Ask box: Open, but anon is permanently off.
The Last Enemy series on AO3:
Snippets and Spoilers on tumblr:
TLE1
Dear Lily,
Well, Homer isn’t back yet, which I can only assume means he’s been seduced by those majestic American mountains one hears so much about. Or perhaps he’s decided he’s had enough of dreary old England and has gone off to start his new life as a cowboy. I assume that’s the sort of thing most Americans do, though I admit I have only a cursory knowledge on this front, having never been to the States myself. My dad did once, though. Spent a week on a Muggle dude ranch out in Wyoming. Or was it Wisconsin? I can’t remember, somewhere terribly American sounding where they have a lot of cows. Anyway, it was a great laugh, according to him, so maybe Homer’s onto something.
If he doesn’t turn up soon, I’ll send this letter via Virgil, my parents’ rather doddering old owl. I’m not strictly speaking supposed to use him for cross-country journeys, but London isn’t all too far, after all, and though it’s only been a few days, I am anxious to hear how you are settling into life with that charming sister of yours. Do let me know.
The quill that had been scrawling this cheerful missive paused, and James Potter scrubbed a hand over his face, frowning intently. Nearly a full minute passed before the ink-dipped nib of his quill returned to the parchment.
The Last Enemy: Dark Marks Soundtrack
Hello my loves! With TLE2 coming to a close, I thought I'd share the full TLE2 soundtrack. You can listen to it here, or I've included the track list below for those who don't use Spotify.
As before, this is a total mishmash of period appropriate and anachronistic music. The genres are all over the place. Some songs directly correlate to the plot, some songs are mentioned in the story, some are pure vibes. It's pretty long...but so is TLE2. 😌
Enjoy!!!
Track list under the cut:
The entrance to Hell is hidden at the base of a large willow tree, a human-sized hollow tangled in its roots, ready to swallow you whole.
Down, down, down into the earth.
You find a low tunnel, as stifling as it is starless, an endless, Stygian squeeze to the core of the earth.
Down, down.
It is hot here, like the blaze of black pavement, like the sear of skin under an angry sun. But through the sweat, you press on, as fast as you can, chasing an urgency you cannot name.
This treacherous earth clenches its fist around you, tighter and tighter, a noose around a neck — until you are forced to crawl on all fours. Tighter and tighter and tighter — you slither on your belly like a snake, squeezing against the tangle of tree roots that strangle your path, until at last, at last, at last you see it: A way out.
A way in?
You press your palms against the trapdoor. Drip of sweat. Decay of destiny. You push…
And the world is engulfed in flame.
“RUN!”
“But what am I going to do without you all summer? Who am I going to talk to?”
Sirius gazed somberly at his companion, unsure how, and frankly, unable to respond to this question.
“I do recognize this is a rather absurd question to ask a dog,” said Lily. “Don’t think the absolutely pathetic nature of this arrangement has been lost on me.” She let out a snort of laughter and sat down upon the fallen bole of a felled tree. Its tangled roots sat exposed above the earth; a spiral of fungi clung to its bark, a slow devouring.
“Listen to me,” she said, with a derisive eye roll. “‘Arrangement.’ Ha. Which reminds me….” She reached into her bag and withdrew a small parcel. “Turkey today,” she announced, unwrapping the parcel to reveal, predictably, a sandwich. Sirius — or rather, Snuffles — padded over and accepted the offering.
Lily smiled. “And yet…even though you are a dog who has no idea what I’m saying and who I bribe into companionship via turkey sandwiches…you’re still far and away a better conversationalist than Petunia’s going to be this summer. I’m going to go mad, I know I am.”
The fog hung low upon the dewy lawn as Remus followed the school matron across the grounds, away from the gentle sway of the Whomping Willow, away from yet another full moon. The last of the school year. It had just been him and Sirius again this moon, much to James’s irritation.
“I can sneak out after Poppy falls asleep,” James had insisted from his hospital bed the evening before. “She’ll be none the wiser.”
“It’s not a good idea,” Remus had countered. “What if she wakes up and you’re gone?”
“I’ll say I fancied a walk!”
“You need to rest.”
“I’ve had nothing but rest. I am overflowing with rest, I’ve reached my rest tolerance, I am all rested out. Besides, it’s the last full moon of the year—”
“He said no, James.” It had been Sirius who’d put his foot down, surprising them all. Perhaps he knew he was the only one who could. “There will be more full moons. I’m sorry, mate, but you have to sit this one out.”
