A/N: Since the last chapter was a bit short, I thought I'd update early. As always, thanks so much for the reviews! I was asked if I have a Tumblr, and I don't currently, but let me know if that's something anyone would be interested in. (And, Nina, so many thanks for putting this up on the JilyArchive Tumblr! You're a real gem.)
Chapter Eight
When James came to, he knew immediately from the smell of antiseptic potion that he lay in the Hospital Wing. He heard hushed voices near his elbow, and the second he opened his eyes, someone hooked his repaired and cleaned glasses over his ears.
That person immediately hugged him, so tightly that James felt his battered body protest, and he knew by instinct, rather than sight, that the arms belonged to Sirius. He was shaking.
"Mate, I'm okay," James told him, even though he didn't yet know if it was true, his mind still clouded. He reached up to hug Sirius back, but found his left arm strapped to his body in a tightly-bound sling. His arm now hurt considerably less as he tried to move, and he knew that Madam Pomphrey had healed it, although his skin still pinched and his bones felt somehow tender, a strange sensation he had never experienced before. It hit him, then, that Sirius was okay, and he felt, for a moment, that he might laugh with relief, before he asked sharply, "Where's Remus?"
"Just here," Remus' voice came, and he felt a hand pat his leg.
"Black, off my patient, please!" As Sirius released him, James got his first look around the Hospital Wing, and he took in several facts at once.
Night had fallen outside the windows, and the sky looked so velvety and black that he knew at once that the hour was very, very late.
Sirius and Remus stood nearby, their faces identical masks of pale worry. The expression fit Remus, but he couldn't recall the last time he'd seen Sirius look like that.
Lily lay on the hospital bed next to him, prone under the covers, her eyes closed. Hestia sat on the edge of her bed, brushing through her long hair, which looked freshly-washed. She made sure to avoid the thick white bandage that wrapped around Lily's forehead. Her face, even as she smiled weakly at James, looked puffy from crying.
"Is she—"
"Evans is fine," Madam Pomphrey assured him, but without any of the gentle bedside manner that one expect from a nurse. James knew, from a great many hospital visits, that it was just her way. She leaned over him, smelling strongly of the antiseptic that permeated the cavernous room, and shined the tip of her lighted wand into both of his eyes. "You had a nasty break to that arm, Potter, and a worse knock to your head. But your nose was healed nicely."
"Evans did that, and she tried to fix the rest too, at least enough to get me here," he explained as she unwound his sling and began to flex his arm and fingers, watching his face closely for pain. The stretching felt tingly, a bit unpleasant, but didn't hurt.
"Hmmm." She pursed her lips, but seemed almost pleased.
"Is she—asleep?"
"Stunned," Madam Pomphrey answered, and for a moment, her brisk visage faltered, revealing just the ghost of worry. "I thought it best to leave her that way." She tucked James' arm back in his sling, apparently satisfied with the mend.
"Madam Pomphrey had to remove an awful lot of glass from Lily," Remus explained quietly when he saw James' forehead crease in confusion.
James felt, again, a bit sick.
Madam Pomphrey glanced at her timepiece and moved to Lily's side. "I should wake her now, though. The headmaster will arrive soon." She looked to Hestia, her eyes beady and intense in the torchlight. "You'll help me hold her, if she panics? She might not know where she is, might think she's still there." She didn't need to specify where. Hestia looked rather sick herself, but nodded resolutely. "She might scream," Madam Pomphrey cautioned further, and then pressed the tip of her wand to Lily's temple. "Rennervate."
Lily didn't scream. She saw Hestia the moment she opened her eyes, and she reached for her instantly with a short, watery gasp. Hestia fell to her immediately, hugging her as tightly as Sirius had hugged James, only Lily, her arms uninjured, could grasp her back. "Jones—" Madam Pomphrey began, in the same voice she had used to scold Sirius and James apart, but Hestia turned her head towards the nurse, and gave her a look the Marauders couldn't see. Whatever crossed her face was fierce enough to make Madam Pomphrey sigh, and she threw her hands in the air, but said nothing more.
At James' side, he heard Sirius scoff in disbelief, an emotion James shared. He'd never seen the nurse deterred before.
"You're okay, you're okay." Lily's voice had the same rough quality that James had heard in his own; her throat sounded painfully raw. She spoke the words not out of comfort, as she had to soothe James in the Three Broomsticks, but in relieved wonder as Hestia pulled back enough, beaming through fresh tears, to kiss each of her cheeks twice. "The whole time I kept thinking—oh, Hessie, your hair!"
James noticed, for the first time, that Hestia's glossy black hair now lie cropped above her shoulders, when it had started the day in a ponytail that swung to mid-back.
Hestia reached a hand to touch it. "Oh, it's nothing," she insisted, and Madam Pomphrey took the opportunity to push in between them and began to unwind the thick bandage around Lily's head. "It just got a bit singed. Madam Pomphrey fixed me in a trice." But she had bandages around each palm, as well, James now saw, and a larger one that covered the right side of her neck, revealing injuries more grievous than she let on.
James looked to his friends, then, with a more critical eye. Both had scorch marks on their clothing, and the shoulder of Sirius' jumper looked as if he had mended it rather poorly, but they otherwise looked entirely fine, if still a bit drawn and pale. "Jones got the worst of it," Sirius explained quietly, too quietly for the women clustered at Lily's bed to hear, before James even had to ask. "Too near a shelf that suddenly combusted, and she went up with it a bit. But we're okay, Prongs." He pulled a nearby chair closer to James' bed, and rested a hand on his shoulder, as if he still needed some solid assurance that his friend survived. "You and Evans scared the shit out of us, though."
"—my clothes?" James caught the tail-end of Lily's question, and turned to see Madam Pomphrey shoo Hestia off the hospital bed so she could pull back the covers. Lily wore a hospital gown, and James realized suddenly that he did too.
"Well, I had to remove them, didn't I?" Madam Pomphrey frowned at the thick bandages that wrapped Lily's calf, the bulk of which almost doubled her leg in size. Speckles of fresh, bright blood had soaked through the wrappings, and she began to unwind them, her movements practiced and sure. "I could hardly heal you otherwise—you had so much glass down your right side that it took me the better part of an hour to remove it all, even with magic, and I had to take some of the smaller pieces out manually." When she removed the last layer of bandages, Lily's leg looked bad enough that Hestia took an unconscious step away from her. The shredded skin looked more like ground beef than a human limb, and exposed to the air, fresh blood began to trickle down onto the white sheets. "Jones, get me the Essence of Dittany, will you?" Madam Pomphrey asked, frowning, and Hestia immediately rushed to fetch the bottle, apparently not her first such errand.
Lily groped across her body towards the right side of her torso, clearly checking for such similar injury as she moved methodically from shoulder to hip. Madam Pomphrey shook her head.
