CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR
All was peaceful the next morning. Light slowly filtered in through the bedroom windows as the sun rose until it finally reached Jane's closed eyes. The light, along with the happy chirps of the birds and the noisy hustle and bustle of the street outside made Jane roll over and bury her face into her pillow. She didn't want to wake up just yet. She had been having a wonderful dream; though, she couldn't really remember it or what had made it so great in the first place. Of course, that was all the more incentive to fall back asleep, and for a while she did.
Sirius had woken about twenty minutes before all of this. He watched with a silly smile on his face as Jane snuggled her face into her pillow to escape the light and noise of the conscious world. She had managed to fall asleep on his side (though she'd claim it was hers) of the bed. Of course, he hadn't been worried about any of that the night before, and quite honestly, he didn't care what side of the bed he got to sleep on as long as Jane was sleeping beside him.
Her dark hair was all tangled and in a mess around her. A few strands were lying on her face, directly under her nose, and they fluttered up and away and back down again every time Jane inhaled and exhaled. Sirius let out a small laugh when she rubbed her nose sleepily, effectively pushing the tickling hairs away from her face.
Sirius leaned down and pressed a light kiss to the top of Jane's head. She let out a small sigh before yawning and stretching, managing to open her eyes. She couldn't stop herself from smiling like a little schoolgirl when she saw him beside her. Sirius raised an amused brow at this, and his own smile turned into the arrogant smirk that usually graced his handsome face. Seeing this, along with the memories of the night prior flooding her mind, Jane actually blushed despite herself, and she tried to hide her face in her pillow so that Sirius wouldn't see. But of course, he did.
"Don't be all shy now, love," he teased as he wrapped an arm around her, pulling her closer to him, and nuzzling his face into her hair before adding in a much lower voice, "You weren't this shy last night."
"Oh, shut up," Jane mumbled into her pillow.
"What?" Sirius teased. "I'm sorry; I couldn't hear you. Did you say, 'Thank you, Sirius, for the best night of my life?'"
Jane rolled her eyes before springing into action, all previous shyness and giddiness abandoned. Within a blink of an eye, she was on top of Sirius. He just grinned up at her. She shook her head at him but smiled nonetheless.
"Must you ruin every moment?" she asked playfully.
"On the contrary, I make them better. Case in point…"
Sirius didn't finish his sentence. Instead, he reached up and brought Jane's smiling lips down to his. His other hand slowly caressed her side as he deepened the kiss, and she sighed in a content way. He pulled away, grinning.
"See? Better."
Jane refrained from rolling her eyes at him.
"You know what I think?" she said, a smile creeping onto her face. "That you should brush your teeth because your morning breath is horrible."
Jane quickly kissed the tip of his nose before jumping out of the bed.
"Oh, like yours is any better," Sirius retorted, jumping up after her and catching her around the waist before she could reach the bathroom.
"Let me go," she said, laughter in her voice as she tried to pried his strong arms off of her.
"Well, that's not what you were saying last night," he said in a low voice, his lips dangerously close to her ear, effectively washing the playfulness of the morning away and replacing it with something else entirely, sending chills up Jane's spine.
Sirius moved to brush some of Jane's hair off of her neck before placing a kiss there, sucking lightly as he pulled back.
"As I recall, you were practically begging for me," he whispered before his lips returned to her neck.
Jane relaxed into him, but before either of them could make another move, an annoying tapping noise intruded on their fun.
Jane sighed and pulled away from Sirius, who only made an annoyed grunt before falling back onto the bed.
"Isn't the point of having our own place to get some peace?" he complained. "It's only our second day here!"
Jane rolled her eyes at him as she pulled one of his shirts over her head. Sirius rolled over and watched her walk out of the room, a smirk returning to his face.
"Now, that is a lovely view," he said.
Jane rolled her eyes once more as she made her way towards the tapping sound that was coming from one of the kitchen windows. A small owl was tapping its beak against the glass impatiently, and Jane opened the window to take the envelope that was tied to its foot before it flew away.
The envelope was made of thick parchment and it was address to both Jane and Sirius in fancy blue lettering that shone in the light.
"We've got mail," Jane called to Sirius as she turned the envelope over in her hands to open it.
Jane pulled out the letter and something else fell out of the envelope and landed on the floor. She reached down to pick up two gold coins. At first glance, she thought they were Galleons, but upon closer inspection, she noted that a phoenix was embossed into one side of the coins. Curling around the bird in a circular way were words that read: MAGVS BIBLIOTHECA SOCIETATIS NVMISMATICAE.
Jane finally turned her attention to the letter in her other hand.
