Lily decided to go straight home from the beach and apparated to her usual spot in a secluded corner of a park not far from where she lived. She walked between tall, anonymous apartment complexes that had never been the most coveted real estate in the city but had at least once been home to many regular, working-class families. Now they were old and worn down after years without proper maintenance, and the residents consisted of the lowest in society. As the rich and wealthy had started to leave Britain once the number of fatal 'incidents' increased, real estate prices had plummeted, and anyone with a little bit of self-preservation sold whatever they could and moved their family abroad.
Then when the Statue of Secrecy had been broken, people had not even bothered to sell – they had just left. The neighbourhood Lily lived in was not abandoned, but the people living there were beggars and petty criminals, addicts and runaway teens who liked to throw rave parties any day of the week. It was the perfect place for anyone who wanted to be left to their own devices, and since the Death Eaters preferred to place their attacks on wealthy suburbs and rich inner-city districts, this old apartment complex suited Lily perfectly.
A group of teenagers wearing old, tattered clothes were currently occupying the playground next to the building where Lily lived. She sighed inwardly when she spotted them perched on the monkey bars and swings and was just about to reach for her wand to cast a notice-me-not charm when they saw her.
"Got any money?" one of the youths, a boy who couldn't be more than thirteen, shouted after her and jumped down from the monkey bars he had been sitting on. "We could use some for a bag of chips from the shop," he clarified.
He was younger than Harry would have been right now, Lily realised as the boy walked towards her, his face still round and childish but his eyes dark and hardened. Two of the others; a girl with dirty blonde hair in two messy braids and a bulky boy with a black eye and a swollen lip followed.
"No," she replied politely.
The first boy glanced towards Lily's satchel. "Mind if we take a look?" he said and took a challenging step forward.
"Do you have any parents?" Lily asked calmly as the last two of the teenagers joined the others and formed a full circle around her. If she had been a regular muggle woman, she would probably have been uncomfortable by the situation, but Lily had a tight grip on her wand inside her pocket and merely felt annoyed that it would take longer than planned to get home.
"What does it matter to you?" the girl with braids spat, her voice higher and more childish than Lily expected. She could not be more than thirteen either,
"It's nearly midnight, you shouldn't be outside at this hour."
"And if we don't have parents?" The boy who had first approached her asked. "If all our mummies and daddies have been killed by terrorists,
"Have they?" Lily asked.
"None of your business," the boy spat venomously. "Now give us the bag and we'll let you be."
Lily sighed and realised that this discussion was not leading anywhere. She removed her right hand holding her wand from her pocket and pointed it at the boy.
His eyes grew to the size of saucers. "She's a witch!" He managed to shout before Lily's stunner knocked him out as it hit him in the chest.
The others tried to make a run for it, but in a matter of seconds Lily had stunned every single one of them. She levitated the bodies and put them underneath a couple of trees that kept them only slightly more hidden than they had been on the pathway.
Lily obliviated the teenagers as quickly as she could. Even under the trees the playground was much too exposed for her to want to linger, and it was only a matter of time before someone would walk by on the pathway and take notice of the five unconscious teenagers on the ground. Even if people here mostly kept to themselves and did not meddle in other people's business, such a sight might actually compel someone to call the police.
She knew that she was taking too much as she hurried through their memories, and she cursed as she felt a lovely childhood memory of receiving a puppy for Christmas disappear from one of the boy's minds. She was also fairly certain that she had accidentally taken a memory of an exciting first day of school from one of the girls and a first kiss at a school disco from another. Damn, but she really didn't have time to be more careful. Lily refrained from waking them up before she left the playground; the stunners would wear off soon enough, and she wanted to be safe at home in her flat when they did.
"You're a thief, you know, stealing people's memories…"
Lily gasped. The voice in her head was so loud and sounded so real that for a moment Lily thought the man it belonged to was standing there next to her, but when she looked around the playground it was just as abandoned as it had been for the past five minutes, and she realised that it was only her mind playing tricks on her. It did little to untie the knot of guilt that had formed in her stomach, however.
The stairwell in Lily's building smelled faintly of urine when she hurried up the steps to the third floor, but it was at least better than the lift where someone had vomited weeks earlier and no one had bothered to clean it up properly. Lily made it to her floor without running into any of her neighbours and she let out a breath of relief as she unlocked the door and stepped into her flat. She had only been away for a couple of hours but thanks to the building's poor ventilation system it always smelled as if no one had been there for weeks. She flicked the light switch on the wall but the lamp in the ceiling remained unlit. That made the third power failure in as many days, Lily concluded with a sigh and cast a non-verbal lumos instead before going into the kitchen.