“Fine,” was James sullen reply. “I’ll just stay here and rest.”
“You have to listen to me —”
“Miss, the mediwizards are right this way—”
“No — I’m fine. I don’t need a mediwizard, I need someone to listen to me!”
Lily pushed frantically through the chaos of the ruined street, trying to find some authority figure who wasn’t completely useless. The air was acrid with smoke — plumes of it choked the village as columns of Fiendfyre still raged on — and though the dueling had ceased and the Death Eaters had vanished, still all was a bustle of frantic, terrified activity as the Ministry officials who had apparated in at last to quell the fighting and flames now attempted to regain a modicum of control over the situation. Wounded students and civilians were herded in a daze towards white tents for medical treatment. Friends separated by the fray reunited with tears and shouts.
Lily didn’t know where any of her friends were. She was desperate to find them — but first, she needed to get help, and no one would listen to her.
Whatever adrenaline or delusion had kept her moving, kept her feet dancing just out of the way of hexes and flames, kept her mind sharp amidst the chaos — it had faded now, and she felt as though waves of weariness had crashed upon her as she stumbled bewildered through the wreckage.
James ran. He ran faster than he’d ever run in his whole life. He hurtled out the door of the apothecary, slamming it shut with his wand as he went, lest the others try to follow him into the fray. He weaved and dodged through spell and smoke, flinging up a shield charm just as a masked man raised his wand — the curse hit the invisible barrier in a cascade of sparks. James paid it no mind. Kept going. Distantly, he was aware of someone shouting at him through all the chaos, recognized adult figures that weren’t masked or dressed in black — he ignored them all. Only one thought filled his brain, drowning out everything else amidst this swirling hurricane — only one word, one idea, one purpose commanded his mind’s eye: Lily.
He was nearly to the bookshop, just a few more paces. The fire was growing — roaring, spitting, spreading; it circled the shop like a snake about to squeeze its prey. If he didn’t make it through, the shop would be cut off — and Lily trapped inside.
A burst of heat blossomed behind him; he pushed harder, ran faster.
Skid of heel against cobblestone; air hot with smoke and ash. He slipped through the circle of fire just as it closed upon itself, a flaming ouroboros. James paused for half a second to catch his breath, sweat pearling on his brow in the heat of the blaze. Then the fiery snake flicked its tail, and a wall of flame crashed into the shop.
Peter stared.
High above him, bright gleaming emerald stars glittered against a smoke-stained sky. They formed the shape of a skull — gaping eye sockets as dark and empty as those of Professor Carter-Myles’ several feet away. A serpent slithered through the skull’s teeth…Peter could almost hear its hiss, echoing in his own skull, slinking through his thoughts, unfurling through all the horrors that flitted about his brain. And amidst the hiss, there was a voice — his own voice — that couldn’t stop squealing: It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my fault!
But how could he have known this would happen? His little plot with the mirror had been completely innocent. He’d just wanted to impress his friends, to get back what was theirs, to show them that Peter Pettigrew wasn’t useless. And he’d gotten the mirror back, had it stowed safely in his trunk in the dormitory. He hadn’t told his friends about it yet — there hadn’t been time, he’d wanted it to be a moment of triumph — and he hadn’t wanted to tell them about the little incident with Snape. But he couldn’t have known this would happen! He thought at worst Snape might tell a teacher, or perhaps some of his Slytherin pals would show up and harass them…but this? This?
Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with him at all. Maybe it was all just a terrible coincidence.
“The Dark Mark,” said Sirius, and Peter wrenched his gaze back from the heavens. “That means—”
“I know what it means!” snapped Peter, and he hated the hysterical shriek in his voice but he couldn’t turn it down.
“We have to move.”
“I’ve been saying so!”
At first, the only thing that registered was the heavy thump of pain that echoed through the body like the aftershocks of a quake, each heartbeat a blast reverberating against this battered bag of flesh and bone.
Then, slowly, Sirius became conscious of the fact that the heartbeats were his own, the pain his own, and he began to make further inquiries into the status of his body. He discovered that he was lying on his stomach, cheek and palms pressed to the hot earth, and they ached. There was some sort of pressure atop him, keeping him down. He couldn’t move. After a heart-stuttering moment, he determined with relief that he could — though it was most unpleasant — feel his legs. They also ached, all the way down to his tiniest toenail. Even the gums of his teeth seemed to ache. His skull clanged like a ringing bell.
