Bitter

Grace attends her own funeral, reunites with some familiar faces, and recruits a new spy for the Order.

"Explain it to me again."

Grace stifled her sigh. She repositioned herself on the wicker chair, legs hooking over one side, back hunched against the other. "So, my Hywell's wasn't actually Hywell's—or, it was, but I guess Healers never really investigated divinatory causes for Hywell's, and—"

"No, no, I mean about the Sight." Lily paused her brewing to level Grace with a thoughtful look. "There are different degrees to Sight, right?"

"Yeah," Grace said. "There are people who can't See at all; their Inner Eyes are closed. Then, there are other people who are attuned to some divinatory energy, which is what helps them interpret their medium while Seeing. I suppose that means their Inner Eyes are only a bit open?"

"Right," Lily nodded. "And then there are people with true Sight, like you. And that means your Inner Eye is wide open?"

"Yup."

"And this means you're pelted with visions until you go mad?"

"Supposedly," Grace said, breaking eye contact with Lily. Her gaze drifted over to the backdoor, which had been propped open to bring in some cool air while Lily brewed. Half of the herb garden could be seen from indoors; Grace began to examine the small green shoots of the newly planted dittany with feigned interest. "I haven't been pelted with visions, though. I get a couple, now and again. But I always know they're not real."

"Hmm…" Lily set down her ladle and pulled out a chair opposite Grace's. "That one case you mentioned—the girl was, what, eleven when she opened her Inner Eye?"

"Yeah, around when she got her wand."

"Are there any cases of this happening to adults rather than children?"

"I don't think so. Regulus has tried to find some in the Hogwarts library, but he came up with nothing. That's part of the reason he's so worried: there's no precedent for what's happening to me."

"Right. Well, what I'm wondering is if this 'madness' thing only applies to children. I know it sounds strange, but I would think a child would more easily confuse reality with their visions than an adult. It makes me think children would be more predisposed to divinatory insanity than an adult."

Grace eased up in her chair. "Yeah—not to mention, I'm an Occlumens. Surely that's strengthened my mind and made me less susceptible."

"Oh, yes," Lily agreed. "Of course, none of that means we shouldn't worry. It is uncharted territory, but I feel as though we could remain cautiously optimistic."

Grace grinned. "Can I get that in writing, please?"

She had gone over Seer's snag and her newly opened Inner Eye with James a few days ago. But between interviews with the Auror Office about her death (her "body," along with Regulus's, had been discovered just five days ago) and hunting down Peter with Vance, James only had enough time to listen to a brief overview. And what he had taken away from it was that Grace was in imminent danger. Regulus had taken the opportunity to bond with James over worrying about Grace, and now the two seemed hellbent on discussing possible solutions to Grace's condition at any available opportunity. These conversations consisted of Regulus lecturing Grace about his findings from ancient tomes borrowed from the Longbottom's library and James coaxing Grace into trying increasingly absurd and questionable home remedies he'd picked up from his colleagues. Just yesterday, he'd brought home two pickled newts' brains from an apothecary in Diagon Alley and tried to convince her to sleep with them in her socks. (Apparently, there was some old rhyme about curing failing memory with the brains of amphibians.)

Lily snorted. "Somehow, I doubt a note from me would do much."

"You just haven't tried, Lily," Grace said. "You only have to tell James you won't snog him anymore, and he'll stop trying to break into my room to stuff newt brains into my socks."

Lily was struggling to keep from laughing. "To be fair—"

"Oh, sod fairness," Grace muttered.

"—it isn't as though you're perfectly fine. You are overcome by visions now and again and, from what I understand, you don't have any control over your body when that happens."

"Only because I haven't figured it out yet," Grace sniffed.

Lily gave her a probing look. "When I say cautiously optimistic, I mean I think you'll be fine in the long run—but only if we're proactive and prepared."

Grace narrowed her eyes at her. "You're trying to convince me to put newt brains in my socks, aren't you?"

Lily's lips twitched. She rose to return to her cauldron, tapping her wand against the kindle to increase the intensity of the flame. "I don't think it'd hurt to at least give it a try…"

"Lily! I thought you were on my side!"

"There are no sides here, Grace," she protested.

"I don't want to sleep with brains tickling my feet!"

"You won't even notice if you're asleep."

Lily shot her a teasing smile behind the cauldron while Grace threw back her head and let out a disgruntled sigh. She was about to retort that it was easier said than done, but her attention was diverted by the sudden rush of air in the sitting room as Regulus and Sirius returned via James's Portkey. (Though James had put in his resignation with the Auror Office shortly after Grace's "death," he kept conveniently forgetting to return the Ministry-authorized Portkey he had been issued. Thankfully, none of the administrative witches or wizards in the Auror Office seemed very keen on badgering James on his Portkey since, in their eyes, he had just lost his sister.)

"We're in the kitchen," Lily called out, continuing to stir rhythmically.

Grace righted herself in the chair, leaning forward on the table with her elbows. She tipped her head to the side, cradling it in her left hand, and watched as Sirius and Regulus entered through the open door frame. Sirius was undoing a few glamour charms he had placed on himself: reverting the salt-and-pepper of his hair to its usual sleek black, erasing the wrinkles he had cast on himself, and taking off a pair of James's old spectacles he had borrowed. It had been decided that simple glamour was too risky for Regulus, too easy for someone to undo, so he had been given a dose of Polyjuice. He currently took the form of Edgar Bones: nearly a foot taller than his usual height, with thick chestnut hair, sparkling eyes, and faint crow's feet lining his eyes. He looked entirely unfamiliar, but he still carried himself the way he always would, with precision and caution.

"How was it?" Grace asked.

She pulled up the chair beside her own for Regulus, who collapsed into it almost immediately. He turned to her with a pitiful expression that might have drawn more sympathy from her if it had been his face making it instead of a stranger's.

"Awful," Regulus said miserably.

"All right," Sirius said at the same time.

Regulus shot his brother a supremely irritated look. Sirius broke eye contact instantly and set about shuffling random items on the countertop. He fiddled with the dials on one of Lily's cookware machines and added, "Well… It could've been better, I suppose. But it wasn't a total loss."

"So, Gregorovitch really is bad?" Grace asked.

"Yes," Regulus said with great emphasis. "He only wants to sell his most expensive wands, and he'd rather the wizard choose the wand for it. He kept trying to convince me to buy this snakewood and Kneazle whisker wand that cost far too much than it needed to."

"And he did convince you," Sirius pointed out, having turned around to lean on the counter and listen in on the conversation.

Regulus ignored him. "I decided to buy it in the end, because… Well, it has a Kneazle whisker in it, which I thought was quite nice…"

Regulus pulled the wand from his pocket and showed it to Grace. It was a deep brown color, almost mistakable for black; the grains of the wood curved through the wand, much like scales. It was engraved in a simple manner, with a notch for the handle and a decorative spiral near the tip. Grace reached out to take it in her own hands and stared at it quizzically. She was not well-versed in wandlore, or even just half-versed, but she felt, innately, that this wand didn't suit Regulus. Perhaps it was the wave-like pattern of the fibers, the shift of the grains under light, like the snake of the Dark Mark twisting and turning. It appeared duplicitous, this wand, almost sinister.

"Does it work for you?" she asked, handing it back.

Regulus accepted the wand into his hands and turned it over in his fingers. The Polyjuice was slowly reaching the end of its effects. He shrunk slightly, rolling his shoulders in discomfort at the sensation. The bronze of his hair was soon swept away by a lustrous black, the blue of his eyes faded into an even paler grey, and his face elongated, growing sharper, angular. Within a minute, the worn face of Regulus Black was looking back at Grace, and he did not seem the least bit pleased. His gaze flickered back down to his new wand.

"It gets the job done," he said emptily.

Lily looked down at him sympathetically. "When all this business is done, you'll be able to go to Ollivanders for a proper wand. You only have to hold out till then."

Regulus gave a stiff nod and hid his wand back into his pocket. Grace's right hand slid down from the tabletop to meet Regulus's by the side of his chair. She gave his hand a quick squeeze. He glanced back to meet her gaze and gave a soft smile.

"All right," Lily said, ladling out some of her finished potion and pouring it into a tin goblet. She held it out for Regulus. "Here you go. It's best while it's still fresh."

Regulus wrinkled his nose as he took the goblet. The potion was a concoction of Lily's own making and specifically tailored to address the unique symptoms Regulus experienced after drinking You-Know-Who's potion. It was meant to lessen the fatigue and flashes of pain as well as bolster the strength of his immune system. And though Regulus swore he was perfectly fine now, Lily still insisted on completing a course of at least two weeks.

Grace privately felt that Regulus was trying to weasel his way out of finishing the course because, despite all the hard work Lily had put into creating and brewing this potion, it smelled bloody awful. It wasn't anything that could be helped, unfortunately: Lily had combined dittany and essence of comfrey for their epidermal properties (which was slowly but surely helping the scar across Regulus's chest to fade), which resulted in a scent similar to that of rotting leaves.

"Mmmm," Grace teased as the goblet neared Regulus. She grinned. "Smells great."

"Yeah, just wonderful," Regulus muttered.

He downed it quickly, unwilling to put up with the smell for longer than necessary, and set the empty goblet on the table. Lily began to store the remaining brew in the cauldron in some extra flasks for the remainder of the week.

"By the way," Lily asked as she cleared away some stray lacewings, "when you stopped by the Longbottom's, did you happen to see Dorcas?"

Sirius frowned. "No. Why? Should I have?"

"No, I was just wondering if she's there is all. I need to have her scout out one of our potential safe house locations. I've a family that wants to relocate."

Sirius nodded. "Yeah, she wasn't there. She's not on patrol either, so probably at her flat? Or Marlene's?"

"Yeah, I'll ring up in a bit, then."

"I dunno if she'd be up for scouting out a location, though. Early patrols have got her beat. She's been trying to…"

Grace quickly tuned out the remainder of the conversation. Her attention returned to Regulus, who had taken his new wand out and was using it to scour some of the singe marks left on the table by Lily's cauldron. Unfortunately, it was taking two or three attempts for each mark to fully disappear. Grace nudged her knee against his. He nudged her back. She nudged again. He shot her a look that said, What are you trying to do? She raised a brow in response, which made him furrow his own. Finally, she sighed, giving up, and rose from her seat. She stretched her arms out and looked at Sirius and Lily.

"We're going to my room," Grace announced, the implication here being that Sirius and Lily were absolutely not supposed to follow or enter at any point.

She reached for Regulus's hand, but he moved out of her grasp. Her hand curled and returned to her side. She leveled an unimpressed expression Regulus's way, but he was too busy trying to needlessly assuage Lily.

"Er—just to talk," Regulus added uselessly. "I wanted to look at Grace's book collection."

Sirius snorted. Lily gave him a kind albeit tired look and simply nodded. Grace stalked off towards the staircase, Regulus shuffling quietly behind her.

Once they had reached the threshold of Grace's door, she pulled him inside and said, "They already know we're together, Regulus."

"You can't know that," he protested. "They haven't said anything."

"What? What do you mean they haven't said anything? Just a few days ago Sirius asked if I wouldn't mind snogging you where James and Lily might see. Something about giving them a taste of their own medicine."

Regulus said nothing for a long moment. He simply stared at Grace, digesting this new information. After a minute or so, he took a deep breath and said, "Sometimes…Sirius is overcome by bouts of lunacy and—"

"Regulus!"

"No, this is true," he protested. "He just says things sometimes. It was probably supposed to be a joke."

Grace collapsed onto her bed and looked up at her star-strewn ceiling blankly. "Merlin's pants…"

"I just don't want to take liberties," he explained further. "I'm a guest."

"Coming with me to my room isn't disrespectful."

"I guess not… But I don't want it to be misinterpreted."

"Misinterpreted?" She gaped at him. "Misinterpreted how? We're fully going to snog in here. They would be interpreting correctly."

"All right, fine, yes—but I'll also look at the books on your shelf."

And Grace watched with quiet bafflement as Regulus went over to her bookshelf and began to examine the spines of the dusty novels she had not touched in years. He did this with far too much diligence than Grace cared for, as though Lily might be able to sense if Regulus did not, in fact, look at the books and would subsequently kick him out of the house for it.

Regulus pried one of the books from its spot and began to flip through it. Any and all pretense for this ruse had fled; he now seemed genuinely interested in whatever it was that was on Grace's shelf.

"I used to read this one when I was little, too," he said fondly, flipping through the pages.

Grace eased herself up on the bed, leaning against the headboard and bringing her knees up to her chest. She set her chin on them and stared at Regulus, trying to understand why on earth he was on the other side of the room instead of on her bed with her and kissing the living daylights out of her.

"Do you…not want them to know?" she asked hesitantly. "That we're in a relationship?"

He wheeled towards her, alarmed. "No, no, it's not that… It's just that…I want to make a better impression. The setting needs to be right."

She stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

"My first impression was so bad—"

"Regulus, you were half-dead!"

"Exactly! It's so embarrassing," he groaned.

"What? No, I'm saying that's not an impression at all. You weren't even conscious. But you have been every day since, and—"

"And I've been trying to get on their good side," Regulus finished.

"What do you mean trying?" Grace said, feeling as though she and Regulus were living in two very different realities. "They adore you! You're the perfect houseguest! You clean up the potion spills in the kitchens and tidy up the sitting room after we've had guests and—and I have no idea why, but you've started helping James do Sunday laundry—"

"The laundry thing is only because…" Regulus scratched the back of his head. "Well, it's sort of comforting to fold up laundry, you know."

"Regulus, my point is that you don't need to try so hard. Do the laundry if you really want to, but you don't need to go out of your way to prove anything. They'll like you no matter what—no, they already like you. Lily told me James is now your biggest fan solely because you chose to drink the potion in the cave instead of letting me do it. You're fine. You can relax. You can come to my room whenever you want. You don't need to make excuses. Truthfully, you don't need their approval either, but you've got it anyway."

"I suppose… It's just that things are so different here. I don't really know how to act, I guess."

"You mean from Grimmauld Place?"

"I mean from everywhere," he said. "I was being watched everywhere I went, whether it was by my mother or by the other Death Eaters at Hogwarts. Part of it is that I really am trying to make a good impression on your family, but maybe…part of it is that I've gotten used to hiding things, too."

"We're still hiding," Grace pointed out. "We're in hiding. But you can tell James and Lily anything. You don't need to hide from them. I promise."

Regulus gave her a grateful smile. "Yeah… Let's tell them, then, formally."

"Formally?"

"Yeah. That we're in a relationship."

"They already know, Regulus."

"You keep saying that, but no one has brought it up at all."

"Yeah, because it's like… One of those things everyone just knows."

"What are you talking about?"

She sighed. "All right, fine, we'll tell them formally."

He smiled at her, then leaned onto the bed to kiss her tenderly. Exasperation fled from Grace. She grinned against his lips and pulled him closer—until she felt the edge of a book spine poke at her waist.

She pulled away. "Why did you bring the book?"

"I sort of forgot I was still holding it," he admitted sheepishly. He then proceeded to shift further away from Grace and sit properly on the bed, splaying the book out across his lap. "I'm surprised you have this one. It's a really old story, written in the early nineteenth century, I think."

"Is that why it's so bloody boring?"

"It was one of my favorites growing up," Regulus continued.

"I was joking," Grace added hastily. She scooted closer to Regulus, leaning into the warmth of his body, and reached over to take a look at the cover. It was The Sorceress and the Snallygaster. Recognition flooded. "Oh, yeah—I'll be honest, I never actually read this one. I just used to pretend to in the yard while James flew on his broomstick."

