mine.
"James, would you come with me please." she finished in a whisper, holding out one trembling hand towards me. Everyone turned and their eyes widened in horror. I had thought that if it had been anyone in our House, it would not have been me. Never me. Not a Potter.
My legs were water as I stood up, but I somehow managed - though even now I do not see how - to walk out of the Common Room, down two flights of stairs to McGonagalls office. She'd gripped my hand firmly with hers all the way there. Leading me.
I rarely thought of my family whilst at Hogwarts. School was like another world, a separate life then. But while McGonagall was leading me mindlessly, I let the two universes merge.
I had a good family. A wonderful family, to tell the truth, when I knew I so easily could've ended up without anyone in the world. I loved them all. My grandparents most; the way they were so much in love filled me with awe. Their secret smiles and swing dancing. I wanted to be like that when I was that age. I couldn't imagine one without the other. What if one had died? What if it was Grandma? Or Grandpa?
My brothers, who'd taught me everything. And I mean everything! From why it was stupid to lick the plug sockets in Muggle homes to why girls got sulky once a month. Lorenzo and Morgead, though sometimes I resented them for having their real mother, were clever and cool and loud and loyal and beyond hilarious. Better than me at everything, of course.
And Topaz. My big sister. I adored her. She was my rock, my protector, my bestest best friend and my anchor. Augusta, my step-mother, no matter how snobbish and nagging she could be, I appreciated that she cared for me as her own child. I really did.
And my father. My one true relative who loved me, even though I reminded him of his wavering fidelity.
Plus the whole time I was thinking 'Who is it? Which one? Why? WHY? How can this be happening to me?'. However, as the door to her study swung open and I saw my father rocking nervously in his chair, I knew. I just knew. He stood up, his skin red and puffy. And his eyes, just like my sister's…
"It's Topaz," I whispered, "Isn't it?" He nodded slowly, looking like a lost little boy with his arms wrapped tightly around himself.
I shook my head feverishly and sat down in a chair, catching my head in my quivering hands. Unable to hold it in any longer; the pain and the worry and the fear that was knotted in my stomach and kept my tears unshed, I let out a single muffled whimper. My father swiftly kneeled down beside me and, for the first time since I was a child, I let him hold me as steaming rivulets of salty tears ran down my face. I clutched at his shoulders, his arms covering me, as sob after hiccoughing sob ran through me all of them building up to a single cruel wail as every painful memory came flooding back to me.
I remembered ever time I'd yelled at Topaz and slammed the door in her face; every time I'd been too lazy to go out with her to watch some Quidditch or do some shopping; every time I had forgotten to reply to her lengthy letters and every hateful and hard-hearted thing I'd ever said to her face and behind her back throughout the past seventeen years.
After what seemed like hours to me, my father suggested I returned to pack my belongings to come home for a while. He wanted me to be with him and the rest of our family, not stuck up in Scotland going to lessons each day without being able to truly grieve. I nodded and then ran from the room, a lump still in my throat. I hurtled down the stairs, into the Main Entrance and out of the front door into the grounds.
The howling night gale slapped my watery face and tugged at my robes. It was dark and freezing and it stung. Had it been raining when Topaz died? Had the cold water saturated her clothes as she walked through Diagon Alley? Had she been alone? Was it quick and painless? Did she die screaming in agony? Had her murderer laughed? Laughed, at my sisters still lifeless body? Was she afraid as she died..?
It was raining outside that night and it was raining inside my heart, as my legs gave way under me. I fell down on my knees in the mud and I prayed to God. I prayed for the wretchedness, the heart-wrenching bitter torture, to go away. My whole life seemed to be flooding my head and I could see no future in the world. To me, the world was now cold and stinging and empty of all reason, of all hope. I prayed as I had never done before and the wind whipped at my shuddering body.
***
I walked in a dream back to my dormitory. When I climbed through the portrait hole I saw the whole House had remained up, sitting in an uneasy silence, clutching at each others hands. No one said anything as I passed through slipping past chairs and sofas towards the stairs, but ever eye that caught me said the same thing: 'We all know by the time this is over, you won't be the only one...'
None of the Marauders followed me up to our room. I doubt they'd've known what to say or do; it was almost as much a loss for me as a loss for them.
