November 21, 1997

"Percy, go to bed."

There was a series of hacking coughs in response from the living room.

"You're too sick to go out tonight," I left the kitchen and the small collection of self-washing dishes I was supervising as I went to him, my feet padding quickly on the floor with dull thumps.

Percy was leaning against the wall, fixing his scarf and coat before adjusting the charms already done on his hair to remove the shade of vibrant red to a dull, muggy brown. His breath was wheezy and shallow.

"I'm fine."

I started removing his scarf as he protested faintly between coughing fits, turning his head and covering his mouth so he would not spread his illness to me. It was very courteous.

"Come on," I put my hands on his shoulders and started guiding him back into the flat towards our bedroom, ignoring his protests about his shoes on the carpet. "Don't worry about it, Percy, I'll clean it up in a few minutes."

I managed to get him into the bedroom to sit on the edge of the bed, placing my hand on his forehead to read his temperature as he stopped fussing and seemed to settle into my care for a few minutes.

"You're burning up."

Percy shrugged as I pulled my hand away, "You've never complained about that before."

"You're not usually infected with disease. Shoes off."

Percy heaved a sigh and popped his feet out of his shoes by applying pressure to the heel of the shoe the way children did when they were coming into the house. "Well, I assume you are a poor judge due to your cold reptilian temperatures."

I rolled my eyes and started popping open the buttons on his coat. If only he knew the extent of my reptilian nature. That was one thing about me I had been able to keep hidden during our Occlumency practice. Unfortunately, my patronus charm was still a pathetic mist.

"My feet are not cold."

Percy was wise enough to let the coughing fit take him before he could form another smart aleck response. I was a normal human temperature and Percy was just warm like a furnace. I just liked to cuddle. His complaints about my cold feet were a personal problem.

"You're not going anywhere tonight." I tossed his coat to the wardrobe, where it hooked itself on the handle and summoned a pair of pyjamas to make a point before he could form a protest and argue with me about it. There were moments where handling Percy meant being a bit bossy and the shock of that from me could get him to listen without too much complaint. "Put these on, I'll get you some medicine and some soup and you can sleep it off."

Percy looked up at me, a hint of ferocity peering out from the shadowy exhaustion of illness. "No, I've indulged you long enough. I said I would go help and I meant it!"

"You're in no shape to go anywhere! I give you a potion, you'll just go to sleep in a bush and that's not helpful at all! I'll go instead!"

"Absolutely not!"

"You're willing to let whoever you're helping tonight go alone without notice?"

Percy had no response for that, but that hard, stubborn look in his eyes remained. I opted to summon the medicine that I purchased from the Apothecary Shop- not Percy's homebrew - as I suspected mine was a bit more potent than the stuff he made. I placed the small vial on his bedside table with a clinking noise.

"Drink up."

I took out my wand and glanced in the mirror to start performing charms on my hair in case my cloak hood was knocked back. A second layer of disguise for my own safety as Percy stared at me for a few more seconds before giving up and putting on his pyjamas, tossing his clothes neatly into the clothes hamper, propping his pillows against the headboard before laying down in bed to watch me charm my hair.

"I don't like the blonde."

I didn't either, it made me look like my mother in a way that disturbed me, but it would be fine for one night as a secondary layer of disguise.

"I don't like you as a brunette." I retorted, as I fixed my eyebrows to better match my new hair color.

"Hm?"

"Your hair."

"Oh," Percy reached up to touch his still brown hair. "The other choice was blond and a very pathetic beard."

That was far worse.

"I'll cease my complaints."

Percy chuckled before beginning to cough again. I left the mirror to take a seat on the edge of the bed next to him and run my hands through his hair, quietly removing the charm to restore his hair to its usual vibrance and restore his freckles. I hated that image of a stranger in my bed.

"I'll put the soup on the stove. You take your medicine and eat when you're ready. I'll be back as soon as I can." I pressed my lips to his forehead while he made a discontented noise.

"You know you're probably already infected right?"

Yep. I was trying not to think about all the snogging and shagging we had been doing before Percy decided it was apparently time for his yearly cold. My days were clearly numbered and sleeping on the couch was not going to save me from catching his disease. I refused to fall for his fatalist ploy for a proper kiss. The inevitability of the matter did not mean I had to speed it along to keep him content.

"Just take your medicine," I summoned his communication parchment from his bedside table drawer, quickly revealing the information with a tap of my wand and memorizing it quickly. "Want me to check on you when I come back?"

"Please. Just so I know you came back."

