Sirius arrives before dawn. It's all been arranged. Lily casts the disillusionment charm herself and Severus opens the door for them under the guise of some other travel that will take him elsewhere with crates of potion, giving them ample time to slip out.
Outside, Lily realizes that the snow has melted and spring has begun in earnest. Winter's bite still chases her ankles under her traveling cloak in the ethereal glow of pre-dawn, but there are stems bursting the last crust of ice over the earth. She tries to exhale through her nose so as not to make visible steam with her breath in the cold air.
Severus stands on the top step, looking like nothing so much as a hawk surveying a meadow of voles. She can hear Sirius descend, faint footfalls on the stair from the front door, but she isn't quite ready to follow him to the edge of the wards yet.
It's easier now that Sirius is invisible, too. She snakes one hand around Severus', interlacing their fingers for a half an instant, pressing a particular rolled scrap of parchment into his hand. She whispers toward his ear, "I've made you a gift." The words make a tiny cloud that caresses the edge of his cheek.
He can't respond. He won't break cover like that, not out where anyone could see-where Sirius can see. But his face inclines ever so slightly toward her position, his fingers curl around the parchment, and his eyes flick past her face as if he can see it. A bittersweet half-smile pulls at the edges of his mouth for a breath, as if he's just remembered something beautiful and long-gone, before he returns to impassivity.
Lily pulls her fingers free and follows Sirius to the walk. He fumbles for her arm, and she holds on tight as he steps forward and out of Cokeworth.
The crack of their appearance doesn't even much disturb the heavy air, warmer than Cokeworth by several degrees and thick with the smell of frozen and thawed rot.
"Ugh," she says, taking one full putrid breath and regretting it immediately. "Where have you brought me?"
"Near our place," Sirius says brightly. He glances up and down the alley to confirm they're alone, then removes a hand mirror from his pocket and directs his wand to his own face. The Disillusionment fades, quickly replaced by Transfiguration guided by the mirror; a lengthening of the nose, thinning of the cheeks, minor changes to make him appear more like his brother. Gray eyes flash up at her behind the transformations: "Lovely, innit?"
"No," Lily says, pulling the collar of her shirt up above her cloak to block the stench. "How do you stand this? Is this where you Apparate from?"
"Smells better to a person's nose than to a dog's, so by comparison to my usual it's roses," he says cheerily. His voice shifts mid-sentence to Regulus' higher, softer tone. "What, you've been sitting on perfumed pillows in that house so long you can't stand a little London?"
"Perfumed pillows?" Lily hasn't been in the city in years, but the offense is open on her face.
Sirius snaps the mirror shut and tucks it away, straightening his robes on his thinned frame. "It always seemed like you had it pretty good over there. Hardly any cleaning, hardly any guests, Snape not letting you in that lab where the real messy work gets done for so long-"
With his wand trained on her, he began the changes. Her body stays the same, since her build isn't unusual; she was perhaps better-fed than the average muggleborn servant but the dress hides enough and Sirius hollows her cheeks to suggest less health than her body truly had.
"Sirius, you had no idea how I had it over there." She felt her nose snap to the side and re-set itself into the previously-broken, crooked shape they had decided on yesterday.
"Snape lets you have run of the place. Reg won't even let me sleep in his bed and keeps me out of the roasts. Makes me clean up my own fur off the divan-" Her hair went mousy brown, eyes dulled to a murky hazel, and the alterations were complete: she was no one just as much as he was his brother. Sirius tucks his wand away and spreads his hands. "I'm joking, Lily."
It seems to her that it is the kind of joke meant to probe at something real, but she lets it go. "How's that going, then? Regulus will have to pick up after his own pet."
Sirius moves to the end of the alley, and Lily follows a demure few steps behind. The streets are empty at this early hour, but he pulls his collar up to protect his neck from the wind. "Oh, it's sure to be hilarious. I'm sorry I'm going to miss most of it."
