An Uncertain Future

A/N: Thanks to Phantom of Delight for Beta Reading.

~*~*~*~

It took a little while to settle down. Malfoy may have left, but a lingering strain remained among the trio and Lily found herself bereft of appetite, though she forced down a few rounds of toast. The bacon which had before smelt so tantalising now looked rank and greasy. Her stomach felt queasy and tight from the stress. Innocuous as it was, Lily realised that she had been calmer back in her own time. Better the devil you know indeed.

Ultimately they settled back in the sitting room with James and Lily taking the settee and Sirius sinking into an armchair, much the same places as they had held the previous day. Unlike the previous day, Lily couldn't ignore the tension in James's wiry frame. Sirius offered to cast a counter-surveillance spell, but James just laughed; a bitter, dark sound that sent shivers up Lily's spine. "Go ahead. See if it helps."

Sirius frowned, but it was Lily who took up the challenge. She drew her wand. At ten and a half inches the supple willow took some storing, she knew some of the Order members had taken to wearing theirs in specialised sheaves fitted to their forearms or slipped inside boots. Lily had always kept hers in her waistband or handbag. Currently it was tucked into the back of her long skirt, the handle hidden underneath the loose hem of her blouse. There was something immensely reassuring about holding the wand in her hand again, its length already warmed by her body's heat.

"Abscondo." She flicked her wand, but nothing happened. As a counter-surveillance spell, not very much was meant to happen. Flashy lights and buzzing sirens tended to rather let people know that you were onto them, so the spell was intended to look like a personal warming charm of the sort favoured by the elderly. It was meant to give a faint buzzing sensation only if the room was bugged so the stillness that Lily felt wasn't anything unusual, but the lack of warmth to let her know the spell had been correctly cast was. She tried again. Same result: nothing.

Sirius must have caught the look in her eyes because he nodded when she spoke. "They've found a way to counter it."

James wasn't looking at them though. Instead he was picking at a loose thread in his shirt. "Try something else."

His voice sounded commanding, so Lily obeyed, muttering a Witch-fire Spell. Again nothing. A small charm to fix James's shirt. Nothing. A minor hex that should have turned her skin green. It remained pink. A dramatic flourish which should have left fireworks dancing along the ceiling, yet which resulted in nothing so much as a spark.

She wasn't certain quite how long she panicked, racing through spells that she knew she knew, but at some point Sirius had joined in. She came to herself when James walked back into the room. "The front door's deadlocked." Lily lowered her wand with a defeated sigh, but Sirius didn't stop until James carefully took Sirius's wand hand in his own, holding him steady. If Lily was frightened, Sirius looked absolutely terrified.

"What's going on?" He sounded hoarse.

"Some sort of magical-void. Didn't you notice the way that slimy Snape didn't take a step further into the flat than he had to?" asked James.

Lily nodded slowly. "He looked really desperate to get out of the kitchen."

"There's some sort of magic repellent in here. Makes spell casting impossible so far as I can see."

"Figures," Sirius croaked. "Wondered why he was so damn happy to trust us with our wands."

"But we said we weren't here to hurt anyone. We promised under Veritaserum." Even to her own ears, her voice sounded thin.

Sirius laughed; an eerie echo of James's earlier. "And you'd just blindly trust anyone who turned up on your doorstep? Even if they made promises under the influence?" He shook his head in despair. "Merlin, I hope you're joking, Lills. I don't even want to imagine what could happen if you really did. Malfoy may not be at war, but we damn well are. You should never trust anyone."

"Except each other," James pointed out wryly.

"Well, yes. Except each other," he agreed, eyes blazing. Abruptly he hung his head. "I'm freaking out, aren't I?"

"Just a little." James was running his fingers soothingly through his friend's hair as one would pet a dog. Sirius seemed to be relaxing underneath his ministrations.

What would it be like to have spent time in another form? Lily wondered. To see things from an utterly inhuman point of view?

Maybe she should add becoming an Animagus to her New Year's Resolutions.

"Don't worry," James resumed speaking. "It's just a spell. I doubt it'll extend much outside the flat, if it does at all. They do tend to be rather high maintenance."

"Can we find the root of the spell and shatter it, James?" asked Lily.

"It could take a while. There are a lot of hiding places even in a place this small."