To Miss Jane E. Hensworth & Mr. Sirius O. Black, III,
Thank you for joining the Wizarding Numismatic Society! The WNS would like to personally welcome the both of you into our community with your very own WNS collectible coins.
The WNS is one of the wizarding world's foremost societies for numismatics. We hold regular meetings at the Marksville Institute of Cultural Wizarding History in London. Attached to this letter, you will find this month's lecture programme. All scholarly lectures are open to WNS members absolutely free of charge.
In addition, the society's journal, The Wizarding Numismatic Chronicle, is published annually. It covers a wide variety of topics and is sent to every WNS member via owl post at the beginning of each year. We hope that you will find it informative and enjoyable.
Please contact our committee chair directly if you are interested in joining a WNS committee. (NOTE: Please allow 1 to 2 weeks for a reply as our committee chair is very busy)
Again, thank you for your interest and welcome to your new Wizarding Numismatic Society membership!
Sincerely,
Katherine Y. Flynn, co-chair
WNS Membership Committee
Jane stared at the letter and programme in confusion. She and Sirius never joined this society. She had no interest in studying dusty old coins. But the phoenix on the coins was too coincidental for it to be ignored.
"Oh, who is sending us money?" Sirius asked after he'd made his way into the kitchen, now dressed in his sweatpants.
He grabbed the gold coins from Jane's hand.
"It's not money," she said, handing him the letter.
Sirius' eyes skimmed over the letter quickly.
"Who in their right mind would join a numismatic society?" he asked, handing the letter back to Jane.
"Dumbledore," Jane said suddenly, and Sirius rolled his eyes.
"It was a rhetorical question, Janie. Besides, Dumbledore may be brilliant, but I don't think I'd say he's in his right mind."
"No, I mean, he's listed as a one of the lecturers on the programme," Jane said, handing the programme out for Sirius to take.
"Remember what Dumbledore said at the end of term," she continued as Sirius looked at the programme and then to the coins still in his hand, "about more and more letters being intercepted by not only the Ministry, but the people working for You-Know-Who as well?"
Sirius smiled as he twirled one of the coins between his fingers before flipping it into the air and catching it.
"It's a message," he said. "It's got to be. It's too random and ridiculous not to be."
"The only problem is, I don't understand it," Jane said. "I knew letters from the Order were going to be cryptic, but I didn't think—"
"Shush, I'm thinking," Sirius said.
Jane frowned at him, but stopped talking nonetheless, going back to studying the letter and trying to figure it out. Sirius turned one of the coins over in his hands. On the one side, there was a phoenix, but on the other, there was a dagger with its tip pointed downwards into a palm of a hand.
"Brilliant," Sirius muttered to himself. "Insanely complicated spell-work, but bloody brilliant."
"What's brilliant?" Jane asked.
Sirius tossed her one of the coins.
"Look at it. What do you see?" he said.
Jane sighed and turned the coin over in her hands. She shrugged.
"A phoenix, some Latin words, a hand and a dagger," she listed off. "Magus bibliotheca societatis numismaticae obviously means the Wizarding Numismatic Society. Other than that, it's just a coin."
"Try again."
"Can't you just tell me?"
"Now, what would be the fun in that?"
Jane rolled her eyes and looked back down at the coin, thinking hard. She understood the phoenix. It was an obvious "Hey, look at me!" symbol to get their attention; after all, they were the Order of the Phoenix. She turned the coin over to the side with the hand and the dagger. Her mind suddenly connected the dots as she looked at her own palm.
"It's not the letter; it's the coin. It's an instruction; not a message," she said.
Sirius grinned at her before turning to grab one of their kitchen knives out of a drawer. Jane watched as he quickly cut his palm before clenching his coin in the injured hand. He held the knife out to Jane, and she was a bit hesitant to take it at first.
"Come on, Janie. Just a small cut. It doesn't hurt that bad. I promise."
Jane didn't have the heart to tell him that that wasn't why she was scared. She could handle a little cut on her hand; she had gotten more bloodied up than that in a Quidditch match before. She was scared because she still wasn't sure how ready she was for any of this. It was only the first of July; she had thought that maybe they'd have just a little longer before all of this started.
However, Jane buried her feelings on the subject and took the knife, following Sirius' example and making a small incision on her palm before closing her hand around the coin. After a few seconds of waiting, the coin in Jane's hand grew increasingly warm. She winced as the temperature kept rising, feeling sure that if the coin got any hotter, her hand would be scalded. But just as quickly as the thought entered her mind, the heat was gone. Jane and Sirius opened their hands to inspect their coins.
Jane noticed that the cut on her hand had healed and there was no sign of blood on her hand or the golden coin. She looked at the coin and noted that the words on it had changed. Sirius ran his thumb over his own coin.
