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“I genuinely can’t believe it’s come to this. Looking back, all I can think is where did we go wrong?” James laments. He leans back in his chair, forcing the legs to tip back; he’d have preferred a recliner but Lily never stopped fighting him on the subject, calling them garish until he gave in and resigned himself to a life of discomfort.
Just about everything is uncomfortable these days. Late December, the Potters have taken to remaining in doors whenever possible. The winds howl through Godric’s Hollow at night, beating against their door, testing its sturdiness, and lashing unlucky travelers skin until it’s chapped and raw. By morning, the winds die down but the air is bitter. A film of crusted ice covers their lawn, immaculate and well-groomed by Lily in the summer months, so that James blasts a loud path each morning as his boots crunch through to the dried up grass hidden below. With the cold comes the aches and pains of age. James swears that his old injury from when he was a soldier, an auror – a shattered femur, patched up with shoddy healing charms on the battlefield and then more deliberately tended once Frank was able to drag him back to Mungo’s – acts up in the cold. The healers all say such a thing is impossible, but it doesn’t stop him from griping at loud volumes to everyone who stops by to visit.
“We have no one to blame but ourselves,” Lily sighs wearily. “We should have skipped all those lessons on nobility, on citizenship. I don’t know a single mother of a Hufflepuff who has to deal with this. Oh, and the Ministry. Of course I blame the Ministry, too.”
James snaps his fingers in agreement. As always, he is all too happy to blame the damned Ministry.
Not that they’re too terrible he supposes. The pension they pay him for his twenty years of service as an auror is excellent if unnecessary, and the new Minister of Magic has done wonders for society, ushering in a new era of civic discourse and tolerance for all. A nation that has successfully rebuilt itself. The tragedies of his youth long forgotten by all but those who suffered on the frontlines alongside them.
“Are you sure you don’t want to invite Sirius? I can sew up another mask before we leave. It wouldn’t be a bother,” Lily offers.
Her fingers move deftly as she maneuvers her knitting needles through the thick fabric, almost finished but still resembling nothing more than a blob with two gaping holes. These days Lily knits more and more frequently, the house filling up with her creations – decorative owls and scarves for the children in the neighborhood and more socks than James could possibly ever make use of – but James sees how her fingers have slowed from when she first started, back when she was only thirty-six and self-conscious about her new hobby, about anything that might suggest that they’d become old and dull.
“We’ll have Sirius round for dinner. This is a family matter. We go down as a team, just the two of us,” James says.
“You and me,” Lily says.
Then she stuffs the finished mask over his head.
“You and me,” James agrees.
Deciding upon the right deed, crime if they were being honest, had been a grueling process. Fueled by several glasses of wine, Lily and James had argued well into the early hours of the morning about what to steal or who to harass. They needed something with high visibility, something that say the Head of the Auror Department couldn’t possibly ignore, but still nothing that resulted in unwanted collateral damage. Preferably, they hoped for something that wouldn’t end in Azkaban.
In one of their darker moments, Lily had hiccupped that she was fully prepared to risk it. It had been at least forty, maybe forty-five, years since the Potters had been so invigorated.
The War of Triumph Museum, more often called the Museum of the Fallen by the Potters’ compatriots, was built in Swindon. The political maneuverings that had ensued as each member of the Wizengamont fought to have the museum built closer to their homesteads had been legendary if completely meaningless. An entire terminal had been built in what would appear to muggles as an abandoned warehouse to floo in any visitors.
The building itself always appears a bit jarring at first glance, a gleaming, three-story structure plopped in the middle of an abandoned warehouse district where all of the other buildings are windowless and decaying. The War of Triumph Museum could never be described as windowless; the sun as it reflected off of the hundreds of reflective windows was said to have blinded at least a hundred geese flying south since it was first build. Symbolic of the end of darkness, light had been central to the architects’ vision for the museum. To contrast the white severity of the walls, the roof was ruddy and sloping, the kind of roof one pictured upon a particularly homey library. All, purebloods and muggleborns alike, would be welcome inside.
