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September 5 th , 1979
Everything was heavy: his robes, his footfalls, his breathing.
Even the air was thick, laden with ash and smoke, cut through only by the hissing sparks of wayward spells. The ground shifted under his feet with every step; his shoe nearly caught on a shard of broken glass sticking up from underneath a disjointed heap of broken stone. With a muttered swear, he stumbled sideways, shifting his weight awkwardly to one side before he could regain his balance. Chunks of broken brick tumbled athwart as small piles of cobblestone dislodged underfoot.
A low rumble emanating up from behind him waylaid any progress forward—he turned messily around, teetering on one leg, and cast a silent confringo at the cursed vines now leaping up at him from cracks in the broken pavement. They exploded in a tide of sickly green.
“JAMES!” A voice broke through the haze of battle, frantic, conquering even the distant booming of explosives. He whipped his head around. Sirius was sprinting toward him, arm raised and shouting something indecipherable.
“What?!” James called back, still maintaining his pace, trusting blindly in his own athletic ability to keep him upright in the maze of rubble and ruin.
“DUCK!”
Duck?
He whipped his head around once more. A tall, masked Death Eater was barreling in his direction, fragments of light already burning from the tip of his wand.
“ NOW, JAMES!”
Oh.
As he tumbled down onto dust-slicked ground, light blue sparks collided with a ray of sickly yellow directly exactly where he’d been standing only milliseconds prior, and for a moment, the world dissolved into a hazy blanket of atomic white.
He shut his eyes against the glare. In his mind, only one, resounding thought.
I’m coming for you, Lily .
September 1 st , 1979
When Marlene came stumbling through the protection ward and into the Order safe house in Derby, her right arm was sliced clean to the bone, muscle and veins bared unnaturally to the open air. The sight of it was nearly jarring enough to pull James’s attention.
Nearly.
He paid shamefully little mind to his friend’s state, cutting his gaze past her pale face and the blood drying in patches across her blonde hair, and instead darted toward the door, unabashed in his distress—he counted one, two, three people bursting their way through the willowy barrier of the ward; one too tall, one too short, one decidedly too male.
No. No, no, no. Not happening.
“Where is she?” He demanded, and then, hearing belatedly the hoarseness of his own voice, repeated with more force: “where is she!?”
It was Edgar Bones who answered from the yard. His face was blood-stricken, some his own, some obviously not, and he was walking with a visible limp.
“She’s gone,” he groaned. At the look on James’s face—or maybe it was the sudden tilt of the world, the way it now felt off-kilter, like the sun had burnt out and left an orbit-less planet adrift—he coughed and spoke again. “No body, Potter. We think they took her.”
From the empty void where the sun once was, now erupted a small spark, golden hope inlaid with crimson, searing anger. No body, Potter. Death Eaters liked to make a spectacle of their violence; to lay corpses out in the street, flayed and broken, prizes and spoils of war. They never left a body hidden. No body meant captive—no body meant alive.
It took more self-control than he knew himself to possess in order to keep his legs from carrying him out the door and through the ward to the apparition point. He could feel his muscles seizing, straining against the stillness he was demanding of them, and he braced his hands on the doorframe to keep from grabbing his wand from his back pocket. He couldn’t even begin to know where he’d go, where he’d apparate to—but that didn’t matter. He needed out. He needed Lily.
They took her. They took her. They took her.
Fuck, but he could feel the panic in every molecule of his body, creeping through his system like poison. He resisted the temptation to look down at his arms and legs; to make sure they weren’t turning green with illness, eroding, sickled and on the verge of collapse. It took him a few steadying breaths to realize the pain was not physical but mental—it was just loss.
Another Order member—a woman, small and brunette and with a name he didn’t bother to remember—pushed past him to enter the house. She offered him a small, tired smile as she walked in, and he fought himself not to take her by the shoulders and yell at her until the smile slid sideways off her features.
They have Lily, he wanted to scream, feeling lost and irate at the fact that no one else seemed to be as panicked as he. They have Lily.
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. She walked on and entered the building and was greeted with scattered hello’s.
James shifted from the door and his whirring thoughts as bustling voices arose from behind him. He’d forgotten there were people in the room.
“Got everything, MacDonald?” Someone asked hurriedly.
“Just about, yeah. Sorry, Mar—this’ll sting something awful.”
