The Resolution
- Chapter Fourteen -

- Rowan Hanely -

The heat of a fast-diminishing Indian summer had broken and the first whispering breezes and crisp air that accompanied autumn had come to wash over Hogwarts. In the midst of October the leaves were changing to dull browns and the bright fields wilted without the strong sun and even rainfall. All the students began to wear heavy cardigans and scarves that sported their House colours as they walked the grounds; avoiding the Black Lake, where the chilly winds picked up, making the tall bulrushes flutter as if to shake off the frost that accumulated every night.

The library hadn't changed a bit though… There was still the heady musty smell of ancient books and the nearly unnoticeable whispers of pages turning. The quiet space had a certain coolness to it even in the summertime, so in the beginnings of a frigid Scottish fall, it had become even sharper.

Which is why everyone within the library during the spare afternoon had clumped near the high windows, where the sun filtered in, illuminating the warm colours of book spines and sending rays across the rickety tables.

Well, if I was going to be realistic, when I described 'everyone' in the library, I meant the meagre few overachieving Ravenclaws and Remus and I.

We sat deep in the corner of a row of Herbology reference books, where Remus had a slew of parchments before him and seemed to be ignorant of the patchy stains of ink all over his dress shirt and forearms.

I, had a modest amount in comparison, so I was free to lean back on my chair – tipping my face into the sunlight as I squinted at my pale friend, my wand twirling in between my fingers in a lazy fashion.

He looked… stressed.

His hand was clutched in his dirty blonde hair, dark circles paired with a sallow face and his round blue eyes blurred over as he scribbled with a scrawny-looking quill that seemed to come from the average chicken.

To be truthful, I felt a pang of sympathy as I watched him. He was after all, a fairly kind friend to me.

I gently let my chair tip forward on to its four legs with a slight clunk. As I leaned towards him, my tangled hair fell forward to cover my shamefully white-scarred cheeks. I held my wand loosely, ceasing my play with the thing and peeking over at his monumental pile of work.

"So, is this a normal event for you?"

I was fairly sure that Remus took note of my disbelieving tone but if he did, he didn't show it. Perhaps, that was why I found his presence so welcoming, and why I spent so much time with him here. Well, I was probably the only one other than Lily who would head over to the library with him. Or talks about class subjects… outside of class.

He shrugged his narrow shoulders and made a quick note on his essay, glancing up quickly at me, before going back to his chicken scratch editing. "Yeah, pretty much," he muttered.

No bitterness there… I thought, struggling to not raise my eyebrows.

I continued the twirling of my wand between two digits of my right hand, while I tugged knots out of the ends of my hair with my left.

"Do you enjoy playing babysitter, then?" I asked him in a soft voice, my eyes watching the splotchy ink of my finished and edited papers before me.

I was referring to the fact that not all the work in front of Remus was his. It was actually a collection of half-hearted pieces of homework and unfinished ten-inch essays, belonging to the less studious members of the Marauders. He was correcting and editing all of it. Every scrap of parchment was being wizened by a careful scratch or two from his crappy quill.

Yet, it was a lot… and he was only one man.

I raised my eyes to see that my question seemed to have affected Remus, because the telltale signs of irritation blossomed as his mouth settled into a mild, yet exasperated smirk.

"When you have friends like James, Sirus and Peter… you are deemed the babysitter no matter your willingness. It's fact, Rowan," he sighed. "They're big kids… and I'm going to forever be making sure they're alright."

I made a small 'tsk' of disagreement, under my breath. "Making sure they're alright doesn't mean doing their work…"

The pale boy finally put his quill down to give me his full and undivided attention. "I'm not doing their work… I'm correcting it."

"Yeah," I scoffed, "because James' work is brilliance in need of only a couple of grammatical corrections." I nodded towards the pile that seemed to belong to James, owing to the fact his block-like writing only covered a measly few inches of a very long piece of parchment.

Remus was threatening to smile, but it was quickly smothered when he shook his head. "It's just correcting it. It doesn't bother me that much."

Fat chance.

He was obviously going towards his wits end, but he was too nice to say anything about it.

I finally cocked an eyebrow at him, feeling the tug of mostly-healed skin. "Because you're being a good friend, right?"

Again, his body tightened and his eyes flashed up to me over the papers, before going back to his frantic 'correcting'. "Yeah, I guess…" he grumbled out.

He was being used by his good nature, and against my will, I felt a twitch of irritation towards James, Sirius and Peter for being so ignorant to the fact that Remus was being weighed down by all their work, when he had his own schoolwork to worry about.

Then again – my body tensed in a weak moment of worry that an onslaught of dream-borne and past reality tremors might rear their ugly heads – Sirius wasn't exactly known for being sensitive, now was he?

