Chapter 7: The Doctor will see you now:

Summer passed quickly, and in what seemed like no time at all, Graham found himself alone as he carried out his renovations. He found that he had something of a knack for household charms - there was something pleasing to him about the sheer functionality of them, the way that their designers had managed to turn magic to such specificities of human activity as washing windows or providing working plumbing to a property.

At the same time, though, Graham was finding himself increasingly frustrated at his lack of progress in every other aspect of magic that he'd taken a three-year hiatus from. His practical, front-line healing spells and a very specific subset of potions for medical use were as good as they'd ever been - but it was deeply frustrating to struggle with seventh year transfiguration and to find himself so slow off the bat in the use of his wand for dueling practice. Jess and David rarely found the time to make it to Lockwood, and the few times Sirius had offered to duel him on his irregular visits, he'd been thoroughly trounced.

"It's not that you're doing things wrong," Sirius had said, consolingly, "It's just that you're a bit behind on the practical front, and your instincts aren't there yet. The best remedy would be more practice duelling, but I get that it isn't really your focus right now."

"Anything I can do to help my complete bloody incompetence without making it my 'focus', then?" Graham had snapped - he had always been something of a sore loser, as much as he didn't like to show it.

Sirius, of course, had laughed at his snappiness rather than taking offence.

"Just do your best to be surprising - it's the best way to make up for a gulf in skill, the first time you face up against someone." He'd advised - and so Graham had tried to speed up his casting, and add some more unconventional tools to his repertoire. It was frustratingly slow going, but it was better than nothing.

On the other hand, Lockwood Manor itself was showing progress at a far greater pace than Graham had realised - in no small part due to Jessica apparating over to manage the really frustrating pieces of transfiguration that he simply didn't have the talent for. Graham still needed to prepare the expansion charms that would render the upper floor of the house a series of classrooms rather than bedrooms - but the property was clean, livable, and, if not quite up to the level of Hogwarts, could at least pass for a charming country hotel or an asylum for a particularly wealthy class of Victorian madman.

As Christmas approached, Graham spent less and less time on the house itself - instead, he increasingly gave himself over to the prospect of how exactly he was going to manage the influx of students he intended to induct into the magical world without completely losing his mind. He still wasn't sure exactly how many kids that he should expect to be born in a given year - in the last, there had been almost five hundred surrogate children born from the clinic Graham had altered, but how many of those would turn out to be magical, he wasn't sure. If the figure was around five hundred, though, that would really mean five hundred per year, which might ultimately reach nearly five thousand by the time the first group left for Hogwarts.

The best plan Graham had come up with, to that point, was to find some means of raising money, and use that to run a series of summer camps for the young magical children to attend - my first time riding a broom, basic potions, magical etiquette, that sort of thing. Beyond the three Rs, magical education certainly didn't need to be comprehensive - he, and most muggleborns, had managed to survive in Hogwarts with nothing beyond a few months' notice of their magical abilities, after all.

But even this most minimal intervention would need teachers, a way of getting children to and from school - Graham scrawled 'Portkey License?' on the corner of a page of notes - it was a hell of an operation to oversee, and Graham didn't feel like half the wizard he needed to be for it to work out. Dumbledore, he thought wryly, would have had a better plan from the beginning, let alone a better approach to preparatory schooling.

Any further musings, however, were interrupted by the chime of the magical registry which Graham had carefully stored on a shelf of its own by his desk - so he reached over to grab it, and flipped it open to the most recent entry. Although he knew that it'd be a good while before he'd find out about any of the surrogate children he was interested in, it was hard for Graham to suppress his interest in the first manifestation of a wizard's magic – even if it felt a little illicit. Still, he supposed that – he peered down the list of names in search of its most recent addition – the young Miss Granger would hardly mind somebody knowing that she'd managed to turn off everything electronic in her house to get a bit of sleep.

Although, Graham realised with some surprise, the implication was that she was another muggleborn. From the very few that had attended Hogwarts – maybe a tenth of the students overall, or a little under that – almost a quarter of students that had been registered in the time Graham had had the birth register appeared to have done something which involved a piece of muggle equipment. Perhaps some wizards were less averse to muggle things than they'd show on the outside, or fewer muggleborns than he'd realised accepted their offers to attend Hogwarts?