For some time I just sat on the edge of my bed staring into space, my mind blank after the rush of thoughts that had overwhelmed me before. Gradually, I began to move things into my trunk, flicking my wand to fold clothes or shrink books; as it was I only just managed to squeeze all my belongings in. With another flick of my wand, my luggage rose steadily into the air and trailed behind me as I left the dorm without a backwards glance.
***
It was a bitterly cold day. Everyone was dressed in black; the horses and carriages were black too. People stood around in a group talking softly under their breath about how it was such a tragic loss and how awful it was for someone to die so young. This conversation had been played out hundreds of times over the past week by the same people, with the same words and the same opinions; all nodding gravely at the same time and sniffing into handkerchiefs at the same time.
I looked up seeing several crows circling high in the pale morning air. Every now and then when someone walked past they would shake my gloved hand and then my fathers saying 'I'm sorry for you loss'. And they said it as if they actually meant it. They didn't mean it. They didn't understand - not one of them - how it felt to have Topaz ripped away from me.
A single cigarette hung limply from my thin lips, the smoke rising in wispy coils above my head. I breathed out through my nostrils feeling the heat scorch the delicate hairs that lined them and the tar begin to stick against my skin.
The funeral was over and her body now lay six feet below the frosted ground, incarcerated inside a shiny maple wood coffin. She'd always been claustrophobic and now she was stuck in the earth until her body decayed and her bones turned to dust. No one else seemed to think this wrong. To put a person in a ruddy great hole and just... leave? It wasn't right! But now, I was just tired.
I was too tired to care any longer. Too tired to do menial things like brush my teeth or eat or cut my hair. What was the point, anyway? I knew that I would eventually end up in the ground; pushed out of sight so people could simply go on living their lives. And yes, I'd go back to Hogwarts and I'd do my NEWT's but, why? Why? What good would it do in the end? None.
I had had enough of this life. The world was cruel. It breed darkness and evil. Where everyone lied and cheated and stole. I didn't want to be part of a world like that. I didn't want to have to exist in a place like that.
"James, it's time to leave," my half-brother Morgead tapped my shoulder, "And what're you smoking for? Put that bloody stick out. You're too young to die." I glared up at him and grudgingly dropped the fag to the ground, grinding it up with heel of my boot.
The journey home was swift, Flooing from the crematorium back to the large fireplace in our hallway. I ran up the stairs swiftly, not waiting for my father, Lorenzo and Morgead. I didn't want to look at them and see Topaz's eyes or Topaz's nose or smile. The mirror in my room was covered with a blanket. My face reminded me of her most. When she was alive we'd sometimes pretended we were twins. I'd never be a 'twin'.
I took off my smart jacket and flung it on a chair, then rolled up my shirt sleeves. The red marks were still there. Still snaking down my arm as a reminder of all the terrible things that I'd ever done. They weren't deep enough, I decided. They were only scratches. Topaz would want me to feel her pain and see it etched into my flesh.
I scrabbled for a razor blade in the bedside drawer.
The first cut hurt. I winced as I saw blood well up under the skin and it began to flow out in thin trickles of scarlet. The second gash was easier though I still gasped as the blade dug in further than it had before. But the pain was good. Any pain was better than the numbness and emptiness that was all I'd known since McGonagall had appeared in the Gryffindor Common Room.
That night seemed so far away to me now. The Marauders and Lily had all written to me countless times but I just swept all the letters straight into the bin. Hogwarts wasn't important.
With each slash the wounds came smoother. Blood scatter the clean white bed sheet I was sitting on but my sight was blurred, even behind my glasses. I couldn't see my hands they were so covered and there was red everywhere. All over my skin like I'd spilt a bucket of fresh paint over my limbs.
I was drowning and I felt dizzy, like I'd just fallen down several flights of stairs. My room swayed in front of me, the deep scarlet still at the bottom of my line of vision. Something clenched in my stomach and there was a strange spasm along my throat. I heaved into my lap, unable to move my head away from my bed. My mouth burned from the acid, with had a horrible pungent taste. It made my head swim.
I felt my eyes rolling up into my skull. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was the flashing gleam of the razor blade, still clenched in my quivering palm.
