Previously in the Darklyverse: After Peter turned himself in as a Death Eater spy, the Ministry arrested most of the Order, including Remus, who anticipated a werewolf transformation. Lucius Malfoy was named interim Minister of Magic when Albert Runcorn was ousted.

xx

June 7th, 1982: James Potter

With his hunched posture and hapless demeanor, Reginald Cattermole looks incredibly out of place in James and Lily's cluttered living room. His sandy hair is stuck to his sweaty forehead, and he's gripping each elbow in the opposite hand, which makes him look like he's either physically exhausted or anxious—in context, probably the latter. It's awkward having him here, of course—there's no way around that. They haven't had a damn word to say to each other since James last saw him at his wedding to Mary, where he told Cattermole "congratulations" and proceeded to ignore him the rest of the night. But Cattermole is James's last lifeline to the rest of the British wizarding world, and James, Lily, and Sirius need him.

It's sort of remarkable how almost every British wizard the three of them are in contact with is a member of the Order of the Phoenix and, therefore, is currently being detained at the British Ministry of Magic. James doesn't know how, but Peter has apparently been keeping tabs on who's joined the Order since he went into hiding, which means that even the Weasleys, the Tonkses, and Kingsley Shacklebolt have been found out and captured. Getting Cattermole to agree to pass along information was a long shot, and James is sure that Cattermole's not happy about being roped into the legal dilemmas of the vigilantes who, as far as he's probably concerned, got his wife killed.

But for whatever reason—loyalty to Mary, probably—Cattermole agreed to help them, and so Sirius looped him into the Fidelius Charm protecting James, Lily, and Harry shortly after they discovered that almost everybody they know is under arrest. None of them is getting the Daily Prophet—they're supposed to be laying low, after all—so it wasn't until last night, when Remus didn't show up for the full moon, that they realized anything was wrong. They sent a whole host of talking Patronuses to half the Order over the course of the night, once it was daytime in Britain—nothing with any sensitive information, which James is thankful for, knowing now that everybody's under Ministry surveillance—and when none of their Patronuses were returned, they knew they needed to reach out to somebody outside of the Order to get their information. They were stumped at first—none of them talks to other people—but that was when Lily remembered that Mary had clued Cattermole in about the Order just before she died, and now, here they are.

Cattermole only knows as much as has been reported in the Daily Prophet—that Peter turned himself in and handed over the identities and crimes of everybody in the Order of the Phoenix in the process. (If they didn't already realize that Malfoy and the Death Eaters he's positioned in integral Ministry positions are leaning on the Prophet, they certainly realize it now that none of the testimony Snape surely tried to give against countless Death Eaters resulted in anything.) The article Cattermole brought over listed the names of literally everybody in the organization but the three of them as being detained at the Ministry right now, which means that it's down to them to get to the Horcruxes and get to Voldemort before any more of them get killed or captured.

That brings them to now—Cattermole shuffling his weight from one foot to the other while James, Sirius, and Lily look around at each other. Do we tell him? James wants to say, but he thinks it would be awfully rude to have that conversation right in front of Cattermole, who, after all, is taking them on faith and helping them instead of turning them (or at least Sirius, who isn't protected by a Fidelius Charm) over to the authorities. He wishes they all knew Legilimency so they could read each other's minds. (Screw anybody who says that Legilimency isn't mind reading. From what James has been able to gather, it's definitely mind reading.)

Finally, Lily clears her throat and says, "Uh, how would you feel about doing us… a couple of favors?"

"Or not," says Sirius quickly. "We can't ask that of him, Lil."

"Well, none of us can leave here if we don't want the Ministry to arrest all of us," Lily snaps, her face starting to go red, "and that's if Death Eaters don't kill us dead first. Either way, everybody in the Order ends up dead or behind bars, and we never get the chance to kill him like we need to."

"Kill—who exactly are you talking about killing?" says Cattermole hoarsely.

"Voldemort," says Sirius impatiently. "Keep up. That's why we need somebody to stay alive and away from the Ministry."

"But everybody knows that You-Know-Who can't be—"

"He can't yet," grants Lily, "but he'll be mortal as soon as we—destroy a couple of things."

"Well, what kinds of things are we talking here?"

James raises his eyebrows. "You're not seriously considering helping us."

