LANDSLIDE, james potter [2]

Chapter Eighteen

It was dark, though Lyra's hair was a bit too blonde to fade into the darkness. It was one of the only things she disliked about her hair being so light, it made it hard to sneak around. She did sneak around surprisingly a lot. 

She wasn't even sure why she was sneaking around, though. If it had been up to her, she'd shut herself inside Malfoy Manor, keeping herself and her son safe from whatever her husband was running around and doing. She didn't ask and he didn't tell. It was like they had quickly gone back to the way things were around fifteen years ago. 

The one thing that felt more like she had traveled twenty years back was who she was meeting. It felt like she was a fifteen-year-old newly minted prefect again, nervous about how her patrols with her partner would go.  "Hello, Remus. Fancy seeing you here."

Remus smiled at her, looking quite tired as he approached the dark corner she had been in. The grey streaks in his hair were surprisingly prominent in the darkness, but his scars were harder to see. It was a strange mix of him looking both younger and older. "Not much of a coincidence, is it?"

"It never is when you send someone a secret note asking them to meet you," she smiled cheekily, before pursing her lips tightly. "What do you want? You know I love you and talking to you but... it's not really the best time."

"On the contrary, I'd say it's the perfect time," he retorted, and she already knew that this was a conversation she wouldn't want to have. At least, one she wasn't ready to have. "If we don't do this now, then I don't think we ever will."

"Do what?" she asked. Just because she had a feeling it had to do with the impending war, didn't mean she knew exactly what he wanted from her. She just hoped to stay out of it, be a neutral party, like she's always been. 

"You know what."

She raised an eyebrow at him, especially when he seemed so certain that she did. It had be something obvious she just didn't think of. "I clearly don't, so why don't you you save us both the pain of me trying to figure it out and just tell me."

"The Order of the Phoenix," he confirmed the thoughts that were in the back of her mind. She knew the name well, a bit better than she wanted to. "We're back in action, now that Voldemort's back."

Lyra quickly winced at the mention of the man that she had always called the Dark Lord, or maybe You Know Who or He Who Must Not Be Named at some rare occasions. "Don't say that name."

The werewolf didn't seem fazed by her fear of the name. It made sense to him, as she had to spend more time around the man than anybody in the Order during the last war, all because of who her husband was. "Why? Because you're scared?"

"Yes, because I'm scared," the blonde hissed, glancing around to double check that there was nobody listening to them. She couldn't afford anyone finding out she was there. "You remember how life was during the first war, didn't you? What we lost?"

"I can't forget," Remus said, his voice low. Behind his eyes, she could now see the way the war had haunted him, the same way it had for all those around their age. "We can't let that happen again."

"But it will," she sighed, though she knew she sounded too pessimistic in comparison to him. "We can't stop it. He's too strong, too powerful. Only now, he's much angrier. All we can do is try to stay out of his way as much as possible."

He frowned at her in exasperation. He knew she had never liked confrontation or fighting, but but this was something bigger than all of them. "You know we can't do that. Someone needs to fight him."

"Why does it have to be us?" Lyra whined, almost feeling annoyed at herself. She wished she was the kind of woman that would gladly become a hero, but she had already lived through a war and lost so much because of it. She didn't want to do the same again. "We've been fighting for years already."