"I got most of that to heal immediately," she said, frowning. "It's just the leg that troubles me, but it took much more damage."
"How did you stand?" James asked, and Lily's head shot towards him so quickly it looked painful. She reached a steadying hand to where Madam Pomphrey had re-bandaged her forehead, and gave him a swift, searching look, before she began to laugh weakly. "Fucking hell, Potter," she swore, but without the energy to give the words any real feeling. He felt certain that she'd never sworn in front of an authority figure, but she didn't give Madam Pomphrey so much as a glance, and the nurse's eyes remained trained on Lily's leg, as if she hadn't heard. "Your head—I don't know how you didn't black out, and I wasn't sure you'd wake up if you did."
"Let me check the rest of your side until Jones gets back," Madam Pomphrey said, and she eyed the three Marauders primly before she gave her wand a sharp flick. The white hangings all around Lily's bed closed, muffling their voices immediately.
"What happened?" James asked urgently, turning to Sirius and Remus. Remus, too, had resettled in a chair at his side, and somehow James knew, just by looking at him, that he and Sirius had sat there for hours, waiting for him to come to.
At that moment, Alice Prewett and Frank Longbottom burst through the hospital doors, with no pretense of patience or regard for the hour. The moment Frank saw James' face, he crossed the tiled floor to wring the hand of his good arm. He still looked rather grey and grim, James thought, but his relieved smile made his features seem more his own. "You gave us a good scare," he said, and over his shoulder, James noticed Dumbledore enter the Hospital Wing and silently close the door behind him.
"Is Lily—?" Alice didn't bother to finish the question, but immediately disappeared into the white hangings around Lily's bed.
Dumbledore appeared more serious and somber than James had ever seen him. He looked at James, who felt as though the headmaster somehow managed to see straight through him, into his very guts and soul, and then conjured a squashy purple armchair near the foot of his bed. "You'll forgive me for sitting, I hope," he said cordially. "It's been a long day, and I'm nowhere near young as I once was."
The curtains around Lily's bed sprang back open. Madam Pomphrey had once again begun to minister to the wound on Lily's leg, a bottle of Essence of Dittany in her hand and Hestia at her side. Neither acknowledged that the curtains had opened, or that Alice sat on the edge of Lily's bed, cradling Lily's head in her arms, her cheek pressed flush against the top of her head.
"—I'm so sorry," Alice said, clearly in the middle of something, and James heard thick tears in her voice that she wouldn't let spill down her face. "I kept telling you to let him go, that you needed help, but you wouldn't listen. I had to stun you."
"It's fine, Alice, really, I understand." Lily had begun to cry now, as she hadn't even with Hestia. She didn't master holding her tears back as Alice had, although it seemed, by the way she dashed them away quickly, almost angrily, that she had tried. "But I had to—I just laid there the whole time everything went on, watching him bleed out, and I couldn't do anything. I had to try as soon as I could."
"The Haileybury Hammers bloke?" James asked, the memory resurfacing in his mind of Lily collapsed by the man's side, trying to stem the bleeding from the stump of his missing leg. "Is he okay?" Alice and Lily both looked up, as if they hadn't noticed the curtains had retracted, and Alice released Lily to look at James quizzically. "He wore a Haileybury Hammers jersey," he clarified. Sirius patted his arm. He shared James' distaste for the Quidditch team, and understood, as probably no one else did, why James had focused on that immediately.
"I guess he did," Alice said. "I didn't notice. Yes, he's fine. As fine as can be, thanks to Lily." Lily shifted a bit under her warm look. "The Ministry found his leg near a farm in Suffolk, and Healers fixed him without issue."
"What about the other Hogwarts students? And the girl? The little girl in the Three Broomsticks?" James pressed.
Frank's face had again gone entirely grim. "The headmaster accounted for all the students this afternoon. They suffered very few injuries. As for the girl, as Alice put it…she's as fine as can be. Her mum too." He held up a hand to ward off any further questions. "Alice and I need to take statements from you all, for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement." Madam Pomphrey gave a loud tsk!, clearly emphasizing that she thought such things could wait, but finished binding Lily's leg and swept away, closing the door to her office behind her. "As you're Hogwarts students, Professor Dumbledore has asked to sit in, and we have no problem with that so long as you don't."
Dumbledore blinked benignly at them all, and no one protested his presence.
Alice stood and drew a quill and thick scroll of parchment from the pocket of her cloak. She summoned a nearby table closer, then unrolled the parchment, and blew on the tip of the quill, which looked unlike anything James had ever seen, with almost painfully white feathers and a long, tapered body. "This will record our conversation verbatim," she explained and the quill went to work, skating across the parchment. Her voice had taken on the tone of someone reciting a long-rehearsed speech. James wondered how many times they'd given this same spiel that night; they both looked exhausted. "Everything we say will become Ministry record, and is subject to review by all branches under the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, as well as the upper echelon of the Ministry cabinet. Additionally, Frank and I—and the headmaster, since he has graciously agreed—will extract memory recollections to supply to the Ministry, which are also subject to the same review. Do you have any questions?"
When no one spoke, Frank continued for her. "We'll ask that you each state your name, for the record, and then we'll start with your accounts." He gestured to Sirius and Remus with one hand, and Hestia with another.
After giving their names, Sirius and Hestia both looked to Remus for answers. The story the quill recorded came mostly from his mouth, although the other two added pieces he forgot or didn't see.
They had just moved away from the counter at Honeydukes when the explosion occurred, Remus explained, a fortunate decision, because the force of the windows shattering pulverized the glass counter as well. (He looked at Lily, there, and swallowed several times, his thoughts still clearly on her leg.) The shock knocked them all off their feet, and Hestia collided with a shelf that had burst into flames, which made the back of her jumper go up with it. (Lily reached for Hestia's hand, then, and gripped it tightly.) She had panicked and tried to use her hands to put out the fire, burning herself further in the process. Sirius and Remus had stepped in almost simultaneously, and cast Aguamenti, which put out the flames, but doing so took longer than it would have than it would have on a non-magical fire, the flames a strange purple hue.
"And then we kind of just…hid." Remus face twisted in disgust, clearly directed inwards. "We talked about going outside, trying to see what was going on, see if we could help—we could hear people screaming, and buildings exploding and all sorts of chaos—but everyone in Honeydukes just stayed put. No Death Eaters came in, but we saw them moving outside through the blown-out windows."
"There's no shame in that, Mr. Lupin," Dumbledore said, his voice quiet but firm in a way that made his statement seem unarguable. "Fully-trained witches and wizards reacted just the same way you did."
"It's protocol, really," Frank told him. "The Department encourages civilians to wait, to let the Ministry arrive and take care of things. They typically disapprove any sort of vigilante justice." It was impossible to tell, from his tone or face, just what he thought of that, but something about the way he looked made James assume he hid his feelings by design.
