Marauders - Always - Part One

Dora's Stew and Pumpkin Bread

James arrived home in the late afternoon, stepping through the floo into the living room at the cottage, carrying his broom and the framed portrait of Regulus under one arm. Lily was laying on the couch, the telly on, her feet up on the arm of the couch, head propped by a pillow, holding a ball of yarn in her chest. The yarn stretched across the gap from where she lay to where Dora sat in the chair beside her, knitting a tiny pair of baby booties in the softest white wool yarn Lily had ever felt.

Lily sat up when James came in. "Is Filch going to be able to fix the portrait?" she asked, laying the ball of yarn on the couch as Dora paused in her work, looking up at her son with as much expectation as Lily had on her face. 

James turned and rested his broomstick against the corner of the fireplace so that the handle was braced against the mantel, well out of reach of the flame. "Better," he said

"Better?" she asked, eyebrows raised with curiosity.

James held out the framed portrait to her and she took it up in her palms, carefully, her eyes widening as she beheld Regulus's face smiling and blinking back up at her. Lily looked up at James with a gasp, then back down to Regulus. "Oh my goodness. Filch did even better than I ever could have imagined..."

"It wasn't Filch," James said, slinging off his jumper and draping it over the arm of the couch Lily had been using as a footrest. 

Dora cocked her head to look as Lily held out the portrait for her mother-in-law to see. "Who did, then?" Lily asked. 

James shrugged. "I don't know."

The telly sounded with tinny sitcom audience laughter.

Lily laughed, "You don't know? How do you not know?"

James told her the story about running into the seagulls and losing the portrait and that, when the seagulls had retrieved it from their Ravenclaw friend, the portrait was fixed, framed, and - well honestly much improved over Remus's original rendering.

"So some kid repaired the portrait?" Lily asked, looking confused.

"One of the D.W.O.'s friends," James said, shrugging. "Although they said Declan claimed he didn't even realize he had the portrait at all when they went to fetch it from him."

Lily paused. The name sounded familiar. "Declan," she murmured. "I think I remember a Declan in Ravenclaw." Her brow cinched as she tried to remember.

"He's done a lovely job if he did it," Dora said. "It's a very nice portrait."

"It looks exactly like Regulus," Lily said. "There's more details than even Remus was able to capture... Whoever did this knew Regulus very, very well." And loved him very, very much, Lily thought. 

"Well Declan is in the Seagulls' year - two years under Regulus would've been - and a Ravenclaw, so I can't imagine he knew him too well," James said.

"What did he look like?" Lily asked. She felt like she vaguely remembered someone named Declan but the memory was elusive, slippery like a fish swimming through water, uncatchable and shimmering even as she tried to place the face to the name.

"He had blue hair," James laughed.

"Blue?" Lily laughed.

"Like... electric blue."

"Oh my."

Dora said, "He must be a metamorphmagus."

"Like Maryrose was," James said. "Perhaps he knew Maryrose and that's how he knew Regulus?" he suggested. "Perhaps the metamorphamaggies had a club or something of that sort."