Chapter Text
Several cold, metal objects prodded her mouth, her gums, scraping at her teeth; her eyelid was stretched open, gripped at the base of her eyelashes by cold, rubbery fingers; a thin pencil-light shone into her eye, tracking its miniscule movements.
There was a faint beeping somewhere to her right. The blurry image of a tall man clad in stark hospital whites loomed over her; dizzy, her eyes slowly slid shut, the scene before her lost.
She jolted awake, heart thudding in her chest. Her hands clutched at her sheets, drawing them up to her chin and trying to regain her breath; looking around quickly, she snatched the mirror from her night-table and peered into it.
She was the same: her bangs, albeit a bit sweaty, were there; her eyes, wide and panicky, were there; the freckle on her right cheek was there. She was all right.
“Alison?” said a voice to her left. Alison jumped slightly, a gasp caught in her throat.
“Alison,” said the voice again, less patient. “Are you okay?”
She sighed and wiped a hand over her forehead, shifting the fringe plastered there. “I’m fine, Aynsley,” she said. “Did anything… happen last night? Like, did anyone come in here?”
It was hard not to feel Aynsley’s judgmental stare boring into her from the opposite side of the room.
“No,” she said dryly. “You’re sure you feel fine?”
“I feel great.” Alison smiled thinly, trying to look as chipper as possible. “Where’s Rach?”
“Breakfast. You’re a little late,” said Aynsley, smile equally thin. “I thought I’d wait for you.”
“That’s really nice of you, Aynsley.”
“No need to thank me.”
“I didn’t.” Alison smiled, sliding out of bed. “I’ll see you downstairs.”
She quickly pulled a robe over her pajamas and half-slid her feet into her shoes before Aynsley could respond and left the dorm; she exited the common room into the dungeon hallways and attempted to keep the panic which bubbled within her suppressed; the gates broke loose when she stumbled into Cosima, who was on her way to the Great Hall, in the first floor corridor.
“Cosima!” she whisper-screeched, digging her fingers into Cosima’s forearms and dragging her to a secluded area of the corridor, around the bend of the stairs. They huddled beneath the stone banister, Alison, still in her panic, leaving crescent-shaped indents on Cosima’s arms.
“Ow,” whined Cosima, rubbing the marks. “What’s going on, Ali?”
Alison dropped her voice to a low whisper. “There were doctors in my room last night! Like, real doctors with masks. Aynsley says they weren’t there, but I’m sure of it. They operated on me, Cosima!”
Cosima snorted loudly; Alison glared at her, more agitated than anything.
“Sorry,” said Cosima, fighting a smile. “They operated on you? Are you sure you didn’t-”
“No, I didn’t have a bad dream!”
“Alright, okay,” said Cosima, placating. “If you’re sure there were doctors in your room-”
“There were!”
“-then that’s not that surprising, right? We know that as, y’know, clones-”
“Not the c-word!” begged Alison.
“-people would take an interest and want to, you know, study us.”
Alison paled considerably; she nervously wrung her hands and glanced over her shoulder, as though she expected a doctor to spring up from beneath the tile and cart her away.
“Study us?” she said. “What for?”
Cosima looked at her incredulously. “We’re, like, a biological miracle, Ali. They’d probably study our physiological functions, monitor our health-”
“Monitor?” Alison screeched, discretion out the window.
Cosima quietly urged her to lower her voice, using hand gestures more than words, and nodded fervently. “Monitor,” she confirmed. “Do you want to… tell the others about this over breakfast?”
“How about somewhere more private?” said Alison. “First floor girl’s toilet after?”
Cosima nodded curtly, and Alison looped her arm around Cosima’s elbow, and they walked as though they had nothing to hide into the Great Hall.
***
James poked at his fried egg, pushing it toward the center of his plate until it provoked the beans on his toast. He hadn’t had much of an appetite lately; he hadn’t felt much of anything lately, really, and was as content as he could be to spend Christmas break huddled in his dorm, talking to no one and doing nothing that would remind him of the reason his heart felt so hollow.
“Are you lot going home for the hols?” asked Sarah tentatively; he hated that - he could almost hear her quick glances in his direction, and could feel the hesitation in her voice, as if ‘home’ was a word that would send him spiraling.
“Yeah,” said Remus, equally careful. Peter nodded in agreement, mouth too full with muffin to properly answer.
“I have to go home,” said Scott. “I’m not sure my mom’s been giving Denise her insulin shot properly.”
