#date | 06.25.1984

[ted-tonks]

Date: June 25th, 1984, approx. 3:30 am  Location: The Prewett Estate, Infirmary @asphodelroot

Things had been mostly quiet in the infirmary during Ted’s shift. With most of the patients gone and the ones left moving between sleep and awake, the biggest hurdle was making sure Rosier didn’t drop dead from exhaustion and that Snape took a break. So far, both things seemed to be going successfully as Rosier hadn’t really left Selwyn’s side much except to generally check on Lily every now and again - and Severus, at the current moment, was no where to be found at all.

The next time Lily woke up, Ted moved quickly to her bedside before Rosier could. Ted thought that Evan might actually be sleeping with his head on Theodosia’s cot - or, at least, he was hoping. Ted stood by Lily’s bedside, looking down at her, and half-closed the curtains around them so Evan didn’t suddenly pop up and race over here.

Ted gave Lily a soft smile in greeting and then raised his wand. “I have orders,” he said gently, holding out a vial of potion. “Drink.” A soft command. He sat in the chair next to her bed. “And then I’m supposed to ask you some questions. Your name, birthdate, and what you remember.” 

[dirkcresswcll]

Date: June 25th, 1984, approx. 3:00 am Location: Nicky and Dirk’s flat @edgeofnicky​

They’d only been home for about half an hour and already Dirk had pulled out parchment and quills to work on his plans. Moody and Hestia had pulled himself aside to say they’d send a time in the morning for their meeting and he wanted to be ready. But Nicky wanted to talk. That wasn’t surprising - usually she did - but Dirk had work to do.

Then again... he sort of did want to tell her about Emmeline’s kiss. If only to get it off his mind enough to be able to fully focus on his plans. He didn’t know the next moves. She’d kissed him - did that mean it was his turn to ask her out? Nicky had spent the last fifteen minutes telling him she wanted to have a party for some of the younger crowd in the Order. Maybe that was where Dirk could hang out with Emmeline next? She had said she wanted to stand on the sidelines with him, after all.

“You think we have enough space?” he asked Nicky, proof he’d been listening this whole time despite his fingers deftly drawing up plans at the same time. He tapped his wand to the parchment and the lines he’d drawn sprang to life, rearranging themselves into perfect straight lines and circles.  He wrote headquarters on one circle and field agent on the other. “When do you wanna do this? Are you sure? We’ve never thrown a party like that before. Remember what happened to Dearborn’s place at the last one?”

[perniciouspotter]

asphodelroot​:​

Holding Emmeline’s hand felt right; hearing the loving awe in her voice as she spoke about James felt even better. Basking in that, she didn’t even mind so much when Emmeline let go of her hand. Falling the rest of the way back to the pillows, she even thought she might be ready to go back to sleep with that warm contentment curled against her chest.

But then Emmeline’s greeting someone and Lily can sense her moving away even before she can wrap her mind around the words Be right back. It doesn’t sound worried or urgent, so Lily only hums and tries to shift into a more comfortable position despite not really feeling uncomfortable, or much of anything at all. James’s voice, even in a hush, cuts through the fog. She’s not sure if it’s her lungs protesting her sudden inhale or something else that makes her chest feel tight and heavy, but it weighs on her, pinning her in place. For a moment, something like panic rises in her throat, fear, dread, and guilt clawing at her in a war with yearning she had been avoiding for so long that it’s suffocating—

And then he’s there. And he’s smiling at her as he jokes, and Lily melts. She still feels as small as he sounds, but how could she not relax when he looks at her like that, all warm eyes and soft concern, like he still cares. For a moment, she can forget how messed up everything was, how wrong the world had gone (or perhaps how wrong it had always been) and think, if only for a moment, that things were right and good again.

It was a short moment.

Still, she smiles back at him because when James Potter smiles at you like that, you had to smile back. “I’ll leave off the bandages next time,” she joked back lamely. The pause that followed felt loaded, and Lily couldn’t let it linger long. “Emmeline said you were here earlier, but you had to leave for the debrief,” she blurted out, not sure where she was going with the statement. “You… you didn’t have to come back.” And she was fishing, and hated that she was fishing, but she’d missed him and he was here and she’d been blown up, she was allowed to be a bit messy, wasn’t she?

