Descend - Wolfstar + Marauders

Transformations

The Prewett’s. Gideon and Fabian, they had all met them at the Order meetings. The two brothers were kind, good humoured people who never failed to break the tension with a joke. None of the Marauders were overly close with them, but they had been friendly. Gideon had shown James and Lily pictures of their young nephews, the little redheaded Weasley boys who looked remarkably like their uncles. Sirius and Fabian had placed one or two bets over quidditch matches. Remus and Peter had bantered along with the rest of them. The Prewett’s were generally well liked, particularly good friends with Frank and Alice Longbottom, and close with Hagrid from their own days as students.

No, the Marauders may not have been overly close, but they knew them. They were real, living, breathing parts of their lives.

Until the day they weren’t.

The Prewett’s were the first members of the Order that they had personally known to have died since they all officially joined.

Not died; murdered. They were murdered. Of course, there had been many victims of the war already. Deaths, disappearances, but none so close to home. And in such a brutal way… it didn’t bear thinking about.

None of them were stupid, they all understood the risks when they joined up to fight. This was different, though. This wasn’t death on a conceptual level. This was not some ephemeral thing. This was Frank Longbottom, a respected, competent Auror who had helped with Sirius and James’ own training, leaving in the middle of a meeting because he couldn’t stop himself from weeping. This was a funeral that had to be protected by undercover Order members to make sure the rest of the family weren’t next. This was two people they had all laughed with suddenly absent, with a darkness filling up the space they used to occupy. Remus thought of their sister telling her small children that their beloved uncles would never come back.

They had attended the wake. One of their nephews, a little boy, only nine or ten. He came up to Remus and asked him about his scars. Introduced himself as Bill.

"I'm going to tell you a secret, Bill, and you can't tell anyone else, you promise?" The boy nodded emphatically. "I got these scars fighting a dragon."

The kids eyes widened dramatically. "My brother loves dragons. He'd be real upset if he heard that you fought one."

Remus cracked a smile. Bill smiled back. He glanced back over to a woman with bright red hair that Remus vaguely recognized as the Prewett's sister. She stared vacantly, not seeming to notice the fussing of the two little baby boys she held in her arms. Bill looked on sadly and Remus felt his heart breaking for them all.

"I should go help mum. Good to meet you," he said, exceedingly polite. Remus just smiled sadly at him.

In an instant, James and Sirius lost any vestiges of cockiness. Moody’s catch cry of Constant Vigilance stopped being the subject of jokes and became a message that they took deeply to heart. Any sense of excitement that danger brought was quickly replaced by fear and outrage. More than that though, was a fierce desire to love and protect. This manifested differently in each of them.

Peter moved back in with his parents, afraid that family members could be targeted and desperate to be close by in case they needed his protection. He had always been fiercely loyal to his family, a well loved only child, much like James. His work for the Order involved being a set of eyes and ears in the Ministry department he worked for. Peter had always had a knack for staying under the radar, and he used this to his advantage. He was grateful to be able to keep such a low profile. The less attention that was on him, the less attention that could fall on those he loved.

Lily, in a move that shocked everyone, proposed to James. Of course, James had been talking to his friends for most of the last year about his desire to propose. They had all told him to come off it and stop trying to scare Lily away. She had more sense than to get married while she was still a teenager. As it turns out, she did not. With the mounting pressure and ever-present threat of impending doom, Lily Evans wanted nothing more than to hold onto love. Defiantly, boldly, with passion and power she declared to the world that no fear or oppression could be greater than love. That to declare their love, in the form of a wedding, was an act of rebellion and hope. James agreed with no hesitation. Lily Evans became Lily Evans Potter, the muggle-born girl taking on the name and legacy of one of the oldest and most esteemed pure blood families in England. They put a marriage announcement in the Daily Prophet the day after the wedding. The two of them got their own home, out in the suburbs, diving headfirst into adult life almost overnight. The urge to find stability in the chaos saw them drift away from the partying lifestyle that had dominated the previous year.