November 24th, 1981: James Potter

Harry's reaction to getting out of the cottage in Godric's Hollow is priceless. He can't say much more than Mama, Dada, Caycay (for Lily's cat, Aquarius), and no, but the way he's been looking out the windows and pawing at the glass makes James think that Harry's starting to recognize that there's a whole world out there that he wants to get at. When James and Lily first Apparate with Harry into the backyard of the little Canadian house they had Sirius buy for them under his name, Harry spends the first few minutes crying and saying owie over and over—James assumes that Side-Along-Apparating was too painful for him to manage—but when Harry's done wailing into Lily's robes as she rubs his back soothingly, he can't stop spinning his head around, running around the yard, and giggling.

Lily and James look at each other. "Should we?" says Lily, almost like she hardly dares to take Harry into the world outside these fences, and James hardly blames her, after living in fear of Voldemort for so long.

"We should change into Muggle clothes if we're going to be walking around town," says James. "You'll have to help me; you know I'm useless at dressing myself like one of them."

"It's easy, honey; just pick out any T-shirt and a pair of jeans from the stuff Mary bought you last week. I'll dress Harry. He needs his diaper changed anyway, going by the smell of it."

Unlike Godric's Hollow, which had a large wizarding population, their new neighborhood in Canada is, as far as anyone can tell, all-Muggle. It shouldn't make a difference with the Fidelius Charm in place, but it'll help them sleep better at night knowing that Harry is that much farther away from anybody with any kind of connection to Voldemort. They're still not a hundred percent sure that their plan is foolproof—using the Fidelius Charm to hide them from British wizards, but not Canadian ones—so it doesn't hurt to be extra-careful.

But they had to get out of Britain. They just had to. After all this time, Harry needs to see the world, and James and Lily need their lives back.

They can't exactly Apparate downtown without drawing attention to themselves, which is the opposite of what any of them wants. They could take the bus into town—it would certainly be faster—but after a goddamn year and a half trapped inside with very few excursions out with the Invisibility Cloak, all James wants to do is go for a nice, long walk, and he's sure Lily feels the same way. The sky is wonderfully blue and peppered with wisps of clouds, and James doesn't think he's ever seen anything so beautiful.

He can give them this, James tells himself. After what they've all been through, he can give his family a nice day downtown without wondering about anything more serious than what flavor of ice cream to buy for Harry at the parlor.

And it works for a while, at least, before the same old stories creep back up, and Lily and James set back into their endless speculation and worry.

"I just don't understand why they killed her if her replacement was going to be Crouch," Lily says while watching Harry out the corner of her eye. They've brought him to a small neighborhood park where he's delightedly toddling around with a little Muggle girl who looks to be about two years old, both of them beaming widely. Of course Harry is excited: it's the first time he's ever been able to play with kids his own age other than Neville. Lily goes on, "Why not Malfoy? His name is out there after he ran in the election last year, and we know from Severus that he's in the inner circle. If the Death Eaters were going to infiltrate the Ministry and push their own choice for Minister onto us—"

"Maybe they haven't managed to infiltrate the Ministry," argues James. "Not entirely, anyway. Maybe they just used Malfoy and whoever else to—dig around, you know, to figure out who would probably get the interim appointment and then see what dirt they could get on them."

"But what dirt could the Death Eaters possibly get on Crouch? He loathes the Death Eaters. He'd do anything to take them down."

"I don't know," sighs James. "I really don't know."

"Hey," says Lily, and James looks up at her. "We got Harry out of the house, didn't we? He gets to be a normal kid for once without having to worry about Voldemort hunting him. We did good."

"Yeah," he says heavily. "One thing at a time. I just—I hope this is all over soon. I hope we get to send Harry to Hogwarts. Ilvermorny is lame."

"Surely Voldemort won't still be in power in ten years," says Lily, but she doesn't sound very convinced.

He sighs. "Let's just watch him play. We can give him that, at least."

So Lily watches Harry while James watches Lily. As usual, he can't believe his luck that Lily ever let him into her life—ever fell for him—ever married him. When you think about how they started out—

It was James's fault: there's no question about that. He's not saying that Snape doesn't still sicken him, more than ever now that James knows Snape would happily watch James and Harry be killed if Lily's life weren't at stake, too—but at first, James couldn't see Lily as anything but the priss who kept interfering when James tried to put Snape in his place, and it's a bloody miracle that they got to where they are now with the way he used to treat her. He still feels ashamed when he remembers third year, when Sirius accidentally let word slip that James thought Lily was attractive, and James reacted to the rumors by making a big deal out of Lily being—he cringes to even remember it—a bitch whose beauty was the only thing she had going for her.