Regulus seemed to struggle with the notion of pretending to read a novel when you could just actually read it. "…Why?"

Grace shrugged. "I dunno. One of my favorite pastimes was glaring at James and thinking envious thoughts while he flew around on his broomstick. But I couldn't just sit and look murderously at him—I tried once, and he complained to Mum that I was trying to make him feel guilty—so I would bring a book and pretend I was reading. But really, I was looking at him and wishing ill will."

Regulus snorted. "Merlin, Grace, sometimes I can't believe you ever thought you wouldn't be Sorted into Slytherin."

"Yeah," she sighed. "It's strange now to think on it and realize that the Sorting Hat was right. I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of Slytherin getting me to where I wanted to be."

"And where did you want to be?"

She looked up at him and smiled sweetly. "Next to you."

His lips twitched. "Flatterer."

"That's me, Grace 'Flatterer' Potter," she agreed.

He rolled his eyes but pressed a quick, affectionate kiss against her scalp anyway. "Did the Sorting Hat consider any of the other Houses for you?"

"I don't think so," she said. "I think it was always Slytherin. I was a little irritated because I wanted Gryffindor and all."

"Wait, you wanted Gryffindor?" Regulus said.

"Yeah," she shrugged. "James was in it, and I just assumed I'd be there, too."

"And the Sorting Hat didn't give you what you wanted?"

She frowned at him. "Does it have to give you what you want?"

"If you ask for it hard enough, it does." Regulus averted his eyes for a moment. "It wanted to put me in Hufflepuff—"

"No way—"

"But I begged and begged for Slytherin—"

"Regulus, you never told me this!" she gasped. "Seven years we've known each other!"

"You missed the Sorting first year," Regulus said defensively. "You didn't know, but I was a Hatstall. I was trying to convince the Hat of all the reasons I ought to be—no, had to be—in Slytherin. I was so persistent and thorough, that it was beginning to think that I ought to go to Ravenclaw instead, but I kept telling it that I had to go to Slytherin. And then it asked if that's what I really wanted. And I said, 'Yes,' and that's where I ended up. It made me think that the Sorting Hat always put students where they wanted to go." He paused for a moment and then added, "You cannot tell Sirius this, by the way. You're sworn to secrecy now."

"But Sirius saw your Sorting."

"Yes, but he doesn't know the Hat was trying to put me in Hufflepuff. I told him that it was trying to decide between Ravenclaw and Slytherin."

"Hufflepuff isn't bad, Reg," Grace said. She leaned back and squinted at him. "You know what? I can sort of see it. I think yellow and black would suit you."

"I know it's not bad," he insisted. "It just feels so…lackluster."

"You think the House that produced Dirk Cresswell is lackluster?"

"No," Regulus admitted. "Honestly, I think I would have liked being in Hufflepuff, if only because it wouldn't have been as stress-inducing as the other Houses. But I told the Hat I wanted Slytherin."

"And you didn't really want it."

"It feels so strange thinking back on it," Regulus murmured. "I was so terrified that day. Just the sheer idea of being in Hufflepuff—and what Mother would think…"

Silence followed. Regulus's hands curled around the edges of the book. Grace looked up at him with sympathy and love. Privately, she felt the Sorting Hat got it a little wrong. Perhaps eleven-year-old Regulus Black might have been suited for Hufflepuff, but it wasn't as though he couldn't have grown into Slytherin—because he did. The Regulus here, now, had grown into it: loyal to the very end, with ambition steeped in diligence and determination, and a brain that could outsmart even the most experienced of wizards.

But none of that really mattered in the end, did it? Because the issue here wasn't if Regulus belonged in Hufflepuff or Slytherin. It was that he had never been given the choice to begin with.

"Apparently, Mother is heartbroken," he said after a moment. "Sirius told me after he got back from the Longbottom's with the Polyjuice potion. One of the Order members was coming in after checking around Grimmauld Place."

"Oh," she said with a hint of surprise. "Do they suspect your mother of something?"

"I think they're just trying to see if the Death Eaters have bought the story we've given them. Narcissa is helping Mother plan the funeral, I believe. Bellatrix will inevitably be there, and they'll be able to gauge from her reaction whether or not Voldemort thinks we're truly dead."

"I suppose that makes sense," Grace murmured. "Are you going to go to your funeral? I imagine Order members would be stationed nearby, so I suppose you could get a glimpse of it if you wanted to."

Regulus's head snapped to hers. "What? Why in Merlin's name would I do that?"

"Why not?" Grace said. "I'm going to mine."

"You are?" Regulus said, sounding half-scandalized, as though Grace had just announced she was going to strip down nude in public.

She stared at him for a brief second, momentarily taken aback. Of course she wanted to attend; it would be her first chance to leave the house. It had been easy enough, the first few days, to stay indoors and lay low. It was necessary, too, because despite all the wards and glamour charms Lily and James had put up, the Order suspected that Death Eaters may observe Potter Cottage from afar to glean whether or not Grace was truly dead. It was too suspicious to immediately put up the Fidelius and disappear from sight—and Grace privately felt it might be cumbersome to cast such an intricate spell—so they simply had to put on the appearance of a desolate, grief-stricken house. The yard had been glamoured over, charmed to appear barren and desolate to anyone who didn't live in the house. All the windows were firmly shuttered and draped over. Grace's only taste of sunlight this past week had been the sliver coming through the backdoor whenever Lily propped it open while she brewed.

She had thought resting would be addictive, that when she fell into her bed and wrapped herself in her blankets, she would never feel the desire to rise ever again. But it had been days now, and she was sick of being trapped in the house. She wanted to run outside and stroll down the shop-lined streets and startle when she heard the sudden, raucous laughter of Muggle kids as they played in the park. But that was a little too ambitious, so she would have to settle for transfiguring her appearance and attending her own funeral to get a breath of fresh air.

She didn't voice this particular reason to Regulus, who had taken to this self-imposed solitude like a selkie to water. He excelled at being stuck at home; it was almost as though he had been preparing for it his whole life. He had a list of so-called 'action items' that he intended to focus on while he was in hiding, things like perfecting his mastery of runes and researching the potential ramifications of Grace's Sight.

"Of course," Grace responded. "I'm not going to miss the only chance I have to see James eulogize me. And I want to know how many people are going to show—and whether or not they're genuinely sad to see me gone or if they're just there out of courtesy. It's a good way to find out who's really on my side, you know."

"Grace…"

"What?" she said rather defensively. "I'm only curious."

"Hmm, you tend to conflate mischievous with curious quite an awful lot."

"Is it a crime to be either of those things?"

"No," he sighed. "It's just that… It's rather morbid, isn't it? To show up to your own funeral."

"Not if you're just going for a laugh."

"It's a funeral, Grace."

"And?"

"It's not a place where you can have a laugh. People will be grieving."

"Yeah, and I want to see how much they grieve. If anyone looks disinterested, they automatically fail. If someone at least sheds a tear, they pass."

"Fail and pass what?"

"It's for, you know—" she waved her hand in the air, searching for the nonexistent term, but she was quickly sidetracked by the faint ringing of the doorbell downstairs.

She perked up, eyes trailing to the door, ears straining. After a few seconds, she heard James's loud voice complaining about how the Ministry had, once again, shuffled him from interview to interview without reprieve and he had missed not only breakfast but lunch as well.

"James is back!" Grace beamed, turning to Regulus. "All right, let's go."

She hopped off her bed and made her way to the door. Regulus scrambled after her, more than a little confused.

"Go do what?"

"Make your formal announcement," she said, hurrying down the stairs.

Regulus momentarily fell behind her, dumbstruck, but reality quickly caught up with him and he bounded after her with fresh panic. "No, wait—Grace! We didn't prepare a statement or anything! I can't just say things. I need to write something out first!"

Grace sped into the open archway of the kitchen. Lily had charmed her cauldron to clean itself and was lounging in the wicker chair Grace had previously occupied, keeping an eye on the brush magically scrubbing the cauldron while talking to James and Sirius. James was hunched over Lily's Muggle food-heater, having gotten a plate of leftovers from the fridge, and was pressing the necessary buttons to make the machine start. Sirius, still leaned against the counter, caught sight of Grace and Regulus first. His gaze immediately zeroed in on the book Regulus was still holding.

His mouth fell open with disbelief. "What? You actually went up there to look at books?"

Grace ignored him and cleared her throat. "Good evening, everyone. I'm glad you're all gathered here today. I have an announcement to make."

Lily looked up with pleasant surprise.

"One meal," James pleaded quietly. "I just want to have one meal in peace…"

"Grace," Regulus hissed quietly, "we don't have a plan—"

"I would like to bring to your attention that Regulus and I are in a relationship. You know, with snogging and romance and whatnot. I expect your full cooperation and support regarding this matter."

Sirius burst out laughing.

"Oh, Salazar…" Regulus murmured faintly.

Lily's brows scrunched together slightly as she took this scene in, as though she were trying to understand why the two of them thought this was even remotely necessary. "Er—congrats?"

The Muggle machine beeped. James opened it with a flourish and popped a steaming spoonful of kedgeree into his mouth. "Yeah?" he said, chewing noisily. "Is there any other new and riveting information you want to share with us? Water is wet? Fairies can fly?"

Lily's lips twitched. Sirius fell into a new round of laughter. Regulus was looking very much like he had come face-to-face with a Boggart.

Grace turned to him triumphantly. "See? I told you they knew."

"No," Grace said. "You're doing this on purpose. Absolutely not."

"On purpose?" James replied, looking shocked at the very idea that he could manage to do anything on purpose. "I don't have the time to do things on purpose, Grace. This was the only thing I could manage to find—"

"But why does it have to be her—"

"Because she's on the other side of the country and she's not related to anyone else from Mum's side since she's Dad's mum's sister, so no one will recognize her."

"Why," Grace moaned, "can't I just charm my hair and eye color?"

"Too easy to undo. You know this. Now, come one," he waved the antique hairbrush in front of Grace's face. "You can have your pick of hairs."

Grace stared back at it, displeased. "Where did you even find this?"

"She stayed with Mum and Dad around when you were born, I think."

"Merlin, really? My life started out so tragically?"

James snorted. "She left behind a bunch of her stuff here. I found some of her dresser things while I was cleaning out Dad's study. No idea why they kept it instead of throwing it out; maybe she was supposed to come back and stay for a bit again."

"Yeah…" Grace replied absently, eyes trained on the golden hairbrush. The bristles were yellowed with age, and a few strands of silver hair clung stubbornly to them. With a sigh of defeat, she reached a hand out to grip the brush by the handle. With the other, she picked out the strand of hair that looked the least greasy and held it up to the light. "I could have been anyone, James. You could have found a Muggle on the street and plucked one of their hairs, and I could have been a young, beautiful bodybuilder. But no. You had to dig through all the storage boxes and find one of Great-Aunt Edda's hairbrushes and make my already dismal life even more miserable. Why not also add the newt brains to the potion, James? Go all in."

"Your ideal disguise is a young, beautiful bodybuilder?" James responded.

"Just give me the Polyjuice," Grace grumbled.

He handed her the flask that had been dropped off earlier by Sirius. She took the open bottle of thick, green potion and dropped a strand of her great-aunt's hair into it. Within seconds, it disappeared into the viscous liquid, swallowed whole, and the color changed from a sickly green to a sinister red.

"Oh, of course," Grace said. "Like the blood of the innocent she drinks."

"Grace," James said with mild disapproval, "she's an eighty-year-old woman who lives alone, and—"

"And why do you think that is, James? No sane person on earth would want to shack up with her. She used to pinch me at the family reunions!"

"Yeah, Mum was livid," James recalled. "To be fair, though, that was only once."

"That's no excuse!"

"And she was only trying to get you to behave since you were trying to upend the pudding bowl."

"Just because a toddler doesn't understand how gravity works doesn't mean you have to pinch them." Grace glared darkly at the mixture of Polyjuice potion. "You know what? This is fitting, actually. Almost poetic. When I don her face, it'll be as though the Reaper is attending my funeral—"

"Grace, I have about five minutes," James said, glancing at his watch. "If we can finish with the theatrics and get a move on, I'd really appreciate it."

She brought the flask to her lips and took two quick gulps of the potion. Her face scrunched into displeasure as the bitter, sharp taste of ginger flooded her mouth. She brought the flask back down, capping and stuffing it into one of the inner pockets of her cloak. The effect was near-instantaneous; just as soon as she'd forced the concoction down her throat, she felt her insides begin to twist and turn. Her skin bubbled and sagged, gathering into wrinkles and folds. She lost a few inches, found her back curving as her posture grew haggard and hunched. Her hair grew thin, lost much of its abundance, and became silver. When at last the uncomfortable feeling of the Polyjuice faded, Grace straightened herself up as best she could and turned to the hanging mirror in her room. Great-Aunt Edda stared back at her: pale as a ghost, with limp hair and eyes as colorless as a still lake. No matter how much Grace tried to soften her expression, Great-Aunt Edda's thin lips seemed to be permanently stuck in the shape of a displeased grimace.

"Good Godric," she gasped. "It's worse than I could have ever imagined—"

"You look fine."

"People are going to think a hag wandered onto the premises," she moaned. "Tell me you didn't give Regulus something as awful as this. I can only imagine how wretched he must be feeling."

"Oh…" James began sheepishly. "Well…"

"What?"

"Sirius, er, just bumped into some Muggle near his complex and managed to pluck a strand of his hair."

She whipped around. "James—"

James winced at the fury blooming across her. "Merlin—don't do that, Grace. It looks absolutely horrendous when you've got Great-Aunt Edda's face on."

"And whose fault is that?!"

"This really was the best idea I could come up with," James said. "I can't give you an Order member's face, since most of them probably wouldn't show up at your funeral to begin with and—honestly, you don't have to come."

"No," she sniffed. "I want to come."

"Then just put up with it for a few hours," James sighed. "Come here, let me fix up your robes."

She reluctantly shuffled towards him. James pulled out his wand and charmed her robes to fit her now smaller, frailer frame better. (He also, to Grace's chagrin, added a nauseating paisley pattern to the outfit.) Finished with the disguise, James gave an approving nod.

"All right, I'm gonna go get ready. You can head out through the back; most of the Order guests who came here went through there, so it won't look strange."

"You want me to head to the cemetery myself?"

"Well, I can hardly escort you, can I?" James said. "S'not like I spent all my time around Great-Aunt Edda. People will think it's odd."

With that, James spun on his heel and marched out of her room. Grace stared at his back as he left, at a loss for words. After a brief moment of contemplating whether or not anyone would notice if she were to switch the fake body with James, Grace gathered herself and set downstairs. She looked around for Regulus, but couldn't find him. Grace surmised he might have gone on ahead with Sirius once he was administered his dose of Polyjuice.

Sighing, Grace made her way out the back, conjuring a hat for herself to hide part of herself from sight. She weaved through the herb garden and out the back gate, making her way through the familiar cobblestone of Godric's Hollow. It was a bit difficult to get through the uneven street with Great-Aunt Edda's feet, but she made it after around ten minutes. Grace supposed she was still a bit early, since there weren't very many people roaming about, so she made her way to a back row of the seats that had been set up by the officiant and began to observe the attendees, hoping to spot Regulus among them.

