As of yet, she wasn't sure when that would exactly be. But it certainly must be soon, right? After all, it had been nearly a year since Lily had seen herself inducted into the Order, and since then she had been on many a mission: she had fought Death Eaters on a train; she had fought Death Eaters in Russia; she had fought, brewed, spied, practiced, deliberated, hexed, followed, healed, hated, loved, nearly died, nearly killed. She probably, now that she thought about it, had killed.
She should not be thinking such things. Not then, in the darkness of a London night, in the midst of dark streets lit by the dim, dusty orange buzz of a sodium street lamp. Not then, when a safe distance ahead of her crept a man in a long dark coat, a man who kept to the shadows as well as Lily did.
James was nearby, she knew, on the other side of the street, as was Arthur Bones. She stopped to look for James, just to make sure. There was something to be said for holding hands while on a mission, and it couldn't be very good. In fact, the something probably sounded a lot like Sirius' teasing. And they had drawn lines-very clear lines between what was acceptable Order behavior and what wasn't, what was to be risked and what wasn't. Despite fighting hard for certain lines, she found that she hated them, really. It would be nice to hold hands, especially in the dark. It would probably make him feel a lot better, and that made her smile softly through the oily darkness.
A mission. A mission to a party of Death Eaters. A mission to a party of Death Eaters being held in an abandoned shelter tunnel so deep into the earth that the tube trains rattled over-head. The thought both terrified and thrilled her, which made her think she must be half crazy. What sort of woman would look forward to putting herself into harm's way?
A woman with something to protect from harm, naturally.
Arthur, a young man only a few years older than James and Lily, held up a hand; the man in black had opened a gate and was heading towards a dingy cement building. The black sign across the top, The Eisenhower Centre, was missing letters and pieces of letters, and the darkness hung overhead like soot.
There was a shift in the nuances of the darkness ahead. She thought the man had turned. Lily held her breath and stood very still, all but one eye hidden within the bricked alcove of a shop's door. The man didn't seem to see them, and he disappeared through a discolored metal door.
She looked over to James and Arthur. Could they see anything else from their vantage point? Anyone else? At their signal, she darted across the street, nothing more than a black-clad streak through the gritty, dark air, soft shoes making no noise against the paving stones.
"Someone should hum the James Bond theme," she whispered. "That'll probably have to be me."
Silly wizards didn't know a thing about good cinema, did they?