"I bet when you told him how to get dog fur out of velvet he almost fainted," Lily murmurs, watching both the street and Sirius from under her lashes.
Satisfied that they are unwatched, Sirius strides silently forth, flicking his fingers to beckon her on after him. "That's nothing. When it licked his face I thought it sucked his soul right out. Turns out Reg hates real dogs."
The way Lily stifles the laugh is a thoroughly inelegant and unladylike snort, but it works better than letting out a peal of laughter on a silent, chilly street, even while looking like no one.
The transfigurations are mild enough that they will wear off slowly, and it was for the best given the depleted store of polyjuice and the uncertainty whether they would need it or, worse, if the Dark Lord would call upon their stock. Too much went to the construct and both she and Severus knew it. But Sirius is more than adept at the art to give them new faces, and that was enough.
The office they come to at the end of their brisk walk through the empty streets of London is small, stuffy, and overwarm. The hearth at the far end of the room is blazing and her cloak is still suited to winter. At the desk sits a small blonde wizard, yawning, chin on his fist.
Sirius slides a parchment across the desk silently, the skull-and-snake insignia on its corner glowing faintly.
The wizard at the desk completes a long and languorous yawn and then blinks sleepily at Sirius' transfigured face before giving a start. "Master Black?"
If the young man knew the difference between Regulus and Sirius, the arch eyebrow Sirius gives him now would give things away. As it stands, it merely serves to stir him to a flurry of action.
"I'm so sorry-you see it's just the end of my shift, Master Black, I'm on the overnight and my relief is late and-I didn't mean to do anything-"
Sirius does an excellent job of looking bored more than amused. "The portkey?"
"Of course, sir. Right away, sir." He bustles away to a closet to rummage.
Sirius glances over his shoulder at Lily and flashes a grin.
Lily mouths back, knitting her brow in mock-seriousness: Master Black!
The little wizard bustles back in with a lovely, if slightly tarnished, candelabra. "I'm so sorry this is all I could come up with, it's not exactly-"
"It will do," Sirius says, all flat business once more.
"-of course, I didn't mean to imply-I mean, of course." The strained smile on the man's face looks brittle, at the verge of shattering. He approaches the desk again and lifts the parchment, eyes scanning it without reading it more than once. "Brussels, is it? Quite a ways! What could possibly take you to Brussels?"
A slow, deliberate glance over his shoulder towards Lily, whose eyes were downcast and humbled once more the second the man emerged from the closet, and then his gaze fixes the wizard again. "Business," he says coldly. The implication is clear, and the answer utterly obfuscated.
"Right!" the wizard says, his voice a nervous squeak. "Of course! And everything here looks in order with the consulate there." He lets out a nervous titter, passing the candelabra from one hand to the other. His eyes move downward and he seems startled to be holding the thing still. He fumbles his wand once, twice in the stiff stillness of his own tension, and taps the candelabra. "Portus." It flashes a sickly yellow, and he shakes his wand out, looking concerned. "I'm sorry, I-I don't think that took right. The feeling isn't-finite. Portus." The sickly yellow again, and that nervous titter again, even higher in pitch and twice as brittle. "I'm so sorry, it doesn't seem-"
"Take a breath, man," Sirius says in a clipped tone. "Perhaps more than one."
"Quite!" He lets out a breathless little laugh. "Finite." He takes in one deep breath, then another, and then says quite firmly, "Portus."
The candelabra glows a bright, affirmative green. Looking relieved, the wizard sets it on the desk between them. "Thank you so much for your patience, I'm just a little nervous, it's not every day that-"
Ignoring him, Sirius reaches back casually and takes Lily's wrist in a firm but not unkind grasp. He puts her hand on the portkey at the same time as his own. A violent tug, and they are pulled out of the office-
-and into a new one, similar, dark, overwarm, both hands on the candelabra, where another wizard simlarly shaped but brunette, this time, starts to his feet, cursing in incomprehensible Dutch.