Though, his disjointed little speech a few days ago did seem sincere…

Internally, I shook my head.

He was a bumbling, roguish womanizer according to Lily.

And he, apparently, felt like he needed to talk to me despite the fact I was too wary of him to want the same…

I mean, it was much easier to leave him well enough alone and hopefully have him do the same after a while. That heart-stopping slip up moment where I said Flynn wasmy brother… it was disastrous with its potent quality. At this thought my throat constricted painfully. The past tense was uncomfortable to even think about. It had so many things attached to it. It seemed mocking… but thankfully, Sirius didn't seem to have picked up on my working. It didn't seem to register to him… That I'd spoken of Flynn like he wasn't even here… which was… true.

Maybe my cold, distant attitude towards him had clouded his judgement on his perception of what I had told him. Which was very good. I didn't want him to know I was the only Hanely left.. I didn't want everyone to know that I'd been fighting for so long only to lose.

Lose…

Everyone.

Lose…

Everything I had ever known.

I had had an isolated understand of what my 'everything' was until now. I had lived in a certain fashion for my whole life. The only reality I knew was the one I'd been immersed in… Learning from my family, working with my family… living, breathing… my family. My mother and father… Willow… Flynn… They were all I knew. I barely spent any time with anyone else. A few Aurors here and there… old friends of my parents… and of course, probably the one other Dark Wizard Hunter family in all of Britain or even Europe: the O'Connors.

As Irish as their name, and the constant friends to our family. They were one of the few who truly understood us… Them, being the same as us: being Hunters, and helping their parents since they could hold a wand… training physically… magically… their sons, Leo and Killian, were my childhood friends. My only friends besides the siblings who were my constant companions.

Willow was completely enamoured with the older brother, Leo, and he with her. Killian was my age, and my absolute partner in crime. Flynn, was a little brother to all of us. He was scooped up constantly by the two boys and tickled mercilessly.

They were extensions to our family, and they connected with us, as others couldn't. Kevin and Siobhan – the boys' parents, were like an aunt and uncle, at times. If Mum griped after Dad and us, we knew we could run off to complain to the boys and Kevin, while Siobhan chastised us in a rich Irish brogue, "we just didn't know what it was like to be a mother!"

They were my family, for a while too. But when we began to run… from this somebody… this rising Dark Lord… who I was now sure had ordered the murder of my family… we couldn't speak with out friends the O'Connors. We wouldn't dare drag them into our mess. So, we hadn't spoken to them for a solid year.

My contact with the tentative pseudo foste family I'd had before was long severed.

So with those swirling thoughts, I watched Remus as he grudgingly filled in the blanks for his dear friends and felt a slight feeling of sympathy on top of it all.

It really was tiring…

Giving a shit about the living and the dead at the same time – never really sure who you should give more attention to.

Life… ought to be a bit more important. I had made a conscious choice a while ago not to wallow in my own sadness. I ought to… be involved with those who were living, not… in a relationship with the dead.

I laid my wand on the unstable writing desk in a movement of defeat, and sighed, extending my hand, palm up towards Remus. My scarlet cardigan covered most of me, but the odd colouring of my formerly scratched palms shone in the light – some sort of clue in, as to how different he and I were.

He looked up, with a slow deliberate confusion that was even more apparent in his narrowed eyes, and his quill was even poised above the page, ink dropping from it in a slow trickle.

I jerked my hand. "Give some here, then. I'll help you out."

My friend across from me seemed excited and surprised at the same time. His eyes became less narrow and wider with happiness, his shadowy face becoming filled with light as he leaned into the sun streams from the window. "Are you sure? I mean – "

I nodded quickly, and my eyes gave a roll without even meaning to. "Yeah, yeah. Hand me a pile and I'll see what I can do."

He grinned, and the happy motion lit him up even more than the sun itself. His sickly frame straightened, and he seemed to lunge for a smaller pile of papers. He slid them over to me, in a swift motion – obviously, he couldn't be happier to have been ridden of them.

I let my fingers snatch the pages, feeling their roughness and slight weight of words on them. They were pulled in front of me, and I leaned back in my chair once more, looking them over in a quick shuffle.

The scrawl was cramped and spiky… meticulous in the beginning of each essay… but becoming more and more erratic towards the end, as if the writer began to care less and less.

Curiously, I laid the sheets out on the sun-warmed table, looking for whom the work might belong to… until I saw a spiky signature.

'Sirius Black'

I scowled slightly at the sub title to his name, which seemed to be even more detailed than the very work beneath it.

'Otherwise known as 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' and partial to such epithets as 'handsome', 'rugged' or 'angelic'.'

How… classy.

