In the Wizarding World, there is a common question that everyone who was alive on 31 October 1981 can answer without hesitation: where were you when you found out the Dark Lord was defeated? But for some folks, the ones who knew them, the question was a little different.

Where were you when you found out about Lily and James Potter?

Oliver Kent would always remember even the tiniest detail about that moment.

It was a Sunday, a light rain falling, pattering against the windows of the Great Hall at Hogwarts. Oliver was sitting at the Gryffindor house table, bent over a bowl of brown sugar porridge with dates and pecans tossed in - a nice warm, thick meal that would stick to his ribs and be filling later, out on the pitch. His Captain's badge gleamed on his chest as he shoveled breakfast into his mouth, head down and reading a letter he'd received the day before. The letter was a diagram of the pitch, a revision of a play he had designed and sent to James Potter earlier on. James had made slight changes with red ink and sent it back with a note written to the tight in his messy scrawl:

This is really good!  Wish I could be there to see you play. JP.

Oliver's thumb was covering that bit, though, he was absorbed in the play itself, watching the drawing move and act out the changes James had made. He was wondering why he didn't think of those modifications himself - of course it made more sense to split the Chasers! Of course! He was grueling himself for having not seen it. The noise all around him - students chattering loudly - was distracting but not enough to draw his attention from the play.

If he had been paying attention, Oliver would remember hearing the kids around him wondering where most of the members of staff were. Several were missing, prominent members, too - Minerva McGonagall, Severus Snape, and Albus Dumbledore among them - and the ones who were there were whispering urgently amongst themselves.

The other thing he might have noticed was that several members of the Slytherin house were absent.

The windows overhead burst open and a cold gust of wind burst through as the owls of Hogwarts soared into the room, filling the gray ceiling with the sound of the beating of their wings. They began depositing their deliveries all around the room, and people were still laughing, still talking loudly about the match, about the incredible feast the night before.

Halloween at Hogwarts had always been a brilliant celebration and Halloween 1981 had been an especially brilliant one - the D.W.O. had seen to that, being that it was to be their last Halloween at the castle and all, Wally had really done it up right... People were still whispering about the prank, breaking into fits of laughter as they glanced in the direction of the Gryffindor table. Greatest thing that had been done since the time the Marauders made the whole school fall in love with Dumbledore, some said. Others said it was the greatest thing since the Marauders turned the whole school blue. Well, said yet others, you'd only be saying those two things were best if you hadn't heard about the time they transfigured everyone in the entire school to look like one of the four of them at breakfast. What about the time with the popcorn, others asked? and Dexter had said, "Whoaaaa, remember how much popcorn they had in the common room? We were swimmin' in it! That really was better than what we did, yeah?"

"Of course it was," Wally had replied as the three of them fell asleep in their dormitory in the wee hours of the night, "But it was the bloody Marauders, we knew we'd never live up to them, but coming in second to all that stuff? That is a crowning achievement. Bet nobody else ever tops that!"

Now, this morning, people were still talking about it.

That is, until there was a shriek of shock and horror that echoed up from the Ravenclaw table.

Oliver looked up. So did Dexter, who had been talking to Macy in sign language across from Oliver, and Wally, who had fallen asleep using his arm as a pillow on the table top.

The Ravenclaw table exploded almost immediately into a panicked, hushed conversation, everyone hurrying to gather 'round a witch holding a copy of the Daily Prophet.

"What's on?" Dexter asked.

"Must be an attack," breathed Wally, staring across the table where the Ravenclaw girl was sobbing.

"Poor thing," Oliver said.

But he had no longer said it than the Hufflepuffs were bursting into cries and conversation, too, and then someone at the far end of Gryffindor had gasped loudly as they unrolled their newspaper.

It took over the Great Hall like a wildfire. From normal conversation into a roar of hushed voices. Glances were being shot Oliver's direction, the word Potter echoing all around him, like ripples from a series of water droplets, shivering through the Hall toward him.

"That's it. What'a happened?" Wally grabbed the rolled up copy of the Daily Prophet from the table top in front of Dexter and debanded it, rolling it out and the sound he made upon seeing the headline was akin to a strangled animal. "No," he choked, "Oh no. No." He looker at Oliver, the blood draining from his cheeks even as the anguish flooded his eyes.

"What is it?" Oliver asked, grabbing for the paper.

The headline said it all.

DARK LORD DEAD? HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED DEFEATED -- HARRY POTTER: THE BOY WHO LIVED!

Where were you when you found out about Lily and James Potter?

Oliver was sitting in the Great Hall, on the bench at the Gryffindor table and the air smelled like breakfast. He was wearing his Quidditch uniform, the maroon and gold stripes, the captain badge on his chest... For years after that he was convinced that if someone were to go look around and get real close about checking between the flagstones in the floor that they might still find shards - left over broken pieces of himself that were never found. But one thing was certain... when he broke that morning, no matter how carefully he had tried at rebuilding himself, Oliver Kent was never whole again.

Most people were celebrating.

Voldemort is dead! Voldemort is dead!

Oliver felt like it was him who was dying.

He didn't remember getting up and leaving the Great Hall, only screaming when the step disappeared beneath his foot and he tumbled down. He missed a trick stair, running too fast on the moving staircase, breaking his ankle in the thing.