Sirius seemed to snap out of his funk as if to prove that he was as capable as James. "And we don't even know that the focus of the spell is being held in the flat." He frowned, thoughtfully. "Are you certain the door's locked? There are a few revelation spells we could try if we were outside the field."

"If we were outside the field it wouldn't be a problem," Lily pointed out. "Still, it does seem rather dangerous for Malfoy to have locked us in. What if there was a fire?" She sounded like her mother, Lily realised. Maybe that was what happened when your parents died. Something inside of you shifted to occupy the void.

"If we could get out of the door, it wouldn't be that great a prison."

Silence greeted his words. It stretched for an infinity and then the tension couldn't fill the void anymore. Lily laughed weakly. "James. Love. Who said anything about this being a prison?"

James looked at her incredulously. "Besides the fact that we're locked into a magic-proof box owned by Death Eaters? Oh, not that much really."

"Death Easters?" The very word seemed so... irrelevant. Completely out of place in this urban Muggle dwelling. Hard to think that less than two days ago they had been a constant of her life, yet now seemed like a child's nightmare. Oh, how the mind wanted to forget. "That's, er, quite a leap."

"It's also quite a fact." James was pacing the room. Apparently at random he picked up the coffee table and swung it at the window. Both shattered into glittering shards to hang momentarily in the air, lace curtains billowing wildly. Sunlight caught the slithers as they spun, suspended, sending flashes of light throughout the room. Like watching a film in fast rewind they were suddenly sucked together again, the window a perfect sheet, the table's glass-surface reformed on the frame in James's hands.

"Interestingly escape-proof, wouldn't you say?" He set the table down carelessly.

Coasters were scattered on the floorboards. Lily knelt to collect them, wishing her thought were as simple to gather. The floorboards were scuffed, she noticed, even though the varnish looked recent.

There were little flowers on the coasters: roses and daisies and harebells. Foxgloves and valerian and belladonna. Lilies and orchids and narcissi. Holly and ivy and poinsettia. Lily might have thought them another feminine touch from the invisible girlfriend, but another coaster revealed rosemary and silverleaf and fayebell and suddenly she was reminded of the herb rack in the kitchen that Malfoy seemed to know so well, and of his friendship with Snape, and wasn't so certain anymore.

She seemed to have missed some of the conversation by the time her mind chose to reengage. James was pacing about the room like a caged tiger while Sirius just sat there, shoulders slumped, slowly turning his wand over and over again in it hands as though sheer focus and willpower alone could make it work. He was muttering something so softly that for a moment Lily thought that he was talking to himself, but when he stopped, James started to rant again. "I just can't believe that we walked into this trap! I can't believe that I was stupid enough to believe a bloody Death Eater of all things. I should have known better than to trust any of your damn relatives." The last was said with such viciousness it startled Lily, but Sirius merely nodded his agreement.

Sirius was muttering again. This time something which Lily thought sounded like 'mole bambi's fasted', but suspected might have been something rather more insulting. At least she hoped so; now was not a convenient time for Sirius to have a nervous breakdown.

"Fucking Voldemort! Damn him!" James punched the wall. It was a futile experience, which only succeeded in making his knuckles bleed.

"What makes you so certain Malfoy's a Death Eater?" Lily asked.

"Just a little thing. Like that he's got the blasted Dark Mark on his arm. I somehow doubt that in the last twenty-five years or so it's become a benign fashion statement."

"And he just happened to show you this?" But Lily could feel her eyebrows drawing together in concern. If that was true... Were they truly here just as guests in an, admittedly rather excessively, secure house, or was something suspected?

James however, seemed to be winding down. He dropped down onto the arm of Sirius's chair, returning to petting the other man's hair. "I saw it this morning." Sirius didn't seem to notice the gesture; maybe he was flipping out after all.

"When?"

"I needed the toilet." James just shrugged. "He was in the shower."

"And you just went in?" Okay, so she'd known that men were strange creatures, but even now, every new day married brought new peculiarities to her attention.

"It's not like there's anywhere else to go here." Which was, Lily supposed, typical male logic.

"And you just happened to be ogling his physique?" Or maybe Sirius was just fine after all and having a quiet moment.

"Sirius! For Hecate's sake it's a big black mark on bleach white skin. It's rather hard to miss." Now James sounded defensive. Clearly he wasn't as happy with Malfoy's more flirtatious moments as he'd suggested that Sirius should be.

