CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE
It had been a little over a week and a half, and finally the first day of September had arrived. Jane boarded the train with her friends, finding a compartment and heaving her suitcase onto the luggage rack. It wasn't long after they had all settled into their seats that Lily joined them. It was the first time since Diagon Alley that they had all been together, and while they all chatted as though it never happened, it was in the back of all of their minds as it had been every day since the attack.
At first glance, they all seemed perfectly fine. However, if one were to look closely, they would notice that Remus seemed paler than usual even though the full moon wasn't due for weeks. They'd notice how Peter kept subconsciously glancing out the train window and at the compartment door as though expecting something bad to happen. They would notice how Lily seemed to jump ever so slightly at loud noises or how Jane kept glancing at Sirius as though to make sure that he was still sitting beside her. Or maybe they'd notice how James' hand had yet to leave his wand or that Sirius, who was usually the loudest, seemed to have very little to say.
Once the train started to move, Remus, James, and Lily departed from their friends, having prefect and Head Student duties to attend to. The walk to the compartment at the front of the train was mostly in silence. They didn't know what to say to each other, and though James hated to think it, seeing them both again kept bringing back memories of the attack on Diagon Alley.
As they passed a compartment filled with a group of fourth years, an explosion went off, and Lily immediately hit the floor of the train, scrambling to find her wand because, suddenly, in her head, she was back outside of Fortescue's. She could practically hear the screaming, could smell the burning buildings.
James pulled open the door of the compartment so fast that the glass shook in its frame. The fourth years all looked up at him, startled. One of the kids was trying to hide something behind his back, but James grabbed the bag out of his hand. James looked into the bag, which turned out to have nothing but Filibuster Fireworks in it.
"Knock it off!" James told them, not handing the bag back.
"Who are you to say we have to?" asked one of the braver kids.
"I'm Head Boy," James said, pointing to his badge, "but more importantly, I'm James Potter," he added, slowly returning to usual, slightly smug, demeanour.
Smirking just a little bit, James closed their compartment door with the confiscated bag of fireworks still in his hand. However, when he turned to find Lily sitting on the floor of the aisle, all remnants of a smirk washed away from his face. He knelt down beside her.
"It's all right, Lily. It was just a Filibuster's," James told her, showing her the bag.
Lily took in a shaky breath and buried her face in her hands in an embarrassed way. Shaking her head, she quickly wiped at her eyes, giving away the fact that there had been tears in them.
"Of course it was fireworks," she said, slowly putting her wand back in the inside pocket of her robes. "How embarrassing," she mumbled.
James shook his head and looked down at his hand that was clutching his own wand.
"No, it's all right," he assured her. "I get it. For about five days after the attack, every loud noise was another explosion to me."
"Yeah, but it's still happening to me," Lily said in a small voice that James had never heard her use before.
"It's still happening to all of us," Remus told her.
James nodded.
"Sirius would kill me if he knew I told you this, but he still has nightmares," James said, "and Jane, I don't even think she knows she's doing it, but she does thing where if Sirius is out of her sight for more than five minutes, she's gotta go and check to make sure he's okay.
"I think it has something to do with him getting hurt, you know? You remember when we found her?" James asked.
Lily and Remus both nodded.
"All that blood that was on her, that was Sirius'. She told me that when it happened, she didn't just think that he was hurt. For those first few seconds, she thought he was dead. I think she blames herself for it."
"I hardly sleep anymore," Remus confided in them, "and my mum didn't want me to come back this year. She and Dad fought about it for days before she finally came around."
"I-I didn't tell my parents, but I think they know something's wrong," Lily said.
"You didn't tell them what happened?" Remus asked in an astonished way.
Lily chewed on her lip and shook her head.
"I knew they wouldn't want me going back to school," she explained.
"But Hogwarts is the safest place on earth," James said.
"Yeah, but they're Muggles, so they don't know that. They wouldn't understand."
Lily looked down at her hands, and she wrung them together to try to stop them from shaking. James noticed this, and he hesitantly took her hands into his.
"We're gonna be all right," he promised her.
Lily looked into his hazel eyes, and she shook her head slightly.
"How do you know? Is the Great James Potter also clairvoyant?" she asked in a slightly sarcastic way.
James grinned just a little.
"I might be," he teased, earning a small smile from Lily. "And I predict that everything's going to be okay. Now, we're going to get up and walk to that prefect's compartment and whip these new recruits into shape!"
"Prongs," Remus said, shaking his head.
"Yeah?" James asked, helping Lily to her feet.
"You're a new recruit," Remus pointed out.
James waved it off.
"Eh, I'm Head Boy. It doesn't count."
Meanwhile, Peter, Sirius, and Jane sat quietly in their compartment. Jane had been reading Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but reading of the French Revolution wasn't something she felt up to at the moment. She had no wish to read of revolution, for she had seen a battle of her own, and Dickens' words only reminded her that she and her friends would see many more.
