Chapter 3: Cross

A mighty yawn escaped the mouth of James Potter.

James had come to King's Cross station in London to board the train for the start of the school year three other times. It was supposed to be a routine thing by now. Arrive, slip through the portal to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters as inconspicuously as possible, see a few people you hadn't seen in several months, and find a compartment when it was your turn, all in time for the Hogwarts Express to depart at eleven o'clock on the dot.

But the rules had changed. There were extra security measures now. (Hit wizards, among other things, according to their father) And that meant that while the train still departed at eleven (with or without you), everyone was advised to be on the platform no later than half past ten.

"Step lively, you lot, or you'll be left behind," their father said for not the first time, glancing back and around them. Fiamma, Lily's ginger-furred cat, yowled in protest at being caged atop her trunk.

"I know, I know – I'll let you out soon," Lily reassured her pet, who opened her mouth toothily and unreasonably wide in what also looked like a yawn.

It wasn't that quarter-after-ten was particularly early… but the current weather (very rainy and a bit cool for September) had a draining effect on people. Even the Muggles were shuffling along much more slowly than usual.

James looked around in an attempt to catch a glance of someone he knew. He looked behind himself, too, and that was where he saw, in long rain coats, two dark-skinned ladies – one much younger than the other. Actually, if he'd had to guess, he would have guessed that the younger of the two was still a girl in her teens, and the older was her mother. Why did they seem vaguely familiar…?

CRUNCH.

James jolted and wheezed as his trunk came to a sudden and forceful halt against the edge of one of the solid brick platform barriers. The handle he'd been using to push his trunk sank into his belly and drove the wind from him.

And, of course, several people, including his family, all turned to look.

"James!" his mother said, cringing. "Look where you're going!"

James groaned and accelerated his trunk around the solid barrier for Platform Eight.

It was not long before they arrived at the brick post in question.

Lily was first in line with their mother. She was wheeling her trunk around to face the barrier. ("Oh, shut it!" she snapped at Fiamma, who affected her best pathetic mewl in an attempt to evoke some pity)

"Now, what you want to do is to get perfectly straight," their mother was advising her. Lily took a patient breath. "If you're nervous, we can go in toge—hold on a second!"

But Lily was already off. She and her trunk disappeared a second later, into what appeared to the naked eye to be solid brick.

Their parents looked at each other. Dad grinned.

"Dad," Albus spoke up, sounding like he'd just realized something. "Where are Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione? Hugo's supposed to be starting this year, too, right?"

Their father grimaced.

"Uncle Ron's got them running late, more than likely," he commented.

"I don't think so," their mother answered. "Hermione wouldn't allow that. Neither would Rose, for that matter."

"Good point," Albus mused seriously before starting through the barrier himself.

James wordlessly started toward the platform until a forceful arm held him back. It was his father, who leaned down into his ear.

"Make sure you keep an eye on Lily, huh?" his father requested. "She's putting on a brave face for everyone, but she's really quite nervous."

"Yeah," James replied. "What if she gets Sorted somewhere else?"

"Does that change anything?" his father asked.

James's answer took him all of a second. "No." I'll just have to work a bit harder, is all.

"Either way, you're not going to be able to count on Neville," his father said. James frowned, only having just remembered again. The announcement had come not two weeks ago now, in a short blurb in the Daily Prophet over breakfast, that Neville Longbottom and his wife, Hannah, had welcomed a healthy baby girl. Alice Augusta Longbottom was her name. It was going to be a good while before Neville Longbottom was at Hogwarts again. "The acting Head of House is this… Professor Wenster. I think you've had him for Transfiguration, right?"

James nodded.

"I don't know him well, but he doesn't seem like a friendly sort, and he's one of the old guard. I'd do my best not to get on his bad side if I were you. And whatever you do – James, look at me." James looked his father in the eye. "Don't get in over your head. Stay out of trouble, especially with Malcolm."

Professor Malcolm was the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Head of Hufflepuff House. To massively oversimplify things, he and James didn't see eye to eye.

"Right," James said, finding this repeated instruction a bit grating.

Fortunately, his mother rescued him. "Harry, we need to hurry up."

