James Potter (mrprongs) wrote in fissuresrpg, @ 2010-09-06 15:54:00 |
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James couldn't believe that everything was so very wrong. The familiar image of his wife's Patronus was the only thing that made a single bit of sense as he made his way around Muggle cars and street vendors. There was no sign of England or magic or the little cottage that had been home to his little family, and after the nightmare, that had him a little scared. It had only been a dream. It must have been, and this? This was a prank gone wrong. He followed the silvery form of the Patronus, his heart pounding more by the minute. He had a bad feeling about this. He had hazy memories of playing with Harry, and that felt real. Memories of Lily declaring it bedtime and those too felt real, but then...then memories that couldn't be real. Memories that were so vivid but were too terrible for James to even acknowledge as anything more than dreams. The doe paused outside of a building then disappeared and James knew he was where he was supposed to be. Lily was there and that meant that Harry was there too and Sirius likely was as well by the sounds of it. Being here meant that he would finally get some answers to what was going on but oddly James was more excited about seeing his family than getting the answers he so needed. He hesitated, then raised his hand to knock on the door. Having been watching from the window, Lily hurried to the entrance of the hostel the moment the silver doe came into sight. Few in the city seemed to even look twice at shows of magic unless they were new to the Hub, which was fortunate because it make things easier but unnerving in the extreme because it was so foreign to what she knew. The knock was barely out before Lily had yanked the door open and launched herself at James, a whirlwind of red hair and sudden tears. It was relief, it was grief and it was partially so fervent because she had been having such difficulty coming to terms with Harry not being there, even if he was someplace safe in Sirius' time, but she hadn't been able to truly mourn what had been taken from them. But with James here, clearly alive, now that could come. James wasn't expecting the tears. It had, after all, been less than a day since this prank occurred, right? There was no need for tears, especially not Lily's tears that always left him flailing for as some sort of way to remedy the situation. He pulled her to his chest and breathed a quick sigh of relief. At least they were together. He and Lily and the baby were going to get back home together, and then whoever did this to them was going to pay. "Alright, love." he said, voice a little deeper than normal due to her tears and the uncertainty of the situation. "It's alright, there's no need to cry. Let's go inside and see the baby and then you can tell me what's going on." That he clearly did remember Harry was both relief and pain, because Lily wasn't certain how she was going to explain to him that their son wasn't here, and that for her and Sirius, Harry was now an orphan. Just saying the words make her feel impossibly more like a failure than she did now, knowing Harry had had to face Voldemort alone. What had defying that monster so many times meant, truly, if in the end, her infant son had been able to defend himself in a way she had been too stupid and slow to do for him? But she tried to pull herself back together, enough that she could talk to him and ask the question that he might not want to answer, but they needed an answer to before any more of this went on. She pulled back enough to see his face, but didn't release her grip on him otherwise, because he was alive. She'd known the truth, as she had dashed up the stairs she had known the truth, and the last two days and nights had been long indeed, living with the truth that the man she loved, the father of her son, had died that night right before she herself did. "Jamie, I need to know what you remember, just what you remember, not what you think it was," she said, searching his face as though she could find the answer herself before he answered. It was a difficult question to answer, because the last thing that he wanted to do was frighten Lily with the nightmare. They had been forced to face the knowledge that Voldemort was after their son ever since the day of his birth, and telling Lily that one of their best friends had let the secret slip, that Voldemort had found them and killed him and likely killed Lily and Harry as well seemed like a bad idea when it had, after all, been just a bad dream. It had to be. "I remember..." He paused, trying to figure out just where the nightmare and prank began and where his life with Lily and the baby in the cottage had ended. It was hard to pick an arbitrary point when it all felt so real. "I remember you making dinner, and trying to help but you banished me out of the kitchen when I nearly caught the drapes on fire again. So I took the baby to the living room and we started playing on the floor." In the nightmare, he and Harry played on the floor until dinner, and again after dinner, but maybe that was where the dream began. "I guess I must have fallen asleep on the floor then. I think that's where the nightmare began. You made a wonderful Halloween dinner, and Harry and I played a little more, then you said it was time for bed." It wasn’t answer enough for what Lily needed to know, and yet James’ response broke her heart just the same. Their lives had been far from perfect, being in hiding like that, but they had still found happiness there because of each other, but even more, because of the son they were doing it all just to protect. That night, before it had all changed, was one of many representative of not only the normalcy they’d striven for, but the normalcy they fought to have with the end of that horrific war. “And that’s the last thing you remember,” she persisted, uncertain what she wanted his answer to be, that he remembered none of the horror that had robbed her of so much sleep since she had found herself here, or that he remembered how, in a moment, their lives had gone so horribly wrong, “Harry and I leaving the room?” Even now, Lily still gripped him tightly, not just the physical show of her strained wait for his answer, but the irrational need to keep contact with him so he couldn’t vanish into thin air or, worse, be killed again. While her mind sought answers, her body sought him, letting the warmth of him through layers of fabric warm her to her bones. |