"I'm not going to—going to go after him for you," Cattermole admits. "You're on your own for that. But if you just need…"

"There's a diary," says Lily, "somewhere in Severus Snape's flat, and there's a sword in the care of some goblins."

"Lily, stop it! You can't just—if anybody thinks to go after—haven't you ever heard of plausible deniability?"

But Lily is talking over Sirius as if she can't hear him. "There are basilisk fangs in the dresser in my and James's bedroom. We need somebody to stab the diary with one of the fangs and then go to Gringotts and inquire about the sword."

"Lily—Lily—" Sirius splutters "—we can't make him do this for us. Think about this for a second. If Cattermole tries to help us, and he gets killed, we can't just—string up a bunch of innocent people to keep trying to do our bidding."

"Nobody's going to try to kill him. Nobody's ever going to suspect that he's on our side."

James says, "Really? His dead wife was just exposed as a member of a vigilante organization in the Prophet, remember? Besides, we need somebody outside the Order to know what's going on in case—in case we don't make it, okay?"

There's a very tense pause as Lily glares James and Sirius down. "Get out of here," James finally mutters to Cattermole. "Get out, and wait for us to contact you again."

"Potter—"

"James!"

"Go, Cattermole!"

Cattermole goes. "You shouldn't have done that," Lily snarls. "What exactly is your plan, James? Who's going to save the wizarding world if you won't let anyone—"

"I'll go," says James.

The decision seems obvious, inevitable, now that he's said it out loud—but apparently it only seems obvious to James. Sirius insists, "No. I'll do it. The Death Eaters are going to snatch you up and kill you, Prongs."

"Nobody's going anywhere! We need to regroup and—"

"You can't go," James tells Sirius; it's his turn to talk over Lily. "Look what happened to Mary—when they got to her, they were able to get to Emmeline."

"Yeah, but nobody's getting to me. I've survived this long without being kidnapped, haven't I?"

"And after Mary, who's to say that you'll make it any longer? At least, if I go, and they get me, Lily and Harry will still be safe."

"Listen to yourself—do you really think I would crack the way Mary did?"

"Don't talk about her like that," James retorts. "Like she was weak. She wasn't weak, Sirius. You overestimate yourself. It was your idea back in October to make Pettigrew Secret-Keeper, and it was for this exact reason—that if you were captured—"

"Prongs—"

"Everybody stop it!"

Lily is literally stamping her foot on the ground; James doesn't think he's ever seen her so frustrated. "Lily, I know you want me to stay hidden with you and Harry, but we have an obligation to—"

"Fuck our obligation! You are Harry's father, and I'm not about to watch him grow up without a father! We've been over this, James!"

She's right about one thing—that they have been over this—but it boils down to the same thing every time: Lily wants James to put his family first, and James wants to put the world first. "I'm not just trying to chase glory," he says in a voice of forced calm. "Maybe I'll fail, and Harry will have to grow up without a father, and that would be bloody awful, but—I want to make a world for him where he can go back home and go to Hogwarts without a price on his head. I want him to know that his parents wanted a better world than this for him, Lily. I don't want him to live in fear. I don't want him or Neville or anybody else's children to live in fear."

"That's really fucking easy for you to say from the comfort of your aliveness. James, I swear to god, if you leave this house—"

But James isn't looking at her anymore. He's looking at Sirius, and Sirius is looking back at him with wide eyes and lines on his forehead. "There's no need for both of us to go," he breathes.

"But Prongs—"

"If you don't get a Patronus from me within the next two days, just… tell Harry I love him."

"James—"

The last thing James hears before he Disapparates is Harry crying in the nursery, and he prays to god that he'll get to hear his son's laugh again.

He doesn't go straight to Britain, of course. With a crack, he rematerializes an instant later in his and Lily's bedroom, where he hastily rummages through the dresser for a handful of basilisk fangs and stuffs them in his robe pocket. He's gone again before Lily or Sirius can realize he's still there, and he appears—

—in the middle of Gilderoy Lockhart's flat, where a stunned Lockhart and Cattermole are both gaping at him. "That was fast," says Cattermole in a quavering voice.

"Reg," says Lockhart, "what—?"

"I'll do it myself," says James, ignoring Lockhart completely, "but I can't do it until I can look up Severus Snape's home address, and to do that, I need to wait until business hours at the Ministry are over."