***
I awoke in a strange room that glowed from each of it's four white walls. There was, I also noticed, a pale tube in my mouth running down my gullet. It made me want to hurl again and I began to cough and splutter around the pipe. Witches and wizards clad in green swooped down on me and for a while everything was very confused as voices called for things and spells were cast over me.
Time passed slowly once the crowd of Healers had left. It seemed hours before a soft knock came at the door and my father walked in looking more nervous than I'd ever seen him. He gave me a small grin and pulled up one of those uncomfortable hospital seats by my bed.
"Hey James. Long time no see," he spoke quietly looking everywhere apart from, it seemed, directly in my eyes. "How...how're you doing?"
I looked down at my arms which were heavily bandaged, a small bit of blood seeping through in places.
"I'm fabulous," I muttered, "What do you think?" For a moment he looked as though he was going to break into tears right there and then but his face hardened - devoid of all emotion.
"Well, I thought you tried to kill yourself James, forgive me if I'm wrong."
"I didn't try to kill myself." I insisted. Why was he even here if all he wanted to do was have a go at me?
"Oh really? So, what, you just got bored one afternoon and decided to hack your wrists up for fun? That's sick James, that's twisted."
"MY SISTER HAD JUST BEEN MURDERED BY DEATHEATERS! AND YOU'RE CALLING ME SICK AND TWISTED?! HOW DARE YOU!" I yelled, my voice breaking slightly and tears stinging at my eyes.
"I am your father."
"THAT'S NOT AN EXCUSE!"
"IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE! DO YOU EVEN REALISE WHAT YOU DID?" He grabbed my shoulders and shook me vigorously, his eyes blazing with flame, "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA?"
"No! So enlighten me why don't you! Impart on me your great wisdom, oh marvellous father! Surely you must understand all things having spent half your life in the whorehouses of Knockturn Alley! So tell me, who killed Topaz? A mate of yours?"
"Stop making this about me! And stop being so selfish! Topaz wasn't just your sister!" Dad flung out his arms wildly, "There are other people in this world and they aren't lying in a hospital bed with scars covering their arms!"
"You don't understand -"
"No - you don't understand! I had just lost one child and because of you I nearly lost another one! How could you be so self-centred to think that you were the only person who was grieving for Topaz? She was mine and Augusta's only daughter; Morgead and Lorenzo's little sister; she was a granddaughter and a niece and a cousin and a best friend!
"You are not the only person to have every suffered! Twenty other people died in the attack and they too had families and friends and lives! You are not the first person to have lost and neither will you be the last!
"I would've thought that after her death you would see the value of life, but obviously you can't tell that other people have feelings! If you had died in your room alone - how would I have felt? How would you brothers feel? How would Sirius and Remus and Peter feel?"
The tears I had seen earlier in his face were now trickling slowly down his cheeks. Each drop caught the sunlight that filtered in through the window and shone like a single diamond. My head lolled forwards and I also began to cry softly. Call me weak - I don't care. I hurt physically and mentally and there were too many feelings crowding my head.
"Sorry," I murmured.
"We all miss you, you know." He replied, "A girl called Lily turned up. She was in a terrible state when we heard that you... were here."
"What?" I looked up at him, amazed. Lily?
"She's okay now, I think. Only tears - nothing too serious," he added hurriedly, "She just really wanted you back at school. She'd been keeping notes and stuff for each lesson for you, so you won't be too far behind. I spoke to one of the Healers; he said you'd be good to go in a couple of days..." Dad rambled on for while.
It was nice to listen to him. To hear about normal things that had been going on, at home and school; all the people I'd barely given a moments thought to over the past days yet knew from my cousins and great-aunts to my classmates and Quidditch mates. They became bright bold poster paints in my mind, next to my dull watercolour. I had shrunken into myself from being the most colourful shining picture of scarlet and yellow gold - the epitome of all that was Gryffindor - to something with barely-there hues of crimson and ochre.
***
Even when I looked back on those first terrible weeks of January, I could still feel the sheer anguish and loneliness as clearly as I had done then. Although the scars on my arms heeled after a while and I returned to Hogwarts, the actual memory of my feelings were the deepest scar.
