WHO: James & Lily Potter WHERE: An empty warehouse. WHEN: Monday, September 12; evening WHAT: Their arrival! RATING: PGish STATUS: log; COMPLETE! NOTES: credit to J.K. Rowling for the recognizable dialogue bits in the beginning!
"Lily, take Harry and go! It's him! Go! Run! I'll hold him off!" "Avada Kedavra!"
James was dead, Lily had heard the shout of the Killing Curse from Voldemort, and even if she hadn't, she would have known it in her heart. Her only mission now was to protect Harry, to beg this monster to spare her son's life, as retreat was no longer an option.
And then there was that pale-faced, red-eyed visage in the doorway of Harry's room, the face of the murderer of countless witches and wizards, including her James. All she could do was plead for Harry's life and protect her child with her very body while she did, a mother's last desperate attempt to save her son.
"Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!" "Stand aside, you silly girl... stand aside, now." "Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead –-" "This is my last warning –-" "Not Harry! Please... have mercy... have mercy... Not Harry! Not Harry! Please –- I'll do anything –-" "Stand aside. Stand aside, girl!"
There was the flash of green, barely registered, and then there was only blackness, but it was nothing Lily had expected death to be, for with Harry's crib no longer at her back, her balance was thrown off and she pitched backward. She caught herself with her free hand – the other now holding something she had not been holding before – before she could fall entirely, but the impact of her hand on solid, hard ground followed by the weight of her body sent a brief ache through her palm and wrist.
The sensations made no sense. Her heart was pounding in her ears and there were still tears on her face and she could feel pain.
James knew when he told his wife to flee with their son that it was the last time he would see them. Even if he had his wand, he knew he would not stand much of a chance against Voldemort and his henchmen, but unarmed he was damned near defenseless. His only hope was that he would be able to put up just enough of a struggle to let Lily and Harry get out alive. Unfortunately, Voldemort wasn't in the mood to bargain or be intimidated, or even waste a moment with James Potter. Only a mere moment after the red eyed bastard showed up, James saw the flash of green, and knew that he was a dead man.
Only he didn't die. He opened his eyes after what felt like just a moment and groaned, rubbing his head. It was too dark to see much of his surroundings, but the one thing James was certain of was that he wasn't at home. How was he not dead? No one had ever survived the Killing Curse before.
Killing curse...
"Lily!" James exclaimed, sitting straight upright and not even noticing the way that the dark stars danced in front of his eyes for a moment. Even if he had survived the Killing Curse, he wasn't home, and that meant that Harry and Lily were alone with Voldemort. He stood quickly, his hazel eyes desperately searching what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse for his wife and baby boy. "LILY!"
Damn it, what sort of trick is Voldemort up to now? James thought, fingers flexing and then clenching. He missed his wand. Without it he felt powerless.
As her name rang out in the empty space, Lily screamed, a gut reaction to the disorientation of being certain she was to meet the end of her life, only to find herself still alive. Her eyes hadn't adjusted immediately to the dark after the blinding flash of green light, but there was enough adjustment now that she could see what she was clutching.
A wand. Her wand, even though it hadn't been in her hand when she faced Voldemort. She would know the feel of it anywhere, even if she couldn't make it out in the dark. It made her next action easy to determine.
"Lumos!" Though she cast it with a choked murmur, the wand flared strongly to life, casting a glow around her for a good fifteen feet that encompassed the mottled grey floor and the messy-haired man with glasses askew standing just at the edge of the light.
James. Even as her heart thudded more wildly and the impulse to throw herself at him welled fiercely, her years in the Order made her practice restraint and caution. She should be dead, he should be dead and this could be a trick of Voldemort's.
"There's nothing you can know that isn't known, nothing you can see that isn't shown," she sang, barely a song at all between the barely-there whisper and the uneven tempo, but it wouldn't matter, if he was who he looked to be, as it had been chosen for the unlikelihood Death Eaters would know what it was.
James let a trembling hand go to push his glasses up on his face before he allowed himself to believe what he was hearing. Lily, his Lily, using their code to figure out if he was who he said he was. “Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be...bollocks, Lily, this is ridiculous.”
He went to her, not even considering that it might be less dangerous to go to her more slowly. He was alive, and she was alive, and that meant that things were going far better than they logically should have. He didn't even notice his wand when he nearly stepped on it, all he saw was his beautiful red-headed wife standing there unharmed. He took her hand, squeezing it hard.
“Where's Harry gotten off to? How'd you manage to get us here?” It didn't occur to him now that something more sinister was going on, that he had died...worse, that Lily had. He assumed that somehow his brilliant Lily found some way out at the last moment, that she had saved him and that their son was dirty from walking around in this old, abandoned warehouse, but otherwise well.
Lily squeezed his hand in return, the only affection she could indulge herself in right now before she slipped her hand from his and pressed it hard to his heart, checking for the telling thump of a heartbeat as she moved her wand around them to illuminate the inside of where they were. There was no one else in sight, but the far more terrifying proof of their potential aloneness was that there was no other noise beyond those they were making. Were Harry here and conscious, surely he would still be crying.
Merlin. She had to find their son.
"Jamie, this is a touch beyond ridiculous," she said, the weight of the words lightened briefly by the nickname, but only briefly. She was using the name now as a touchstone, a semi-conscious focus on grounding him so when she let this all sink in and had a fit, at least one of them wouldn't be going 'round the bend.