A green light from his desk interrupts him and, burning in reverse, the parchment Sirius had slid across the desk in London appears. At the sight of the glowing insignia, the man halts completely.
Sirius releases her wrist and sets the candelabra down firmly on the desk, waiting for this new attendant to complete his perusal of his paperwork. This one looks up more than once, not recognizing Regulus on sight, but he does recognize the name-or at least, the skull and snake.
"Ach. My counterpart in London failed to send the documentation ahead. My apologies." His English is accented, but easy, and he is less flustered. After a moment, he speaks again. "Everything appears in order here, Master Black."
Sirius nods, gives a gesture to Lily, and sweeps out the door.
Brussels is a close-packed city, old and steep and decorated the way Muggle cities swollen with commerce had become after the statute of secrecy locked magic away from the populace and fear of consolidation-fear of errant Fiendfyre, fear of a sleeping geas, fear of an end that could not be defended against-had left them.
That fear returned, it's clear. It had returned in broken windows, in flags above the parliament replaced with a snake that twined lazily around a glowing skull. Dawn breaks across the city and still the streets are almost empty. Those that move are small, quiet, hunched. No one is willing to see their faces, which renders their disguises nearly superfluous. You can't be forced to inform on your neighbors if you refuse to see them.
It's a mile, if Lily had to guess, and then two, winding an indirect path. They duck into alleys to Apparate twice. Her boots chafe at her little toe. The seam in the end of her socks rubs uncomfortably across her toes. Housework may have kept her nimble and from going to rot-muscles in her arms could attest to the weight of sodden laundry done by hand on a washboard-but it hadn't done much for her endurance.
Sirius doesn't look back, not once, until they come to the edge of a long street. Neighborhoods have been declining by degrees, into a new kind of decay that Lily suspects predates the war. The windows are shuttered and then the buildings become vast and windowless. It reminds her of Cokeworth, in a way, of Spinner's End and the indelible stain the mill left on all the houses. She had only been there a few times-once, when Severus was sick; a few times one summer in the dead of night to work on spells; once, in the summer she was seventeen, the week after the Hogwarts Express had left them at the station, to silently return a book she'd found in her trunk. He'd slammed the door in her face and the doors, here, look like that.
There is a low brick building across from a train track and Sirius performs a piece of complex wandwork before the door. Glancing up and down the street, he performs a knock: twice firmly, a pause, three times, another pause, and then two more.
A slit opens in the door, exposing narrowed brown eyes. "And you would be?"
His face is Regulus', still, but the grin is all Sirius, sly and preening. "A friend," he says.
The voice replies, sharp, "We haven't seen one of those return in quite a while."
It's some kind of coded passphrase, Lily understands. She remembers this.
Sirius says, "That's the nature of the phoenix."
The eyes flick over his shoulder, finally, to Lily's changed face. "And that one?"
He isn't expecting that. "Her? Don't worry. Trust me, you'll be glad to see her."
The eyes don't look less suspicious, but the woman behind them does unlatch the door, and they enter.
The place must have been a warehouse or a factory; the building is split into two floors, utterly unmagical, no expansion, nothing to speak of, with chipping paint covering the brick in a dingy gray. There are makeshift beds on top of a large kitchen, and stores and supplies shelved as far as the eye can see.
The woman knits the wards Sirius undid up behind them faster than should even be possible. She's short, square, red-haired and frowning. "A new one? We've nothing arranged, but we have the room just now, but not for long. How long will she be staying?"
"I'll be taking her with me, actually."
"And where are you headed, then?"
"Business." His wand passes over his face and the Transfiguration fades, replacing itself with his real face, the smile there now better suited to the features. "It's the real thing, Molly, something real we can fight for instead of holding ground, but we can't tell you the details. We're only stopping through for brooms."
Molly. That struck a gong under the dark and impenetrable lake of her past. But the last name, that had changed and she knew it, she could hold on to that-
"Molly Weasley?" Lily asks.