"If we suspect we know someone, someone we saw with the Death Eaters, do we tell you?" Sirius asked. His eyes had gone rather strangely bright. "Or, since it's unprovable, would that just create…more madness and suspicion?"
"Why?" Alice asked intently.
Before Sirius could reply, Dumbledore caught his eye. James wasn't sure how the headmaster managed to grab his attention, even, because he didn't move an inch in his seat, but James felt own gaze strangely pulled towards him too. Dumbledore looked perfectly relaxed, fingers folded calmly across his lap, but his eyes held a sort of intensity that almost hurt to look at. He shook his head at Sirius, almost imperceptibly, just a single movement to each side.
"No." Sirius shrugged, and leaned back in his chair. "I just wondered how there's any way to catch these gits, when they keep their identities so concealed. Do people tell you, if they suspect someone?"
Frank gave some line in response, something that sounded ripped from a brochure on how to deflect troubling questions aimed at the Ministry, and then continued on.
He and Alice asked a few questions, odd ones that puzzled James, and seemingly stumped Hestia, Remus, and Sirius as well. Could they see the sun from inside Honeydukes? Could they smell or taste anything in the air, anything besides smoke? What had happened to the Christmas light displays within Honeydukes' windows when the glass had shattered?
Finally, Frank and Alice seemed satisfied, if not in an entirely bleak manner. And then they turned to Lily and James, the moment he had dreaded the entire time he listened to the others' tale with horrified fascination.
"I'll tell you," he offered immediately, before Frank had even finished his prompting question, and he hoped he sounded as firm as Dumbledore had when he had spoken to Remus moments before. "You've done enough," he told Lily, and he tried to smile at her, although he knew he failed. "But I cracked my head pretty good, so correct me if I'm wrong on anything. I trust your memory more than mine." She mouthed her thanks, her lips forming the words that her throat didn't seem to want to supply.
He launched into the story, and found that his recollection matched Lily's almost entirely. She corrected him on a few minor timeline details (for one, "The table exploded before the Death Eater ripped open that poor woman's arm," she reminded him colorlessly, as though it hardly mattered, and he realized she was right), but otherwise only interjected to add something that she felt he'd overlooked, or something she'd seen from her slightly different vantage point. He got through Louisa Mullins's murder remarkably well, by his own standards, although not entirely unaffected. Sirius' hand had gone back to his shoulder, the same shoulder Lily had gripped on the floor in the Three Broomsticks, as if to keep James anchored in the present moment, which had helped. James only hesitated for the first time when he got to Lily's insistence that she could have stunned the Death Eater, unsure how much she wanted him to say, but she waved him on, looking numb.
"James was right," Frank interrupted sharply once James explained her intent and his own reasoning against the move. It was the first time either he or Alice had interjected during his monologue, and it made James jump. "You might have hit him, Lily, but they would have swarmed you and you were injured. Do you know how many more were outside?"
"At least two," she replied, although she clearly knew he meant the question rhetorically. "They came in to join him." Still, she didn't attempt to sass him further.
James' voice broke several times as he tried to explain the torture they'd witnessed in the aftermath of Louisa Mullins's death, though, towards the end, he faltered more out of frustration than anything else. No matter how carefully he mulled it over in his mind, no matter what words he selected, he couldn't conjure to life the absolute horror of those timeless moments, and the things he'd felt, the things he'd heard, the things he'd seen. And it felt so necessary to do so, necessary to explain it all correctly in order to give some sense of justice to what others had suffered, when he had suffered so mildly in comparison. But his words still fell flat, short, to his own ears.
"—and Evans took the Disillusionment Charms off of us and patched me up—bound my arm, healed my head a bit, fixed my nose. Then she got up and went over to that Haileybury Hammers bloke, and the next thing I knew, Frank was there, and I woke up here." James realized, after he ended, that he hadn't needed just the right words to draw forth the terror of the situation. He had hit his mark. Hestia's face looked so stark white against her black hair that he thought she might faint.
"I put James under a simple sleeping charm, to make it easier to transfer him back to Hogwarts," Frank supplied for the record in his most official Ministry voice. "Lily, what else do you remember?"
"Not much," she answered dutifully, and her face had scarcely more color than Hestia's, although her voice sounded strong enough. "I went over to try to stop the blood flow from that man's leg, because that's—that's all I could seem to think about the whole time I was lying there, as everything else happened. I felt obsessed, but I think focusing on that really blocked out a lot of other things. And I heard you, Alice, when you came over and tried to get me to stop, but I…also didn't hear you, somehow."
"I stunned Lily," Alice said in a voice that matched Frank's, although James saw her right hand twitch, as if she wanted to reach out and stroke Lily's hair, and resisted only just. "She had gone…rather hysterical. Which is understandable," she added quickly, all professionalism dropped, her voice understanding and warm. "After everything, it's entirely understandable. And you saved him. We might have gotten there in time, but we had so much else to figure out, so much else to do—we might have missed him until it was too late."
"How did you stand?" Remus asked Lily quietly. He, too, looked rather bloodless. James supposed they all did. "We saw your leg." He didn't need to add anything else.
"I healed it the best I could before I got up. Healing charms, they're helpful, you know." They exchanged a smile at that, Lily and Remus, although one rather subdued. "But it didn't take."
"Madam Pomphrey thinks there might be something in the glass she pulled out of you, some remnant of whatever curse they used to blow off the front of the pub," Hestia said, and both Frank and Alice looked keen at that.
"We should go ask her," Alice said. "But first…" She launched into the same three puzzling questions they had asked Sirius, Remus, and Hestia. Could they see the sun from inside the Three Broomsticks? Could they smell or taste anything in the air, anything besides smoke? What had happened to the light displays within the Three Broomsticks' windows when the glass had shattered? James found his answers matched Lily's entirely: didn't notice, no, and no idea. Alice then noted the time and ended the interview, and as soon as the quill finished scratching, she lifted it up, blew on the tip again, and tucked it into her pocket.
"Excuse me for a moment," Dumbledore said mildly as Frank and Alice departed to knock on Madam Pomphrey's office door. He rose and stepped away from the hospital beds, back towards the hospital door, where he stood alone, facing the corner. James could hear him begin to hum faintly to himself.
"How badly are you burnt?" Lily immediately hissed, and she sat up and leaned forward to pull up the back of Hestia's shirt, unbidden.
"It's honestly fine now," Hestia said in her gentle tone, even as Lily sucked in a clearly disagreeing breath. "It looks worse than it is, because Madam Pomphrey covered me in salve anywhere even slightly red. But she said if I leave the bandages on until morning, it shouldn't leave a trace, or not much of one." She jerked her shirt down and rounded on Lily, and suddenly her eyes seemed to throw flames perhaps more dangerous than those that had burned her. "Although you should talk, with your fucking leg."
