A/N: Hello, 9k+ words of worldbuilding and politics that no one asked for! Naturally, as usual, I regret nothing.
I've gotten questions about my update schedule. For the first time in my fandom experience…there isn't one. Not now, at least. I'm embracing the chaos and the creativity as it comes and posting when and where I feel like it. It's freeing and exhilarating all at once. You can follow me on tumblr at scriibble-fics for more updates on updates and general pandemonium.
Still feels weird to write a dual POV! Do let me know what you think.
Chapter Three
LILY
"You did what?"
With nothing more than three sharp words shrilly spoken, Lily finds herself transported back to school days at State Establishment 7.
There's some difference, of course, and it's to those differences—distinct, important, undeniable—that she clings in the lavish formal sitting room of her coven's headquarters.
The setting differs. Outfitted in gleaming mahogany and solid gold fixtures, with plenty of lush fabrics gracing settees and loveseats and armchairs alike, the atmosphere of the Berkshire estate stands in direct contrast to the cold concrete and sparsely-furnished rooms of State Establishment 7. Where comfort goes to die, Mary had once described the general aesthetic of the school where they'd spent a combined total of sixteen years. In contrast, headquarters are where comfort goes to live, down to the ornate crown molding on the ceiling and the rich scent of mulled cider in the air. It's different than State Establishment 7. She's different than she was at State Establishment 7, and that bears repeating. She's different.
There are windows, too, oversized ones draped with plush hangings pulled back to reveal rolling green countryside. Cold rain pounds against windowpanes at a prodigious rate, the same rain that had soaked her hair and shoes and cloak when she'd made the mad dash inside earlier that afternoon, but the sound soothes rather than irritates. At State Establishment 7, locked doors and shuttered windows had been the norm. Storms had often passed overhead with no evidence of their existence.
Most importantly, she's among friends. The faces at the circular table that surround her vary in every discernable way, from age to race to sex, but no one looks at her with any amount of rage or revulsion or disgust at her very existence. Expressions range from understanding to shock to outrage—and all of that encapsulated between the three souls at the head of the table—but there's no element of danger. No one here will curse her for her missteps or follies.
Mary had repeated those exact words to her before the meeting had started. "No one will curse you," she'd whispered, her hand a reassuring weight on Lily's forearm, and she'd done her best to smile as she'd said it.
Marlene had stared on in bafflement. "Why would anyone curse you?" she'd demanded, and, at that, Mary had truly smiled.
Of course Marlene hadn't understood. But Mary had—and Mary understands then, too, as she flinches a little in her seat by Lily's side at the increased pitch of Adel Pearce's voice. Standing rigidly with her hands clasped in front of her, it takes Lily conscious effort not to do the same.
"Let me get this straight, Evans." Adel shifts aside the teacup in front of her with such force that the porcelain clatters. "You outed the coven to those outside our ranks? You spoke of our existence without the permission of the family, and you did so to those who could have easily turned you over to the actors of the state?"
Heat works its way up the back of Lily's neck to prickle at her skull. It gathers there, clustering anxiously, and she can only assume that the same heat floods her cheeks. "Yes and no."
At Adel's side, Melvin Doyle—another of the coven's heads—utters an almost soundless titter, one nearly lost under a clap of thunder so strong that the elegant chandelier overhead rattles faintly.
Adel's thin shoulders hunch. From the bridge of her nose, she pulls a delicate pair of spectacles and allows them to dangle from the golden chain around her neck. "Explain yourself."
How many staff members at State Establishment 7 had once demanded that exact same thing?
But there's no wand pointing at her this time. There are no thick, iron chains hanging from the ceiling or suspended from the walls. There are no silent cells awaiting her imprisonment. Still, every doorway becomes a noted exit—three in total: one to the foyer, one to the kitchen, one to the dining room—before Lily so much as attempts to answer.
"I heard Matilda McKinnon talk about Euphemia Potter many times before." On her other side, Marlene shifts in her seat. "I didn't know Matilda long, but I'd heard countless stories, so I'm sure you all heard even more. Remus Lupin, who we all know as a friend of the coven, is good friends with James Potter, Euphemia's son. After everything I heard about their family, I made the only decision that made sense at the time. It was a risk, but a calculated one. I couldn't see any other way to escape the situation alive."
Adel doesn't mince words. "So you saved your own skin, even though it put every other member of this family at risk."
The accusation stings. "No. If I had been by myself, I might have made a different choice. But—"
Marlene—sweet, loyal Marlene—interrupts. Though she doesn't rise from her chair, she does press her hands to the tabletop to lift herself halfway to her feet. "It's my fault. Lily saw me get hit. She knew the Potters would help me. If she didn't confide in them, I wouldn't—"
"Sit down, McKinnon. Evans has the floor. Not you."
"But—"
"Sit down."
Again, Mary flinches. Marlene does not. Her chin juts out, her fingers flex, and—
James Potter. No matter the difference in their coloring; no matter the soft, rounded features of Marlene's face that look nothing like his angular jaw and sharp nose; no matter the several inches of height and breadth of his shoulders that allows him to tower over her—Lily spies familial resemblance all over the defiance in Marlene's gaze.
Pureblood privilege, Mary would have said. Adel has it too.
So does Ezra, Marlene's older brother, yet it's his hand that grips the back of Marlene's jumper, his arm that pulls her back to the cushion of her seat, and his warning glare that ultimately silences her. Not Adel's.
A beat passes, one in which none of the three dozen or so other members of the table even seem to breathe. Finally, Adel speaks.
"I know what this was." No satisfaction rings out; bitterness takes its place. "We all do. No one in this coven authorized the business you partook in. The destruction of Diagon Alley, the attack on the state, the outing of our way of life—none of this was done in the coven's name. This was Order business, undertaken utilizing our methods of magic, and—"
Like an angel of rescue, Helena Wigglesworth, the final head of the coven, swoops in to save the day.