“Fe and I are staying here,” said Sarah. “S’s… Mum’s cooking is… it’s total rubbish.”
“Completely,” said Felix, edging into the space between Sarah and James. “That woman is so hopeless, not even magic could save her food.”
“Plus,” said Sarah, pausing to speak around the toast in her mouth. “Every Christmas Eve, she drags us to Bobby’s and forces us to sing shitty karaoke with her.”
“On stage,” added Felix. “You remember that one year with Christmas Tears?”
“Awful,” said Sarah.
“I’m staying here as well,” interjected Lily. “My sister, you know, she… she doesn’t really like magic, and every time I go home, we end up fighting.”
Alison made a small, sympathetic noise and placed her hands over Lily’s, which were folded on her lap. “My mom’s the same,” she said. “Which is why I’m staying, too.”
“Wow,” said Peter. “Everyone’s staying here. It’ll probably be more fun than Christmas at - ow!”
James looked up at the cry of pain, only to realize that Sirius had jabbed Peter’s side with his elbow while jerking his head quite unsubtly in James’s direction.
“Oh,” said Peter. “I didn’t mean-”
“It’s fine,” said James, short, running a hand through his hair. “Really,” he insisted as his friends’ faces tightened with pity. He offered a slack smile. “In any case, I’d rather hang out with you losers at Christmas. Mum keeps trying to smother me with knitted sweaters.”
“Same here,” said Cosima, pushing her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. “The hanging out with you guys part, not the sweater thing. I mean… we’re family. We have to stick together.”
“Merlin’s pants, Cos, it’s only eight in the morning.” said Felix.
“Hey, uh, after breakfast, do you guys want to hang in Myrtle’s room?” said Alison, looking pointedly between James and Felix.
“What?” said Sirius. “Where’s that?”
He and Lily glanced at each other, equally bewildered as most everyone else at the table nodded in unison.
***
“Where on Earth could they all have gone together?” said Lily, hands clasped behind her back as she nervously paced the length of the rug in front of the fireplace. “This castle is big, but it’s not that big.”
“Why didn’t they invite us?” said Sirius, sprawled across the couch, looking about as nettled as Lily felt, if not more. “Did we do something?”
“Well, it was rather rude of you to cut off Peter like that, you know James is feeling sensitive right now, you don’t have to be so obvious.”
“Excuse me?” said Sirius, sitting up quickly. “I’m not the one who was going on and on about my tragic life as someone else has lost his sister. Oh, boo hoo, your sister is mean to you.”
“I wasn’t going on and on!” said Lily, indignant; she realized, with growing horror, that she was standing with her hands on her hips, exactly as her own mother did when scolding. She quickly lowered her arms. “I was providing reasoning for-”
“I was providing reasoning for-” mocked Sirius in a nasally voice that sounded nothing like her own.
“For why I’m staying at the castle-”
“For why I’m staying at the castle-”
“You’re insufferable!” said Lily, and she did not stamp her foot like a five year old when she said it.
“Your shoulders are too wide for your head and you’re never going to be able to fix it,” said Sirius.
“At least I’m not a codependent loser who’s so wrapped up in his best friend that he can’t remember where his own personality ends and James’s dick begins,” said Lily.
“At least my body doesn’t follow the same color palette as the Italian flag,” said Sirius.
“We’re both in the same situation right now,” said Lily slowly, closing her eyes and breathing deeply through her nose. “We’re both being left out of something important.”
“You’re right,” said Sirius. “Much as I hate to admit it.” He rolled off the couch elegantly; Lily wondered, briefly, if Purebloods had tutors who specialized in making anything mundane look graceful.
“I know how we can find out where they are,” said Sirius. “But we’re going to have to break into James’s trunk, which is very uncool, and he might be mad about it.”
“Fine by me,” said Lily. “He’s your boyfriend.”
They crept up to the boys’ dormitory; Lily couldn’t quite wrap her head around the purpose of their stealth - after all, it wasn’t possible for Sirius to break into a dorm that he himself lived in. Sirius cracked open the door slightly and peered in, then swung it open.
“What are you two still doing here?” he barked, striding immediately toward James’s bed; Remus and Peter looked up from their respective trunks, confused.
“We live here,” said Remus.
“We’re packing,” said Peter.
Lily stood awkwardly in the doorway, feeling incredibly out of place as Sirius popped the lock on James’s trunk and retrieved a folded parchment from inside.
“Not a word,” he said, pointing the parchment at the other two.
“Didn’t see it, don’t care.” said Remus.