My scowl turned into a reluctant smirk, and I ran my finger over my ridged lip so I could stifle a snort of laughter.

He really was something else.

He had such a big head – it was a wonder he defied the laws of physical exertion and managed to haul it around along with his ego.

I smirked more deeply at that and finally reached over to dip my quill in Remus' pot of sharply red ink. It was a wicked colour and I just couldn't wait to paint Sirius' essays with it.

I harrumphed, and tucked my feet under my old wooden chair, making little scratches here and there… writing comments or correcting his grammar in the obscene red colour.

Truthfully, he was smart… he just didn't find use for commas or foot notes… or… well, he was inventive… it just ran on and on… Everything… from citing forgotten laws of Transfiguration to describing the wonderful benefits of shoe polish when it came to patching up the scruffy edges of your black cloak.

How that related to Herbology, I had no idea.

I stretched slightly, raising my focus from Sirius' mass of half-assed work, and saw that Remus seemed to have de-clenched slightly with less of a bundle of sheets to correct. His body was less hunched with stress and his mouth was not pulled down in the touch of despair and exasperation that had clouded his narrow face earlier.

Good for him. He hardly deserved to be stuck in here sweating out the better part of his sanity while the other Marauders were out doing Merlin knows what.

Immediately, almost without thought, my head swivelled to the window, shielding my eyes with a ink-splotched hand, as I looked for three rumpled Gryffindors who were presumably out on the grounds while Remus was here toiling away.

The sunlight warming my cheeks, I looked in vain for the familiar faces…

The grounds were almost endless though, and as I watched the tall grasses and flicker of reflection against the stained glass from the lake – I recognized no one.

I guess it was verging on stupid of me to say that I didn't recognize anyone. Fact was, I didn't really know anyone besides my dorm mates, the Marauders, Severus the Slytherin boy, a meagre few from the Gryffindor house and of course the students from other houses that happened to be in my classes.

The grounds were immense though. On my runs during the summer and my explorations, I hadn't covered them in their entirety. I intended to… at some point… owing to the fact that Dumbledore had encouraged me to run around wildly, very literally running from my nightmares.

But still… I thought as I kept my gaze fixed on the rolling hills and dying Scotland landscape, …if the grounds of Hogwarts were immense, then the Forbidden Forest was endless – as endless as a rolling ocean, with all the dangers of strong waves crashing on rocky shorelines, except in the forms of creatures and plants that were cautioned against us magical children since we'd been old enough to know that not every fluffy living thing was to be petted and fed Ginger Newts.

I felt my mouth quirk slightly, as I twisted in my chair to watch the closest edge of the Forest, where the autumn winds made the plants sway in such a fashion that it seemed as though they wanted to creep towards the castle… It's not like this terrified me. I still continued to be fascinated with things that tried to bite me… Take the Mustelids, for example…

My mouth threatened to smile even more.

This, this was probably the exact reason Hagrid and I got along so well… I was smirking thinking about Mustelids.

But, as I watched the Forest through the high window of the library, my smirk… started to vanish.

There was a crowd… well not really a crowd, but an odd gathering of students near the edge of the trees that I'd absent-mindedly surveyed. They were all wearing the dark school cloaks that marked them as students… and they stood almost perilously close to the wood's edge, but still, they carried themselves with an almost careless fashion. As if nothing could touch them.

I wrapped my fingers around the backing of my chair, watching them as they seemed to herd around something, and I was sure, by the bobbing of their heads, that they were laughing at something.

But… there was something, a bit off. I could feel it in the fibres of me – in that little sense I'd cultivated over the years. Perhaps it was intuition, or – my back tensed slightly – it was the way these boys seemed to create a formation around this something. A loose circle, that reminded me in a sickening way of the night where I'd been circled by tall men in dark cloaks, and I wondered if these boys had their hoods raised over their mocking heads, would the uncanny similarities make my blood run cold? Even in broad daylight? A very far cry from the stifling hot night that I could remember with clarity that threatened nightmares even in daydreams?

I leaned forward, totally engrossed now, forgetting that I that Remus even sat across from me, or that a pile of Sirius' now utterly correction-ravaged work sat before me. The group of boys, moved as one entity in a sheep-like fashion towards what looked like to be an entrance into the darkness that was the Forbidden Forest – a sort of trail that had grown in, and the limbs of some ancient tree hung low over the bushes that parted there, as if warding off entry.

My mouth was a firm line now, as I saw the bunch of them come to a stop, but they were still surrounding something. Here, where they had paused in the clear sunlight, but so close to the shadows, I could see that their scarves were a deep green and silver and they were hung around their neck in a similar fashion – all tied rather expertly, to fit in with each other it seemed.