Unfortunately for Graham, his thoughts were brought to an abrupt end when a pair of men apparated onto the front lawn. Before he managed a proper look at them, one slumped to the ground and lay there, motionless – the other stood defensively over him, and wove an enchantment which drew a shimmering net around the two of them not a second before a blast of light burst against it, signifying the arrival of a masked pursuer.

"Oh dear, oh dear – you chose to run somewhere where there's nobody home?" laughed his assailant breathlessly, before she calmed herself. "And you're defending your friend with a shield that'll snap like a twig if you don't weave it fast enough?"

Sirius didn't respond; to her jibe – he was too busy working at the shield in question. Each additional incantation added another layer to the network of glowing wires which encased him, while lumps of earth ripped themselves from the ground to provide a physical component to this defence. Unfortunately, this did nothing to deter his assailant, who gleefully began to spit out curses at her pinned target, rather more quickly than he could compose new layers of protection.

"Imedimenta, flipendo, tarantagrella, bombarda, bombarda, diffindo, – oh, this is exciting, isn't it? Like unwrapping a present, one spell at a time." She giggled. "Now, what should I -"

"Stupefy!" A bolt of red light lanced into her side from a few metres away, and – gasping with the exertion of casting a stunner while maintaining a disillusionment charm– Graham fell to his knees. Behind him, Sirius let out a bark of triumph, and dropped his shield.

"Thank Merlin! And you, of course." he said, grinning. the moment of elation passed, and Sirius became a little more serious. "It's bad, Graham, or I'd never have come here – I just didn't have a choice. Remus is in a bad way, Poppy's out of the country, and we can't take him to Mungo's – I need you to help him."

Graham didn't understand why Lupin hadn't been taken to St. Mungo's, but he was astute enough to know when the time for such questions was; he lifted him from the ground with a careful levicorpus.

"Alright, Sirius," he said, "I want you to handle our extra guest, and obliviate the hell out of her on top of whatever else you do. You-Know-Who can't know about this place, alright? Oh, and – is there anything I need to know about Lupin before I treat him?"

Sirius paused as a series of emotions fought their way across his face – but he seemed to firm his resolve, after a moment.

"The curse was silent, a brown-black colour, and he took it in his side. It's some kind of internal effect I've never seen before, and – and – he's a werewolf, okay? I know that can affect treatment. I swear I'll explain after, alright?"

Graham paused a moment longer than he ought to have, but eventually, he nodded, and conveyed Lupin into the house.

"If anything, that's good news - I understand that he'll have a bit more resistance than he might otherwise. Can you deal with her? Whatever else you do, though, obliviate the hell out of her. I can't have You-Know-Who knowing about this place."

Graham had been right about his patient, it later transpired; although the spell he'd been struck by was indeed a nasty one, his heritage had protected him from the worst effects of what the diagnostic spell he'd cast revealed to be the entrail-twisting curse; rather than a full magical surgery, Lupin ended up needing little more than a couple of intravenously delivered potions and a sleep charm to keep him still while they took effect.

Once Sirius had dispatched his assailant to the Order ("with the last few days completely blitzed, don't worry") he and Graham sat in the main hall, sipping at the bottle of gin which Graham's brother had sent him for his birthday some months before. Lupin, Graham had said, would take an hour or two before he stirred from his sleep.

"How long has Remus been a werewolf, anyway?" Graham asked, at length; the question had been eating away at him since Sirius had told him.

Sirius sighed, and looked away for a moment. "He was a werewolf since he was a kid, you know - Dumbledore let him in, but it was a struggle to keep his furry little secret - that's what we called it, James, Peter, and I - well, a secret while he was at school."

"Honestly, I feel a bit stupid, in retrospect - I mean, all those times he was ill around the full moon? the poor bugger. He's lucky to have had you lot, anyway." Graham said.

Sirius smirked, and drained his glass; the sun had started to sink towards the horizon, and patterned light from the stained-glass windows was spilling into the hall. "So, about this place - what do you see it becoming, if we make it through this damned war?"

