Lily had learned a short farewell speech in Swedish with which to impress Heli Norberg.

They had hiked through the woods, James in stag form acting as a pack horse, laden with their insulting attempts at homemade Swedish breads and pastries. The sun shone brightly that morning, unhindered by clouds, and the icy drips from overhead branches that fell down their backs seemed a spiritual confirmation: their departure from Sweden was well-timed. This era had ended.

But the Potters never said goodbye to Heli Norberg.

Maybe the cold had preserved her, or maybe they'd missed her by minutes. The unlit fire could've meant anything but it did not matter now.

They stood at the foot of Heli Norberg's bed, just staring. The only sounds in the house were the hungry meows of Heli's cat. The doberman, Vesuvius, lay beside Heli with his head on her stomach, looking up at the visitors with sad eyes.

They had all seen dead people before. They'd seen the life vanish from the eyes of teenagers in the war. They'd seen dead parents. They'd seen body parts and blue corpses but this was different. This was a lifetime coming to an end. The full stop on the last page of the book. No battle, no screams... Heli Norberg had simply drifted away.

In novels, death was peaceful. Heli did not look peaceful. She just looked dead.

"What do we do?" asked Lily finally, in a whisper as loud as she dared.

James deliberated, and finally shrugged. "Bury her, I suppose."

"What about her relatives?"

"We can bury them too."

"James, I'm serious."

"Alright, we can leave her here for her family to find in a few weeks time!" James looked at the dead woman. "If she has any family, that is..."

She looked like a mannequin, as still as they'd ever seen a person. The sight was jarring for Lily, who'd only ever seen dismembered and bloodied bodies of the young. Unlike her, James hadn't had family members who cared enough to bless his dead father's body on his behalf. As for Lily, the contents of the coffins lowered into her parents' graves would always remain an uncomfortable curiosity.

Dorea Potter had been the first to go. Her death had shook the wizarding community, which buzzed with talk of her widower's cruelty and infidelity; their irritation towards the flighty wife of a wizarding mogul transformed into a defence of the beautiful, naive prisoner of marriage. A young Lily had paused her animosity towards James out of distant sympathy, only to read days later that her father had succumbed to his smoker's lungs. Charlus Potter met the same fate four years later, collapsing in the garden holding a muggle cigarette he'd confiscated from his son weeks before. Elizabeth Evans was the only one to meet her grandchildren. Content that her daughters had healthy, beautiful babies, Elizabeth Evans surrendered to her death bed after a lifetime of shop work in smoggy industrial cities.

To see a person die of old age, to merely fade away, stunned them both into silence.

They covered her face, and levitated her.

She floated through the trees, held aloft by charms from the Potters' wands. She was buried in the woods, at the river bank. Above her body, Lily conjured pretty lights and glowing visions. Illuminate blue salmon swam in circles and quickly dispersed to make way for viking ships, snowstorms and stampeding elk. The wizards fashioned a cross out of sticks as a muggle grave signifier, in case any worried relatives came searching. Harry watched in an uncharacteristic silence. They left her as the snow began to fall.

No words were said for Heli Norberg. She left the world as a mystery to the Potters; a question that would never be answered.

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"LILY!"

Baby Matilda was momentarily crushed between her mother and Emmeline Vance as the latter launched herself at Lily. Over Emmeline's shoulder, Lily could see into Emmeline's Parisian apartment. The huge windows at the other end of the hallway reminded her of the abandoned rooms she had given birth to her daughter in.

"I'm am genuinely so pleased you're here. Come," Emmeline grabbed Lily's arm and pulled her into her apartment, which looked as though a trio of burlesque dancers lived there rather than a solitary woman. Confetti, flower heads and lone heeled dancing shoes littered the hallway. A sheer stocking hung from the chandelier.

"Jesus..." Lily whispered under her breath. "Emmeline, this place looks like an explosion in a cabaret tent."

Emmeline turned to reply, yet something she saw behind Lily stopped her. "What in God's name..."

Lily spun round. She had forgotten about the beast that accompanied her. "Oh."

Neither Potter had been especially keen to become dog owners. Their own cat, Tuppy, was still so petrified of anything that adding another animal to the household would likely cause the poor thing to have a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, they were hostages to the pathetic mewlings of Heli Norberg's obese cat, Zeena. Heli's doberman had made it clear quite quickly that the cat was going nowhere without him.