Sirius snorted softly, somewhere between amused and surprised, and James understood entirely. She looked, he assumed, the same as she had when Madam Pomphrey had tried to pull her off Lily, and, as he looked at her fierce face, he knew now why the nurse let her be.
He also couldn't remember a time Hestia had sounded anything less than entirely pleasant, or sworn at all, and Lily seemed equally as taken aback, even as she didn't appear to take the anger as directed at her. "It really doesn't hurt anymore," she said, and she moved her leg under the covers slightly, as if to make her point.
"It shouldn't, after everything she's done to it, but it still won't heal."
Alice and Frank returned, and Alice went back to Lily's side. She sat back down on her bed, and now she let herself smooth back Lily's hair, almost motherly, even though they spanned not two years apart in age. Alice had something about her, James saw in the moment, that felt entirely maternal, and although he couldn't really remember her that well during her time at Hogwarts, it came to her so naturally that he assumed she had always possessed the quality. "You did so well," she told Lily quietly, and for the first time that night, Lily's face brightened, a bit pleased.
"I assume you have questions." Dumbledore had wandered back over, and taken up his seat as if he'd never left. "Oh, just to put a bit of a gap in my memory," he explained when he caught Hestia's frankly bewildered look. She blushed scarlet when she met his eyes, clearly flustered by his attention. "I believe I have enough skill to extract what I'd like to extract and leave in what I'd like to leave, in terms of what I give to the Ministry, but one can never be too careful. You can ask what you need now, off the record." He nodded serenely at Frank, and James wondered if a similar reasoning had led him and Alice to follow up with Madam Pomphrey. "Frank, Alice, can I conjure either of you a seat?"
"I'm fine," Alice said, her hand still atop Lily's head.
"I'll sleep if I sit," Frank said, and now his personality colored his voice as the façade of an Auror dropped abruptly. He sounded overwhelmingly tired. "Sixteenth interview tonight, and this the most helpful by far. Most people don't know a thing, and were too terrified to recognize even the person next to them, let alone what happened around them. That goes twice as hard for anyone at the receiving end of those bastards' wands." He turned to Sirius, the lines of his face exhausted, but his eyes alert. "Who did you see?"
"Bellatrix Black," Sirius answered without hesitation. "My cousin. I haven't spoken to her in years—maybe two or three now—but I'd recognize her voice anywhere. I'm one hundred percent sure that I saw her from the window of Honeydukes." He moved his mouth oddly, as if he had just tasted sick. "She threw some Unforgiveables. I knew it was her because she talked the whole time, made all kind of taunts."
"And she laughed," Remus added darkly.
"That could have been her in the Three Broomsticks, the witch who came in later," James realized, and turned to look at Lily, but she had closed her eyes, although he doubted very much that she slept. "Evans, d'you think?"
She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Could be. I didn't know her well enough to say. I tried to avoid her when she was here, and she graduated, what, our second year? I don't know if I'd recognize her."
"She's Bellatrix Lestrange now," Alice said shortly. "She married Rodolphus Lestrange last month."
Sirius pulled a face. "That tosser? I'm not surprised, but—Merlin, can you imagine if they have kids? Any spawn of theirs would give You-Know-Who a run for his money."
A small smile played across Dumbledore's face. "It doesn't do well to dwell too much on what could be, Mr. Black." The smile faded, and he once again looked deadly serious. "But I must thank you for not mentioning this in the interview. I would encourage you to keep that information amongst yourselves. We think it best not to tell the Ministry too much right now, until we're certain we know where the information goes and that the people who receive it don't run back to Voldemort." He didn't explain the plural behind his explanation, but Frank and Alice seemed clearly involved, because they nodded in agreement. "And I would encourage you to say his name, all of you, and not fall prey to the fear of it created by the Daily Prophet. A name can harm much less than fear, after all."
The advice seemed ill-timed, James thought resignedly. Just when he'd never feared the man so much. "Why the questions at the end?" he asked, searching Frank's face.
"We think the Death Eaters might have hijacked the snowing charm set over Hogsmeade, and that's what made it impossible for anyone to Apparate or Disapparate and led to all that splinching," Frank answered. "We couldn't Apparate into Hogsmeade until they finally lifted the spell, and they made the choice to do so. If they hadn't, I don't know if we would have ever gotten in. It would have at least taken hours to crack."
"And if they did this—again, this is all still an assumption—altering the snowing charm might have distorted the weather enough to have given the illusion of a shift in the sun, or even double suns, at least to people on the ground in Hogsmeade," Alice put in.
"And sometimes magic that strong leaves a smell or a taste in the air. Alice thought she detected a hint of it back there." Even in his exhausted state, Frank's voice warmed with pride.
"What was it like?" Lily asked.
"Sweet," Alice answered after a long pause. "But bitter at the end, somehow. I thought I imagined it, but a few other Aurors noticed as well."
"Is there a way…" Hestia trialed off, clearly hesitant, but then tucked her shorter hair behind both ears and continued, her voice a little surer. "Do you know who cast the initial snowing enchantment? Isn't it possible that the same person cast and then altered it, when they were ready to attack? That way they'd understand the theory behind the magic, and know how to modify the spell quickly."
Alice and Frank shared a significant look, and then both turned to Dumbledore, who nodded slowly. "That would track, Ms. Jones," he said slowly, and she once again flushed scarlet at his voice. "You'll ask Alastor?" he suggested to Frank with a real note of earnest.
Frank nodded. "Of course." He checked his watch. "Actually, we should go now, take that right to him. He may have already thought of it, but in case he hasn't…and then we have to get back to interviews." He rubbed his eyes, clearly attempting to rouse himself. "They would pull this shit on Christmas Eve. That was clearly by design. The village was packed, which means hundreds of witnesses to interview, but of course no one really saw anything. It's a show of power."
"Your question about the light displays," Remus said, as Alice rose and she and Frank drew on their cloaks. "Do you think those triggered the explosions? Each shop looked torn apart in front, at least the ones we passed when we were brought back here."
"Yes, that's the general idea. Some shops were hit worse than others. We were told each shop had a different window display, so the difference in damage would make sense if triggered from there, but…" Alice opened her hands expansively. "It's all smoke. We haven't been able to grasp a thing." She hesitated by Lily, and placed a gentle hand against her injured forehead one last time.
"How many people died?" Lily asked, looking up at her.
"Eight that we've counted so far. We're still sorting it out. We won't know the total count for days."
"How many muggleborns?"
Alice didn't hesitate, her voice as bitter as James had ever heard it. "All eight. The Death Eaters seemed remarkably restrained on that account, if you consider torture retrained, which I suppose it is, comparatively. They searched out the muggleborn owners and staff again, just like Diagon Alley, and only shot to kill them."