Mary had arrived. She and her assistant Healer were getting to work on Marlene’s arm, swapping dittany for various droughts and back again. Marlene leaned limply on Sirius, who held her up against his chest with a tight expression. He’d never liked witnessing anyone else’s pain—always wanted to take it for himself.
When the last person staggered into the house—four out of five back, a solid eighty percent, someone might say—James shut the door with a flick of his wand. It slammed close like a clap of thunder.
* * *
It took six hours to heal Marlene. James spent the entire time in a small study off the east wing of the building, mapping entry and exit points to the last-known Death Eater hideaway, papers strewn across chairs and a large, antique-looking desk. His fingers shook in moments of idleness, and to abate this, he simply eliminated any idleness at all; every breath was an exhale on a movement, from hands spreading maps onto tables to fingers pinning tacks into red-circled locations. When Peter popped his head in to tell him Mar would make a full recovery, James looked up, blinking, not a half-sense of decorum left to get him to nod and comment his gratitude.
“Brilliant,” he said woodenly. “Thank Merlin.”
Peter opened his mouth as though about to say something else, maybe a placation or a worried remark on the haphazard disarray of the room in front of him, but shook his head instead and, with a grim expression, departed without another word. His footsteps echoed on the creaking panels of the wood floor.
“James,” Remus’s voice floated up from the base of the nearby staircase and into the small study a few minutes later. “You need to eat something. Come and fetch some stew before Dorcas eats it all.”
“Oi—Lupin,” a voice—presumably Dorcas’s—followed, “don’t make me jinx you.”
This interaction set off an anger that, even as it eroded his insides and burned scorch marks up his esophagus, James could recognize as ridiculous and irrational. There was no reason to be furious with Remus for caring about him, and even less so with Dorcas for such a benign pronouncement.
But even with this recognition came an intense, heart-pounding rage, such that he had to press his hands down flat onto the desk to keep them from curling into fists. How can you ask me to eat at a time like this? He thought. How can you focus on anything other than getting her back?
The idea of succumbing to the mechanics of his existence—eating, sleeping, dressing and undressing himself—seemed not only unnecessary, but even further, downright offensive. It was as though his vision had blurred the second Edgar Bones limped through the door, and in every moment to follow, the only things he could see with clarity were those that might aid him in securing Lily’s safe return. All those other facets of life would simply have to wait.
He let himself sit in this feeling for only a moment before the logical side of his brain took the reins, washing over this anger, a lapping wave against the sun-scorched sand. You’re not going to be of any help to her if you run yourself into the ground, it said, she needs you to take care of yourself.
“I’ll be down shortly,” James called. “Cheers.”
It was an hour before he proved the statement true.
By this time, the Order house was relatively calm—members sat at tables and on sofas, reading or drinking or talking in low voices. The windows had been opened to let a cool breeze into the syrupy heat of the crowded building.
Peter greeted him timidly at the base of the stairs. He looked haggard and drawn-in, purple shadows dragging his eyes downcast. James wondered if he, too, had devolved so much in appearance.
“Food’s gone cold,” he said, “but there’s still a bit left. I reckon a heating charm’ll do.”
James thanked him and turned to make his way toward the kitchen.
On his way was the large sunroom, turned into a stopgap infirmary over the course of the past week; beds lined the farthest wall, cauldrons boiled atop small fires in the opposite corner. Tables littered with textbooks and rolls of parchment were pushed together in the middle, eerily reminiscent of the evenings spent in the Gryffindor Common Room those years ago, all manner of students huddled together to study frantically for exams. He stopped briefly to examine it, lost in thought.
“Come to see me off into the afterlife?” Marlene McKinnon’s wry-humored voice forced James to blink out of his reverie. She was flat on her back on one of the closer beds, and her face was still pale, but she seemed in good enough spirits. “Sorry to say, chum—not happening this time.”
“Glad to hear it, Mar,” he said, and could only hope his sincerity came across. He was glad to hear it; Marlene was a great friend. He just wasn’t able to focus on such gladness at present.
Instead of elaborating, he let his gaze zigzag across the room.