"—and we have agreed, for the good of the family, to keep these entities separate." A pair of knitting needles work endlessly between her wizened fingers; even when she looks up, brilliant red yarn continues to weave ceaselessly. "You and Melvin have requested that the members of this family who aren't a part of the Order should remain uninformed of our activities. Those of us in the Order have honored that request. There was no reason to inform you of our activities last Friday. That is our agreement, isn't it, Adel?"
Again, silence clouds the table.
"It is," Adel agrees. Her mouth puckers sourly. "It is in theory. But when you're undertaking goals as rash as these—to attempt to break out a prisoner of such high caliber as Alastor Moody—you can't expect us to—"
"I don't believe we expected anything of you. If we had, we would have requested assistance, and you would have been well within your rights to refuse. Besides, are—"
"And we would have refused. To use our magic in this way, it's not—"
"Are our goals not the same?" There, Helena lowers her knitting needles to the table, where they clack loudly against the wood. "The family and the Order both seek the end to a bigoted, corrupt, and violent state. We may go about it differently, but our strengths have always come from the overlapping efforts of our organizations. If you seek to sever that, you only benefit the state. Is that your intention, Adel?"
Adel sputters. "Why—of course not—"
"So please allow Lily to explain herself."
Necks crane back in Lily's direction. Her left thigh, still tender after six days of healing, throbs faintly.
"Thank you." After she speaks, Melvin titters again. It irritates nearly as much as the weakness in her leg. "I made a calculated decision. I'd make the same one again. I'll apologize for it, but only if it ever puts another member of the family in jeopardy, which I don't believe it will. I trust my instincts and the decision that I made, and I'm asking that you trust in me too."
"Proud," sneers Bronwen Carrow in the far recesses of her memory. Even seven years out, she can still perfectly reimagine the slight lisp in her Transfiguration professor's voice. "We'll work that out of you."
They hadn't, although they'd never stopped trying.
Melvin summons a nearby teapot with a tiny flourish of his stubby fingers. With impressive grace, the teapot floats through the air, where it comes to a halt just above his cup. A steady stream of steam escapes as tea flows neatly with no concentration on his part. "To me, it seems that we're not distrusting you, Evans. Our fate could now rest in the hands of the Potter family, and to me, at least, that is what I distrust. Matilda McKinnon made several overtures to that branch of the family to try to get them to join us. They refused at every turn. They owe us no loyalty and could be selling us out as we speak."
Again, thunder rumbles. More than one head twists in the direction of a nearby window.
Lily's own paranoia spikes in turn. "I've thought of that many nights. Every night, honestly, since it happened. But doesn't that only prove that they already knew of our existence and have never spoken of it? Matilda outed us to them long ago, and—to my understanding—she did so with the sanction of this coven. I didn't—"
"And now she's gone, may her soul rest peacefully, and the Potters have less reason to keep her secrets."
Marlene does stand at that, and so abruptly that her chair nearly topples to the ground behind her. "This is ludicrous. They're not going to sell me out—or Ezra or Lavinia—any more than they would have Mum. Besides, they have their own reasons for keeping quiet. Their own secrets. If they were to say anything, we could—"
"What secrets?" It comes from across the table, a question blurted from the mouth of Penelope Boot. "If we could use that—"
Gertrude Cygnet, seemingly older than time itself, opens her eyes. Despite slouched shoulders and a drooped head, her eyes are bright with no hint of sleep. "Oh, surely you've heard the rumors, Penny. Haven't we all? No one accumulates that sort of wealth legally, not in this day and age. Not before the takeover, either, although many of you weren't alive for that. And Henry Potter, the wily old coot—that man had more streams of income than a Gringotts goblin. Never could get him to give me a straight answer about it all, although I tried many times to get it out of him. You know—"
Two seats down, Kingsley Shacklebolt's low, measured voice overtakes the conversation. "We can't base actions on rumors, and these are rumors older than you, Gertrude."
"Cheers, dear."
"I only meant—"
Ezra once again pulls Marlene back to her seat. This time, he doesn't release the back of her jumper. "Fix this," he hisses under the conversation, his blond head ducked so close to Marlene's that their matching hair melds together. "You set this in motion, Marlene. Fix it."
Marlene's mouth opens. "I—"
A loud crack rings out from the head of the table like a gavel struck. Bodies jump, cloaks rustle, and silence falls.
Adel's hand remains held aloft long after the ringing note fades. Carefully, pointedly, her fingers curl inwards. "Evans has the floor." It sounds like even more of a reprimand the second time around, and the way she intertwines her hands together—all mock patience, no real feeling—only demonstrates more of the same. "Evans, what did McKinnon mean?"
The lie comes instantly. "Nothing."
"You know the consequences for falsehoods to this family."
She does. In nearly three years, she's only seen it performed once, but once had done the trick. Witnessing a person stripped of their magic—a ritual she hadn't even known had existed before she'd observed it for the first time—had proven even more brutal than some of the worst public executions.
Worry pulses in her throat. "I do, and I can't answer for what Marlene meant. But they obviously have their own secrets. They knew of Matilda's involvement in the family. They hid me, Marlene, and Mary despite knowing what we'd done. I'd consider those fairly big secrets that would keep them from turning us in. As for the things Penelope and Gertrude have said—" Again, her leg twinges. "Those are rumors I've never heard."
"Liar," Rafe Mahoney, State Establishment 7's Magical Conduct professor, had snapped at her early and often from the age of eight onwards. Schooling hadn't worked that out of her either. Perhaps it had only trained her, because she has no difficulty meeting the steel in Adel's stare.
