The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part One

Talk

Lily filled the silence after Underhill's departure with jumping into action, getting the two boys cleaned up and bandaged. Jasper was given a pair of jeans, which they had to engorgio just a tiny bit as he was taller than James, no where near as skinny as Remus, and not as interested in covering his legs with safety pins as Sirius was.

James insisted on bypassing Mungo's at all cost, and even though Lily urged him to go and get the ear fixed, upon clearing away the dried blood that covered him, he decided the splinching hadn't really been so bad.

"If you wait, they won't be able to fix it," Lily reminded him.

James shrugged, "tis but a scratch."

Lily sighed.

She got James to bed while Remus and Sirius went downstairs and got dinner from the curry shop with Jasper, and by the time they came back, the poor knackered hero was out like a lamp.

Lily took the box of leftover Remus had carried upstairs from him and sank into a chair, criss-crossing her legs and eating. Remus was using magic to clear up the blood in the carpet where James had fallen after staggering in, and Sirius made a big production of being exhausted himself, saying about fifty times he was going to go to bed before he actually did it, leaving Lily and Remus alone in the living room.

Lily pushed the basmati rice about in the takeout container with her fork, staring down.

Remus, as satisfied with the carpet as he was going to get, sat on the couch with a great release of stressful energy. He leaned back in the cushions, facing the ceiling and rubbed on his closed eyelids. It seemed impossible to him that he had started the day off at classes, been on the lunch date with Sirius, come home and been through all the things that had gone on since. "What an absolutely unending day," he muttered.

Lily nodded absently.

He looked up. "Lily? Are you alright?"

"Hm?"

"Are you alright?"

He was thinking of her screaming earlier, and how she'd been shaking and crying so inconsolably for half the evening. She had relaxed only moments before James and Jasper had arrived and Remus had no doubt that was no coincidence.

Lily nodded. "I'm alright."

Her tone said otherwise.

"Talk," Remus said.

"I could feel it, Remus," Lily said, eyes full of tears. "I could feel it. Physically feel it."

Remus sat forward. "Feel what?" he asked.

"Jasper."

"What?"

Lily drew a deep breath. She'd been wanting to talk about the Love Magic but hadn't been sure how to do it or when. She'd been nervous about telling James - he was already concerned with the sheer size of the books that she might be over extending. If he knew what it was really doing emotionally to her he might be against it all the more. Remus, she realized, was the perfect person to talk to about it.

So she told him. She told him all about what happened to her when she copied the runes, how her mind overflowed with flashbacks and memories, how every stroke of her quill seemed to draw them out of her, as though the memories were the ink in which she were writing with.

"And ever since the day when the memories focused on Jasper its like I can feel him a little bit. Like he is a part of me, or I am a part of him," Lily said. "Like we're tangled up somehow on some level."

Renus thought for a moment. "You can't feel Petunia?"

Lily shrugged. "I suppose her life may be so boring and normal that she doesn't feel anything strong enough to reach me."