James rather likes the museum. When it first opened back in 1988, he’d attended the swanky gala as one of the guests of honor, but the champagne and praise of his peers had failed to hold his attention. Instead, he’d walked through the halls of the museum alone, eyes tracing with wonder the names of the fallen that were carved into the walls, gently tracing the petals of the flowers that bloomed for each of the deceased. For having fought in the war, James quickly learned that he knew very little about it. Before the exhibit on Voldemort, he hadn’t known that the man was born Tom Riddle or that he’d been a half-blood. The display on international support informed him of the expansive networks in Ireland and how they’d helped to smuggle muggleborns out of the country and into the far north, territory which was unpenetrated by death eaters.
As much as James likes the museum, that’s how much Lily hates it. She left the opening night frowning and desolate, tears drying in her cleavage from the crying she hadn’t bothered to stymy.
Tonight, they are breaking into the museum’s hallowed halls.
Security is almost embarrassingly lax, and Lily feels a moment’s pang of regret as she considers the embarrassing headlines that the auror department is sure to face in the morning. Concern aside, Lily still runs her wand along the hinges of the back door. She breathes the charms she learned throughout her career as a cursebreaker at the security enchantments. The key to these things is to coax the door into opening, to sway it to her side, and Lily has always been an excellent negotiator, sure to garner the empathy of everyone she meets. Inanimate objects not proving an exception.
“Back when I was running the department, we never would have left this place unguarded We’d have put a griffin on it at the very least,” James says mournfully.
Lily does not have to look up from the door to know that James is shaking his head back and forth at the oversight. “Darling, when would you have ever used a griffin to guard a museum?”
“We used griffins all the time!” James protests. “Excellent at guarding things. And they’re more clever than vicious. Honestly, that quadruple X classification always struck me as a bit overcautious.”
“I could argue that your idea of the appropriate amount of caution for any given situation has never matched up with others’,” Lily hums. “And you still would never have posted a griffin at a museum. It’s a soft target.”
Grumpily, James concedes, “A house elf at the very least then.”
“A common dog, more like,” Lily says.
The door opens with only a whimper. Despite the security oversight, it’s clear that the museum is well-maintained. No creaky hinges here.
James takes the lead through the maze of exhibits, each one afforded its own room in the labyrinthine structure, because Lily hasn’t visited in over thirty years and doesn’t have the slightest inkling of where the Harry Potter room has been moved. James does. Not that he ever takes the time to visit the shrine to his eldest son, but it would be impossible to miss. Alongside the tribute to the dead, it’s the most popular exhibit to this day.
Disturbingly enough, the room has been enchanted to look like their first house in Godric’s Hollow. The house that they had called a home before Voldemort had blown himself up and their charming cottage with him. Everything is an exact replica, from the placement of the photographs on the mantelpiece, the Dursleys’ family photo hidden in the far back behind one of Remus drunkenly singing karaoke to an aquarium of frightened fish (a relic from his twentieth birthday party) to the golden snitches dangling from the mobile above Harry’s crib.
Lily trails her finger along the fraying wallpaper, rich brown stripes with lemon stenciling above. She recoils when it the abrasive lumps from where the glue has dried underneath feels the same as she remembers it. Maybe the mind plays tricks, memory is a strange thing. After all, thirty-nine years have passed since that night when Lord Voldemort had tried to murder her family, and yet she knows that everything here is perfect. The curators have done a fantastic job of mimicking that night.
“So, what should we take?” Lily asks.
Either her voice is not as strong as she would like or James can sense her distress because he walks over and embraces her from behind. Lily relaxes backwards into his arms, to the safety they still promise. The longing for what was stolen that night disappears. Because James is still here. Her children are all alive and thriving. Voldemort was a terrible deviation from the path her life was meant to take, but he was a hurdle they had crossed together, and she does not regret the life she has built now.
“It almost doesn’t feel like stealing, seeing as all this stuff was ours once,” James says, breath fanning strands of hair, escaped from the confines of her mask, out from her face. “Let’s take the crib. Who knows, maybe we’ll try for another baby?”
Lily elbows James rather indelicately in the gut as punishment for his waggling eyebrows. The mere suggestion of a fourth child makes her sweat. At their age! But she doesn’t disagree with stealing the crib. It’s big, it’s cumbersome, and it’s their best chance at tripping up one of the alarms.
They charm it to levitate behind them and stroll out of the museum hand in hand. A nice, elderly couple out for a walk in the dead of night.
“Honestly, I’m not even sure how to get caught at this point,” James laughs.
“In a muggle museum there would be a trip wire or something,” Lily says in agreement.