I set the soup on the stove with a warming charm and realized that walking out the door into potential danger was both a duty and perhaps a kind of twisted desire of my person, an attempt for control where my opponents were clearly defined and there were not innocent victims of circumstance to catch in the crossfire of my words. There was clarity in clearly drawn battlelines in a way that never truly existed for the political sphere.

As I gathered my things and began to make my way out of the building to the apparition point, I allowed the anxiety of the matter and the tension to wash over me for a moment. How strange to an active bit player and not someone in a position of manipulation for once. It offered relief in a way. When the war ended, I was not going to do that anymore. My words were only going to be for me, not something to turn other people into pawns for my own gain.

I would be a better person than that.

The surprise on Oliver's face when I arrived in Percy's place was amusing. He had a good laugh at the new disguise and asked for the security password -Bludger- and quickly picked up that I was not Percy. I quickly explained the situation, that Percy was far too sick to be helpful tonight and I came out instead due to the short notice.

"Yeah, he gets one of those colds every year." Oliver said quickly with an amused smile as he peered through the bushes and passed me a fresh communication parchment "I had to watch him drink two Pepper-up potions so he would not miss McGonagall's Transfiguration test in fifth year. He doesn't remember anything, got an Outstanding for some reason!"

"Hilarious."

"Horrifying." Oliver clarified as he checked his papers with some notations in what I recognized as Tavish's handwriting, even if I could not decipher it. I did not believe it was in English, it looked like some sort of code. "He's a bit of a nutter, least you're a reasonable person."

"Thank you!" I followed Oliver's gaze to the small hamlet village below. "What's the plan?"

"Get in, pick up and get out."

I nodded slowly as the last rays of the sun began to set over a distant hill.

"Where are we exactly?"

Oliver grinned, "Welcome to Hagstun." He pointed to a tall steeple in the center of the town. "This is where the Hag Uprising ended, the remains are under the old church there. The town just sprung up around it." Oliver pointed towards the stone wall that surrounded the village, they were not tall, only coming up to my hips and covered in a green moss they spoke of how old these walls were. I could see a few places where the walls had fallen down from a lack of repair. It was a small village containing only a few families, judging by the number of houses but I was sure there were a few more out of sight and over the hills beyond.

"Alright. What's my role in this?"

Oliver smiled, "You're keeping watch while I pick up some parcels from the church." He pulled out a small map of the village. "We're going in through this gap in the fence here." He marked a spot on the map, your job is to make sure I have a clear path out of the building."

I nodded quickly.

"What about Snatchers or Death Eaters?"

Oliver released a breath he had been holding. "There are patrols here, but I think it's just one man. Hagstun is not really on a big watchlist."

"Which is why we're doing pick-ups here."

Oliver nodded. "This will be the last one though. We can't have arrangements like this for too long." He pulled his cloak over his head and his face shifted to someone unfamiliar to my eyes as the final rays of light disappeared beyond the distant hill and a cold bitter chill moved through the air.

Oo0Oo0

Two hours later, I found myself crouching in an alleyway under an invisibility charm and scribbling a note to Oliver declaring that he was clear to leave the church, the words fading quickly on the parchment. It had been a quiet, easy thing to accomplish everything we needed to do tonight. Nothing had gone wrong. There had only been one guard wandering through the hamlet and he was easily avoided as he seemed a bit lost in his own little world, uncaring about what was surely the most boring job on the bigot roster.

I could see Oliver moving out of a side door of the church, him and three other figures under invisibility charms that left them only as faint outlines to my eyes when they moved around, they settled in an alley across from me, a safety precaution so we could hit an enemy from behind if needed.

I glanced out to the main street for the lone guardsman.

There he was, strolling down the street in his black robes and the faint reflections off some sort of white mask.

Wait...

This was not a Snatcher.

This man was a low-ranking Death Eater. He had to be unimportant to be stationed out here alone. Must have annoyed someone.

I shifted back into a small alley between a house and a shop, out of sight of whatever figure was lurking on the main street of the hamlet. I could see Oliver not far away, the faint outline of him from his invisibility charm left home only as a slight outline that could be best seen when he moved.

It made me wish for a real cloak of invisibility. Like the one from the Tale of Three Brothers, how useful that would be in this situation!

I could tell that Oliver was looking over at me, the small family under their own concealment spells. That was too many people to apparate.

The masked figure was coming closer.

Oliver had too many people with him to hide properly.

Perhaps in later years, I would consider this one of the stupidest moments of my life.