This wasn't something Graham had actually thought about - he'd focused on the immediate goal of flooding the world with muggleborns. But what about after he'd stopped that- or, stopped that from being his immediate goal "I suppose," he said, "a school for everyone, magically speaking - in the long run - a pre-prep for wizards, so to speak. Everyone'll end up a bit better at magic, and possibly, if we're *really* lucky, grow up without some of the prejudices their parents drop onto them. For now, though, a helping hand for muggleborns will be more than enough work!"

A magical chime alerted the both of them to the awakening of Lupin, and they rose to go and greet him - about an hour before Graham had expected him to awaken.

"That werewolf constitution again," grumbled Graham, "messing with my medical timings."

Sirius smiled at his disgruntlement. "I think Remus might have a sheet from Madam Pomfrey somewhere, actually - a brief guide from her experience with treating a werewolf, that sort of thing. On which topic, actually - would you mind, if this sort of thing happened again -"

"Not at all. I'm happy to take any chance for practice I can get!" Graham replied (with perhaps a little more enthusiasm than good taste would strictly permit, a characteristic he shared with most medical students).

Remus, as he'd insisted Graham call him, was very grateful to have a healer on-call for the times when he was injured; he and Graham hadn't connected to any great extent when they'd been at Hogwarts, but the two of them were quite similar, and found that they got on quite well. If anything, Graham enjoyed the prospect of additional company; Jessica was so often on-call, now that she'd begun working in actual wards, that she was half-dead when he actually managed to get in touch, and in any case she and David seemed to spend most of their free time planning their nuptials.

More than that, though, Graham was still struggling with the guilt that had followed his decision to flee the wizarding world in his final year at Hogwarts. While he'd been studying medicine, he'd been able to convince himself that he was in exile from a world that hadn't wanted him. The more that he prepared for a life within it again, though, the more he'd started to feel craven in the presence of people who were regularly risking their lives for what was essentially his future.

So it was that, a few weeks after the new year, Graham offered his services as a medical adjunct to the Order in general; most of the work he'd needed to carry out on the manor had been completed, and the rest could be put on hold until its prospective students were nearly of an age to learn there.

For all his nerves at the prospect of actually taking part in the war, there was still a part of Graham that found working as a healer thrilling - it felt almost like a window into the life which the ministry had denied him when they'd prohibited muggleborn healers in his final year of school.

For the most part, the help Graham offered was not particularly glamorous. What he mostly ended up doing was visiting wizards and witches who were already recuperating from their injuries; St. Mungo's provided excellent care in the immediate aftermath of incidents, but they had neither the funding nor the ward space to retain patients for the duration of their recovery. Happily, this pastoral care did serve to offer some solutions to his schooling concerns.

"So," Graham asked, on one of his regular visits to Delia Thistle, a muggleborn from two years above him at Hogwarts, "aside from your current occupation of helping to save the wizarding world, what plans do you have for the future, when we've won?"

Delia smiled weakly; Graham took care to show a positive outlook to his patients on the basis that there was plenty of gloom to go around without a pessimistic doctor stepping in on affairs.

"Well, what I wanted to do when I left Hogwarts was to teach," She said, "but - even assuming that we do eventually defeat You-Know-Who, I'm not sure where I'd manage to do that. The purebloods won't let a muggleborn tutor their kids, the rest can't afford tuition in any case, and Hogwarts doesn't have any vacancies - I suppose I could try and head to the States, but they've got a strict no-entry policy on England right now, of course."

Graham winced sympathetically; MACUSA had imposed the anti-immigration policy on British wizards as a retaliation against their problems with blood supremacists some years ago, but the greatest victims had been really been muggleborns being turned away from their borders when they came to America to seek asylum. Before answering, he cast a careful diagnostic on Delia, who had been recuperating from a muscle-atrophying curse which had crippled her in a skirmish some weeks before.

"So, firstly - we can actually downgrade your potions regimen again; you'll need to take one of these a day, and then we can start thinking about some basic physiotherapy to get you on your feet again." He rested a small case of vials on the counter by her recliner, and looked at Delia thoughtfully, before continuing.

