For Now

It's Maggie's idea, the memory spheres, the goodbyes. Funny, really. She'll die a few days after she brings the cardboard box filled with crystal spheres to the Order meeting, die without ever having recorded one of her own. A lot of people will half-forget about her, like all the rest of the Order members who died before the photograph was taken; she's just a half-blood shop girl in her mum's Hogsmeade location and not especially precious to anyone else in the Order. She didn't do anything extraordinary, didn't save any lives in splashy, spectacular ways, didn't even get to stand among the rest of the Phoenixes and smile for a frozen memory; and for most, she'll fade from recollection, her loss eclipsed by the hundred tragedies, small and great, that will follow.

She shows them all how to work them, her royal-purple fingernail varnish chipped and her numerous messy bangles clinking against each other on her thin wrists as she demonstrates. Maggie manages to lighten the mood (it's a little morbid, really, what she's suggesting) and repeatedly refers to everyone having a good laugh in fifty years when they root their recorded goodbyes out of a wardrobe, an unused and forgotten relic of a war long since won. That some of these messages will have to be played, that some voices will sound when their owners are dead and gone, is a truth better left till tomorrow. There is a price to be paid, they all know this.

The meeting, the demonstration, is the last time a lot of them see her alive. They'll all see her again, of course. A few will find her ravaged, near-unrecognizable body in the back room of her mother's shop; Fenrir Greyback loves his skinny, childlike little girls. The rest will see her reconstructed for her own funeral, face clean of her glam, gaudy glitter-makeup and her hair a solid dark brown, no long run through with chunks of platinum and pink. They'll witness the horrible row her parents have at the wake, her muggle father in brutal, angry agony, raging at his witch wife and her strange, ugly world, the world that killed their daughter two weeks after her twenty-first birthday.

If she said any goodbye, no one can find it. Maggie left a number of the memory orbs scattered around her room in the flat above the shop, mixed into the mess of David Bowie and T. Rex albums and neon clothing on the floor. All of them are blank.

The first one to play is Benjy Fenwick's. There's no family to play it to, thank God for small mercies. It's only a few of them, gathered around in the small Order gathering that's passing for a funeral these days. There's not really much to bury, in any case, and no grieving, delicate family members to need the closure. The Phoenixes know nothing if not how to say goodbye.

It's a quick, general farewell. Benjy's not much for flowers and eloquence and there's really not much regret. He's tired and he's old and he misses his wife's fussing, strangely enough, misses the decades-dead little sister and the rest of his long-gone family.

You're the most family I've had since Rosellen died, so thanks for that. The voice seems to hesitate. I can't be that sorry, and I figure I must've gone down in some way that made it all worth it.

One more pause, before he finishes: Alastor, if I've gone first, I'll see you soon, friend. I'm sure they'll be waiting with me. Just don't be in too big a hurry, Kitty won't thank you for it.

Best of luck to you all. Benjy coughs, and his voice stops, and the faint buzzing sound in the background clears as the sphere deactivates.

Marlene's is obviously coerced. C'mon McKinnon, just say something. Sirius Black's voice is the first thing to sound out of the crystal Gideon Prewett found hidden in her long-dead brother's room.

No one notices how terribly rigid he goes, his jaw setting together almost painfully, when Sirius's voice rings through the room.

Christ, all right, Black! There's a shuffling noise, like the crystal changed hands, and Marlene's voice resounds, more clearly this time.

Hi. There's a rather awkward pause. This is clearly unrehearsed. Well, I'm not particularly planning on dying, but should it come to that…bye mam, da. Thanks for…whatever you did, raising me and all. Sorry I'm getting in the habit of fucking things up, sorry I'm not coming to any birthdays or dinners, sorry sorry sorry.

Those in attendance look around as Marlene's Highlands lilt reels on her quick apology to her parents: they were buried this morning as well, beside her, beside her years-buried brother, and the McKinnon name is dead with the four.

Marlene sighs impatiently, I'm thinking that's enough, Sirius? That's a goodbye…

Nothing to say to me, then? Sirius's voice is distant, tinny in the recording, almost mocking as it goads her on. To the back of the room, the living Sirius is regarding the sphere with a growing unease

You're an obnoxious arse and a desperately easy pull. And you smoke shite cigarettes. Now fuck off! Then there's a whirring (like air whistling by, the sphere's been thrown) followed by a thud and a muffled Fuck, Marlene! In the back, in the shadow, Sirius gets a strange look on his face and his hand drifts to his shoulder, remembering.

And then the sound dies. That's the end, that's Marlene's coerced goodbye. The room empties out, and Gideon recollects the sphere. He leaves it on for a little while, hoping for a little more, just one more whisper of his name.

He waits in vain; there's nothing more in the sphere, and there's nothing left of Marlene for him beyond what he can find in his memories.

The first few minutes of Edgar's message is to his family. There's a respectful sort of silence for what's left of it; his elder sister Amelia sits silent, while his brother holds tightly to his infant daughter Susan, asleep against his shoulder. The rest, Edgar's wife and their four children (young, tragically painfully young) lie alongside him.

