The Seventh Year

The Seventh-Year Saga

Chapter One

The Best of Times

He who has never loved before; may he love today

The flowers of South Cunningham, that's what they were called. Lily and Petunia, the pretty, young women who always had their faces to the sun. Petunia, who fit her name exactly, a feminine, passive girl who had just turned fifteen. She sang with a sweet, liquid sound that rivaled the nectar of the gods, but she took second place to Lily. Lily, fiery in every aspect of her life, from the fierce auburn of her hair to the passionate fury in which she defended her younger sister. She was so completely unlike her name. Perhaps she would have made a better poppy or dandelion, a name that commanded bright colors and strong emotion. Lily had a boyfriend, ten O.W.L.S., a confident air and the extroverted beauty that completely mirrored her personality. Lily, always two years older and always two steps ahead.

On August 30, 1975, Petunia Evans did not feel very much like a flower.

She felt more like a weed than anything, something to be uprooted and dropped onto the compost heap. A weed that was strangling a flower, a lily.

Petunia sat on the dock in the small fishing harbor of South Cunningham, feeding bits of bread to a seagull. She knew she wasn't supposed to, but Lily convinced her that there was nothing wrong with feeding a hungry bird when she showed her the gull's nest of small hatchlings.

"So, in a bit of a tight spot yourself, are you?" The bird took a crust in her beak and bit off the end. "Yea. Me too. God knows I love going to Hogwarts, but have you seen my sister lately? Going on and on about this boarding school she's attending all year, telling Vee all about the castle and the grounds, even the squid. She might as well tell him about the magic as well, and blow our cover!"

The gull cocked her head, as if to reprimand her. "I know. I shouldn't even be telling you, but you're not likely to tell the whole world about us. Vee's getting suspicious. It's not right how she treats him." The gull hopped closer, questioning.

"Vee? He's her boyfriend. Muggle. Mum calls him a hoodlum; always about on that motorcycle, but I suppose that's he reason Lily is with him. I don't know how much she really likes him. She certainly takes advantage of him." She sighed, tossing another crumb to the bird. "I don't suppose it matters. We'll both be away at Hogwarts all year. Maybe she'll break things off by Christmas."

The gull pecked at her fingers, searching for more food. Petunia laughed. "Alright, I admit it, I do like him. But don't tell Lily."

"Don't tell me what?" Her sister strolled down the dock with a fresh loaf of bread and a plastic bag with some soda cans in it to cool them from the summer sun. She handed Petunia a soda and tore off a bit of bread for the gull.

"Just some girl talk with my buddy the sea gull."

"If you're so sure it's your friend, you should name her."

"What do you name a sea gull?"

"Umm . . . Hagrid?" Lily offered. Petunia laughed and Lily fed the bird more crumbs. "Here, Hagrid, enjoy."

"Should we tell her that we named her after the gamekeeper? He could probably step on her and not notice." Petunia chuckled and Lily tried to look disapproving.

"That's a mean thing to say."

"He didn't hear it."

"But we'll see him again in a few days. Can you believe how fast the summer went?"

"For you it did, you mean. You spent most of it snogging with Vee."

Lily blushed slightly. "I don't know if I should dump him or not. I mean, it'll be a good excuse to say I'm taken if James asks me out again, but then I can't go out with anybody at school. He's a good snog, but that's about it."

The seagull christened 'Hagrid' opened her wings and took off, spooked. The girls turned to find out why, and saw Vee walking down the dock.

"Hey girls," he called. "Last day before boarding school." He sat down next to them. "What're you two talking about?" Petunia felt her face grow hot like it did every time Vee talked to her. He was blond and muscular, nicely transformed from the pudgy boy he was in grade school. He was sweating in a t-shirt that read All the Way to China above a picture of a drill, an add for some electric drill company. The first time he had worn it, Petunia didn't understand what it had meant.

"What's a drill got to do with China?" she had asked.

"Well, like digging a hole through the earth, you'd use a drill. The saying is digging a hole to China, but I guess from here we'd end up somewhere in New Zealand." He had grinned at his own cleverness, but Petunia remained unconvinced.

"You look like you could use some cooling off," Lily advertised as she handed him a soda can. He eyed the girls in their skirts and bikini tops, wiping sweat from his forehead as he accepted the drink.