Fabian and Gideon Prewett sat on adjacent beds, looking seemingly uninjured, handing back and forth a hand-rolled cigarette; Frank and Alice Longbottom stood in a far corner, whispering closely to each other, Frank’s hand rubbing circles on Alice’s arm; Mary MacDonald sat in a small, wooden chair, and behind her, Sirius was taking hearty sips from a bottle of Ogden’s Old, Remus beside him.
James caught his brother’s eye for a moment, and the two nodded at each other, each too awash in their own silent turbulence to do anything more, and James had to fight off the sting of surprise at the other man’s stoic expression.
The thought occurred belatedly, and with it, a churning sense of guilt: he could not—should not, in fact—claim to be the only one devastated by Lily’s capture.
James was missing his wife; that was true. But he’d forgotten that Sirius was missing his sister.
He turned away sharply from the sunroom when Sirius handed the bottle of firewhiskey to Mary, his face grim even in the face of her medical success, battle-worn, shadows walking the sunken pathway of his cheekbone. Mary took the bottle with a shaky hand, veins bright through skin scrubbed scrupulously clean of blood and essence of Dittany. She looked tired. They all did.
James knew the routine of what was to come next: Marlene, lying languidly in a makeshift hospital bed, grinning with all the effort it took to wash away the taste of a too-close brush with death; the sardonic I’m alive, you’re alive joking, the incredulous chuckling that always followed a near miss.
But the last thing he wanted to hear was laughter.
It was reprehensibly ironic, the way that James Potter—the noted purveyor and proprietor of laughter for most of his life—now wanted nothing more than to chase the sound away, to see it purged from his awareness. There would be no laughter in Lily’s absence. How could there be? Laughter was the crystalline emerald in her eyes on a cloudless day, the dimple pressed by joy into the silken slope of her cheek. The idea of trying to conjure it independently felt repugnant and irreconcilable.
Remus, ever-observant, was the one to catch his ungraceful swivel from the sight, and James could hear the breath he huffed as he walked over; too sad to be a sigh, too understanding for a scoff. When he reached James in the doorway, he clapped a hand on his shoulder with a meaningful look.
“Someone will get her back, James,” he murmured, “she’ll come back.”
James shrugged the offending hand off, brusque and terse and all those things he’d sworn never to be, those things he’d seen etched into other soldiers in the war. But the air in the room felt too tight; his clothes a size too small. Even his skin felt itchy and taut.
“I know she will.” He said. The tendons in his back shook and stretched as he rolled his shoulders. “I’m going to get her myself.”
September 5 th , 1979
The building was in view now, surrounded by wrought-iron gates and tendrils of ivy like char-darkened lace. It was old and gothic and probably cost a fortune, sitting garishly upon acres of well-maintained garden, supplanted onto vast green nature like the latent mark of a cigarette on flesh, mismatched and bruising. It reminded James of his parents’ house, if all the color was sucked from it and replaced with harsh greys and blacks; like someone had taken the world and shoved it through an old-fashioned camera.
Remus jogged toward him and matched his stride. “You’ve got the Cloak, haven’t you?” He asked. A small trickle of blood cascaded from above his right temple, the origins of which were lost in the dirty-blond thatch of his hair.
“In my robe—here.” James stuffed a hand under his Order robes and pulled the shimmering garment out, watching the air ripple and sway. He shoved it at Remus. “You take it.”
“What?”
“I said,” he huffed, “you take it. I don’t need it.”
“You don’t—” Remus’s bluster was interrupted by the tell-tale snap of the wind tearing open. Next to them, Sirius appeared, freshly apparated and grinning, and they kept onward once he fell into step. Remus continued: “what do you mean, you don’t need it!?”
“He doesn’t need what?” Sirius asked.
“He says he doesn’t need the Cloak!”
“What—Prongs, you need the Cloak!”
“I don’t need the fucking Cloak,” James hissed. The three Marauders approached the gate, trampling heatedly over grass and then, after a moment, onyx-tinted gravel. “I’m going in the bloody front door.”
“James—you can’t—the plan, remember?”
“Fuck the plan.” His Order robes felt suddenly too stifling, too weighty, and he shucked them off and shrunk them to fit in his trouser pocket without a spare thought. They were right in front of the gate, now. They’d have to spend at least a few minutes disengaging whatever complex locking charm kept it in place. “I’m getting my fucking wife back—not the Order, not Moody. Me.”
September 3 rd , 1979
“You can’t go in there, mate. You won’t keep your head.”