"Is that what you meant, McKinnon?"
Marlene doesn't hesitate. "Yes."
Lightning flashes, striking close enough to bathe the south side of the room in sharp, painful light. Thunder follows, louder than ever.
"I'll go speak to Fleamont." Helena retrieves her knitting needles, her resolve palpable. "I'll extract an oath of silence from him and offer the same in return. I'm sure he'll see reason—after all, he's a businessman first and foremost. Lily, perhaps you should come with me. We'll discuss it at a later date."
Dismissal. There's dismissal in her tone, and it takes everything in Lily not to sink back into her seat.
Melvin lifts his teacup to his lips. "There's still the matter of potential sanctioning." Somehow, he manages to make the possibility sound almost cheery. "What Evans did—"
"And we'll discuss that as well—the three of us, you, me, and Adel. Lily, you may sit."
And so she does, as carefully as she can. Immediately, Mary reaches for her hand under the table, and she grips it tightly for the remainder of the meeting.
Yet it's Ezra McKinnon who catches her elbow when the meeting adjourns, once the sky has darkened to an inky black and the rain has slowed to a faint drizzle and other members have rushed from seats to hurriedly don cloaks in the brief interlude in the weather. "You alright?" he asks, concern masking his patrician features, after Mary and Marlene have offered quick embraces and joined the crowd heading for the doors. "You looked a little—"
"Never better." Her cloak slips between her fingers, and cascades towards the polished floor in a heap.
Ezra retrieves it wordlessly, and he slings the worn fabric over his forearm atop his own thicker cloak of deep navy and rich silver stitching. "Of course." He has a little of Marlene's smile, and he offers it like an olive branch. "Are you headed up to brew?"
"Yes."
"Feel like company?"
"No."
There, his grin breaks free. "Can I join you anyway?"
It sounds so much like Marlene, and so much like their younger sister Lavinia, that Lily very nearly laughs despite the continued pounding of her heart. "If you must."
And he must, it seems, because he follows her through the darkened corridors of the manor, past closed doors and flickering torches and up a long, winding staircase to the deserted second floor where the coven's brewing lab—her brewing lab, at least in her mind—awaits.
His works awaits, too, in a thick stack of complicated Arithmancy charts bound in an expensive leather cover. As she frees her wand from her back pocket and takes to lighting lamps, he settles into a burgundy settee and uncaps a vial of emerald ink. "Vinnie, Mary, and I took turns working in here while you and Marlene were recovering," he explains as he stretches long legs out in front of him. From the end table beside him, he selects an eagle feather from a stack of fine quills and twists it between his fingers. "We didn't really know what to do, exactly, other than just keep an eye on your potions, but—"
"Thank you."
"They're your babies. Someone had to make sure they survived."
It's true, so true that it weighs almost like sadness upon her shoulders.
Her babies. Her legacy. Her life's work, all contained within a small, cozily-kept bedroom and hidden from public eye.
If she had died in the streets of Diagon Alley, would any of it have mattered?
For all the company he offers, Ezra sets to work silently, and she's grateful for it. She's grateful for his silence save for the scratching of his quill, grateful for the way he seems to ignore her very existence, grateful for the peace it provides her as she tends to the three active cauldrons spaced throughout the room. Every calculation carefully recorded, every adjustment of temperature, every addition of ingredient, every cautious stir—the labor soothes like a balm until the frazzled nerves within her body slowly unclench and then relax entirely.
Seconds pass, and then minutes, and then hours. By the time dizziness sweeps over her, midnight has come and gone.
Ezra only looks up when she takes a seat. Several crumpled pieces of parchment litter the area around him, and one brushes against his sleeve as he reaches for his wand. With a wave, a glass of water materializes in front of her. "Not to sound like Mary—" He waits until she's taken a swallow before he continues. "But you probably shouldn't be doing wandless magic. There's no way you're fully healed yet."
A vein throbs in one temple, the pain matched by a constant, low ache in the pit of her stomach. "Did you follow me up here just to tell me that?"
"And to keep an eye on you. Mary and Marlene couldn't, so it fell to me."
Pride piques. "I'm fine."
"You could have died, Lil."
"But that's—"
—every day. For everyone. At all times. The words lodge in her throat. In front of her, a single bubble pops in a cauldron filled with a smooth, silvery potion, one so brilliant that it reflects the ceiling. On instinct, she lifts a hand to correct the temperature.
Ezra beats her to it. Without warning, he's on his feet, his ink set aside and his portfolio tossed onto the seat behind him. His wand—in far better shape than hers, still highly polished and neatly bound in ash—hangs over the surface of the cauldron. "Tell me what to do. Let me do it."
It's not fair. It's not even close to fair. Even though he exists on the outskirts of society, a fugitive just like Marlene and Lavinia, he has more freedom with his wand than she's ever had with hers.
Pureblood privilege.
"Turn the heat down." She hears the exhaustion in her voice. "Just a little. Two degrees, maybe three."
He does. The flame under the cauldron's base lowers faintly, just enough that she can detect the difference.
He can't. "Did I—"
"You did. Thank you."
He doesn't return to his seat. A spare stool rests a few feet away, one typically only occupied on review days, when Adel or Melvin or Helena invade her space to check on progress. Ezra drags it a little closer, and he settles it beside the cauldron silently.
The surface of the potion stills, falling back into a molten skin, as Lily nurses the water in her hand.
"What are you working on?" she asks eventually, and it pulls Ezra from the depths of the cauldron and the depths of whatever thoughts refuse to show upon his face. "Is it for the family or the Order or pleasure?"
