Under the Same Sky

Gryffindor common room hadn't changed since the day it had been completed. The students changed; the notices on the boards changed; the minutiae of boarding school life which always lay scattered around the place changed from day to day (and from minute to minute); but the room itself looked as it had when Lauren's parents had been at school, and her Grandma and Grandpa Weasley, and all the rest of the Weasley ancestors who'd been in Gryffindor, which was all of them (and a lot of them there were, too: all Grandma and Grandpa Weasley's children had had a big family tree put up at the Burrow, so everyone could keep track of all their relatives).

Lauren wasn't thinking of how things stayed the same; the continuity of the Gryffindor common room would not have been something she'd have thought about. She preferred great Quidditch discussions with her cousin, Susie, and trying to convert the rest of their friends to a mad passion for Quidditch, and that was what they happened to be doing.

The five third year Gryffindor girls were clustered in a corner of the common room, all the seats by the fire having already been taken when they'd come up from dinner. Libby, another Weasley cousin (just not a Weasley with the Weasley name, but she was a Weasley in all the ways that counted) had been explaining to their two Muggle-born roommates, Amy and Caroline, about Hogsmeade. Lauren and Susie were inclined to feel that Amy and Caroline would find out all about Hogsmeade tomorrow on their first weekend trip, and that firing up the other three for the Gryffindor/Slytherin Quidditch match next weekend was much more important. Being rather quieter than her cousins, Libby had been forced to give in, and Lauren and Susie were engaged in comparing the relative strengths of the two teams, in an enthusiastic manner, so as to pique the interest of the others.

It had always come as rather a surprise to the two girls that not all of their cousins were obsessed with Quidditch. The Weasley name had always been synonymous with Quidditch at Hogwarts; anyone who expressed a vague interest in this to Lauren and Susie was dragged off to the trophy room, where one could find lists of all the team captains. The victim would have the list shoved in their face, as one or other of the girls pointed out the relative and explained the relation. "That's Uncle Charlie, he's one of our Dads' older brothers, he was Seeker and he could've played for England. That one, Angelina Johnson, is Susie's Mum, and she played Chaser for the Prides for a few years after the War. And the captain after her is Lauren's Mum, Katie Bell, she was a Chaser too, and then Ron Weasley is our Dad's younger brother, he's Amber, Daniel and Rose's Dad, he played Keeper, and Ginny Weasley is Libby's mother, she played Seeker for a year and then she played Chaser. Our Dads were both Beaters and Libby's Dad was Harry Potter and he was a Seeker," the listener (or not-listener, depending on the level of interest and the volume of the speaker's voice) would be breathlessly informed. Usually, on being allowed to leave the trophy room, the victim would have Lauren and Susie keeping pace with them down the stairs, explaining the strangeness of the fact that not all of their cousins were Quidditch-crazy. It was an effort just to get Libby along to the Quidditch games, let alone show any interest whatsoever, and her parents were Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley!

So it was that Libby was paying no attention at all to what her cousins were saying; she'd become rather an expert at tuning out and was currently going over Charms homework with Caroline (Lauren and Susie did not appear to have noticed this yet). Amy, who had slightly more than a passing interest in Quidditch and always liked to know exactly what was going on in any given situation, was listening to the complicated and involved speeches about the skill of the Gryffindor Chasers versus that of the Slytherins. Having been practically guaranteed spots on the starting team next year when two of the Chasers left, Lauren and Susie, who were currently reserves, made it a point of honour to know all about every player in the school. Amy supposed this was a good thing; at least she'd know who was who next weekend.

Life in the Gryffindor common room had always been like this. On any given evening, a stranger in the common room (though none had gotten past the Fat Lady since Sirius Black when Lauren and Susie's parents had been at Hogwarts) would be able to find the Quidditch maniacs, the bookworms, the pranksters, and the other varieties of person who made up each generation of witches and wizards. There was only one blip in the life of the common room, when the greatest War the Wizarding world had ever seen had raged in the world outside. Then, fear, intermingled with hope, had been the greatest thing in anyone's mind. Quidditch, homework, their love lives: it all came second to the awful waiting, the dread, the grief for the loss of loved ones. News of victory had bought relief rather than joy to the common room, and within two years as life went back to normal, one might have thought the War had never happened.