It took her a moment - similar emotions running through her features in the same way they’d run through him - but she got there. She smiled a matching one to him and it was so fucking beautiful that James was fairly certain it could take any person’s breath away. When Lily Evans smiled like that, you couldn’t look away. “They really bring out the color in your eyes,” he joked again with that grin of his. The grin that promptly dropped from his face at her next statement.

“’Course I’m gonna come back,” he replied easily before moving onto the harder stuff. “Emme’s too nice to me,” he continued heavily and practically fell into the chair next to her bed. He grabbed her hand, brought it up to his lips with a heaviness of the weight on his shoulders. He was sinking - he could feel himself drowning, but it was like he’d forgotten how to swim. “The truth is that I got kicked from the infirmary,” he admitted and his voice was thick with embarrassment and guilt and everything he’d had a chance to feel since it happened.

“I got back and heard you’d been hurt and then I came here and saw you...” He tried explaining, but it all sounded stupid to his ears with hours between that adrenaline-filled moment and now. “...and I sorta got into it with Sna - with Severus.” He dropped his head to his arms resting on the bed, leaning forward, still holding her hand in both of his. The position made his voice mumbled, but he couldn’t stand to look at her. 

“’M sorry, Lily,” he said to the ground. “I know I keep fucking up and it’s like I can’t do anything to stop it. I’m just... just so mad all the time. I was never like this before. I’m really sorry. I’ve been a shit to you.”

[ted-tonks]

Date: June 25th, 1984, around 3 pm Location: The Ministry of Magic, Auror Department @adarkershadeofalice​

Ted hadn’t gotten any sleep between the nightshift at the infirmary and heading to work that morning, but he’d suspected neither had the witch he’d made his way up the lift towards the Auror Department to see. Admittedly, the bags around his eyes were just as much about having this conversation as it was about being tired, but Ted had never been one to stray away from hard discussions in his life.

Most of the Aurors knew him by now. Their departments had to work close together often and Ted’s friends, aside from his wife, all worked on this level of the Ministry. He had lunch here often, with Alastor or Frank or Alice. It made it so he was able to mostly blend in, sending a few nods in greeting, as he moved towards Alice’s desk.

He tapped on it when he got there, standing silently and tall as she looked up at him. He gave her a soft smile to tell her he had not intentional harm in being here, but his gaze was heavy and she would know that there was more to this appearance than just a simple visit. “Your break is coming up, isn’t it?” Ted said it like a question, but it was more a suggestion. “It’s no longer raining outside.”  He wanted her to talk a walk with him - away from these prying ears and eyes.

[ted-tonks]

Date: June 25th, 1984, around 11 pm Location: Tonks’ home @drxmedatonks​

They’d made up - twice. Ted had known they would. He wasn’t worried for it. They fell in and out of arguments as easily as falling in love had been (though, that, at least they’d never fallen out of). Now, in their bed much too late at night with Andromeda’s hair tickling his arm - their daughter long asleep a few rooms down - Ted grew weary. He’d been up for over twenty-four hours straight (stretching himself too thin) and he struggled keeping his eyes open as he looked at her with his head on the pillow.

But he couldn’t sleep yet. There was too much to say and, for a man who thought words held weight and usually kept them close to the chest for that reason, that meant something. 

Still, he told Andromeda most things and she did the same in return. And the conversation he’d overheard much too early this morning and then the later discussion it spurred with their mutual friend was too much to hold onto, even for one more day. “The infirmary was... interesting,” he began, his voice low with weariness. He ran his fingers through her hair. He hadn’t said he was sorry, but he hadn’t needed to because he’d shown her. Which meant the topic of their argument - said infirmary - would’ve now been considered a safe one to breach.

[ted-tonks]

Date: June 25th, 1984, 2:10 am Location: The Prewett Estate, Corridor outside the meeting room @drxmedatonks​

Ted stood in front of his wife, one hand holding hers lazily between them. He hadn’t asked her opinion on volunteering to be here all night, but he didn’t think he needed to. She hadn’t asked his for coming into this organization in the first place, after all. And one of those seemed like a bigger deal than the other, though he was fairly certain Andromeda would not feel the same. 