Slytherins…

Now, this was the sort of thing that gave them their sneaky nature wasn't it?

And me, watching them, was a credit to Gryffindor's supposedly nosy nature…

But, this wasn't nosy. It couldn't be – because I felt something was going wrong here, and despite it possibly being none of my business, it was suddenly becoming more and more distressing to watch.

I gripped my chair even more fervently when I saw that the boys were laughing once more, and they had picked up a smaller dark form off the ground. The smaller form… they had surrounded. The smaller form, which seemed to be… a young boy… A young boy, who they now grabbed by the collar and shoved around, until he appeared disoriented. It was all too obvious by the way he was unsteady on his feet, that he was terribly afraid. He seemed to look up frantically at the older boys who surrounded him – and I couldn't make out his features but I was sure they would be almost pleading. His blue scarf was barely held around his neck because of all the rough prodding he was receiving. The dark haired young boy tried to push through the crowd of Slytherins around him, but to no avail – he was smaller and they bunched around him again, almost as though they were intent to drown him in their laughing and their pushing.

I felt my nails dig into the grains of wood on the backing of my chair, and I was sure Remus was saying something or another, but this - this had my full attention, and it was making each muscle in me tense, with an almost acute pain of inaction.

The Slytherin boys now grabbed their target by the back of his cloak, and practically launched him toward that overgrown entry to the Forest.

My stomach dropped.

How stupid could they be?

Did they not know what was in there?

I might make fun of those 'fluffy munchkins' in the Forest, as Hagrid called them, but I was not about to push someone in there – especially not someone as small and seemingly helpless as that unidentified boy.

Again, I watched, frozen in my chair as the young boy shied away from the enveloping darkness the shadows of the ancient, swaying trees sent skittering across the grass, and he turned to the mob of Slytherins, his hands held up in defence, as they advanced on him, and I could practically hear their jeering and coercing, as he was backed into a metaphorical corner.

Face the Slytherins, or head into the Forest.

Some tic in my jaw began to spasm as it tightened, and I felt a sudden rush of anger and energy.

There was no way in hell I was just going to keep watching this.

I felt useless enough – being alive while I watched them all – I wasn't a Dark Wizard Hunter anymore but – That boy, he might be hurt right now while I thought this. My mind was running in desperate circles, so much so that I felt an almost horrible nausea.

I had to -

"I have to go," I spit out suddenly, as I turned to Remus with a quick movement, which sent my hair flying around my face. I brushed it away impatiently, while I tossed the papers around before me, scrabbling for my wand.

He was staring at me with what appeared to be serious concern, or the look, which was proof that a seed of doubt about my sanity was being firmly planted in the fields of his mind. His brow was furrowed, his hands were free of papers or quills, and they were outstretched towards me.

"… Is everything alright, Rowan?" His voice was cautious.

I was getting slightly frustrated, but I tried not to let it show on my blank face, despite the fact I was now slapping at random piles of parchment to see if I could feel that familiar cylindrical shape beneath them. "Yes! Yes!" I said, "I just need to head outside for some fresh air, and perhaps it would be good if you did the same once you're finished with Peter's stuff."

He leaned back, still watching me in an undisguised worry, as he saw my mask slipping as I gritted my teeth with the mounting pressure of time. "What are you looking for?" he asked simply.

My voice was very smooth, despite it all. "My wand."

He raised his eyebrows slightly and he inclined his head to the right of me. "It's right there, beside the ink well."

Sure enough, when I turned to look, my whirlpool-ish coloured wand lay by the ink well, and I snatched it up quickly, before shoving the corrected papers in Remus' direction.

In a quicker move than I had accomplished in a long while, I had nodded thanks to my bewildered friend, peeked out the window to see the mob closing ranks again, then took off at a brisk pace that I knew Madam Pince, the librarian, couldn't yell at me for.

"I'll see you outside later, then?" I heard from behind me, a loud sort of yell that broke the quietude of the library.

I half turned to see Remus frowning at me from our rickety table, before Madam Pince swooped down at him like a hawk, with that harsh, matronly 'shhh!' of hers, that had him hastily apologizing.

Needless to say as soon as the entrance to the library was behind me, I ran.

That's that! I'm such a jerk, updating so late then leaving you with a cliffie. Sorry for my awfully late update in any case, but I am wretched away from my writing more than I'd like to be. Also, I'd like to thank my anonymous reviewers for such kind words... I can't respond to tell you how thankful I am privately, so consider this a general thank you to all of you who were kind enough to leave me a few comments. Oh, and of course, thank you to all you reviewers in general! Can't forget you guys, you're the very essence of fanfiction! Well then, feel free to leave a review, and as always, thank you for reading!