"Prophet," Katie announced, setting the paper down on the coffee table. Her voice was grim, as was her face. Jack summoned the paper, but not before Andrew caught a glimpse of the headline, and of his father's name. Jack's expression twisted as he read, and then he glanced up to make eye contact with Andrew.

"Denmore's the new head of Magical Ed." He didn't beat around the bush, and Andrew appreciated it. "Snape's the new head, and Amycus and Alecto Carrow are filling openings in the staff."

Andrew closed his eyes, sinking into his chair.

"Not good, then?" Jack asked, and Andrew shook his head, bringing his hands up to run through his hair.

"They're some of the ones from out of Azkaban. And from the stories, they were mad before they went in. Sadistic, liked causing pain for the sake of pain. Loyal to the cause."

"Sound like Bellatrix Lestrange," Katie put in.

"Yeah," Andrew said, "And now they're going to be in charge of a bunch of kids." He huffed a laugh, short and humorless, and opened his eyes. "And my good old dad put them there."

"And wrote about it in the paper," Jack added.

"I don't really see how that's relevant, to be honest," Andrew said, looking over to where Jack was flipping through the Prophet, his face darkening as he took in the headlines.

"They've run everything like it's normal, slotting it in with stories you might see any time. Department heads, shifts in the law. Of course, all of Britain knows that it was a coup, and that they're a bunch of terrorists, but doing it this way makes a case to other countries that it was normal. It's a clever way to…well, not to gain allies, but to stop everyone from being your enemy. If they can't prove Britain needs help, there's not a lot they can do to offer it, legally."

"Brilliant," Andrew muttered.

"It's better to know now," Jack responded. "As long as their cards are on the table, it makes it easier to choose our next move."

/

"We'll have to prep the room before we move them, and I'm certainly not doing it alone."

"I thought you were planning to move them somewhere secret."

Andromeda raised a brow at the question behind Adrian's statement.

"Do you have someone you're planning to tell?" she asked.

Taking his silence for the denial it meant, she held out a hand to him.

"Ted will look after them while we're out," she reassured him. Ted Tonks had been a bit of a shock: he seemed to be made up of the same material as a ray of sunlight, gentle and bright and—somehow—cheerful. In his presence, Andromeda had lightened as well, her expression softening whenever she looked at him. Andromeda had been familiar to Adrian, but Ted seemed to share nothing with the adults who had surrounded him in his childhood. He imagined that the same must have been true for Andromeda, and wondered if it was that which drew her to him.

"As long as he fills out my chart correctly," Adrian responded, releasing a grand, exaggerated sigh and then taking her hand, submitting to the horrible gut-wrench that came from side-along apparition.

He managed to stay on his feet when they landed—thank Merlin—but couldn't immediately shake the feeling that he was going to hurl.

"Andy!" a voice called out cheerfully, and Andromeda was swept away from him and into a hug. Adrian looked around—they appeared to be on the porch of a house—getting his bearings and hoping his stomach would settle soon, and by the time he looked back, Andromeda had been released. Her face had an expression Adrian hadn't yet seen on it, something between exasperation and amusement—fond was the closest word, he thought. The man on the receiving end of this look was examining him closely, his deep blue eyes inscrutable.

"Sirius, this is Adrian Pucey. He was assigned to the Longbottoms at St. Mungo's. Adrian, my cousin Sirius."

"We've met," Black said.

"After the forest," Adrian supplied for Andromeda. He barely remembered anything after the battle. It was only flashes, really: checking with the rest of the DA to be sure no one had died, being escorted to the headmaster's office, being told his father had died.

The door to the house opened then, and Adrian thought he'd never been happier to see Ron Weasley's face.

"Pucey?"

"Weasley."

Ron grinned, poking his head back through the door.

"Oi, get down here, we've got a visitor!"

He stepped inside to let them enter, and Adrian looked up to see Hermione Granger and Harry Potter coming down the stairs. Of course, he thought. It wasn't a surprise—or it shouldn't have been, at least. In any case, he was glad to see the three of them, glad that they'd not been caught up in the mess at the ministry.

"Adrian!" Hermione's face lit up as she saw him, and Harry nodded at him.

"Glad you got out alright," Harry said. "Dunno if you've been able to hear from anyone, but from what the twins said it sounds like Bagley and Fawley made it too."

"They got us a list of DA they had accounted for, if you want to see it," Hermione added, and with a wave from Andromeda, Adrian headed up to the landing, where Hermione met him with a roll of parchment. He found Jack and Andrew first, needing the confirmation, and was glad to see some of the others too—Rissa, Edgecombe, Diggory, and especially Jake, whose situation had been concerning ever since he'd joined the fight in the forest. Miles and Kevin Bletchley were also listed, although the twins had noted that they were still home—and so were still at risk, at least in Adrian's view.

"Thanks. This is…it's great to know they're safe. And you all too—unless you're heading back to Hogwarts?"

"We've got another…project we're working on. And we'll be helping the Order, when we can."

"Right." Adrian had gradually gotten more information about the Order of the Phoenix from Andromeda, and wasn't sure what to do with it. He certainly wasn't going to turn them over to the Death Eaters, but at the same time, he wasn't sure that he wanted to join them. Andromeda had reassured him that he wouldn't be expected to, but being here otherwise felt like an intrusion, even if it was to care for the Longbottoms.

"Here, I think you're getting set up in one of the drawing rooms, I can show you—it's one of the only places we're sure is cleared out."