He tried to determine where he was, to remember how he got here, but he came up empty. Perhaps he’d been attacked by his cousins again. It felt about the same.
It occurred to him at this point that he might open his eyes. He tried it. It didn’t make much difference. He could only see straight ahead — all an endless, dusty grey — and of that he could only glimpse a sliver as there was most certainly something large and painfully heavy atop him. Like a wall. It was as though a wall had collapsed on him, pinning him to the ground.
That didn’t make any sense.
“Here we are,” said James, breezing into the bookshop as merrily as the jingling bell that announced their arrival. “Hotbed of dangerous political activity, and all that.”
He peered around cheerfully. Though he, Remus, and Peter had arrived on the early side, arms laden with signs for the protest they’d crafted in the dormitory earlier, the place was already quite full of activity. He’d been inside this tiny little shop once before, and it had been utterly empty. Today, however, it was teeming with people, all students, all milling around picking up books and chatting.
“Blimey,” said James. “I guess we successfully got the word out?”
“I’d say so,” agreed Remus. “Here, give me those signs, I’ll set them up on a table over there to hand out later.”
“Right you are.” James unburdened himself of his political paraphernalia and turned back to beam around the shop, basking in the bustle of activity as one might enjoy a really sunny day. He’d been quite grumpy on the way over, to tell the truth. They’d taken that tunnel hidden behind the mirror, not wanting to draw attention to their protest signs and Muggle clothing, and James had engaged in a good sulk most of the way about the fact that Sirius had opted to stay behind to “get to know Garrett.” It didn’t take a genius to spot that Sirius was, one might say, up to no good.
The cup of tea was hot in her hands as Lily watched the milk she’d poured unfurl in a riotous blossom. She gave it a stir, gazing intently at the swirl, the storm, the eventual settling. Eternity in a teacup.
She sat alone at the Gryffindor table. Only a few other students were freckled around the Great Hall, sleepily assembling their own breakfasts. She’d come down far earlier than was her usual habit. No one would ever accuse Lily Evans of being a morning person, but she’d woken up early today. She couldn’t sleep. The frantic week prior had flitted away like a fretful spring breeze — all their planning and plotting, whispers in the corridors, owls in the evenings — until suddenly it was Saturday.
The day of the big protest.
Probably it was some combination of nerves and exhaustion that kept her staring into the depths of her tea, and she lost track of precisely how long she’d been at this before she noticed a presence behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. It was Severus.
He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop.
At least, not at first. He’d been working on his essay on poison antidotes (trivial stuff, he couldn’t wait to get to N.E.W.T.-level, leave the rest of these third-year dunderheads behind and learn the real art of potion brewing) when he’d been distracted by a reference in the text to something call a bezoar. He was in the library, waiting for Lily to meet up with him as they often did on Friday afternoons, but she was late, as she often was, and he found himself irritated by his own shameful state of unknowing, so he’d got up to find another book that would provide an answer to this new, itching question. His studies often lead him down such circuitous paths of learning. It may not be the most efficient method, but there was a reason he far excelled his classmates in every subject.
As he stood to begin this hunt for knowledge, he noticed something that made his skin crawl: Sirius Black and James Potter were seated only a few tables away, partially obscured by one of the library’s tall shelves, so that Severus hadn’t noticed them before. All Black would have to do was tip his chair back and he’d easily spot Severus sitting behind him.
This felt like an unbearable intrusion. This was his place, the one part of the castle where they weren’t supposed to bother him. And yet, here they were. Intruding. He wondered if they’d sat there on purpose, if that was their goal, to make sure that Severus knew that nowhere in the castle was safe from their hooliganish behavior, their constant torment that had steadily escalated in the nearly three years they’d been at school.
The annoying thing about Sirius Black was that he wasn’t just good at things: He always had to be the best. This obnoxious perfection extended, it turned out, to the protective charms he’d placed on the remaining half of his two-way mirrors. This was perhaps effective in preventing Snivellus from snooping on them, but it was proving extremely irritating for Peter, who had been working for weeks and hadn’t yet cracked the spells.
