I Know The End {Fred Weasley, ACT I}

Chapter 27- The Last Halloween

Crack!

Lily Potter split the egg on the side of the bowl and mixed it into the batter, making away with the broken shell. She knew it would be faster to just use magic, but she had always felt that food tasted better when made by hand. She'd baked with her mother as a child, before Hogwarts. Biscuits, pastries, cakes, banana bread, pumpkin bread, you name it. Love, her mother would say, that's the secret ingredient and then she'd wink and let Lily lick the spoon clean.

She poured the cake batter into a pan and placed it into the top rack of the oven. She cranked her little, off-white timer for forty-five minutes and decided to prepare the frosting while the cake baked. Her mother would be proud of the effort she was putting into this damn cake. Handmade frosting, handmade batter, some fondue animals she was definitely going to use magic on to perfect. A wolf, a dog, a rat, and a stag, exactly as Eleanor had asked. The perfect birthday cake for a daughter who'd been cooped up inside for so long.

Lily craned her neck to look from the kitchen into the dining room where Eleanor sat with her faced pressed up against the window. She was watching enviously as the trick-or-treaters ran from house to house, collecting candy in worn-out pillowcases, all skipping by their invisible sanctuary without a second thought. Eleanor pushed her face as close to the window as humanly possible, her nose squished against the glass pig-like, her fingers clawing the window for escape.

"Please, Mommy," she whined. "I want candy!"

"I'm sorry, Ella," Lily said gently, and she meant it, "but we can't. It's not safe."

"Because of the bad man?"

"Because of the bad man."

Eleanor flopped down on the windowsill, now sitting to face her mother. She folded her arms and pouted. Her bottom lip jutted out, tears gathering in her dark brown eyes. Lily mentally pleaded for Eleanor to keep it together. It was becoming difficult to instill hope into her daughter when she was losing hold of hope herself. She didn't know if she had it in her today.

"Do you know what I'm doing right now?" Lily asked, moving to the fridge to grab butter and milk.

"What?" Eleanor's voice perked with interest. She had always been an easy child to distract.

"I'm making your birthday cake." Eleanor smiled a big toothy grin that brightened Lily's whole day. "You remember what tomorrow is, don't you?"

Eleanor nodded vigorously. "My birthday, my birthday!"

"Yep, and how old will you be?"

Eleanor held up four fingers and began shouting four over and over again. Lily couldn't believe her baby was turning four. She still felt like a baby herself, only twenty-one years old with a one-year-old and a four-year-old but she wouldn't change a thing. Even now, with the world imploding on them thanks to one fucking prophecy involving her son, she'd still do it all again. James always joked that at least they'd still be quite young when they sent the kids off to Hogwarts. Thirty is the new twenty.

"And Uncle Moony will be here!" Eleanor yelled, "and Uncle Sirius, and Uncle wormy, and Aunt Marlene-"

"No, Aunt Marlene won't be here," Lily said, clutching the kitchen counter to keep herself present. Thinking about Marlene hurt too much. She hadn't figured out exactly how to tell Eleanor that her aunt was dead. She wasn't quite sure how to explain the concept of death to a child so young. They'd lucked out in some ways that Eleanor couldn't remember her grandparents. They'd didn't have the conversation with her about those deaths. Sirius kept urging them to tell her, be direct and honest, explain that dead meant never coming back. James eventually snapped and told Sirius he should do it himself if it was so easy. Sirius hadn't commented sense.