James Potter and the Crimson Thread

11. BLACKBRIER QUOIT

No word came from Hagrid before the Christmas holidays, leaving James free to attend to his packing and planning and general trepidation about his trip with Millie. He remembered to bring his dress robes and secretly dreaded having to wear them. He thought about being alone with Millie outside of school and felt both nervous and feverishly excited about the prospect. Would they be unsupervised a lot of the time? Or even more supervised than they were at school? What would her parents and family be like? Millie had attempted to describe them and warn him of certain eccentricities, but he hadn't absorbed much of it. The only thing he understood for certain, based on her descriptions, was that the Vandergriffs had a much different lifestyle than any James had ever encountered. Scorpius had summed it up when he had described them as "old magic", although James had only the vaguest idea of what that meant.

The train ride back to London was typically raucous, the compartments filled with happy students, the corridors decorated with pine boughs, colourful enchanted light globes, and foot-long candy canes. The cart lady's wares consisted entirely of holiday cookies, miniature mincemeat pies, sugar snowballs, cocoa cockroaches, and pepper-imp snaps. Millie bought several of everything and distributed them to the crowded compartment they shared. James accepted a palm-sized mince pie with a sheepish smile. He barely knew any of the people crammed into the

compartment, most of them being Millie's friends, her fellow Hufflepuffs, although a few were at least familiar faces from Night Quidditch. For their part, they seemed to accept James as one of their own, based solely on his connection to Millie.

She sat next to him, hip to hip, holding hands, bouncing excitedly with the conversation. Outside the window, the winter sun descended over pristine white fields, snow-decked forests, and mountains dim and hazy with distance. The light turned dusky and purple and the shadows grew long. Eventually, the lanterns of the Hogwarts Express lit themselves with soft popping sounds, bathing the entire train in golden light, and James knew that the journey was very nearly over.

A pang of trepidation came over him as he remembered that, with their arrival at Platform Nine and Three Quarters, the familiar part of the holiday would be over. Suddenly, he missed the comfortable banality of the Burrow, the gingerbready smell of his mother's frantic baking and the warmth of Grandma Weasley's hugs, the homely live spruce Christmas tree decorated with beloved family ornaments and the bullfrog croaking voice of Kreacher.

Kreacher, at least, he didn't have to miss very much. He had just seen the ancient house elf only the morning before, awaking to his patiently grave stare and drooping watery eyes as the elf stood on the foot of his bed, a stack of wrapped presents at his feet.

James had decided that he couldn't open the presents yet, despite Kreacher's monotone holiday benediction.

"It's not Christmas yet," James had said, yawning and stretching, his hair still prickling from the shock of waking under the elf's unblinking glare. "I'll open them when I get back. It'll give me something to look forward to."

The elf had accepted this with stoic grimness, vanishing shortly thereafter with a snap of his bony fingers, leaving a scent of pine needles and peppermint in his wake.

Now, as the train steamed slower and slower, the chug of the engine dropping from a staccato rhythm to a descending bass drum-beat, with the dark brick walls and chimneys of the city sweeping past the windows, James cursed himself for agreeing to go with Millie for the holiday. He knew now that he had mostly done it just to spite Albus and Lily. But now he felt that he was only punishing himself, and digging himself into a

deeper hole with Millie, with whom he still intended to break up just as soon as the moment was right.