Professor Flitwick was staring at her from under his large bushy eyebrows. He was saying something, but she kept getting distracted by the teetering piles of books that littered his desk. She wanted to know what books professors read, advanced texts far beyond what they assigned to students. I'll graduate soon, though, and then I can read whatever I want. So long as I've got the gold to buy it.
"Miss Stevens?"
She snapped back into awareness. "Hm? Sorry, Professor-"
"I asked you how you feel about your progress this term," the tiny wizard sniffed. "You will be graduating this May, if you recall."
She drummed her fingers on her thigh impatiently. "Well, I've been making progress in everything that's relevant."
"Evidently you don't deem History of Magic relevant. I hear from Professor Binns you've gotten D's on every assignment this term."
She tried to keep herself from scowling, and failed. Moody always said to control your facial expressions. Never let them know what your next move will be. "I turned in extra parchment for every one of those."
"You didn't follow the prompt. You wrote two feet about the history of centaur rebellions when you were supposed to write one and a half about the events of the second troll war."
"I don't think memorizing names and dates of trolls is going to help me much in my future life."
Flitwick took a deep breath, clearly also trying to control his facial expressions. "Miss Stevens, it is unclear to me what that future will be if you do not learn to apply yourself and follow rules."
She fiddled with her wand in her pocket, finding it difficult to meet Flitwick's eyes all of a sudden. She still had plenty of time today, if she put off charms homework- maybe she could go practice her dueling spells. "I told you, I want to work in a bookstore."
Flitwick sighed, his tone softening. "Miss Stevens, you are one of the cleverest students I have ever taught. I would hate to see you waste such cleverness in fighting every little thing you don't like. Pick a path and stick with it, even if it isn't exactly what you want, and I know you can do much more than work in a bookstore. Keep giving up at every minor indignation and you may not even get that far."
She nodded intently and made a show of hanging her head on the way out, but she couldn't take Flitwick seriously. All he was telling her to do was compromise.
She spent the evening in an empty classroom, tinkering with a few new spells she had invented. She had no Moody this year to practice with; there was a war on, and he had better things to do than teach teenage girls how to duel. Still, she found herself missing her time with him. Fighting was one of the few things she could do well; it felt right, the way she could dance with her opponent, feeling out the charged space between them, the quick flashes of spells brightening the air like fireworks.
But it wasn't just the practice sessions; she missed real fighting, that one night in the prefect's bathroom when Sirius Black had looked at her with his dark eyes and she had almost been killed by a curse and she had felt alive. Not bored, not useless, but awake and hungry, dancing some purposeful dance she could only catch glimpses of in her everyday life.
But Sirius Black was gone too; he had graduated last year. Word of her dueling skills had spread, though the Slytherins were careful to keep quiet about their firsthand experience. Few people teased her any more. They just stayed away.
More's the pity, she thought, picturing Goyle's ruddy, ham-like face before she turned her attention to offensive spells.
Flitwick doesn't understand what it's like, she mused as she practiced hexing beetles absentmindedly. There was something dreadfully wrong with the world, and it seemed she was the only one who could see it. Why make rules in the first place? Why do we need ministers and laws and jobs? She made a beetle dance a little jig on the desk, then broke its legs with a single crushing hex.
"Sorry," she said, and set it right again.
After practice she went to the library. She knew she ought to be doing research for her charms homework, but every other book just seemed so tempting. She curled up in a plush red chair with a copy of Origins of Curses: The Myths Debunked until Madam Pince kicked her out.
In bed that night, Nellie lay staring at the ceiling, the restless energy that churned within her so often keeping her from falling asleep. The Ravenclaw dormitories were painted a deep blue set with stars that changed with the seasons. Tonight the Dog Star was out. It gleamed brightly in the heart of the constellation Canis Major, almost seeming to wink at her. She remembered with an odd pounding of her heart that the Dog Star was also known as Sirius.
Canis Major twinkled, teasing in its incomprehensible closeness, the disparate stars making a picture she could never quite put together. She made a face.
"Shut up," she said aloud, and went to sleep.
When she had graduated and moved into her first tiny flat off Fleck Street, it was Moody who came to visit her first. She should have known, she supposed, when he showed up on her doorstep after nearly two years with fresh scars and a grim look on his face. But she was seventeen and she didn't know anything.
"Look at you, Stevens, out on your own." He grunted his thanks as she ushered him into her only chair and went to make a pot of tea. "You keeping in touch with your mum still?"
She shook her head. "Not much." Lana had offered her some money, but she had turned it down. She loved her mum, but she had made a promise to herself she would never take any of her money, no matter how bad things got.
"Finding work alright?"
"Hardly." She grinned at him from her tiny kitchenette. "It's a bad year, Moody, with a war on and everything. Not many places are still open."
"Aye, that's the truth of it. Shameful time to be going out into the world on your own."
She looked at him shrewdly as she handed him a steaming cuppa. "What brings you all the way out here then? Going to offer me a job?"
"Not a job. Something like."