"Of course. Anything you say, Prongs." Oh yes, Sirius was definitely having a laugh at James's expense. While the atmosphere might have needed lightening, she wasn't entirely certain that watching the two get into a brawl was the ideal solution right then.

"Look," she said, trying to divert them, "it could be innocent." Okay, maybe she could understand their scepticism. "Remember how Frank almost stole those government papers for the Lestranges before people realised he was under Imperius? Maybe something like that happened here to Malfoy? And anyway, the war's probably long over by now. How likely is it that it's dragged on for an entire generation? I mean..." She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence, but from the grim looks which met hers, Lily knew she was understood. Wars needed people to fight them. At the rate that people were 'disappearing' there wouldn't be soldiers enough to last a generation.

"Are you certain it was the Dark Mark, James?" Sirius sounded unusually thoughtful. All earlier signs of lethargy and exuberance were gone.

"Of course, I'm certain. It was a little blurred, but I know what the Dark Mark looks like. Just like I know what all those books in the 'spare room' are. Makes the Restricted Section look like a first year's reading list."

"Then, unfortunately, we have a problem. 'Cause if Malfoy's got the Mark and we all agree that the war's unlikely to still be going on, then it does rather tend to suggest that Voldemort won." Sirius sounded calm. "And if that's right, we need to get out of here pronto."

~*~*~*~

Lily didn't really know what a magic-blocking ward would look like, but she did know that that the only room she hadn't seen the inside of was Malfoy's bedroom. Hence, while James was tearing through the kitchen and Sirius was pouring over the spare room's books, she was standing at the foot of a king-sized bed gazing at a wall.

Okay, to be entirely honest, she was inspecting a portrait hanging on the wall, rather than the wall itself. It was a large photograph in the Muggle style, maybe two feet by three feet in size and in a simple black frame. The picture itself was greyscale and mostly dominated by beautiful seascape. Two people stood entwined against the wind to the right of the image, but they faced away from the camera. From the long, wind-swept mass of silver hair, Lily guessed that Malfoy was the person closest to the photographer. The second person was mostly obscured by the flowing robes and Malfoy's own bulk. All in all Lily thought that it was a rather peculiar and egotistical image to hang over your bed.

There was a matching image on the opposite wall. Unlike Malfoy's portrait this one was colour, although still a Muggle photograph and of a matching size. It was clearly a wedding, complete with the silver flowers on the frame and a pretty young woman in flowing white silk. Her smile was beautifully forthright and had captured Lily's gaze for a good few moments when she first walked into the room. Was this the mysterious girlfriend? If so, who was the man on her right? He looked a lot like Arthur Weasley. Maybe the Weasleys and Malfoys had finally ended their feud. Certainly it would add the icing of bitter irony to the cake of complete disaster that this visitation was turning into.

Unfortunately there didn't seem to be much in the room to hide a ward. Lily was beginning to detect a theme in the polished floorboards and pale, painted walls. It was defiantly a functional room, with a wardrobe on one side of the bed and a set of draws with a lamp on the other. There was a blue and red rug on the floor. The blinds were beige and lowered. They matched the duvet.

Experimentally, Lily lifted the rug. There was nothing underneath it, not even any dust. The same went for the bed and she idly wondered whether Malfoy hired a maid to clean or if he lifted the wards to cast a few spells. Somehow she couldn't envision him on hands and knees, reaching underneath the bed with a duster. Experimentally she lifted the mattress. It was heavy, sagging in the centre, making it hard for her to tell if anything was stashed between boards and bed. For a moment she felt herself dithering. Suppose Malfoy came back early and discovered her here? Or he noticed that the sheets were tucked in differently? In fact, how had the sheets been tucked in?

It all seemed like a terrible invasion of privacy.

Resolutely telling herself to get on with it, she jerked the mattress up as hard as she could and caught a glance of the bed frame before the mattress fell back down. It was bare. The bed was a state.

"Oh well, may as well make the most of it." She hated talking to herself. It was a false comfort.

Kicking off her shoes, she scrambled onto the loose bedding and over to the black and white portrait. It was hung on a picture rail that threaded about the top of the room maybe a foot below the ceiling. Lifting it off was the work of a moment and the back turned out disappointingly blank so she loosened the back of the frame and checked inside too. It was also devoid of anything approaching spell-work. With a defeated sigh, she rehung the portrait and cast a cursory glance at the top of the wardrobe and down its back. Also nothing.