They have to search for a bit but eventually they find a portrait of Dumbledore that they are able to cajole into helping them. The depiction agrees after very little convincing to dash off to his other stead in the Ministry and raise the alarm about a band of masked deviants trying to vandalize the Potter exhibit; he suspects they may be rogue death eater sympathizers. Lily winks at the portrait, but in her mask she wonders if the gesture loses some of its meaning.
Exactly three minutes later they are arrested.
Exactly four minutes later they are unmasked and the unfortunate auror on duty that night, a young man of only twenty-eight still trying to forge his place in the department, realizes just what he’s dealing with.
Exactly fourteen minutes later, the Potters are seated in a waiting room while the Head of the Auror Department is summoned to deal with them.
Unshackled as the young auror had been to terrified to so much as touch them, Lily and James Potter share a high-five.
There aren’t a lot of people on duty that night. It’s unlikely there are more than two dozen people in the entire Ministry. To start, it’s only four in the morning and even the most intrepid Ministry officials, like that Percy Weasley who heads up the Department of Transportation and has taken to crafting policy and weeding through memos on magic carpets and floo powder ratios with a zest that is unparalleled in modern memory, need sleep.
More damningly, it’s Christmas morning. For most families, the day will dawn with the merry cries of children and the indulgent smiles of the parents who can’t begrudge their children’s tears of gratitude to Saint Nicholas. There will be peppermint and the tang of peeled oranges pulled from overstuffed stockings, Christmas trees strung with enough color to dazzle the most distractible toddler into a few minutes of shocked silence, toes warmed by the fire and throats scraped raw from caroling.
The Potters have every intention of experiencing every single one of these wonders today. But their day will start with something a little bit different.
“Are you two completely mad?”
Having fallen asleep on her husband’s shoulder while they waited, Lily blinks awake. Her oldest son is glaring down at her, hands propped on his hips like a disappointed matron. Lily wonders whether he picked that particular trait up from her or from Minerva. Keeping a straight face is already proving difficult and they’ve barely begun.
“Good morning, Harry. Happy Christmas,” James says pleasantly.
Harry gives his father a very dirty look, having pegged him as the mastermind behind their shenanigans. History may be on his side, but Harry’s wrong in this. Man and wife plotted this up together, the idea blooming into existence organically so that neither could possibly remember who had first voiced it aloud.
“I just got a floo, telling me that my parents have been arrested for grand theft. Breaking and entering into government property. Vandalizing a memorial dedicated to the fallen heroes of the War of Triumph. It is not a happy Christmas,” Harry barks at them. He raises one finger at a time as he tallies off their crimes. They sound quite naughty when it’s all laid out like that.
“You’re right, dear. It is not a happy Christmas,” Lily replies saccharinely, and Harry tenses at her tone. “It’s not a happy Christmas because our son, our first most beloved son didn’t take the day off to come visit his poor parents. Oh no, our son decided that he had to work through the holidays, forget that we are cold and lonely out in Godric’s Hollow, all alone. Forget that I labored for six hours to bring him into this world. Without so much as a card, our son has abandoned us to cry into our Christmas pudding.”
“Not a happy Christmas indeed,” James chimes in helpfully.
Harry rubs at his beard just like James always did when he felt uncomfortable. Back when James had a beard. Once upon a time, Lily had liked the way the hair had scraped against her thighs, but now she likes his cheeks smooth, likes to trace the way his skin is changing, the lines that etch around his mouth and cement once and for all that he has lived a life full of laughter and joy.
“First of all,” Harry begins, failing to not sound chagrined. “I sent you a card and a Christmas present, which I know that you’ve already opened.”
“Should have been delivered in person,” James answers immediately.
Undeterred, Harry continues, “Second of all, you’re not celebrating Christmas alone. You’ll have Darlene and Philip over as well as Uncle Remus and Sirius.”
“But you’re my favorite child,” Lily stresses. “Darlene and Philip are bores. They’ve never defeated so much as one measly dark lord.”
James tries to transform his chuckle into a gruff cough. He’ll have to slip an extra few galleons into the other kids’ presents this year to make up for that little lie. He’ll never hear the end of it, especially from Phillip if he hears his mother so much as hinted that Harry is the favorite.
