Frigus . Sirius Black (Mortem BOOK 2)

chapter sixty-nine

May 4th, 1980 - Grimmauld Place

Lily Potter had basically moved into Grimmauld Place after what had happened with Nephera, partly to keep an eye on Sirius when one of the boys couldn't, and partly because she spent almost every waking moment scouring through the vast library at Grimmauld for some kind of cure to obliviation.

So far, two and a half weeks in, there was nothing. Well, nothing that she thought any of her friends would go for. The only reasearch which had been done on obliviation thus far had showed some success through cruciating the patient, for intense pain could often wake up memories. There were a few issues with that plan of action, though. First of all, the experiments performed were only performed on small cases of obliviation, nothing like the spell Riddle casted on Nephera. Second of all, she did not think that any of the boys would be all too keen to cruciate their best friend. Not to mention that to curse the brunette witch, they'd have to catch her first, and the redhead figured they'd have better luck trying to off Riddle to break the curse.

She closed one of the dozen books in front of her with a sigh. When she started, she was under no delusion that this would be easy, but after two weeks of dead ends, she was slowly starting to lose hope. She had even looked into Nephera's books on dark magic and hte Black Arts, and even there, there was nothing mentioned on how to break an obliviation spell. She figured if Nephera was there she'd be able to do it, perhaps combine two or three spells to create her own, but Lily was only just starting to get the hang of dark magic, let alone trying to modify spells.

She couldn't show it, though, at least not to Sirius. The boy was a complete ghost moving around Grimmauld, sleeping whenever he wasn't working, and throwing himself into work when he wasn't sleeping. The witch had seen all that before, back in seventh year, although this time she could tell it was far worse.

She didn't blame him, not really. There is only so much a person can handle before they completely break apart, and this seemed to be that point for Sirius.

She was alone in Grimmauld right now, well, barring Kreacher who was off tidying the rooms and mumbling something underneath his breath as always, and she was thankful for the relative silence. It was rare these days, what with people coming in and out constantly to see if she was making any progress, James fussing over her for the pregnancy, and all four boys residing in Grimmauld for the time being, it tended to get quite rowdy.

Also, there was the issue of the pregnancy. She had never tried to break a spell as powerful as obliviation before, but she was certain that the hormones and constant food cravings weren't exactly aiding her concentration. Still, she was quite thankful for it as much as she was stressing about it. If bringing a baby into this world was stressful before, it was even more so that one of her friends was now actively trying to kill her husband and father of her baby because she was under the impression he was the one who had drove the whip up her back. Nevertheless, it gave her hope. In three months from now there would be a small person there, looking like a perfect combination of James and herself, how could she not be excited about that?

She shook her head, as much as she'd like to, she couldn't linger on those thoughts too long. She had a spell to break.

To the untrained eye, the Auror office was probably the one place which had remained the same before and after Nephera had been obliviated, mostly because the Minister had declared her public enemy number one ever since she had attacked him. Still, Moody could both feel and see the changes. He had lost two of his best Aurors, the Prewetts, and their loss was felt very heavily from everyone. Another issue was the ticking time-bomb known as Sirius Black who was wondering the halls. Moody had put him in charge of interrogating, he figured if the younger wizard was that angry, he might as well put it to good use, not to mention that Moody figured it might actually be good on him.