"Beginnings: The Auror's Journal"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

I've been told, advised more than once, not to do this. To make no marks and to leave no records. So that if the worst should happen, nothing I have done or said will be there to be used against us. And it is good advice, as far as it goes.

But I have also been told, by one I trust implicitly, that there is a way, that with the right spells, the right quill and ink, my words can be recorded safely. No one will see these words but those who have a right to them.

He doesn't use this spell much, for all that he taught it to me. He doesn't believe in taking many risks. Not if he doesn't have to. Nor do I, come to that. But this feels- necessary, somehow.

The history of this is simple enough, but it interests me. Few Aurors have ever been comfortable with Pensieves. Even those who lived in peaceful times seemed to feel that such things could be abused far too easily if they fell in to the wrong hands. And yet many of them felt, as I do, the urge to write things down, to put them in another form than thought, to get them, somehow, out of one's head. They wrote for their sanity and for posterity, and everything that they wrote down came, eventually, to reside in the Archives. There it might be someday of use or help to the Aurors of the present day.

I find it strange and yet oddly comforting that these things will one day be read by those I'll never know, that other hands will turn these pages after I and the others are dead and gone. They will learn from my mistakes and my discoveries, the wisdom of my teachers and the innocence of our students.

I wonder sometimes what they will think of us, what they will remember about us and why. I wonder if we will seem as different to them as the Aurors of old have seemed to me, when I met them through their writings. I know that time changes everything, but it is so, I think, more with Aurors than with many others.

My generation has, rather like the one that came before us, the desire to be remembered as the one that vanquished forever the dark wizard Voldemort and his followers, the Death Eaters.

I know beyond doubt that we will be remembered for having tried.

They say that hope is fragile, but I believe that it is not. That hope, like faith, is not so brittle- it can bend when and where it must, and it is not easy to break.

I believe that we have a chance in this war, a chance to survive and a chance even to win.

I know that we will give everything we have to see that victory. I know that we are fighting for the very survival of our world, and so we can do nothing else.

There are those who believe we are never afraid, but none of them have been Aurors. I am so afraid sometimes that I can scarcely breathe. All I want in those moments is to run home and hide myself away, huddle close to those I love, and pretend that there is not a dark moment to the lives that we live.

This is what I want to do, but I never will. I have trained and worked all these years, giving nearly everything for the sake of this calling of mine, and I cannot shirk my duty because I am afraid. It is those I love whom I want to protect, far more than myself, and they will no more hide away than I will.

My place is alongside my dear ones, come what may. My oldest friend, close as a sister, and even more than she, my dearest, my mentor and the love of my life. How could I ever have stood anywhere but beside them, beside him?

I have spent much of my life struggling to find a place where I truly fit, a place where I belonged. I had found it at long last with Alastor Moody, at his side. And at his side I would stay, no matter...

He could wish, I think, that I were perhaps a bit less dedicated to my work, to our work. That I had chosen, perhaps, a safer path. But I am who and what I am; he will not ever ask me to change, and I have always been grateful for that.

He understands, I think, because we feel the same. He has no more intention of leaving me to face the dark alone, than I do of turning away from him.

I know that we have a long and hard road ahead of us, that it may ask of us more than in other times we might be willing to give. I know, too, that it might take- many things, my life or his. I pray that we will make it, and I believe that we will.

I understand, however, that we may not. And so I live my life from moment to moment, each instant as it comes, and I do as best I can to enjoy the time that has been given to me, to us. I savor every moment we have, enjoy all that I have for as long as I might hold it.

I know, now, what it is to have something worth fighting to keep safe from harm, not an abstract thing such as a faceless world of those I will never meet, but one I love, dear friends close as kin.

Suddenly it is my own future I am fighting for.