Sirius’s warning fell on deaf ears as James stalked toward the large, wooden door in his path. It was only when a set of hands pushed him back that he even deigned to turn his head and respond.
“Rosier’s in there,” he snapped, “they got fucking Rosier.”
“I know who’s in there. I was there when they brought him in, remember?”
He tried to start forward once again. “Then you should let—me—go.”
“Ah-ah-ah!” Sirius moved along with him, hands still pushing him away from the door. Next to him, Remus and Peter appeared, expressions mirroring Sirius’s. “You’re not going in, Prongs. End of it.”
“Fuck off. He knows—he’s got to know—”
“He does know.” A gruff voice interrupted as the door in question swung open, revealing Alastor Moody, who appeared about as cheerful as James felt. He hobbled forward and looked at each of the Marauders in turn. “If you’re wondering whether or not that daft sod in there knows the whereabouts of one Lily Potter—he most certainly does.”
James lurched forward at this, nauseous in his desperation, but stopped himself before he could do something physically offensive, like grab Moody by the lapels and shake him for information.
“Where is she? Did he tell you? Where are they hiding her—”
“Merlin’s trousers, boy!” Moody cut him off with no small amount of disdain. “Get a hold of yourself. I said he knows. Never said he told me.”
James balked, momentarily stunned. The urge to strangle the man was damn near uncontrollable. He sputtered for a few breaths before speaking again. “What the fuck are you talking about? What are you on about? Aren’t you supposed to be the bloody torture expert?”
“The only bleeding thing I am is needed in no fewer than three different counties at this exact moment,” Moody scoffed, “I’ve not got the time to break in a low-level Death Eater right now.” He looked James up and down, and for the briefest of seconds, a flicker of something like sympathy passed over his—functioning—features. “I’ve been called back to Hogwarts for the afternoon. I’ll be back this evening; I expect you can get something out of him by then.”
A beat followed. Out of the corner of his eye, James saw Sirius and Remus exchange a look: he’s leaving us alone with him?
Or, probably more accurately: he’s leaving James alone with him?
“Pettigrew!” Moody barked, and Peter yelped an affirmative noise. “Come with me—we’re going to discuss that vanishing cabinet situation I was telling you about.”
Peter, apparently used to this sort of unwitting deputization, simply deflated a bit and acquiesced, and after a moment, both men had departed down the hallway. This left James, Sirius, and Remus standing outside the door, the former of whom was now armed with Moody’s explicit permission to question the man on the other side.
“Alright, James, let’s think about this—”
Once again, the protest fell on deaf ears. James was already moving.
He stormed into the room, finally, with his friends at his heels, feeling sick and angry and inexplicably late, and then stopped short when he saw Rosier’s face.
Rosier’s face, which, as he looked at it, was not so much a face but an amalgamation of mismatched features, curves and slants and inclines, the topography of which should have—as it would have with anyone else—collectivized to form a human face, but unmistakably, in this specific case, did not.
There was something nonhuman about him, something dark and mythologically terrifying in such a way that boggarts were terrifying; unnamable and unrecognizable, yet so unnervingly familiar, like a long-repressed nightmare come to life. James had shared a school with this man for seven years. He had shared classrooms and library spaces with him. They had faced off against each other in Quidditch innumerable times, red against green, chaser against beater—some part of James’s mind wondered now if those meetings had been cheap rehearsals for this very moment, in which they would be adversaries once again.
But this time, instead of the end goal of their encounter being victory to one House over another, it would be to see which one of them would stand, in the end, over the other one’s grave.
Rosier looked up from the floor and met his gaze.
“Hello, Potter,” he sneered. For the first time, James registered bruises and cuts spanning from his brow down to his jaw, evidence—he was sure—of Moody’s interrogation tactics. The sight of them gave James a dark sort of satisfaction.
Good, he thought, you should hurt. You should be wounded.
It was inexorably true that the James from Hogwarts would never have thought such a thing, reveled so deeply in the pain of someone else. But this wasn’t Hogwarts anymore, and the world was different now, and good people were the ones who drew blood—not the ones who stood by in horror.
“You have information I want.” He stated after a steeling breath through his nose.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rosier replied. The smugness in his tone prompted an inelegant desire to clog James’s throat, such that he might quite like to leap forward and smash Rosier’s head against one of the paisley-printed walls. As if sensing this, Remus and Sirius both shifted forward, shoulders brushing up against his, silent reminders of their presence; of his personhood; of the need for him to stay calm.