It's about five in the morning in Vancouver right now, which means it's one in the afternoon at the Ministry in London. Technically, James could have gone straight to Gringotts—he'll need to do so in order to ascertain whether the bit of soul attached to the sword has been destroyed—but doing so in the middle of the day seems unnecessarily brash: better to head there around half past nine or quarter to ten, when business is winding down and the place isn't chock full of people who would turn him over to the Ministry in an instant.

No: he'll wait it out at Cattermole and Lockhart's flat, catch what little sleep he can (he's going to need it after staying up all night), and wait until dark to hit first Gringotts, then the Ministry. "If you can't go to the Ministry just now," Cattermole points out, "then why did you come here?"

James actually blushes a little bit at that: he supposes it wasn't necessary to make a big, dramatic exit from the house, that it would have been more sensible to play along until enough hours passed that he could Disapparate directly for Gringotts. "I couldn't stay there another second," he says instead, and he's a little surprised to find that it feels true. "If I'd stayed any longer, Lily would have found a way to stop me from leaving at all, and I couldn't… I have to do this."

"Well, now," says Lockhart in a brassy voice, "isn't anybody going to tell me—?"

"You're a big Defense Against the Dark Arts buff now, aren't you?" snaps James. "How would you like to help me kill Voldemort?"

Lockhart shuts up at that.

"Is there any particular reason you're both home at one o'clock on a Monday, anyway?" James muses, not really expecting an answer back.

"I'm on bereavement leave," says Cattermole stiffly, "and Gilderoy is working on his book."

"Right. Is there, uh, somewhere I can grab some sleep? I've been up all night."

"Well… yes. You can sleep in my room. It's way in the back, the one with the double bed."

"Thanks, Lockhart," says James tiredly.

Unsurprisingly, he doesn't rest much. He stares at the pink wallpaper adorning Lockhart's walls in between snatches of sleep—half an hour here, twenty minutes there—and tries not to think about everybody he loves ending up in Azkaban for the rest of their lives or, worse, dead. He really allows himself to consider the possibility that he's going to die this week, and for the first time, he wishes he could think like Lily—put his family first and stay home for them. It wouldn't be easy, knowing that they were in danger as long as things went on like this, but at least he'd have the security of knowing that he'd see them again the next day—ever again. As it stands…

Finally, finally, Lockhart's WWN starts blaring at half past nine, and James drags himself into a sitting position and reaches for his glasses. This day has been dragging for hours while he's waited for this, but now that the time has come…

He wishes he'd thought to grab his Invisibility Cloak when he was gathering the basilisk fangs, but it's too late now: if he tries to go back home for anything, Lily will take his wand and tie him down faster than you can Disapparate. So he thanks Lockhart for the use of his bedroom, casts a Disillusionment Charm on himself, and Disapparates for Gringotts.

The lobby is mostly empty when James appears in it; a couple of people emerging from their vault glance around, looking for the source of the crack, but they mercifully don't seem to spot the chameleon of his figure. He approaches the nearest teller and says in a low voice, "This is James Potter. I'm here on behalf of Albus Dumbledore about the Sword of Gryffindor."

The goblin raises one thin eyebrow but doesn't seem to question James's invisibility. "Albus Dumbledore is in Azkaban. No one is coming here on his authority."

So his friends have been moved from the Ministry to Azkaban. James can't say he's surprised, but there's a sinking feeling in his stomach all the same. "If you've been following the papers, you know that the Ministry is looking for me, and you also know that they haven't found me yet. I've been in hiding from the Death Eaters. Dumbledore can't follow through about the sword, so—I'm taking matters into my own hands."

The goblin furrows his eyebrows and thinks. "Odbert," he calls, and a few moments later, a second, shorter goblin comes scurrying forward.

They confer for a moment, their voices low enough that James can't make out the words even through the silence of the deserted lobby. Finally, they both look back to James. Scowling, Odbert says, "You can take off the Disillusionment Charm. No one here is going to turn you in."

James glances around—the only occupants of the lobby by now are goblins. He pulls out his wand and raps himself over the head. Odbert continues, "You can't have the sword back, if that's what you're after."