It was only a few minutes later when James and Lily arrived and the officiant began the service. By that point, Grace had recognized which of the guests was Regulus, and she was now set on spending the entire ceremony shooting him envious looks. Not only had he decided to sit in the front row, but he also looked fantastic. Merlin, was Sirius's apartment complex filled with models? The Muggle man whose face Regulus wore seemed to be in his mid-twenties, with copper hair that was lit gold under the sun, a sharp jaw, and a fine nose. Grace felt like he was attracting far too much attention (and at her funeral), and she was beginning to wonder if anyone would find it suspicious that such a handsome man might have known her well enough to come to her funeral.

She was also more than a little annoyed at Regulus himself—although it wasn't anything he could help. The turnout for her funeral was, to be frank, pathetic. There were rows of chairs that had been put out in preparation for the visitors and mourners, but less than a quarter of them were filled. Grace herself sat at the very back, partly to prevent Great-Aunt Edda's face from scaring any guests and partly to observe everyone else as they moved about. There were some Order members, of course, like Dorcas and Marlene who had come as they were since Grace knew them through Lily. There were a few Order members she didn't know—and still didn't, because they were in disguise—who lingered suspiciously at the outskirts of the cemetery, keeping watch at the perimeter. The handful of guests who had come of their own volition mostly consisted of distant friends of her parents who had heard of Grace's passing and came by briefly to pay respects. Oh, and there was the officiant, too. It was not the same one who had eulogized Mum and Dad (apparently he was unwilling to return to Godric's Hollow after the disaster that was the last funeral), but he was just as dull as the previous one had been.

In short, this funeral was a stinking disaster. She had heard from Lily, who had been stationed near the Black family mausoleum along with a few other Order members the day of Regulus's funeral, that Regulus had gotten an entire procession. There were droves of people, and all dressed in black (unlike the current proprietor of Sleekeazy's, who had decided to show to Grace's funeral in a set of plaid robes), with dozens of flowers. Even Bellatrix Lestrange had arrived with a bouquet, according to Lily. (This had been told to Grace with the intent to calm any worries that You-Know-Who might not believe they were truly dead, but now it irritated Grace to know that Regulus's funeral had been so impactful that notorious killer Bellatrix Lestrange thought it would be in good taste to arrive with a few flowers.) Walburga Black, for all her faults, had seemingly spared no expense for her son's funeral. There had been a band, for Merlin's sake! Meanwhile, there were, at most, ten people (not including Order members) who had decided to show for Grace's funeral, and many of them were more interested in observing the scenery than listening to the officiant recall the life and times of Grace Potter.

"You all fail," Grace hissed under her breath.

It did not help, either, that Grace's reputation had taken even more hits after her death. Walburga Black was so distraught at being informed by the authorities that the son she thought had been at Hogwarts had, in fact, been residing in what was (to Grace's displeasure) now being referred to as a "love shack" with a member of a notorious blood traitor family that she completely changed the circumstances revolving around Regulus's death. She had told all the pure-blood families she remained on good terms with that Regulus had been kidnapped by Grace and held at Falmouth against his will for the entirety of Easter. How anyone managed to believe this was beyond Grace, but the damage had been done. Regulus was some innocent victim who had been lured to Falmouth, and Grace's character was now undergoing at least fifty different iterations of rumors, none of which were even slightly positive.

She grumbled silently in her seat throughout the rest of the ceremony, only perking up when James was called to say a few words. The brief ray of hope that shone over her was quickly overshadowed, however, when James refused. He put on a glorious performance—fake tears, trembling hands—and said some absolute nonsense about how it would be too painful to get up there.

Bollocks, she thought viciously. You just forgot to prepare anything.

"Well, then we shall proceed…" The old wizard coughed briefly and straightened himself up. He took out his wand and gave it a flourish. "Now, we lay to rest this life that was snatched too soon, and hope that the cool of this tomb will provide the comfort and rest that the world could not."

The stone slab sunk into the earth, swallowed into the black dirt. It was quick and quiet: a gentle hiss of soil, and then brief silence as the spectators watched with halfhearted grief. The tombstone was erected, a handsome thing of silver-lined obsidian, cut in the same manner Mum and Dad's had been. Grace was too far away to make out the epitaph carved into the stone, but she could still make out her darkened reflection—or, rather, the reflection of Great-Aunt Edda. The old, withered face stared back at her, shadowed, sullen, looking immeasurably burdened even though this whole ceremony was meant to be freeing. Grace had come here for a laugh, after all, but seeing the marker for one's grave was enough to make anyone feel a bit depressed.

It didn't seem to matter that the buried body was, in fact, a cleverly and heavily transfigured bookshelf. Everyone here believed it was Grace Potter who had been cast into the dirt—and that belief was powerful. Grace leaned into it, into the fabrication of it all. She wanted it to be a burial, a real burial, where she would watch this dupe of herself be thrown into a hole—and, along with it, all her mistakes, all the awful, early days of her last term at Hogwarts, all those chilling meetings with Death Eaters, all the pain and suffering, all the nightmares. She wanted everything of her past to be buried, to be forgotten, but now the funeral was coming to a close and she felt the same as she did before. Just as heavy. Nothing of her had gone along with the fake corpse; she had kept it all, good and bad, greedy to the very end. She might laugh now and again, make jokes and pretend it was all right, but there were moments like the one stretching out between herself and her grave, moments where she could do nothing but be stilled by the power of memory. Though the glamour concealed it outwardly, the bags had not yet disappeared from underneath her eyes. It took a Draught of Dreamless Sleep to settle her more nights than not. Whenever her left sleeve caught on something, her gaze was drawn to the Dark Mark still stamped into her skin—and a terrible guilt roiled within her.

(There had been one night, too, when she had worried James and Lily a little too much. Now, it was more embarrassing than anything, but in the moment… She had fallen asleep in the sitting room after staying up late to talk to Dirk and Lila about how the rumors were spreading in Hogwarts. It was uncomfortable on the sofa, and after a few hours of fitful sleep, she woke up in something of a haze. The flames of the fireplace were dying out, but a few embers remained red-hot and scorching. In her dazed state, her eyes latched onto the weak source of light and she mistook two curling, burning pinpricks of ash for You-Know-Who's eyes—and she screamed in her fear. Please. It came out choked, pathetic. But why wouldn't it have? She thought she was about to die. Please.)

The funeral-goers began to disperse slowly. A few milled about the fresh grave to pay their respects. Grace rose when most of them had disbanded and followed to the grave absently, emptily. Her eyes traced the meager scattering of flowers before following up to the headstone. Grace Sylvia Potter, it read. 4 February 1961 - 14 April 1979. And underneath all that, a simple line of text in the same style as her parent's joint grave: Thou mak'st faults graces that to thee resort.

She frowned at it, feeling a little annoyed that she couldn't decipher the line. Merlin, did James even understand this? It had to be Lily who chose it.

A hefty bouquet of purple, cup-shaped flowers was conjured atop the grave. Grace looked to her right, where Regulus had come, and shot him a very unimpressed look. "I'm not dead."

"Everyone else was leaving flowers," he said defensively.

"Everyone else?" she said skeptically. "You mean the ten people who actually bothered to show, and that's including the officiant, who's paid to be here."

"If the wizarding world weren't in a state of panic and most of your friends weren't in hiding or at Hogwarts, there would be far more people here," he assured her. "And, besides, at least you got what you wanted: now you know how you stand with the people who did show."

"I suppose," she said grumpily, turning her attention back to the grave. She read the epitaph once more, but found it even more confusing the second time around. Why was this line bringing up faults? Wasn't it a bad omen to speak ill of the dead? "Merlin, why'd they choose that?"

"Choose what?"

"That line."

"Oh." Regulus paused for a moment, reading it himself. "I think it's quite nice. 'Thou mak'st faults graces…' You turned all your faults into graces."

She blinked with surprise. "That's…generous."

"It fits perfectly," he assured. "And I think…"

"What?"

His lips twitched. "I think they mostly chose it for the pun. All your faults are yours, and you're Grace, so…"

"What? No—come on, my funeral isn't a joke," she groaned.

"You came here for a laugh," he reminded her.

"Yeah, but I'm allowed to because it's my funeral," she huffed. "Whatever. This just gives me more incentive to outlive James. I'll put a pun on his headstone. No, even better, I'll make it simple, straight to the point. 'Rest in Peace, Jam-Jam.' See how he likes that."

"He probably won't react at all, seeing as he'll be dead."

"Oh, ha, ha," she said flatly.

"It's true," Regulus said lightly. "You can't be mad at me for being right."

"Watch me."

Regulus snorted. His gaze flew away from her and returned to the tombstone. "They should have asked you to choose the epitaph."

"Yeah, they should have," Grace agreed. "I should have planned this whole thing, actually, instead of letting James do it—because apparently all he did was just make Sirius and Lily do it. Merlin, if I'd been in charge, this funeral would have been fantastic. Far more people would have come. I would have joined it with your funeral service."

"I don't think my mother would have agreed to that."

Grace ignored him. "I would have made my epitaph something like, 'Here lies Grace Potter. She died doing what she loved.' And then there would be an arrow pointing from my grave to yours, and your epitaph would read, 'I'm what she loved.'"

Regulus choked on nothing but air.

"It would be romantic," Grace added.

"Romantic," Regulus wheezed. "The implication that we both died in some freak accident while having relations with each other is romantic to you?"

"Who says 'having relations'? Just say sex, Regulus."

"We're at a funeral."

"It's my funeral, and I want you to say—"

James poked his head between the two of them and asked, "Say what?"

Regulus nearly jumped out of his skin. He looked to James, and then said in the most suspicious voice he could have possibly mustered, "Absolutely nothing."

James turned to Grace and raised a brow.

"It's none of your business, and—why are you so close to me? Get away." Grace jerked away from her brother violently and glared at him. "By the way, do you mind explaining to me why you chose this epitaph?"

"Oh, that? Lily and Sirius chose it. I only saw it today. Although…" His brows scrunched together as he took it in. "Sounds sort of insulting, doesn't it?"

"Merlin, James, you couldn't even choose the epitaph for your own sister's grave?"

"In case you didn't notice," he began with heavy sarcasm, "I was stuck at the Ministry for the better part of two weeks giving interviews about your death and convincing the severely under-staffed Auror Office to let me resign."

She narrowed her eyes. "Fine. But know that at your funeral, I'm going to let someone else choose the epitaph."

He scoffed. "You think I'll die before you? When I eat so healthily and—"

"I'm sorry, what's so healthy about treacle tart and coffee again?"

"I eat other things. I'm allowed to enjoy myself once in a while. Not to mention—"

"Shouldn't you, er, not chat so casually in front of what's supposed to be the grave of your dearly departed sister?" Regulus interrupted.

"Oh, right," James said, casting a furtive glance around the cemetery. "Yeah, let's head out. We're Apparating to the Longbottom's to go over next steps, so I came to corral you two. That, and people are beginning to gossip about Great-Aunt Edda flirting with younger men…"

"Honestly, if word about this ever gets back to Great-Aunt Edda, she should thank me," Grace said. "I've astronomically improved her reputation in the course of two hours."

"Yeah, I'm sure she'll be pleased," James said flatly.

He gestured forward so they could head out. Grace turned on her heel and moved forward. Her steps were quick and light, and she felt her good mood returning to her, flooding into her like a wave of warmth. Those dark moments would return, she knew, but it was difficult to be wary of her worst fears and nightmares when she was in the company of the people she loved most.

James's gaze lingered on the grave, but the soft expression of regret quickly morphed into wild incredulity. "Did someone leave violets? Who in their right mind—"

All the love she felt for James evaporated in an instant.

"Merlin, please spare me from this," Grace pleaded quietly.

"Those are bellflowers," Regulus corrected swiftly, nodding to the bouquet he had conjured. "I wouldn't bring violets to a funeral. I'm not a lunatic."

"Are you sure about that?" Grace murmured.

Regulus nudged her. "They're not funeral-appropriate is all."

"They're not wedding-appropriate, either," James added. "You don't understand, Grace. It isn't just that the color purple clashed with the theme of red and gold. There was also the—"

"Is it too late to call the officiant back?" Grace interrupted. "And have him bury the real me in that grave?"

Longbottom Manor was situated deep into the countryside. The large, brick-and-mortar house stood staunchly atop a hill, shrouded by looming cedar trees and a rowdy underbrush. There were faint traces of a once well-kept estate: chipped and worn pedestals that used to support statues that had now been removed, the scarcely perceptible markings of what used to be a tidy, square lawn. It might have appeared much more impressive back in its heyday, but Grace found herself impartial towards the overgrown manor as it was. She liked the way the ivy crept over the brick, the bend of the trees as they circled the house, as though nature itself were trying to conceal and protect the Longbottoms.

The effects of the Polyjuice Potion receded after a few minutes of loitering at the far corner of the manor. Grace did not want her first impression to be made with her great-aunt's face. She felt the tell-tale signs as her body returned to normal: her skin shifting and sifting, almost like a gentle breeze pulling at sand, and her hair falling back into its thick, lush state. She also reverted her robes to their initial silver-speckled black, and emerged from the side of the manor feeling far more confident. Regulus followed after her, having been pulled into the corner as well, and watched as Grace messed with her hair, pulling it over her shoulders and then behind them and then back over again.

"You look fine," he assured.

She glanced at him. "I know I look fine, Regulus. It's just that having Great-Aunt Edda's face for the better part of three hours has damaged my psyche somewhat."

He snorted. "It wasn't—"

"Do not tell me it wasn't that bad," she warned. "You didn't have to drink the same potion I did. You got lucky. You were at least fit."

Regulus shot her a strange look. "I was fit? As in, when I was not myself? And—am I not anymore?"

"What I mean—you see—the Muggle Sirius chose for you…appeared…" she struggled to find the right words for this, "…aesthetically…decent."

"Is that so?" Regulus said lightly.

"You're more fit, obviously," she tacked on.

"Hmm," Regulus acknowledged absently.

"Really," she insisted. "Honestly, I've forgotten that Muggle's face. Can't remember anything now. I was just jealous that I was stuck as Great-Aunt Edda and you weren't."

"I didn't say anything."

"I—" she narrowed her eyes at him, "—you aren't actually upset, are you?"

"I didn't say anything," he said again, this time with a small smirk.

"Merlin, spending laundry time with James has changed you," she scolded.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Regulus said lightly. "Laundry time is always pleasant and peaceful."

"Yeah, I'm sure it is," she muttered.

"Last laundry time, James mentioned that when you were little and upset, you sometimes used accidental magic to stack up all the chairs in the house and—"

"Finish the sentence and see what happens, Regulus."

He wisely fell quiet.

"I can play this game, too," she said as they arrived at the open door of the manor. "I'll ask Sirius for all your embarrassing childhood stories."

"You can try," Regulus said. "But you won't hear anything. I've never done anything embarrassing."

She glanced at him, amused. "That's impossible, Reg."

"No, really," he insisted. "I've always been too anxious to do anything embarrassing."

"Embarrassing things don't just happen on purpose," she protested. "You must have—"

"Oh, hello, Grace!" a bright voice interrupted.

Grace turned and saw round-faced Alice, with her hair shorn short and her large blue eyes crinkled happily, welcoming them inside. Frank was passing by in the background, levitating a tray of refreshments from the open kitchen.

"And you must be Regulus," Alice greeted, coming closer. She took both their hands and shook them. "I can't tell you how surprised I was when Vance first broke the news to us. Spies! I mean—" her gaze wavered to Grace, "—I had always thought you'd certainly join after you left Hogwarts, but I didn't think it'd be spying."

"You'd have thought correctly if the circumstances were different," Grace said. "I was absolutely rubbish at it."

Alice rolled her eyes. "Don't say that. You've no idea what a help you've been. Saved us a lot of guesswork—and many an all-nighter. We're grateful. Truly."