His is the message everyone wishes they were eloquent enough to say. It's brave and sure; he's so certain that this is all worth fighting for and that he does not regret any of it, even though it has been the end of him.

More than a few wonder, though, if he'd still think it all so noble and worthy if he knew how death would come: not just to him, but to his wife and innocent children, from the ten-year-old Melissa, waiting for her Hogwarts letter, to the four-year-old Andrew clutching to his soft-toy clabbert, all killed mercilessly one night and left where they fell under the sickly green glow of a false, ugly constellation.

Three-month-old Susan wakes towards the end of the recording, fussing. Only when she begins to bawl into the dead, respectful silence does her father dissolve into tears for the family lain low, for his dying name.

Edgar's wife has the last word, her voice soft and sweet and beautifully hopeful. "It's just for now...just for now."

Dorcas Meadowes kept one for Fabian, and everyone listens, in the Burrow after they bury the brothers. He says nothing of her in his goodbye, and Dorcas sits in blank, betrayed shock until Molly pulls her aside after and presses another into her hands. Molly's had it in keeping, in a little box with a letter in a cupboard out of the reach of Bill and Charlie's curious hands, magnetized towards the fragile and breakable. She listens alone, it's meant only for her.

If you're listening to this, it begins, we're not married. I was going to make another after I married you, if you're hearing this it means I never got to. Dorie, I'm so sorry, love.

Dorie sits alone, listening dumbly, a single streaming thought in her head: notfairnotfairnotfair.

There's nothing in the world I wouldn't give for you, his earnest voice carries on, and I regret so much that you'll never be my wife, never carry my name, my children.

These goodbyes are supposed to be peace, supposed to be closure, but the empty hole in the pit of her stomach (the one that seems to expand with every breath she takes in an existence without Fabian) just fills up with anger. What the fuck kind of world is this?

Dorie's never felt so angry in her life. Angry with Fabian, herself, the world, just angry in a vast and despairing way that seizes her up. Her limbs don't seem to work, there is no thought that can manage to complete itself in her head—everything falls to pieces before it's even finished.

And suddenly, all she wants in the world is her mum. The anger drains out of her, and liquefies all her bones with it and she collapses back onto their bed in a puddle of despair (she prefers the anger—at least it filled that cavernous empty with something, at least she could feel something.) Dorcas just wants her ordinary muggle mum and the ordinary muggle life she'd turned her back on at eleven. She wants the nice, soothing lies mums always tell: that this isn't the end of the world and that tomorrow maybe food will taste like food and not ash, that maybe there's something, somewhere, in this great and beautiful world that might begin to fill her up again.

She hasn't got that, though, and so she curls up in a bed that still smells achingly of Fabian and sets the sphere's sound to loop and falls asleep to Fabian's voice. I love you, Dorie. I love you I love you Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou. The words run together in her head; he says other things too, practical things about moving on and loving again and fighting and strength, but it's nothing she wants to hear right now.

When Sturgis suggests, a few weeks after Caradoc's gone missing, that they should listen to his recording, Hestia goes white, her hands frozen on her swollen abdomen. And everyone shuts up.

A few days later, when Hestia's left after the tea Sturgis and his sister invited her to that evening, he finds the crystal set on a table near the front door. There's a scrap of parchment there under it in Hestia's spidery hand: I can't listen to this yet. I'm not quite ready to let it all go.

It's a makeshift sort of memorial, a few Phoenixes gathered around Sturgis' kitchen table, the sphere set in the middle.

Caradoc's voice speaks of no one and to no one but Hestia and the little baby girl she's still carrying. It's a message for only those two, the woman he loves (or is it loved? No one's sure on the appropriate tense) and the daughter that isn't even born yet. They listen until the end, waiting for something else; there is nothing for anyone but the woman who least wants to hear it.

He tries to give it back to Hestia when he comes to see her and Megan a few days before Christmas. He holds it out and Hestia turns away hastily, picking the brand-new Megan up from her cot and acting as though she never saw the orb. Her voice is rushed, hurried, forced when she grinds out some pleasantry, offers Caradoc's daughter out to Sturgis to hold.

When he makes to leave a little while later, Hestia whispers in a low voice, maybe I'll ask for it back someday. And then, like she hadn't just spoken, she launches into 'best Christmas wishes!' and hugs him tightly at the door.

Sturgis keeps the goodbye for her for years. Hestia keeps her desperate hope alive instead and never comes to claim it.

Someone thinks to claim Lily and James' from the blasted-out shell of their cottage. There's a short argument between a few members before they're activated—some say they should be saved for their son (when he's old enough to comprehend), for Remus (gone abroad, gone away).

Those views are in the minority. It doesn't matter in the end.

There's only unnatural static recorded on the spheres, whatever words of farewell there might have been wiped away in the cataclysm that all but leveled the house, leaving only an orphan where once there was a family and a monster. It's haunting and empty, with a few snatches of what sounds like breathy, broken whispers drowned under the grey, lonely noise.

"That's enough of that," Alastor Moody rasps, breaking the horrified trance of his colleagues. And he smashes the spheres and that is, indeed, enough of that.