"Ex cinere: resurgemus," he read aloud.
"What does that mean?" Jane asked.
"From the ashes, we shall rise."
The rest of the message wasn't too hard to decode. They had figured out enough to know that the place and time would coincide with Dumbledore's "lecture" on Wizarding Currency through the Ages. Sirius had teased Jane for not understanding that while reading the programme list the first time, saying that even "someone as dense as Peter" would've understood it.
"You shouldn't say things like that," Jane had told him, opting not to tell him that she might've figured it out sooner if her brain hadn't been rattled at the sudden correspondence from the Order so soon after their graduation; they hadn't even received their N.E.W.T. results yet.
As the day progressed, Jane noticed that all Sirius wanted to do was talk about their first upcoming Order meeting while all she wanted to do was forget about it. She was worried about what they were going to ask of her, of what they were going to ask of her friends. Sirius wanted a job that was important and exciting. Jane hoped that their jobs would be boring and menial, something more on the safe side. Of course, she didn't tell Sirius any of this for fear of how it would sound. She already knew she was a coward; she didn't need him knowing it as well.
As the day passed, Jane realised that she desperately wanted someone to talk to about her feelings, something that was highly unusual for her in these types of situations. She found herself laughing bitterly at the irony of it all. The one time in her life that she wanted to open up to someone about how she was feeling and she couldn't. She didn't want to tell her friends because either they would think she was a coward or they were all secretly freaking out about it as well. She couldn't talk to the Potters about it because they had all agreed not to tell James' parents about the Order. She couldn't tell her father because she had just gotten him back, and this seemed too heavy a subject to just write down in one of her letters to him; plus, she was scared that the shock of his only daughter putting herself in danger by joining a secret society to undermine the dark forces of the wizarding world just might cause him to relapse. So she decided to keep her mouth shut and responded to all of Sirius' excited ramblings with: "I'm sure they'll let us know at the meeting," or "I suppose we'll find out in a week."
The next day, Jane finally got a break from all of Sirius' Order talk because it was Sunday. And Sundays, as they had both promised before they left, meant having lunch at the Potters'. Jane had even made some treacle tart, though it was nowhere near as good as her father's used to be. She silently wondered if he could still make it the same way, and if he could, if he'd be willing to teach her someday.
Jane was happy to be back at the Potters'. It had only been a couple of days since she and Sirius had finally settled in their apartment, but it had been long enough for her to miss the place that she had called home for well over a year now. As she and Sirius made their way towards the large house, Jane smiled warmly at Mr. Potter, who'd made his way out to greet them at the door. As they walked in the house, Jane could hear Mrs. Potter's voice coming from the dining room as she complained about James not setting the table like she had asked him to, causing Jane to smile.
However, as she made her way into the dining room, her smile fell. She had known Mrs. Potter was looking a bit peaky over the last few weeks she'd spent with them, but now, she looked much frailer than she had when they left. What worried Jane most was the sling in which her left arm was residing. Jane sat the treacle tart on the table and waved her wand at the napkins and dinnerware so that they began to set themselves in their correct places on the table.
Mrs. Potter smiled at her.
"And that's why you're my favourite," she teased.
"I heard that!" James called from some other room in the house, and his mother laughed.
"What happened to your arm?" Jane asked.
Mrs. Potter shook her head slightly.
"Oh, don't worry yourself about it, darling. It's going to be just fine in a few days."
Jane wanted to point out that that wasn't an actual answer, but Mrs. Potter had already wrapped her in a hug with her good arm and started talking about how she was going to miss Jane helping her around the house because James always seemed to conveniently forget the things she'd ask him to do.
As lunch progressed, Jane had a difficult time trying to pay attention to Mr. Potter talk about how he was planning on retiring soon. She was too distracted by the sling and by the fact that she had now noticed the same faint, vein-like white lines that she had noticed back at Christmas. Except now, they weren't just on Mrs. Potter's shoulder, they were spreading up to the side of her neck. Jane wondered just how long they had been there, how long they'd been spreading. She tried to remember if she'd seen them at all after the time at Christmas, but now that Jane thought about it, Mrs. Potter always seemed to wear long sleeved shirts these days.
After lunch, Jane had planned to ask Mr. Potter about it since she figured she wasn't going to get an answer from Mrs. Potter herself. After the table was cleared, Mrs. Potter excused herself to the bathroom, James pulled Sirius to the side to talk about something (no doubt in Jane's mind that that "something" was the Order), and Jane quietly followed Mr. Potter into the sitting room. Before she could open her mouth, Mr. Potter turned to her and pulled something from his pocket.
"Ah, Jane, good. Sirius dropped this outside; I'll just give it to you," he said.