Him being gone tonight meant she wouldn’t see him until late in the evening - he would briefly come home to shower and change before heading to work early and staying late. They would be doing damage control nearly all day and it was doubtful he’d even be at the Ministry. While he doubted Andromeda was actually mad at him over this, his wife’s moods could sometimes be unpredictable, especially when she was in tired and in pain - both of which she was now.

Ted said nothing, just raised his brows in a silent speak your piece. She would get it out. He would kiss her, ask her to give one to Dora for him, and then he would go do his night shift. He was concerned about Lily, which was why he’d volunteered himself in the first place, but he also felt a pang of something towards Theodosia. He might not trust either her or Evan much, but he could recognize love when he saw it and he pitied the man for having to be the one who had intercepted his own partner.

[dirkcresswcll]

Date: June 25th, 1984, 10:30 am Location: Prewett Estate, Strategy Room @madeyed-andmoody & @helloxhestia

Dirk had gone home with Nicky after the debriefing and, after listening to her chatter about excitedly for them to plan a house party of all things, he’d gotten to work. The nap he’d taken after his shower before the meeting had proved successful because, once he’d heard about things like magical Dark Marks, he couldn’t stop thinking. 

Now, he had pieces of parchment in a neat line in front of him as he sipped (okay, chugged a bit) coffee that he’d opted for instead of tea. Moody and Hestia had sent an owl early that morning to schedule his meeting that he’d requested and he wanted to be prepared. 

Each parchment had plans that he’d frantically stayed up all night designing. His eyes were red-rimmed and he was still coughing every now and again from the intense smoke inhalation, though Emmeline’s potions and healing had done wonders for that. The burn on his arm was very nearly gone underneath the neat wrapping he’d been instructed to wear until the next day.

When Alastor walked in first, Dirk perked up, grinning nervously with a bit of tremble in his fingers. “Hello, Sir!” he greeted and it was over-excited. He paused, his neck turning red from embarrassment. He faltered. “I, uh, I have everything ready for when - when Hestia gets here.”

[ted-tonks]

adarkershadeofalice​:

Alice had known Ted more than long enough to know that if somebody was going to fill the space of their exit from the Ministry with innocuous chatter, that somebody was going to have to be her. That was all right; Alice had yet to run out of things to say, especially to her friends. (For fuck’s sake, she’d spent half her time at Hogwarts chattering away to twatsticks like Lucius fucking Malfoy; she could handle a little innocuous gabbing with someone she actually liked!) She fell into an easy rythym as they walked, talking to Ted — mostly griping to him, if she was being honest, although something about talking to Ted always made even the most annoying parts of a day feel lighter — up through the atrium and out onto the street.

It was Ted who finally curtailed the chatter, cutting across her comment about Proudfoot’s habit of oversteeping their tea with customary frankness. (Some people might have called interrupting her mid-sentence rude, but not Alice; that sentence didn’t matter, and what Ted had brought her here to talk about did.) She clipped the words off with a sharp nod, her gaze sharpening on his face as the empty nonsense of her words dissipated in favor of the point to this meeting.

Alice flopped onto a bench beside him and clasped her hands between her knees, ready to listen. She almost immediately regretted the pose, because she couldn’t now easily lean back with deliberate casualness without looking like she was trying to lean back with deliberate casualness. She settled for a terse smile and the consolation that at least she didn’t need to worry about absently fidgeting with her fingers already laced together like this.

“Hadn’t thought about it,” Alice admitted, which was true — at the time, and also in the aftermath, there hadn’t been any room in her head for thinking about anything but Theo — although she certainly was now. The smile she gave him now was no wider, but there was a wryness to the expression that at least indicated it was genuine rather than forced. “Pretty sure it wouldn’t have stopped me from saying any of it even if I had, though,” she added, and that statement was as genuine as the thin smile that accompanied it. Alice had never been the sort of shrinking violet who hesitated to speak her mind out of concern for her audience. Still, it was always easier to say things like that in the heat of the moment than in the calm, collected light of day afterwards.