“Oh,” Rosier continued, “I see you’ve got your bum boys here as well. But where’s the short one? He was always fun.”
“Shut the fuck up, would you, Rosier?” Sirius rolled his eyes and turned to the other two Marauders. “Gods, I’m not sure who thought capturing him was a good idea—not only is he too stupid to be trusted with any useful information, he’s actually under the illusion that he’s funny.”
“You fucking—”
Sirius turned back to the man in question. “Did I invite you to speak? I don’t remember hearing myself do so.”
“Enough, Sirius,” Remus warned.
“Yeah, enough.” James spoke for the first time to his friends. As they looked over at him, he unbuttoned his sleeves at the wrists, though his eyes never left the captive Death Eater in their midst, hazel meeting a cold, steely blue. This fucking tosser knows where Lily is.
He rolled each sleeve up to the elbow. “We’ve got work to do.”
* * *
Surprisingly, Rosier was still alive when the three men left the room some hours later.
This, James would gruffly admit, was the fault of Remus and Sirius, and he knew that—at some distant point in the future—he’d be glad for their intervention; glad for this tether back to humanity, away from who he was when the war cried out sharp across his body. The three were called into a small conference room only minutes after exiting the room where Rosier was held—in it stood Moody and Peter, the latter of whom looked a confusing mix of haggard and bored.
“I know more about vanishing cabinets than I’d ever cared to,” he muttered when Remus shot him a curious look.
Moody cleared his throat. “Alright, then. Let’s hear it.”
The three described to him everything they’d learned—the location and the layout of the large, looming house she was being kept in, all dragged out of Rosier either verbally or, in desperate moments, through their half-cocked attempts at Legilimency—and he hardly looked surprised, which somehow pissed James off even more.
“Birmingham, eh?” Moody snorted, like he was being recounted the ending to a story he’d once heard but couldn’t quite remember. “A bit industrial for the Death Eaters, but I believe it.”
“So?” James prodded. “When are we going? What are we doing?”
Moody cast him a scanning glance with his good eye, the other swiveling about the room. It was unnerving to look at.
“Are you sure you don’t need to sit this mission out, boy?”
Whatever indignant response James was about to exclaim was cut off by Sirius huffing a laugh over his shoulder. “Oh, good luck with that, Mad-Eye,” he chuckled. “If you need someone to help hold him back, I suggest you seek assistance elsewhere. I’m not trying to get my head bitten off.”
Another spared glance in James’s direction seemed to confirm this suspicion for the head Auror. He took a long breath that sounded like a drag from a cigarette.
“Right. Well, then—we’re going to need a plan of entry. You got out of him where they’re hiding her, didya?” James nodded. Moody paused, staring somewhere behind his head, like he was looking at a battle plan written in the wood-paneled walls. “I hope you’re prepared to map it out. We’re going to need a distraction event at least a kilometer away, and then I’ll send you three in to work on the anti-apparition wards. After that, I suppose, it’s just a matter of sending the signal and waiting for the cavalry to arrive.”
“How are we supposed to get in?” Remus asked. “They’ve got to have the house guarded like mad. Rosier said they’re keeping her there—” he glanced at James, as though unsure if he could say this information aloud, despite the fact that James had already heard it straight from the source, “—they’re keeping her there to make their poisons. Not like they’re going to just leave her there unwatched.”
Moody pointed at James with his cane. “You’ve got an Invisibility Cloak, haven’t you?”
James nodded.
“Then there you have it. But I can’t emphasize this enough to you whelps: stealth is absolutely key.”
September 5 th , 1979
The front double-doors of the large mansion burst open with a mighty slam, and James Potter stalked inside like Death itself, wand drawn, come to collect.
He was barely a step into the building when a curse came flying at his chest—and then another, and another. Blue, yellow, purple. He planted his feet.
His wand slashed across the air in a wide, punishing arc, and all three spells dissipated in tiny, sizzling fireworks against it, useless, impotent vestiges of too-weak magic. They’d have to try harder than that. He took another step.
“You dare come here, blood traitor?” A voice roared from his left, and in the next moment, three cloaked figures came rushing through an arched doorway. He turned to meet them.“You think you’ll make it out alive?”
