All in the Family

Chapter 166: The Dursleys Departing

Sunset sat like a giant tangerine on the cookie-cutter houses all neatly squared away in Little Winging, Surrey.

Peter landed in a litter box, shaking the flecks from his hair in disgust and apologizing to a tabby cat that was puffed up and hissing at him as he looked all around the cabbage smelling house. James had landed at the table and was brushing cake crumbs from his shirt with a sorrowful look for having it thrown on the ground along with a tea set as he offered him a hand up.

"Cheer up mate," Peter said quietly as James didn't even try to chase one of the cats around, didn't even make a joke about Padfoot showing up in here. "It's not like I'm moving to Australia."

"I know," he huffed as he gently picked up a particularly fat white one that did not want to be held and tried to scratch at him. He apologized as he let the cat fall back to the floor and it sprinted away to lick itself, but his goal was met and it wasn't blocking the door anymore. "I'm more annoyed than anything you're right, Padfoot and Moony literally haven't noticed or cared."

"Remus will notice eventually and kick himself for it," Peter shrugged. "You yourself said Sirius was already talking about doing the same thing."

"I'm just worried your life is going to get boring, only hanging around that little swat," he was mostly teasing, but he knew he sounded wistful.

"Maybe I'm looking forward to a little boring," he lied.

They frowned though and looked at the nearest window in confusion upon hearing a strange noise.

Remus and Lily landed in a young boys room, filled with dinosaur figurines. "Relative of yours?" Remus asked with a small smile as he picked up a homework binder with the name Mark Evans done at the top.

She picked up a baseball and spun it delicately in her hands as they looked around with a sad frown. "Oh I doubt it, both my parents didn't have siblings."

There was no noise of anybody else moving about in the house and both called out just to be sure before they set their things down and moved along towards the door.

Remus got there just slightly first and held it open for her. She gave him a casual smile and walked past, trailing her fingers along the pale wallpaper. "I wanted to ask you something," she said softly, peeking over her shoulder at him as she hovered in the entryway. "We're not exactly friends though, so you can tell me if it's rude and I'm sorry."

"Ask away," he assured, though he was already rocking back on his heels uneasily no matter how much he tried to sound otherwise.

"Your dad, um, well you've never said," she began uneasily but only shifted closer and gently touched him on the arm as she eased into her ignorance, "what kinds of things have you tried in the past? To know about whatever potions you're immune to?" It wasn't something she could really work on until they got out of this mess, but she was compiling ingredients in her head in the meantime anyways.

He actually burst out laughing that's what had her so ill at ease, and she gave him a tentative smile back as he brushed off, "the polyjuice potion mainly, stuff that doesn't work on nonhumans broadly, the end results for my kind are pretty gruesome. We didn't find that out until we went looking for details of it this year though. Ah," he gave her an uneasy frown, but she kept watching him with nothing but curiosity, so he elaborated, "well, see, Snape tried to slip some Angel's Trumpet Draught into my drink one night, and it didn't work, so, we got curious and compared a few ingredients." He finished with a casual shrug to her disgusted face.

It was a poison meant to sprout wings from one's back, you'd slowly shed them and when the last feather fell you would fall into a coma until awakened with a very specialized tune keyed into the potioneer that had brewed it. Her stomach knotted terribly, but for once without surprise as she accepted that was just something Severus had been doing behind her back for years now.