Back in her Hogwarts days she had been the most organised person in the entire Gryffindor tower. The other girls in her dorm had spread out clothes all around the room and make-up items in the bathroom, but Lily had always kept her robes neatly folded and her toiletries in her toilet bag. Teenage Lily would probably have been appalled at the state of present-day Lily's flat, and particularly the kitchen.
On the enchanted stove (it was electric, and she did not dare rely on the electricity not disappearing while she was away) three cauldrons with different potions were bubbling, and the kitchen table was cluttered with cutting boards, potion ingredients and potions books filled with handwritten notes in addition to the original recipes. Heavy drapes covered the lone window in the room, barring any natural sunlight to enter the cramped kitchen during daytime, and more importantly keeping any curious eyes away from looking in. Lily walked over to the stove to check on the progress of the potions, and with a quick glance at her notebook on the counter and another at her watch she realised it was time to add powdered bicorn horn to the large copper cauldron. The Order's Polyjuice demand was nearly endless; after some standard healing concoctions that took no time and only little skill to whip up, Polyjuice was their most used potion. The long and delicate brewing process required a lot of attention, and if Lily was late adding an ingredient, adjusting the heat or stirring the potion even once the whole batch would be lost.
In a small, golden cauldron a pale white, nearly translucent potion was simmering on low heat. It was her third Veritaserum attempt this month, and this one had to go well. Her first batch of the potion had been ruined after the entire Order had been called urgently to help out with an emergency in Oxford where a group of Death Eaters had attacked a large lecture hall full of students. The Order had been notified way too late and by the time they had made it there the scene that had met them had been horrific. Row upon row of brutally murdered muggles, most of them in their early twenties who still wore a look of shock and horror on their faces. There had been a couple of survivors, but Lily doubted any of them would ever be well enough mentally to attend university again. As usual there was a number of young women missing. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that the ones who had been brutally murdered on the scene were the lucky ones, but there were never any happy endings for the muggle women who were abducted. Dumbledore had always been vague in his descriptions of the abductions during the meetings, but once he died and Moody was put in charge, the former auror had not withheld any details about the horrible fate those women, and sometimes men, met. Lily should not have been surprised; rape was part of all wars and wizards were no less brutal than muggle men, no matter how much they liked to think so. Once Lily had made it back to the flat after Oxford, the Veritaserum she had been brewing had turned black – a sure sign that it was unsalvageable, and she'd had to start over again only to have her second batch ruined early in the brewing process by a bad jar of lacewing flies.
Once she was certain that her potions needed no further attention, Lily sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and pulled out the small vial of green liquid she had found on Mulligan. She had seen it several times before, and the test she would conduct on it when she had the time and energy was more of a formality to confirm what she already knew. They had started finding it on the bodies of Death Eaters some years ago, and after a series of intricate tests they had been able to determine what it was; a lethal dose of a highly potent snake venom mixed with emerald potion. The snake venom was diluted enough to keep the drinker alive for at least half an hour, while the emerald potion caused delirium, extreme anxiety and agony. Lily had seen the effects of the mixture once on a captured Death Eater who'd manage to take it whilst in Order custody, and even if she thought no person who had willingly sworn themselves to Voldemort deserved to live, no human being deserved to die the way the Death Eater had after ingesting the potion.
It had taken the man close to forty minutes to succumb, and there had been nothing to be done as he agonisingly slowly perished while being in excruciating pain. Afterwards she had made attempts to create an antidote, but finding one for such a complicated mixture required more skill than Lily possessed.
She put the vial away in a kitchen drawer and reached for a notebook to write down the information Mulligan had given. It was important to do it straight away while she still remembered all the details; the Order did not have access to a pensieve anymore, and Lily refused to let anyone inside her mind.
"The first seventh floor corridor to the left…" she said to herself as she wrote it down. Lily struggled to visualise that particular part of Hogwarts; the seventh floor was not much used, and the only class she could remember attending there was arithmancy. That classroom was in the corridor to the right, though, along with an office that had been Flitwick's during Lily's Hogwarts years. She would have to ask the others at the meeting tomorrow. She was fairly sure that the Ravenclaw Tower was accessed from that floor, and they had two former members of that house left in the Order.
The electricity did not return that evening, and when Lily finally went to bed well after two in the morning, she could hear the distinct sound of fighter jets in the skies above. She tried to ignore the anxiety building up inside and attempted to empty her mind to entice sleep to claim her quicker, but she did not manage to fall asleep before the sun had started to rise.
AN: English is not my first language, so some grammar errors and strange word choices might have made their way into the text.