She held her tongue and let him sip his tea. It was getting dark outside, dingy Fleck Street glowing misty as the lamps flickered on. When he spoke again, his voice was low and harsh.
"What I'm about to tell you, you tell no one. Understand?"
She stared at him blankly for a moment, then nodded her head.
"The Order of the Phoenix- that name mean anything to you? Good," he said roughly when she shook her head. "The Order was founded a few years ago. We're underground, secretive, and extremely illegal. We're also the only chance anyone's got of beating Voldemort." She sat in silence as he took another sip. "Bloody good tea," he added calmly.
"What about the aurors? Thought you worked for them."
He laughed his raspy laugh. "I do, but they're not good for much. Half the Ministry is Death Eaters at this point." He stared hard at her. "Sit down, Stevens."
There wasn't another chair, so she pulled up her small wooden table and sat on that.
"We- that is to say, myself and Albus Dumbledore-" Nellie's eyebrows shot up but she stayed quiet "-want you to work with us. It'll be nasty, and bloody, and possibly the last thing you'll ever do, and you can't tell anyone else about it. Not your friends. Not your mum."
She fought the urge to tell him she didn't have any friends. Her nails dug into the worn wood of the table, but she held his gaze.
"Once you're in the Order you belong to the Order. You belong to the fight." He snorted. "But you'll be doing some bloody good with your life."
She felt her heart rattling around inside her like a caged thing.
"That sound like something you're interested in?"
A car raced by, casting red and orange bars of light across their faces. There was a whole world out there, a world she could never be a part of if she took this chance. A world of rules, and laws, and safety.
"Yeah. I'm interested."
After several months, Alastor was still the only one she could bring herself to talk to. She sat at one corner of the table with him, mulling over several complex maps and a steaming mug of tea, but her mind was elsewhere.
"Remember old headquarters?" she said suddenly, turning from her map to look at Alastor's grizzled face.
"Bloody hell." He grinned. "That shoddy little place out in the country?"
She laughed. Park Street had indeed been shoddy, and tight, but somehow they had all managed to cram inside. They would squeeze around the wobbly-legged table, sharing mugs of tea and cigarettes and listening to the radio. Sirius always tuned it to the Muggle stations- Queen and disco, strange, wonderful music Nellie had never heard before. They had all been so young- mostly students fresh out of Hogwarts. She remembered Sirius' fingers threading into hers under the weatherbeaten table as they laughed at dying and planned for a war they knew they would win.
"This place is so grim," she said softly. "It's not like it was back then."
Alastor gave her a long, calculating stare. "You know it's the Black family home, right?"
She blinked at him, flabbergasted. "What?"
"They didn't tell you?" he snorted. "Sirius inherited this place."
"Nobody tells me much of anything, Alastor." She sipped her tea primly, wishing it were whiskey, and stared at the room around her with renewed curiosity. Sirius had been born within these walls, grown up here, walked out one day believing he would never return.
I couldn't stand it anymore, told the whole conceited lot of them they could bugger off. It was a long time before he would tell her any more than that. His eyes, gleaming in the dark, long lashes wet. It was what they did to Regulus I couldn't stand. He was a good kid, once. He was my brother. And now Regulus was gone, too, with all the rest of them.
She scowled at the black curtains. "Christ, it's ugly."
Still, she couldn't help feeling pangs of sympathy for Sirius every time she saw his gaunt, handsome face at the other end of the long table. She said hello to him at every meeting. Sometimes their eyes would catch over one of the many massive parchments and she would feel a familiar lurch in her chest.
Would you even have believed me? she heard him say again.
I would have believed anything you told me. I would have done anything you asked. She stared at him, standing alone at the end of every meeting with a glass of whiskey, his beard growing more and more unkempt, and wasn't sure if she wanted to hex him or comfort him. Somehow she always ended up doing neither, giving him a sad little smile as she left and returned to her lonely flat, feeling unaccountably empty.
She was in the dark, looking for him. Shadows loomed around her, materializing into dark curtains, patches of slashed and peeling wallpaper. Grimmauld Place, she realized. Every corner, every stairwell, seemed laden with his shadow, and she swore she could hear the rhythm of his breath, the familiar tread of his footfalls so close to her. But she wandered without a glimpse of him, calling his name into that empty, swallowing space until she awoke with a gasp.
She lay on her narrow bed, struggling to catch her breath. The light was thin and blue- early morning. She remembered, without meaning to, other early mornings, in another sparsely furnished flat. His lips on hers, the shadow of his breath ghosting in her ear. Those dim, secret moments when the rest of the world was just waking up, when she'd felt as though they were stealing something perfect and wonderful.
You're so beautiful. His voice, hoarse with sleep, his lips soft and pale in the new light. I wanna taste you, Nel.
Puppy, she teased, and he bent down and licked her right under her chin.
There. Now I'm your puppy. His hands already pushing her legs apart, his grin broadening as he looked up at her through shaggy, bed-tousled hair. Yours forever.