"Sure could. It's burning up out here. You girls are lucky, you get to pull off looking sexy and stay at a temperature below boiling." Lily laughed and stood up, not hesitating to pull off his shirt and drop it on the deck. Petunia tried to suppress her envy as she did whenever they showed how comfortable they were together. She checked her watch.

"Lil, mum wanted us home a few minutes ago." Lily wistfully gathered the remaining sodas and bread and kissed Vee goodbye.

"Vernon, time to come home," a voice called out of the perfect day.

"Coming, mum." He kissed Lily on the mouth before he turned away, lingering for a few seconds to suck on her lip, get a final, sensual taste of his girl. "That'll last me until December. Write me, both of you." He waved goodbye and jogged down the road.

"Wait, you forgot your . . . shirt . . ." Lily's call after him faded as he got farther away.

"See, why would you break it off when you guys have such a good thing going?" Petunia asked as they headed back down the road.

"It's complicated, 'Tunia," Lily began. "It's like, I'm just with him to have a summer boyfriend, but he really likes me . . . a lot." Lily paused, as if she had something to say but muted herself as she said it. "I don't know if I can commit to that for a whole year."

Petunia, lagging a few steps behind, jogged to catch u with her sister. "There's something you're not telling me, Lily. I know it."

Lily avoided her eyes. "Not now, Petunia," she whispered, gesturing to their mother hurrying towards them in a huff.

"Petunia Evans! You promised me you would be home by three-thirty! What time is it now?"

Petunia looked at her watch. "Four."

"Exactly! You have an entire year to pack for, young lady, and you now only have two hours to do it in," Mrs. Evans panted.

"Hey, what about Lily? She's late too!"

Mrs. Evans patted Lily's cheek and smoothed her hair. "She started packing yesterday, now hurry up. And do something about those freckles, Petunia."

"Lily's got freckles!"

"She has red hair - It's natural and looks lovely. You need to stay out of the sun. Now get a move on. We're having dinner at the Liptons' at six."

Lily and Petunia groaned in unison. Although Cynthia Lipton was Lily's best friend, an event at the Liptons' was about as exciting as a long line at a Muggle cafeteria. Petunia couldn't count the number of times she, Cynthia, and Lily had tried to escape the endless droning about real estate that Mr. Lipton always commenced the moment everyone was seated. This usually proved to be unbearable to the point of insanity, and now that Cynthia was away for the summer at her Muggle cousins' house in Scotland, the evening was sure to be their breaking point. Petunia stalked home silently, keeping her eyes to the ground so she could walk in the footsteps her sister made in the dust.

_

Cynthia Lipton hopped out of her cousins' car and decidedly stepped into Edinburgh Airport. She was a slim, attractive girl in her late teens who always wore Beatles tank tops under her Hogwarts robes and carried an emergency pack with her everywhere containing the essentials of life: tampons, lipstick, tic-tacs, tarot cards, and a trashy novel. Her strawberry blonde hair was pulled back, revealing a tan, slightly sunburned countenance. It was a round, freckled face that belonged to someone who absolutely believed in freckles mixed with blond hair.

It hadn't been her choice to fly to London on a Muggle airplane. She could just as easily have flooed to the city, or even ridden on a broomstick the whole way. She wasn't afraid of flying. She loved soaring on her Neptune 360 high above the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch, feeling the cool, thin air on her skin. It was the plane she didn't like. When she told her cousin that she didn't like airplanes, she was bombarded with scientific explanations as to how the plane flew and what kept it in the air. She shook her head forlornly at him, longing to explain that she had renounced her firmly-believedcience long ago and adopted a belief in that which could not be proven by Muggles when she received her first letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

It had thoroughly terrified her parents, blissfully ignorant Muggles who avoided any mention of the paranormal. Cynthia was delighted, realizing that this would be an embodiment of childhood afternoons spent finding the perfect tree branch to call a wand. She clearly recalled organizing seances in the town graveyard with her friends, none of which succeeded in bringing forth the dead.

Cynthia squinted, trying to decipher the Muggle signs, which would point her in the right direction. She checked her boarding pass. Gate A5. Having checked her suitcases at the curb, she slung her one carry-on bag over her shoulder and hustled to find the security check.