"On the job front, I might actually have a couple of ideas as well. Obviously, for now your focus should be on recovery; but would you mind if I give you my phone number? Once all this blows over, I think I might be able to help you out…"

Although Graham found working for the Order (although, at his request, he hadn't been inducted into it, and beyond the identities of his patients had no idea of its membership) to be an excellent salve for his conscience, it did very little to solve the problem of his increasingly scarce savings. Sirius had managed to secure him a consistent supply of potions ingredients - apparently the apothecary in Diagon Alley regularly supplied the order with the necessities for healing potions as a gesture of support - but Gamp had regrettably proved that you couldn't conjure food, and Graham was highly uncomfortable at the prospect of asking anyone for money (especially after everything that Sirius had done for him), even if his expenses were relatively limited.

Happily, the answer to his problems revealed itself on one of his irregular trips to the grocers' - the use of stasis charms meant that he didn't need to venture to the nearby muggle village more than a couple of times a month.

"So, Mr Longshaw - what is it that you get up to?" The grocer had asked him, as she bagged his vegetables. "I see you around here every now and then, but I haven't seen you about town outside then."

He smiled at her, desparately grasping for an excuse until one came to mind.

"Actually, I spend most of my time working on one of the old estates out of town, up by the moors." He said, smiling as convincingly as he could. "Basically, I'm there as a handyman-groundkeeper sort of thing - just keeping an eye on things while the owners are off jetsetting wherever they've decided to spend the winter."

"Oh, so you're good with your hands?" She asked, and giggled at his blush. "Only, the drains in my cottage have been giving me hell whenever it gets cold, and it'd be great if you could lend me a hand with them? I'd pay, obviously."

Although he hesitated for a moment, Graham took the opportunity he'd been given - aside from a bit of mummery over pretending to understand how plumbing worked (and how he was going to fix the issue), it took only a few moments' spellcasting to repair the pipework on the house once the grocer had gone off for work, and he found himself a couple of hundred pounds better off for the job.

Of course, Graham had no idea that he'd quoted a price vastly under that of a proper plumber, but nobody was any the wiser (although the grocer later remarked to a friend how strange it was that the pipes now worked better than they ever had since she'd installed them), and he'd found a source of work which took hardly any time and gave him enough to live off; he pinned his phone number and rates to the noticeboard by the village church, and got enough work to easily pull in a few hundred a week with hardly any effort.

The whole affair had him thinking, though - why was there such a thing as a competent poor wizard? The ministry didn't really have the ability to control magical-muggle interaction beyond blatant infractions of the Statute, and yet so many wizards lived humble existences within the confines of the wizarding world. If they were careful with their acting, there was an essentially endless supply of work and money to a wizard with a dab hand at household charms. In fact, Graham thought, was there anything preventing a wizard from flipping houses - buying them cheap and decrepit, doing them up, and selling them on? It was practically a recipe to print money. He filed that thought away for later - that was an endeavour which would require rather more time than he had available while the war was still on.

Although Graham's life had settled into a comfortable rhythym, he was proving a rare exception to the increasingly dire state of the wizarding world by the Spring of 1981. Minchum had been forced out of office after one failed response too many from the aurors had left five dead and another thirteen injured on the steps of Gringotts; his successor, Millicent Bagnold, appeared to be a relatively effective leader, but she had all the charisma of a paper bag and did little to assuage the fears of the public; half the shops in Diagon Alley had closed their shutters, and the goblins were threatening to do the same if effective action was not carried out against the Dark Lord.

The Order of the Phoenix were faring little better, Remus remarked to Graham as he held his arm out for inspection after a recent skirmish.

"It's just a question of numbers." He griped, wincing at the buzz of the diagnostic spell as it travelled down his arm. "We've plenty of excellent duelists, and Merlin knows we're all working as hard as we possibly can be - but there are far more on Voldemort's side, and they don't mind going for killshots, either, while we're constantly stuck on the defensive."

"You mean the Order isn't trying to hunt Death Eaters down?" Graham asked in surprise.

"No - we've been strictly retaliatory for months, now. Dumbledore doesn't want us to go on the offensive - he's waiting for something, and I have no idea what it is - but I hope it comes soon, or half of us won't be around to see it. Do I need any treatment that you can see?"

He smiled, a little bitterly, when Graham shook his head. "Good to see that this damned affliction is good for something, at least. Is there anything you need before I head off? What's your ingredient stock looking like?"

