Being a Greengrass after all should sound pretty serene.
But being a part of "the Emeralds" should not, especially when hearts become entangled with the infamous Regulus Black.
Goodness, lawfulness, or evilness. Which path will they tread in the ti...
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July 16th, 1978
It had been two weeks since Hogwarts closed its doors for the summer, and Avery was beginning to suspect that waiting might actually be a form of torture. She hadn't heard from Regulus. Or Barty. Or Evan. Not a single letter.
Objectively, she knew two weeks wasn't very long. People went longer than that without writing all the time. The problem was that logic had very little influence over the part of her brain that checked the window every morning for an owl. By the end of the first week, she had started making excuses for him. Maybe Walburga and Orion were watching his post. Maybe he was busy. Maybe his owl was injured. But none of those explanations accounted for Barty or Evan.
The only thing left to do was worry. It didn't help that the Daily Prophet seemed determined to make worrying as easy as possible. Every morning brought another story about an attack, a disappearance, or some Ministry statement that somehow managed to say nothing while taking up half a page. Avery had developed a habit of reading the paper twice: once for what it actually said, and once for what it was trying very hard not to say.
That habit was probably what pushed her toward the Order in the end. When Lily Evans had approached her near the end of term and asked again whether she wanted to help, Avery hadn't given her an answer right away. She had spent weeks turning the idea over in her head, weighing the risks, considering all the reasons it was a terrible plan. Eventually she realized that she'd stopped asking herself whether she should join and had started asking herself why she hadn't already.
Besides, she wasn’t alone. Dorcas hadn't needed nearly as much convincing. She had already made up her mind the moment she saw the look in Avery's eyes.
"Then let's do something about it," she said simply, as if it were the only choice worth making.
Pandora Lestrange was different. She knew exactly what she stood for: freedom, justice, and something brighter than the world she'd been born into. But when it came to the idea of joining a youth organization dedicated to fighting Voldemort and his followers, she remained unmoved. Not because she didn't believe in the cause, but because motives mattered and this one didn't call to her for some reasons.
Avery Greengrass and Dorcas Meadowes didn't have a big, dramatic entrance into the Order of the Phoenix. It was more of a quiet showing-up. The first meeting was in a dim old room at the top of a creaky house that smelled like dust. The table was scratched and ancient, and most of the faces around it were familiar to them. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, in that chaotic-but-comfortable way that meant nobody really minded being interrupted.
At the end of the long table, Emmeline Vance was sipping tea with the kind of poise that came from both class and practice. She laughed at a joke Gideon Prewett cracked from across the table, his sleeves rolled up, ink staining his knuckles from notes he'd been scrawling minutes earlier.