"Ma'am, I'm sorry, but explosives are not allowed in carry-on luggage," the young man who was checking the monitor explained. He grabbed her bag and emptied the contents into a tray, showing her the Filibuster's Fireworks she had brought and never used.

"Forgot those were in there," she muttered as the man searched for more displaced objects. He pulled out a book and observed it, impressed and perplexed.

"Standard Book of Spells, Grade 7? What is this, magic?" Cynthia reached for it, but the guard only held it higher, teasing her. He opened it to the inside cover and read the name that was penciled there.

"Cynthia Lipton, huh? Well, Cynthia Lipton, I should have you checked over to make sure you're not dangerous, but I'll let you go, if," he paused to write ten digits underneath her name, "you promise to call me sometime." He returned the book with a wink. "Name's Nick Tucker."

"Sure," Cynthia lied as she scooped her things back into the bag. Secretly she let out the breath she had been holding. That had been a close call. She made her way to her gate and relaxed, reading her textbook to pass the extra time. Now she was careful to disguise it with a thick women's magazine. Opening it to the title page, she saw the phone number and wrote "Nick Tucker" underneath it. Maybe she would call him after all, if she could get her hands on a phone at Hogwarts. She made a mental note to find one in Hogsmeade.

Unfortunately, most of Cynthia's mental notes were lost in the filing process. If only she cold tell her teachers that she missed many of her homework assignments simply because she forgot to bring them to class. If only she could explain to James Potter that they lost the last Quidditch game of the year because she couldn't remember the details of James' latest brilliant game plan. With memory as her excuse, however, she could find no mercy. They said she didn't apply herself to her work. They accused her that she didn't care enough about the game. But this year was going to be different. This year her average would be an A and her Quidditch team would win every game and she would win so many points for Griffindor that the hourglass would explode. Cynthia couldn't take another year like her sixth.

Cynthia heard the boarding call for her plane and automatically searched for the person who was using a Sonorus charm before remembering that loudspeakers were used in the Muggle world. She stuffed her book into her bag and retrieved her boarding pass from her pocket as she got in line.

I will never understand how Muggles do it, she thought as she watched the flight attendant demonstrate how to buckle the seatbelt. She did not realize how easily she had renounced her own life as a Muggle and distanced herself from Muggle ideas. Her cousin's lecture hadn't helped one bit since he didn't know that she was a witch, never mind that there was a magical alternative to airports. She leaned against the back of her chair and tried to sleep.

The plane landed at Heathrow Airport where she flagged a taxi to take her to the Leaky Cauldron.

"Where?" he asked, puzzled.

"Oh," she gasped, and quickly changed the location to the CD store on the left of it. Two close shaves in one day. Cynthia mentally smacked herself on the head and promised to be more careful.

"Oy, Cynthia," a familiar voice belonging to the bartender called. "How's my favorite niece?"

"Hi, Uncle Tom! How're you doing?"

He waggled his hand as if it were a seesaw. "So-so. How's your mother doing these days?"

'I'm not sure, haven't seen her all summer. Can I have the key to my room?"

"Sure can, sweetheart." He tossed it to her. "Room 411, liked you always have. Oy, Remus!" A thin, mousy-blond boy of seventeen stuck his head out from behind the storeroom door.

"Yup, Mr. Lindenshire?"

"Take Miss Lipton's things up to her room, will you?"

"Sure thing, Mr. Lindenshire." He caught sight of Cynthia standing in front of the bar. Cynthia Lipton, the girl he'd been infatuated with since his fifth year at Hogwarts. "Cynthia!"

"Hi, Remus! I didn't know you were working here. It's great to see you!" She watched him walk up to pick up her bags and searched him for changes. He had definitely grown up a bit since she had last seen him. He was taller and slightly more muscular from carrying guests' luggage up and down four flights of stairs. His scrappings of a beard were thin and light from only a summer's worth of shaving. He picked the suitcases up and struggled with them to the stairs

"What do you have in here, bricks?"

They climbed to the top floor and rested beside the door to her room. Cynthia watched him sit down and lean against the wall in exhaustion and realized that she could be well on her to way to having a crush on him. And Cynthia was never one to miss and opportunity.