"I'm doing alright on that front," Graham replied, "but I do have a small request, for Lily and James, actually. Do you think you could deliver this to them?" He rummaged through the desk at the side of his makeshift ward (actually a spare bedroom in the cottage he lived in) for a few moments, before he finally found the envelope he was looking for - Remus, though, was shaking his head.

"I don't actually know where James and Lily are." He griped. "Whatever they're up to - I mean, besides childraising - is so secret that only Dumbledore and Sirius have any access to them directly. Do you want me to pass it onto one of them instead?"

"That'd be brilliant," said Graham, "I just wanted to see if I could get my hands on the portkey liicense they must have applied for when they were putting on their wedding. It's much easier to renew one than to apply for one, or I wouldn't ask."

Remus nodded, and gathered his belongings. For a moment, as he stood to leave, he seemed far older than his twenty-one years, and Graham felt a rush of sympathy.

"Stay safe, okay?" You're pretty tough, but you're not made of steel, Remus."

And, with a tired smile and a shrug, the other wizard was gone.

As Spring turned to Summer, the dire straits which the Order found itself in only became deeper and more perilous. Graham had urged Jessica and David to take the opportunity to travel that summer (once they'd struggled through their end-of-year exams) on the basis that their future medical careers wouldn't give them the time for such travels; he'd begged off their invitation to join them due to his own medical work, and so they'd set off for Asia for a couple of months in the sun .

Graham, on the other hand, found himself even more isolated than before. Remus had told him that he was going undercover in June, and he hadn't heard from him in the two months following then; Sirius could barely muster the energy to stand when the two of them crossed paths, let alone socialise, and most of the Order fared no better.

For all that he had been avoiding conflict, though, Graham's caution was not infallible, and his luck finally ran out late in October that year.

"Alright, Frank - I'm going to start hitting your leg - not too hard, I promise. If you feel pain, I want you to say 'Aargh' for me, alright?"

Graham grinned at his patient as he rapped the side of Frank Longbottom's knee; some weeks ago, he and his wife had been working a case for the aurors when he'd fallen prey to a particularly brutal trap that had practically separated his leg from his torso; although Mungo's had reattached the limb, the nerves were taking a little longer to sort their act out.

"Okay, nothing on that side? That's very good news!" Graham beamed; Frank's recovery had been exceptionally swift, considering how brutal his injury had been. "Now we'll try the other - sorry, what's that noise?"

A low whining noise had started as he spoke, and was quickly ascending in both pitch and volume. Frank's eyes widened in horror.

"It's the wards!" He leapt to his feet, siezing his wand, as his wife burst into the room.

"Oh Merlin, Frank - there's already an anti-apparition ward around the house - I think this might be it, just like Dumbledore said - at least Neville's with your mother."

She turned to Graham, who had blanched in horror, and smiled weakly at him.

"You poor sod," she said, "I know that you never wanted to fight. We've only got a few seconds till the wards fall - just be brave, alright? If we can hold out long enough, the Order can make it to us, and we'll all be fine."

Frank drew his wife into an embrace, and she kissed him on the cheek, lingeringly; then Alice directed the three of them into a defensive formation, and Graham said a private prayer to a God he wasn't convinced by as the wards reached a tortured scream, and shattered into nothing.

They were not all fine.

Graham remembered less about the details of the fight, in the days after, than he remembered the sounds and sensations of it. True to Sirius' advice, he'd done his best to be surprising; he'd coated the floor under the death eaters' feet with conjured industrial lubricant, had swarmed them with conjured insects, and even deflected a few spells back at their attackers with carefully angled shields; Alice and Frank were making a sterling attempt at fighting off four opponents at once, and - for a glorious moment - Graham had even thought they had a chance of holding out until the order arrived.

But all the finesse in the world hadn't stopped him from being hit by the Cruciatus curse, and at that point the conscious world dissolved into a haze of memory. From an academic standpoint, he'd wondered what "the most painful sensation imaginable" actually meant; but no descriptor could do justice to the feeling of every nerve in your body activating their pain receptors, all at once. It was being burnt and frozen and pinched and bruised and cut, all in the same moment, everywhere on the body. Graham was distantly aware that Frank and Alice were being put under the same curse by whomever the spellcaster was, once it was taken off him; but the world had become shapes and colours by that point, and he remembered nothing more than the screams and the laughter blurring together until he could hardly tell the difference between them; then, blessedly, he knew no more.