Over the duration of the next hour and a half, 'nothing' turned into the watchword. Lily searched high and low, poking through men's clothes and rifling through the few books on top of the draws. Nowhere she looked turned up anything and Lily probably spent as much time if not more obliterating signs of her trespassing presence as she'd spent ransacking the room.

Eventually, she gave up and collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs. James was still poking about, but in a half-hearted way that seemed more focused on hunting for lunch than wards. It was almost a relief when Malfoy returned home.

~*~*~*~

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when Malfoy designed to re-enter the equation. Everyone looked dispirited and tired as they sat about the coffee table, a fact that even Malfoy, amazingly, picked up on as he entered the rooms.

"What's the matter here? Did you find anything out about your situation?" There was an odd mixture of hard and soft in his voice and the softness took Lily by surprise. She hadn't known that Malfoys could express concern.

Not that he followed up on it. "Doesn't look like you've got through a lot of reading." He poked sceptically at the (small) pile of books on the glass table top. Lily had poked at them too. Literally. With a shaking finger. Some of the books looked like they have been made from human skin. That in and of itself wasn't so shocking - there were plenty of similar books with in Hogwarts' Restricted Section - but the runic titles were.

Malfoy had clearly got a good look at some of the titles too. "'The Ultimate Sensuality: How the Preying Mantis Can Teach You About Immortality.'" The tone said everything, but from the look he was sending Sirius's way, Malfoy clearly thought that Sirius might need some help getting the point. "As much as bugs and shades are interesting topics, don't you think you have better things to read up on?"

'Bob' just folded his arms defiantly. "Maybe I just wanted to check up on my descendant's preferred reading. Check what recommendations to leave in the old will. That sort of thing."

"I see." Malfoy turned, pacing towards the window. For a moment Lily thought that he was just doing it out of frustration. A nervous habit maybe to match Sirius's way of crossing, uncrossing and re-crossing his legs to shake off excess energy. He didn't pace back though. Instead he gripped hold of the left curtain and yanked. Hard. A corner resisted for a moment before billowing out. Malfoy released it, the heavy fabric erasing the creases he'd inflicted underneath its own weight. It settled over the window again.

"Next time you feel the need to break my windows in a rage, could you at least make certain it doesn't heal with bits of curtain stuck through it? People here about may not be the smartest, but they do seem rather more observant than the average individual. Especially," and he turned to glare at them as he spoke, finally showing the annoyance Lily suspected he was feeling, "if the things that they observe are... unusual."

"Fine." Sirius hadn't moved, but remained slumped in this chair, arms folded defiantly. James was also glaring at Malfoy. "Next time we break your things we'll be mindful of who's watching." Their expressions were so similar that, if Lily hadn't been sitting with them since lunch, she would have been convinced they'd worked things out.

"I see." Malfoy's eyes narrowed, suspiciously. "And are you planning to break more of my things? Because, if so, it appears that I'll have to remind you that you are guests in my home. As such, you do owe me a certain level of respect."

"Guests," James said, bitterly. "And are we really your guests?"

"Well, I don't know what you'd call yourselves otherwise. Just unexpected, annoying guests." Malfoy folded his arms arrogantly and in a crude mockery of Sirius's seated stance. "Why? What would you call yourselves, Fred?"

"How does 'prisoners' sound?"

For a moment actual surprise flitted across Malfoy's features, but it was gone in a second, lost in the folds of an arrogant sneer. "Oh yes, I can see just what you mean. Why, if I just take out some of the chintz and add in a couple of dementors you could hardly differentiate between this place and Azkaban." He tilted his chin upwards and tossed a few loose locks of hair over his shoulder with a quick toss of his head that left memory-induced afterimages across Lily's mind. "Do you care to qualify your comment a little more?"

The toss of his head made Lily want to kick herself. Of course he folded his arms like Sirius. Sirius probably picked it up from a Black too. A father or an uncle or a thrice-removed cousin who Malfoy had also taken to mimicking, just like he'd learned the toss of Narcissa's hair. It was strange to think of Sirius as admiring someone in his family sufficiently to mimic them as a child. Stranger still to envision Malfoy doing similar. There was something too cold about him. It made such things as childish hero-worship seem utterly alien to him.