James didn't need telling twice. He pushed his trolley straight at the barrier. Several times he'd played a game of chicken with this trick wall, trying not to close his eyes as he approached. Several times he had lost. This time, he won, only to find out that it did no good – the passageway between Muggle and wizard worlds was blacker-than-pitch-black darkness. It was so dark that, when James emerged on the other side, he found himself needing to squint for a moment, the dim light of the real world appearing blinding by comparison.

Once his eyes had readjusted, he glanced at his surroundings and noticed several differences from last year. Several uniformed gentlemen (and at least one lady) in dark blue outfits dotted the station, wands at the ready. Signs had been erected on the platform, directing students of certain houses in certain directions. Almost predictably, Gryffindors and Slytherins were going to be on opposite ends of the train. James's heart sank somewhat. As he looked around, he noticed that students were clustered in groups.

"Disgusting, isn't it?" a voice asked. James jumped.

"God! Do you ever warn anybody?" groaned James as he stepped backward.

"I move quietly." The girl that had appeared next to him in a hooded, blue raincoat shrugged. "You haven't seen Richard, have you?"

"I just got here. Ten seconds ago," James replied, a bit irritated. "'How was your summer, James? Do anything interesting?' Nope. 'To hell with James. Where's Richard?'"

"Would you really want me to ask those sorts of questions?" the girl replied, removing the hood on her coat to reveal longish, blonde hair. "I already know your summer sucked."

James didn't know whether to be angry at her for a moment. He opted for 'mildly peeved.'

"You always know everything, don't you, Serra?" he asked sarcastically.

"I don't know where Richard is," Serra said. "That's why I'm asking you. I wanted to talk to him before they funneled all of us off to our slaughter pens."

"Don't you think you're being a little dramatic?" James asked.

"James!"

James had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. He turned to find his parents approaching, and quickly.

"Where are Albus and Lily?" his father asked immediately.

"Never saw them," James replied truthfully. "I think they might have gotten on the train already."

"You were supposed to keep sight of them," his mother interjected.

James was right about to open his mouth to defend himself (and probably get slapped in the face) when his father bailed him out.

"I'm sure they're fine, Ginny. I mean… look at… Merlin's pants. What's the story with all these hit wizards?"

"We knew there'd be extra security," his mother commented. His father looked somewhere between appalled and furious.

"Extra security?" he repeated incredulously. "A quarter of London's force must be here at the station. For God's sake, these are kids, not criminals."

"Now that you mention it," his mother replied, sweeping her eyes across the station, "this does seem a bit over the top."

"So, James," his father turned to him and Serra. "I see you've made a new friend."

"Not new, really…" James muttered, but Serra was out in front of him.

"Serra Paxton," she introduced herself politely, shaking hands with both of James's parents in turn. His father's eyes widened perceptibly.

"Paxton… couldn't be… this grown up?" Harry Potter uttered, astonished. "I haven't seen you since you were about knee-high. How old are you now?"

"Fourteen," Serra answered.

"So you're going into fourth year just like James. Merlin's beard. I can't believe it's been that long," Harry remarked. "What house are you in?"

"Ravenclaw," Serra replied proudly.

"Doesn't surprise me one bit," Harry answered. "Not if you're anything like your father…"

A chime rang.

"Attention all Hogwarts students: the time is now ten-fifty. Please proceed to your designated areas on the train. The Hogwarts Express will be leaving at eleven o'clock sharp. Again – attention all Hogwarts students…"

Serra grit her teeth. "Sod, we're out of time. Listen, if you see Richard at any point, let him know –"

"I'm not gonna be your owl," James interrupted her. "If you two have stuff to work out…"

"It's nothing to do with that. I just thought he should know… Brynne, too, if you get to her before I do…"

Exactly what this was, James didn't get to find out quite yet. A blur of red hair came flying past him.

"What are you doing?" his mother called, seeing Lily running toward her. "You've got to get on the train!"

But Lily didn't listen; she ran headlong at her mother, buried her head in her jacket and started to cry very loudly.

Albus

Albus looked up as the door to his compartment opened.

There stood a pale-skinned boy with frizzy auburn curls for hair, clutching a stitch in his side.

"Sorry," he breathed. "I tried to stop her."

