*The summer between graduation and Auror training had been a good one. They'd traveled together, maybe not in style, but far and wide. The swimming hole had been in Darwin, Australia, spring-fed and difficult to get to.

Whatever frigid and subterranean hellhole the spring water came from, it moved quickly enough on the way to be ice-cold but unfrozen. You climbed the rocks, lined up your feet at the very edge of the topmost, and jumped--and when you hit, it felt like nothing else in the world at all. It felt like being born or dying or being punched in the gut or receiving a million simultaneous mediocre handjobs. Or all of those at once.

Gideon's feeling precisely that way now, as his brother's shout cuts through his sleep like a knife: he opens his eyes and there they are, one of them already crumpling to the floor, and his wand is already in his hand and the blasting curse finds the base of the bookshelf and tips over a lifetime's worth of comic books, Muggle and wizarding both, onto the Death Eaters in the doorway of his room. In the next second he's on his feet, one bare and one sporting a purple sock, leveling his wand at the small crowd in his bedroom.*

SHIT.