Chapter Fourteen

A/N: No reviewers.

Lilly awoke suddenly to a loud bang outside her bedroom window. For a moment, she remained in the haze that the clutches of sleep had left upon her, unaware of what was happening just a couple of dozen feet away from her. But that haze soon faded, and she stood from her bed, running to the window to see the horrors that had begun to unfold outside her home.

Flames. That was the first thing that the young woman saw, and the first thing that she recognised as danger. The fire came right up to her front door, licking at the paintwork outside the house, and spread across half the garden, moving further with every second that passed.

Despite the increasingly high temperatures, Lilly felt as if she had been frozen to the spot. The flames were dancing, the reds and oranges of the fire contrasting with the emerald green of the young girl's eyes. Her mind had become empty, she had no clue what to do now. This was His revenge.

'He's punishing me.' she summarised immediately. 'He offered me a place in the ranks, I refused, and now Voldemort is going to kill me.'

But then a thought struck her. There had been many opportunities for the man to kill her in the past, but he had not done. Her home had been vulnerable, as it was surrounded by Muggles, and the Death Eaters could have easily penetrated the protective charms. So, why attack her now? Something must have changed. But what?

And then her mind was drawn to the box, hidden beneath a loose floorboard and under many protection charms to keep it out of sight and danger. The box that contained the most lethal weapon in all of the Wizarding World. The Elder Wand.

Harry had asked her to destroy once the Battle of Hogwarts had ended, but somehow, she could not bring herself to do it. That wand had been so incredible, one of the only tangible links to what most thought was a mere fairytale. To destroy that would have been to destroy part of the amazing Tale of the Three Brothers, a story that children had loved for hundreds of years. It would have been to destroy the first real link she had felt with the Wizarding World, when she had read the book for the first time. She couldn't do that, she simply couldn't.

And so she had lied to Harry and said she'd destroyed it, for his peace of mind and her own. If he had known the truth, he would have tried to steal it and destroy it himself. He could not have done so, of course, as only the master of the Elder Wand could possibly snap it, but he would have tried to convince her to do so for every waking moment until she did it in his sight. It had seemed to be the best option at the time to keep it a secret. Now, though, Lilly was not so sure.

This would be an important part of their battle plans, if she told the remainders of Dumbledore's Army and the Order of the Phoenix that she still possessed the Elder Wand. With it in her possession, they could bring down all of the Death Eaters. But if it wound up in Voldemort's hands, he could bring down the whole of the Wizarding World.

Bringing herself back to reality, the young woman bolted underneath her bed, muttering the charms to remove the floorboard and retrieving the Elder Wand from its box, waving it and casting a silent spell, hoping beyond hope that the effects would indeed be strong enough to stop the powerful heat of the magical flames, which were licking now ever closer to her window frame.

Luckily, her prayers to Merlin paid off, and the heat disappeared almost instantly, taking the light of the flames down with it. She took a moment to breathe a deep sigh of relief, before she turned to replace the box in the hole beneath the floorboards, her movements as dazed as her expression.

The surreality of the night's events had not been lost on the girl, but she managed to force herself to see past that, in favour of attempting to work out the reasons behind such an attack. 'It just happened so quickly.' she thought to herself. 'There must have been a reason why.'

Dozens of thoughts ran through Lilly's hand, dozens of reasons why Voldemort could have ordered this to happen. Was he trying to make a point? Was he trying to get to Harry? Was it revenge for her father, her brother, even her? Or did he simply take an opportunity when he saw it? Nothing that she thought of rang out as true, but she could not think of anything more plausible.

For now, Lilly tried to disregard the potentially catastrophic chain of events, hoping to slow her racing heart enough to allow sleep to claim her once again. She sought the comfort of her warm bedclothes, though they had long since turned cold, even with the blazing heat that the fire had brought, but no matter how hard she tried, sleep would not come. 'It's probably for the best.' she thought. 'I would only have had nightmares anyway.'

And so, in the time before the comforting sunlight would stream through her windows, Lilly whispered into the darkness, hoping that she had not imagined the figure she had seen in her bedroom not long before, and that she would appear again soon. She had never realised how much the woman's presence had meant to her until she had found her and lost her again.

"Help me, Mum." she whispered to the cold and empty room, wishing for a voice to answer her through the darkness. "I need you."

A/N: A bit of a filler chapter probably, and I have a bit of writer's block on this story, but I'm working through it. Hope you enjoyed, and please review!