Jane's face didn't even have time to form a curious expression before Mr. Potter was tossing a gold coin towards her. Her eyes widened and she scrambled to catch it. The coin from the Order? Why had he brought it here? What had he been thinking?
Jane immediately opened her hand to inspect the coin, and she let out a small sigh of relief in discovering that it wasn't the Order coin at all but just a Galleon. She let out a laugh and shook her head at her paranoia as she put the coin in her pocket.
"Thanks, I'll make sure to give it back to him."
Mr. Potter studied her reaction carefully, and he frowned.
"That's quite the look of relief on your face," he noted aloud. "Perhaps you were afraid that I had found something else."
Jane froze. She could hear the suspicion in his tone.
"Something like what?" Jane asked, trying her best to sound utterly confused as to what he was talking about.
"Something like the gold coin I saw in James' room yesterday," he said without hesitation. "Tell me, Jane, my Latin's a bit rusty, what does ex cinere: resurgemus mean?"
Jane's blood turned to ice in her veins. How had she managed to get herself into a situation like this? Omitting certain truths when it came to the Potters, she didn't like it, but it was doable. However, now she was supposed to lie, and she could already feel the guilt bubbling up inside of her.
"I don't know," she lied quietly, "I was never taught much Latin."
Mr. Potter sighed as he pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose before sitting down on the arm of one of the armchairs in the room.
He didn't believe her.
"Jane, do you know what the Order of the Phoenix is?"
"No," she lied again, answering far too quickly and mentally kicking herself for it. "What is it?" she asked after a pause, thinking it might make her sound less guilty.
"As of now, it's only a rumour," he told her, "only mentioned in whispers around the Ministry since there is no concrete proof of its existence. A group of well-meaning people who think that they should get involved as far as the Ministry's hunt for and fight against Riddle goes."
Jane winced as though Mr. Potter had said "Voldemort." She had never heard someone call him by his real name, and it seemed cringe-worthy and far too human a name for You-Know-Who.
"A group of organized vigilantes who think that they can do the Aurors' jobs better than them," Mr. Potter continued.
Jane was quiet for a moment before finally responding.
"Is it such a bad thing that people want to help, want to fight?" she asked because she was a bit shocked by the hostility in his voice as he talked about the Order.
"There are right and wrong ways to go about helping with things. Most at the Ministry believe that, if such a group does exist, that they're going to end up getting themselves and possibly others killed. They just aren't trained for this kind of thing. And the world is getting dangerous enough without people turning themselves into walking targets."
Jane listened to him and she remembered how she had felt after Sadie Selwyn and Vikram Patil had left Dumbledore's office that day. She remembered how she had kind of agreed with them. She remembered how she wanted to get out of her chair and follow them out the door. But she had not, and here she was having to lie to Mr. Potter about all of this, having to listen to him tell her what was going to happen to herself and possibly the whole Order. But she had already known that, hadn't she? Hadn't she settled on the fact that she might end up in an early grave because of this? She had made up her mind when she signed the paper and taken the oath. She may have been scared to death, but she wasn't going to stay idle while the people that she loved were off fighting. She was going to fight whether it killed her or not.
Jane squared her shoulders and stood a little straighter.
"Maybe sometimes it's better to fight and die rather than watch the world burn around you," she replied.
Mr. Potter sighed again.
"Maybe," he half-heartedly agreed. "But for the people left behind, the world gets even darker."
Jane let his words sink.
"Why are you telling me all of this?" she asked, going back to pretending as though he were talking nonsense, even though she knew he'd probably figured it out long before he'd even started talking to her.
"Because out of the three of you, you were always the less reckless. You were always easier to talk some sense into," Mr. Potter said. "Though you did have a proclivity for letting the boys talk you into things you knew you shouldn't be doing," he added thoughtfully.
"I'm sorry, but I still don't understand," Jane lied again.
Mr. Potter looked at her, and Jane saw the worry in his eyes.
"Of course not," he said, standing from the chair. "Just the ramblings of an old man."
Jane nodded, vaguely wondering if that meant he was letting the topic go. She had long forgotten about Mrs. Potter's arm and wanted to go find James and Sirius as quickly as possible. After a moment of silence, Jane slowly made her way to the door.
"Jane, please do me one favour."
Jane stopped and looked back at Mr. Potter, waiting for him to speak.
"Make sure you all look after each other," he said, "and take care with who you place your trust in these days. The world is getting worse, and not everybody who is lining up to fight is fighting for the right side."
Jane opened her mouth to say something, but she wasn't sure what she was supposed to say. So she swallowed the small lump that was forming in her throat and just settled for nodding her head before leaving to find James and Sirius.