Alice's open, honest gaze softened the knot in Grace's chest. "I'm glad," she managed to say after a brief second of overwhelming warmth. "It's just too bad we can't help you in that regard anymore."

Alice gave her an understanding look and patted her shoulder. "You've done enough to last a lifetime. Now—come on in. You haven't been to the manor before, have you?"

Grace hadn't. Alice and Frank had always been more James's friends than hers. She and Regulus followed after Alice as she showed them around. They were led into an enormous parlor room that the other Order members were gathered in. An endless swell of light fell over the room from the dangling candle-lit chandeliers and torches affixed to the walls. The room itself was a patchwork of decoration, eclectic, as though Alice and Frank had not been able to agree on a certain style of decor and each had decided to just do their own thing. Some corners were minimalist: smooth, modern drawers that had been fitted into a few lonely nooks and corners to provide extra storage space and a set of simple, sheer cream drapes to block out the windows. Other areas were antique and dense, with damask-patterned throw pillows, toile fabrics, velvet cushions, and various bric-a-brac placed in a heaping mound atop any available surface. But plastered over Alice and Frank's home was the Order Headquarters. Extra tables and chairs dotted the room, and there were a couple of rolling blackboards pushed against the walls with some notes and reminders about the patrol schedule.

Order members were scattered across the room. Grace recognized a few of them. Marlene McKinnon and Dorcas Meadowes, both close friends of Lily's, were relaxing at one of the tables in the center alongside Edgar Bones, who Grace only recognized because Regulus had worn his face a week prior. There were also quite a few new members—or, just members she had yet to meet properly. In one of the corners of the room were a pair of older wizards who were chatting merrily with one another. There was a witch who seemed roughly the same age as Vance organizing some scrolls near the blackboards. At the very front of the room, beyond the desks and tables, stood a very grumpy, middle-aged wizard. He had lost his leg to some or the other dark curse, and hobbled across the wooden floor with a peg instead.

"Is that Alastor Moody?" Regulus whispered into Grace's ear, catching onto the grizzled wizard as well.

"I think so," she replied.

Alice floated back to the foyer to usher in more Order members, leaving Grace and Regulus to wander through the parlor room. Lily had gone to approach Dorcas about some issue with her safe house operation. Grace didn't want to disturb them as they discussed delicate matters, and she certainly didn't want to search for James (she was still irritated with that mess of a funeral), so she shepherded Regulus to one of the tables to sit down and wait for the meeting to begin.

She naturally gravitated towards one of the tables near the back of the room, where the two old wizards were catching up, but she stopped in her tracks when she noticed what could only be described as a horrendous nightmare come to life: the Prewett twins.

Fabian and Gideon were leaned back into their chairs, looking infinitely bored. One of them had propped their feet up on the table as they waited for the meeting to begin. Or—perhaps that was just a trick of theirs. They appeared bored out of their minds, but they were most likely thinking of some dastardly method of torture to inflict upon an unsuspecting passerby.

"Oh," Fabian or Gideon said, catching her gaze, "you—"

"Somewhere else," Grace hissed, turning her back immediately. She grabbed Regulus's hand and hauled him to the very front of the room. "We'll sit here."

For Regulus, resident teacher's pet, this was the perfect place to sit. He nodded with approval and took a seat. Grace cast a wary glance around, noting that Moody would likely be pacing past them during the meeting, before sitting down beside Regulus. She waited a minute or two in silence, simply observing the room and its inhabitants, before she got distracted by the shuffling of a chair beside hers.

She glanced at Regulus. He had come so close to her that it almost seemed like they were sharing a bench instead of sitting in their own seats. "What is it?"

He looked back at her and blinked owlishly. "What?"

"The desk is so wide," she said, leaning forward to spread her arms out over the expanse of the table. Even then, she couldn't quite reach the ends. "Why're you right next to me?"

"Do you not want me to be?"

"No," she said pointedly. She shifted her arms on the table, so she could prop her head up with her left hand. "Are you nervous?"

He scoffed. Grace raised a brow.

"A little," he admitted. "I've never met any of these people before."

"You've met me."

"You don't count."

"Of course I count," she protested. "You've met James and Lily and Sirius, too."

"They…"

"That's already four people. If you include yourself, it becomes five people—that's like a good twenty percent of the people here."

"Why would I count myself?"

"Don't you know yourself?"

He snorted. "Yeah, I suppose."

Grace angled her face further up. "Feeling better?"

He didn't say anything immediately, simply looked at her the same way she was looking at him.

"What is it?"

"I love you," Regulus said fondly.

She grinned. "Yeah? Then why aren't you kissing me right now?"

His lips twitched into a small smile, and his eyes searched hers lovingly. He shifted closer ever-so-slightly, and before Grace knew it, Regulus was leaning over—perhaps to give her a quick peck or just tease her—but he never got to carry out whatever action he had in mind because another face squeezed between theirs.

"Why'd you choose this spot?" James complained, scooting his chair between theirs. "It's so close to Moody. He'll be shouting directly in your ear."

Grace's eyes narrowed at him, but he pointedly ignored her glare, instead pretending to look around the meeting room as though he, too, were seeing it all for the first time. Having had enough of this charade, Grace kicked James's leg under the table. James yelped.

"What was that for?!" he demanded.

"Go away," Grace sniffed. "We didn't invite you to sit with us."

"What? Is this some sort of exclusive table?" he scoffed.

"Yeah, only people who aren't prats are allowed."

"How am I the prat after you kicked me?"

"You'll always be the prat—"

"I'm only responding to your own prat energy—"

"What in Merlin's name is prat energy supposed to be?"

"It's when you're such a big prat it starts affecting other people, like—"

"I will pay you real money for you to shut up—"

"Ha! As if I could be bought. I wouldn't—"

"Hey, guys?" Sirius called out, bringing the siblings' bickering to a halt. He had chosen to sit at the table to the immediate left of theirs, where he had gathered with two other Order members in deep conversation. Parchment was spread over their table, with open inkpots and quills pushed to the side. "Now, I can't believe I'm the one saying this, but we're sort of having a quick debrief right now, so could you—I dunno—keep it down for one bleeding second?"

Regulus laughed, but quickly tried to disguise it as a cough. Grace harrumphed quietly and turned away from James entirely. She rose and pulled her chair out, moving it to Regulus's other side. Regulus watched her silently, shifting uncomfortably in his seat as he realized he was now caught in the middle of the Potter siblings. Thankfully, Lily soon finished imparting her instructions to Dorcas and meandered back to James. She raised a brow when she spotted James sulking beside Regulus.

"Don't give me that look," James complained.

"What look?" Lily murmured, pulling up a chair beside his.

"That look," he emphasized. "You know."

"I don't," Lily said honestly. "By the way—why are you sitting so close to the front?"

"Grace chose this spot."

"What—I didn't choose it for you!" Grace cried out, craning her neck around Regulus. "You came and forced yourself into my life."

"Forced myself into your life?" James repeated. "It's the other way around! You were born and forced yourself into my life!"

"Again—" Sirius called out, "—could you be quiet for—"

"Mate," James groaned, twisting around to level Sirius with a very put-out expression, "you're supposed to be supporting me, not admonishing me!"

"And you only said to be quiet for one second," Grace added heatedly. "Which we did."

"Exactly," James nodded. "You can't blame us for giving poor instructions."

"You should have asked for five minutes of silence," Grace agreed.

"Merlin, having you two gang up on me is worse than having you bicker with each other," Sirius muttered, returning to his impromptu meeting.

James opened his mouth to retort, but Moody cleared his throat and thumped his wooden leg against the floor, signifying the beginning of the meeting. The two Order members Sirius had been working with began to collect and put away their scrolls. Regulus immediately straightened up to give his undivided attention to Moody as he brought out one of the blackboards.

"Should I be taking notes?" Regulus asked James.

"What?" James said, looking aghast. "Why would you do that?"

The Order members who had been roaming about quickly took their seats. Moody surveyed the room as he paced across the blackboard.

"None of you were followed?" he said in greeting.

A few no's punctured the air. Most of the Order members, however, simply rolled their eyes.

Moody nodded his approval. His hard gaze passed through the group, finally landing on Grace and Regulus before drifting away again. "We'll begin with the rumormongering. Potter?"

It was Lily who responded. She pushed her chair out slightly, angling out towards the rest of the Order members, and began, "Our contact in Spain was successfully able to get in touch with a trusted student at Hogwarts—"

"You had to go to someone in Spain to talk to a student that lives here?" Podmore interrupted.

Over his wife's shoulder, James shot Podmore a particularly vicious glare.

Lily cleared her throat. "I don't know what others think, but if I were to just stroll into Hogwarts and tell students what to believe—I don't think that'd go over very well. We helped a Slytherin student's family flee the country during the summer, and she's in contact with another Slytherin student. We figured that it'd be best to push a rumor through Slytherin using her, since Death Eaters would be more susceptible to believing them."

"Ah, hold on, I think I'm missing something," one of the old wizards in the back said sheepishly. "What rumor are we discussing?"

"This is why you can't just skip meetings, Dedalus," his friend muttered.

"Our spies—" Moody began.

"We have spies?" Dedalus said.

"—were in danger of being found out, so we've had to fake their deaths. But as you very well know, Voldemort won't just sit and believe anything we tell him. Potter—ah, the new one—" Moody clarified, when he saw both Lily and James look up, "—suggested we take advantage of Hogwart's rumor mill to make the deaths more believable."

"It seems like it's working," Lily continued. "Apparently, one of the Prefects witnessed James when he went to see Dumbledore that night, so there were already a few nascent rumors forming. The Slytherin student we're in contact with has used that Prefect's account to help spread variations of the rumor that our spies were killed in a clash with vigilantes that was then covered up by the Auror Office."

Lily was giving a rushed overview. The Prefect James had run into that night hadn't just been some Prefect; it had been notorious gossip Mira Finchley. By the time Lila had gotten in touch with Ophelia, there were already fifty different rumors about why Grace's brother had come to Hogwarts in the middle of the night in a bloodied robe. It had been more than enough for Ophelia to start a few rumors of her own: that it was James himself who killed Grace and Regulus in a fit of rage, that Grace had been caught up with Death Eaters and returned to James at the last minute, when it had become too much to bear—but by then, it was too late. The most popular rumor right now was the story Dumbledore had intended to sell: James and a few Auror buddies had stumbled upon Grace and Regulus at the Potter summer house. A duel ensued when James discovered his sister was a Death Eater, and the rest was history.

They were still not certain if the Death Eaters, or You-Know-Who himself, believed these lies. But they did know that the Death Eaters at Hogwarts had definitely heard of them, and likely passed them along to their superiors.

"It's more than just working," a familiar voice added. Grace twisted in her chair and saw Vance entering the parlor through the foyer. She rolled her shoulders briefly before coming over to collapse in a nearby armchair. "They've completely dramatized it. I can't get through lunch without hearing someone mention the tragic betrayal that transpired between the Potters. And that's just the other professors."

A slow smile worked its way across Grace's face. Vance caught her eye as she finished, and threw her a quick wink.

"Good," Moody nodded stiffly. "The less energy we spend trying to convince Voldemort you two—" his gaze returned to Grace and Regulus, "—are dead, the more we have to spend on the real problem."

Someone coughed in the back. "The real problem…?"

"Yes." Moody paced back to the center. "Our spies had to go into hiding. Have any of you lot wondered why?"

"I thought it was just James's fault?" Marlene said.

Moody ignored her. "They stole something from Voldemort."

Regulus stiffened.

"Stole?" Dorcas said with great interest. "Stole what? Is it something useful?"

"That's on a need-to-know basis only," Moody grumbled. "In fact, you wouldn't be hearing any of this, but Vance and I had a frank talk with Dumbledore, and we decided that we'll need to tackle this as a group."

"All right, but tackle what exactly?" Bones asked.

"Thanks to our spies, we now have a weakness of Voldemort's in our possession—or, to be more precise, a part of his weakness. Dumbledore suspects there is more than what was stolen. We only have one piece so far, and if we're to take him down and end this bloody thing, we're going to need to collect the rest of the pieces. The problem now is that we—"

"Wait, what?!"

Every head in the room turned to the source of the outcry: a taken-aback Regulus.

"What do you mean there's more?" Regulus said.

"Why's he surprised?" the other old wizard in the back asked around with great confusion. "Didn't he steal the damn thing?"

"I mean," Moody began, rearing forward, "we have reason to believe there's more like what you got that night."

Regulus simply stared back at the hardbitten wizard, at a loss for words. Moody turned away after a few seconds, hobbling back to the center of the room.

"What's the matter?" Grace whispered to Regulus quietly while the attention returned to Moody. "Makes sense to me has more than one. He probably makes them for fun."

"It's not that," Regulus said urgently. "It's more than the fact that the process is gruesome. Every time you make…one of those…you split your soul in half. Making just one means you've lost half your soul. Make another, and you've only got a quarter left. And the way Moody's phrasing this makes it seem as though Voldemort has more than just a couple, which is just…unthinkable! He must have barely any soul left."

Grace barely had to think about it. "Yeah, actually, that checks out. He probably has a hundred."

Regulus wheezed. "He would scarcely be a ghost if he had a hundred—"

"All right," Moody coughed loudly, shooting Regulus and Grace a supremely disgruntled look. Regulus immediately fell quiet, while Grace reluctantly turned her attention back to the grizzled Auror. "Now that we've settled all the questions, let's move on to the entire reason we've all congregated here: we need to locate these weaknesses. Now, that'll be rather difficult since we only ever found the first because the location was relayed to our spies. And we don't have spies anymore."

Grace shrunk a little in her seat as a few Order members looked at her and Regulus.

"We can surveil as much as we like and try to narrow down where these artefacts are hidden, but we suspect that a few of them might have been stashed away long ago, in which case we can only determine its location if Voldemort tells us directly. And that won't be possible without someone on the inside. Now that we don't have a leak of our own, I believe it's time to revisit the idea of one of our own infiltrating the Death Eaters."

"We can't do that," Bones protested. "We tried it once, and it didn't work. No—even worse, it failed miserably. Dearborn died."

"We have more advantages now than we did back then," Moody pointed out. "We have two insiders who made it into Voldemort's circle."

Grace exchanged a worried glance with Regulus.

"How much help is that going to be?" the middle-aged witch near the files asked. "None of us have the background to infiltrate Voldemort's group. You know that, Alastor. Half of us made our career working in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement!"

"Let's not write this off before we've even attempted it," Dedalus tried. "We should at least figure out a potential plan first."

"The problem is coming up with a plan that even has the slightest chance of working," Frank pointed out.

"And that's exactly why we're all meeting here today," Moody said flatly. "To find a solution to that problem."

Marlene let out an irritated groan. "Well, maybe we could figure something out if you'd at least tell us what the fucking weakness is?"

"That's on a need-to-know basis only," Moody repeated.

Before Marlene could argue further, Alice looked up and suggested, "We've tried sending in someone new before, and that didn't work. It's like Hestia said, none of us have a background that Voldemort would trust. Not to mention, I think Voldemort might be wary of new recruits after Grace and Regulus. So, instead of sending in someone new, how about we convert someone old?"

Bones snapped his fingers. "Yes! Use their own tricks against them. Do what they did with Pettigrew to us."

"That might actually work," Podmore said with some degree of disbelief.

Alice nodded. "All we'd have to do is corner a Death Eater—maybe someone like Goyle, right? He doesn't have the backbone to go against us. We can threaten him to switch sides."