The sharp brown eyes are back on hers again, narrowed, untrusting. "And where would you have heard that name?"
"I don't know." And it's the truth; while the years 1979 to 1981 have started to surface, slow and murky as seen through water, Molly's face is different. She's harder now than she ever was, as if the soft woman she'd known at Order meetings (sitting next to a hole in her memory, an emptiness that laid its hand on her knee) had been a clay mold for this woman before her.
Sirius moves close to her. "Hold still," he says, and his wand passes over her, and she can feel her face changing back to her own.
Molly Weasley lets out a gasp and very nearly drops her want. "Lily? Lily Potter?"
She shrugs, giving a crooked smile with as much truth as she has. "So I'm told."
"I thought-oh, Merlin's beard, we weren't sure, I thought you were cursed or worse-living all this time under the thumb of that detestable Snape boy-" She flings her arms around Lily's neck as though they're old friends.
Lily stiffens, but lets it happen. She had been prepared to keep their purpose secret easily enough; she hadn't been prepared to meet half-remembered friends who recalled her a wife and mother when she herself did not. Over Molly's shoulder, she cocks a brow at Sirius: does she know?
A tiny, almost imperceptible shake of the head, and there's a smile on Sirius' face but it's rigid, and the mirth has evaporated from his eyes.
Molly's been babbling into her shoulder, and finally pulls away, saying, "Aren't you just a sight. Look healthy, too, that's a relief he isn't starving you. Half the girls come through here looking like they've just survived a famine." Molly glares over her shoulder at Sirius. "That's how I go through so much so fast, by the way, and be sure to let your brother know. Either get his friends to start feeding them or expect me to keep running out. I won't ration them, not after what they've been through. I'd sooner go hungry myself." Her hands are smoothing at her apron. "But why are you here, both of you?"
"Like Sirius said," Lily picks up. "Business. Sorry. Can't tell you any of it, it would put everyone in danger."
"Of course, of course. But-does this mean you've managed to get Snape under the Imperius, then?"
Lily smiles, and touches a finger to her lips to imply a secret, and it's for both Molly and Sirius. "He's tractable."
"Good," Molly says with a sudden fierceness. "Good. You know what he's done more than any of us. Anything short of the Killing Curse is too kind by half."
This line of conversation is dangerous; much as she might agree with any criticism levied at Severus' character-and there are several that leap to mind-she certainly doesn't want him dead. He's useless dead.
Sirius interjects. "Much as we'd love to stay and eat your cooking, Molly, we need to keep moving if we want to get where we're going. The brooms?"
"Of course, of course." She bustles away.
From the second floor, through a railing, a small and freckled face is peering down at her, chewing absently on a finger.
"I forgot, I'm sorry, I should have figured she'd remember you," Sirius is murmuring in her ear, but Lily holds up a hand to stop him.
"Hello," Lily calls to the boy at the railing. "What's your name?"
"This is Ron," another voice calls behind the boy. Still a child's voice, exuberant, curious, and a face to match overtopping his younger brother. "And I'm Fred!"
Another one, to match the second, identical, punches the first on the shoulder. "No, I'm Fred!"
"Boys!" Molly calls up warningly from somewhere deep in the warehouse.
"She said hi first!" the first Fred cries.
Lily means to support their claim but she can't take her eyes off the smallest one, the one staring at her. He looks about three, maybe a little skinny for his age but growing apace. He's the same age as the Malfoy boy. The same age as-
"Don't mind them," Molly says, returning with two brooms in tow. "They know to hide, they don't make too much noise. Bill keeps them in line well enough."
Inside herself, she reaches for something, anything; a memory of weight in her arms, a cry from a crib, anything to help her bridge the chasm of loss opening inside of her. There's nothing there to reach for, it all runs through her hands like water, but staring at the boy she realizes there is another woman there inside of her, another Lily with her eyes open and weeping and watching the boy through her own eyes. The room goes hazy. Tears, she realizes, drawn from that dark and deep wellspring of forgetting inside her, drawn in place of memory.