It was fifth year when James grew up enough to realize that there was a whole person inside of Lily that intrigued him—that he wanted to get to know. Still, even after Lily and Snape stopped being friends—even when Marlene adopted her and she started seeing James by proxy all the time—it took months for Lily to start spending time with James anything more than incidentally. In fact, James is pretty sure the only reason Lily ever changed her mind about him was because of the Order—because he made it plain that he wanted to fight Voldemort and the Death Eaters, and he wanted to do it with her.

And now Peter's turned out to be one of the very Death Eaters they all were supposed to be fighting. James can't even imagine how he could have survived that blow if he hadn't had Lily to lean on.

They let Harry play for another twenty minutes, then thirty. He can't do much besides run around screaming and throw a ball back and forth with the little Muggle girl, but even that keeps him fully occupied until he trips over his untied shoelace, face-plants onto the ground, and starts to cry. "I think he might be a little overstimulated," Lily says when Harry doesn't calm down after a few minutes in her arms. "This is a lot of excitement for him to have all in one day, and with the time difference, it's way past his bedtime to begin with."

Back at home, James reads the same book to Harry over and over to calm him down as Lily wanders around the house Conjuring up their Vanished belongings and putting everything in its place. "You take over," Lily eventually tells him when it's been an hour and most of their stuff has been unloaded. "You're the one who worked at Fluke-Nettles. Aren't you supposed to have an eye for matching furniture?"

She's talking about the wizarding interior design studio where James put his Transfiguration skills to use after Hogwarts, at least until they had to go into hiding. "Fair point," says James, grinning, even though he's had his fill of conjuring furniture, enough to last a lifetime.

And he thinks that's going to be the end of it, the perfectly ordinary last of a perfectly extraordinary day in the life of James's family—until Albus Dumbledore comes knocking on James's front door at half past midnight.

He's apprehensive when he first hears the noise, but of course, if Voldemort had found them, he wouldn't exactly have bothered to knock—and then James is totally taken aback to realize who it is on his doorstep when he opens the door. "Professor," he says. "You're…"

Tired, James thinks. Dumbledore looks tired, but he's smiling, at least, as he asks quietly, "Might I come in? We have some things to discuss."

James steps back to allow Dumbledore inside. "It's late," he says for lack of anything more intelligent to say.

"Not in Britain," says Dumbledore lightly, "but I apologize for not adhering better to your schedule."

He's a little annoyed—in the effort to adjust to the eight-hour time difference in Vancouver, he and Lily stayed up way later than was comfortable, and Dumbledore's arrival woke them both (along with Harry, who's now crying his eyes out upstairs) out of a dead sleep. "Lily's up with Harry," he says, "but if you want me to go get her—"

"No," says Dumbledore. "No, I think that for the moment, we should talk alone."

"Right," James says skeptically. Is Dumbledore planning on telling James something he doesn't want Lily to know? What could Dumbledore possibly want from James that he'd want him to keep secret from his wife when they're both founding members of the Order? "So what exactly is this about?" he asks when Dumbledore has followed him into the living room and perched on the edge of the sofa James charmed in here just hours ago.

Humorlessly, Dumbledore smiles. "How would you like to be the one to kill Lord Voldemort?"

xx

Even though Dumbledore expressly asked James not to share their conversation, the first thing he does the next morning is share it with Lily. Of course he does. How could he not?

Neville is here, playing with Harry in the backyard. Since James and Lily have been stuck at home watching Harry anyway, they've been providing free childcare to Alice and Frank most weekdays; yesterday, moving day, was the first exception James can really call to mind. Of course, now that they're in Canada and the world is their oyster, they'll be asleep while Frank and Alice are at work and need someone to watch Neville. Frank's mum agreed to look after Neville from now on, apparently, but Neville and Harry are so used to spending time together every day that Lily and James have agreed to take Neville for a couple hours each British evening (Canadian morning) at first to ease the transition.

They'll be able to get jobs if they want them, provided that those jobs allow them to stay out of the papers. They hardly need the money—they're still comfortably living off their savings even while paying Remus's way—but James knows he's not the only one who's been going nuts trapped inside the house.

Regardless—they don't have jobs just yet, and so James and Lily are sitting on the back patio watching the boys play, carefully keeping their voices low and casual so as not to alarm the kids. "And then Dumbledore told you his plan for how he's going to kill him?"

"Well, no," says James, frowning. "That's the thing. He says he's working on it, and he wouldn't involve anybody else in it at all—except we're running out of time, with how quickly the Death Eaters have been picking us off, and working alone will just slow him down. He says he just has to confirm something first, and then he'll have—a mission for me. Maybe more than one mission. He wants to give me the information as he figures out what exactly those missions are. And then, when all the pieces are in place, it'll be time to track Voldemort down."

"So he wants you to risk your neck and won't even tell you what you're risking it for?"