Regulus looked at Grace. His face was scrunched into a deeply concerned expression.

"What is it?" Grace murmured.

"I don't think that would work," Regulus said quietly.

Before Grace could ask why, James loudly proclaimed, "Regulus doesn't think that would work."

Regulus stared at her brother, taken aback. James gave him an affirming nod and leaned into the back of his chair.

"Why is that?" Moody asked, swiveling back to their corner of the room.

"Well," Regulus began, squirming under the Auror's hard gaze, "there's no chance that a Death Eater who believes in blood purity would decide to suddenly switch sides and help us. And if you instead tried to threaten someone into joining us like they did with Pettigrew… It wouldn't work, because every Death Eater is more scared of Voldemort than you."

Murmurs of agreement floated through the room.

"Yeah, that's fair," Edgar Bones said thoughtfully.

"Is it?" Marlene countered immediately. She looked at Moody fiercely. "They may fear Voldemort more than any of us right now, but give me ten minutes and a windowless room and I'll have them begging to help us."

"I'm not sure about all this," Dedalus's friend said. "Say we manage to sway a Death Eater to ours… How can we trust them? Surely, at the first chance they get, they'll run back to Voldemort and betray us? We can't trust any one of them to do anything for us."

"You're making broad assumptions," Sirius retorted. "I'm the last person to defend any one of them, you know that, but surely there's at least one wizard or witch who was coerced into joining Voldemort. Weren't there rumors of Death Eaters using the Imperius to gain recruits?"

"Yes," Vance said. "We haven't been able to prove the validity of these statements yet, but a few of the Death Eaters that have been put through the Wizengamot claim to have only gone along with Voldemort because they were under the Imperius."

"Right," Sirius nodded. "We could use that to our advantage. So—"

"So," Frank cut in, "if we try to turn one of these individuals into a spy, what's to stop them from getting Imperiused again when they return to Voldemort's side?"

Sirius appeared stumped. A few other Order members picked up the argument, and the back-and-forth continued. Moody shuffled from one side to the other, grimly listening in on the conversation as it flowed across the room. In the midst of these arguments and counter-arguments, Sirius's idea was brought up again: wasn't there a better chance of bringing a Death Eater into the Order's side if they had been forced to join You-Know-Who? Slowly, surely, the idea began to slip into Grace's head. Because there had been such a Death Eater. She had seen the misery across his face, the crude creases and folds as he had been bent and remade into the shape of a Death Eater. (It hurts more, he had told her that first day, when Grace had made the first of her many, many mistakes, knowing the person you love is being punished for the mistake you made. Wasn't the face he had made then the face of a guilty man? Hadn't he looked hurt beyond belief, punished beyond punishment?) There was a Death Eater who was canny and clever enough to have almost sniffed her out when even You-Know-Who hadn't. There was a Death Eater who might be ambitious enough to take this chance—the chance for immunity, the chance to play both sides. There was a Death Eater whose vulnerabilities Grace knew well, who had told her as much.

"I know who it should be," she said. It came out much louder than she intended, and those around her immediately glanced in her direction. "We can turn Avery into our spy."

"What?" Regulus spluttered.

"Who?" James said.

"The old git that owns cauldron manufacturing companies?" Dorcas asked, frowning. "Rawdon Avery?"

"Rawdon?" Grace repeated. "No, no—I'm talking about Castor Avery."

"Castor Avery?!" someone near the back shouted.

The exclamation caught the attention of the other side of the room, who had been fiercely debating the ethics of threatening a Death Eater to do their bidding. Soon, everyone's eyes were on the Prewett twins, who had been spending the majority of the meeting with their feet kicked up on a back table, surveying the others as they discussed next steps.

"You're talking about hoity-toity, 'my hair products are worth more than your life,' Castor Avery?" one of the Prewetts asked.

"Er, yeah," Grace said.

The other Prewett blew out a breath. "Merlin, so he's joined, has he?"

"Yeah, but I'm fairly certain he's been forced into the position," Grace said. "And I think I know how to get to him and convince him to spy for us."

"And how is that?" Moody asked.

"There's someone he used to know that—"

"Wait, are we just going to spend the whole meeting about this?" Hestia, the woman who had been going through the files, demanded.

Vance looked at her, faintly surprised. "Is there something else you'd like to do?"

"I'm just wondering if we can really afford to spend all of our time recruiting new spies just to steal some of Voldemort's belongings," she replied urgently. "I don't know how potent these weaknesses of his are; even if they can take down Voldemort instantly once we have them in our grasp, it isn't exactly feasible to spend all of our time on this. We can't do that. Not when Death Eaters are still out there terrorizing innocent people."

"Well, we can't be expected to stop Death Eaters from terrorizing innocent people until we stop Voldemort once and for all," Frank pointed out.

"Of course not," Alice agreed, "but I think what Hestia is trying to say is that if we devote all our time and resources to finding and stealing these weaknesses, then we're not spending any time stopping Voldemort from, say, gathering more followers or assassinating high-ranking Ministry officials or what all else. This weakness issue is an important one, but there are a lot of moving pieces."

"Right," Bones agreed. "We've been hanging dry these past few weeks, too, ever since some of the Death Eaters went into hiding."

"That's exactly why we need to recruit a new spy," Vance urged. "We can't go back to just guessing Voldemort's plans. We were stopping his Dementor ploy so well before, but now we're bereft of spies and we have no idea if he's still pushing forward with that—even worse, we don't know how to stop him if he is pushing forward with it."

"Which is why we should be focusing on dispatching Order members to check in on Death Eaters already incarcerated in Azkaban," Hestia argued, "instead of discussing hypotheticals about whether or not we can convince a Death Eater to become our spy. We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Having a spy won't fix all our problems."

"Can't we do both?" Dorcas said wearily. She looked to Moody. "We don't have any concrete intel on what Voldemort's planning to do next, which is why I've been thinking… Instead of thwarting him or his Death Eaters whenever we gain insight into their plans, how about we start attacking their foundation? We can weaken Voldemort's power structure, have him lose faith in key Death Eaters."

"That's brilliant," Lily breathed. "It's like what the tabloids are doing with us, right? Spreading fear and panic, so no one can get their heads straight. If we can shake their confidence in Voldemort, if we can make them doubt him, then his power structure begins to weaken. He'd be knocked back a couple of steps. He'd have to go back to instilling confidence in his Death Eaters to get them to do his dirty work, and that gives us more time to devote to finding these weaknesses. And we don't even need a spy for this; we know a lot of the key Death Eaters are already planted in the Ministry, and we've been watching a few of the others for the last few months. We only need to start spreading misinformation to shake their loyalties."

"What you're suggesting is a smear campaign," Vance said.

"A smear campaign sounds great," one of the Prewetts agreed, "but don't you think that'll be a little too obvious? If we put up big banners outside the Ministry that say 'You-Know-Who Eats His Own Shit'—" his brother snorted, "—the Death Eaters would be more enraged than convinced. They'll know we're just doing it to get back at Voldemort. They won't believe it on principle."

"You're right," Vance said. "It needs to be far more subtle than that. We'd have to begin by finding or creating something especially damaging. We can then target a few Ministry workers we've identified as Death Eaters. A few of you can very discreetly spread this information. We'll have to work out the best way to do this, of course…"

"We can split into two teams, then," Moody said. "One for the spy—"

"Some of us should still be focusing on tracking down the missing Death Eaters," Hestia added.

"Three teams, then," Moody said roughly. "Vance, you'll head the smear operation. Jones can continue handling Death Eater patrols. And for the spy recruitment…"

"We're going with Avery, right?" one of the Prewetts asked. He pointed towards himself and his brother. "We should head that, then. We actually know the bloke."

Moody seemed to be undergoing some internal struggle. His eyes flitted between the Prewett twins, and then to the rest of the Order members, who very conveniently began to move around and ignore the unfolding situation.

"Fine," Moody sighed. "Who do you want?"

"Hmm… We'll take the littlest Potter."

James looked to Grace with an expression that would have been better suited for the funeral they just came from. "I'm so sorry…"

"And we'll take Podmore—"

"Absolutely not!" Podmore barked. He rushed to Vance. "Put me on the smear team. Please. Please, Emmeline—"

"Oh, all right," Vance sighed.

The Prewett twin that Grace was beginning to suspect was Fabian (his movements and expressions were a bit sharper and brasher, reminding her of the aggressive way Fabian used to retort back at Hogwarts) looked around the room and caught onto Marlene. "Oi, McKinnon—"

"I'm already on patrol," she said flatly, not even bothering to look up.

"What about Bones?" Gideon asked.

Bones didn't respond, perhaps because he had somehow disappeared in the last thirty seconds.

"What the—" Fabian said, shocked, looking around wildly. "He was right here, wasn't he?"

"Coward," Gideon muttered.

"Fine," Fabian said. "I see how it is. What about Black? You're a good gossip, at least. It'll keep things interesting."

Regulus turned to Grace, looking horrified. "I'm not a gossip, am I?"

She patted his shoulder. "I don't think they're talking about you."

Sirius gave the Prewetts a thumbs up. "Sure."

"We'll take the other Black for the smear team," Vance called out. "We need the intel on Death Eaters."

Regulus gave Grace a rather distressed look and slid out his chair. He rose to join Vance and her growing team on the other side of the room. Lily joined Regulus as he made his way over, having already been picked alongside Dorcas. James dawdled by Grace for a few minutes before resigning himself to joining Hestia as she went through a new and improved patrol schedule. Grace stayed at her table, watching with bemusement (and a shred of dread) as the Prewetts raced across the room to convince others to join their team. Unfortunately, it seemed Grace and Sirius were all they were going to get.

After a few more minutes, Grace resigned herself to this nightmarish team and rose from her seat, making her way near the back. Sirius was already there, leaned against the wall, watching as the Prewetts grumbled amongst themselves about how lazy everyone else was.

"Hey," Grace began, sidling up to Sirius, "do you know any embarrassing childhood stories about Regulus?"

A mischievous glint entered Sirius's gaze. "Oh, Grace, you don't know how long I've been waiting for you to ask."

"I hate this," Grace muttered for might as well have been the hundredth time in the past hour. "And I hate the three of you, too."

"Merlin, spending time with the Death Eaters has sure turned you into a bitter, hateful thing, hasn't it?" Fabian said.

Sirius, perhaps because he saw the murderous look beginning to bleed into Grace's gaze, nudged Fabian to get him to be quiet. He looked to Grace unsurely and said, "Look, we can't do anything about it now. Next time, you can come with us when we scout Muggles for strands of their hair."

This did little to soothe Grace's stinging pride. All that mattered to her was the moment as it unfolded before her, and it was a very upsetting moment indeed. Sirius, Fabian, and Gideon had all adopted the faces of a set of young Muggle men they had all bumped into earlier today. Grace, meanwhile, had been—yet again—saddled with the wretched, wrinkled face of Great-Aunt Edda, simply because the others had very conveniently forgotten to fetch a strand of hair for her, too.

"It's just bizarre," she complained. "We're so conspicuous! In what universe are three young men just casually hanging out with an old woman?"

"You're supposed to be our grandmother," Gideon said easily. "We're all just going out for ice cream together."

"Ice cream," Grace hissed. "Three grown men need their grandmother to buy ice cream for them?"

"We could be buying you ice cream," Fabian pointed out. "Three upstanding young men treating their grandmother…even though she doesn't deserve it."

Grace scowled at him. He returned it mockingly.

"Be quiet," Gideon hushed them.

He inclined his head towards the shining building of Gringotts that lay just beyond the ice cream parlor whose menu they had been pretending to peruse for the better part of an hour. Grace shifted in her chair, watching with narrowed eyes as the double doors opened and the few wizards who worked as vault security consultants and constructors came out. Among them was Francisco Calderón.

Fabian and Gideon leapt into action immediately, rising from their empty table to hurry after Francis. Grace followed at a much slower pace, in part because Great-Aunt Edda's body didn't allow for much mobility but also because she just wanted to keep some distance between herself and the Prewett twins. Sirius accompanied Grace leisurely, and they watched as Francis descended the front steps of Gringotts and began to meander through the twisting streets of Diagon Alley. He seemed to be heading towards a nearby café for lunch.

Today was their first day tailing Francis, and his life seemed to be just as dull as Avery's. They had watched Avery for a few days, to see if they could manage to usher him aside, but it seemed unlikely. He spent the majority of his day working at the Hall of Prophecy in the Department of Mysteries, which none of them could dream of accessing, and then went immediately home to the Avery estate, which was similarly prohibited territory. Their best chance of contacting Avery, they soon realized, would be by getting to him through someone else.

"I still can't believe it," Fabian said conversationally as Francis disappeared around a street corner.

"I knew they had gotten a flat together after we graduated," Gideon began, "but I thought they were just roommates…"

"Honestly, what I can't believe," Sirius started, glancing at Grace, "is that the Head Boy had been giving you the Gryffindor password all those years ago. I never would have guessed."

"Right? I can't believe Francis betrayed the sanctity of Gryffindor," Fabian muttered. "Giving the password to his boyfriend, who then gave it out to every Slytherin who asked."

"Sanctity?" Grace scoffed. "Gryffindor was anything but—"

"Wait, isn't that…?" Gideon interrupted suddenly, grasping his brother by the bicep. He nodded towards a demure witch carrying four bags from Twilfitt & Tattings.

Fabian stopped in his tracks. Sirius and Grace bumped into his back.

"What is it?" Grace asked, stepping beyond Fabian's shadow.

She followed the Prewett twins' line of sight to the slight witch and her shopping bags. She didn't seem the least bit extraordinary. She had stopped at the corner of the street, diagonal from the café. All of her bags had been placed on the sidewalk while she rummaged through her handbag for something. She seemed to have lost something.

Fabian squinted at her. "That's Dorcas's landlady, isn't it?"

"Are you kidding me right now?" Grace demanded. "Why—"

"Dorcas's landlady threw out her hairbrush a month ago. Dorcas has been using it for her Polyjuice ever since," Gideon explained hurriedly. "I think that's Dorcas, but why's she on patrol here?"

"What if that's her actual landlady?" Sirius said.

"Her landlady's a Muggle," Fabian responded, already starting forward to intercept Dorcas. "She wouldn't be in Diagon Alley."

The foursome crossed the street. Fabian pretended to trip over nothing and stumbled into Dorcas's path, who looked down at him incredulously. She made to sidestep him, but he looked up and said, "Hey—oh, bollocks, what was the…? Er, it's me…?"

Dorcas pulled out her wand.

"I—Merlin, Dor, I'm Fabian," he emphasized in a whisper. "Can't you tell?"

"I'm sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else," she replied coldly.

Gideon came up behind Fabian and gave her an apologetic look. "Sucker punch."

"That's the code this week?" Fabian said.

Dorcas looked between them with an exasperated expression. She stuffed her wand back into her pocket and pulled Fabian up by the lapels of his robe. "What the blinking hell are you two doing here?"

"We're doing recon," Sirius answered from behind.

Dorcas whipped around and caught sight of him, and then Grace. "What the—why are all of you here? You only need one person, two if you're scared, for recon."

"We thought it would be a nice team bonding experience," Gideon shrugged.

"Team bonding, my arse," Grace muttered.

"Look," Dorcas said, letting go of Fabian and instead focusing a heavy glare at him, "you're not supposed to be disrupting other people's patrols—"

"So, you are on patrol," Fabian said knowledgeably. "I thought as much."

"If you thought that," Dorcas seethed, "why're you interrupting me?"