Lily freezes it over without even meaning to.
Lily swallows once, twice, not looking at Molly, but her mouth's gone dry. "How old are they?"
Molly's face melts to pity, which is detestable but better than the alternative, and her eyes go to whatever is happening on Lily's face to Sirius and then back to Lily's face, which she can't even feel right now. "Oh, you poor dear, I'm so sorry, I didn't even think- Boys! Back to your rooms now, on the double, we have grown-up things to discuss."
"We're grown-ups, Ron's the baby!" But the two Freds retreat as a party, tugging the smallest behind them. Lily watches the youngest disappear and something inside her goes back to sleep again.
There's a moment of silence, listening for the small feet padding backwards into the makeshift bunks. "The twins'll be six this year, and Ron will be four." Molly's voice is low, sweet, kind as balm, and Lily hates it. "Ron and Harry would have been-"
"I know," Lily says, unable to stand another pitying word. It comes out tighter than she means it. She focuses on Molly, forcing out a smile that doesn't even convince herself. "Thank you."
A few minutes later, they are disillusioned and on the brooms, rising into the mid-morning sky in silence together, leaving the tiny brick box and all its children behind.
"The way you looked at those kids, I thought you were going to kidnap the lot of them," Sirius says easily.
"Considered it. I think I'm probably a rubbish mother, though." It's easier to say, here, to an invisible man flying next to her, with the wind pulling at her hair.
"You weren't," Sirius says.
"Good mothers don't let their children get killed."
They're flying low and slow and close together enough to hear the shock in his voice. "You didn't-that wasn't your fault."
Lily longs for a change in subject. "That man in London seemed scared of you. Of Regulus, anyway. Why?"
She can't see him at her side, but she can hear him wondering if he's going to let it pass. He does, with confusion in his voice. "He's a Death Eater."
"Don't be dense. That's not the only reason for all that fear. Is Regulus particularly vicious or something? I can't imagine that."
"Course not. Just-well, imagine how it looks to someone who doesn't know."
The wind pulls at her hair while she does. "That warehouse looked fitted out to hold at least a dozen, and to supply a great deal more for travel."
"The bed situation was a little optimistic, but it's good for when we can grab a whole family, or a blood-traitor couple, or a child and muggle siblings."
That brings things into sharper focus. "So they all assume he's Macnair with more vile tastes."
The sound of disgust Sirius makes deep in his throat makes her laugh. "Keep things below his level and Regulus will only be considered the second most heartless, depraved man in all of London."
"What was that about children and siblings? I think that qualifies as most depraved."
Sirius lets out a curse. "That's disgusting."
"Well, what else is there to think?"
"Reg is a researcher, not a- deviant. That's his place in all of it, in the books. Researching ancient artifacts of power, going back in bloodlines, legitimizing people as wizards or not."
Lily mutters darkly, "Yes, I'm sure that's never got anyone killed."
Sirius' tone turns nasty. "Not as many as Snape's poisons. Not as many as the polyjuice, or the people he saved with that cursebreaker potion he dreamed up who went on to kill more of the Order, or any of the rest of it."
"And what would a researcher need to go through so many servants for, then?"
If Sirius were visible, she's sure he'd be scowling. "Experiments," he says eventually.
His reluctance is worth pulling on. "Like what?"
"For a long while Reg was told to figure out how to remove magic completely from a muggle-born and put it into something else-a crown or a wand, a muggle, another wizard. He didn't try, just shipped them off and said they kept dying. Texts supported that, anyway. But that work petered out about a year ago in favor of looking for artifacts, working with them, and that's…"
She waits for him. She can be patient. They duck a flock of birds emerging from a copse of trees. Once they reach altitude again, her patience pays its due.