Jane had closed her book and sat it down in Remus' vacant seat. She sighed and ran a hand through her hair before quickly shifting her eyes over to Sirius. Sirius, who had been pretending to sleep, opened one of his eyes slightly and peeked at her curiously.
"What?" he mumbled in a tired voice.
Jane almost jumped at his voice. She shook her head quickly, looking down at her hands.
"Nothing," she said, her face turning pink; he occasionally caught her looking over at him nowadays.
Jane didn't know why she did it. She didn't know why he always had to be within her eyesight. Maybe she was still scared. Never had she come so close to losing one of her friends. But she hadn't lost him; he was sitting right beside her. So, why on earth was she still afraid he'd disappear?
Jane furrowed her brow and picked her book back up. She pretended to read it while she mentally belittled herself for being so sensitive. To her, everyone else seemed to be handling everything just fine. And here she was, still slightly skittish and anxious, having to make sure her friends were still around her, and for what? For fear of being all alone, having no one to come to her rescue? It was the only reasonable explanation she could fathom, and it was pathetic.
Of course, Jane hardly bothered to wonder why it was always Sirius she was looking for nowadays. Maybe it was because of what happened to him at Diagon Alley, or maybe it was something else, but Jane didn't like thinking about it because always confused her. All she knew was that everyone else seemed to be managing okay while she couldn't even read a book without picturing what had happened at Diagon Alley inside her head. And it made her feel weak, and she was angry with herself for it.
Sirius continued to look at her. He could tell she wasn't really reading. Whenever Jane read a book, she always kept her right index finger under the next page as though she couldn't wait to turn it. She wasn't doing that now; plus, she seemed to be clutching the book way too tightly as though she were getting ready to rip it in half.
He wanted to ask what was wrong, but he could already hear the words, "Nothing. I'm fine," coming from her lips. Besides, he had a pretty good guess as to what she was thinking about. The attack was still on all of their minds; he was sure of it. And for a moment, he felt compelled to move closer to her, to put his arm around her as though he could protect her from her own mind. However, he stayed put because he knew he couldn't stop the thoughts and memories from swirling around inside her head—hell, he couldn't even stop his own thoughts from wearing him down on the inside.
Still, he wanted to comfort her; she was his friend after all—maybe something more. No. She was definitely something more. By this point, his feelings for her had grown so much that he couldn't deny it to himself anymore. He thought about her a lot. Not to mention that before the attack, she had been popping up in his dreams in ways that would give James a heart attack. Sirius much preferred those dreams to the nightmares that still plagued him.
Sirius had only told James about the nightmares, and that was because, at the beginning, James had had nightmares too. The two of them would stay up for hours, playing Exploding Snap or taking the bike out for a spin. If Jane ever had nightmares after the attack, she never said. Sirius supposed she knew how to deal with nightmares by now. She'd had her fair share of them after her mother had died.
It was now Jane's turn to catch Sirius looking at her as she moved her eyes from her book back towards him.
"What?" she asked, just as he had done to her.
"Nothing," he said, but instead of looking away as she had, he just shrugged and continued to stare at her.
Once again, Jane felt her face heat up as she looked back at the book. Sirius smirked ever so slightly as her cheeks flushed pink. Peter looked between the two of them, one of his eyebrows raised just a bit.
"I can't believe we're in our last year," Jane said, staring at the crackling fire from her place on the couch in the Gryffindor common room.
"I know," James said. "Six years ago, on this very day, we all met each other for the first time. Can you believe that?"
"I feel like I've known you guys for a lifetime," Jane said.
"A lot has changed since then, hasn't it?" Remus added.
The rest of the friends nodded their heads in unison. A lot had changed. They weren't the same little, bright-eyed kids that they had been when they'd first set foot inside Hogwarts, waiting nervously to be sorted. For Jane, the little girl that had just found out that she was a witch seemed like a different person—a stranger even. Jane wasn't sure she'd recognise her eleven-year-old self if she was standing in front of her. And Jane wondered if she were standing in front of herself at that age, would she be happy or disappointed at who she was now.
"What are we supposed to do? After school's over and with this-this war going on?" Peter asked.
It was a good question. Should they really be worried about the normal things-finding jobs, starting their own lives—or should they be more concerned about fighting in this war? It wasn't fair. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and now it seemed as though most of it was going to be filled with darkness.
Jane pulled her knees to her chest and leaned slightly into Sirius who was sitting beside her. A small smile tugged at the corners of Sirius' lips until he saw the blank expression on Jane's face.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
Jane sighed, closing her eyes for a moment before opening them again and staring back into the fireplace, the reflection of the flames flickering in her eyes making her grey eyes seem as though they were orange and yellow.
"I'm not ready for a war," she whispered.
No one said anything for a while. They were all silently agreeing with Jane. None of them were ready for a war. Hell, they were still only kids, and what were a bunch of kids going to do against Voldemort and his followers that were growing in number every day? How were they supposed to try and light up this ever darkening world? They weren't warriors or soldiers or guardians of anything. They were just teenagers being thrust into a war that was far too big for them.