I had never seen, nor have seen since that day, my father so deeply angry and upset. A lot of people had shouted at me in my first term of seventh year. Telling me things that I didn't want to know about or was too arrogant to care for. That, was perhaps, my greatest shortcoming. Underneath my skin I was still an egotistical prat who believed themselves already an adult.
Until Topaz's death, I was still a child – a very scared and confused one.
The fact, however, that I could remember all of it with such startling clarity gave me more... I don't know... drive, you could say. Not a single day past for the rest of the school year were at least one person was affected by Voldemort. The students of Hogwarts during my seventh year were, to put it simply, a doomed youth. We lost part of our childhoods and our first - normally glorious - years of adulthood pushing ourselves to the extremes; even the first years were trained for combat.
The day when I walked back through the gates flanked with winged boars to the school, healed and rested, I looked on it as the first day of my new life. I had had my hair cut, my scars healed (except for the burn on my wrist), I stopped smoking and whining every five seconds. I even got Muggle contact lenses!
Going back into the Common Room after so long away was the best. Sirius, Remus, Peter and Lily had all thrown themselves at me, I'd gotten pats on the backs and handshakes from the Prefects and tumultuous applause from my Quidditch team. Life wasn't perfect, but it was okay. And existence - I had decided - was not as tangible as teenagers are wont to believe. I wasn't going to waste mine.
A/N: Okay, this was a longish chapter to keep you going. The updates may not be quite as often for a couple of weeks or so. This is because I've just gone back to school to start my first year preparing for GCSE's – exams for 16 year olds in eleven subjects, two year course with loads of coursework and homework and, oh yeah, the rest of my LIFE depends on them, aaaaaaaaarggggh!!!! So as you can imagine the teachers are freaking out and piling on the work. Therefore – update maybe once a week, tops! Sorry!!!
But anyhoo… Thank you all the people reading this (if you haven't reviewed it why not? See, lil button down there *points*) and thanks to all the reviewers who came back!!! Yay!
Slytherinangel922 – Thank ye very much! Am most pleased/proud/ego-growing by the second that you like! Keep liking and I'll be a very very happy person indeedy!
Captain Oblivious – Yay! Worked very hard on making that cute! Also worked hard on making me cry a lot on this…Poor Jamesie! Bless his soul! And, yeh, the guy Remus is based on was not impressed..!
CalliopeWithAQuill – Ooh, I'm so glad you reviewed again! I thought I might've driven you off with James smoking, but no, you're back!!!! Yay! Glad you feel special and Lucius is evil evil evil nasty boy. Being mean to Lily… how dare he?! But good ol' James to the rescue! And look – James has quit smoking!!! Be proud! P.S – What's a calliope? In particular, why would it have a quill...? J
Wicca Willow – Wow! Thanks for putting me on your favourite's list! I feel so loved! *does freaky little dance* Pensieve convo took me aaaaaaages and I had to ask one of my friends what the Pensieve should be and he was no use whatsoever and told me I was crazy. Ah well… Keep reading!
MysticAngel14 – No problemo with the e-mail, in fact you should have another one for this chapter! So effiecient! And Malfoy is scum, but so cool to write!!! Hopefully it'll get even more interesting! There's so much I wanna put in this story and so little time goddamn it!
Tv-fan-06 – James is adorable! Everyone should have a guy-friend like James! A James for everyone!!! Am continuing… Keep reading!
Unhealthily-Obsessed – I hope Dumbledore bought his too! Though the thing that worried me that I realised after I posted the chapter was… Snape uses Dumbledore's Pensieve. Ick… Oh, and my stats say I'm on your favourites list!!!! Wow! Thank you!!! *Blush*
Professional scatterbrain – New reviewer! Yep, unfortunately, as you can see in this chapter James does self-harm. Buuuuut, he's going to stop now. And as much as I'd love to answer you're other questions I can't! Woah, this is what JK must feel like… maybe not… Keep reading!!
Hannah7 – Last but not least..! Malfoy IS nasty! But cool character! Think I might write a Draco or Lucius fic if I ever finish this one… Hmm, interesting idea… Anyhoo – keep reading and writing and get Chapter 2 posted ASAP!!!