"Thanks, Remus. Stop in, have a drink. Let's catch up." Remus hesitated to accept for a moment, but admitted that his shift ended in ten minutes and he had nothing else to do. They entered the room, lugging the bags behind them. It was a pleasant room, composed of a queen-sized bed, a squashy armchair and sofa to make for a small living room and a dresser with an old mirror above it.

Cynthia looked through the complementary items assembled on the dresser. "Looks like Uncle Tom's given us some champagne. Shall we?"

"Sure." Remus opened one of the two bottles and poured the drinks, handing one to Cynthia, who sat on the armchair, before perching himself on the bed. "So, why do you always get this room?"

Cynthia sipped her drink. "Well, it's my birthday. April 11."

"No way. That's my birthday too!

"That's incredible! Let's have a toast." She refilled both of their glasses. "Happy Birthday to us."

"Happy Birthday to us," Remus repeated, and they both raised their glasses before drinking it all in one sip. "Ha! I won. Remember? Gryffindor rule--whoever finishes the drink the fastest gets to make the next toast. To Dumbledore."

"To Dumbledore?"

"Well, why not Dumbledore?" Remus challenged, and Cynthia laughed.

"Okay, to Dumbledore." The glasses were raised, and Cynthia finished first.

"To Uncle Tom."

"To Diagon Alley."

"To Muggles."

"To airports." This last toast finished the bottle, and the two friends collapsed in tipsy giggles.

"Hey Remus, you wanna play a game? It's called secrets. You tell a secret and you get to drink. If you say something I know already, I get a drink. Get it?"

"Sure." Remus paused to open the second bottle and Cynthia joined him on the bed to have him fill her glass. "My secret is that I have a twin brother and he's coming to Hogwarts this year from a school in Italy." Remus filled his glass and took a sip.

"No way!" Cynthia exclaimed. Remus nodded. "His name's Romulus. I know it sounds cliché, but my mum must've had a thing for Roman myths."

"Well here's my secret. I got my first kiss from James Potter."

"I knew that." Remus took another drink.

"He told you?" Remus nodded in response. "Okay, your secret now."

"Try this on for size. I forged my mum's signature so that I would be allowed into Hogsmeade."

"I don't believe it. You wouldn't do that."

He finished the glass. "But I did it." Cynthia giggled and drank her glass down. "Hey," he complained. "It's not your turn!" he began to giggle as well until they collapsed on the bed in a fit of intoxicated laughter. Cynthia left her sober thoughts behind and decided that she definitely had a crush on this boy.

"Here's my secret," she whispered rather loudly. "I think I have a crush on you." Remus was only a small bit taken aback at this, his mind clouded with alcohol and his heart intoxicated with hope. As they were both lying down, he only had to reach his head forward to kiss her. She closed her eyes and flopped on her belly so that her lips were on top of his. Remus found a shiver of lust running down his spine as she hooked her hands about his neck. Her kiss was sweet and light, like strawberries and cream on a moist, spring day, just as he had dreamed it would be. She gently pulled her lips away to end his reverie.

"I think that's about enough for one day," she said with a lopsided grin on her face. Remus nodded, satisfied, and sat up, saying, "I should go home."

"You can't, not like this," Cynthia moaned. "Stay here. Sleep on the couch; there are blankets in the closet." As if to convince him, she guided his face down to her lips and gently kissed him. He nodded in consent.

Tom opened the door five minutes later to check on Remus and saw the two teens sprawled on the bed and couch, a small bit of lipstick smudged on the boy's face, and the two bottles of champagne, one empty and one only half full. He walked away, chuckling "kids."

By the time morning come for Cynthia, it was one in the afternoon. She opened her eyes and groaned from the hangover and the bright sunlight determined to get her out of bed. For a moment, she wondered where she was, but then she saw Remus, who had fallen off the couch and was tangled in his blanket on the floor. He snored slightly and Cynthia giggled.

He woke with a start, immediately pressing his hands to his forehead in a futile attempt to stifle the oncoming hangover. "I feel like some kind of junkie," he moaned.

"Look on the bright side," Cynthia offered. "At least you only got drunk. You could be smoking Floo powder and doxy eggs like the Blacks."