"Who has time for pleasure?" With a stretch that cracks the base of his spine, he stands to retrieve his discarded portfolio and offers it to her. "It's for the family. We got hired to ward a house near Birmingham. You wouldn't believe how complicated their requests are, and you know Melvin-he didn't want to bother with it so he shoved it off on me. The pay is good, though, and someone has to pay for all the Graphorn horn you're using."
Past the front cover, she uncovers page after page of mathematical charts. "And the money we use for bribes and political campaigns and general supplies and undercover missions. It's not all Graphorn horn, thank you." Each row of minute figures adds into the next, the pattern only broken by symbols she recognizes vaguely from many years past, but the runes sketched in Ezra's artistic hand feature far more detail and far more flair than the runes she'd once learned in school. One, a sort of swirling circle that rotates counterclockwise upon the page, burns warm under her fingertips. "I wish they'd taught us more of this in school. We didn't get much information at all in the way of Ancient Runes, and we got even less Arithmancy."
"I could teach you."
It's not the first time he's offered; it's also not the first time she turns him down. "I'm too old to learn new tricks." Closing the cover, she looks up into his face.
He has Euphemia Potter's eyes.
"What?" he asks. "Is there something on my face?"
There is—a smudge of emerald ink near his left ear, the same ink that has stained his fingers permanently—but it's not worth mentioning. "You have her eyes. Euphemia's."
"Oh." Those eyes, mossy green and upturned in the corners, follow her as he returns to the stool at her side. "Yeah…Mum used to say that." As always, his tongue trips over the mere mention of his mother in a way that Marlene and Lavinia never have.
She doesn't call him on it. Not like he might her.
He clears his throat. "How is she? Effie? And Monty? And James? Marlene said they're fine when she told me everything, but—I saw her after you all got back. I doubt she remembers anything clearly. She was roughed up."
Why does she admit it? To say the words aloud feels uncomfortably like weakness, and it's a confidence she hasn't even shared with Marlene or her sweet, sweet Mary. And yet, there's something about those eyes—those Euphemia Potter eyes—that spurs her forward.
"My teeth fell out."
"What?"
If she presses her tongue to her top molars, she can still imagine the tenderness of the gaping socket and the sharp, metallic taste of blood. "My teeth fell out. Some of my hair too. It happened Tuesday, so a few days after I thought everything was more or less sorted and I'd healed. I hadn't."
He swallows, the sound audible. "Merlin, Lil. Is that—"
"Helena said it was normal after everything. You know—'magic has its price' and all that." It hadn't comforted her then, and it doesn't comfort her now. "But she also—she was right there with me when I was casting. I mean, I did a lot of dueling and I started the fires, but she was beside me casting the same sort of magic without any issue. And that—"
That irritates her still, like an itch in the subconscious of her mind that she can't quite reach. With every tooth she'd spit up, with every clump of hair that had dropped from her scalp, with every pain that has continued since, the same thought had nagged her then and nags her now.
Does it come down to blood? Does Helena—pureblood Helena—simply have something she does not?
Ezra shakes his head. "Helena's like eight hundred years old. Of course she can do things you can't. But—to hear Mary and Marlene tell it—you did things they could never do. You did things they've never seen. And—"
"Out of fear. I was terrified."
"So?"
"So it's not—"
"It is impressive, you idiot. Don't obsess over the motivation. I know that's what they teach us, but the action—the outcome—that's what matters in the end, isn't it? So don't—"
"I'm not an idiot."
"Then stop acting like one."
It sounds so much like an exchange he might have with Marlene or Lavinia—that he has had with Marlene or Lavinia, and frequently—that she can't help it. She smiles.
He smiles back, and she spies it for the first time: another Potter connection, this one present in the chiseled line of his jaw. When he smiles, his chin dimples, just like James Potter's.
When she blinks, the comparison vanishes.
"They're doing well," she tells him, and then she must quickly clarify. "The Potters. That's how it seemed, at least. The shop seemed prosperous. Euphemia was over the moon to see Marley. She asked after you and Lavinia too."
"And Fleamont?"
"I think he would have thrown me back into the alley if I hadn't mentioned Marlene's name. Not that I blame him." And she doesn't, not even then. In discussions had afterward, when Lily had relayed the entire tale to her, Marlene had taken more offense to Fleamont's refusals than anyone else. Mary had simply nodded with grave understanding, and, when pressed, had summed the situation up in a single question.
"Why would they have helped?"
Marlene had stared at her, her blue eyes wide. "Because it's the right thing to do."
Mary hadn't said it, but Lily had known she'd thought it. Pureblood privilege.
It's a sentiment Ezra, somehow, doesn't share. "I understand it. Between Mum and Granddad—" He doesn't finish, but he doesn't have to. Instead, he sighs, the sound soft and subdued. On the other side, he attempts to smile once again. "And James? How was he?"
A thousand different descriptors rise and fall within the confines of her mind. Ezra waits, patience personified, as her mouth opens and closes several times over. "Arrogant," she says finally. "'Cocksure,' my mum would say. I've never seen anything like it."
When Ezra laughs, he does so with his whole body. "Yeah, that sounds like him." True fondness leaks through the words. "He's one of the world's favorites and he knows it."
"I mean, he was kind," she corrects quickly. "And selfless. And me and Marley and Mary wouldn't be here if he hadn't stuck his neck out. But—the recklessness. I tried to make him explain to me why he'd put himself out to help me, and he just…he couldn't." Even still, the puzzlement on his face when she'd asked remains burned in her brain. "He just did it without thinking."
"Because it's the right thing to do," Marlene repeats piously in her ear.
"That's James."
Should she admire such behavior or consider it the reddest of flags? Days later, she still doesn't know.
Ezra takes the portfolio from between her hands and immerses himself in the pages once more. "I bet he liked you."
"What?"