“What is that?” asked Lily as they made their way downstairs and huddled in the corner of the common room that was obscured from view by the fireplace.
“Do you have eyes?” snapped Sirius. “It’s a map.”
“It is not!” said Lily. “It’s blank.”
Sirius pointed his wand at the center of the parchment, cleared his throat impressively, and recited: “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.”
Ink bloomed from the center outward, revealing what appeared to be a map of the castle. Lily leaned forward, intrigued.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, sounding awed despite herself.
“We made it,” said Sirius impatiently, scanning the map quickly. “Ah, there he is - and there are the rest of them. They’re hanging around without us… in the…”
“Why,” said Lily, deliberate, “are they in a girl’s toilet?”
***
“So you think you’re being monitored because Alison had a dream that some doctors operated on her?” said Felix. He looked unconvinced.
James hadn’t participated much in the conversation; he chose, instead, to listen, and to focus on the pools of water that gathered on the stone floor and dimly reflected the candlelight above. The girls’ bathroom on the first floor had been their recluse for all things clone-related; it was one of the most private areas of the castle - the ghost haunting it, Moaning Myrtle, wept so often and so heavily that she deterred all girls from using it.
“It wasn’t a dream!” said Alison.
“Listen,” said Cosima, placating. “Whether or not what happened to Alison was real - which I believe it was,” she included hastily as Alison opened her mouth to unleash another tirade, “I think it’s reasonable to assume we’re being studied: we’re scientific miracles, they’re probably doing some kind of twisted nature versus nurture experiment - produce some identical human subjects, study their choices.”
“So it would have to be people close to us, right?” said Sarah, swinging her legs from atop the sink. “‘Cause they’d have to be watching us pretty much all the time.”
Alison shuddered visibly. “We need to start thinking of the people we’re around often and deciding whether they’re trustworthy or not. Just between us,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “I think Aynsley might be in on it.”
“Aynsley Norris?” said James, looking up. “The Prefect?”
“She’s my roommate,” said Alison. “And she’s so critical of me, and she didn’t even care when I said there could have been people in our room last night.”
“Well, it would make sense for each of us to have a specific monitor,” said Cosima. “Someone uniquely close to us.”
“That’s definitely not creepy,” said Felix.
“Wait,” said James, suppressing the rising panic in his throat. “Hold on. If each of you has someone watching you, how are we supposed to know who we can trust?
Cosima smiled grimly, looking more pained than amused. “We can’t.”
“Well,” said James. “Well, yes, we can. We can trust Sirius, and Remus, and Peter, and Lily.” He ticked each one off his fingers.
“We don’t know that, James,” said Sarah. “We’ve got to think hard about this - they are around pretty much constantly.”
“And we don’t even really know them that well,” said Alison, nervously wringing her hands. “Sarah’s right; we have to think about what’s best for our safety.”
“They’re our friends,” said James, looking between them disbelievingly. “You’re not buying this, are you, Cos? Felix?”
Felix shrugged, picking at his cuticles to avoid looking James in the eye. Cosima sighed heavily.
“We know they’re your friends, James,” she said gently. “They’re our friends, too. But-”
“But nothing,” said James. “I’d trust any of them with my life, and... and Beth would have, too.”
The bathroom fell silent; the only sound that could be heard was that of Myrtle quietly sobbing in the stall furthest from the door.
***
James slunk into the common room, Sarah on his heels. They quietly eased the portrait of the Fat Lady closed and slumped heavily against it. The room was so dark, he could hardly make out her features.
“Everyone’ll be at lunch, then boarding the trains to leave,” he said in a low voice. “Let’s just stick it out.”
“Right,” said Sarah. “The less questions, the better.”
There was a low click from the furthest corner of the room, and they were suddenly bathed in shallow light.
“Merlin’s fucking pants!” said James, squinting in the sudden light.
“We’ve been waiting, James,” said Sirius, lounging in an armchair. Lily was perched on the edge of her seat, hands folded neatly over her knees.
“You didn’t have to wait for me, you could’ve gone to lunch.”
“We weren’t waiting for you so we could go to lunch, you idiot,” snapped Lily. “We know you were all talking about something without us.”
“Yeah,” said Sarah, rolling her eyes. “Because it’s private, you psychos.”
“It was… family business.” said James.
Sirius leapt up from the couch. “So Alison Hendrix is more of your family than I am? Huh?”
“Oh, my God,” said Sarah.