"It's fine," Rose said, tapping the seat next to her, indicating where her little brother should sit down. "Aunt Ginny will get her back on the train somehow… hopefully."

Albus heard the doubt in Rose's voice, and wondered if she knew (or at least sensed) what he knew. Both he and James loved and were loved by their mother dearly, but Lily and their mum had a special bond – unique, Albus guessed, to mother and daughter. As much as Lily complained about being left alone when the boys went off to school, and as excited as their mother was about seeing Lily finally start at Hogwarts, the fact was that neither one was completely ready to be without the other yet. The first few weeks, Albus knew, would be rough. Lily took after Mum, of course; strong and brave, with flaming red hair and brown eyes. She'd be fine, eventually.

Eventually.

"I couldn't wait to be shot of my mother," Sylvia piped in from Albus's left. She'd let him have the window seat even though he had offered it to her. A gentlemanly gesture, he thought. Somewhat unfortunately for him (although he shouldn't have been surprised), Sylvia Thomas wasn't the type of girl to melt over a single act of chivalry. Not that Albus was going out of his way to get Sylvia to 'melt' for him. Nope. Not at all. Sylvia was a friend of his going all the way back to first year. A friend. Who happened to be a girl. And a girl who happened to be very, very pretty.

"I can see why. You two act just alike." Scorpius Malfoy looked somewhat different than what Albus had remembered last of him. First off, he had long since passed up Albus in the height department. Again, this wasn't much surprise. His father was tall and very thin, and he as the spitting image of his father could safely be expected to end up the same way. Second, his lengthening hair had started to wave a bit. It wasn't nearly as curly or messy as Hugo's, but neither was it perfectly straight anymore. The curls, he'd explained to Rose a bit earlier, came from his mother's side of the family – and although they appeared to have skipped a generation (both his mother and aunt had straight hair), Scorpius got them a bit, and his younger cousin, Lena (in her locks of darkest jet black) got them a lot.

"Do not!" Sylvia protested. Her hair was dark, wildest and frizziest of all of them. Mercifully, though, she'd bunched it back in a bushy ponytail so as to not endanger anyone's face.

Scorpius just sat back in his seat and smirked.

Two thumps came at the compartment door, which slid open a moment later.

"Everyone alright?" A pretty, older blonde girl with a Gryffindor Prefect badge gleaming on her robes appeared in the threshold. Hugo grinned and waved at her. "Hey, Hugo." Her face fell. "Where's Lily?"

"She went to go say goodbye to Mum," Albus explained.

The older girl's face fell into an expression of worry as she turned her wrist to investigate a small watch. "Oh. Well, hopefully, she's back on the train somewhere. We've got three minutes until we take off. I've got to go – we're supposed to be meeting right at eleven when the train leaves."

She went to depart, but Rose yelled after her. "Dominique, wait!"

The blonde girl stopped for a moment.

"It looks good on you," Rose said.

Dominique Weasley grinned and shut the door behind her.

Not long afterward, just as the final call sounded, Lily appeared back in the compartment, plopped down at one of the seats and buried her face in her hands. Hugo quickly put an arm around her shoulder. Albus frowned and tried once again not to hate his younger cousin.

Okay, it wasn't so much that Albus hated Hugo, or even disliked him; sometimes, though, he wondered if Lily considered Hugo a better brother than either him or James. And Albus wasn't entirely sure if he liked that idea. He supposed it was somewhat natural, though. He and Rose, since they were born around the same time, were very close. Likewise, Lily was close with Hugo. Although, unlike Albus and Rose, where Rose was several months older, Hugo and Lily were mere weeks apart, with Lily having a birthday in early December and Hugo celebrating his right after the new year. They were also much closer in personality. Both were energetic young children that liked to laugh and had a penchant for small-scale mischief. As toddlers, they had started Showing their magic at about the same time, too, resulting in an incident where both of them ended up on the top shelves of Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes' stock closet.

Just about the whole trip was dreary and rainy. Almost predictably, they started to nod off one by one. Rose had fallen asleep against the window, her face smashed oddly against the wall. Albus tried not to laugh at her. Lily had gone to sleep on Hugo's shoulder – how, Albus wasn't sure. Hugo's snores seemed to be shaking the whole compartment.