"I don't need to keep the thing—I just need to know that the piece of soul inside it has been destroyed. I don't care what you do to get rid of it. Destroy the sword, destroy the soul—it doesn't matter. I just need to confirm that it's gone."

"Well, I'm afraid you're out of luck. It's not gone. Not yet," says Odbert. "Our Curse-Breakers are working on a way to remove the piece of soul from the sword and attach it to another object that then can be destroyed."

"And how much longer is that going to take?"

"Not long," Odbert says with an insufferable air of forced patience. "Give us four days."

It's not the answer James wants to hear, but he supposes it could have been a lot worse. He thanks Odbert and his fellow and Disapparates for the visitors' entrance to the Ministry.

The badge in his pocket reads James Potter: Address Seeker, and he supposes he can't blame the spell running this elevator for its best attempt to synthesize his reason for coming here into a two-word catchphrase. He's not entirely sure where in the Ministry they would keep records of wizards' homes and rentals, but he's got to be looking in the right place, hasn't he? He's sure the government keeps tabs on the locations of all the wizards in its charge, and anyway, James hasn't the foggiest idea where to go in the Muggle world to figure out whom Snape is renting his flat from. (He assumes Snape is renting a flat in the Muggle world, anyway—it's what almost everybody James's his age is doing, with the exception, of course, of James and Lily themselves, who live in the house Sirius bought in his name for them.)

His best guess is that residence records are kept somewhere within the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. When he gets off the lift at Level Two, he keeps his wand raised in front of him and wanders the halls, closely reading the signs demarcating the offices corresponding to each subdivision of the department. Finally, he lights on a likely office—Administrative Registration—and dashes inside. He's probably being paranoid, but just in case, he locks the door behind him (though, of course, a simple Alohamora would be enough for anybody to get through).

It takes James twenty minutes of rummaging through files before he finds the one he wants. There are fewer pages than he would expect in the folder listing the registration of every wizard and their place of residence—can you really condense the whole British wizarding community down to this short a stack? But he supposes it makes sense: there were only thirty-some graduates in James's class at Hogwarts, after all. If you figure that thirty-five wizards are born in Britain each year, and if everybody lives to be, say, a hundred and fifty—some wizards live to be two hundred, James knows, but plenty of others die early by duel or disease… he can't really do the maths in his head, not having ever learned maths properly at Hogwarts, but that can't be more than a few thousand people, can it?

Whatever. It doesn't matter. The records aren't alphabetized—the documented wizards look to be ordered by birth date, and he flips through with shaking hands to find the years 1959 and 1960. Finally, finally, he finds Snape's name under January 1960: it looks like he's living in an English city named Cokeworth.

Lily grew up in Cokeworth, James recalls suddenly. Does that mean Snape is still living in his childhood home? He can't be—Lily said, on one of the rare occasions they talked about Snape, that Snape couldn't stand his father. Assuming that the man is still alive, there's no way Snape is living under the same roof as him.

The next thing he does is cast a Patronus to deliver to Sirius and Lily, letting them know that the Horcrux in the sword will be destroyed in four days, repeating Snape's address, and promising to return home as soon as he's gotten the diary and destroyed it. He's never been to Cokeworth, and though he has Snape's exact address, he really needs a visual to lock onto in order to Apparate there accurately, and he doesn't have that (where's the curse-identification orb when you need it?)—better to find a fireplace and Floo there, he decides.

There are fireplaces in the Atrium, he recalls, so he unlocks the door and positively sprints toward the nearest lift—but it appears his luck has run out, because waiting in front of the lift and smirking is one Lucius Malfoy.

Shit.

"Now, now, Potter," he sneers. "You didn't really think you could use your real name to sneak into the Ministry of Magic without getting caught, did you?"

James's left hand automatically goes to his pocket and clenches the offending name badge, while his right goes for his wand. But before he can Disapparate, Malfoy disarms him with an all too casual Expelliarmus, and his wand goes flying.

Shit shit shit.

"Going to kill me, are you?" says James with a lot more bluster than he's really feeling. "Or are you going to hand me over to your master to do it for you?"

"You of all people should know I have no qualms about killing," says Malfoy smoothly. "But the Dark Lord specifically requested to kill you himself, were you caught."

"He did, did he? I thought he was after my son."

Malfoy smirks. "Ultimately, he is—but in the meantime, you'll do."