His voice is grim. "Ancient artifacts tend to have ancient curses we can't even begin to unwind, not even with the two of us. Sometimes the only solution is to discharge the curse on someone and hope we can heal them."
And there it is: the chess game again. Pawns sacrificed in the name of appearances. "Of course."
This is an argument he's had before, it's clear, but he's still angry at the vile compromise. "We can't give him nothing."
"I know." The blood shed at Beauxbatons is on her hands too. It was, after all, still a poison, and she had brewed it. "And who makes the decision? Who decides who takes the curse?"
"They do," he says, but it comes too quickly. "We don't ask anyone to do anything that-"
The trap closes. "Oh, you don't ask, but you offer options, is that it? 'Touch this cursed crown, suffer the consequences, and maybe we can see if we can get you and your children to safety?' What exactly do you think Severus offered me?"
"It's not- what?"
"What do you think Severus offered me, when he locked it all away behind the memory charm?"
Sirius seems to be stymied by this. "Didn't think he'd asked at all," he says finally.
"He did." Well, Severus says he had, and she believes him. Knowing the memory charm was breaking, if it were a lie, he'd know it to be a lethal lie to tell, and Lily trusts Severus' cockroachy sense of self-preservation more than her own mind most days. "Know that, before you go off next time on what he's guilty of. There's a list but that isn't on it. The rest-he's making the same calculations as you two are, I'd reckon. So if you deserve indulgence, so does he."
Sirius grumbles. "An inquisition, is this?"
"No." She keeps her tone even, offers up something he'll like the taste of more. "You won't refuse me or stay quiet or storm off, so I ask. You're not Severus."
"Is that what he does?"
The truth will serve. "Sometimes. Generally after he's let something slip that he didn't mean to, or after I've given him a good verbal thrashing."
"Sounds about right."
It's a nothing-statement, practically an engraved invitation to further inquiry. "So you've got a muggleborn, they're ready to disappear. I can gather they go through Brussels from London. How long do they stay?"
"Long as they have to. Sometimes it takes months to get something set up elsewhere and chart a path, and we can't do it all ourselves."
"And after that?"
"Why, are you looking to compete? Start a smuggling business as well?"
It's been so easy to get information out of him up to this point that she's a bit surprised at his sudden resistance. "No. Wouldn't make sense for Severus to start going through muggleborns when he's been satisfied with the same one all this time. It'd draw attention."
"Then why are you so curious?"
Because Severus won't tell her enough, and there's no other safe way to know. To fix this world she has to know its face. "I'm thinking about what happens if we have to run. All the packed bags in the world don't help us if we don't have somewhere to go."
He considers for a moment. "Australia's been safe, if you can make it there. Canada and the Americas are harder to get into. We've actually managed to get some goblins to help us truck them through to some safer parts of the Middle East, they get settled down properly there with a little bit of the Black gold to ease the transition. Goblins don't much care what the work is as long as they're getting paid for it, and our contracts are ironclad, Reg sees to that. Contracts are complicated enough to take a while to understand-all about moving goods, not specifying people-and I'm the signer so it doesn't run directly back to Reg if some rat busts into Gringotts and starts going through the paperwork." His voice dips, and he must have dropped to skim a copse of trees before returning to her side, leaving branches whipping in his wake. "Can you believe, though, the Americas and the Soviet Union are still going at it? Proxies, of course, but you'd think with the Statute blown they'd care more about magic."
"Has it really been blown?"
"What, the Statute of Secrecy? Of course. You can't take over half of Europe and maintain that level of deception. Not enough Obliviators in the world, and too many cameras these days."
Lily chews on that. All the fuss and bother-all her summers spent not doing magic when all she and Severus wanted to be doing was magic-and now it's over. Children doing magic in the streets, whenever they pleased, in sight of whomever they pleased.
Well. Not all the children. But there's something else to explore in that. "What about the muggles? It's not the Dark Ages, there are weapons-hydrogen bombs, nuclear bombs, things like that?."
