Previously in the Darklyverse: After almost two years in hiding, Lily and James planned to move their family out of Britain and reset the Fidelius Charm to cover a wider area. Death Eaters murdered Minister of Magic Millicent Bagnold, and Barty Crouch Sr. took over as interim Minister. Dumbledore took a leave of absence from Hogwarts.

xx

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 American 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 want. 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 they watch 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?"

"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 is at work and needs 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 are 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.