"This year's going to be…" Sylvia muttered and shook her head. "It's bad enough we're stuck with Wenster as our Head of House until Longbottom gets back. But no Unity Weekends – can you believe Flitwick even did that?"

"Uh…yeah," Scorpius said, as if he couldn't believe Sylvia was asking this question in the first place. "The Slytherins almost murdered our Head of House last year."

"One Slytherin," Albus corrected his friend – but he shrugged.

"It's all the same to a lot of people," Scorpius said. "What's the big deal? The Veil isn't going to be up this year, so I guess the only difference is that we can't stay over in each other's dorms."

"The Hogsmeade trips are cancelled, too, remember?" Sylvia groused. "That's the worst part, I think – it's like they're punishing the whole school for what one person did."

Scorpius grimaced. "I guess they thought somebody would use the trip as a chance to get back at the Slytherins – only two Professors normally go and the students are scattered all around the village."

"Still doesn't seem fair," Sylvia answered. "Who knows? Maybe it'll only be for a couple of months, and things will be back to normal again."

Scorpius gave a wordless utterance of halfhearted agreement. "You know, I noticed a couple of odd things when Mum and I got to the platform."

Scorpius had mentioned before that his mother had brought him alone this time; his father had not made the trip with them.

"Besides the dozen Hit Wizards standing around?" Sylvia asked sarcastically. "I think one of them had a Probity Probe… gotta wonder exactly what the hell he was thinking of doing with that…"

Scorpius ignored Sylvia's dark mutterings. Either he did not find wizards with Probity Probes odd, or they simply weren't interesting enough to mention. "Rowan Lester was here when Mum and I got here."

"Well, that's not 'odd'," said Sylvia. "He's supposed to be here, isn't he?"

"It wasn't him, it was who he was with," Scorpius clarified.

"He lives with his uncle now, right?" Sylvia queried.

"Will you let me finish?" Scorpius asked sharply. Albus, unable to restrain himself from instinct, made a quick but silent pat-down motion with his hand. When Scorpius glanced at him in confusion, Albus responded by pointing out all three of his sleeping family members. Scorpius gave a sigh and a half-grimace as a wordless apology. "Yes, Rowan was there, but he didn't show up with his uncle. His uncle wasn't there at all. It looked like he showed up with Brynne Walter and her mother."

"Couldn't have been her mother," Sylvia argued. "Her mum's dead. You don't know that story? Her parents were murdered when she was only a couple of years old. It was one of the worst crimes in Wizarding Britain this side of Voldemort."

"Well, it was some red-haired witch," Scorpius answered. "I figured it was her mum. She and Brynne looked a lot alike, enough that they could've been related. Maybe an aunt or something?"

"What was Rowan doing with them?" asked Sylvia. "Especially the way things are right now?"

"No idea," Scorpius replied, shrugging his shoulders. "But he and Brynne seemed to be getting on well. They were talking. I had no idea they were ever that close. Never saw them around each other much in school. Speaking of people we haven't seen…"

He stopped, uncommonly aware of the impact of his next statement and oddly milking the pregnant pause for all it was worth.

"Do you both remember Lilith Cross?" he asked.

For several seconds, there was no noise inside the compartment except for the rumbling of the railcars and the incessant tapping of raindrops against the window to Albus's right.

Sylvia's jaw dropped. "You're yanking my wand."

Scorpius shook his head. "I don't forget faces. She's older now, obviously, but… I'm pretty sure it was her."

Albus, Sylvia, and Scorpius hadn't seen Lilith Cross in well over a year. She had withdrawn from Hogwarts under mysterious circumstances (leaving only her older sister, who had since become a Prefect) at the end of her first year. Since then, whispers had gone around the school saying that she'd had something to do with the fire in the Great Hall that year that had nearly killed several students. Rumors were only rumors, though, and even if they had been true, Albus thought, it was almost certainly a case of Lilith, who had been a first year like them at the time, experimenting with magic a bit over her head and causing a horrible accident. Surely a first-year girl with no known ill will toward anyone hadn't meant to set the Great Hall on fire with most of the student body inside…

"Maybe they had some mercy on her," Sylvia remarked. "Decided to let her back in."

