It wasn’t that Lily didn’t like Dorcas Meadowes.

‘You cannot wear that,’ Sirius’ mother said, not for the first time.

Dawn had dragged its delicate fingers across his face before he rose.

Alecto Carrow was taller than her, more solidly built, so she bounced on impact.

...so they hid in the back of the library.

Storm-clouds rolled over another above, toiling for dominance like the Wild Hunt itself hounded them.

‘Hogsmeade countdown commencing,’ Dory said in a needlessly deep voice as she sat down with Lily at breakfast. ‘Five days.’

Sirius’s day at Hogsmeade hadn’t been great.

The first time he woke it was to surge from dark into light.

He rose from the bed, straightening his robes that had become so rumpled in the diversion.

It was like the Stun came at her in slow-motion, so easy was it to summon not even a full Shield against it, just enough of a protective spark from her wand to deflect the energy off to the side.

Shadows of Slytherin common room wrapped themselves around him like a blanket.

Breath burned in his lungs like the news, enough to choke and smother him, enough to set him ablaze from the inside.

Frozen wind whipped at Lily’s hair the moment she descended the Knight Bus onto the quiet London street, plunged into a winter’s night this Christmas Eve.

Silver erupted across the nave, a white, translucent shape of four legs that thundered into the Dementor and sent both it and the shadows billowing back.

Lily was out of her seat the moment the first Transfigurations lesson of the year was over, leaving behind a bewildered Dory who hadn’t packed her bag enough to follow or catch up.