“It’s not really me I’m worried about,” he replied.
He leveled his wand at the men, and then it began.
Deflect, counter; one step to the left, further into the entryway; deflect, deflect, shield.
The three men spread out in front of him, two emerging from behind the first like bat’s wings, extending out to his left and right. They were trying to back him up against the wall—to immobilize him.
Not going to happen.
Deflect, counter, stun; one man down, cloak billowing. He crumpled on the floor, dark eyes vacant through his mask, unseeing.
“CRUCIO!” Shouted the second man, but he was too slow, the incantation too delayed on his lips. James spun out of the way, and the stream of red shattered a mirror behind where he’d been standing.
“Bombarda!” James shouted back—the two men threw themselves to the ground, narrowly missing a small explosion that rattled the foundation of the room.
“Incarcerous!”
“Reducto!”
“Impedimenta!”
Dueling, oftentimes, was ballet: choreographed, achingly physical, with a specific flow and cadence. The rhythm of the spells nearly followed an eight-count beat, demarcated by the hiss of magic leaving wand, by footsteps back or forward.
This duel was harsh and brutal, crude and raw and unpolished. Spells flew wayward in every direction; bounced from shields, torn from their paths, swallowed by bigger, brighter spells. There was no rhythm, only chaos, harsh breathing and swear words cut off by frantic casting or ducking or, in the case of the second man, cut off by a curse sent into his chest, cut off by his own blood, bubbling up his throat, spilling between lips and mask.
He fell with a gurgle. The third man leapt over him with a cry.
I want you to fucking try, James thought as he ducked under a Killing Curse that flew past his ear, I want you to fucking try and keep me from her.
* * *
The room where James finally found her was freezing and barren of any furniture, tucked deep in the basement of the building, next to their small potions lab. He nearly missed it as he tore from room to room; it was only when he heard the sound of her breathing—her breathing, he’d know it anywhere, even in calamitous noise—that he stopped before a small, offset doorway. He took a deep, steadying breath, trying to quell the rising emotions, grounding himself with physical sensation; his boots on the damp ground, the sweat sticking his shirt to his body, the cut across his arm courtesy of that blasted slicing curse of Severus Snape’s invention.
The third man had thrown it only minutes ago; it was the last thing he would ever cast.
Shaking the thought away, James pushed open the door and rushed in, and a strangled cry passed through his lips before his brain gave it permission to do so. On the ground was Lily, head lolled forward, hands clasped together in front of her knees as she leaned against the stone wall.
It was then that he suffered from the acute sensation of two conflicting emotions hitting each other headfirst.
The first was limb-sagging relief, because there she was in this dark, damp space, red hair covering half her face and spilling over her shoulders.
She was alive. She was alive, alive, alive.
But the second he got close enough to her to see the magical bindings digging red marks into her wrists, close enough to watch her drag a stuttered breath through blood-chapped lips, this relief hit a wall of cool, spine-straightening fury, the kind that crawled through his sternum, that left him in small doses through every breath.
Lily’s chest inflated shakily in a long drag for air, like the breath was rattling around her ribs. James started forward at the sight of it.
“Lily?” He whispered, horror-struck.
She stirred lightly at the noise, and then, possibly at the tug of her wrists against the bindings—or maybe any other number of injuries inflicted upon her—she let out a feeble moan of pain. Her eyes stayed shut through the entire movement, as though unable to open, even when presented with sufficient stimulus to trigger such a reaction. She hadn’t yet recognized his presence.
He wanted to see Voldemort himself, to make him answer for this. He wanted to burn the earth.
She was less than a meter away when he whispered again: “Lily? Baby, are you—”
A beam of dark blue light screamed toward him from across the room. One small flick of his wand sent it shooting up and through the ceiling, leaving only scorch marks and the creaks of loose floorboards in its wake. Bits of dust and debris floated down from the new, gaping hole above them, swirling about the room in loose spirals.
James turned to see a masked figure standing in the doorway, wand pointed at him.
“Drop your wand,” the man—for it was a man, that much he now knew—said. “Drop your wand, and I’ll think about letting you live.”