It had been early morning when they heard about Dorcas and Marlene. He knelt beside her in the bleary gray light and held her hair as she was sick in the ancient toilet crammed in the corner, as her whole body shook with something that raged and screamed inside her. He made her go to bed when she tried to sit up all night in case they were next. And he held her when the nightmares came, night after night. Sirius, the Potters, Alastor, Sirius- sprawled on the floor of their flat, his handsome face set and pale like that of a drowned man. Blood blooming like roses in the grimy carpet.
"I'm not going anywhere," he'd whisper in her ear, his arms around her in the dim, murky heat of their room. The flat had no AC so they slept tangled together on top of the sheets, sweating but not wanting to let the other go.
"I promise, I'm not going anywhere." He'd grin, a smile that didn't quite reach his dark eyes. "Trust me, you'll never be able to bloody get rid of me."
And she'd giggle in spite of herself and lean against his chest and believe him. Even in the midst of the war, even older, sadder, and poorer, he had never lost the power to make her believe him.
She rolled out of bed, ignoring the wetness in the corners of her eyes, and tried to clear her head. What was wrong with her? she wondered as she splashed cold water on her face in the chipped bathroom sink. Ben had been good, and kind, and loving- everything she was supposed to want in a husband. But she never dreamed of him. The only thrill she knew was falling into those dark spaces, calling out someone else's name forever and ever.
I always knew you weren't really mine, Ben had said. I tried to pretend that I could accept it, be the bigger man, but I can't.
She had opened her mouth to lie, decided it wasn't worth it. You never knew the half of it, Ben.
She had slept in late, and it was nearly lunch time. She whiled away the afternoon in coffee shops and bookstores, dashing in and out of the drenching rain. Too poor to buy anything, she contented herself with looking at the neat spines of books, each one enticing, mysterious. She ate her lo mein on the floor for a change of pace, rereading the one book in her possession, Jude the Obscure, for what had to be the thousandth time. Not bothering to turn on the light, she bent closer and closer over the book until her nose was practically touching the onion-skin pages. When it became too dark to read anything at all, it was time to go to work.
She took the trash out, relishing the cool night air on her skin. It had stopped raining finally, and there was a rare moon peeking through the clouds. Good for a hunt. She let herself back in, called goodnight to her landlady, and turned on the spot into nothing.
She knew something was off before the alley had fully materialized around her. The streetlight at the corner, which usually cast just enough bleary orange light for her to see by, was inexplicably dark. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. Could've just been an outage. Still, it never hurt to expect the worst. Alastor's paranoia had seeped into her over the years, and she was grateful to it for keeping her alive thus far.
She silently cast a quick revealing spell, and every nerve in her body tingled when she realized someone was hiding behind a dustbin not twenty feet away. Shit. She was just about to send a message to headquarters when a meaty hand grasped her wrist crushingly tight.
A large blonde man had materialized out of nothing, his face twisted in a crooked grin.
"Yaxley." She grinned up at him. "Does hominem revelio not work on pigs?"
Immediately strands of rough rope shot from his wand but she was quicker. She darted away, sending a blast of fire that got close enough to singe his hair and left him coughing and swearing. The figure behind the dustbin was now moving towards her, a jet of light bursting from his wand. She ducked just in time to hear the curse collide with the opposite wall, sending a shower of brick dust cascading over her. A car alarm went off not too far away.
She was dueling on both sides now, hurling spells as fast as she could while ducking and dodging. This was the battle clarity she remembered, better than any high- every motion electric, crisp, just hanging on the edge of death. The bolt of a curse crackled just above her ear and she snarled.
"All right, let the adults play!" Her curse hit the second man squarely on the chest and he toppled, hitting the ground with a sickening thump. She hadn't recognized his voice or build. Sending newbies after me. They should know better.
But she had no time to gloat. With only Yaxley to deal with, she managed to duck into a doorway and send a quick message, praying it reached headquarters in time. A bolt of purple lightning shattered the bricks near her face and she cried out as pulverized rock sprayed into her eyes and mouth. Ears ringing, she stumbled out of her enclave, only to find more Death Eaters popping out of thin air. One, two. Their masks gleamed in the watery moonlight. Three- dammit.
"Four on one! Is your precious Dark Lord that afraid of me?"
At the sound of his name the Death Eaters hissed like serpents through the masks, the sound metallic and inhuman. The short thin one might have been Dolohov; she couldn't quite tell. They were advancing, backing her into the now pocked and crumbling wall.
Wordlessly she shot a pummeling hail of rock onto her four assailants. A heavy piece of lintel hit the Death Eater farthest to her left and he crumpled like a doll. She made her escape, dodging a volley of curses to jump over his body and get some breathing room. Dammit, where was the Order?
Aiming for Yaxley, she felt a searing pain in her shoulder that quickly faded. Then another, in her stomach. The adrenaline dulled the sensation, but she knew from experience she had just been hit with a powerful curse. I am going to die. She was crumpling, her legs giving way; she saw more people apparating but couldn't tell if they were friend or foe. Sirius, I'm going to die. The pavement loomed close in front of her and then went black.