Then he started to laugh.

James and Sirius had apparently spent the last two minutes expressing (with quiet decorum, naturally) their displeasure over the day's confinement. In spite of being glad that she hadn't been the one to make Malfoy laugh like that, Lily did wish that her attention would stop drifting. She also wished to never hear Malfoy laugh again; he had an odd, creepy snigger.

"No." Malfoy had stopped laughing, but his eyes were hard now, no trace of his earlier softness. "There is no way that you, any of you, are leaving this flat."

"But-"

"No! You have to stay here. Merlin alone knows how much more damage you'll do to the fabric of time if you go wandering about everywhere doing things." He made 'doing' sound like a dirty word, but in an entirely different way from Alainie's gossipy tones.

"And you're going to stop us how?" Standing, James loomed over Malfoy by a good four inches and Lily almost pushed him back down into his chair again. God, but she hated it when James acted like a bully!

Malfoy just rolled his eyes. "Take your best shot. There's no way you can hurt me in this house."

"Yeah?" Sirius had joined James. "Willing to let us try?"

"Just stop it!" Lily tried to get in between them all and only just escaped a black eye for her troubles. Malfoy at least had the grace to look slightly guilty, she noticed. Not very guilty though, and certainly not enough to offer her an apology. James made an abortive attempt to get the Malfoy into some sort of painful grip, but one of many good things about being married to James was the slim degree of control it gave her over him. He'd thought she was joking when she told him not to put that potion in Moody's goblet as a 'test' and, in spite of the rather imaginative nature of Mad-Eye's retaliation, it was being forced to sleep on the sofa for three days that had really stuck in his mind. She gave him 'that look' again and he backed down.

"Don't you dare hit my wife again." He punched Malfoy full in the face, sending the other wizard sprawling. Maybe he'd just been backing up for a better shot then. She was really going to have to talk to him about that temper some time. Preferably sometime when her blood wasn't freezing at the thought of the potential consequences. Even Sirius looked shocked as he reached out to grasp James's arm, too late.

A quiet sound drew Lily's attention back to Malfoy. He was picking himself up, apparently none the worse for having been belted across the mouth. Clearly he hadn't been lying about the flat's protection. "Are you quite done with that idiocy now? Because it's not going to get you anywhere. You. Are. Not. Leaving. This. Building. It's not safe for anyone."

"For which we only have your word!" James wasn't making any effort to throw off Sirius's restraint, but nor did he look quite so calm as he had when he'd thought his punch had connected.

"For which you have the word of any book you'd care to read. Not," Malfoy said, gesturing theatrically about the room, "that you really seem to have much interest in the subject. In fact, this is almost enough to make me wonder whether you really do have alternative plans for your little excursion into the future."

He didn't really look suspicious, but James was brisling all the same. "And we're just meant to believe anything we find in these books?" His gesture was almost as wild as Malfoy's. "Are we really meant to think that your books are entirely unbiased?"

Perhaps to James's surprise and certainly to Lily's Malfoy actually paid attention. "How about I offer to get you any book you want to consult?"

"And we're meant to know which books we need how?"

"Your problem."

James paused to think things through. "And you promise to get hold of any books we want?"

"Sure. Within reason. Don't go expecting me to dig up the Bible's unpublished chapters from the Vatican or the like. But with in reason, sure."

"Promise?"

"Of course not." Malfoy rolled his eyes. "I've just spent several very taxing hours trying to get answers for you and come back to my sanctuary only to find that you've tried to redecorate my house and then that you'd like to have a go at my face too. If you think I'm going to bloody promise you anything, you're fricking crazy as Godric Gryffindor."

"Don't worry. We take your word for it." Sirius cut in. Lily decided there and then that she hadn't been transported to the future. She was dead. Somewhere along the line life had slipped away from her unnoticed, because that was the only way to explain why Sirius was holding James in check rather than the other way around.

But dead or not, James wasn't shouting and Sirius looked actually rather calm and Malfoy just took a seat and started to sort through the pile of books which James had amassed to show just how dark Malfoy's library was. All MAlfoy said was 'interesting' though and then sent Sirius off to get some more 'useful' texts.

~*~*~*~

A/N: Abscondo, according to the Latin dictionary I found, means 'to conceal'.