At breakfast the next morning, Fawn received a note to meet Dumbledore again in his office. This was probably for the best due to the fact that dozens of foreign faces surrounded her yet she somehow could not shake the feeling of deja vu.
Plus it didn't help that she could barely hear anything over 'Black,' 'Potter,' 'Pettigrew,' 'Lupin,' 'Moony,' 'Wormtail,' 'Prongs,'and 'Padfoot,' being shouted all morning. Each name sounded familiar and brought different rushes of nostalgia, grief and anger.
The latter for Pettigrew.
"You wished to see me Professor?" Fawn asked as she entered the dimly lit office once again. This time though, they were not alone; two elderly adults were standing there looking at her with warm yet perplexed expressions. They too seemed familiar, like people out of a well told storybook, yet she could not place a finger on why.
"Yes. Miss Briggs, this is Mrs. and Mr. Potter."
There it was. That's why they seemed familiar. Harry had told her, Hermione and Ron the story of what, or rather who, he saw in The Mirror of Erised. These people, down to the very last curly lock of Euphemia Potter's hair, were Harry Potter's grandparents.
"Hello dear," Euphemia greeted her kindly, "We've heard a bit of your predicament and are so pleased to meet you and take you in while you are here."
It appeared the woman knew more of Fawn's 'predicament' than Fawn herself knew. However based on Dumbledore's treatment of Harry this past year, she doubted she'd get any answers from the 'wise' man.
"Oh well thank you," Fawn said awkwardly, glancing at Dumbledore to see if possibly he'd explain further. He did not.
"Well I suppose you should go with the Potter's now and get settled."
And that was that. Within a moment Fawn found herself in the Potter Manor, with still none of her questions about how she'd possibly traveled to the past without a time-turner answered.
Euphemia and Fleamont—Mia and Monty, as they told Fawn to call them—led her to one of many of their spare rooms and told her to make herself at home. They promised to go out and buy her clothing and other essentials very soon which would be good considering she hadn't the foresight to bring her life's possessions with her to save Sirius Black. It was foolish of her truly.
Fawn admired the room around her: the bed was a queen with a red and gold comforter along with a bajillion pillows taking up half of its space, there was a connected bathroom that she had all to herself and an oak dresser that could hold three times her typical wardrobe. Sunlight shone in from a large bay window that took up nearly all of the right wall, that would be perfect for reading—Not that she did much, it was just an observation.
The thing that perhaps was the most peculiar about the room, was that the walls were rounded, in the shape of an oval, instead of straight and rectangular. That and the fact that the chandelier played Beethoven.
After several hours Mia and Monty brought their son, James Potter, home.
Fawn truly did not know what to expect. She knew that many people thought highly of him. That he viewed it as the highest dishonor to mistrust friends and was fiercely loyal. She also knew, based off of one of Harry's failed Occlumency lessons, that he could also be a cruel and vindictive bully if crossed by the wrong person.
Whether James Potter would view her as a dear friend and become a sort of surrogate brother to her, or if he'd see her as a threat to his perfect, only child life, she did not know. And quite frankly, she was apprehensive about finding out.
"Home sweet home!" A voice that was undeniably the Potter boy's rang out throughout the manor.
"Ah it's good to be back," he exclaimed again and his body thumped against what Fawn assumed was a sofa.
A few moments of murmuring between the Potter trio, James' voice rose up again.
"Okay so where is she?"
Fawn decided now was the best time to make her appearance. "I'm right here," she said awkwardly, coming out from behind the wall that she had definitely not been spying from.
James jumped up and strutted over to her, his gaze traveling over her as if to test if she met his standards of acceptable company or not.
"Your name's Fawn?"
Fawn just nodded, being too shocked at the realization that, 'Harry, you look just like your father,' had in fact not been an exaggeration. Honestly, she was bloody looking her best friend in the face again.
"Brilliant, I think we'll get along then! I love does, stags and the like. Deer happen to be my favorite animals."
Fawn had to keep herself from snorting. Knowing that he was an animagus and that Lily Evans, his future wife's patronus was a doe, was just too funny.
"Well I sure hope so, considering I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future."
James grinned that annoying cocky Potter grin. "Wicked!"
*****
"James I swear to Merlin if you leave the toilet seat up one more time I'll hex your balls off!"
