Right. Pettigrew. She now recalled his name from school. Rumor was he had been friends with Black back then. Nasty business.

"Dunno, " was Quill's reply about the whereabouts of Pettigrew's finger. Now that he mentioned it, she wondered as well. Did they present it to his family in a somber little box? They were trained to save leftover limbs and bundled them up with their owners, but she didn't remember the policy for orphaned digits.

"No, no! It's fine. I don't mind," she said and waved a hand in the air. "Strong stomach."

"Really, who else are we supposed to talk with about this kind of thing?" 

What time was it? She glanced at the tarnished silver clock behind the bar. She was surprised that time was flying by. But she wasn't at all ready to go home. She was actually having fun.

"Alright. Good stories." She cocked her head in a performance of trying to recollect.  After a minute she snuffed a laugh. "All mine are grim, I'm afraid. I mean, let's see. Oh!"

She'd thought of a good one. Quill turned in her seat.

"Do you know of the Auror called Alastor Moody? He killed Evan Rosier." She inspected Lawrence's expression. She wondered if he'd perhaps met him.

“Everyone knows Moody!” Lawrence exclaimed, face lighting up. “He’s a bloody legend - fills half the cells on Two with his followers. I’ve the utmost respect to a wizard who can do that.”

He had been worried when she had glanced at the time, whether she would be wanting to leave soon. Lawrence was still at an age where he occasionally misread the signs of when was polite to cease socialising. He longed to spend time out of the Musgrave family home in St Albans to firm up friendships and establish himself as an adult. Daily, he was thrown in at the deep end as a trainee auror at the tail end of a war, because they were always short of decent wands.

It was Lawrence’s aspiration to either be as legendary as Alastor Moody, or to lead a bunch of them as a Head Auror later in his career. He always wanted to do a job to the best of his ability, whether that was filing paperwork at the moment, doing all the necessary checks and procedures for locking up a prisoner or honing his accuracy in duelling. To do that, he had to try every opportunity he got.

“I’ve only seen him in the office, been introduced with the other trainees, but you know, trainees are trainees. Nobody remembers our names.” He shrugged, “Do you know him well, like?”

Quill's face lit up when Lawrence's did.

She pressed her palms together in front of her chest, and nodded her head. "No!"

Oh. Eh! That probably sounded a bit odd. She cleared her throat and dialed it down a notched, but she was still grinning.  "No, never met him. But I was there when they couldn't get his nose back on. Not all of it, anyway. Just here? You know how he's missing that bit? If you'd seen it before, you'd say it looks really good, actually."

That Auror Moody, he was a hero. Her smiled flickered, and she said it before she meant to: "Do you think it's over?"

It had been ten years since this all had started. Barely seven since they'd found out her sister was dead, presumably kidnapped and killed by Death Eaters. She had done like so many others had done, steeled herself to the trauma and pushed on. Bravery, she'd learned, was acting despite fear. The sentiment was too achingly true to be a cliche.  Almost everyone she knew had lost someone. And almost everyone she knew had been tired for ages.

And now? He Who Must Be Named was apparently dead and Aurors like Moody were taking out the rubbish? It seemed like it all might end.

Lawrence had been right, and Quill agreed: Catastrophes reacted to what was happening. Aurors tried to stop it.

"For us, things are getting better. Fewer and fewer calls."

But did the Aurors have another perspective?

“Do you think it’s over?” Quill asked, and Lawrence’s grin over Moody faltered thoughtfully as he considered an answer. She did not mean I Saw Three Ships, which the lute player was rounding off as the singer reached for a drink and took polite applause. “For us, things are getting better. Fewer and fewer calls.” A hopeful easing of duties for Three.

“Merlin, I hope it is.” Lawrence agreed wistfully, tapping his boot against the leg of his stool, the alcohol now successfully beginning to disconnect the world from the keenest of his senses, dulling the ache of yesterday’s bruises. “I do hope everything is going to be alright, or well, as alright as squashing rampant blood supremacy gets us.”

What was normal these days? He’d grown up through Voldemort’s recruitment and rise to power. Seen families his mother would attempt to socialise with suggested as part of it, others arrested. He’d been in attendance for some, at houses he’d been dragged to as a child. It was one of the many times Lawrence had laid awake unable to sleep after the day’s events, even though he was only a few months into the training, just contemplating how he could very nearly have been on the wrong side.

Eyes glazed over from thought, the trainee auror licked the warm cider from his lips thoughtfully. He remembered himself and glanced to Quill. “Trouble is, I don’t think we’ll be there for a few more months.” He lowered his voice, “There’s some key figures still evading even Moody. The Longbottoms…” The unspeakable horror of what had been inflicted on Frank and then Alice. Aurors, captured, tortured. “I heard they may never recover, bless their souls.”

The Longbottoms.

Frank and Alice had been at Hogwarts with Quill. They'd just had a little baby. They'd been heroes of the war, formidable Aurors even as young as they were. For them to be taken out like this, in some spiteful desperate death rattle of a crushed cult? Some things would never make sense.

But that's what this was about, in part, for Quill. Putting thing back on order, making explanations where possible, and finding normal.

Thunk.

Quill hit the heavy bottom of her glass on the bar top before lifting it between her and her date. Her solemn expression was now touched with the defiance that had spurred so many of them forward these last few years.

"May they all get what they deserve."   

She paused and smiled a bit darkly.

"And may you and I be the couriers."

Lawrence and she, they were young. Skilled. Both proven brave. Hope didn't have to perish with the Longbottoms when the Musgraves and Soms of the world were there to try.