“And thirdly,” Harry practically shouts at them, fingers pressed deeply into his temples, hard enough to color the skin red. “I’ll be over after my shift’s done. Gin and I will bring the kids by for dinner, and we’ll see you then.”
All of Harry’s reasoning falls on deaf ears. In unison, James and Lily shake their heads. This will not do. Not do at all.
“You mean to say our grandchildren are going to open their presents when we’re not there to watch? Simply unacceptable,” James says like the situation’s entirely outside of their hands.
Wearily, Harry sinks into the chair opposite them. It’s a chair that’s usually occupied by an interrogator, hounding the criminals on the other side of the table until they confess to their crimes. Now the tables have turned and the criminals stand righteous on behalf of all the underappreciated parents of the world.
James feels a tiny sliver of guilt for the “trouble” they’ve caused as he studies his son: the bags under his eyes are heavy, his cheeks gaunt like he’s been skipping meals again, and Harry’s hair is whipped into a mess that even James classifies as disarray. Overworked and overstressed, the consequences of heading the auror department even during peace time. As much as James understands though, he also knows that the only way to survive the wear and tear of the job is to balance it with family. James had struggled walking that tightrope at first, but after Lily had threatened to march down to the Ministry and tender his resignation herself unless he made more time for the family, James had made striking the balance a priority. And it had worked. Now Harry just needs to learn to do the same.
“Our holiday plans aside, you’re here because you committed several felonies. I don’t know what you were thinking?” Harry sighs.
“It was our crib,” Lily says unrepentantly. “Did they ask our permission before they made a creepy shrine to our house, hmm? No, no they did not. I think we were perfectly within our rights.”
“No, no you were not, and I can bring in some legal counsel if you need the nuances explained to you,” Harry says.
“If you must know, your new secretary refused to schedule us an appointment with you,” James says matter-of-factly. “We were forced to take matters into our hands.”
“You did all this because I told my secretary not to patch you through to me,” Harry whispers in pure disbelief.
“Ha! I told you that the secretary was just following orders!” James bleats victoriously. “Pay up, baby. You owe me a galleon.”
“Damn, and I really thought she was just being stubborn,” Lily grouses as she digs through the pockets of her robes to settle the bet. Watching their antics, Harry triples the pace of his temple rubbing.
Harry looks every bit like he wishes he was still standing so that he can drop into his chair all over again. Lily makes a mental note to check with Ginny to see if he is having trouble sleeping again. Maybe he’d benefit from a sleeping potion. Of all her children, Harry has always struggled the most with lasting through the night. Phil sleeps like it’s his favorite past time, and while it takes Darlene a while to fall asleep each night, once she is out, she’s out. Harry was always the one who would come creeping into their bedroom at three in the morning, blanket trailing him like a tail. James would never turn him away, letting him heft his little limbs up onto their bed and curl up between them every night if he so wished. Eventually, it had been Lily who started to set boundaries, worried that Harry would never learn regular sleeping patterns if they continued to indulge him. It had all but broken her heart the first time she heard him sniffling outside the door like a hound left out in the cold by unloving masters.
“I don’t…you broke several laws,” Harry says.
“Do you intend to charge us for these countless evil deeds?” James asks. “Because while I would like to go home and see my other children this Christmas, I can’t lie. It would be spectacular to see the Wizengamont try to figure out what to do with us.”
“Hardened criminals like us? I’d say a year in Azkaban at least,” Lily muses.
“No one would put you on trial,” Harry bites out as if they need to be reminded that they are heralded as heroes throughout the wizarding world. First for their participation in the Order, then for Harry’s miraculous defeat of Voldemort as a baby, and then for James’ unerring service throughout his career. No one is putting them on trial indeed.
Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be hysterical to watch them flounder as they try to sort out what to do with them.
“It’s nepotism, expecting you’ll get off just because I’m the department head,” Harry mutters.
“No, nepotism was you taking over when I retired. Advancement due to familial connections. This would be a blatant disregard for the law in favor of letting your elderly parents spend Christmas at home,” James corrects. “Oh, and also it’s bullying. On our end at least, because you are absolutely going home with us.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Harry says, “Dad, I can’t just go home. Someone needs to run the office even on Christmas day. Crime doesn’t exactly take a holiday.”
“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about all of those wild criminals who rampage across the island every Christmas. Always such a busy day for the aurors,” James says drily.