"I don't think Hogwarts had anything to do with her leaving in the first place," Scorpius answered.

Truth was, nobody knew anything about what had happened to Lilith Cross after their first year. She was somewhat nondescript, even as Hufflepuffs go – a random girl with few, if any, close friends. She was closest of all with her older sister, Laurel.

"Her sister, Laurel…" Scorpius remembered at that moment, almost as if he'd read Albus's mind. "Wasn't she seeing Freddy at one point?"

"I think so, yeah," Albus didn't see Freddy very often his first year, but in many of the glimpses he saw, Laurel Cross was not far away. But they had fallen apart at some point that year, if Albus remembered correctly. Realizing that this was the perfect opportunity to break some news, he added, "Not sure if you heard, but he's going to be Quidditch captain this year."

"I know. I ran into Greta on the platform," Sylvia answered. "I don't envy her this year – or the Head Boy, for that matter. Do we know who it is?"

"The Head Boy?" Scorpius asked. "Not sure. It's not Tommy Jordan, though. When I saw him, he just had a normal Prefect's badge."

"Huh," Sylvia mused, sounding somewhat disappointed. "I thought he might have made a fair Head Boy."

Scorpius frowned. "I'll bet someone didn't want the Head Boy and Head Girl to both be Gryffindors. Makes no sense – Head students have to be neutral. They almost don't even count as members of their own Houses. That's why you can do Quidditch captain or Head student, but you can't be both."

"Well, I'd definitely be Quidditch captain if I had to pick," Sylvia remarked. "Who wants to spend all their time enforcing stupid rules?"

Scorpius grimaced. "Your dad, apparently."

Sylvia winced. Her father, Dean, was the Flying instructor at Hogwarts and also served as the arbiter for the Quidditch matches. Quidditch had a deceptively thick rulebook, and there were nearly seven hundred fouls an arbiter had to try to remember. "Good point. Have you ever seen the book of fouls, by the way? Some of the stuff in there is sort of mad." Glancing at Albus so it was clear she was talking to everybody, she went on, "Bludger-grubbing. Have you ever actually seen that? How would you grab hold of a moving Bludger? But apparently it's been done before, so they have a foul for it."

Scorpius raised an eyebrow for a moment. "I suppose it makes sense… you can't make things easier on yourself by carrying around one of the Bludgers and keeping it from doing its job. Like you said, though… how you'd catch a moving Bludger without breaking some bones is anyone's guess…."

He leaned back against his seat.

"I'm sort of surprised they're still going through with the season," Sylvia remarked. "Dad's gonna have his hands full when Slytherin and Gryffindor play each other."

"But that's not really new, is it?" Albus finally asked. "Those matches are always one bad foul away from getting out of hand."

"I wonder who their new Seeker will be?" asked Sylvia. "Gettis is playing for Falmouth now. Doing well for himself, too, I heard…"

"Good for him," Scorpius said with a smug expression. Wilmerlin Gettis had been Slytherin's Seeker for the last several years. Many called him the best professional prospect Hogwarts had seen in many years.

Scorpius was Gryffindor's Seeker, had faced Gettis twice, and had beaten him both times.

Scorpius would probably be a player for the British and Irish League in four or five years' time himself. But Albus knew Scorpius would have considered that a disappointment. He wanted to take England, whose national Quidditch teams had historically struggled, to a World Cup championship. Multiple, if his career allowed him the time. He wanted to be nothing less than the best Seeker in the world. Better than Bulgaria's Victor Krum. Better than Brazil's Goncalo Flores (he and his team had lost in the 2014 Final but came back to win in 2018). And Albus, at this point, knew better than to suggest that he couldn't do it.

"Speaking of which, where's your broom?" Sylvia asked.

"Getting looked at," muttered Scorpius, sounding like he didn't really want to talk about it.

"Looked at?" repeated Sylvia. "What did you do to it? Did you crash?"

"Have you ever seen me crash?" Scorpius queried, sounding annoyed. Raising his eyebrows, he explained, "Apparently the way I flew during our final with Ravenclaw is 'too much stress for a twenty-five-year-old broom to be going on with.' It's got a slight roll to the left now. So every time I try to dive…" He made a spiraling motion in the air with his finger. Sylvia grimaced.