"I bet he liked you," he says again, and with more certainty than before. "Your strength, your conviction, your own recklessness, the fact that you killed a bloke—"
Chill washes over the pit of her stomach. "I don't want to talk about that."
He looks up at her, although she doesn't look back. Instead, she crosses the thick, cream-colored carpet to a long table that lines one wall, and she reaches for a handful of fluxweed that she doesn't truly need.
"Have you spoken to Moody?" he asks as the silver knife in her hands releases the sweet, citrusy aroma of fluxweed into the air. "Maybe that would help you feel better, because—we got him out, Lil. You got him out. You and Helena and Marlene and—"
Her knife slips; the thin blade gouges directly into the fleshy pad of her thumb. On instinct, she draws it to her mouth. In contrast to the scent, fluxweed twists bitterly across her tongue. "I haven't seen him. I've been busy."
"You're avoiding him."
She is. She absolutely is, and she's not even ashamed to admit it.
"He's asked after you," Ezra continues. "Edgar and I visited a couple of days ago. You were the first thing he asked me about."
"What did you say?"
"Well, I didn't tell him you were losing your teeth. If I'd known, I would have."
And Moody would have laughed, probably, knowing him. She can hear it even then, that loud, grizzled laughter that had once echoed through Order headquarters on a daily basis. His absence had made meetings nearly unbearable.
"Go see him," Ezra urges. "You'll feel better, Lil. I know you will. You'll—"
And, again, it's so very Marlene that she capitulates. "Fine. Alright? I will. Happy?"
When he beams at her, she has no choice but to smile back. That, too, reminds her more than a little of James Potter.
xxx
Two days later, she finds Alastor Moody seated at the kitchen table in the Highlands' farmhouse that houses the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix. He leans heavily against the scuffed wooden tabletop, but he sits up straight the moment he recognizes her. A bottle of whiskey rests beside one gnarled hand; he holds a glass of the same amber contents in the other. A second glass rests nearby, almost as if it waits for her.
"The Prewetts smuggled it to me," he explains without offering so much as a greeting. "Molly'd have a fit if she knew, so don't tell her."
A roaring fire crackles in the grate. It's there that Lily pauses to strip off her cloak, and the flames bring tingling life back to her fingertips. "Are they trusting you here by yourself?"
Moody snorts. "Of course not. Vance is in the other room. I haven't had a moment's peace since they brought me back here. It seems I need round-the-clock care like an invalid."
You are an invalid. It very nearly slips off her tongue and only halts at the last minute when she recalls the Head Auror and leader of the Order of the Phoenix she'd known over five months prior and not the gaunt, gray-haired husk of a man before her.
He catches it anyway, and a smile twists that only draws further attention to the new, angry scars that crisscross his face. "Good lass. Here, have a seat."
Somehow, he looks even worse up close. A spell has taken a large chunk of flesh from his nose, leaving a raw, reddened stump warped by curse lines. Hard lines of bone stand out from his shoulders, transforming once sturdy boulders into misshapen lumps. A particularly nasty scar of vivid purple slants diagonally across one eye, where scar tissue twists his eyelid into a tight bundle.
"Bastards took my leg too." Pushing himself back from the table, he reveals a single leg present under the heavy folds of his robes. The other has vanished entirely. The remaining leg, as scarred as the rest of him and as thin as his shoulders, flexes slightly as he pulls himself back toward the table's surface. "First thing they did when I tried to escape. I've got Flitwick working on some sort of replacement. The fingers—well, I don't think there's much of a replacement for them." Between middle and index fingers, the only two present on his wand hand, he lifts the neck of the bottle of whiskey to splash a good bit into the glass before her. Righting the bottle comes with the assistance of his left hand, where his pinky and ring fingers end in matching pink stumps just inches from his palm. "Kip Carrow did that work personally. I trained him and he worked under me for years, so he knew I could use my wand in both hands. He wanted to make sure he'd covered his bases, although he took his time. That's why he didn't finish the job. Didn't have the time before you all showed up."
Nausea spreads across Lily's stomach like a thick quilt and creeps steadily up the front of her throat, choking her, as Moody pushes the glass her way.
"What else?" he asks. "They snapped my wand, of course. Let me tell you, there were more than a few nights where I wished I'd taken your lot's suggestion and joined your little coven. I could have used some wandless magic."
Her mouth has gone dry, and her tongue lies as useless as a bed of cotton. "Your ear?" she asks, the words strange and fuzzy.
The few fingers of Moody's hand trace the thick, red gash that mar the entire left side of his face, where only a gnarled nub of cartilage remains. "Aye, they did that too. I'd near forgotten." He smiles a little, his lips bloodless. "I have a hearing problem, it seems, so they figured I didn't need both ears since I wasn't using them."
Moody's ruined hand aside Moody's ruined ear, both scarred and destroyed beyond recognition, stay singed in her brain even after she's pushed her chair back, lurched across the room, and retched into the bin.
Her pain brings him joy, at least, or something close to it. He gives a hacking laugh as she empties the contents of her stomach, and he doesn't stop when she's finally heaved up everything. "Figured this was why you hadn't been by, so we'd best get it out of the way early," he says, still chuckling, as she vanishes the mess in the bin with a shaky wave of her wand. "You're an odd one, Evans. Never seen blood bother you, not once, but—"
"I don't like torture."
"Turns out I don't either. Sit back down and have a drink with me."
What else can she do?
He watches her closely, and a hint of black amusement remains present in his dark eyes even after she's settled back at his side. "I'm done now. I owe you that. To hear the others tell it, I owe you a good bit more than that, honestly."
Whiskey burns the raw length of her throat with a single swallow. It's decent, whatever the Prewetts have provided him, and spiced deeply. Between the thick undercurrent of cinnamon, the resulting burn, and Moody's words, heat rushes to her face. "I don't know about that."