As the masked figure walked past me, I set the hem of his cloak on fire with a quick charm. In the bevvy of cursing and swearing that followed I ran out of the alley towards the woods, getting my victim's attention by firing another spell that flew past his left ear with a crackling noise like a firework. In that moment, I saw his mask and it registered to my mind that it looked like a vulture.

There was a blurred view of the hamlet as I took a sharp turn down a small alley off the main road where we had snuck into the village and quickly disappeared into the treeline. I leaned against the first sturdy tree I found and tried to catch my breath, my heart threatening to explode from my chest. I should take up running. I'm clearly in very poor shape.

A jet-black spell flew in front of my nose, missing me by the barest inch.

With a gasping breath, I moved to the other side of the tree, keeping my back pressed against it as I tried to get my barring on where exactly my opponent was hiding.

There! He was standing ominously in the trees, half hidden by the darkness and the low hanging branches of the trees.

'Alarte Ascendre!'

The black robed vulture flew upwards into the air, crashing through the branches of the tree above. There was a faint popping noise and a flash of darkness that broke my spell as the Vulture disappeared and reappeared in the tree above me. The edges of the robes were frayed from more than my fire spell and the edges appeared as feathers to my vision for a brief moment before I dodged the array of conjured knives that came at me from above.

'Incarcerous!'

Rope sprang from the end of my wand, the figure disappeared in a flash of shadow.

A reflexive jerk saved me from a nasty curse that barely missed my shoulder. I turned the ropes from my previous attack into vines and flung them at my attacker who was now at my level, holding his wand slightly tighter than the arrogant, relaxed grip he had so favored earlier in the night.

'Terra Carceris!'

The earth rose at the masked figure's feet, covering them in an effort to encase him in the earth below, to drag him down into the darkness as he began to quickly climb up his legs.

The masked man grunted and disappeared in a flash of shadows as my spell fell back into place.

He reappeared once more, further back and still looking as calm as he had only moments before.

I felt myself slipping back into the duelling stance I had learned from my grandfather, turning slightly sideways to make a smaller target of myself, my cloak making me appear wider to provide more opportunities for my opponent to miss his shot.

The vulture cocked his head slightly, a kind of mocking arrogance and familiarity to the gesture that I did my best to ignore.

My opponent fired first, the bright red light of a stunning spell lit the trees in a shade of red and violet.

'Protego!'

The shield encased me quickly, rebounding the spell up into the tops of the trees.

Lightening began to spark from the vulture's wand and before I could offer a counterspell, a surge of power came down in a bright light that made my hair stand on end in the brief milliseconds before impact.

The force of the spell hitting the earth knocked me off my feet and through the air in a breathless, hard tumble where my feet flew over my head and left me at the base of a nearby tree, the impact rattling through my skull.

I yelped as the spells that held my cloak in place were ripped away, taking a chunk of my hair from my scalp with it.

Suddenly, everything stopped.

"You- You shouldn't be here!"

I knew that voice.

"I can't look at you when you look like that!"

What did he-? Oh! Right. I could see the faint strands of blonde hair and remembered that I now looked disturbingly like our mother.

The hood of his robe had fallen back and I could see the streaks of gray and silver at the edge of the mask close to his ears mixed in with the rapidly fading night black of the rest. The refusal to remove the vulture mask and see me face to face told me everything else I needed to know.

I clearly did not move fast enough because the spell fell over me so quickly, it was like being hit by a Sasquatch, all ferocity and power motivated by fear and rage that made me gasp with the suddenness of it.

"Alex…"

His gray eyes were wide as he looked at me, seeming coal black in the shadows of the woods around us. I could not see his full face, but the expression of horror and disgust in his eyes told me more than enough, even if I was unable to tell if that disgust was aimed at himself, or at me for stepping out of the role I had been placed in as a non-participant in the Graves family glory.

"What are you doing here?" The tone of his voice had faded from shock and horror to something more ominous and threatening.

"Me? You're asking me that?" The words tumbled out of me in a thoughtless way, fast and hard like a freshly sharpened blade as the reality of the situation settled in my bones as if I had been drenched in cold water. There was blood running down my neck from either my near scalping or my head meeting the base of the tree. I staggered to my feet in an act of sheer willpower, still somehow clutching my wand through everything. "Get that thing off your face! A-and show me your arm!"

Alex tilted his head slightly in a manner that reminded me of Hermes when he was looking at a rat in the alley by our flat. I could see the light of his eyes, reflecting from the slivers of moonlight that suddenly peeked through the clouds at this family drama playing out in sight of a silent world.

"I don't have to do that."

Screw it.