To Lauren and Susie, the War was a somewhat distant event, that they'd grown up hearing bits about and had learnt to be careful asking their parents about. They knew that their parents had lost friends and relatives in the War, but it was an unreal, ghostly spectre, ugly, but harmless, like the ghoul in the attic at Lauren's home, Windermere. The War was just another one of those events that featured in the history books; it had never personally touched their lives. Their parents were grateful; each of them had War in their past. The reality of the War was almost like a barrier between the two generations.

***

None of them had made a conscious decision to come here, but here they were. Perhaps Lauren and Susie had been drawn by the family connections and Amy had followed; maybe Amy had followed the lure of history and knowledge and Lauren and Susie had come along for the ride. Whatever it was that had brought them, the three had left their schoolmates behind in Hogsmeade (Libby and Caroline were drinking tea in Madam Puddifoot's) and had clambered up the hill to the cemetery and stood now in the section devoted to those who had died in the War.

"It was a really big deal, wasn't it?" Amy asked, quietly, looking to her two more knowledgeable friends for information.

"It was huge," said Lauren, who was staring at the great stone memorial dedicated to those who had won the freedom of the Wizarding world. "There was this evil wizard who wanted to take over and he had this band of followers called Death Eaters."

Death Eaters. The term sounded incongruous to the three girls bathed in the thin November sunshine.

"Death Eaters? That's creepy," Amy remarked.

"They went round torturing and killing people. Muggle-borns, half-bloods, Squibs, any pure bloods they didn't like." Susie spoke calmly, as if she was recounting a story. She felt she was.

"Just killed them? Just like that?"

"Well, they'd usually torture them first. This section of the cemetery is for all those who were killed like that. Here - " Lauren indicated a gravestone in front of her. The girls had wandered as they talked, and had come to a place Lauren and Susie had reason to know well.

Alicia Jayne Spinnet. 15^th February 1978 - 21^st March, 1998. Always loved. Forever in our hearts.

"Who was she?"

"She was our mothers' best friend. She was a half-blood, and the Death Eaters tortured her and killed her."

"She wasn't very old."

"She was twenty," Lauren mused. "My Mum came home one day and there was this Dark Mark in the sky above their house. It was a sign the Death Eaters conjured up whenever they killed, like a calling card. She knew that someone was dead, either Aunty Angelina or Alicia. She said it was the worst moment of her life, going in, and finding Alicia's dead body. Well, she didn't say, Dad told me, when I was old enough to understand. They come here every year, on the day she died. We used to come, until we started at Hogwarts."

Amy stared at Lauren, awe-struck. She'd never known anyone who'd experienced anything as horrible as that. She stared again at the gravestone, recalling that Lauren's middle name was Alicia. "How old was your mother?"

"She was nineteen."

"She was nineteen and she came home to find that her best friend was dead? That must have been so horrible."

"Yeah," said Lauren, quietly, staring at the grave, wondering, for the first time, what Alicia would have been like if she'd still been alive: Alicia, in her mind, was a mix of her mother and her Aunty Angelina. She tried to imagine what her mother must have been through; how she'd feel if she found Susie's dead body. "I can't imagine, really... what it must have been like."

"It wasn't that long ago, was it? Does everyone still talk about it - your parents and stuff?"

"They tell us about it, because they want us to know, but it never seems - real," Susie said, slowly, her thoughts moving the same way as Lauren's. "It's always like Binns talking about the goblin rebellions or something. Like it's just history or something. But... I know it's not history - not history like that."

"I know Mum still thinks about it all the time. She told me, last Christmas, that it's always with her - it's always with all of them. She said that there were things she saw during the War that she'll never forget." Lauren didn't take her eyes from Alicia's gravestone; a long suppressed memory had suddenly stirred in her heart. She'd been eight, and she'd woken up one night, thirsty, and had tiptoed down to the kitchen. She'd heard an odd sound coming from the living and peeped round the half-open door: her parents were curled up together on the couch and Mum was crying, and saying something about how she wished they'd been allowed to have a normal life, how she hated the memories that she couldn't get rid of. Lauren hadn't gotten her drink of water that night and had almost forced herself not to think about it since. Mothers didn't cry like that. But now... she realised Mum had been talking about the War. She shivered. All those years... and she'd just acted like it was something boring and irrelevant...

"Are you all right?" Susie asked, quietly.

"Just thinking."

They stood in silence for a while, each of them lost in her own thoughts. Lauren and Susie were realising for the first time that their parents had lost something more than loved ones during the War; Amy was contemplating the idea of death and hatred so near at hand, the very evidence staring in her face in the form of Alicia Spinnet's gravestone. Muggle-born, she'd always thought that the very biggest and most awful wars belonged to the distant past.