"Who are you watching?" Sirius asked, trying to divert her attention from Fabian.

Dorcas looked away and pinched the bridge of her nose. After a few seconds, she looked back and answered, in a much calmer voice, "Avery."

Grace lurched with surprise. "What? Really?" She looked between Fabian and Gideon. "Do you think he's here because of Calderón?"

Fabian was already looking around. "I don't see him."

"He's right there," Dorcas said, redirecting him towards the open-air café. "The one behind the newspaper."

Grace's gaze flew over the seats. A few tables behind Calderón, there was indeed a wizard busily reading an issue of the Daily Prophet, however, it wasn't Avery. This person was far too old, with a bald patch growing out from the center of his scalp and a thin grey mustache gracing his upper lip.

"That's… Is that Rawdon Avery?" Gideon said. "What's he doing here?"

"He's here to watch the guy four seats away," Dorcas said. "He does it every few days. Dunno why. I already raised it to Hestia, since he might be thinking of recruiting him—"

"But that's Calderón," Grace said urgently. "He comes here to watch Calderón?"

"This is bizarre," Fabian said, stunned.

Dorcas looked between them with furrowed brows. "What're you on about? Who's Calderón?"

"He's the person we're following," Sirius explained. "He's Avery's weak point—the Avery we're thinking of recruiting as a spy."

Dorcas frowned. "Then why is Avery's father following him?"

Grace stared at the scene. Rawdon Avery hadn't flipped a single page of his newspaper since they started observing him. He was only pretending to read it.

Gideon ran a hand through his hair. "Why indeed…"

"You don't think…he knows," Fabian said, looking to Grace, "that his son and Calderón were in a relationship?"

"I… I don't know," Grace admitted. "Maybe. It might explain why Avery and Calderón parted ways."

"Hold on," Sirius said, shaking his head. "Do you think he's following Calderón around to make sure he's not meeting his son?"

"It's not completely out of the question," Gideon granted. "We can't use Calderón, then. Avery's father will notice."

"But there's no other way to get through to Avery," Grace argued. "None that I know of, anyway."

Fabian and Gideon exchanged a glance with each other. Gideon blew out a long breath, and he ran a hand through his hair. "I think we'd better update Moody. If Avery's father is keeping an eye out like this… It means he already doesn't trust his son. We can't touch Avery. It'll be too risky."

Grace stared at him incredulously. "I thought you two were all about risk!"

"Not when it has the potential of affecting people beyond ourselves," Fabian said with unusual sagacity. He nodded towards Gideon and Sirius. "Come on, we'd better get Moody's input."

Grace watched helplessly as the Prewett twins turned their back on Calderón—on her plan—and Apparated away. Sirius threw her a sympathetic glance, and then followed. After a brief few seconds of spluttered disbelief, her shoulders slumped and she Apparated to the Longbottom Manor, too.

Moody hadn't yet arrived from the Auror Office, so the Prewetts were avidly discussing the situation with the Longbottoms, who seemed to agree with them that it might be too risky to continue with Avery and they'd better look to another Death Eater—or another method entirely. The issue was, of course, that there was no other Death Eater who would cooperate with them. Grace huddled in the far corner of the parlor room, arms crossed over her chest, staring pensively at the Prewett twins. It would only be another hour or so until Moody arrived, and the chances of him disagreeing with the Prewetts were slim. Moody took paranoia to the extreme; he'd rather abandon this entire idea than run the risk of a Death Eater finding out any inkling of their plan.

"Hey."

Grace looked to her left sharply, where Sirius had come. "What is it?"

"You're certain Avery would switch sides if he had the chance, right?"

"Yeah," she said. She had fallen into her plan so deeply that wishful thinking and reality had blended together entirely; it no longer mattered if there were more nuances than previously thought, Avery simply had to become the Order's spy. "He's unhappy, I know it. And I think if we gave him a reason—and we have a reason in Calderón—he'd help us."

"All right," Sirius said simply. "Let's do it, then."

She frowned at him. "Do what?"

"Do the plan."

She wasn't certain if it was Sirius who was being thick or her. "But we can't," she said slowly. "The Prewetts will tell Moody we can't go any further without risking the Death Eaters noticing something."

"So? We'll just go behind Moody's back," Sirius shrugged. "Marlene sometimes keeps an eye on the Avery estate; we can pick a night she's on patrol and have her make certain Avery's father isn't sniffing around Calderón. Then, we can put your plan in motion. No one will know."

"But…"

She stared at Sirius, more than a little taken aback. She knew why she was so attached to this plan, to this idea. She saw some shadow of her own pain in Avery, and she had been grateful for what little help he had been able to provide while she acted as a Death Eater. She wanted to help him, pull him out of the abyss he had fallen into, remind him of what he used to have—of what he could get back. And she knew she could do it, but only because she had met the man and seen all the vulnerability that lay within him. Sirius had never met Avery, had no reason to believe any of this would work, so why was he so insistent on carrying this through so riskily?

He took her hesitation as fear.

"We can do it," he assured.

"How do you know?"

"Because you said so," he said simply. "I trust you."

Francis lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building near King's Cross Station, in a bubble of other wizard-owned and managed buildings. To Muggles, it appeared to be an old department store slated for demolition, but Grace and Sirius could clearly see it as a sprawling tenement: red-bricked, with open windows from which they could see a few of the residents coming home to relax after a long day of work.

Grace and Sirius were waiting by an alley opposite the building. Sirius shook out his right wrist impatiently, taking a look at his watch. Grace was smoothing down the front of her robes, the grey uniform that all Aurors wore, which she had taken from James's wardrobe and shrunk to better fit her frame.

"Shouldn't she know by now?" Sirius demanded grumpily, stuffing his hand back into his matching set of robes.

Grace merely shrugged. She peeked her head beyond the corner of the alleyway, taking a look at the building. A spoken password was needed for the front door to unlock, but she and Sirius had already overheard it after scoping out the place for the better part of the day. All they needed to do now was wait to make certain Rawdon Avery wasn't anywhere near the area.

Thankfully, that wait didn't last long. It was only a few minutes later when wisps of silver light coalesced, and a white mongoose appeared where previously there had only been empty air.

"All members of the Avery family are accounted for," Marlene's voice spoke through the Patronus. "I'll let you know if there are any developments."

With that, the mongoose faded into nothing. Sirius turned to Grace, ginning.

"Great," he said, relieved. "Let's go ah—"

The mongoose reappeared in another flash of white light. "By the way," Marlene added, "you fucking owe me for this. I had to do three early morning patrols in a row to get this one just so I could keep an eye out for you. And don't pull the same bullshit you did last time and say, 'Oh, Mar, but friends do friends favor.' We're not friends. I only tolerate you because of Lily. I fully expect you to take on at least three of my shifts for the Pettigrew hunt. Actually, let's double that since we're going behind Moody's back and I need more incentive to keep your stupid secrets. Goodbye."

Sirius stared in disbelief as the mongoose, with a crack of its tail, disappeared once again.

"Wow," Grace said.

"She's, er, just joking…"

"Yeah, whatever makes you feel better," Grace shrugged, already surging out of the alleyway and towards the apartment building.

After a brief moment of disbelief, Sirius gathered himself and followed after her. They quickly muttered the password, bubble and squeak, and strode into the first floor. There was only one witch busily scolding her two children by the stairs, but she paid neither Grace nor Sirius any mind as they slipped by and practically ran up the steps. They slowed their gait as they reached the fourth floor, walking down the long, carpeted corridor, and stopped just outside the door that read 405.

Grace took a deep breath. "Ready?"

Sirius cracked his neck. "As I'll ever be."

He raised a fist and knocked on the door. There wasn't an immediate response, so he tried again. A few seconds later, they heard a faint bark on the other side of the door—and then it opened. Standing in the doorway was Francisco Calderón. He was a touch shorter than Sirius, with a shade of a beard overcoming the lower half of his face and a pair of wide, circular spectacles sitting on the bridge of his nose. His dark hair was a mess of curls, hastily combed through with his fingers to get it out of the way of his face. His ears were pierced, but both were missing any adornments. He looked between Sirius and Grace with some suspicion. The weak light of the candlelit hallway washed over Francis, saturating his olive skin and making the dark, exhausted bags under his eyes more prominent.

"Hello, Mr. Calderón. We're with the Auror Office," Sirius said, flashing James's old Ministry pin. "Petty Crimes Division."

Incredulity brewed across Francis's face. "Petty Crime—?"

"One of the tenants on this floor reported a burglary," Grace said briskly. "We're just taking statements for the time being. I'm Auror Jewell Gubbins. This is my junior—" she ignored Sirius's affronted look, "—Alistair Boondoggle. Can we come inside?"

Francis's gaze fluttered between Grace and Sirius. They had disguised themselves tonight, so he saw nothing more than two middle-aged Aurors with crow's feet and greying hair. His eyes scanned over their standard, grey robes before coming to rest on the Auror Office badge pinned to Sirius's robes. After a moment, he gave a minute nod and stepped back, allowing them inside.

Grace glanced at Sirius before stepping in. Francis guided them down a short corridor that opened up to a small but tidy sitting area. There were two armchairs set across a secondhand sofa, with a wooden coffee table in between. Grace sat down on the sofa, and Sirius followed.

Francis dawdled at the mouth of the corridor, looking between them apprehensively, as though he weren't quite sure what to do with himself. Grace did not know the Francisco Calderón of before very well, or at all, but she knew, somehow, that the man standing before her now was nothing more than a shadow of himself: some husk, some sharp, tired thing that went through the days simply because he did not care enough to not go through them. He was steeped in misery, had bent himself into it; Grace could tell from the way he carried himself, from the way his hands tugged and tangled into each other anxiously. There was a basset hound here, too, having toddled over from the corner of the room to come nuzzle at its owner's feet. The dog, Grace felt, suited Francis perfectly. It lay by its owner's feet, face drooping, eyes pathetically large and watery. She wondered if he had gotten this dog on purpose, simply to highlight his own unhappiness. She could not glance at the basset hound without feeling bad, and then she would look at Francis and feel even worse.

He ought to get a record player in here and play sad violin solos while entertaining guests, she thought. Just to complete the experience.

"Would you like some tea?" Francis asked after enough time had gone by without any of them really saying anything.

"Sure," Sirius said before Grace could refuse.

Francis took this as an opportunity to go elsewhere and collect his thoughts. He hurried out of the sitting room and to the cramped little kitchen that was only partially obscured by a hanging curtain. Grace leaned back into the sofa, trying to watch him through the gap in the curtain. The basset hound came over to lie by the armchair, dolefully watching the guests.

"I feel like I've walked into a funeral home," Sirius murmured to her.

"Yeah," she whispered back. "He must be, er, going through something."

"That's putting it kindly…"

They sat quietly. Sirius began to examine the sitting room. Grace copied him for a little while, though she quickly lost interest. The flat was not decorated with any personal belongings. There were no picture frames or decorations, no plants, no stand with coats or jackets, no rack with reading material, no throw pillows with ridiculous phrases stitched into the covers, nothing at all that might have suggested to a visitor that this was a well-loved and well-lived in apartment. There was, however, paperwork—files and scrolls of parchment that had been set on the mantle above the out-of-use fireplace—a plain grey mat at the center of the room, and two food bowls set aside for the dog by the curtained archway leading to the kitchen. She wondered if Francis had only recently moved into this house; it might have explained why he looked so tired. Perhaps he was still unpacking.

The basset hound—who Grace was beginning to suspect was not an actual dog and instead some kind of illusion Francis had conjured to make his guests feel guilty for no good reason—lifted its head half an inch off the ground as Francis made his way back into the sitting room. A tray of teacups floated behind him. The tray approached Sirius first and stayed still as he opened the sugar bowl and mixed a few cubes into his cup of tea.

Francis returned to his armchair, the basset hound watching him solemnly all the while, and smiled forcefully.

"Haven't made a cuppa in a while," he confessed. "I hope it tastes all right."

The tray moved on to Grace. She took one of the remaining two cups and took a quick sip, more out of courtesy than anything, and immediately winced at the bitter taste. Had he steeped the tea for too long, or was this some vile brand that Grace had simply never had before?

"It's great," she said as her tongue curled with distaste.

"Yeah," Sirius agreed, wincing.

"Oh, good," Francis said, sagging with relief. "So, there was a robbery, was there? I hadn't known."

Grace looked to Sirius briefly, who nodded. She swallowed thickly before leaning forward to set her barely-touched cup of tea on the table.

"Truth be told, Mr. Calderón," she began, "we're with the Espionage Sector. The burglary was a cover story we used in case anyone was listening in outside. We've come to you to follow up on a lead. We need your help in contacting someone."

Suspicion was beginning to cloud Francis's face. He held himself tensely. "Who?"

"Castor Avery."

"I don't know who that is."

The response was fast, hard and forceful, like he was trying to convince himself of it as he was saying it, like he was hoping, praying, that by the time he finished the sentence he would have forgotten Avery entirely. But he didn't. He remembered. Grace saw the aching pain of memory seep into him. All Francis could do was remember.

"Really?" Sirius said. "He was in your year. Slytherin."

Francis's eyes flashed to him, and he snapped, "Perhaps you should ask some of the other Slytherins who were in his year, then?"

"We'd try that," Sirius responded, "if only they weren't all Death Eaters."

Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. Francis rose from the armchair like a whip and pointed to the front door. "I want you out of my house."

"Stop talking," Grace hissed to Sirius.

"Yeah, fair…" Sirius murmured, bringing the teacup to his lips.

Grace looked to Francis and tried to assuage him: "We're not trying to upset you."

"Yeah? Well, you're doing a bad job at that."

"Listen. We've been gathering intelligence on Castor Avery for quite some time now, and we believe he can be used as a mole. The Auror Office is in desperate need of information about You-Know-Who's targets and plans. We're launching this informal operation to use someone—"

"An informal operation?" Francis repeated with mounting irritation. "So, it's not on the books? You can screw him over when it's all said and done, and indict him anyway?"

Grace's lips thinned. "No, I mean only a handful of people are aware of this. If Avery cooperates with us, and depending on the usefulness of the information provided, he can receive full immunity once the war concludes."

Francis's heated gaze flew over Grace, and then to Sirius, who returned in coolly. "I don't see how I could help. I don't know where he is or what he's up to. If you have as much information as you say you do, can't you contact him without me?"

"We can't go to him. So, we need to give him a reason to come to us," Grace said.

Francis scoffed. "And what reason could I possibly give you?"

"We know you two were romantically involved."

Color bled from Francis's face. He fell back into his armchair. Any and all ferocity was lost, replaced again with the misery he had first greeted them with. Or—something more than misery. It seemed almost like misery on purpose, as though he wanted to be unhappy. Grace was looking at Francis, and she did not see a lover scorned or a man betrayed. She looked at him, and she saw a guilty man who had decided to spend the rest of his days punishing himself for something beyond his control.

"We suspect this was used against him to coerce him into joining You-Know-Who," she added quietly.

"I… I don't want to get involved," Francis said listlessly. "I don't want to be the reason. I'm already the reason he's a Death Eater. I—I can't be the reason he ends up in Azkaban, too. I can't."

Francis's hands curled over his knees. His eyes, wide and red-rimmed, watered. The basset hound let out a pitiful whine and shuffled closer to Francis's feet.

"What do you mean?" Grace said. "It isn't as though you forced him to become a Death Eater. You can't be blamed for someone else's choice."

"It wasn't much of a choice," Francis answered tightly, voice choked. "It's what you said: coercion. Can't really call it a choice when your father says he'll kill your boyfriend if you don't do what he says, can you?"