He didn't remember much over the next few weeks, honestly, and when he went home for Holiday, the ankle still hurt, though nobody really believed him. Pomfrey insisted that the skelegro potion she gave him had healed it. But Oliver said his ankle still hurt. He skipped two quidditch matches and countless practices between Halloween and Christmas, limping about the castle, dawdling and wincing everywhere... And when he went home and continued to complain of the pain, even Meg's magic healing couldn't make it go away.

Nothing made the pain go away.

Maybe it was a manifestation of the things he ought to gave been feeling emotionally coming out in the form of a sharp, shooting pain going up his leg from his ankle. Maybe it was a phantom, haunting him, torturing him, not letting him forget... but he spent all of Christmas holiday refusing to get out of bed until the very last day before going back to school, Jasper finally broke down and took Oliver to a muggle doctor. The muggle doctor was confused by the x-rays, saying the done in Oliver's ankle appeared to have once been broken but - "odd, impossible, even!" - had regrown, the bone matter in his ankle newer than the bone matter directly beside it. The doctor had been so perplexed by this odd x-ray that he assumed whatever made the bone look so new was indication enough that pain could be present and he prescribed Oliver little bottles of muggle medicine to fix the pain. And they did, but only when Oliver took two instead of one.

He tried to say he was alright, but he wasn't.

He tried to say he would move on, but he couldn't.

He tried to say he would stop taking the pain killers, but he didn't.

See, the thing was that when he got back to school he figured out how to do a duplicating charm on them instead, so that the bottle would simply produce three more each time he shook some out -- for yes, within a week of being back at Hogwarts, Oliver was taking three at a time.

And when three were not enough, he discovered if he took them with swallows of firewhiskey, the pain went even further away.

So it was that he was sneaking out passageways to Hogsmeade as often as he could get away with it and knicking bottles of firewhiskey from the Three Broomsticks or the Hog's Head - whichever he could sneak into the store room of on a given night...

Soon, Oliver was drunk more often than he wasn't.

"What are you doing?" Wally asked him once in February when Oliver turned up drunk to a match, his quidditch captain badge on upside down, his robes untucked and broom untrimmed. "You're fucking everything up."

"I am?" Oliver had laughed. "Me? Everything has been fucked up for me, Wally. I am not the one fucking it up."

"No, something happened that was bad but you're spinning out, mate, you're losing everything. If you don't get it together you will, anyway. James Potter wouldn't have wanted you to --"

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT JAMES POTTER WANTED DOES IT? HE IS FUCKING DEAD ISN'T HE?" Oliver shouted. "He's dead. He's dead and he's gone and it doesn't matter what he thought or what he wanted or what he did or could have done or believed about me because he is DEAD!"

"Well you're ruining the legacy he worked hard to build in you," Wally snarled, "And I think it's fucking disgusting what you're doing. You're no better than Sirius Black!"

"Sirius BETRAYED him!"

"And what do you think you're doing? You idiot. You're certainly not honoring him! Get yourself together. You have to get yourself together..."

There were fights all the time now - between Oliver and Wally, between Oliver and Dexter, between Oliver and Macy or Vivian or any bloody person who tried to tell him to slow down. It didn't matter when he lost his status as Captain. It didn't matter when Dexter complained and took over his Prefect duties. It didn't matter until the day he got a visit from Jack Scout, the NWQL agent that James had been in touch with for the past two years about Oliver's talent and aspirations, that Oliver even slightly woke up.

"Look Oliver, I ain't goin' to be lyin' to ya," Jack said, his thick Texas accent twangy as ever, "If you don't clean up your act you ain't goin' to be gettin' into pro-Quidditch. I know you been through a lot an' all and I've been prayin' for ya to bounce back, but you've really lowered your prospects. You keep on the way ya been going and I'll have to withdraw my offer."

Oliver almost didn't care when he said it. But that night, he'd reached under his bed looking for his wand after it had rolled off his nightstand and he'd found the balled up parchment that was that last play that James Potter had written him back with by owl post.

31 October, 1981, the date at the top corner of the letter read.

This, Oliver realized, was likely the very last owl that James Potter ever wrote.

To him.

To Oliver.

He had to bloody make it count.

So he'd cleaned up. He had, he'd done everything he could think to do. He went through an awful week of detoxing, he threw away the bottles of pills he'd duplicated by magic, and he poured the firewhiskey in his stash down the loo. He begged for his position back on the team and although he didn't get to be captain again, the Gryffindors were quick to accept back their star seeker. They won the cup, and Scout held up his offer and after a whirlwind of a summer, Oliver Kent was officially signed to the Chudley Cannons with a large sum retainer that gave him enough gold to go off and buy himself a house in the south west of Britain, where he was close to the sea and close to the team's home pitch and there was lots of land to hold pick-up games like they used to play at the Potters...

And for a time, for a time things were good. For a time, he kept that letter framed and displayed where he could see it, next to a picture of himself and James Potter from the day Jack Scout had first made his offer...

But now and then there would come a night when the dark was too dark... when the silence was too heavy... when that ankle would start hurting again.

And it would be a couple glasses of whiskey later before that pain would even start to numb away... or just a couple pills knicked out of other players lockers...

He tried to say he was alright, but he wasn't.

He tried to say that it was different, but it was the same.

He tried to say that it wouldn't happen again... but it did.