Adrian let himself be led, not sure what "cleared out" meant, and honestly not sure he wanted to know.

/

It took less than a day for Marietta to be ready to hex Augustus Rookwood on sight. Not that she did, of course—she had some self-preservation instincts, after all. Still, the sight of his face was enough to make her hand itch to grab her wand—sometimes even to tighten around it in her pocket.

It wasn't that her work had changed so very much. On the whole, in fact, it was quite the same as it had been: a lot of note taking and little experimentations on how space affected various parts of spellcasting, often working alongside other divisions in the department to do so. Rather, it was Rookwood himself that threw her off, with his habit of dropping slurs like they were nothing and generally looking at and speaking to the members of his department like they were something slimy he'd stepped on. No matter how true Andrew's assessment of the situation—that being overlooked let you get away with more—may have been, Marietta couldn't stop it from rubbing her the wrong way.

It was worse for the others, she knew. Cedric had come back from his first day under Yaxley with more curses on his lips than she'd heard from him in the years they'd been friends, and had only gone back once he'd been promised that they'd meet for an evaluation of the situation soon. Alicia had returned with the news that Magical Law had been informed that their active cases had all been dropped, but that they'd be getting plenty more soon—something none of them liked the sound of—while Kim reported a crackdown on both Portkey usage and the Floo Network.

It felt to Marietta like the whole ministry was holding a collective breath, anticipating the next step. It was the only thing they were sure of: that there was something else coming, that this wasn't the end of things. Horrible as everything already was, they all knew that they were in the calm before the storm, and all they could do now was to brace themselves for when it hit.

/

"I'm getting out before something happens." Cedric's voice was steady and sure, and Andrew wished that there was any room at all for another option, any space for him to point out that it would really be better for them to have an idea of what they were up against before they started fighting it. But how was he supposed to argue with certainty, with Cedric's declaration that he refused to be used as a weapon, even for only a day? Especially, Andrew thought, when he himself hadn't experienced the ministry under Death Eater control, instead staying home and well away from his father, working with Jack to piece together the details the others brought home into a complete picture.

"I think we all need to leave together. It wouldn't be hard to connect any of us to each other, and if someone doesn't show up, the others are in danger of being interrogated—and I think that's something we'd all rather avoid."

Andrew wished that Alicia also made a little less sense, because this idea truly eliminated any chance of them having a spy in the ministry.

Right, because you're all so cut out for espionage, a voice in his head pointed out. It sounded a bit like Adrian in one of his more pessimistic moods, which Andrew conveniently had a great deal of practice ignoring.

"I won't try to make any of you stay, because I have no idea what it's like, really," Andrew put in, "but I think you should give it until next Monday. That's only a few more days, and they'll likely expect you to leave on the weekend if you do. Coming back on Monday means there'll be more of a chance of you hearing something that'll be helpful to us—new security measures or plans or anything like it. And we can always cut out early if any of you decide you need to."

"And then what? We sit out the war in Rissa's house?"

"Not past August. My parents will be back, and they're not going to want to see you lot here."

If anything, this made Angelina's question hang more heavily in the air, and Andrew felt everyone's eyes going between him and Cedric, expecting one of them to have the answers.

"I don't know," he admitted. "What it will look like, I mean. I'm not sure where we'll be or what specific steps we'll take, but I do know what I'll be doing. I'm going to be a guard, whatever that looks like. Just like we've been doing."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Alicia said, shooting him a grin. The others slowly assented as well, some looking less than thrilled at the lack of details in the plan. Fred, George, and Lee seemed to be having a miniature conference of their own, and broke apart from it looking apologetic.

"We've got to stick around the Order. Lee'll have Potterwatch to keep up and running, and George and I told Remus he could plan on having us around to run missions. But we'll be in touch, of course."

"We were going to mention it today anyway," George added. "We were just at headquarters talking to Remus yesterday. And you'll never guess who else we ran into there."

"Harry Potter?" Andrew guessed, and George rolled his eyes.

"Technically, yes. But I was actually thinking of Pucey."

Andrew felt his eyebrows shoot upwards, mentally echoing Jack's shocked "Adrian?"

"The same. Don't think he's in the Order fully, just around. Good to know he's not in Mungo's, though."

Images of Adrian getting dragged out of St. Mungo's by Death Eaters, punished for turning his back on them—or worse, somehow brainwashed into becoming one of them—flooded Andrew's senses, accompanied by a deep sense of guilt: if Andrew had told him about the Guard, had invited him to join, he would've had a warning. They would have made sure he was safe. It wasn't a new experience; he'd lived this every night.

"Definitely good," he agreed, amazing himself with the steadiness of his voice, as though "good" wasn't the understatement of the fucking century.

They shifted to making plans, and Andrew knew he should be listening, but he wasn't; instead he just looked at them all, counting them. The twins and Lee were on the couch, but they were preparing to leave. Angelina and Alicia in armchairs by the fire, Katie on the floor between them made three, then; Jack and Patty were four and five, Gil, Kim, Jake, and Corrie at the table were six through nine. Cedric (ten), Marietta (eleven), Rissa (twelve). He was number thirteen.

It was ridiculous, really, the idea that thirteen people, all barely out of school, were sitting here making plans to fight. Andrew wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh at the absurdity or throw up at the risk, or if you just wanted to scream at the injustice of it all, at how very much none of them deserved this war their parents had made.

In the end, he did none of them, but instead simply sat, soaking in the sight of his friends together, wondering which of them the war would claim.