Chapter 2 – New Recruits

12th November 1978

James had never been to the Ministry of Magic before. Despite growing up in a wizarding family, there had never been any reason for him to go, so he was nervous as he travelled to the centre of London.

He'd apparated to the street where the visitor's entrance was located, but there were three telephone booths and he'd had to try all of them before he found the right one. He looked down at the scrawled numbers on the back of his hand and dialled 62442 on the large keypad to be connected to the operator.

Welcome to the Ministry of Magic. Please state the purpose of your visit.

"Er," James said, "I'm here for my first day of Auror training."

The Department of Magical Law Enforcement can be found on the second floor. Please take your pass and have a pleasant visit.

"Oh, thanks." James took the pass that dropped out of the slot, and then the telephone booth rumbled to life and shot downwards. When it shuddered to a halt, he stepped back through the door of the booth and found himself in the atrium.

The dark wooden floor was so polished that James checked his shoes for mud before he stepped any further, noticing that on both sides of him were lines of fireplaces with wizards and witches pouring out of them in flashes of green smoke.

He walked past a large fountain featuring a witch, wizard, centaur, goblin and house elf, and then he had to push through the crowd to reach the front desk. There was a sign saying Welcome Desk in large letters, but the witch standing behind it looked less than welcoming.

"Visitor's pass?" she said when James got to the front of the queue. James held it out and she stamped it. "Second floor."

Her tone was dismissive, so James thanked her before spending far too much time staring around him at the multitude of doors and passages until he eventually found the lifts. It was the morning rush, so he was crushed up against other witches and wizards like pickles in a jar. A pair of owls flew in just before the doors closed, one of them landing on James' shoulder.

"Careful," a witch said to him, "they leaving droppings everywhere."

"Thanks for the warning," James said, glad that the owl flew out when they reached the next level.

With so many people flooding in and out of the lifts, it took several long minutes to make it all the way down to the second floor. He was relieved when he was finally out of the crowded lift and into the open corridor.

However, he became immediately dismayed upon finding that there were no signs anywhere and three corridors stretching out in front of him. Completely clueless about where the Auror Headquarters were, he picked a direction at random. He tried more than once to ask a passing witch or wizard where to go, but everyone seemed to be in too much of a hurry to help him with anything.

James was beginning to panic as he glanced at his watch and saw the minute hand ticking further and further past the time he was supposed to have arrived, so it was with huge relief that he heard a voice behind him call, "Hey, Potter! James!"

He turned to find Frank Longbottom hurrying towards him, giving him an easy smile.

"You have no idea how happy I am to see you," James said. "I'm spectacularly lost. I thought I'd be stuck wandering around here all day."

"It is a bit of a maze," Frank agreed, steering James down a narrow corridor to their right. "But don't worry, I'm running late too, so I'm glad I found you. Moody's less intimidating when you don't have to face his wrath alone."

"Alastor Moody?" James said. "He's here?"

"Oh yeah, he's always around. Been training a lot of the new recruits I think."

"But he's a legend!" James exclaimed. "He's defeated loads of dark wizards! What's he doing training us lot?"

"A very good question!" a voice growled. They had turned a corner into the Auror Headquarters and come face-to-face with Alastor Moody himself. He was around forty, with scraggly hair, a solid build, and scars on every visible bit of skin. "Potter, is it?" Moody said gruffly.

"That's me!" James found himself beaming at him.

"Get in here then, the pair of you," Moody said. "And don't be late again! I've got better things to do than wait around for you to saunter in whenever you feel like it."

With a flick of Moody's wand, the door slammed shut behind them. He led them through to his office, an extremely cluttered room full of an array of magical objects James didn't recognise. The desk was stacked with papers that looked like they had largely been ignored, if the layer of dust on some of them was anything to go by. Moody looked at the desk with something akin to distrust before he pulled a chair out and sat down heavily.

"Damned leg," he muttered as he rubbed his knee. The hem of his trouser came up and James noticed that he had a wooden leg. "Right then, Potter." Moody picked up a folder with James' name on it and gave it the briefest of glances before thinking better of it. "I'll be straight with you. You got this far because of your grades, but I don't give a damn about any of that. What you need now is guts, good sense, quick learning, and watchfulness. If you've got those, you'll do just fine. If not, you'll be out of here in no time. You got that?"