"This wasn't me," she continued, assured of his heartbeat and able to step away now to search further. "I am a capable witch, not a bloody Portkey," she continued, pausing when she spotted the wand on the floor behind him, then circling him to pick it up and hand it to him as she continued, "my wand wasn't even in my hand when he-"
Her throat closed around the rest of the sentence.
Though he was momentarily settled by her use of his pet name (only Lily Evans Potter had ever been able to call him that and receive a goofy grin instead of a thump on the head) James's mind whirled at the implications of what she was saying. She wasn't the one who brought them here. What's more, James didn't really save his family, he didn't give them enough time to escape and Voldemort had hurt her. His eyes turned dark and he studied her for a long moment before deciding that she was indeed still alive and well. But they had not really been the ones that Voldemort was after, were they?
"Oh sodding hell..." His voice trailed off as he darted into the darkness, searching first one end and then the other. "Harry!" Maybe the baby was just sleeping...perhaps he had somehow managed to wriggle behind something and take a nap in the darkness. He would be cold and lonely and tired and maybe a bit hungry too, but he would be alive. James didn't feel like a man who had just lost his only son, so maybe there was hope yet.
The dark wasn't helping, so Lily searched for wall sconces or lamps of some kind of light instead of just wands, especially as James wasn't even using his right now in his franticness. Wall sconces or lamps weren't what she found, however.
"This is a Muggle building." A moment later, a row of lights above their head went on one by one, the lightbulbs flickering to life as she pointed her wand at them. It illuminated the warehouse, showing it to be empty save for them and a stack of wooden pallets, not in disrepair but definitely not being used.
And Harry was nowhere in sight, but that didn't stop Lily from dashing over to the pallet stack and checking behind it and around it.
James grew more and more worried when his calls weren't met with the indignant cries of his son. Fear coursing through him, he felt his wand in his fingertips, and though he was confused for a moment as to how it had gotten there (he forgot Lily pressing it into his hand, and nearly everything else really, when she let it be known that Voldemort had reached her), he put it to use, pushing pallet after pallet out of the way. The light that Lily illuminated the room with showed clearly what he did not want to believe. Harry was nowhere to be seen. Muttering a curse under his breath, James turned back to Lily, his pale look saying what his words could not.
"Maybe he..." What, Potter, crawled away? Not bloody likely. Toddled a half mile away on his tiny baby feet? Hopped in a Muggle cab and found his way home again?
He didn't want to sound absurd, to make Lily angry with him, or offer her false hope, but he couldn't shake the feeling that, though nothing about this situation was right, his son was alive. There were two very real options and, as far as James could see, only two. Either Harry was somewhere close, or he was dead. Voldemort had not come to take Harry for a ransom, he came to kill their baby. If Harry was with that bastard, he was dead already.
Turned and examine every which way, things weren't adding up, not in the physical sense and not in Lily's mind. She had heard the words called by Voldemort twice, once for James and once for herself, and yet here the both of them stood, hearts beating and she holding a wand she hadn't been holding before. They were in a Muggle building that she knew wasn't close to Godric's Hollow, as it was unfamiliar, neither of them had Apparated, especially not a distance like whatever this was with no wands and there was nothing at all close to them to have been a Portkey, especially given she hadn't touched anything.
And more important than all of them was that Harry was nowhere in sight, which meant he had been left alone with Voldemort.
At that thought, Lily closed the space between herself and James and gripped him tightly. The tears she had cried in terror were renewing themselves now with a different force – panic.
"We ought to figure out where we are," she said, pressing damp cheeks against the front of his robes to dry them.
James wanted to open his mouth, to tell her that they couldn't leave this place without their son, but he knew that Harry wasn't here. Perhaps if they could discover where they were, they would be one step closer to finding Harry. Besides, he had to be strong right now, for Lily's sake. She stood to lose just as much as he did, and she had likely heard what she thought was him dying. Resting a hand on the back of her head, he smoothed down her red hair for a moment, trying to find some sort of comforting words and coming up with none.
"We'll find him." He said finally, and he knew that was the truth. No matter what had happened to their son, they would find him...it was the condition they might find the baby in that worried James.
Though James struggled for comforting words, it was his presence and that simple touch, the warm weight of his hand against her head, that was of the most comfort to Lily that anything could be right now. It was from that she drew strength. Harry was Merlin knew where, the likelihood of it being at the hand of Voldemort a sickening reality, and she didn't have time to break down and weep right now.
"Too right we will," she said softly, then withdrew her wand arm from the embrace.
"Expecto Patronum!"
Lily's Patronus sprang forth from her wand a second later, a silver-white doe as bright as the moon, and circled around the two before coming to a stop directly beside them. Her head bowed briefly in their direction and then she turned and picked her way between the now strewn-about pallets and out of the warehouse. The creature's mission was clear – to find Harry James Potter.
Holding her wand defensively, she took James' hand, grateful for yet another time in her life that her left-handedness meant they would both be armed and still have that physical connection of hand against hand. They would follow the doe to their son if he was within any distance they could reach him, Statue of Secrecy be damned at this point. If he was not within reach – well, Lily didn't know what she would do then.