Graham awoke three days later, which was a pleasant surprise for somebody who hadn't expected to awaken at all, and found himself in a hospital ward which he blearily recognised from a previous tour as the Janus Thickey ward for spell damage. The ward was dimly lit and sparsely attended - far away, Graham thought, he could hear the sound of - celebration?

Wincing, he sat up, frustrated at the stiffness of the motion, and reached out for his wand - only to stop and stare at the jittering of his hand. Academically, he knew that the shaking was symptomatic of those who underwent the Cruciatus curse, and would fade with the passage of time; practically, it was a damned nuisance.

Graham stumbled his way across to the ward's entrance, and the celebration he thought he'd heard grew louder as he approached.

"Ah, you're up and about, mister Longshaw!"

Graham whirled around to see an avuncular healer smiling beningly at him, and the motion almost knocked him off his feet - he was quickly steadied as the healer - Wrigley, his nametag informed Graham - caught him by the arm.

"Easy now - you've been through quite the ordeal, young man. The cruciatus isn't something you just walk off, you know!" He burbled happily.

The man's perpetual cheer was infuriating to Graham, and he couldn't help but snap at him: "what about Alice and Frank? Are they alright?"

Wrigley's face fell, and he sighed. "Well, it's quite a delicate situation, you have to understand - the Cruciatus curse isn't like a normal spell, you see, it -"

"Look - I trained for two bloody years to be a healer - I know what the Cruciatus does. Are. They. Alright?" Graham ground out - and, taken aback, the healer gave a supplicatory smile, and led him through to a closed off section of the ward, revealing Alice and Frank on a pair of hospital beds. Alice stirred weakly as they approached.

"G-graham?" She asked, trying to push herself upright, but the healer rushed to calm her, and used a gentle sleeping spell to put her to rest.

"It'll be a long road to recovery for her, but we'll be able to repair the worst of what was done in the end, mark my words." Wrigley cast his eyes across to Frank, who lay entirely still in his own bed, and sighed. "Mister Longbottom, on the other hand - we just don't know. Certainly, we've never seen nerve damage on this scale, and I'm afraid he may simply be trapped inside his own head, unable to get his body to function at all; we just can't know yet."

Locked in syndrome, Graham thought - an incredibly cruel fate for anybody, but particularly someone as dedicated and brave as Frank was.

On healer's orders, Graham reluctantly returned to his own bed - he could be discharged on the next day, he was told, but for now he was under strict orders to get some rest.

"Oh, Healer Wrigley?" He asked, as the wizard turned to begin his rounds again, "Why exactly is there such a ruckus downstairs?"

To Graham's surprise, Wrigley beamed at him, and hurried off, before returning with a copy of the Daily Prophet.

"Of course!" He said, handing the paper over. "You were out for three days - you haven't had a chance to hear the news!"

Graham cast his eyes down, and managed to take in the headlines:

DARK LORD FALLS AS HARRY POTTER SURVIVES KILLING CURSE, AVENGES PARENTS

And, further down:

SIRIUS BLACK ARRESTED AFTER KILLING THIRTEEN AND BETRAYING POTTERS

And, just like that, the bottom fell out of Graham's world.

AN: Thank you so much for reading! Apologies for the frankly ludicrous gap between this installment and the previous one are owed, so thank you for your patience in coming back to this some months later! Apologies for the slight rush of this chapter - I decided that progressing the plot would be a decent plan, and had a lot of ground to cover.

A slight butterfly effect is in effect in this chapter, as well; Graham's presence reduced Alice's time under the Cruciatus (he was a distinctly secondary target to the others). Details of the attack on the Longbottoms are surprisingly scarce; if there is some canon I'm missing, though, I'm truly slightly sorry.

In the future, I hope I can update this story on a three-week basis; it's one of two I'm working on right now, so two is a little enthusiastic, but hopefully I can keep it under a monthly update. As always, reviews and critique highly appreciated - getting a review really makes my day, so if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it!