"I'm so sorry, Emmeline."

Emmeline seemed only mildly surprised to see a dog the size of a pony on the doorstep of her flat.

"This is Vesuvius."

Emmeline blinked. "Right."

Emmeline's bedroom, into which Lily was lead, was strewn with brightly-coloured silks, negligee, corsets, shawls... Lily knew Emmeline was a messy person from the painful few weeks of living with her as the Order drew up battle plans, but a clear culprit to the disaster was the baby sat at the chest of drawers, who was pulling a bra out of the lower drawer.

"She won't stop," Emmeline cried. "If I stop her, she just screams! I can't bear the screaming!" Emmeline plonked herself down onto the bed and screwed up her face. "What did I do to deserve this..?"

Lily, half-guiltily, started surreptitiously poking the sleeping Matilda so that she might wake and start to cry, in hopes of showing Emmeline the commonplace nature of her problem.

"Emmeline, are you here alone with the baby?"

Emmeline nodded. "Neeley says we're a family unit and if he is to love me, I must learn to love the baby. Now he's at work having a jolly old time while I'm living in chaos."

Lily looked around the room. The baby on the floor looked at her and giggled. She seemed to have doubled in size since Lily last saw her at St Mungo's.

When the uncooperative baby in Lily's arms continued to sleep, Lily sat on the bed.

"Emmeline... it seems a little unfair that Mr Peck has left his ward with you, without any help. You're not... his wife, after all..."

"He's a thoughtless beast, Lily. All men are." she sighed and leaned her head on Lily's shoulder. "I've fallen for a monster..."

Lily raised her eyebrows.

"Oh, Lily, I was so fun once... I used to dance on bar counters in Prague's magical Square, I used to ruin men, I used to fight death eaters! And now, here I am... a victim of domesticity. A prisoner to the motherhood forced upon me."

"Emmeline, you're going to be fine..." despite Emmeline's melodrama, Lily was shocked at Healer Peck for leaving his lover to care for his niece. "Children are hard work, but you'll have help. I can-"

A key rattled in the front door's lock. Lily leapt to her feet, grappling for her wand.

"THANK MERLIN!" Emmeline jumped up and sprinted for the front door. Lily stared after her, astonished.

"Emmeline?" Lily followed her into the corridor as the front door opened. Emmeline turned to stare innocently at Lily just as a middle-aged woman entered the apartment carrying a basket of groceries.

"Lily, this is Bridgitte. The housekeeper."

Bridgitte smiled insincerely, "housekeeper, maid, personal assistant, nanny, I am everything." Her thick French accent made her sound even less impressed with Emmeline than she looked.

Lily stared wide-eyed at Emmeline. "You said you were on your own!"

"I was!" Emmeline turned to Bridgitte. "Where have you been?!"

"You wanted me to go to the patisserie." Bridgitte turned to Lily. "Since becoming a guardian, Mademoiselle Vance is experiencing cravings."

"You said you'd be half an hour! The baby's torn the place apart!"

"I was half an hour."

Emmeline resembled a child faced with an angry schoolteacher. "Well," she snatched the paper bag from Bridgitte. "Thank Merlin Lily is here. It'll take all three of us to finish all these."

Bridgitte rolled her eyes. "You ask for ten pies, I buy ten pies, what more could-"

"The nice plates, today, I think! As we have a guest..." Emmeline pulled her own wand out of her silk gown and flicked it in the direction of the kitchenette. A cupboard opened and three frilly white plates floated out and came to rest on the island counter.

Lily watched curiously as Emmeline and Bridgitte marched down the hallway into the kitchen, where Emmeline tore open the bag and deposited three small pies onto each plate.

"Bon Appetite!" Emmeline announced self-satisfactorily as three forks clattered down into the middle of the counter from nowhere.

"You will adore this, Lily. It is made with Gruyere cheese. It is a traditional French recipe but, I think it tastes exquisitely like England!"

Bridgitte looked ready to stab Emmeline with her fork.

Lily was whiplashed from the past five minutes, so dazedly joined the other two women in eating. The pie was, as it turned out, sublime. Pork and leek, just like Lily's grandmother made in the 70's. Half-embarrassed by her indulgence, Lily looked up at the other two women and found herself astonished, pleasantly, by Emmeline. The most elegant and delicate woman Lily had ever known was devouring the pie like a starved wild animal. She made noises of pleasure, flicked bits of leek onto the counter and wiped cheese sauce off her cheek with her wrist.