"I'd be risking my neck to save the Wizarding World."

"Well, yeah, but he won't tell you why the things you'd be doing were important?"

"Guess not," says James. "Look, I'm not just—accepting it, either. I don't know why he wants me, of all people, to do it. First he tells me I can't leave my house for a full year and a half, and now—"

"It's like he thinks you're expendable."

That's when it clicks. "No, it's like—it's like he thinks we're going to die anyway, so I may as well go out doing some good in the world."

Lily doesn't say anything back for a long time, but her eyes turn to flint and the leg she's been bouncing in the air freezes rigid. "But James," she replies eventually, "that's horrible."

"I know," he sighs, "but it makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it?"

"We have the Fidelius Charm in place. Sirius would never betray us, and none of us is ever going to suggest a switch after what happened with Peter."

"Lily, they're plucking us off one by one. What happens when Sirius gets killed and everyone in the Order becomes a Secret-Keeper? Who's to say that one of them won't turn us in? Peter might not be the only one of us who turns."

"So you're just going to hang yourself with a death sentence? You're going to let Harry grow up without a father?"

"Keep your voice down," James urges her. She rolls her eyes but doesn't argue. "You talk like there's no way I'll survive this."

"You talk like you've already made up your mind that you're doing this."

James is starting to see why Dumbledore wanted him to keep this to himself. "So we're just going to let other people get killed in our place? I thought this was the exact reason we started the Order in the first place—because we wanted, needed, to be the people on the front lines."

"That was before we were parents."

"We were still fighting when we were trying to conceive Harry—even when we knew that you were pregnant. It didn't stop us then. You're saying Alice and Frank should quit the Order, quit their jobs, and leave our friends to die?"

"This isn't about Alice and Frank," says Lily. "And for that matter, this isn't just about you. We're supposed to make these decisions as a family."

"Harry wouldn't want his dad to be a coward."

"Harry wouldn't want his father to die."

They seem to have reached an impasse, and it's a long moment before James is the one to back down first. "I'm not trying to abandon you," he swears. "I'm not. But if Dumbledore is the one with the plan, and Dumbledore gets himself killed going on these missions, what's going to happen to the rest of the world?"

"You realize there's a simpler solution to that problem: Dumbledore can tell other people what the plan is. Did he even tell you why he won't?"

No, James has to admit if he's being perfectly honest with himself. Dumbledore didn't.

xx

Sirius is a little more sympathetic to James's intentions when James fills him in the next time they see each other, but even he insists, if gently, that Lily has a point. "I'm not saying I don't want to see Voldemort dead, and I'm not even saying that you shouldn't be the one to help Dumbledore do it, but Lily's right that you should be making a decision that big as a family. It's not just you who's affected anymore if you die."

"Yeah, but we used to risk our lives for the Order all the time, even when we were married and she was pregnant,," points out James, rolling his eyes. "How is this any different? If anything, I'd think that running around in the shadows for Dumbledore might be less risky than being on the front lines on raids every week was."

"Maybe, but she's had a lot of time to get used to the comfort of you two not directly going out on any raids now that you're a family. Anyway, if you help Dumbledore, won't you have to leave the confines of the Fidelius Charm? He shouldn't be asking somebody who can't set foot outside Canada."

"Yes, but if Dumbledore's right that I'm going to die anyway—"

"Who says you're dying anyway? I'm not giving up your secret, and I'm not switching Secret-Keepers, not after Peter…"

James closes his eyes. He still has trouble reconciling that Peter—whom he knew, whom he loved, who became an Animagus for Remus and had been one of James's best mates since they were eleven years old—could possibly have betrayed them all, let along for as long as he had: for almost the entire duration of his membership in the Order.

He doesn't point out the obvious: that Sirius can only remain Secret-Keeper for as long as he remains alive. Instead, James asks, "Do you think you can ever forgive him? For betraying us?"

This seems to catch Sirius off guard. "Are you kidding me? With all the deaths he probably had a hand in? If I ever see him again, I'll have half a mind to kill him myself for—for Marlene."

James closes his eyes again. He doesn't like to think about Marlene, either.

It's a little strange, the relationships between James and his friends from his house and year at Hogwarts. At least up until recently, James could confidently say that he had eight whole people that he could call his best mates in the world—but for all the time they all spent together, probably pretty codependently, James didn't actually have a lot of one-on-one conversations about anything heavy with all of them for all those years. He can't even remember the last real talk he had with Marlene—how much time elapsed between whenever it must have happened and the day that she died. For that matter, he can't remember the last time he spent time one-on-one with Peter before his betrayal came to light, either.

Did he waste the time he could have and should have been spending with Marlene in her final years? Did he have some part, even a small one, in driving Peter to do what he did?