The office was so barren when they were led into the holding room that Lily swore she saw a tumbleweed drift past. No one else’s son had felt the compulsion to work through Christmas.
“Someone still needs to run the office!” Harry says.
“What about that lovely, young man? The one who arrested us,” Lily suggests. “He seemed very competent and was more than gracious when he took our mugshots.”
“Doyle took your mugshots?” Harry’s eyes widen to the size of sickles. “I mean…Doyle’s green, in his twenties. Great auror but unexperienced.”
“I understand. In wizarding history, no one’s ever proven competent against dark wizards before the age of thirty,” James drawls sarcastically.
Using the table for leverage, Lily pushes herself up and out of her seat; these Ministry-bought chairs are far too low to the ground. Her body doesn’t follow her commands like it once did.
“Careful, Lils. You don’t want Harry to have to stun you,” James laughs. “It’s procedure when the detaineee starts to approach.”
Feeling pretty confident that her son will not raise a wand to her, Lily rounds the table. She stops before her son and stares him directly in his eyes. Her eyes. That’s what everyone has always said. Darlene has her chin, Phil her nose and hair, but it’s her first boy, her sweet Harry that was born with the same striking green eyes. She can remember staring into them after he was first born, too small to lift his head up from where he slept, too underdeveloped to see more than a meter in front of him. She’d held his tiny hand in hers and stared into those eyes and known that they understood each other already. Harry may have yet to learn to read or walk or string a sentence together, but mother and son shared a mutual understanding, written in his keen, emerald eyes: Lily would never, ever abandon him.
“Love, come celebrate Christmas with us. We hardly ever see you anymore,” Lily says gently, petting flat the mane that her son calls hair and then repeating the process when it springs back to life a second later. “I understand that your work is extremely important, and we’re both very sorry to have taken such drastic measures, but you’ll regret it if you miss Christmas. Come home.”
The moment Harry closes his eyes, leaning more fully into her touch, Lily knows that she’s won. Covertly, she gives James a thumbs up behind her back.
“I have to finish up some paperwork, but I could be over with the kids by eleven,” Harry relents.
“Ten,” James says immediately, crossing over to join them as well.
They must have thoroughly broken their son because he doesn’t fight it for a second. “Fine. Ten.”
Their moment of family bonding is cut short when Doyle comes bursting back into the room looking as harried as any auror in the history of the Ministry. “Sir! There’s a situation…where, um…someone’s broken into the Ministry and vandalized the portrait of Minister Granger.”
Harry sparks back to life, triumphant and grinning. “See! I told you there was crime on Christmas! I suppose I can’t come home now. It’s probably a separationist. Best to handle it personally.”
Doyle coughs uncomfortably, “Sir…the suspect in custody is your wife.”
Silence descends on the room. Like a marionette with his strings cut, Harry slumps fully onto the table, forehead making unpleasant contact with the unyielding wood and not minding the pain at all. Lily takes to patting at his back consolingly while Doyle rushes from the room.
“Mum, Dad, did you put Gin up to this?” Harry asks, voice muffled by the table.
“Nope, we acted alone. Never said a word to anyone,” James says.
Cheerfully, Lily adds, “I always knew I liked that Ginevra. Clever girl.”
The Potters begin to snicker, their laughter growing louder and louder until even the sound of Harry’s put-upon sighing is drowned out. Diaphragm convulsing like a trampoline with each burst of laughter, James worries that he might somehow pull a muscle in his abdomen. He leans on the table for support. Lily’s laughter emerges from an open mouth, all of her well-tended, white teeth on display.
James looks at his wife, sixty-years-old and still somehow more beautiful that the day they were married, with her hair going dark and a smile so brilliant the only match for it is her mind, and he can’t resist pulling her close. Something in him still hums whenever she’s near, an awareness, a pleasantness that he’ll never be able to replicate with someone else. Will never try.
“Got to go bail out Ginny. See you at ten,” Harry says.
Rather dramatically (and James hasn’t the slightest idea where he may have gotten that tendency from), Harry leaps to his feet and makes for the door. Even after a lifetime of embarrassing exposure to it, he’s never grown accustomed to the sight of his parents kissing like the world is about to end, like the final credits are about to roll at the end of a romcom.
After forty-three years together, Lily and James haven’t gotten used to it either. And as their lips meet, everything feels brand new.