James almost let out a laugh, but he stifled it at the last moment before it breached the barrier of his lips. He pivoted on his feet slowly, angling himself between the man and Lily, who was drifting in and out of consciousness on the dirt-covered floor.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said calmly. The man stiffened—maybe he’d only just recognized James. Maybe he didn’t like the tone of his voice. “But I’ll tell you this: if you run now, I won’t come after you once I’ve freed my wife.”
Whatever Death Eaters possessed in cowardice, they most assuredly made up for in gall. The man scoffed, his masked face jolting upward with the movement, and waved his wand lazily at James.
“So, you’re the mudblood-fucker I’ve been hearing about, then?” He took a step forward. “James, isn’t it? She’s been saying your name in her sleep. Been a right bitch trying to keep her quiet.”
If someone were to ask James Potter what spell he next threw at this unnamed wizard, he would be helpless to answer. He had no idea what it was, or if there was an incantation for it, or if it even originated from his wand.
He knew only two things: first, he knew the rage that flooded his body, the coil snapping through every atom in his being, a star in supernova—the roar he let out wasn’t enough of an outlet, surely. Surely this rage would tear the earth in two, create a black hole; surely he would be a human no more in its wake.
The other thing he knew came later. After the rage subsided, James was certain that where the man had stood just moments ago, now there was only ash and the smell of smoke, one that forced James to cough into his sleeve, shock and adrenaline warring in his nervous system. His eyes found the man after a brief period of searching: laid out in the hallway, blasted so far back he was barely visible.
“Fucking—”
He whipped around to see Lily staring at him, fully awake, eyes and mouth open in muted shock. He made it two staggering steps toward her before his knees gave out, falling in front of her as his hands flew to her face, brushing her hair back and scanning for further signs of distress. He took out his wand and cast a silent diffindo and freed her wrists from their bindings. Lily continued to stare at him through the entire process, unblinking.
“James?” She whispered. “James, how—how did you—you’re here?”
Gods, but had he thought he’d felt relief when he first saw her? That was nothing of the sort. That was a shadow of the real thing, because this—this, this sensation of looking into her eyes, of crying out her name and seeing her open her mouth to respond—was relief, in such a capacity he hadn’t thought himself capable.
It took him a good, few seconds to realize he was talking; it took another few to blink back the tears in his eyes.
“You’re alive,” he was hissing, frantic, fingers dragging over eyebrows and temples and carding softly through long, red hair. “I was going fucking insane. I knew they’d—but you’re alive.”
“You came,” she said, and then repeated, as though the first time hadn’t solidified the reality. “You came.”
He nodded quickly, unable to form a response, for there were far too many running laps in his brain. Of course I did, silly girl. You think I’d ever let them take you? I’ll always come for you.
Lily sagged against him as she rubbed her wrists. James tucked her head into his shoulder, breathing deeply, feeling the air in his lungs anew, like it hadn’t fully reached them before this moment.
“You’re hurt, though,” he said as it came to him. “Where are you hurt? And your wand, where’s your wand?”
“Oh. Well, I told them where to shove it when they tried to make me their potions-master, so they’ve used the cruciatus,” Lily admitted with a grimace, and something dark reared up in James’s brain; he let out a seething breath through clenched teeth. “But that’s all—and I think it’s been a day or two since. The bindings have done the worst of it. Everything else is from the mission.”
“And your wand?”
Her brow furrowed as she tucked her bottom lip behind her teeth, deep in thought. “I think…I think they’ve put it in a box upstairs. Some locking charm on it.”
James nodded. He’d send a Patronus to Sirius and Remus, tell them to retrieve the box and bring it back to the safe-house. He was sure that they had finished breaking through the apparition wards by now—knowing the two of them, they’d finished long ago and had since been fighting about what to do next: Sirius, arguing to follow James into the house and blast the building to pieces until he found them; Remus, yelling back that they should have already sent the signal to the Order by now.
He pressed a kiss to Lily’s forehead and looped his arm around her shoulders, rubbing her arm and listening to the sound of her breathing. They could have taken her anywhere—not just England, not even just Europe, but anywhere in the magical or muggle world—and he would have found her just the same.
Through the small window near the ceiling of the basement, light began to trickle in from outside, soft and orange, dappling the cold room with spots of warmth. The sun was setting. He’d not spend another night away from her; not for as long as he was able.
“Take me home, James,” Lily murmured.
It was the easiest order he’d ever had to follow.