“It’s not like that,” said James. “It’s just… okay, I really wish I could tell you, but I can’t unless everyone else is here, and it’s too complicated to explain otherwise.”
“No, it’s fine.” said Lily in a tone that suggested it was not fine at all. “It’s fine, we’ll just stay out of the loop.”
“It’s nothing about you!” said James. “If I wanted to talk shit about either of you, I’d do it to your faces.”
“That’s good to know. I’ll be applying that policy more often, then.” said Lily, and she stood and stomped up the steps to the girls’ dormitories.
Sarah rolled her eyes again. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Look, Sirius,” began James once they were alone in the common room.
“Don’t talk to me,” said Sirius. “Go talk to Felix or Alison.”
“Fine,” said James, stung, and he turned to leave the common room. He made it halfway to the staircase before Sirius sprinted up beside him and skidded to a stop.
“You know I didn’t mean that, right?” said Sirius.
“Sure,” said James with a tired smile. “Yeah, I know.”
***
A week had passed since their meeting in the bathroom; the issue of monitors had largely faded from memory, or at least temporarily receded into its trenches, as Hogwarts had quickly emptied most of its population. The remaining students contributed their time to decorating their common rooms and tossing snowballs at each other in the courtyard. Being only one of two Slytherins who had remained at the castle for Christmas, Alison had roped Lily into her mission to decorate the Slytherin dungeon.
They stood in front of the fireplace, both angling their heads to best scrutinize the wreath Alison had conjured to hang over the mantle.
“I don’t know,” said Lily, cradling her chin. “I think the point is that the leaves aren’t supposed to be dead.”
“Fish sticks,” said Alison, dropping her wand on the couch behind her. “This would be so much easier if some of my housemates had any interest in helping me. It’s just so… gloomy in here, you know? I mean, we’re under a lake and all, but that doesn’t mean we have to live like… like we’re in a cave!”
“Maybe that’s the motif they’re going for,” suggested Lily. “Keep it slimy to ward off mudbloods and all that.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Alison, slumping onto the couch. “All my housemates hate me. That’s probably why none of them stayed here for Christmas. Well, almost none of them.”
“Who else stayed?”
“Severus,” groaned Alison, burying her face in her palms. “You probably shouldn’t even be here, he might slither out and start apologizing again.”
Lily felt a sense of dread creeping through her as she pondered the idea of facing Severus again; it was like an open wound, the fact that she had wasted so many years, turned away so many friends, to stick by his side, and he had thrown it back in her face, practically admitting that she was worth less to him than his future Death Eater friends.
“You’re right,” she said, no longer wanting to pretend to be in a cheery mood. “Look, can we work on this tomorrow? It’s kind of late.”
“Fudge, it’s almost eleven!” said Alison, glancing at her watch. “Yes, yes, go to bed!” She gently shooed Lily out of the Slytherin common room, whispering a quick ‘goodnight’ before the stone wall slid shut.
Lily stood alone in the dark, damp corridor, crossing her arms over her chest as she made her way toward the stairs. Everything about the dungeon was off-putting, from the moss that grew beneath the cracks in the floor, to the draft that blew from behind her. She wondered how anyone could stand to live in such a place for seven years, and why Slytherins didn’t just transfer to Beauxbatons.
Hogwarts was still at night; during the day, the castle bustled with activity: the portraits jeered, the staircases shifted, the Quidditch players practiced. At night, it was as if Hogwarts had been shut down. The quickest moving things were the clouds in the sky, and she could see them from the window by her bed. She lay on her side for a while, counting the trees she could see from her window, then counting the number of clouds that looked like an object, then trying to count the stars and eventually giving up.
It was past midnight and she could not force her eyes to stay closed any longer, so she swung her legs over the bed, found her slippers, put on her robe, and left the room. Lily wandered aimlessly through the castle, only her dimly lit wand guiding her, until she found herself at the Great Hall.
The stairs that led to the Hufflepuff basement had always intrigued her; they emanated a warm, yellow glow that drew her nearer, until she was descending them. Underneath the Great Hall was just as warm as the stairs: the light wood of the floor homed a cozy discoloration that led her to a large portrait of fruit.
Stretching her hand out to touch the canvas as high as she could reach, she brushed her hand over the apple, the grapes, and the pair. The last fruit giggled, she gasped, and it transformed into a green gilded door knob, slotted directly into her hand.
“Weird,” Lily whispered, though she had seen weirder.