"Not all of the Blacks," Remus reminded her, carefully defending his best friend. "But I'm sure Bellatrix and Narcissa are on something. You know I tried Floo powder once, fifth year. I didn't like it. How do you know they're using it?"

"Yea! I caught them smoking it on the North Tower landing!"

"And Professor What's-Her-Name didn't catch them?" Remus asked in disbelief.

"Professor Priam? No. She's high on some kind of incense half the time anyway. She's very gifted at Divination, though. It's too bad she's so old; I'd give her five years to bite the dust." She looked out the window at the dazzling, blue day. "What time is it?"

"One-twenty. I should get going. I still have to buy my school supplies."

"Yea? Bought mine a month ago. If I left it to the last minute, I'd forget to buy them at all. Hey, can I ask you something? Why was your brother in Italy all these years?"

Remus looked amused at the question and cleared his throat.

"Well, how's this for a story? My parents are dead, so Rom and I are sent to this orphanage where different people adopt us. We're two years old. So Rom's living in Italy and takes a trip to England, where we bump into each other right here at the Leaky Cauldron. We've been in touch ever since."

"You're pulling my leg." Remus grinned at this expression of disbelief, walked over to the bed, reached under the covers, and pulled her out by the feet. She landed on the floor with a flump. "Yes, I sure am."

Cynthia smacked him on the head and kissed him. "You're too cute to be mad at."

Remus grinned jubilantly. "So what does this make us?"

"I dunno. Are we going out?"

"Fine with me."

"Same here."

"Then that's that," Remus finished, with a smile that nearly blocked out the sun. He turned to leave and waved to Cynthia behind his back. As he closed the door, he sank down against it, basking in his ecstasy. Through the door, he could hear Cynthia on the phone he had convinced Tom to put in for the muggle-borns who came to buy school supplies.

"Hey Lil! It's me . . . . You are? Let's meet up! I don't have to shop but I have so much to tell you. Hey, you'll never guess what happened yesterday . . . . No, I'm going out with Remus Lupin . . . . Yea, I'll give you the details later . . . . Vee? You mean Vernon Dursley, that old hulk? . . . No, I said hulk, not hunk . . ." Remus could have listened to the sound of her voice for hours. He stood up and floated down the hallway to collect his money and his sense and go find the other marauders.

_

In a darker section of London, two friends who happened to be sisters were meeting. Fairy tales are filled with pairs of fair and dark women, and these two were the ultimate embodiment of something that had fallen out of a child's book. One was thin and white-blond with a body that could only have been created through starvation. She had the air of a ghost about her, a presence that had to be touched to know that it was real.

The other was quite real and was quite sure of it. She had the uncanny ability to center any situation around her and turn any happening into one she could gain from. Her thick, black hair tumbled past her waist when it hung loose but was gathered up on the back of her head in a messy, careless bun. Her eyes were dark, so dark that there wasn't a distinction between the iris and the pupil. Her skin was a sallow, ivory tone, the kind of skin you would expect from someone who had never seen the sun. But her general appearance reflected that of one who had seen the world, denounced it, and judged that it was better for her to stay inside.

She was clothed in a black, hooded sweatshirt that read "watching you" over an foreboding, red cat's eye and faded blue jeans with a hole or two at the knee. The blond had less grungy tastes, but her clothes reflected those of someone who had been locked in a closet without proper human contact for far too long. She wore a black blouse that accentuated her small bosom but did not flatter the rest of her torso, hanging over her sunken skin rather than fitting properly. Her skirt hid her spindly legs, reaching all the way down to the soles of her feet and trailing in the mud of the dark space behind a shop in Diagon Alley.

The girls sat in silence. They didn't look at each other, and didn't move from their seats on forgotten wood beams in a long forgotten crevice. After an eternity of waiting for peace, the girls had sought an alternative. Girls from a pureblood family, girls from a family whose very name meant the epiphany of darkness, could not expect genuine peace. Artificial was sufficient.

The dark-haired girl was the first to move. She reached into the bag laid at her feet to find one of the many carefully prepared rolls of powder. She remembered when they had started, in their fourth year at Hogwarts. It was such an available drug, and so completely untraceable. The perfect option. The majority of the adult world didn't even know it had uses other than travel. She had discovered its use when she came upon her older cousin, Sirius, and his friends smoking the green powder for fun one holiday. They weren't addicts. Just for fun, they had tried it and they decided not to use it again.

