Title: ME: Trapt
Author: Seadragon
Genre: Action/Adventure/Drama/Humor
Rating: Pg-13
Summary: Hogwarts 5th years and up are off to a Muggle Camp. A Death Eater attack finds Lily and James lost in the woods, with no way to get back, and an army searching for them. Some people will stop at nothing to get what they want. Voldemort is no exception.
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AN: Again, just want to let you know, The Last Stand is set in the same AU, 20 years later! (They are 15/16 in this and 35/36 in TLS) You might want to read that after you read this, but you don't have to. Er, remember, anyone who wants to yell at me for ruining the "mood" of the story, I need to incorporate some sort of messed up humor, like there was in chapters One to Five. Which, I will be editing shortly. I will keep the humor to a minimum though. Actually, it's less humor, more… Er, I don't really know what to call it. Anyway, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm updating on a rotary cycle. So, till next time…
That shall be all.
Seadragon.
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Chapter Nine: Improbable
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Not much had happened in the past hour to Lily and James. They were still lost in the forest, which was getting increasingly darker the further in they went. They were still running away from an army of people who would have no hesitation in killing them.
And Lily was still getting understandably worried about the condition of her sanity.
She had just spent the last hour thinking about killer plants, and staring at James Potter's back. To top it all off, it was pitch black, and they had no idea where in the name of Merlin they were going.
But James didn't appear to be too worried about that.
He was staring intently ahead of them, his eyes straining. He muttered something unintelligible and again, a clear blue light burst into being on the flat of his palm. It leapt from his hand and erupted into a wall of light.
It showed a clearing, and a broken down hut.
Both had been invisible to Lily in the darkness. She didn't know how James had seen them, or how he had made the light. But now, she wasn't so sure she wanted to know, not after his display earlier that night, well, she supposed it was morning now. She wasn't going to bother asking him, because if he wanted to tell her, he would have by now. They had had plenty of time, as they had been wandering around the forest like chickens with their heads cut off for about two hours in total now.
She stared at the hut like it was heaven on Earth. Actually, it was pretty close for two people who hated each other, who were wandering around in a pitch black forest, in the middle of the night. Lily let out a strangled cry of relief and bolted for the wooden hut.
Or at least she tried to.
As she leapt into the clearing, invisible ropes latched firmly onto her and held her back, as well as raising her upwards. She hung in midair, simply hovering there, bound. She tried to break out of the bonds, but they held her tighter than reinforced steel could have. She let her limbs hang limply, and settled for glaring at the raven haired boy below her.
But he wasn't so much a boy as he was a monster.
Lily had given up trying to stay calm around him. She just couldn't. This boy, monster, whatever he was, he just came, and he conquered. There was no battle. There was no struggle. There was just him, through the clouds of the confusion, he would just appear. And then it was all over. You couldn't stand against him.
There wasn't any obvious effort on his part. Things just were. If he willed it, so it would be. And that scared her. It wasn't right. But, now was not the time to debate that. Now was the time to scream bloody murder until he let her go. Go where? She didn't know, but she just knew she wanted to get away from this monster.
And that was what he truly was, a monster. He ceased to be human when he exercised his superior powers. He ceased to be James Potter, the boy everyone wanted to be, or be with. He ceased to be everything at all, he just was.
And she wanted to be as far from that as possible.
Though, right now, nothing of the sort was likely. It was more likely that she was going to be stuck in that grungy little hut with James Potter, source of her fears, for quite a while. And that wasn't something she was going to enjoy one bit, especially if he didn't let her down, and soon.
Luckily for her though, the monster in question was too busy examining the clearing and the hut with his magic to be hearing what she was thinking. Because, if he had, Lily would be a lot more that uncomfortable.
Slowly, the invisible ropes lowered her to the ground, but they weren't ready to release her quite yet. Trying to scream at James, she realized she couldn't make any noise. She turned to him and glared. If looks could kill, he might just be a puddle of flesh colored jelly. Though, then again, he wasn't natural, so his reactions wouldn't be either.
As he inspected the hut, Lily found her eyes straying to the scars on his back. She thought he was too deeply immersed in what he was doing at the moment to know she was watching him, but, again, she thought wrong.
"Stop it."
His voice was cool and clipped, very assertive. When had that happened? Just yesterday he had been a fun loving, extremely devious, teenager, with a life as normal as you could get as a wizard, or so they had thought. In retrospect, Lily thought, no one ever really knew him. No one, except for the Marauders, of course, but that was a given. James Potter had been a mystery man, and he still was, just less of a man in the eyes of those who knew him for who he really was. Now? Now, he was a machine.
Despite his dramatic personality change, he still looked like himself, sans the scars all over his body, now visible to her eye, despite what Mister Potter wanted. But suddenly, that too changed.