She swung open the door and found herself facing… a kitchen. Feeling deflated, she noted that it was not an unimpressive kitchen by any means - the ceilings were as high as those of the Great Hall above, brass cookware hung from the ceiling like contemporary windchimes. She scanned the room, not realizing that she was intruding until her eyes swept the floor and met dozens of pairs of shining, tennis-ball sized eyes blinking up at her in worry.
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean-”
“Evans?” said a familiar voice. She groaned inwardly.
“What are you doing down here?” asked James, rising from the short stool he had been perched on.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said.
He was silent for a moment as he rummaged through several cabinets before retrieving two mugs and setting them on the countertop; he waved away several house elves as they insisted on aiding his endeavor to make hot cocoa for each of them. Surprised, Lily accepted her mug, fingertips tingling with its warmth.
Lily perched herself on the countertop, resting her elbows on her thighs and cradling her hot cocoa; James slumped easily into the low stool again. They sat in the stillness of the night, devoid of sound save for the occasional offering of a pastry by a house elf, or the gentle chimes of the brass pots above.
“Every Christmas when we were kids,” said James suddenly, breaking the easy calm that had settled over the kitchen, “Beth and I would get up as soon as the sun did, and we’d run to Mum and Dad’s room and jump on them until they woke up.”
Lily smiled sadly into her mug. “I bet they loved that.”
“They did, actually,” said James with a quiet laugh. “We’d all decorate the tree together, but we always waited until two nights before to actually get started. Beth and I constantly fought over who got to put the star on top - until I got taller than her and could reach it without Dad lifting me.”
He was clutching his mug so tightly that his knuckles had paled. Lily realized, with a sharp pang to her stomach, that he was trying not to cry.
“It’s just… I can’t be at home right now,” he said, voice strained. “I can’t do it - I don’t want to wake up on Christmas and have her not be there, because then it’ll be real and she’ll be gone.”
“I know,” said Lily.
“And I feel especially awful because I know Mum and Dad need me to be at home right now, but I can’t. And I can’t deal with the extended family and all their sympathy, like ‘her body is gone, but not her soul.’ What does that even fucking mean?”
“I know,” she said again, sliding off the countertop and kneeling in front of the stool. She placed her hand over his, slowly prying the mug from his grip. “I know it hurts. And it’s going to hurt for a long time. I don’t even want to get up in the morning because I can see her bed and I know that she should be in it.”
She placed both mugs on the ground and grabbed his hands, looking him straight in the face. “Look, I know we haven’t been the nicest to each other, but I’m here for you. Stop concerning yourself with what everyone else needs from you. Be selfish for a little bit, Potter. Get angry, get upset, scream at the universe for as long as you need to - the last thing she would have wanted is for you to keep it all locked up for the sake of others.”
She saw the faint trace of a smile etching itself over his features. “You’re alright, Evans,” he said.
“How often do you come down here?”
“Only when I can’t sleep,” he said. “Which has been a lot, lately. Might need to find a new spot if you’re going to keep hanging around.” He quirked a real smile, teeth and all, at her.
“Get used to it,” she said, gently knocking him on the knee with a loosely-wrapped fist.
“Hey, uh,” said James, looking slightly awkward hunched down in the stool, “I’m sorry about earlier this week. With the bathroom and all.”
“It’s completely fine,” said Lily, sincere. “I was being dumb, it’s your privacy. I shouldn’t have kept on about it.”
“No, it’s…” said James. “Look, it’s just kind of a difficult thing to say out loud because you might think I’m making it all up, but you deserve to know because you were Beth’s best friend and… just don’t laugh, alright?”
“Why would I laugh?” said Lily, sitting up straight. “You really don’t have to tell me if you don’t want-”
“No, I want to,” said James. “It’s just… look, they’re genetic identicals. They’re not, like, sextuplets or however many there are. Sarah, Beth, Alison, Cosima - they’re all the same.”
Lily paused. “Genetic identicals?”
“I don’t really understand it all myself,” he admitted. “But Cosima kind of figured it out through some samples; she said that they were created in a lab and inserted into surrogates; Beth was adopted by Mum and Dad, so they had no way of knowing this-”
“So they’re clones?” interrupted Lily. “Lots of muggle scientists have been talking about human cloning, but I didn’t think anyone had actually done it yet.”
“Yeah,” said James, looking fairly relieved that she had taken him seriously. “They’re clones, I guess. And Alison brought up that they might be under watch by whoever cloned them, and it really freaked her out because we don’t really know who’s watching who.”
“What?” said Lily. “That’s a total invasion!”