"Yes sir," James said quickly. If possible, he was grinning even more than before. Moody had said exactly what James had wanted to hear: being an Auror wasn't about grades, it was about action.

Moody gave him a long, hard look before he asked, "What Hogwarts house were you in?"

"Gryffindor," James said. "Home of the brave and mighty."

"Of course you were." Moody looked unimpressed. "Now listen here, just because this job requires bravery doesn't mean that courage is all that matters. Rushing into a fight without considering your options is what gets most young Aurors killed. Don't be one of them."

"Right. I won't be," James said, with somewhat less certainty than before.

"Hmm." Moody stared at him for several long seconds before he barked, "Longbottom! You've been here long enough to know a thing or two. Show Potter around."

"Sure," Frank said. He didn't seem quite as awed by Moody as James was.

"Off with you then!" Moody said. The two of them backed out of his office quickly, leaving Moody to stare at a stack of papers with distaste.

"He's amazing," James said as soon as the door was shut behind them. "I can't believe I just met Alastor Moody. He must be the most famous Auror alive. And he's training us!"

"Yeah, we're lucky," Frank replied. "He doesn't normally do this sort of thing, but he lost his leg about a month ago and since then he's been side-lined until he's recovered. I heard the head of Magical Law Enforcement tried to get him to take a few months off but Moody refused, so we got him instead."

"Wow," James said. "You've been here a few weeks, right? What's he been teaching you? Have you been out in the field yet?"

Frank snorted. "Hardly. He may not be one for theory and discussion and all that but he doesn't let anyone go into a dangerous situation until they're ready. He's been teaching me a lot of curses and defensive magic, though. I've learnt more since I got here than I did in seven years of defence against the dark arts."

"Wow," James said again.

"Yeah, he's a great teacher." Frank paused to point out the training room, with walls of very solid-looking stone and rows of dummies with blast marks on them. When they moved on, he said, "Alice keeps saying she's jealous of me being taught by him, but she didn't want to go down the Auror route. Did she tell you and Lily that she's doing an internship at the Daily Prophet?"

"No, she didn't, but that's great! I get the feeling the Prophet hasn't been telling the full story lately."

"That's what she's been saying," Frank said, frowning. "Lily's training to be a healer, right?"

"Yeah," James said proudly. "She started last month."

They stopped at a room with a large fireplace and a row of desks smaller than Moody's. Frank explained that it was the only place other than the atrium with a connection to the floo network. He started pointing people out until James spotted a familiar face.

"Kingsley!" he said.

Kingsley looked up from the folder on his desk and smiled.

"Well look who it is," he said, standing up to greet them. "Seems like half of Gryffindor has ended up here lately."

"Kingsley's already halfway through his training," Frank explained. "Unlike me, he actually got organised as soon as we left school and came right here. I wish I'd done the same instead of faffing about for a year."

"Wait, you're only halfway through?" James said. "You mean it takes two years to complete the training?"

"At least that," Kingsley said. "Sometimes it takes three. Depends how quickly you progress. Moody doesn't mess around, though – he's not that bothered about formal assessment. I've advanced much further since he took over my training. I think he wants Aurors trained as quickly as possible, what with everything that's been going on." He paused. "I heard about Chloe Bailey, by the way. She was a good kid."

"Yeah." James' grin disappeared. "Yeah, she was."

Silence fell – but it didn't last long. Moments later, Moody rushed into the room, his wand drawn.

"There's been an attack," he shouted. "Death eaters by the sounds of it. Muggleborns in danger. Let's go, and remember – constant vigilance!"

Suddenly the witches and wizards who had been chatting and doing paperwork just moments before sprang into action. With their wands at the ready and steely determination on their faces, they looked like a force to be reckoned with.

"Alastor, you shouldn't be coming on this mission," a middle-aged witch said sharply, but Moody didn't listen.

"Do you think I'm going to sit here while innocent people are dying?" Moody snarled. He rapped on his wooden leg. "This thing isn't going to stop me."

James started following everyone towards the fireplace, but Kingsley put a hand on his shoulder. "Where do you think you're going? It'll be months until you're ready for this sort of thing. You need to stay here."

"But you heard Moody – there are people in danger!"

"Potter," Moody said, and James felt a flicker of hope before he continued, "stay here with Longbottom. The start of your training will have to wait until tomorrow."