Dumbledore stood up to lead them to the door. "I'll escort you out, Frank and Alice, and leave the rest of you to sleep. I'm sure you need it. And I have assured Frank and Alice that you will treat this information with the utmost discretion, although we agreed that we can hardly keep you from discussing the matter among yourselves." He knocked on Madam Pomphrey's office door as he passed, as if to signal to her his exit. He lingered for a moment, even after Alice and Frank gave the warmest goodbyes time and energy would allow, as if he had more to say. "Happy Christmas," he settled on finally, and left.
Madam Pomphrey bustled out moments later, before anyone could fill the silence that the headmaster and Aurors had left. She looked rather cross. "You three, out, unless you'd rather sleep here for your burns, Jones."
Hestia looked at Lily, who shook her head. "You'll sleep better in the dorm, Hessie. I'll be back in the morning."
"Oh, you think so, do you?" Madam Pomphrey harrumphed, and she ushered Sirius, Remus, and Hestia to the door with such force that even Sirius didn't protest. "Sleep!" she commanded to the two patients left in her care, and then returned to her office, closing the door smartly behind her. The torches in the room extinguished immediately.
"Evans? You alright?" James asked the moment the room went black. As his eyes adjusted to the near darkness, he could see her profile in the light of the moon filtering through a series of windows, still quite full from only a few nights prior. James recalled the free joy of running in the forests around Hogsmeade with Sirius and Remus that night, all three of them transformed, the village's lights bright in the distant. It felt like very long ago now.
Lily seemed not to know how to answer, as if she could hardly grapple with how she felt in that moment. Finally, she interpreted his question literally. "No, I'm not alright," she said, after a long enough pause that he might have thought she had fallen asleep, if he couldn't see that her eyes remained open. "Are you?"
"No," he said, and as she rolled to face him, the moonlight now came in behind her, obscuring her face. Her hair seem to float.
He followed suit, turning to face her, and found that his weight didn't irritate his injured arm as much as he thought it would, really hardly at all. He knew that the scanty moonlight gave her a far better view of his expression than it offered him of hers, but, he thought wryly, that was just as well. He could never read her anyway. "I'm sorry," he said after another long silence, one that stretched on so long he felt loathe to break it, but even more reluctant to apologize to her in the light of the next morning. "You did everything today. You kept us safe. You healed me. You healed yourself. You healed others. I just laid there like a prat."
She gave what almost sounded like a laugh, just the softest exhalation of breath. "It's fine. I don't need you to protect me, Potter."
"I know that," he said, vaguely annoyed, although at himself—or at her—or both—he couldn't say. "But that doesn't mean I don't want to." He didn't bother to correct the present tense in his statement. He still wanted to protect her, as he hadn't done earlier, even now that the immediate threat had passed.
She tucked a hand underneath her pillow. "I don't think you understand what your head looked like," she said matter-of-factly. "I didn't notice it at first, because I was so overwhelmed by your arm, and I thought that was the worst of what you got until I lifted the Disillusionment Charm. You told me I was bleeding, but—" Here her breath came in rather shakily. "I don't know if it was the chair next to you, or some part of the bar shot out towards you, but something big and heavy cracked your skull. There was blood all over the floor underneath you."
James rolled back over, groping for the nightstand, and found his wand. He tried the spells wordlessly at first, but found they didn't take, so he cast Depulso on the nightstand between them and Accio on her bed under his breath. The latter took almost all his concentration, as his head still throbbed rather persistently behind his ear, and he did his best to set all four legs of her bed down simultaneously and silently, so Madam Pomphrey wouldn't hear. He just managed.
He'd left space between their beds, a good six inches or maybe more, unsure how she'd react to even that amount of intimacy, but she didn't protest. She didn't say anything. He could see now, so much closer to her, that her eyes had stayed open, but she closed them as he reached out a hand to touch her hair.
"I've always wanted to do this," he told her as he pulled his hand along her loose waves.
She smiled against his hand, just slightly, as he brushed her cheek. "Did Madam Pomphrey wash my hair?"
"Or Jones did, I think."
"Good. I figured Alice wouldn't touch it otherwise, but I'm still glad."
"I don't think I would have minded," he told her truthfully, and she opened her eyes to look at him, seeming to search his face for if he meant it.
"You look like shit," she said after a beat, and he chuckled under his breath.
"You look lovely." And he meant that too, bandaged head and all. "Don't feel bad about my head. No, really, don't," he insisted, when she opened her mouth to presumably argue. "You didn't know. I don't think you'd just leave me to bleed out on the floor if you did, although I wouldn't blame you, after everything this year." He meant the last bit to sound light, but he didn't quite have Sirius' knack for cutting the tension, and the words fell short.
"I almost didn't go help him, the man with the splinched leg." Her words came out so quietly that he almost didn't hear them, even in the deafening silence of the still room. "Because even after I healed your head the best I could, and stopped the bleeding, I was pretty sure you were going to pass out—I still don't know how you didn't—and I thought if you did, you might die. You lost so much blood. But…I knew if I didn't help stop that man's leg from bleeding, that he would definitely die. And then I saw Frank, so I went to help, even before I could get his attention, because I knew as soon as he knew we were there that you'd be okay."
"None of that make you a bad person," he told her, because everything in her tone suggested that it did. "I would have done the same for you, or Sirius or Remus or Jones, even though I don't know her that well. We're always going to prioritize our friends in times like that, or even just people we know, over people we don't."
"I suppose." She looked at him for a moment longer, and her lips remained parted, as if she wanted to say something else, but then she rubbed her face wearily. "I'm going to sleep. 'Night, Potter." She rolled over, away from him, and now her hair tumbled across her back. "Happy Christmas."
He wanted to keep talking to her, to keep touching her hair, but he receded to his own mattress. He watched her in the moonlight, for how long her didn't know, until he finally dropped off to sleep. In that time, she never moved.
xxx
Madam Pomphrey woke them both up several times that night—a customary measure for head wounds, she insisted in response to James' anger—which made it the most restless sleep he had ever had. James felt like his eyes would just start to droop, and he would then wake to find Madam Pomphrey over him, wearing a long, beige nightdress with her hair in curlers, to check the reactions of his pupils to the light of her wand. He realized later that she must have immediately seen that he'd moved Lily's bed over to his, but she never commented, in the night or the morning, a move most uncharacteristic for the nurse that he knew.
Lily ended up getting her way, and they managed to leave the Hospital Wing Christmas morning, although not without a lengthy fight. Lily's final line in the sand—"Either let me go or give me a sleeping potion to knock me out"—made Madam Pomphrey come around, although James thought the progress Lily's leg had made overnight probably cinched their dismissal. The wound hadn't disappeared, as Madam Pomphrey had clearly hoped, but it had scabbed over, and new skin, a bright and shiny pink, had begun to form along the edges. As for James' head, he promised Madam Pomphrey that it hardly hurt anymore, although he found himself more relieved that he could again wordlessly cast a banishing charm—the first thing he tried in the morning—than from the lack of pain. His inability to do so the night before had worried him more than he'd let himself realize.