James nodded fervently. “We’re trying to come up with a plan to figure out who’s monitoring who, but we’ve come up blank.”
“You’re thinking too hard,” said Lily. “You need to relax; give your brain time to wind down and return to the problem the next day. You know what,” she stood up suddenly. “We’re all going to have fun if it kills me.”
***
He had to hand it to Lily: she was not one to go back on her word. Immediately after the next night’s dinner in the Great Hall - made less Great by the fact that the long benches had been pushed against the wall and the room now featured a single standard sized dining table for remaining staff and students - she cornered them all and proposed her idea of a fun night.
“Gobstones?” said Felix, unimpressed. “You want us to sit in the Gryffindor common room and play Gobstones?”
“It doesn’t just have to be one game,” she said. “We could play Exploding Snap, or Wizarding Chess, or-”
“Listen, Lil, you’ve set us on the right course,” said Sarah. “But I think there are better ways to have fun than that.”
“Nothing illegal,” said Alison warningly.
“I have an idea,” said James. “I don’t think it’s illegal, but we’d do better without being caught.”
“Oh, c’mon,” said Sirius, fairly peeved. “You’re going to show them the tunnels, too?”
The secret passages that veined the ground beneath Hogwarts were, in James’s opinion, one of the castle’s finest features. So far, they had documented six on their Map and were in the process of searching for others; it was Sirius who had discovered the statue of the one-eyed witch adjacent to the stairs that led to the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom. It had taken a while to discern the spell needed to reveal the pathway, but they had gotten it eventually: one simply needed to tap the hump of the statue with their wand while casting the Dissendium charm, and the statue would slide open just enough for one person to slide down to the hidden passageway at a time.
“How did you find this?” said Cosima in awe, not paying much attention to the muddy ground beneath her feet or the damp walls of the tunnel.
“We get around,” said Sirius.
“Where does this lead?” asked Felix, winding the arm not holding his illuminated wand around Sarah’s elbow and sticking to her tightly.
“Honeydukes’s cellar,” said James, who was crouched over to fit in the tunnel, matter-of-factly. “From there, we have free roam of Hogsmeade. Which, I know, pales in comparison to a night of Gobstones-”
“Shut up,” said Lily, though she looked amused.
James stopped abruptly and put a finger to his lips before pressing his ear to the cellar door above. When he had decided that the cellar above was quiet enough, he pushed the wooden door open and pulled himself up through the opening, offering a hand below to the others who weren’t quite tall enough to reach.
They crept quietly through Honeydukes, long-since closed at 11 P.M. James winced as the bell above the door tinkled quietly when he opened it, and held the door while ushering everybody out to prevent further noise.
Hogsmeade was impressive in the winter: a little picturesque village, fresh snow piled atop the sloping roofs, the orange light of the streetlamps glowing warmly above the plowed road.
Alison shivered and pulled her hat lower over her ears. “I can’t believe it’s colder here than in Toronto,” she said, stuffing her mitten-clad hands into her pockets.
“Let’s head to the Three Broomsticks,” said Felix, rubbing his hands together furiously. “I’d die for a Butterbeer.”
The pub was still open, and was fairly crowded for a holiday evening. They managed to snag a booth near the back and were practically on top of each other in an effort to sit comfortably. The pub was quite crowded for Christmas; assorted loners were strewn about, nursing their drinks, likely avoiding the bleak solitude of their homes. Rosmerta, however, had never looked less busy, and served their drinks almost as soon as they had sat down.
James sat back in the booth, sipping his Butterbeer and silently watching his friends, he felt more at peace than he had in weeks. The atmosphere of the pub was warm and dimly lit with orange lights, though snow continued to pile up outside. The various conversations around him piled up: Cosima, in a flurry of wild gestures, was trying to explain some concept beyond anybody else’s scope of reasoning to Sarah; Felix and Alison snickered behind their mugs at a joke nobody else would be let in on; Lily teased Sirius about something or other, poking him in the ribs while he swatted her hands; Sarah finished her Butterbeer and waved Rosmerta over for another while Alison, ever the concerned friend, tried to yank her arm down. James realized, with a start, that he was beginning to be alright looking Sarah, Cosima, and Alison in the face again.
Though they were not Beth, they were extensions of his family. Not just the three, but all of them: Lily, and Sirius, and Scott, and Remus, and Felix - all appurtenances of his life, all people he could depend on. Not replacements for Beth - no, she could never be replaced, and he would never try to - but a category in their own right.