Her Single Rose (Remus Lupin)

One-Hundred & Twenty-Four

Aries had begun working tirelessly on her guarding spell. After the last letter she had received from Dumbledore, she couldn't do anything else. If she did, she would be forced to think about the war and what it had come to.

"Aries?" Remus knocked on the basement door, but Aries didn't respond. Instead she stared down the plant in front of her, hating the way it drooped black dead. The clock beside her had a good two minutes left before she hoped it would come back to life.

The raven haired girl suddenly felt the body of her fiancé behind her, his hands touching her shoulders before coming up to the shorter strands of her hair, "You cut it?" 

Aries felt the strands of her hair that stopped just above her shoulders. It was for Alice. She had always wondered what Aries would look like with shorter hair. 

Sirius had his own way of mourning the losses, going out to get tattoos rather than cutting off his hair. With a month after their deaths, he had a fair share littering his chest and arm.

"She wanted me to. Alice loved putting flowers in my hair but she wanted to match. She didn't deserve such a death, none of them did." Aries whispered. 

She had cried when Dumbledore had told her Alice and Frank had been tortured on September first of 1981. She had cried harder when she found out Fabian and Gideon had died trying to protect them. 

Peter had went to visit the Longbottom's to check-in, he had sent the twins a patronus for backup. Fabian and Gideon had managed to fend off the Death Eaters only for a couple minutes before they were overrun. 

Neville hadn't been there, so they tortured Alice and Frank until their last breath. Not just anyone either. Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange, as if it was some sort of date. Neville Longbottom would grow up without his parents for the rest of his life.

Neville wasn't the only one without parents either. In another letter sent from Will Fenler, Honey and Ben had been attacked as well, leaving Abigail and Dylan in the care of Will and Kelsey. 

Even as their godmother, Aries knew they couldn't take the girls in. She was still hiding from Voldemort and needed to keep Estella safe. 

She had gone to a nearby town in animagus form and apparated to California to check on the girls just in case something had happened to them. As it turned out, Ben and Honey did have use for a backup plan, keeping the girls in a one-way entrance basement until Will came and found them.

Abigail and Dylan had been alright, which the former shouldn't remember much if anything. It was Dylan and her memory that Aries worried about. 

"They're all dying, Remus...All of our friends. Marlene first, now Alice, Frank, Honey and Ben. I don't want to lose anyone else." Aries sighed, putting her wand down on the table, keeping her back to him. 

Remus brought his body closer to her, wrapping his arms around her middle. He knew it had been hard on Aries trying to live through the war, staying indoors all the time. Now her closest friends were being hunted and murdered and she was stuck.

Not even a funeral was able to be planned. 

Aside from the deaths, the Order had been a jumble of argumentative meetings, everyone trying to figure out who the spy was and how Alice and Honey could've possibly been found. Especially Moody.

As it was his own nephew to be murdered with an unforgivable curse, he was more angry than most.

Aries had struggled not to look at Peter throughout them. Deep down Aries didn't want to know if Peter was the spy, she had hoped that maybe there wasn't a spy to begin with. Maybe Voldemort was just finding little slip-ups and tracking them as best as he could.