For Bellatrix and Narcissa, it had been different.

It all began with pain. Bellatrix saw her mother killed by her father in her bedroom and she saw her father molest her sister and it hurt her, it hurt her in her core. She built a barricade around her inner self and focused on callusing it permanently. But the pain thrived, and it still hurt. Bellatrix remembered her cousin smoking the Floo powder and decided to try it. It felt good. It wiped away her pain and filled her, not with peace, but with neutrality. She hadn't thought about doing it again, but she found that when things got a bit too hard for her to block, she found a neutrality again. It was just an optional escape.

Not anymore.

Now, she couldn't stop, and she didn't want to. What was the point of returning to the pain when you could enjoy this nothingness that had morphed into pleasure? She needed the Powder in her blood, and once it was, she was alright. She was fine.

Narcissa lit the small cylinder and inhaled deeply. The summer was over. The smoke clouding her blood told her that she could return to the solace of Hogwarts and Powder. It made her believe these things, reassured her where she could not reassure herself. Narcissa loved her sister, loved her for giving her the drug, but she knew that Bellatrix only thought she knew pain. No. Bellatrix only knew hate.

Narcissa knew pain. She inhaled another sweet puff and all her trauma melted into an oblivion. She had had a nightmare the night before. It was gone now.

She had dreamed of the time that he had entered her. She was fourteen, and he had murdered her mother. She was crying in her bedroom and looked up to see that her father was standing at the foot of her bed.

"You look so much like your mother," he murmured, almost inaudibly.

"Father," she sobbed. He leaned over, his arms outstretched, and she let him hug her. But it wasn't an embrace. He was pushing her down, feeling her body, touching her breasts and removing her shirt. She tried to push him away. He struck her, and her cheek bled. In fear, she cried out and her struck her again. The cry brought her sister running to see what was wrong. She came in time to see her father enter Narcissa's virgin skin and stood, frozen, in the doorway.

Except in the dream, Bellatrix had been egging him on. She had been laughing at Narcissa, calling her a slut, calling her a whore, telling her to let him do her and to enjoy it. It wasn't in her bedroom, it was a dark passageway that morphed into a circus tent, filled with jeering creatures, ghastly shapes that threw her soul in her face.

He never raped her again, but he hurt her. He had found her in her room and called her a harlot, a bastard child and he hit her. Whenever she returned home from Hogwarts, he slapped her, punched her, and threw her into a corner to bleed. But every time, she saw Bellatrix take care of her and she knew that Bellatrix was thinking what her father said: Bastard Child.

She closed her eyes and felt the Powder take over the memories, dispersing them and pulling her into a blissful high. She couldn't remember a time when she was happy. This was as close as she could get.

_

Remus hurried down the street, not noticing when he knocked into random schoolchildren who came to gather their supplies. ere were his friends staying? He wracked his brain for where he put the address, and finally pulled it out of his pocket. Remus read off the two-week-old scrap of parchment. It was wrinkled and had probably been through the wash, but Remus could read James Potter's handwriting anywhere.

258 Diagon Alley

above Apothecary

back door in alley

2^nd floor, room 5

He searched for the apothecary shop, which was only a few doors down from where he stood. He knew James would be worried, and tried to feel guilty for not letting him know that he would be late. But it was impossible; Cynthia filled his mind and there was no room for anything else. Maybe Sirius would have calmed James down; the easy-going boy never got worked up if he could help it. But then there was James.

"Keep away from me, Potter," Lily Evans screeched in Remus' memory.

"C'mon, Lily," James pleaded, dropping the pretense of aloofness. "Just one date. No astronomy tower, I promise! I'll be a perfect gentleman."

She nearly spat at his feet. "James Potter, I could never go out with a spoiled idiot, never mind expect someone who's so completely pig-headed and arrogant to be a gentleman." She strode off with a posse of girls behind her. James pushed out some witty remark that Remus couldn't remember, so to have the last word.

"Can you believe that?" James spat later in the common room. "She called me pig-headed."