Needless to say Fawn and James were getting on great.
It had been two weeks and the pair were already bickering like siblings. James loved it of course, he had always wanted his own sibling. Fawn however was not so happy with this arrangement. It was like dealing with Ron and Harry's crap all over again. Something she had momentarily thought she'd escaped.
Shame on her really, like father, like son.
"You wouldn't dare!" James shouted back.
"Watch me bit—"
"KIDS!"
The bickering was ended by the saint of a mother, Euphemia Potter. How she managed to put up with the two sixteen year olds and not pull all her hair out was truly a mystery.
"Sorry!" Both kids called from two of the upstairs rooms. Fleamont just laughed.
"Don't encourage them Dear," Mia said with a sigh as she settled in with her breakfast tea.
Fleamont looked up from the Daily Prophet, a small smile tugging at his lips. "Oh come on Mia, they're just being kids. My brother and I used to bicker like that all the time."
Mia just hummed. She had definitely gotten quite accustomed to Fleamont and Charlus' banter over the decades that the couple had been together.
"I seem to recall that you still do."
"Do not!" Monty scoffed.
Euphemia simply rolled her eyes. They'd planned for one kid and yet she was raising three, one of which was nearing seventy.
That night in the middle of dinner, someone came flying out of their Floo. Fawn jumped at the noise, but the Potter's seemed unaffected.
"Will you go check on that dear?" Mia asked her son, who promptly took action.
After a few minutes of faded conversation, James returned with a worn out, raven-haired boy.
"Hey Monty, hey Mia, mind if I stay here a while?" the boy asked, a sheepish smile painted on his bleeding face.
Mia shot over to him immediately. "Of course dear!" she said, bringing him into a hug. When she pulled away though, she examined his face closely. "What on earth did they do to you?"
Sirius just shrugged, "You know, the usual."
"This should not be the usual," Mia huffed angrily as she began muttering healing spells and dabbing Sirius' face with a wet cloth.
"James, please find Sirius some clothes and start a warm bath," she commanded, her mother mode kicking in.
"Oh, and tidy up his room alright," she called as an afterthought as James began ascending up the stairs.
"Sure thing Mum."
Fawn didn't know how to act. This boy was the man she had nearly sacrificed her life for not even two weeks ago. Now here he was, sixteen years old, curly hair plastered with sweat, eyes bloodshot, and face bloody. This was not the Sirius Black she had grown to know.
So, she stood there awkwardly as Mia healed him and murmured sweet words and Monty tried to strike up a conversation about Quidditch to distract Sirius from what had clearly been a traumatic event.
Eventually she decided it was best to go and see if James needed any help. She found him, sitting on a spare room bed, staring blankly at the beige colored wall.
"James, are you alright?"
Blinking rapidly, James looked up to see the girl that had quickly become a sister. "Uh yeah fine, just worried about Sirius is all."
Fawn took a seat beside him. "Does this happen a lot?"
"Not like this. He'll usually run away at least once during the summer but it's never gotten this bad. I don't know, I think this is it."
Fawn furrowed her brow in confusion. "It?" she asked, "What does that mean?"
James sighed and ran his hands over his face and through his hair in tired frustration. "He won't be going back this time. He-this time he means it. He's been talking about it a lot, getting disowned, running away. I just-I never really thought he'd go through with it. I'm not saying he's a coward, cause he isn't, it's just that his parents are beyond terrifying. Leaving them is practically a set up for suicide. His home life is bad, really bad, but the repercussions of him leaving..." Unable to finish that thought, James broke off, his gaze returning to the dried drip of paint on the wall.
Fawn rested a hand on his forearm. "I'm sure it will all work out how it's supposed to."
She knew that those words meant nothing, that it was all for a false sense of comfort. She knew that none of this worked out ideally, that neither of these boys got the fates they deserved. But what was she supposed to say?
'Oh yeah don't worry you'll be dead in five years anyway and will be leaving behind an orphaned son, so in the grand scheme of things Sirius' disownment is quite minuscule.'
No. That was definitely not the right way to go. Besides, Hermione had made it quite clear that changing the events of the past was beyond dangerous.
Fawn, as she sat on the bed attempting to comfort her best friend's dead father, realized she'd have to experience the first war and all that came with it first hand. And there was nothing she could do about it.