"Oh, they tried that. Someone had enough sense to ask Reg to look into it, once the war got too big, during the planning stages of the Battle for London."
"And?"
"They fired one. Just one, after London was lost. Bunch of Death Eaters on brooms turned it into a whale and let it fall into the ocean. We heard he sent a very nice note saying the next would just turn around and head back to where it was fired from. They didn't try it again after that."
She could almost laugh. Muggle Governments were at least quick enough to not try playing checkers against an adversary playing chess. "And I imagine the other schools, over there, are probably in on things now? Protecting borders, shoring things up?"
"Probably. Not our department, though. Soviets liked it less, what with Durmstrang being in their bounds, but they seem willing enough to cede territory rather than fight another war on another front. You-know-who wants the rest of Europe first, anyway."
Of course he does. They fly in silence for a while. "So where to now? You said London, Brussels, but now where are we heading?"
"Frankfurt. Well-near Frankfurt. Little town called Hahn, Muggles used to have an air base there."
"And now?"
She can hear the shrug in his voice. "It's a sleepy little town that used to have an air base. The hangar is good to lie low in, it's where I went after- bear north a little, we want to avoid this town."
Below them, the world is dappled with trees and houses and streets that seem to come in waves. Highways stripe the countryside but the further they get from Brussels the fewer they become, and the more wild the countryside is. A town will crest and then fall away beneath them; another church-spire will appear in the distance and disappear just as quickly, never seeming to come any closer. They gain and gain and gain altitude as the countryside becomes increasingly mountainous. They stop for lunch on a mountainside, trading sugared barbs over whose cooking is better, Lily's or Sirius' old house-elf's. By the time the sun is setting, Sirius has corrected her flight path more than once, and Lily is sore and exhausted from travel and talk. The pitted cement and desolate hangar with its solitary unflown military plane seem like a welcome refuge for her wind-chapped face.
She spends an hour stretching, and once it is well and truly dark she uses the ladder left sprawling on the cement to climb onto the wing of the plane. The aluminum is cool and smooth beneath her. Lily conjures fairy lights and unspools a tiny roll of parchment from her pocket.
She suspected she might find something there already, and she's right. A familiar ugly, spiky script is staring up at her, black as his eyes are: Are you safe?
Lily had always thought a quill and ink hopelessly fussy, so she's got something better: a biro, transfigured painstakingly from a butter knife dipped in ink and her memory of a ballpoint's inner workings. It had taken several tries to get right and it still spluttered ink distressingly like a quill could, but it served. We've just come down after a long day of flying. I'm all right.
Duplix duplicis, a simple note-copying charm, done over and over and over had side effects they had both discovered early on in their years in Hogwarts. The parchment goes warm, the charm carrying her words back to Cokeworth, back to Severus. If she knows anything about him-
And the words appear almost as soon as hers go. Of course he'd be watching, he probably tucked it up his sleeve so he could feel its heat when she wrote back. Sentimental. Where are you?
I'm not telling, that's shoddy spywork, she scribbles back. How's the pet?
She- this scratched out in favor of It is herbivorous. Then, It sounds increasingly like you. A pause, a drip of ink quickly smudged away to a gray smear, and: This house is very empty.
Comfort is for children, and love letters go in the fire; that isn't what this parchment is for and he needs to know that. That house has more than one soul in it, so there's no reason to be lonely. And if I have my way, a little more than that before once I get back.
Lily waits several minutes-counting seconds until Sirius calls for her-but Severus doesn't reply. She hadn't realized storming-off was irritatingly possible on parchment, but it is. It's only now, with Sirius beckoning her down, with fairy-lights out and trying to sleep inside the echoing hangar, with the parchment tucked up her own sleeve that she realizes; she misses him, too. It's sentimental. Foolish. And something else says, mine, and half asleep in a little town in Germany, Lily cannot help but agree.