"That's not good," she said.

"You think?" Scorpius snapped. He seemed very upset about this broom situation. "They're not even sure if it's fixable. Might be that way for good now, and if so, I'm not gonna be able to use it in a match ever again."

He gazed up at the ceiling, looking morose.

"If all else fails," Albus offered, "you could always get a new one, right?"

"It's not that simple," Scorpius said after a sigh. "Of course I could get a new broom. That's not the problem. I knew that broom. It's all I've ever flown on, really. I knew what it could do, what it couldn't do, how fast it could do it. I knew how fast I could get to full speed, how fast I could stop if needed… how fast I could bank, lift off, dive… and even if I got another Nimbus Two Thousand and One, it's not going to be the same broom."

He grasped at his hair for a moment.

"I'm being selfish, right?" he murmured. "Worrying about brooms with all this other rubbish going on…"

And with no more preamble, he stood and left the compartment.

Sylvia deflated sadly.

"I didn't mean to upset him," she said, surprising Albus a bit. Normally, she didn't have that sort of awareness. She wasn't mean, but she could be somewhat insensitive and tactless at times. "I was only trying to make small talk…"

Albus grimaced. "I don't think Scorpius thinks Quidditch is 'small talk'."

Sylvia let out a sigh. "God, I hope he's not sore at me. I didn't mean anything by it, honestly…"

She swallowed hard and went silent.

"I don't like it," she finally said, in a soft, serious tone of voice Albus had never heard her use before.

"What do you mean?" Albus asked.

"Any of it," Sylvia replied. "It just gives me a bad feeling…"

Albus understood. It was a combination of things – the attack on Neville last year, but also the dodgy things that had happened overall. Ever since the fire, it seemed that there was a pall over the school, and over Albus's friends and family. And Albus, for one, couldn't shake this strange feeling that these weren't just random events – that they were connected somehow, to something or someone that was making them (or at least allowing them) to happen. Maybe it was his being brought up a Potter, knowing all the things his father had gone through during his Hogwarts days…

"It almost feels like we're going off to war or something," Sylvia mused sadly.

"It's not going to be that bad," Albus replied, more to convince himself than anything. "Professor Flitwick and the others will keep things under control."

"I know one thing," Sylvia said, staring at her knees. "If someone wants to try to start a fight with me, I'm not just going to sit there and take it. And I don't want you to, either."

She had looked Albus straight in the eye.

"I hate fighting," he admitted. "I know that sounds strange when my dad basically dueled for a living, but…"

He heaved a sigh and looked away from her.

"You'd think it would be in my blood," Albus mused. "Not just my dad, but my grandparents, and aunts and uncles, too. Half my family was in the Order of the Phoenix when Voldemort was alive."

"You think they liked it?" Sylvia asked. "Fighting, I mean. You think your dad likes it?"

"No," Albus said simply. "He says he does it to keep everyone safe."

Albus heard the rustle of movement and then felt a hand on his left shoulder.

"Are you afraid?" he asked.

"Only an idiot's never afraid," Sylvia replied.

But when he looked at her, and she looked back, her lip was trembling a bit.

An unintelligible shout broke the pregnant silence to pieces. Sylvia's brows furrowed.

"What the—?"

Albus looked up toward the door. "Sounds like it's coming from outside."

As he followed Sylvia to the compartment door ("wuzzgoin…?" Hugo murmured as he began to stir from slumber) Albus couldn't help but feel a bit irritated at the timing of the loud interruption. Sylvia had been about to say something important, but the sudden noise had broken her focus. Sylvia went out through the compartment door, ignoring a half-hearted, wordless warning Albus never got the chance to give. Albus, hating himself, took a moment to draw his wand, then emerged as well.

The last time Albus and Sylvia had happened upon a commotion aboard the Hogwarts Express, a Gryffindor boy in their year had found himself accosted by two boys from another House, and the shouting match had ended in violence.

This time, it was two girls from another House, both brown-skinned, and both shouting at each other with Scorpius standing square in the middle.