I moved my wand quickly, yanking the mask off of my brother's face and calling the mask to my hands and Alex yelped from the sudden, unexpected, blow to his ego and pain of the spell pulling his skin.

It was a beautiful mask. White and lined with dark obsidian paint that provided the image of a vulture through careful, subtle lines that helped create the hook shaped beak and a pale ivory color helping to create the image of the bird's distinctive bald head.

Things began to fall into place, like pieces of a puzzle.

"You…"

Alex hurt Percy. My brother tried to maim or kill the love of my life and I could not say anything about it! Everything I feared had come to pass in a nasty, horrific fashion because I was trying to play both sides and hope for the best. That Percy and Alex's chances of meeting on the opposite ends of each other's wands was too slim to worry about. That my brother had long been an observer of events and never a participant in atrocities beyond what was needed to earn trust by saying all the right things.

"You are so much better than this!"

"I'm doing this for a better world!"

"Better?" A high, cold laugh tore itself free from my throat, sending chills down my spine as I stepped forward. "How many people have you torn apart for your better world?"

"It's not a better world for you!" Alex was unfazed, but clearly irritated. "A world where Thalia and other werewolves don't have to hide what they are!"

"And the Seeds? You'll throw them aside!"

Alex caught his breath for a moment, looking honestly conflicted for a moment.

"Answer the question!"

"Sometimes there are sacrifices on the way to something better!"

I saw an image of Zara in my mind and the name of Annette's little friend Angeli Gomez from Ilvermorny. Cassandra Barebone's resolute face came to my vision. Valencia Talbot standing strong in world that saw her as lesser. All of the children I had helped hide away in Thornell at great risk to Lucinda and everyone we knew and my temper only grew.

"I love you! I came here to find you and have a brother again but clearly that was too much to ask! Thalia deserves better of you! The world deserves better of you!"

"This doesn't mean the end of the Seed cause, Audrey! Think! There is a bigger picture than just preserving the status quo of wix kind!"

"I was there when the Ministry fell, Alex! I saw him!" I took a shaky breath, holding myself upright only on knees that only trembled in the terror of what I was seeing and what my brother had become. "If you think that that monster gives a damn about the werewolves, you're completely delusional!"

A moment of silence from Alex was broken with his response. "I saw him too."

"Then you understand why this needs to end!"

"I have never seen so powerful a warlock in my life. It just radiates off of him, but sometimes revolution and change happens-"

"How many Valencia's have been made from this, Alex?"

Alex stopped talking, a hard look on his face and unspoken words lining his mouth through the set of his jaw and the shock of his eyes. How dare the little girl mention that? How dare she bring up something so painful and intrinsic to how Alex's life had come to this point?

"How many Seeds have been tortured? How many are dead? How many families will never know what happened to people they love? How many have been abused for being seen as lesser?"

Alex was starting to move his mouth to speak- but Alex had done enough talking in his life and I would have the last word for once.

"You and I are complicit in this! You wanted me to take a stand on something, well here it is!" I pointed my wand at Alex, my rage making me appear calmer than I really was in that moment. There was no trembling in my voice. My hand was steady. "Pick a side Alex. I've chosen mine."

There was a momentary shock in my brother's eyes as my wand hand remained steady. If he tried to start another fight, I was ready. I was not sure if Alex had in in him to kill me, but I had to fight as if he could, Alex had always been a better duellist than me, I had grown up hearing as much. Every practice fight when I was a kid had left me in the dirt, learning how to take a hit while my grandfather looked on in disappointment at my failures as the years went by that there was not another Graves duelling prodigy under his tutelage.

Alex disappeared in a soundless pop of apparition.

I was now alone in the woods with only my own thoughts for comfort and they failed at even that as the shock finally fell over me, putting me on my knees as the combined weight of knowledge and disgust at what had just transpired settled on my shoulders.

Well, it looked like I had earned the privilege of strangling Alex.

The knowledge of it tasted like ash in my mouth.

Oo0Oo0

Author's Note:

*sips coffee and hides*

Why a vulture? Well, we've seen that Americans who can produce a patronus charm will sometimes get tattoos or some sort of charm related to it. Like Auror Jenkins and his stallion tattoo from a previous chapter. I also like to think that the members of the Graves family that we see have patronus' related to death or war in some capacity. Jack Graves has a Puma patronus (aka Mountain Lion or Couger) – the many names of this one animal reflecting the facets of his personality in a way.

Alex's mask and patronus is a Vulture, both to fall into this theme and as a meta joke about a term for journalist being 'vultures', always lurking around and circling crisis for a story.