Sirius gagged on his tea, sloshing some of it over the rim and onto his robes. Grace stared up at Francis, taken aback. He knew. He knew precisely how he fit into this plot. Did he know, too, that Rawdon Avery had only been sitting four seats away at the café by Gringotts last week?

"Why—why aren't you in hiding?" she found herself asking. "When you know they'd kill you, when you know—"

"Hide and have him think it was Castor who helped secret me away?" Francis shook his head. "It's only his father. I doubt he'd have told anyone else, got any of the rest of his lot in on it. He'd have to tell them who I was, how I posed a threat to him—and he'd be too prideful to get into all that. No, it's just him keeping an eye on me—and keeping an eye on me is all he can do. If he kills me, he loses the leash he has around Castor."

Grace let out a breath. She leaned into the back of the sofa, rattled.

"We can work around Avery's father," she continued after a brief pause. "We can protect Avery. We can help protect you, too. All you need to do is help us get in touch with him."

Francis shook his head. "What makes you think he'd come if I call?"

"Why would he still be putting up with his father if he didn't care for you?" Grace said. "If he'd forgotten you, he would have left, wouldn't he? It's like you said—you're the only thing they can threaten to keep him in place."

Francis sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I—I don't know. Even if he did show… It'll just put him in a difficult position. Putting him in contact with forces that oppose You-Know-Who… If it gets back to his side, he'll be done for."

"That's why we have to be meticulous and careful—"

"No matter how much you plan, it'll still be risky. Even if he agrees and goes along with it, he'll still be going to You-Know-Who and the other Death Eaters. Won't they get suspicious after some time? They didn't get as far as they have because they're stupid; they'll figure him out one way or another."

There were so many arguments going through Grace's head. She was getting frustrated with Francis. She wanted to yell at him, tell him that he couldn't just make the decision for Avery. He couldn't just decide whether or not this was worth it. At the same time, she wanted to placate him, tell him that they could work around this, that, yes, You-Know-Who and his Death Eaters were clever but Avery could be cleverer. He would not make the same mistakes Grace and Regulus had made. Avery was a veteran. He had been surviving among You-Know-Who's fold on his own for years now, and he had done so with impeccable skill. He could surely take on any obstacle that came his way. They only had to have faith.

But Francis did not seem like the sort of person for whom faith was enough. Grace was half-certain that any argument she gave him, he would refute simply because he wanted to, because he could not bring himself into contact with Avery, because something in him had broken and he was afraid. She was at a loss for how to continue.

Sirius set aside his tea.

"What're you hoping comes out of all this?" he asked. "Do you want Voldemort to win?"

"Wh—what?" Francis spluttered, wheeling to him. "No, of course not."

"Then you do realize that once our side wins, Avery—and every other Death Eater we can manage to get our hands on—will be going to Azkaban, right? It's going to be risky. You're right there. He'll be in danger. There might be immediate consequences. But, Merlin, wouldn't you rather he had the chance to be brave and do the right thing rather than be miserable doing all the worst things? Even if it all goes wrong in the end, he'll at least be remembered as someone who risked it all to defy Voldemort rather than the coward who died in Azkaban after being captured."

Grace had never so sharply felt the need and urgency to slap Sirius. She looked to Francis, worried that he had been completely put off now, too offended to even continue to discuss this with them—but instead he appeared surprised. He stared at Sirius, as though it had never occurred to him that the war might end, as though he had thought—and hoped—that they all might be stuck in this limbo forever, with neither side tending towards victory, with Castor and himself always stuck in the middle, each alive but separated. The full force of Sirius's speech hit him like a flood: overwhelmed him, drowned him. He seemed even more helpless than before.

"All right," he croaked out eventually. "I'll do what you want me to. I'll do what I can. But I have two conditions. When you're talking to Castor about this deal, I want to listen in, so I know he's being treated well and you're upholding your end."

"Okay," Grace agreed immediately. "The second?"

"Obliviate me when it's all over."

They had chosen an old music shop at Hogsmeade as the location for their ambush. It was Francis's idea. Apparently, he and Avery used to frequent the back alley of this shop while they were at Hogwarts. Francis felt it would be a location that Avery could immediately call to mind and Apparate to without the risk of his father following. (Although there was no risk of Avery's father following today. Grace and Sirius had waited to get another all-clear from Marlene before proceeding.)

"Are you ready?" Sirius asked, lounging against the brick wall of the shop.

Francis stopped his pacing for a moment. He looked to Sirius and nodded. "Yeah."

"All right. Then let's send that message, shall we?"

Francis swallowed thickly before pulling out his wand. He gave it a smooth wave, and a silvery ibis emerged from the tip. It fluttered against the floor before looking up at its conjurer and parting its long, curved beak.

"Cas," Francis murmured to the bird. "Cas—something's happened. I—I'm by the music shop we used to meet at. There's… Please come, Cas. I need to see you. Please."

Grace had been worried that Francis would not sound panicked enough, but that concern quickly faded. Francis did not sound particularly frightened, no, but he did sound distressed, like the moment was only just now dawning on him. There were only a few minutes, now, that stood between Francis and Avery, and it was enough to reduce Francis into a shaky, tense mess.

The glowing ibis closed its beak, swallowing the message, and disappeared like white sand dispersed by the wind.

"That's good," Sirius said approvingly.

Francis nodded numbly, watching quietly as Sirius cast a disillusionment spell on himself and disappeared into a shadowy corner of the brick wall. Grace was at the narrow entranceway to the alley, although Francis did not know this. She had borrowed James's invisibility cloak for today and was looking out into the open street, wary of any curious passersby peeking in.

Scarcely half a minute passed when Francis faced the seemingly empty alleyway and said, "He won't come."

But he did. He did, and it only took another thirty seconds. He did, and he brought all his worry and affection with him, his whole aching, bleeding heart. The encounter was not quick and painless like Grace had hoped it would be. Avery appeared with a crack of thunder and he flew into Francis, arms outstretched, a desperate love clinging to him. He hurtled forward, took Francis's face in his hands, and searched his eyes frantically.

"Are you all right?" he asked, as though they had only been separated for four minutes rather than four years. "What happened?"

Francis trembled under him, slack-jawed, eyes wide. His hands reached up almost without his telling them to, as if to hang onto Avery as well, but he stopped himself mid-motion and simply stared, face tight and taut, eyes already watering.

"I'm sorry," Francis choked out.

"What—"

"I'm sorry, Cas, but they promised they would help. And they said they wouldn't—"

Avery's eyes flashed. "What are you talking about?"

Sirius emerged from his hiding spot and immobilized Avery, who grew rigid and stiff. He teetered back, but Francis leaned forward to catch him and gently lay him on the ground. Avery's dark eyes continued to move, looking between Francis and Sirius with mounting fury and panic.

"You weren't supposed to mention anything," Sirius grumbled.

"I—I didn't want him to think…" Francis turned away, pressing the hilt of his palms against his eyes. He shook his head, as though trying to erase away what had only just taken place, what was still unfolding. "Where's your partner?"

"She's already at the location," Sirius lied. He nodded his head towards Avery. "I'll get him there and then come back for you, all right?"

Francis nodded and stepped aside. Sirius bent down to pick up Avery, ignoring the cold rage that emanated from his stunned body. He dug into the pockets of Avery's robes and pulled out a beech wand, putting it aside in his own pocket. Then, he put one arm around Avery, readying to Apparate the two of them to the Shrieking Shack, which he and Grace had decided was the only convenient location from Hogsmeade that they could be sure no one else would intrude upon. Sirius discreetly put out his other hand. Grace shuffled forward underneath the invisibility cloak and took his hand, squeezing twice to let him know she was ready to go.

They were sucked into the air, bent and twisted as Sirius's magic funneled them through the tight atmosphere. Grace collapsed onto a decrepit rug in a dusty home, tangled into the invisibility cloak. Sirius had maintained his balance and was now dragging Avery towards the room they had prepared in advance. It, perhaps, once served as a bedroom, but the bed was in shambles: the hangings had been ripped off their rods and the frame groaned under the weight of a musty mattress. It was here that Grace and Sirius had set up two chairs and a table, after casting a few wards that would ensure no sudden escapes.

The door creaked as it was opened, and Sirius disappeared behind it. Grace rose from the floor and slipped off the invisibility cloak, pooling it into her hands. She swallowed thickly, staring emptily at the silky fabric. The furious look in Avery's eyes had not lifted in the slightest in the time they had stupefied and brought him here; she was beginning to worry he might not listen to her. With some trickle of anxiety, she stuffed the cloak into her pockets and made her way to the bedroom. Sirius had leaned Avery in a precarious position by the table, angling him in such a way that he couldn't see the doorway.

"You've got this?" Sirius asked.

"Yeah," Grace said, mouth dry.

Sirius nodded. "All right. I'll go pick up Calderón. We'll be outside."

"Okay. Lock the door on your way out."

Sirius nodded and slipped out of the room. The door closed behind him, swiftly followed by an unmistakable click as the lock turned. Grace drew herself together and raised her wand. She pointed it towards Avery and wordlessly performed the counter-spell. Avery nearly fell from his unsteady position against the table, but he managed to twist and catch onto one of the chairs. He drew it closer and hefted himself onto it. His hands fisted into his robes and his breathing grew ragged as he began to assess the situation he had now found himself in.

Grace stepped forward and fell into the seat across from him. "Hullo."

"Oh, you—" Avery promptly fell into a string of expletives. "Of course. Of bloody course. Of course you didn't have the decency to just die and let me be. No, no, of course not. Of course you had to have some inane, cockamamie plan. I knew it."

"Yeah…"

"That's all you can say for yourself?" Avery cried out. His hands were curled into his fists. "Just 'yeah'? Just—Merlin, Potter, let me out of here. I can't believe—how in the world did you get him to call me here? Why would you do that? Do you realize—"

"Look, we've got a lot to discuss—"

"You're bloody right we have a lot to discuss!" Avery screeched. "First of all—"

"Stop interrupting me," Grace snapped. "I'm trying to answer your—"

"Stop interrupting you? When you're the one interrupting me? You interrupted me from my life! You just kidnapped me!"

"That wasn't a kidnapping," she protested. "You came here of your own free will."

"I was lured here under the false belief that someone I knew needed help," he snarled. "What on earth are you trying to accomplish exactly? Have you decided just watching me be miserable isn't enough? You need to play an active role in torturing me, too?"

"Can you calm down? You keep spitting out a new question every other second."

"Oh, I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. I should be perfectly calm when someone I vaguely trusted re-appears from the dead and uses one of my most well-guarded secrets against me—"

"If Francis is your most well-guarded secret, then you really need to re-evaluate your secret-keeping strategies."

"Potter—"

"I'll start from the top. Just listen for a bit, okay? I asked Francis to contact you. After some convincing, he decided to help me do that. We ambushed you at—"

"Yeah, funnily enough, I was there for that part."

She coughed. "Right, so… Basically, I brought you here because I needed to talk to you. You see, the Order wants to work with you—"

"No."

"You haven't even heard what I'm about to say."

"You want me to spy for your lot just like you used to spy for them before you decided to play dead."

Grace stared at him, alarmed. "Er, how long have you known that for, exactly?"

"Well, it's sort of obvious now, isn't it?" Avery said, glaring at her. "Believe me, I was always a bit suspicious of you. But you never actually did anything when you were with us except irritate the Dark Lord, and most of the setbacks we experienced happened a while after you joined. So, I started to think that you really did join because Black did. And then you went and died all of a sudden—that, too, with Black—and I started to feel like something was off."

"You didn't believe I was dead?"

"No, I believed it. When I look back now, though, it was more wishful thinking than anything. Thing is, Potter, you don't seem like the sort of person who just dies. You're the sort of person everyone wishes were dead. But you're so infuriatingly stubborn that even if you do die, you do nonsense like this and show up very much alive."

Avery finished his rant. Grace massaged her forehead and then looked up to meet his cold, furious gaze.

"Have you got it all out of your system now?" she asked sarcastically.

He narrowed his eyes at her instead of responding. Grace drew herself up and rolled her neck.

"You're right. I've been spying for the Order. But I can't anymore, on account of me being dead, and we still need information about what You-Know-Who is up to."

"Why?" Avery countered. "You lost your spy. We lost ours. From what I can tell, everything's balanced out now. You could have saved us all the trouble and kept things as they were."

"We won't get anywhere if you don't at least try to listen to me."

"Fine, then. What sort of ingenious idea have you come up with this time?"

"We know how to stop You-Know-Who. He has a weakness. Several, technically. But we need someone on the inside to gather more information about it. We need a spy. It's too risky to send someone new in after me; he won't trust another outsider again. No one really wanted to recruit someone who was already a Death Eater, but I thought it might be worth it. If it were you."

"Am I supposed to be feeling touched right now?" he sneered.

Her jaw tightened. "Do you not understand what I'm offering you right now? I'm giving you a way out! The Order is headed by Dumbledore, who's the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. You could be given full immunity once the war concludes in our favor. You could live a normal life after all this is over. More than that—you won't have to keep doing this. You won't have to just do what you're told to do. You can do something good."

"No."

The rejection was immediate, without hesitation, a slap to the face. Grace flinched back at the sudden intensity of it, the sheer amount of hostility that had been packed within that single word. Avery looked at her like a cat backed into a corner: hair on end, hackles raised.

"If you don't help us, you know we can't just let you go back."

"Threatening me already, Potter? I thought you'd at least buy me dinner first," he snarled.

"I'm not threatening you," she bit back, growing just as irate. "I'm trying to talk some sense into your head. This isn't what you—this can't be what you want to do, doing You-Know-Who's dirty work, playing house for your father—"

"Do not presume to know what I want and do not want—"

"Do I really have to presume? When it's written so clearly on your face? When you Apparated back to Francis in a matter of minutes? Don't think I don't know what I'm talking about. I didn't approach you to take a chance. I approached you because I know you can do this. I know you would do this, if you would only be brave for one, stinking second."

Avery's jaw was tight. His nostrils flared. "Brave? Brave? You don't know bravery, Potter. You don't understand it. In my world, bravery is the sort of thing that gets you killed. It's loud and reckless and untrustworthy. What I'm doing isn't brave, sure, but it's keeping me alive and—and it's getting the job done. I don't want to spy. I don't want to put myself—and everything I have worked so carefully to conceal and protect—at risk. You won't convince me. My answer will always remain the same: no."

"You won't leave here until you say yes," she said.

"People will come looking for me," he responded coolly.

A steely silence followed. Within it, bloomed disbelief, desperation, and displeasure. Avery's hands were curled into fists, resting tensely on his lap. His dark eyes watched Grace unflinchingly, with such fierce distrust that Grace found herself reciprocating the look out of sheer irritation. If he was going to be difficult, then, fine, so would Grace—or, at least, that was what she would have liked to do. No matter how pinched and upset her face grew, that indignation did not reach her heart. It could not, because she was too confused about how to proceed, too bewildered by the fact that Avery wasn't even trying to trick her. He was being too upfront, too steadfast. No, he said, would always say. No. But—why not say yes? Why not nod your head and agree, and then slip out and tell You-Know-Who everything anyway? Why not take her trust and then betray it?

Her heart was too full of hope to be well and truly upset. Could it be that he wanted this deal but was too wary and paranoid to reach out and take it?

"Let me do a reading for you," she found herself saying. "You can ask whether or not this is the right path for you."

Surprise blinked across his face, but it was quickly masked by a sneer. "Oh, yes, so you can spin some drivel about how this is all my fate."