"From my father's patisserie," Bridgitte told Lily. "Best pie in Paris. Please," she gestured to Lily's pie.

Seeing Emmeline give herself over to the joy of flavour, Lily felt a weight she hadn't realised was there leave her. When she ate the pie, the nostalgia and comfort she felt made her crave other things she used to devour. Jam tarts. Her mother's roast chicken. Cornish pasties she and Petunia once bought from a stall in Birmingham Market. The peanut brittle Marlene's mother would send her for Christmas. Her first ever curry, eaten on a table outside in the rain under a gazebo white visiting Alice in London, visited twice more during her stay.

Lily's mother, who lived in the kitchen out of enjoyment rather than marital obligation, instilled in her daughters the importance of food as a way of saying whatever needed to be said to whoever you were feeding. It was a homing beacon, and were she alive today Lily would take her family to her often to be fed by her.

As Lily ate, she thought of the people she knew who could do with some time with a friend at the dining table, and added them to the pile of things she was determined to fill the war-shaped hole in her mind with.

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James was not sure what he had been expecting when they'd decided on Italy. In his dreamy recounting of holidays to Rome and Sicily with his parents, he had forgotten these had all been taken in the summer months. In December, Venice resembled a boring grey day in England.

They had decided they would finally return to England once Sirius' baby was born, but found that their visitors in Venice were surprisingly more frequent than when they had lived in the Swedish hills.

Feeling lavish for once, James had thrown money at the perfect palazzotto. The four-storey crumbling house in the middle of a terrace along a thin, dark ribbon of a canal had become a renaissance palace filled with gold and marble, venetian gothic sculptures and byzantine mosaics. Lily had stared in horror upon their arrival and after Harry swiftly demonstrated the fragility of such luxurious items, James agreed to tone down the lavishness of their new home.

Despite the wintry breeze, the doors to the balcony remained wide open. This was a common demand from guests. Isabelle, whose belly was growing, complained often of mugginess and insisted on letting in the cool air. Nymphadora, whose parents had brought her to Italy for a brief visit while she was on her Christmas holidays, could not get over the novelty of the balcony. She spent hours watching muggles on gondolas pass, and the Italian wizarding families on the other balconies sing folk songs about vampires at which Italian-speaking muggle tourists merely chuckled.

If only James could enjoy such a paradise. His January exams loomed. He was slowly getting used to studying on the balcony with loud commotion from inside breaking his concentration. Nymphadora and Harry were bad enough, charging around the house chasing balls and pretending to ride broomsticks, but when Emmeline Vance, healer Cornelius Peck and his small niece joined the party for a day and night, the entire household were on hand to prevent the baby from pulling apart Harry's toys or toppling a pile of books. The household was clumsy, noisy, messy, with squealing babies and clattering pots and pans. Lily had become a kitchen ghoul the past few days, which James had originally interpreted as a way of putting off writing, but the closeness he witnessed between Lily and Emmeline Vance, the love of food, quelled many anxieties he had about his wife.

Matilda began to smile. Harry began to read. Isabelle's stomach grew. Christmas passed, and left them happy and heavy. James studied, and practiced, and despite the pressure of Auror training, began to relax into this new, joyful existence.

The day before his first exam, he sat on the balcony wrapped in a blanket, skimming over his revision notes one last time before getting some rest. Cornelius Peck and Andromeda had taken the children to see the harbour and the house had been still and peaceful for almost an hour.

James heard the fireplace whoosh. Someone had arrived.

"Remus? You alright?" James heard Sirius enquire.

But Remus was already storming through the balcony doors. He pulled a cigaratte from his mouth and blew out the smoke. Before James had a chance to berate him for smoking inside the house, Remus slammed a copy of the Daily Prophet onto the little table. James saw the picture before he read the headline: The Malfoys being lead across the main Ministry hallway, ambushed by journalists and camera flashes, Narcissa shaken, clutching a bundle of blankets.

NEW BUNDLE OF JOY FOR MALFOYS- OR FAMILY COVER-UP?

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A/N: omg. The previous chapter was a flash forward and I'm never doing it again because the AMOUNT OF MEAN SHIT IN MY INBOX IS WORRYING.

I have a baby and two jobs and a phd to finish. I'm writing this shit for free. I love writing but some of you are making it so haaarrrdd let me be.