"But you just said yourself that you can't sit around while people are being killed," James protested, "and neither can I. I need to do something – to help."

"What you need is to stay alive long enough to complete your training," Moody said, his tone firm. "This is too dangerous. Kingsley, with me. Longbottom, make sure Potter stays here."

Kingsley gave James an apologetic look as he grabbed a handful of floo powder and disappeared after the others.

"We can't just do nothing!" James said when he and Frank were the only ones left. "They can't really expect us to just sit back while this sort of thing happens again and again."

Frank shrugged. "I don't like it either, but Moody's right. We're no help to anyone if we're not prepared and get ourselves killed."

James knew that, realistically, this made sense. But when he thought of muggles dying at the hands of death eaters, when he thought how Chloe – a sixteen-year-old who had been his friend– had died the same way, all sense fled.

If he had to prepare for months or years before he could fight, if he had to just sit around doing paperwork while people got hurt, then what was the point of training to be an Auror in the first place?

Lily wiped her sweaty hands on her lime green uniform, sighing heavily. She had been a trainee healer for almost a month now, and up until recently everything had been going perfectly well. This week however, she had been assigned to the fourth floor – spell damage. She'd quite enjoyed working on the wards dedicated to creature induced injuries and plant poisons – it had been hectic but Lily had always been a quick learner, and there was something exhilarating about the rush of healers scrambling to think of the most effective spells to cure the stings of obscure magical creatures or the uncontrollable giggling brought on my being too close to certain plants.

Her couple of days working with magical bugs and diseases had been a different kind of experience all together. A lot of the conditions they dealt with were contagious, and Lily had held the hand of an old witch on her fourth day on the job, trying to comfort her while an experience healer told her she had dragon pox.

Lily had only ever been to a hospital a handful of times before considering her career – when her sister had had her tonsils removed, or when her grandfather had been old and ill. At first glance, the muggle hospitals she'd visited hadn't seemed much different to St. Mungo's, but Lily quickly realised that wasn't the case. Many of her older colleagues – pureblood witches and wizards who had worked as healers for years – regarded healing as vastly superior to muggle medicine. Lily knew that magic certainly had its advantages, leaving a lot of muggle aliments easily treatable or simply non-existent in wizarding communities, but in the few days she'd spent dealing with spell damage she had been faced with the stark reality not just of the good that healing magic could do, but of the horror that curses and hexes could cause. In particular, Lily dreaded having to visit the Janus Thickey ward, where a handful of patients with lasting spell damage lived permanently, many of them being too badly injured to remember who they were before dark magic had changed their lives forever.

Lily was leaning against the wall in the corridor just outside the main ward when she heard a commotion that immediately told her something was very, very wrong.

The voices of an army of healers filtered through the corridors and Lily pushed herself away from the wall just in time to see them round the corner.

They were floating five stretchers between them, moving as quickly as they could while still trying to be careful. Lily noticed that as well as levitating the patients, several of the healers were also already muttering healing charms under their breaths, the concentration giving their eyes a glazed, haunted look.

Belatedly, Lily pulled her wand out of her robes, blasting open the doors to the ward to allow the healers through.

She followed them with a growing feeling of dread in her stomach, watching as if from far away as a number of other healers already on the ward jumped up to help, acting with far more intuition and urgency than Lily felt capable of.

"Lily!"

The shout came from the witch who was the healer in charge of the ward, and Lily was momentarily startled at being addressed so informally.

"Evans, focus."

Lily blinked, Sister Carter was staring at her insistently while a dozen other people swarmed around her, shouting healing spells and pushing potions into one another's hands. Both of Carter's hands were clasped over a wound on the chest of a woman who was lying on a newly made bed.

Shaking herself, Lily darted to her side, where she could clearly see the jagged gash that stretched from the woman's abdomen right up to her collar bone. The majority of the curses that Lily had read about in defence against the dark arts, though painful, left little physical evidence, so the sight of the woman's blood, spilling more quickly than the healers could replenish with a potion, made Lily's stomach lurch. Clearly whoever had inflicted this wound had wanted to make a show of it – had wanted the woman to suffer.

"Hold this while I try to close the wound," Sister Carter instructed, and for the first time Lily heard the strained edge to her voice as she spoke.

Lily took the gauze, pressing down against the woman's stomach. "What happened?" she asked desperately as Carter began a complicated string of incantations.