"You set the buildings on fire, didn't you? Grindel's Gang wouldn't have scattered otherwise. Of course, you nearly sent me up along with them, but I'd have rather gone that way than stayed in their custody another day, so I don't blame you for that."
"Kind of you." It earns her another snort. "Yeah, I did that, but not alone. It wasn't—"
"I know. Wigglesworth has been here. She told me she had a hand in it, although only after she took the piss out of me for getting caught in the first place."
A second swallow goes down easier, far easier than the mental image of Helena Wigglesworth—ancient, proper, immaculately-kept Helena Wigglesworth—taking the piss out of anyone. "You're joking."
"No. She might not show it around you kids—she has a reputation to uphold and all—but she has a mouth on her. Shame she doesn't show it more, and shame you don't show it less." He offers her a smile as he speaks, one more meant for her benefit than his own. She can recognize that clearly and without question, and she does, as evident as when he'd tried on similar bits of banter after Matilda McKinnon had died. His attempts to bring any small moment of cheer to Ezra or Marlene or Lavinia had sat at great odds with every other facet of his personality, and sits even stranger with the new damage to his face and body, but—
She's suddenly never liked him better, and it hits like a slap across the face, one so strong that it would rattle her teeth if physical.
Moody catches her out quickly. "Don't do that," he says shortly. "Don't go all doe-eyed. You're the strong one, Evans, you and Macdonald. I've come to depend on that. Don't let me down now."
"Sorry," she says, the apology automatic and without thought.
When thought does hit, it comes with the sudden urge to scream and to scream until her raw throat bloodies.
Of course she and Mary are the strong ones. From childhood, they've had no chance to be anything but strong.
Moody catches that too. "Go on, then. Get angry at me. That's fine. It won't bother me a bit."
The words seek freedom from her mouth. "You know why—"
"Aye, I know why you and Macdonald are the way you are. I also know it's shit, but I appreciate you for it just the same. That's all I meant."
It is, without a doubt, the closest Alastor Moody had ever come to offering her an apology.
Wind rushes by the windows in the silence that follows, flowing in several great bursts that draw goosebumps to her arms. No matter the smoky warmth of the kitchen, her body temperature refuses to regulate. It's been that way for days.
"I heard you killed a man," Moody says eventually, causally, and the words hit her as abruptly as those same spoken from Ezra's mouth. He notes the subtle flinch of her shoulders, of course. "Did you know in the moment? When you did it?"
"Yes." How could she not? In some times of crisis, adrenaline speeds up her sensibilities. In others, it slows down. Trapped in the twisted streets of Diagon Alley, aware that they'd only had a window of ten or maybe fifteen minutes to intercept Moody's transportation from prison to execution site, it had slowed down every sense exponentially. Every sight, every smell, every sound, every feeling—each had turned over and over in her brain, branded for all eternity, and she hasn't escaped them since. No matter how hard she's tried, she can't escape the lingering sense of panic that has remained taut underneath her skin since Grindel's Gang had surrounded them. She can't forget the hot ash and panic that had coated her tongue and skin and hair. And she certainly can't forget the way fear and rage and pure hatred had bubbled underneath her flesh, building in her chest and rushing down her arms and collecting in her fingertips, when she'd heard Marlene scream. The way wandless magic had crested inside her—more powerful than a spell cast with a wand, but less precise and wilder—lingers in her system like a bad cold, and she hadn't known then what she'd hurled from her palms towards the man who had attacked Marlene. But she'd seen the man's neck snap just the same, although she hadn't heard it crack over the roar of the flames and the burgeoning chaos all around them. Still, it hadn't mattered. She'd spotted the unnatural angle, had watched his chin flop uselessly to the side, and she'd known.
She'd killed him with magic that had felt effortless until a sharp, stabbing pain had hit her directly between the kidneys, a pain she'd considered entirely worth it when she'd seen Mary help Marlene duck out of the line of fire. Internal energy sapped, she'd known it foolish to press on, but she had the moment she'd gotten the all-clear from Helena to Apparate away. Truly, she'd only meant to hurl the man's corpse through the air, to just get the reality of what she'd done away from herself, although it hadn't surprised her to see his comrades rise around him. The vacillation of her mood—the adrenaline, the fear, the upset, the relief, all of it together—had left her incapable of controlling the magic inside her as the coven had trained.
Moody continues to watch her. She can feel it, even though she doesn't return his gaze. "How did you feel?" he asks.
She doesn't have to think. "Terrible."
"It gets easier."
"I hope it doesn't."
"Would you do it again?"
"Yes." She knows, even as she speaks, that it's an admittance she'd never give to anyone else.
But Moody not only understands—he also thinks the better of her for it. "Good." The single word rings with praise, and he smacks his lips loudly around another drink. "For what it's worth, I'm grateful. I've already thanked the others—especially the Longbottoms for hearing that they planned to move me, and McGonagall and Flitwick for actually getting me out—but setting the street on fire put everything in motion. Grindel's Gang would have wiped you all out if they'd had full control of the situation."
Under different circumstances, she'd preen under the compliment. Under these, she can't. Not with the memory of the crimson-cloaked figure's neck snapping so fresh in her mind—a man named Arden Thorpe, she'd read in The Diagon Examiner, a half-blood fresh out of Hogwarts whose life she'd ended with nothing more than a wave of her hands.
"That'll mean more when I haven't just thrown up."
"Noted." He nudges the whiskey bottle her way. "Drink up. You're going to need it for this next part." He doesn't allow a moment's pause to contemplate his meaning before he presses on. "Word on the street is that you're shagging James Potter."
She doesn't need more whiskey, not ever again, not after what she holds in her mouth promptly travels up into her sinuses.