"Did people fight?" Amy asked, eventually. "Did they battle the other side? Or... how did they win the war?"

"Guerrilla operations, mainly. Spying, finding out where Death Eaters were based, going in and wiping them out. Of course, sometimes it went the other way round: the Death Eaters found out where the Aurors and stuff were based and wiped them out. Sometimes Death Eaters would just appear somewhere, looking for a fight, and our guys would have to go off and fight them. The biggest thing was when Uncle Harry and Aunty Ginny destroyed Voldemort - he was the evilest one of them all. The leader. After that it was much easier to get the rest of the Death Eaters." Susie no longer felt as if she was reciting a well known history lesson.

"Our Dads fought... they were part of a top-secret group called the Order of the Phoenix - all the Weasleys were, and Uncle Harry and Aunty Hermione and most of our other random relatives. The ones that aren't related. Our mothers were sort of on the outside: it was really really secret and there were only a few people in the inner group. One of our uncles died, fighting."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Our Dads and our Uncle Bill were there that day... Bill saw him die - our Dads were off battling with some other guys." Lauren moved off, knowing the other two would follow, and led the way to her Uncle Percy's grave in the killed-in-action section of the cemetery. Percy's grave was just as well-kept as Alicia's, and, like hers, had taken on a sudden significance.

Amy shook her head as they surveyed the grave. "Your parents weren't very old when all this happened... and some of these people who died were so young."

"I can't believe it really happened. I never thought it did, really, before today." Susie was twisting her long black plait with one hand. "Now I know - " she swallowed. "Now I know why Mum cries sometimes."

"So does mine," Lauren said, feeling as though she were admitting something, but knowing that it didn't surprise Susie and that Amy was beginning to understand. "I saw her one night... she was crying into Dad's shoulder. I was so scared."

"Dad hates talking about the War. He's always so jokey and so funny about other things, like Uncle George - but he hardly ever talks about the War. He says it was the most awful thing that ever happened in his life, or Mum's life, or anyone's lives," Susie whispered.

"At Christmas - when Mum was telling me about it - she said she used to have nightmares. She thought Dad was going to die. She said that if he'd died, she wouldn't have coped. She says she hardly coped after Alicia died. She's Muggle-born. Every day she woke up wondering if she was going to be next." Lauren closed her eyes, forcing herself to imagine the pain her mother, only six years older than she was now, must have gone through every day of the War, the pain she must still be feeling. 'Why didn't I ever think?' she wondered, almost angrily. There were so many people who'd gone through the War: her family, the extended Weasley clan, the Hogwarts professors. It had been real. It had happened. What Lauren saw as irrelevant and mythical was something her parents had to live with every day.

Opening her eyes, Lauren looked up into the sky, thinking of her parents standing in this cemetery every year, growing ever older but never able to leave the War behind them. She wondered what they'd been like at school: George and Katie, snogging in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Mum talked about that stuff happily enough, her cheeks turning a bit pink as she'd confessed to Lauren and Susie about using the bathroom for a romantic rendezvous. It wasn't a scene Lauren really wanted to picture; instead, she tried to realise how that George and Katie had been thrown head-first into a war of hatred and death and fear, and had become the people they were now. How had they been able to love and marry and have Lauren, Jacob, Nathan, and Charlotte? How did fighting in a war hurt you so much, yet leave you able to smile and laugh as your children climbed into your bed at six a.m. on Christmas morning? Did they have to consciously force down memories every morning? Did they ever wonder what they'd have been, who they'd had been, if the War had never happened?

Standing in the Hogsmeade cemetery that November morning, Lauren tried, for the first time, to imagine her parents as people; people who had watched history unfolding around them. She thought of the hundreds of generations of Gryffindors, of Hogwarts students, who had lived and loved and died, and fought, and hated, and tried to hate. It was real. The War was real, history was real, and life was more real than ever before.

Tightening her hand around her wand, Lauren Weasley stared at her Uncle's grave and hoped desperately that war would never become so real again; that no more Georges and Katies would ever get caught up in a war like that.

Starting back down the hill, she thought of Quidditch, testing herself and her new thoughts. She still loved Quidditch, she always would. So would Susie. But it seemed to her as though they'd learnt something new today, something about life which Libby had always known instinctively. With a sense of awe, Lauren realised that life had just changed.