Yes, Remus agreed. Pig-headed and stubborn and you always will be, but that's why we like you so much. But Remus would never have said this to his best friend, especially now. In public, James's attempts to date Lily were jokes, but privately, he was devastated by each refusal. Remus had never had much success with the opposite sex. He kept to his male friends and enjoyed a platonic relationship with them, but his attempts to get girls to notice him all fell at his feet.

James, on the other hand.

James could have any girl in the school he wanted, right down to Professor Cassandra Priam. Why he picked Lily Evans, the one girl he had ever met who disapproved of him, Remus would never know. Maybe he needed a challenge. Maybe he loved how she always stood up to him. Maybe it was just the hair. James always had a thing for redheads.

Remus turned into the gap between the apothecary and a store selling rare magical objects, Pandora's Box. He always thought the name was a bit presumptuous, and made a point to avoid the Greek storeowner. The alley was small; only three people could have fit shoulder-to-shoulder. On the right hand side were boxes of old stores of valuable potions long forgotten and decaying animal parts never used in them. As these were piled up to five feet high, he couldn't see the light from the door until he had advanced past them.

Which was why he stumbled over the two girls immersed in euphoria, and didn't realize who they were until one denounced him as a pig's liver damned to go to Hell. He only knew one person who insulted so imaginatively, and that was Bellatrix Black, the cousin of Sirius Black, whose seductive and alluring presence caught the marauders smoking the Powder one night over Christmas vacation. Bellatrix and Narcissa, he thought, the two most troubled girls at Hogwarts with some of the weirdest names Hogwarts has ever seen. Sure, every boy had had his Black Sisters fantasy at one point or another, but when Remus realized the state of depression the girls were in, they lost their appeal. He walked around them, trying to reach the door while going unnoticed.

"Sirius?" Narcissa said in a long, drawn-out breath. Remus froze and pivoted to face her. "Sirius, I thought you left already. How did you get back in?"

"Not quite. It's Remus."

"Ah. You won't tell anyone, right Lupin?" Bellatrix croaked in a hoarse cough

"Not anyone who doesn't already know."

"They know?" Bellatrix scrambled onto her knees, clinging to his pant leg like a hungry dog. "Who knows?"

"Nobody. I didn't mean it. I won't tell anybody." He jerked away. "Let me alone, will you?" She still held on. "I said, let go." She released him and slumped back against the cold, hard wall. Remus opened the door and quickly advanced up the stairwell in front of him, taking the steps two at a time. Second floor, room five. Second floor from the top of the stairwell. He continued up the second flight, only resting when he reached number five. Knocking on the door, he prayed that they wouldn't be too angry with him.

Peter Pettigrew opened the door, his small, ratty face poking out cautiously, as if expecting the worst.

"Remus!" he squeaked, and then reduced his voice to a whisper. "Where were you? James' gone ballistic, hurry up and get in here."

"Peter, who is it?" James' voice emanated from the apartment. Remus ventured into the pleasant room, but was rudely interrupted from absorbing his surrounding by James' screech.

"Where the hell were you? We've been worried sick, you damned prat! You told us you'd be here last night, and look what time it is! How the hell were we supposed to know what happened to you, bastard?" James erupted on him with the force of ten howlers.

"James, relax. I'm sorry, I got caught up in things--"

"Bollocks! You got caught up in things? How about us?" He waved the Daily Prophet in Remus's direction, manically gesturing at the headline "Wizard Genocide: Unknown Killer" and shoved it in Remus's face. He skimmed the article and caught "five wizards, one Muggle, two werewolves, and one hag were killed between ten o'clock last night and five o'clock this morning."

" . . . could have died and we'd never know, doesn't even bother to check up, say 'Hey guys, I'm alive and well so stop worrying yourselves to death,' maybe you could even have shown up on time, but no, Neanderthals can't be bothered to actually do something right . . ."

"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't know about this. Let me explain. You're starting to sound like my mum."

"And I damn well should!" James pushed him into a chair and jabbed his finger in Remus' face. "You could be dead. They haven't even been able to recognize the victims yet, so you aren't the only one we're worried about."

Remus paused, open mouthed, searching his brain for what James might be referencing to. Than it clicked. He remembered what Narcissa Black had said, mistaking him for another. The last marauder was missing. He closed his mouth, gulped, and whispered into James's red face.

"James, where's Sirius?"