"You know you're not supposed to be in here," the older of the two, already in her Hogwarts robes, said loudly. The yellow trim on her robes and the badger badge on her chest signaled her as a Hufflepuff Prefect.

The younger girl was toward Albus and Sylvia, behind Scorpius. It had been a while, but Albus knew that face. Her hair was dark, coiled and down to her shoulders, tucked behind her ear with a clip on one side. She was still in a blue rain coat.

"Not even for a short chat?" the younger girl asked. "It's not like I went into one of the Gryffindor compartments—"

"Everyone's got to stay with their House," the Prefect cut her off. "Do you really want to be starting trouble the first day back?"

"By doing something that's been allowed for years?" the younger girl asked. "Yes, because that's causing such a problem. Aren't you supposed to be in a Prefects' meeting or something?"

"Don't be a wise-arse, Lilith," the Prefect said, her eyes flashing. "You don't want to get the Professor's attention…"

"What's the matter, Laurie? Is he afraid of me?" Lilith asked acidly. "Shouldn't be, if he's got nothing to hide, right? But I've known something's off about him, ever since you started going to his 'Remedial Defence' classes. Like anyone was going to buy that one. You had top marks your first four years. I remember, because Mum and Stewart wouldn't stop going on about them— perfect Laurel with her perfect marks. But God forbid you ever got an 'E' or Stewart would give you hell—"

"Stewart?" Laurel sounded appalled. "Show our father some respect, you ungrateful—"

"He's not our father," Lilith said. Then, with a pause, as if aware of how impactful her next statement would be, she added, "Our father actually had balls."

Sylvia was saying nothing, but her – and Scorpius's – jaw visibly dropped at that statement.

Laurel's teeth grit and her eyes narrowed for a moment… but she bit her lip and then smiled. "I'm not falling for it."

"And what's that?" Lilith asked, looking distractedly at her nails as if Laurel wasn't worth the eye contact.

"You're trying to bait me into doing something daft," Laurel said disdainfully. "I'm not falling for it. Professor Malcolm already told me if I've got the makings of a Head Girl next year."

"Yeah, I forgot," Lilith sighed. "It's all about making Laurel Cross Head Girl. 'Screw Lilith. She's just Laurel's little sister, and she's inconvenient, so let's just keep her out of the picture for a while….'"

It became clear at that point that Lilith was clearly not the same girl that had left suddenly at the end of first year. She had seen things – and, apparently, many of them were not good.

"Do you have any idea how lonely it is to be the only witch your age around for miles?" she asked. "When you should be at Hogwarts with the other second years, but you've got to study completely alone because your sister's worried you're going to mess up her chance to be Head Girl, and your father's scared to death of a letter from some 'A.R.' bloke no one's ever heard of. Who the hell is A.R., huh? And why do they care so much about whether or not I'm at Hogwarts?"

"Wh—" Laurel was caught off guard by this revelation.

"Yes, Mum told me. You think she wouldn't?" Lilith queried, with more than a bit of a scoff in her voice. "I knew when we left, it was because she thought I should return to Hogwarts and Stewart said 'no.' He'd have kept me out the full six years if he'd gotten his way."

Laurel pursed her lips. "He was trying to protect—"

"That wasn't protection. It was prison!" Lilith interrupted her.

Laurel paused for a second, but only a brief one. "Are you done yet?"

Lilith glanced up at Scorpius and the others for a moment. Then she walked past Laurel, taking no care to avoid shoulder-checking her on the way by.

"No," she replied as she left. "Not nearly."

Laurel didn't even acknowledge the Gryffindors standing there. She just turned around and followed her sister out of the train car.

No one said anything. Until…

"What was all that noise?" Hugo, his coiling hair matted, emerged from the compartment, looking irritated. "Rose and Lily are trying to sleep and you lot are all shouting at each other like it's a Quidditch match or something! Bloody hell…"

And he slammed the sliding door shut rather forcefully.

"So, Scorpius," Sylvia remarked, trying, as always, to keep the mood light. "I see you've made a new friend."

Scorpius was equal parts amused and nonplussed. "Is that what just happened?"

Indeed, Albus thought, Scorpius had the look of someone who had stepped knee-deep into trouble and was fully aware of it.