Emmaline Vance ducks her dark head into the kitchen in the midst of the coughing fit that follows. Lily can offer little more greeting than a slight wave before she doubles over, face towards the wooden floor, to nearly cough up her lungs.
The worry has cleared off Emmaline's brow by the time she emerges from under the table. "It's lovely to see you, Lily." She carries a heavy tome between her hands, one with pages gone yellow from age. "Alice said you'd been…feeling under the weather. I'm glad to see you're doing better."
It had been Alice—kind, compassionate, ever-patient Alice Longbottom—who had reaffixed every missing tooth to her jaw and had regrown every strand of hair upon her head, and all without a single word of complaint. She can't begrudge her a bit of a gossip.
"I'm doing great." Tears cluster in her eyes, countering the notion, and she wipes them away with the heel of each hand. "Or I would be if Moody would stop trying to kill me."
Moody grins into the neck of his glass. "I'm just letting you know what I've heard. Figured you'd rather get that intel from me than from Gideon or Fabian, wouldn't you? You know they always have their ears to the ground and their eyes everywhere. Sounds like it didn't even take twenty-four hours for a couple of Grindel's Gang to start spreading around that they'd caught James Potter taking up with some muggleborn witch. From the description they gave, it didn't take them long to put two-and-two together."
"You're enjoying this."
Moody doesn't hesitate. "Of course I am, although not as much as they are. Speaking of taking the piss—"
Oh, they're going to make her miserable.
Emmaline also seems to fight a smile, although hers errs a little kinder, a little more sympathetic, and a little less irritating. That smile drops when she catches sight of the bottle at Moody's elbow. "Did they give you that?" she demands. "The Prewetts? Alastor, you know you're not supposed to be drinking. Honestly—" With a short, sharp sigh, she crosses the floor to confiscate the whiskey with a tight fist. Moody makes no attempt to stop her. "Do you want me to tell Molly? Or Poppy? I can't imagine that either would take too kindly to this behavior, not after how hard they've worked to heal you. You'd think losing an actual limb would get you to take this seriously, but you never listen. Why would you? It's not like—"
The humor remains on Moody's face. "You're really going to take that from Evans right now? Really? When she looks like that?"
If offered two guesses, it would undoubtedly only take Lily one to place the look on her face.
Emmaline hesitates by the scratched wooden tabletop, bottle in hand, and then replaces it silently. She leaves without another word, although she takes the time to pat Lily's shoulder on her way out.
Moody takes his sweet time in refilling his glass, and the burning shame in the pit of her gut—in the center of her chest—in the apples of her cheeks—remains throughout. "Come on, now," he says, all logic and reason. "Would you rather explain this to me or McGonagall? Because that's your choice."
"I already explained it to McGonagall. At least—"
At least the broad strokes of the story, the part where James and the Potters had helped her. Even then, at all the things she'd left unspoken, embarrassment had twisted like a snake inside her stomach. And although McGonagall had certainly suspected more, a fact evident just based on the hollow of her cheeks and the slant of her thin eyebrows, she hadn't pushed.
Moody understands. "Not all of it, eh? Well, she'll finish up classes soon. I can summon her here. If you'd rather, you can tell her all about it."
The thought of saying the word 'shag' to Minerva McGonagall, and the imaginary shade of puce that the professor's face would undoubtedly turn at the very insinuation of sex, is enough to spur her forward.
"The Potters hid us, me and Marlene and Mary. That's really it. I was foolish and got caught in the open with James, but—"
"They've got some hidden place where they smuggle goods, don't they? Is that where they hid you?"
For the first time in ages—perhaps the first time in her life for as far as she can remember—she can't even summon forth a lie.
"What?" she asks finally, slowly, the question drawn out over multiple syllables. In contrast, what follows pours out quickly, unstoppably, with the force of a waterfall. "Who told you—how did you even know that they—Moody, you can't say anything. I promised—I swore on everything—"
"I've known for ages," he says, and her glass very nearly slips through her fingers. "I mean, as good as knew, at least," he amends. "There've been rumblings around the government for years, even way back before I joined the Aurors. People know they're up to something, anyway, even if smuggling isn't necessarily on the state's radar. Henry Potter always paid off the right people, and Fleamont has continued that. We always knew, but only those of us at the top, and we couldn't do anything about it. I never much wanted to anyway. Nice bloke, Henry Potter. Shame they finally put him down."
She's heard Moody speak of death in similar ways, and often at that. Still—perhaps because the murder she'd committed still sits so close to the front of her mind—it fills her veins with ice.
"What did he do?" she asks, and Moody shrugs thin shoulders.
"Don't rightly know. That order didn't come from my office. We learned about it through the papers. Heard the typical rumors—consorting with muggles, anti-state plots, even some wild tales about an attempt on the governor's life—but never anything concrete. Anyway—don't worry, Evans. I'm not about to say anything about their hidden little life. How would that benefit us at all?"
It wouldn't, but it hardly soothes her. If it would benefit them—
He'd use it. Without a doubt.
"McGonagall probably has her own suspicions," he adds. "Did she ask you about it?"
"No."
"Well, she will. I wouldn't lie. She'll know."
"I gave my word that I wouldn't say anything to anyone." At the base of her skull, a headache begins to form. "That means something to me, and I owe it to them after they saved our lives. I didn't even tell Helena, and that—"
"Oh, she knows. If I know, she knows. She doesn't miss a beat."
Before her very eyes, the promise she'd made to the Potters unravels like a loose ball of string.
"Besides," Moody adds, "It doesn't matter if you haven't told Wigglesworth. Your allegiance needs to lie with the Order over your coven. You know that, Evans. How many times have we been over it? You can't—"
"That's not fair." It's an old refrain, and it rings as one. "You wouldn't want Order information going to the coven, would you?"