"Then do the reading yourself, too," she shrugged, pulling out her cards from the inner pocket of her cloak. "I'll say my version, then you say yours."

He scoffed. "You'll say yours is truer. You have the Sight, and these are your cards."

"That's the nice thing about tarot reading," she murmured, fanning out the cards between her hands. "They rely on the picker's ability to tap into the Sight. I'm only the interpreter. Whatever you choose, it's yours and only yours. If what I tell you feels wrong to you, then it can only be wrong."

Avery's gaze flickered away from her uncertainly and landed on the outstretched deck she had spread out between her hands. With great hesitance, he reached forward and picked out three cards. Grace put away the rest and leaned forward to flip each one over: first came the Two of Swords, then the Wizard, then, finally, the Ace of Cups. Grace had passed these cards through her hands for seven years now. She could call the meaning of each one to mind in an instant, but she said nothing, instead looking up to Avery, probing for some sort of reaction.

His own hand reached out and gently, gingerly, with the careful touch of a man afraid that he might scare away the future if he approached it too hurriedly, he took the last card, sliding it across the table and towards himself. He stared at it with something like painful nostalgia, as though he were looking at a photograph of some deceased family member—a face that inspired love but was simultaneously a reminder that that love was gone.

Perhaps he suspected something that Grace did not see, because she did not know precisely what question Avery had in mind. She could only put together a vague, general response from the cards picked: conflict from the Two of Swords, willpower from the Wizard, and a new beginning from the Ace of Cups.

"Another one," he croaked out.

She took back the other two cards wordlessly and let Avery hang onto the Ace of Cups. He was thumbing it nervously, watching as she shuffled the deck smoothly and then fanned out her cards once more. He reached forward again, this time with an unusual eagerness, greedy for the future he had thought impossible. The cards were picked and flipped over: the Lovers, the reversed Eight of Pentacles, the Ten of Cups. Grace's eyes scanned across them, and a hint of a grin began to peek through her lips. It was one of the funniest readings she had ever done simply because it was just too obvious, too clear-cut, as though Fate itself were straining against the cards, on the very cusp of coming out to knock sense and meaning into Avery's head. She could tell, just from the cards, what the question might have been: If I do this, will Francis be okay?

The Lovers were Francis and Avery in their youth, in the past, when they were at Hogwarts, happy and untouchable. The reversed Eight of Pentacles was Francis alone, could only be Francis alone, because Grace knew what Avery did not: she had seen Francis in that emotionless little flat of his. She had seen the absence of picture frames, the pile of paperwork brought back from the Ministry to lull him into distraction. She had seen his uncertainty, his jittery leg, his inability to hold eye contact. She had seen the lack of focus, of ambition, of motivation—and it was everything the reversed card represented. It could not have been Avery, who had only survived so long precisely because of the strength of his determination.

Then came the last card: Ten of Cups, the standard card for emotional satisfaction. A happy ending, if you will—though happy endings did not always arrive in the expected fashion. For instance, this one might take years to come and it may not involve Avery at all, but that didn't seem to deter him in the slightest. Avery picked up the Ten of Cups and placed it next to the Ace of Cups. He simply studied the pair for a moment, the happy little family in the Ten of Cups and the white dove dipping its beak into the overflowing goblet in the Ace of Cups.

"Well?" Grace asked.

"It's funny," he said, casting the cards away after one final glance. They pattered to the center of the table. "You have the same cards Vablatsky did."

"I know," Grace said quietly, collecting them and tucking them back into her pocket.

"It's almost the same reading, too."

Grace's brows furrowed. "What?"

"The first one you did," he clarified. "It's almost the same as the one Vablatsky did for me during my last year at Hogwarts."

Grace had been there for that. She remembered the message Vablatsky had given—don't give up—but could not recall the exact cards. "Really?"

"Yeah." He seemed faintly troubled by this. "It was the Two of Swords, then the Wizard, but the last one… It changed."

"What was it before?"

"Five of Cups."

"Oh," Grace said. She waved her hand. "That makes sense. You did that part already."

"Did I?" he murmured. "I thought it might be happening right now."

"No, you did it when you stayed with Francis when you shouldn't have. And then you did it again when you left Francis because of your father. And then you did it again—a million times over, actually—every time you met with You-Know-Who and the other Death Eaters. You kept not giving up. You kept taking the chance, whenever it was given, and it's all led to this moment, which leads to…this." She tapped the two cards at the center of the table, the Ace of Cups and then Ten of Cups. "They're connected, you know."

"I know," he said softly.

"One cannot exist without the other."

"Yes," he agreed.

"Your happiness ensures—"

"I get it, Potter. You don't need to keep shoving it down my throat." He let out an exhausted sight and rubbed his hand over his face. "Salazar… You are just…the worst person I've ever had the displeasure of meeting."

"Funny, I was just thinking the same of you." A beat of silence followed. Grace examined Avery carefully. "So… What do you say? About the offer?"

Avery looked away at her for a moment. He scoffed at nothing, as though he couldn't believe what was going through his own head. After a minute or two, his gaze returned to Grace and he said, "The Order must be desperate if they're resorting to kidnapping."

"Not a kidnapping," she reminded him. "But yeah, we are."

"I suppose someone's got to help you lot," he continued. "If not me, then who?"

A slow smile was easing its way across her face. Avery scowled at her.

"Wipe that smirk off your face," he said.

"It's not a smirk," she protested. "I'm just glad. It was the reading, was it? That convinced you?"

"No," he said rather pointedly. "It's only in part due to the cards. It's mostly… I'm thinking about it, and if I impose my own conditions and you agree with them, then I cannot possibly be cheated."

Grace mulled it over briefly and nodded. "All right, sure, we can draw up some sort of contract—"

"Not a contract," he disagreed. "I want something stronger than that."

She frowned slightly. "What?"

"I want to make the Unbreakable Vow."

Her brows lifted. Her hands curled away from the table on instinct and buried themselves within the confines of her cloak. Truthfully, the request wasn't completely unfounded. It made sense. It was just that Grace had heard quite a few (mostly made-up) stories about witches and wizards unintentionally breaking their Vows because of a cleverly worded condition or a situation they had not taken into consideration. She was instinctually reluctant to the suggestion, but if this was Avery's only stipulation…

"All right," she agreed. "I don't know if Dumbledore would make one with you, but there are other high-ranking Order members who'd probably agree with that."

"No, I don't want any of them," he said. "I do not know any of the Order personally, of course, but from what I gather they're self-sacrificing in the worst way. Do you have any idea of the number of people who have historically taken the Vow to get something for their benefactor and then purposefully broke it—and died—for that same benefactor?"

"No one in the Order would—" she began immediately, but was swiftly cut off by Avery.

"But, you see, I don't know that. What I do know is you. You're a Slytherin, Grace Potter. You want to live. That's why you faked your death. That's why you're in hiding. You won't break this Vow."

"You want to form an Unbreakable Vow with me?"

"Yes."

"Is there any possible chance that I could get you to, I dunno, calm down for one moment and not resort to something so dramatic?"

"No," he said simply.

"I'll do another reading for you," she offered uselessly.

"I'm afraid the same trick won't work again." Avery studied her for a moment. "Your reluctance is a bit alarming. Do you not think you'll be able to follow through?"

"I know I'll be able to follow through," she said. "It's just that now we're in the opposite situation. You're trapping me into a life-binding contract where you can set any conditions you want—and what if you put something in there that I might accidentally break?"

"Then we're back at the beginning again," Avery said, frowning as well.

Yes, Grace agreed privately. They could not trust each other, but they needed each other desperately. The Order needed Avery for the information, for the leg up in the war, for the locations of the remaining Horcruxes. And Avery needed the Order to weasel his way out of a life sentence in Azkaban should he be caught.

"What if we do two?" Avery sighed wearily. "You make one, set your conditions for me. And then I make one, set my conditions for you. We'll write them out first and show each other so that we can both agree we're not tricking the other."

"Fine," she agreed. She rose and walked to the door, reaching out a hand to knock against the wood. "Sirius—are you still out there?"

"Yeah," he called back, sounding considerably farther away than Grace had thought he would be. "What is it?"

"We're done."

"What? Really?"

"Yeah."

"And he agreed?"

"Er, yeah, sort of… Look, can you just get in here. We need to go over some stuff."

"All right," Sirius agreed. "Let me just wash my hands."

"Wash your—what are you doing?"

"I was eating."

"Eating—"

"Just give me a minute," Sirius said, now even farther away than before.

Grace distantly heard his feet padding against the ragged carpet of the shack. She sighed and turned back to Avery apologetically.

"Er, when Sirius comes back, we can have him cast the Vow," she explained.

Avery did not seem very impressed, but he nodded all the same. He leaned against his chair, eyes flickering over Grace. "Sirius is…Black's brother, correct?"

"Yeah."

"And, given your relaxed nature every time I mention Regulus Black, I assume he's not dead, either?"

Grace chose not to answer, if only because she didn't want to give Avery information before she got any from him, but he seemed to have already surmised the truth.

"Do they believe I'm dead?" she asked, hoping to turn the conversation back to herself.

"The other Death Eaters?"

"Yeah."

"Some do, some don't," Avery said flatly.

"What about You-Know-Who? What does he think?"

"I don't know," Avery snapped. "Do I look as though I have casual conversations over tea with him?"

"Well, what's your best guess?" Grace asked with growing exasperation.

"He definitely hates your guts, and the fact that he hasn't expended every ounce of energy to find you and make that hate manifest means that he probably believes you are dead. Honestly, I think that might have more to do with the fact that Regulus Black is dead. We all believe he's dead, because none of us have any reason to think he would have faked his death. And since the story is that he died with you, that would mean either both of you actually did die together—or you switched sides and helped the Order kill him. And You-Know-Who seems to think you wouldn't kill him."

Grace was mildly surprised by this. She was about to ask whether or not the Death Eaters believed she and Regulus were killed by members of the Order, or if they preferred a different rumor that had begun to spread, but Sirius unlocked and entered the room shortly after Avery finished. Sirius ran a hand through his hair and glanced around the room, as though it might have changed in the brief hour he had not been in it.

"Success, then?" Sirius grinned.

"Yeah, almost," Grace said. "Avery wants to make the Vow."

"Oh." Sirius blew out a breath. "Well, I wouldn't be opposed to it if we lay out our conditions first—"

"I want to make the Vow with Potter," Avery cut in, looking over Sirius with distaste. He was likely still a bit sore about being stunned.

"What?" Sirius said. He looked to Grace. "And you want to do that?"

"Yeah. We're going to make two. One with my conditions for him. And one with his conditions for me. We'll write it all out first to make sure it's all ironclad. No loopholes. I figure you'll be helpful for that."

"I mean… I can help with that, but are you certain this is something you want to do? It's your life you're putting on the line."

Grace frowned at him. "You were just about to put your life on the line."

"Yeah, but… Oh, fine, but if James finds out, you have to tell him you did it when I wasn't looking."

"It's my life, Sirius. I can do whatever I want with it."

"I know that, but I'll look like an irresponsible third party if I just agree to whatever you say."

"You are the irresponsible third party—and you've been doing a fine job. I just need you to continue for a little bit longer."

Sirius snorted. "All right. Let's get started on these conditions, then."

"Great," Grace nodded. She moved to close the door behind them, when she caught sight of the empty corridor. She leaned towards Sirius, lowering her voice to just a shadow of a whisper, and asked, "Did you take him back?"

Sirius nodded. "Yeah, yeah," he whispered. "He wanted to leave barely halfway through, actually. Thought everything was going well since there wasn't any screaming coming from the room or anything like that. That, and I figure he just wanted to go home. I—you know—" he tapped against his forehead, "—and sent him on his way."

"You Apparated him back to his flat, I hope?"

"Of course," Sirius said. "Can't just leave him roaming Hogsmeade without any memory of how he got there, can I? Took him back and—that's actually when I went out to get my falafel."

"Am I just supposed to pretend I can't hear anything you're saying, or what?" Avery drawled.

"Er, right, sorry," Grace mumbled, turning back to Avery. "Okay, let's get this sorted."

They crowded around the table. Sirius conjured some paper and quills, and they set to writing out their terms. They quickly narrowed in on two major conditions for each of them and spent the next few moments perfecting the wording. Within a half-hour, they had agreed to each other's conditions and Sirius was preparing to cast the Unbreakable Vow.

"Are you sure about this?" Sirius asked one final time.

The question was aimed towards Grace, who simply nodded and reached out to clasp Avery's forearm. Sirius gently placed his wand on their hands and softly uttered the spell that would bond the two through their vows.

"Will you, Castor Avery, spy for the Order of the Phoenix and pass on any relevant information to us for however long you remain a Death Eater?"

"I will."

A thread of white light spilled from Sirius's wand and twisted across their hands, binding them together. Grace felt the warmth of the first vow flash over her flesh.

"And will you keep the Order's secrets and never betray us for as long as this current war lasts?"

"I will."

Another strip of light spiraled across their linked hands. Sirius lifted his wand and then placed it atop their hands once more, beginning the spell again. Avery swallowed thickly, and then began his own clauses.

"Will you, Grace Potter, ensure the Order of the Phoenix will support my appeal for amnesty should the war conclude in their favor?"

"I will."

"And will you ensure the Order keeps my secrets and never betrays me for as long as this current war lasts?"

"I will."

With the last press of white-hot flame across their hands, Grace made to release Avery from her grasp, but he held on tightly.

"Wait," he said.

Sirius had already retracted his wand. "It was only two clauses each."

"This is just for us," Avery said. "Another Vow isn't needed."

Grace looked at him. "What is it?"

His eyes searched hers intently. "We're bound in death now. I know your conditions, and you know mine. I will do what I can when I can, but that does not always mean I can do the good thing. I need to know—will you trust me no matter what?"

"Will you trust me?" she shot back.

Silence fell over them. Whatever walls Avery had put up quickly came crashing down. Gone was the superficial, sneering expression he had kept plastered onto his face for the majority of their conversation. In its place, was a desperate, bleeding look: a pair of aching eyes, hungry for hope. A terrible crack split its way into Grace's chest. It was not easy to survive, to not give up, and yet here Avery was, crushed into fine dust and yet, still, going. She could understand this. She could understand his resolve. More than that, she could trust his resolve, especially when it was a resolve born from love.

Grace parted her lips. Avery—Castor—did the same.

"Yes," they said together.

A/N: hello everyone! hope you enjoyed this chapter. i've been away from this fic for a little while, so i hope there aren't too many discrepancies. thank you all so much for reading, giving kudos, and leaving comments. i truly appreciate all the kind words and support! :)

Random Reader: Thank you! So, so glad you enjoyed the last chapter. I'm always so impressed by how accurate your theories and predictions are! Like pretty much everyone you mentioned—Castor, Francis, the Prewetts—made a comeback this chapter, haha. I'm most excited about having James and Grace be close again, too! And, yeah, poor Podmore :( I wrote him in mostly as comic relief, but he truly was having the worst day.

The Goode Ravenclaw: Thanks so much for your kind words! So happy you enjoyed the last chapter, especially Dirk's reappearance. I sort of missed having his character around, too, and I wanted to explore him a bit more. He'll definitely be coming back in a larger role a bit later. Thanks again! :)

lilyflowerre: Thank you for the sweet review! I'm so excited to get back into James and Grace banter, too, haha. And yes! Ophelia and Lila! Super excited to get into this part of the story, because we'll finally be learning more about Lila. Thank you for reading and leaving such kind words! Hope everything's going well for you, too :)