"The brain is fragile," Lily told him after he'd confided in her as they made their way to the common room. She seemed less concerned about his head than he would have thought, perhaps too caught up with relishing her freedom from her hospital bed, which she'd only secured after several additional promises to return throughout the day so Madam Pomphrey could monitor her healing. "You know, muggle doctors have spent centuries trying to figure out why the brain works the way it does, but there's still so many things they don't understand. And they don't even have magic to consider. I don't think I've ever seen it theorized where our ability comes from, but if it's the brain, you're lucky this didn't scramble yours further."
She sounded cheerful, determined to put the previous day behind her, at least for the moment. James didn't blame her; he felt similarly himself. He did wonder, however, if they would ever discuss how, upon waking up for the final time that morning, they'd found that Lily's hand had migrated to his bed sometime in the night, and she'd rested it on his arm. She had promptly acted like it never happened, and he had followed her lead.
Sirius, Remus, and Hestia were already awake when they entered the common room, and had presumably been for a while. They had stacked the lot of all their presents underneath the Christmas tree, and set aside a tray of breakfast, the smell of which made James' stomach rumble.
"Have you ever been to the kitchens, Lily?" Hestia asked excitedly, her first question after inquiring after her friend's health. "They're incredible!" Behind her back, Remus looked at James, a bit shamefaced that they'd taken her there, and Sirius lifted his hands in a brief motion, as if to say what else could we do?
"I took Evans once," he said before Lily could answer, and before his friends could feel too guilty.
"You whatnow?" Sirius asked, but, but by then, James had already made it halfway up the dormitory stairs. He almost expected Sirius to follow him, to demand clarification and also, probably, to demand why he hadn't heard about this sooner. But he didn't, which left James to shower in peace. Covered in what felt like a lifetime's worth of soot and grime, he could swear it was the best shower he had ever taken.
They opened their gifts together while Lily and James ate, seated around the Christmas tree in a way that reminded James rather warmly of home. Sirius nearly shouted with excitement when he opened the beater's gloves James had picked up the day before, which James had found piled neatly on his bed along with all his other Hogsmeade purchases, the bags hardly even damaged. "We have to go out today!" Sirius insisted as he pulled the gloves on, and then remembered James' sling. He frowned. "Tomorrow? When does that come off?"
Hestia opened a bulging bag of toffees and a whole stack of Teen Witch Weekly magazines, nearly two dozen, in a parcel from Marlene, which sent her and Lily into laughter. James smiled at the sound, soothed by their cheer. "Marlene makes fun of me constantly because I love it so much," Hestia explained, rifling through the copies. "It's my guilty pleasure."
"Not even Witch Weekly? But Teen Witch Weekly?" Remus asked, plucking a couple copies from her hands. "'Which Holyhead Harpy Are You? Take Our Quiz to Find Out,'" he read aloud from one cover.
"You have to take that," James told Lily, and she smiled into her toast.
"'Who is Your Perfect Quidditch Star Boyfriend? Take Our Quiz Now,'" Remus continued from the next cover.
"Oh, we're all taking that," Sirius said, grinning.
"How many of these quizzes are about Quidditch?" Remus asked, handing the magazines back to Hestia.
"Most," she admitted. "It's an easy go-to. And most everything in here is hilariously bad, but I love them. These look like back issues. I wonder how she got them?" She seemed entirely pleased.
When Lily opened her present from Hestia, she looked somehow torn between happy and sad. "You went back for it?" she asked, holding the cream-colored sweater to her cheek, the fabric so soft it seemed to slip through her fingers.
"Before we went to Honeydukes," Hestia explained, and she reached out to touch Lily's back, as if she wasn't sure how best to comfort her, or if she even needed comforting. "I told Lupin and Black about how you mooned over it for ages while we were shopping together, and they agreed I should get it. I had something else for you before I bought this, and after everything that happened, I figured I would have to go with that, but all of our things from yesterday were near our beds this morning, yours too. It took a bit to remove the smell of smoke, but Lupin helped."
Lily lowered the sweater, suddenly serious. "You must have passed Gladrags on your way back to the castle. It was hit worse, worse than Honeydukes, wasn't it?"
"How did you know?" Remus asked. His content expression, which had appeared when Hestia mentioned his help, slid off his face.
"Elazar Kincaid worked there. Marlene told me once that he was muggleborn, or at least that his mum is, and she married a muggle. His mum is friends with Marlene's mum."
James didn't know what to say, and it looked like no one else did either. He wasn't sure how to put into words how desperately glad he felt that Sirius, Remus, and Hestia had left Gladrags so quickly, before the attack, but he felt the relief—even though he knew they were safe and he sat before him—to his very core.
He also didn't want to add—although he didn't think he had to, it wasn't necessary—that they now probably knew the identity of one of the other bodies pulled out of the wreckage from yesterday.
"I love it, Hessie, so much, as much as I did yesterday," Lily assured her, and she kissed her friend's cheek several times, almost as if to bring back the typical pink hue that had suddenly vanished. "And it's…it's a nice reminder, of how the day started. Because I really did enjoy myself, before everything happened. I'd rather focus on that."
James watched and waited, waited to see if she would look at him after she said it, but she didn't. She kept her eyes trained on her friend, and she smiled so convincingly that it seemed to somehow lift the mood, just a little.
They opened gifts from their families as well. Sirius and James received Quidditch gear from James' parents: new helmets, goggles, and shin, knee, and arm guards. ("Always the same, can't show favorites," Sirius joked, but James knew that he spoke the truth.) Remus' parents sent him a trio of books on defensive magic ("How dull, but also like you," Sirius said, not without fondness), and his mum included several new shirts in the parcel. ("Mum's a muggle," he explained to Lily and Hestia. "She's been married to my dad for ages, but even now, she's really not sure she knows what wizards need.") Hestia's father and Lily's parents sent money, the latter in muggle bills that James and Sirius marveled over. ("Talk about not knowing what I need," Lily said, sharing a smile with Remus. "They have no idea." Hestia didn't comment on hers, but just tucked the money pouch out of sight.)
"You got letters too," Hestia told Lily and James once they had opened all the gifts and eaten all the breakfast. She passed Lily an ordinary muggle envelope, with Lily Evans, Hogwarts printed on the outside in blue ballpoint pen. "Dumbledore must have written to our parents last night, because we all got one this morning. Well, except…"
"Except me," Sirius said, his voice easy but a rather hard glint in his eye. "Dunno if he wrote my folks, but if he did, they'll just be sorry that the Death Eaters missed me—that is, if they're not too busy dusting the rubble off their robes. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if they joined good old Bellatrix for the fun." He took a deep breath and then smiled, his expression clear. "This came though, mate," and he said, and proffered a letter to James, addressed to both of them and already opened. He then turned his attention to Lily, to ask after the muggle envelope, which she handed him absently while she read her parents' letter, written on thin, lined yellow paper.