At first he’d thought it wouldn’t be a big deal if he couldn’t get all the protective magic scrubbed off, but it turned out tracking spells were extremely sensitive to magic, and any deviation from the original charming messed the whole thing up. It occurred to him with a sort of heavy sinking in his gut that this meant any tinkering Snape might’ve done could derail his whole plan and put Peter firmly back at square one…but he wasn’t ready to give up yet.
The frustrating thing was that he knew if just asked his friends for help, they’d be able to fix it in a moment — but he was determined to do this on his own. To prove that he could do this on his own, to finally show them up just once…so he’d squirreled away for the evening in the dormitory while the other boys remained downstairs, spending his evening in solitude, fiddling with charm-breakers and other complex spells that made his head hurt.
After about an hour of this, Peter actually felt as though he’d made some progress. None of his revealing spells showed any traces of magical barriers…but then he was faced with a new complication: How would he know if he’d got it right, if the connection between the two mirrors was indeed fully cleared again?
He stared into the small, square mirror, his scowl reflected back to him as he thought. What harm could it do, really? Just for a moment…?
“Dreadful, dreadful thing,” said Professor Slughorn, shaking his head sadly as he spread a great glob of clotted cream upon a scone. “There’s simply no rhyme or reason to it — especially when you add those Muggle automobiles into the mix—” “I really—” interrupted Lily, because she couldn’t bear it. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Professor Slughorn had invited her to tea in his office. She sat across from him — he in a plush armchair, she on one of the grand leather chesterfields — a spindly table set up between them, topped with a tiered tray of sweets and scones, bright and colorful as baubles in a shop. A stout silver teapot glinted in a beam of afternoon sunlight that filtered through the windows. She didn’t particularly want to be here, but she understood this was the sort of invitation a student had to accept. Professor McGonagall had summoned her for the same sort of thing a few days earlier — a handful of biscuits and the obligatory check in from which Lily desperately wanted to check out.
“I really just want to focus on school right now,” she said at last. “Catch up on what I missed and everything.”
“There’s that classic British phlegm,” said Slughorn approvingly. “I’ve always known you were made of tough stuff.”
“Monty, guess who’s come home to see you!”
A low groan, a rustle of bedsheets, a squint through the darkened room. “Who…?”
“Hi, dad.”
“Who is this? Who are you?”
“Dad, it’s me. James. Your son…?”
“I don’t have a son. Ephie, who is this?”
“Oh, dear. James, darling, come on, we’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Dad—”
“James,” hissed a voice, followed by the sharp nudge of an elbow to his ribcage, and James blinked back to attention. He was seated at the grand dining table in Professor Slughorn’s office, along with about eleven other students and a few guests Slughorn had brought in, all of whom were staring at him over the towering blancmange a house-elf had just delivered.
“Er…” said James awkwardly. “Sorry, spaced out a little. What was that?”
“My dear boy,” laughed Slughorn. “What were you thinking about?”
“Er…” said James again, desperately rooting around his brain for a more suitable answer than the truth. “Quidditch.”
“That’s all he ever thinks about,” said Florence, patting his arm in an affectionate-but-long-suffering sort of way.
(OK I LIED. YOU GET ONE MORE. NOW I'M ON VACATION BYEEEE)
“HANDS IN THE AIR, NOW!”
Beneath the Invisibility Cloak, Sirius froze — but only for a second. Wand gripped in one knuckle-clenched fist, he turned rapidly from Lily — who stood wide-eyed and wandless with her hands raised to her shoulders — to the door behind her that had sprung open so suddenly. In the sparse pool of light from the gaping door, Sirius took in the form of a tall black woman in what appeared to be pajamas, her hair wrapped up in a scarf, a furious expression on her face. One hand held Lily’s disarmed wand, while the other pointed the woman’s own wand directly at Lily, whose back was to her still.
“Put your hands on your head,” directed the woman, “and turn around slowly.”
Lily began to do so, and Sirius saw his opportunity. Flinging the Cloak from his shoulders and stuffing it into his pocket in one swift motion, he sent an aggressive disarming spell towards the woman. It should’ve taken her by surprise, and it was strong enough that it would’ve knocked most wizards off their feet, but the woman reacted with preternatural reflexes, as though she had already been anticipating an attack from all sides, and launched a shield charm so powerful it knocked Sirius back against the glass window of the shop. He recovered himself and quickly pointed his wand back at the woman. “Leave her alone!”
“Put that wand down,” demanded the woman in a harsh voice.
“You first,” snarled Sirius.