"It's different and you know it. I know your coven doesn't like the state any better than we do, but—well, do you agree with their tactics? With their ideas of overtaking the government slowly with money and candidates of their own? Or with ours, with actually getting things done, with taking people out when and where we can and looking after our own? I know some of you think those goals can overlap, and they can until they can't. You're going to have to choose eventually, and you might as well start today, by telling me everything, rather than—"
Her head throbs. "Do you lecture anyone else like this, or is this energy reserved solely for me?"
"You're not that special. Vance got the same lecture an hour ago and she didn't even do anything to deserve it. It was merely a precaution. Constant—"
"—vigilance. I know."
Moody waits, although for what, she doesn't know. He waits and a clock beside the door counts the seconds loudly, each one pulsing in her temples.
"James Potter," he prompts finally, and the urge to press her forehead to the table, and to leave it there indefinitely, rears its head.
"What about him? He's—" Three more seconds pass, and then it clicks. "Good lord, he's not—I'm not actually shagging him. Do you really think I'd—"
"Haven't a clue what you would or wouldn't do, if I'm honest. Not in that way, at least. Always knew you had it in you to kill a man, for the record, but I couldn't care less what you do in your private time. That's not my business."
"Well, for the record, I'm not shagging him." The cadence of her voice rises, sharp beyond her control, and she bites down on her tongue in self-rebuke. Emmaline sits only one room away, and she can easily imagine the small, private way she might smile at such a sentiment. "Christ, Moody, it was a ruse to explain away why I was in his flat. I'd have thought you—with all your insistence on deception and disguise and quick thinking—would have praised me for that, not assumed anyone relaying information to Fabian and Gideon would tell the truth."
Again, Moody shrugs. "I had to ask. But he went along with it, did he? Potter?"
He had. He'd stared at her like he'd thought her absolutely batshit insane when she'd pulled off her blouse while the cover story of their alleged affair had sprouted from her mouth, but he'd never once faltered.
"Yes."
"Wonder why he'd do that."
An admonishment sits dormant on her tongue, and probably a nasty one at that, before she truly takes stock of his tone. He poses the question musingly, like a brainteaser he can't quite pull apart, with no insinuation or smirk in his tone.
It's still hard to take at face value. "I think—" she begins, the words spoken after a careful breath. "I think he's just a good person, or he's at least a good person to people he cares about. Knowing I know Marlene, and that I'm friends with one of his friends too—"
"The werewolf, right?"
There's no nastiness behind the question, but prickling irritation sweeps across her chest regardless. "Remus. His name is Remus."
Moody simply grunts in return. A chanced glance at his face reveals a distant, almost dreamy expression, as if thoughts have suddenly transported him far away.
She knows that look. They all know that look, everyone in the Order, and it fills her with nothing but a faint sense of dread.
"Do me a favor," he says eventually, long after he's finished his drink and she's drained most of hers as well. The bottle sits half-empty in front of him, and full night has fallen outside the safehouse's windows.
"Do I have a choice?"
"We all have choices, Evans. Your free will doesn't begin or end with the Order." He picks up the whiskey bottle and takes a swig direct from the source. "I assume you'll see the Potters again. Keep an eye on them for me, will you? All of them."
Faint dread transforms swiftly to deeper dread, and the gooseflesh on her arms spreads down her torso. "I'm not spying on them. I'm not. I won't—"
"I'm not asking you to. I'm just asking that you keep an eye and ear out. That's it. I can't imagine any of the Potters joining our side—or the state's either, honestly. They've always seemed more motivated by coin than ethics or hate." He leans forward, his palms flat on the table and his eyes bright. The scar over his eye seems to glow. "Still, getting them on board with us—given their connections, and their business, and their name—that'd be a huge get, Evans. A huge get."
For not the first time, she recalls the ravenous hunger in James Potter's voice when he'd expressed interest in her magic. "I want to know everything about it," he'd said, and she'd heard herself reflected in that sentiment. Hadn't she herself spoken nearly those same words to Mary three years before when she'd first watched magic flow effortlessly from her fingertips? "I'd give anything—"
So reckless, so arrogant, so determined to do the right thing and uncover the knowledge of the world—he'd be easy to manipulate. He'd be a dream.
The very notion sours her stomach.
Moody reads it on her face. "They'd be a big get for us," he repeats with more emphasis. "The flip side of that is that they'd also be a big get for the other side, and we don't want to see that happen. If you see any indication of that—well, we'd need to know."
"They'd never get in bed with the state." Somehow, she knows it in her very bones. "I mean—for god's sake, Moody, they're up to illegal activities themselves. Why would they—"
"You think the state wouldn't sanction that if it meant getting their cut and their intel?"
They would. They absolutely would, and—
Disaster. Disaster beyond disaster. Still—
James would never. She might not know him at all, but she knows that inherently.
"Just let me know if I should be concerned," Moody presses. "That's all I'm asking. It's really nothing, Evans. Especially compared to other things you've done for us. It's nothing."
Then why does it feel like everything?
"I'm not promising anything," she tells him, but he still grins as if she capitulates a large prize into his grasp. "I don't even know if I'll see them again. Helena mentioned it, but I don't—"
"Atta girl."
She leaves not long after, and even stepping briefly out into the cold night leaves her soaked to the bone with chill. Only later, when sleep once again fails her, will she mull over Moody's brief showing of praise spoken in those two simple words.
Never once, not in all the years she'd had at State Establishment 7, had a professor ever truly acknowledged her actions or work or life as anything within the realm of positive. Although she'd never told him as much, she's always suspected that Moody must know that. And if he knows it—
How often does he, or will he, weaponize it for the greater good?