Before her very eyes, the scars melted into normal, unmarred skin, invisible again. It was as though they no longer existed.
Lily tore her eyes away from James and focused on something else. Such as how she was going to get out of her current predicament, A.K.A, stuck in one position, with no means of communication, as she had been Silenced. It was going to be difficult, but it kept her mind off of other things, or people, something that would be greatly appreciated.
Unfortunately, we can't have everything.
Or, in Lily's case, we can't have anything. But you can see how she would think this, she was lost in the woods, with someone she hated, who was being hunted by the most feared being in the entire world, and was becoming increasingly more terrifying, and she was being tied up like some criminal! Not the grounds for a happy person. So, you can understand her frustration when she couldn't get the frightening raven-haired being out of her head.
Again, she should be very thankful he wasn't paying her any attention. It wouldn't end well for her at all.
Finally, after Lily thought she would go mad trying to think of something else to think of, although, it had only been about five minutes, he let her go. What irked her most though, was the fact that he didn't even offer some sort of explanation. He just walked into the hut. Normally, she would have engaged him in a screaming match, but after the last two days, she wasn't so sure that would be such a good idea. Especially with her well being in mind. Because it certainly wouldn't be on his as he did what ever he felt like to her. Foremost being tying her up outside again.
Instead, she followed him inside and took a look around. It didn't take long. All in all, the hut was about 20 feet in diameter, with a dirt floor and two windows. On the wall farthest from the door, there was a couch. Across from the couch was an empty fireplace. Below one of the windows was a chair. And that was about it. Thankfully, the door and windows closed and locked easily. Lily didn't enjoy the idea of sleeping in the middle of the forest in a hut that didn't have any way of barring unwanted entry in the middle of the night.
She leaned against a wall and closed her eyes for a minute.
When she opened them again, the hut was definitely different. For one, the floor wasn't dirt anymore, it was a light green carpet. And the wall weren't brown, untouched wood, they were a forest green. The door and the window trim were white. The couch was beige, as was the chair.
It was a distinct improvement. She didn't much like dirt floors, for understandable reasons. Such as, they were, well, dirt. But no matter, because it certainly wasn't dirt anymore. Moved away from her position on the wall and sat down on the couch. James took the chair.
As she settled back on the couch, the room became considerable warmer.
After everything that had happened that night, day, morning, whatever it was now, the little things terrified her. So, when she realized the room was rapidly heating up, she leapt off the couch and spun in a circle. Once she had calmed down enough to realize what she was seeing, she was considerably embarrassed.
In the fire, dancing silver flames gave off a comforting heat. She sat back down sheepishly and settled for staring at her feet. All in all, things hadn't been going to well for her recently. And now, things were about to get a whole lot worse.
"So…"
A feeble attempt to start a conversation, she knew, but she had to try. Sitting her in the silence was not making her anymore comfortable. And somewhere out there an army was hunting them. She didn't even know if they would be able to fight them when they came, or if they would just be annihilated. She knew James could handle himself against ten or twenty Death Eaters by himself, but hundreds? She wasn't so sure.
"I can handle it." His voice was sharp and unforgiving. Somehow, she couldn't blame him. If she had to carry all of this, she would have broken by now. But breaking wasn't always something to be ashamed of. You had to pick your battles. But that probably wasn't something he had ever had to do. He had probably never been broken.
And, for the sake of the world, she hoped he never would.
The stony silence was resumed and Lily found herself wishing for the old times, of not so long ago. Even screaming and shouting was better than this. But it wasn't the old times. This was new, all new. And screaming and yelling just didn't have a part of it. They were trivial matters, and this was anything but.
She remembered all the tears shed over those arguments. All the anger, and the hate, behind the words they said. The pain they inflicted, and the rifts they caused. But how she longed for those things now. They brought along the semblance of peace.
It was ironic to think that fighting brought the closest thing to peace they could ever have. It brought the belief that everything was alright in the world out side of their petty arguments. But it wasn't, nothing was really alright. There were children without mothers, without fathers, without siblings, without family. There were children who had nowhere safe to go. There were children who were plagued with endless nightmares. There were children whose only relief was to bring unconditional pain to others.
And somehow, James Potter fell into all of those categories.
And somehow, that might not ever change. The next generation might grow up under the banner of fear, just as they had. They hadn't had the choice to be young and innocent, they were going to be thrust into adulthood before they were ready. But there was no choice. To survive that had to happen. They had just been born into a dangerous time, where if you didn't fight, you didn't survive. If you did not run, you could not hide. Despite what she had said earlier, she knew Voldemort didn't care. She knew it didn't matter who you were, why you were, or what you were. It just mattered that you were. That you existed.
And if you existed, that must be changed.