James read his parents' letter quickly, written in his mum's familiar tilted hand. Nothing it contained surprised him. They worried—his mum especially. They wanted to make the trip to Hogwarts to see him and Sirius—his mum especially. But Dumbledore had suggested against it, and they agreed—his dad especially, who wanted to follow the headmaster's guidance.
"'I expect you both home for Easter or I'll box both your ears, and don't tell me I won't,'" he read aloud with a grin, and Sirius chuckled. "Odds of heading home when we have to prepare for NEWTs, though?"
"Not high," Sirius agreed. "I'm going to duck for weeks around her when we get home in June. There's no way she doesn't mean it. Evans, what is this?" he asked, holding up the envelope, but she shushed him as she turned her letter over, to read the back.
"You put letters in it, muggle thing, it's called an envelope. It's got a sort of sealant on it, around where I opened it, see? You lick it and it sticks closed," she explained once she finished, and she handed him the letter as well. "Muggles use this paper instead of parchment. It's kind of like newsprint, I guess." She let him turn the paper over, curious, before she took it back, although she left him the envelope.
"You lick it?" James asked, intrigued, plucking it from Sirius' hands. "But how does it stick? I don't get it."
Lily didn't answer. "They're alright," she told Hestia, in response to her friend's quiet question. "They don't really understand, of course. I don't know how Dumbledore wrote about what happened, but they seem to think that someone set up an explosion and I just happened to be there. Which is mostly true, I guess. But they don't really get anything about Voldemort, or why it happened, so they just hope whoever did it gets caught soon. I don't know how to explain to them why that won't happen." She had shifted uncomfortably when she uttered the dark wizard's name, but she hasn't hesitated. "And your dad? How was he?" she asked in return.
Hestia shrugged. "The same," she said simply, and left it at that.
They both looked sad, in different ways that James couldn't quite pinpoint. He hesitated, wondering what to say, and wished that Remus would speak up instead, because he had always been much better at this kind of thing, this form of comforting, or that Sirius would offer a joke to break the tension.
Finally, James used his good arm to pick up Sirius' beater's gloves, which he'd only just taken off, and tossed them at him. "Odds I can fly with one arm?" he asked flippantly.
"You wouldn't," Hestia admonished in a voice that revealed that she clearly thought he would, all traces of sadness gone.
Lily sighed. "Are you thick?" she asked, but she smiled, so he had the effect he wanted.
xxx
Truthfully, James had never wanted to fly so badly, now that he knew he couldn't. He'd never broken a major bone before, not in all his years flying and all his years of mucking around with his friends. He'd suffered head injuries; broken fingers, toes, and noses; bad sprains; and too many countless magical maladies to count, but he'd gotten over those almost instantly with Madam Pomphrey's expert care. (He did wonder, now, after his experience the night before and his conversation with Lily, if he should have worried a bit more about the head injuries when they had happened.) His mind fairly itched to get outside, now that his body wouldn't allow it, and the entire situation felt maddening. But he didn't seriously consider flying, not really, and Sirius hadn't pushed it, either, past the banter they'd exchanged for the express purpose of winding up Lily and Hestia. That surprised James more than anything, and he thought, not for the first time, that yesterday seemed to have shaken Sirius in a way that nothing else in his life yet had.
They wiled away the day in the common room, playing Gobstones and taking turns at quizzing each other from Hestia's new Teen Witch Weekly magazines. Sirius seemed to find the entire thing almost as amusing as Hestia, and certainly more outwardly so, because he never stopped laughing at his results.
"Darren O'Hare?" he asked incredulously, chortling, after Remus had finished quizzing him to find his perfect Quidditch star boyfriend. "Of the Kestrels?"
"The same," Remus said, handing him the issue.
"How old was he when this came out? He retired, what, in '60?" Sirius looked to Hestia and Lily, almost accusingly. "Was he a sex symbol? Did that happen and I didn't know?"
"We're about twenty years too young to know," Lily told him. "You'd have better luck asking Madam Pomphrey. Come with me if you'd like, when I go see her next. I'm sure she'd love to tell you if he tickled her fancy." She leaned towards him, across the Gobstone circle, to read the date printed down the magazine's spine. "But he might have been sexy back then, who knows—this issue was published in '51. Where did Mar get these?"
"Owl her and ask," Sirius said, still rifling through the pages. "We're going to need more."
Christmas dinner surpassed James' expectations. Sneaking off to the kitchens for years had left him feeling as if he had experienced almost all that Hogwarts' house-elves could offer. Yet somehow, they proved him wrong. He and his friends tucked into roast turkey and duck; potatoes cooked every way and smothered with gravy; and heaping sides of Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, and brussel sprouts, with mince pies and Christmas cake for dessert. James ate so much that, by the end of the meal, he felt almost sick.
Snape seemed to feel similarly, but for different reasons. James had watched for him, of course, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Slytherin's face when he saw the dressing wrapped around Lily's leg, made obvious by her skirt, the bandage too thick for her to conceal beneath jeans. He caught the look that passed between them when their eyes met across the Great Hall. He could read Snape's expression easily enough—he looked pale and a bit green, after all, which said everything. But James couldn't get a decent angle to see Lily's reaction, not without her catching what he was up to, because she sat at his side. But he would take that physical closeness, and the way she laughed at his jokes and teased him about his own Teen Witch Weekly quiz results and let him steal bits of turkey off her plate, over the chance at trying to decipher her expression any day. After all, he reasoned, he never really succeeded at reading her. Snape got up and left the Slytherin table midway through the meal, even before dessert appeared, and Sirius caught James' eye from across the table and winked.
James felt much too full after dinner to do anything other than doze lightly while Sirius battled Hestia at chess and Remus and Lily cracked open their Arithmancy textbooks.
"On Christmas, no less…" Sirius continue to mutter, even as Hestia had almost won the match. He didn't bother to keep his voice down; if anything, his words sounded pointedly loud.
"It feels normal, and I like that," Lily told him primly, for about the twelfth time, and then resumed arguing with Remus about the correct answer to the same equation they had wrestled over for an hour, their answers different by a single digit.
Hestia ended up winning at chess, but Sirius didn't seem to mind. She acted the most gracious winner ("You would have had me in a few more moves, I swear!"), and, with her cheeks glowing from firelight and victory, she looked quite pretty, James thought. After catching the brief look that crossed Sirius' face, he knew his friend thought so too.
Lily stepped out to visit Madam Pomphrey one last time before bed. James offered to go with her, but Hestia insisted, and he tried not to feel bitterly towards her for it. He warmed considerably at her pure excitement when they returned, as she nearly crowed that Madam Pomphrey had pronounced Lily not quite healed, but improved.