A beat passed and she found her eyes wandering away from Ted to the distant ribbon of gray-blue sky visible over the roof of the adjacent buildings. “So…what part of it brings us here today?”

She hadn’t thought at all about it - which Ted thought surprising. Not because Alice generally overthought her words (typically the opposite, digging her heels in, assuming she was usually right), but because she’d let out secrets that he doubted she’d meant for him, specifically, to learn.

In true Alice fashion, however, she stated it wouldn’t have changed anything she did. He gave a soft Mmm of acknowledgement, nodding his head lightly. He doubted she would regret it - just had suspected she’d think about it after. He wondered if she even knew what he was talking about. Or if she even realized what she let slip.

Because he certainly wasn’t talking about what she’d said to Theodosia Selwyn. Honestly, Ted had to agree with most of what Alice had said then. Not, perhaps, her thinking the pregnancy was a lie - but the rest of it. The stuff Selwyn hadn’t told the Order. There was a reason Ted was mistrustful of both her and her boyfriend, Rosier. It wasn’t that he thought Theo was still working for Voldemort - just that she hadn’t been fully honest with them and, clearly, she hadn’t.

Alice didn’t hedge around the complicated conversation Ted had begun - just pushed forward like she did with everything in her life. “It’s about the choice you made,” Ted replied evenly, looking her in the eye - also not shying away. “For the family you might’ve had.” He thought his words over, was careful with them. Of course, she and Frank were a family on their own, but it was a different family than the one she’d decided not to have. 

“Now let me be clear - I don’t judge you for that choice, even if it had been different than the one Andromeda and I made. It’s just - “ He faltered. This was rare for him and he took a breath before continuing quickly, not enjoying it. “ - you made it sound as though this hadn’t been discussed with Frank and I trust you can see how this has put me in a difficult position. I’m not keen on the idea of keeping secrets for a friend from a friend.”

[ted-tonks]

drxmedatonks​:

The blessing and curse of being together for so many years was knowing how most scenes ended. Andromeda could see every outcome in her head and she assessed them during the meeting, staring pointedly at the wall ever since he’d volunteered to take one of the infirmary shifts. In one scenario, she didn’t say anything, they kissed goodbye, and she laid in bed awake all night thinking about it. In the other scenario, she said what she thought, and then she laid in bed awake all night thinking about it. 

It was late. Her elbow was aching, shooting a dull pain up to her shoulder, her eyelids weighed two tons. Her motives for throwing a tantrum over this were entirely selfish, she wanted her husband in bed with her tonight. A peaceful few hours of sleep, before they had to get up for work, that had been the dream he robbed her of. She stood in front of him with her jaw set, one arm crossed over her middle – she’d have both crossed over her chest if it wasn’t for Evan telling her to keep the hurt elbow straight when possible. 

“You’re stretching yourself too thin.” There was always a certainty in her words, specially when she was looking for an argument. It was never I think that, never Perhaps this or that, it was always: this is the truth from my mouth and you can’t take it from me. It might’ve been the very root of a lot of their fights, but she continued to do it deliberately. She was right about most things, as far as she was concerned. Ted wasn’t the only one in this marriage with the I told you so’s. “It’s two in the morning, you have work tomorrow, Ted. There are a handful of idiots here who don’t even have jobs, who could’ve taken this spot.”

.

Andromeda’s expression was twisted with pain and Ted recognized it - wanted to reach out, brush his fingers against her bandage and take care of her. But she’s signed them up for this and now, getting involved meant taking care of her. She’d made that decision for them in the same way she said he was stretching himself too thin: with certainty.

He said nothing, waiting for her to continue, because Andy always had something to follow up the beginning of her words. She explained just why she felt the way she felt and Ted frowned, the crease between his brows deepening, but still said nothing.

She wasn’t wrong about her facts. There were others - Ted refused to call them idiots, unlike her, he thought no one in the Order was an idiot, some just were smart individuals who didn’t deserve his trust - but he’d stepped forward anyway. He waited until she had completely said her piece and then waited some more. Waited until it looked like she was about to explode before he said, quietly, even, “I suspected you would’ve been happy.” He raised his brows imperceptibly. “I’m involving myself.”