"Another attack."

The answer came from a first year healer who Lily had already spoken to a number of times since she started at St. Mungo's. She peered as far as she could over her shoulder to catch sight of him and saw that he was holding a thick purple potion in shaking hands.

"It's the third this month on muggleborns," he said, the words tainted with a fear that Lily knew all too well. She wanted to respond, but he was quickly pulled away by the healer dealing with one of the other victims. It was only when Lily cast her eyes across the row of beds that she realised the patients were a family. The woman she was trying to help must be the mother, she thought, looking for the first time at her face. She was maybe in her 40s, with thick black hair and the beginnings of thin lines around the corners of her eyes. Beside her was a man of a similar age, another, lighter skinned woman, and two near identical teenagers who looked almost the same age as Lily herself. Only one of them was conscious.

She was pulled out of her thoughts when Sister Carter shifted beside her, distress evident on her face.

"This isn't working," she was muttering to herself. "Why isn't it working?"

"What isn't working?" Lily asked.

"Look at your hands."

Lily did. Even from under the layers of gauze she was holding against the woman's chest, blood had still managed to soak through and coat her skin.

"The spells aren't working; I can't close the wound."

The declaration was followed by a momentarily lull in sound, a second where the healers who had been working frantically to mend bones and ease pain were united in silent horror.

"The curse – I've never seen anything like this. It's like whenever I try to stop the bleeding, something pushes back and stops me. I don't -"

She paused, utterly at a loss. "I don't know if there's anything we can do."

James had been home for hours. There had been nothing for him and Frank to do, since all the qualified Aurors had left to deal with the death eater attack, so they had left while it was only mid-morning.

It was now late evening, and Lily still wasn't home. Her shift at St Mungo's was supposed to end at 5pm, and he had been sitting by the front door waiting for her as the flat grew dark around him.

He hadn't been able to eat all day, his stomach already feeling full with the heavy weight of dread that had never quite left since Chloe's death. Too restless to stay still, he had spent most of the day pacing back and forth across their small living room until he finally sank into a chair and stayed there.

Some of his worry lifted when he heard a key in the door. When Lily stepped inside, she looked haggard, wisps of hair escaping from the knot at the back of her head and purple rings circling her eyes.

"James."

His name slipped out before Lily had even spotted him, and in an instant he was beside her, eyes full of concern.

"Are you okay?" he asked urgently as she wrapped her arms around him, letting herself fall into the warmth of his embrace.

"I don't know," she replied. "God, I just – I don't know if I can deal with this."

"Come and sit down," James said, guiding her to their new sofa, neither of them feeling particularly inclined to move away from one another. Lily sank down onto the leather like she'd never move again.

"What happened?"

Lily shook her head. She tried to push back the strands of hair that were falling into her face, but they stubbornly remained stuck to her forehead. In the end she pulled the scrunchy out of her hair, feeling slightly more like herself despite the lingering flecks of blood she could feel on her skin.

"Lily?"

"There was an attack on a family of muggleborns today and they were brought in," she told him, her voice sounding strangely calm even to herself. "Two of them are recovering but the other three… This is just going to keep happening and those bastards make sure we can't heal the people they hurt. And it's terrible but all the way home I haven't even been thinking about the people we couldn't save, I've just been wondering how long it'll be until it's someone else we love." She turned to him, wanting an answer she knew he couldn't give. "James…"

"I know," he said. "All the Aurors went to help, but they wouldn't let me go with them." Lily leant her head against his shoulder and he gently ran his fingers through her tangled hair. "I thought it would be different once we left Hogwarts, you know? I thought we'd be able to do more."

"So did I," Lily replied softly, "but I still feel so useless."

"I just wish we didn't have to do all this training. I want to make a difference now."

"I know, but you have to be safe."

"Why?" James asked petulantly, and Lily took her head from his shoulder to look at him. "No one else is safe – muggles and muggleborns are getting hurt all the time. It's not fair for me to just sit back and wait around because I'm a pureblood. I don't want to be safe if people I care about are in danger."

His jaw was set and his eyes were bright, not just with anger but with a fierce determination.

"You're an idiot, James Potter," Lily told him affectionately. "I want you to fight, okay? But I have to know you're safe, that we'll both be okay."

"We will," James said confidently. "We're stronger than they are."