Lily affected a less-impressed look. "She's still making me go to the Hospital Wing three times tomorrow, and she said 'we'll see' about the day after. So annoying—Potter nearly loses the little brains he has and he's out the door, but she pokes and prods me for days?" But James thought he detected a little relief in the look she gave Hestia, although he couldn't tell. She remained, still, so hard to read.
James hesitated, heart beginning to race, when Sirius and Remus bid the girls goodnight and Remus carefully shuffled the cards for another game of Exploding Snap. "Deal me out this hand, will you? I'll be right back." He followed Lily and Hestia across the common room quickly, and caught them right at the foot of the dormitory stairs. "Evans, will you wait a minute?" he asked, even as she placed her foot on the first step.
When she turned to look at him, he felt her eyes scan every square inch of his face, in a searching look that reminded him of the one Dumbledore had given him the night before—or, rather, very, very early that same morning. While her gaze lacked most of Dumbledore's intense, almost frightening power, James found that she made him ten times as nervous. She seemed hesitant to agree, just as she had in so many recent times, like when she'd agreed to let him show her the secret passage back in October, or before she'd given in to go somewhere with him after McGonagall had caught them fighting in November. She always seemed to teeter on the edge of telling him no, even now.
But now, as then, she relented. "Okay," she said finally, and James couldn't think of a possession that he wouldn't have given up, in that moment, for the chance to look inside her head and understand what made her hesitate so much. "I'll be right up," she told Hestia, and James waited until he saw Hestia disappear up the stairs, and heard their dormitory door close behind her, just faintly, before he even tried to talk.
"I got you something yesterday," he said, and the words came out more rushed than he would have liked, revealing more of his nerves than he wanted her to know. "It's not a big thing," he added quickly at the surprised look on her face, and the way she opened her mouth as if to protest. "I didn't plan it, or go looking for it, and it cost me next to nothing."
"You're really selling it," she told him teasingly, but, despite her tone, he thought she looked a bit uncomfortable, and her next words confirmed his suspicions. "But you really shouldn't have." And she sounded like she meant it, that he really should not have gotten her anything, and didn't offer the statement as a typical expression of gratitude.
He didn't exactly want to hear those words, but he couldn't help but feel a bit gratified that he'd anticipated her discomfort even before she'd voiced it. And, really, he couldn't disagree with her entirely. "Probably not. But I did, because I wanted to, and I'm impulsive." She favored him with a smile at that, one that looked almost fond. Feeling as bold as he knew that he ever would, he handed her the parcel, still wrapped in the shop's brown paper, that he'd retrieved from his bed while she'd gone to visit the Hospital Wing. "Really, don't get your hopes up," he added, although he didn't know who he spoke to, in that moment, her or himself.
She glanced up at him curiously for a moment, still smiling, and promised, gently sarcastic, "My hopes are already up so high. Again, you're really selling this." She pulled the paper off and flipped the old, weather-beaten paperback over in her hand to read the title. "Grindelwald's Greater Good: An Auror's Account Amongst His Allies."
"Have you read it?"
She shook her head and turned the book back over the peruse the back cover. "I've never even heard of it. How old is it?"
"Published in '46, I think, right after Grindelwald's downfall. It's my dad's favorite book; we have about three copies lying around our house. It's the autobiography of a British Auror who infiltrated Grindelwald's inner circle on Ministry orders. He got in pretty early, in the 1930s, and basically saw the whole thing, rise to fall. There's a good bit about Dumbledore in there, including the whole Dumbledore/Grindelwald duel that made me scared shitless of Dumbledore as a kid. Don't tell McGonagall, but I really think that if she'd have sent me to Dumbledore's office first, even second, year, instead of trying to deal with me herself, I would have turned into a real Remus."
"So, what, still friends with arrogant troublemakers, but not necessarily one yourself?"
"Eh, something like that, I suppose," he said, and she laughed. "But it was my favorite book as a kid. I snuck it out of the library when I was real young. It gave me nightmares for weeks, and when my mum found it in my room she took it, and I spent another few weeks trying to find it to steal it back, which, of course, gave me nightmares again. But it made me want to become an Auror. I must have read it more than half a dozen times over the years, and when I saw it in Melvin's yesterday, I wanted to read it all over again. But then I thought about you. I figured it was a long shot that you hadn't read it, because you've probably read half the library at this point, but I had to grab it on the chance."
"I have not read half the library. I don't even think that's possible," she said, and her voice had gone rather soft. Her face had, too, he realized suddenly, and she looked so unlike herself that James immediately felt his nerves skyrocket again, just when they'd finally settled after seeing her obvious interest and hearing her laughter.
"I know that?" he said, and his words came out as more of a question than a statement, colored by his confusion over her expression. He felt his ears redden slightly, embarrassed by his own tone. "But, look—I'm glad I picked it up, even more than I was yesterday, because of everything that happened after I bought it. After what you said at Slughorn's dinner party, and even more so after we talked in the prefect's bathroom, I've thought off and on about what kind of Auror you'd be, and how you'd probably be a good one. But after watching you yesterday, I know you'll be great, the kind of person that will write their own books someday, or that other people will write books about. And I'm not just saying that because I fancy you."
He'd meant the final sentence to make her laugh, or something close to it. He even would have settled for nettling her slightly in that moment, so long as she stopped looking at him like she did just then, almost sadly, like she'd appeared after reading her parents' letter that morning. But she didn't laugh, or even smile. "Why didn't you give it to me this morning?" she asked, a fine line creasing between her brows. "When we opened everything else?"
He fell silent for a second, struggling to find the words to explain that sharing this with her, this book that had formed such a large part of his soul and identity, made him feel exposed enough just between the two of them. "I didn't want to make it some big thing. I just kind of wanted to share it with you, and didn't want to have to explain it to anyone else. Bloody hell, Evans, I didn't mean to make you sad!" he exclaimed, because the line between her brows had broken, and the corners of her mouth had turned down, just a fraction of an inch.
"You didn't," she said simply. "Well, you did. But that's okay. I love the book. Thank you."
And then she kissed him.
He wouldn't comprehend how she had done it, later, when he tried to pull together all of the threads of his mind that suddenly came loose at that moment, and he never understood completely. He didn't remember bending towards her, and she never put her hand on his neck to bring him down to her height, but he found her mouth on his with a surprise that confirmed that he hadn't initiated the move. The kiss lasted only a handful of moments, moments where time seemed to utterly stop and also completely speed by. He had just enough time to take in the gentleness of her hand against his chest; the softness of her new sweater, impossibly warm from the skin underneath, as he slipped his good arm around her back; and the even softer feeling of her mouth, before she stepped lightly away from him. Her eyes looked impossibly green, but he only managed to see her face for a flash of a second as she spoke words he later wouldn't remember (but polite words, he knew—happy Christmas, maybe? Thank you? Goodnight?), before she turned to follow Hestia upstairs and disappeared into their dorm.
Over near the fire, Sirius and Remus began to applaud.