All in the Family

Chapter 2: The Boy Who Lived

Lily stooped down, and picked the book up slowly, gazing hard at the year before slowly looking around at the others. Then she marched back down to the dungeons.

"Evans, what are you doing!" James protested as he followed her. "We should stay together, we have no clue what's going on-"

"As if he's ever needed a reason to be around her," Peter muttered to Remus as the whole group followed, Sirius and Regulus trialing at the back reluctantly.

They entered to find Lily already fast at work, with James still talking at her more than anything and Peter and Remus hovering uneasily behind him and still looking anxiously around like they were expecting an attack. Alice and Frank were shifting anxiously in place just as uneasily behind Lily with absolutely no clue how they'd gotten involved in this but deeply regretting whatever this was.

Sirius just perched on a stool as far from everyone as he could while Regulus slumped against the wall even further away, feeling even more out of place than the couple.

Lily ignored them all, running back to the cauldron, and then she dropped the book back in it, and turned to the student supply cupboards and began pulling ingredients out.

"Lily, what are you doing?" Alice decided to try since Potter was being so thoroughly ignored.

"Reversing this," she said flatly.

"You're insane," Frank pleasantly informed her, though his claim was backed up by Pettigrew.

"He's right, we have no clue what got us here. You're good Evans, but even you're not good enough to create the counter potion for something that more than likely was just invented!"

"Well I'm certainly going to bloody try rather than standing around here doing nothing," she hissed as she began cutting up some roots.

James snatched the book out of the cauldron before she could dump anything on it, and huffed, "well fine, you do whatever you like then. I'm going to see what all of this is about," and he began the iconic first line of the series.

"The book's called Harry Potter, and it starts with something as lame as Muggles," James pouted as he again checked the front cover.

"You think anything not about you is lame," Remus rolled his eyes at how this was starting.

"What are you doing anyways?" Alice decided to ignore the boys commentary on how boring this muggle life sounded in favor of asking Evans, who seemed the only one keen on getting them out of this.

"Retro Diebus," she answered without looking up from the spile she was carefully inserting into a fruit Alice couldn't identify. Then again, she'd never been as good at Potions, or Herbology for that matter, and would be quite glad to drop both classes if not for her Auror training. It was a good thing she'd found Frank to tutor her, and well...

"I have no clue what that means," she confessed aloud before she could get lost in thought.

"It's going to reverse what Lupin did," she said with utter confidence.

"Are you still blaming this on me?" Lupin couldn't help but yip in protest. "It's not my fault you didn't banish your potion like everyone always does. You're as conceded as you accuse us of being, always keeping samples of your own work to try and improve upon them."

Lily flashed him a look that lesser men would have shrank away from, but James was still ignoring them all and continuing, as well as he really didn't want to see this fight progress. Lily's work thankfully kept her attention as she began stirring ingredients in her very precise method and so didn't take the opportunity to shoot back at Lupin.