Hi all, so I am back to this wonderful fandom with a new story! I am taking a delve into a fandom, an era and a couple that has always fascinated me and it's the James/Lily era.

This is the second part of the story that started in the Beginning of the End and these are the moments in the first Wizarding War and the build up to Harry.

This story will be twenty chapters long and some events/events that do take place might be missed.

Also spelling/grammar...not my best thing. Again keep that in mind when you read...please.

Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine.

Please Read and Review.

And on a side note, I like so many other Fanfiction Authors no longer receive notifications via email about reviews/PMs etc. So if you do send any it might be a while, if ever before I get back to you. Please keep that in mind for it is not intentional-If anyone has a fix please let me know

I do not receive PMs anymore, if you have a question stick it in a review and I will answer it in the chapter notes.

And yeah, this one wounded me, this one physically wounded me. God knows what the next one is going to do. RIP Marlene.

The End Of The Beginning

Chapter 8-Closure

James has to keep his head above water in the aftermath. Because the woman he loves and his best friend are both on the floor and he doesn't know how to get them up because his own heart too is breaking.

It was a dark and difficult time after Marlene McKinnon died.

It was very, very dark and very, very difficult.

It was the darkest days that he had experienced yet and James by the time he had become of age had buried both of his parents. He had seen death and he had seen suffering and he had seen blood and guts and he had nearly been murdered and had almost murdered himself. He was no novice to loss or grief or suffering. And yet this…this was the thing that kept him up at night shaking and shivering and desperate, the nightmares clogging in his throat, the scream desperate to rip out of him and yet every night he had to keep his thoughts to himself as to not wake Lily at his side or heaven forfend Sirius if it was one of those wired and yet wonderful nights where they both managed to get to sleep.

He couldn't wake them, didn't dare wake them. Lily and Sirius were existing only by the skin of their teeth as the days after Marlene's death turned into weeks and then turned into months.

It had shattered them all into pieces and what was worse was that nobody had seen it coming. The McKinnon's had been respected, had been pure-blood, sure they had been blood traitors and sure there had been attacks on blood traitors or family members of those who were in the order from time to time but there had never been a mass, pre-planned attack and it had not just been the ones like Marlene who for better or for worse were on a list somewhere, it had been the children, pregnant woman and children and it had been a total annihilation. They had gone for every man, woman and child that they could find and now the McKinnon family which had up until now had been one of the oldest and most prestigious families in wizarding history had been wiped from the pages of the history books.

It had been…devastating to say the least when James had opened the door one morning in his pyjama's and willing the tea to enter his bloodstream and had seen Dumbledore with what he was now calling the look, asking if he could speak to them, all of them because something had happened James, something terrible had happened. And then they had all been pulled out of bed in different stages of dress and it had only been when Dumbledore started talking that he realised that he wasn't waiting for Marlene because it was about Marlene.

And that had been the end of it. The end of the world as they knew it. James thought it might have been the end of their childhood, of their happiness, of their belief that they would be able to just survive to the end of this war. Certainly it had been the end of Marlene. Certainly it had been the end of her.

And it had been the end of his brother as well. Sirius who had shrivelled up and died in the aftermath of what Dumbledore had said. Lily had burst into tears, Remus had leapt to his feet. Peter had stood to make the professor a cup of tea and did not return for several minutes keeping his back to them all and James had sat there watching as his best friend shrivelled up and died all the while feeling a cold so terrible spread through his veins and his bloodstream and his bones that it was like he had gone swimming in the lake at Hogwarts in the middle of January.

The murder had sent shockwaves through the Ministry. Already heavily criticized for their lack of understanding, their lack of speed, their lack of purpose when it came to catching Death Eaters even the Prophet had turned against them. Within a week reports on who the Minister was dining with, prominent pure blood families with Death Eater ties were named and shamed, dark creatures were shunned, a great wave of anger erupted against those who the common man and woman blamed for the death of the McKinnon's, began and the culling of the privileged began. The entirely of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement went on strike in the end days of January demanding their boss be replaced because he was a blood tie to the Lestranges, Crouch was the new Head of the Auror office and had taken it upon himself to become renowned in the history of the ministry as the most bloodthirsty and the most brutal (said Mad-Eye when he thought people weren't listening and quite a few times when people were to boot) but James thought that that was a good thing. So what if the Auror's were finally given the power and the encouragement to kill rather than bring in the bastards alive. Bellatrix Lestrange, Antonin Dolohov, Nataylia Greengrass, Evan Rozier…these men and woman were never going to let themselves be taken in alive. They were too dedicated in the service of their master for there to be any other life for them outside of dedication to his service.

Even the Prophet who had been so loyal to the comfortable, safe, dependable administration (a lot of whom had fattened their own pockets while letting decent people suffer along the way if you wanted James's political opinion) had turned against the men and woman of the old bloodlines and it was not out of common for the Blacks, the Malfoys, the Greengrasses (though why you would go after them considering they were borderline moral compared to the rest of them—bar one—was beyond James), the Notts, the Crabbe's and the Goyles and the proof was in the pudding when James opened the copy of the Prophet one morning just for something to do to find out that Regulus Black had died.

He had told Sirius but Sirius had trouble getting out of bed these days and to be honest he was not sure if he had heard him.

Today…today was a nice normal day as far as nice normal days went. Remus was back doing what he had to do for the Order—not that James was ever supposed to know and Peter had gone home to his mother who he claimed was getting worse (and though it seemed unfair and highly hypocritical he hoped she could hold out a bit longer because the last thing James needed right now was another death on his plate) and so he set about making breakfast.

Sometimes Lily would join him, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she spent the whole day in Sirius's darkened room uncaring of the smell or the mess or the man on the bed who looked at the curtained window and saw without seeing while he grieved the end of his world as he knew it. James had not even begun to process his own grief for the silly little blonde girl who had been a silent support of strength for him when his mother had died, who had been a friend to him when he had needed one, who had been down to be Lily's maid of honour, who had sat and chatted about flower arrangements and whatnot and whose room in Lily's apartment was still the same as it ever was as though she was just around the corner her infectious smile shining brightly.

Today however Lily had decided that she was going to come out of the room and sit at the little island. Her hair was a matted mess of red but she looked…different than she had done before. It had been six weeks and it had felt like longer. There hadn't been a funeral for Marlene because there had been no body to bury. The Death Eaters had not even granted them that final mercy.

"I want to sell the flat" she said quietly as James poured her tea. "I want to sell the flat and I want us to have a quiet wedding and I want us to move into your old house like we planned too. I want us to do all of that as soon as possible. I don't care about big celebrations or floating champagne glasses or everyone being there. I want to be with you and our friends and…and I want to try and be happy"

It was so in line with what James wanted he could have cried with relief.

"Okay" he said softly. "But we don't have to rush this Lily, if you want to postpone the wedding—"

"Don't do that" came a horse voice from the doorway and they both froze and Lily turned around so fast her red hair nearly blinded him despite the fact that it had not been washed for several days.

Wasn't this, this whole in sickness and in health thing that they all talked about?

Sirius was stood there. His hair was long, he was rapidly growing a beard and he was in his dressing gown but it was the first time that James had seen him on his feet since he and Remus had tugged him to bed that night and he had howled with silent sobs that his shoulders had trembled with as he had dealt with the terrible burden that was loving and loss and grief and pleasure and pain and the terrible reality of what it was to try and build a life in the middle of a war.

James couldn't blame him.

If it had been Lily in Marlene's place…

Lily who had lost both of her friends, who didn't have any family…

He didn't think he could stand the pain of that kind of loss.

It kept him up at night more times than he cared to think.

"Don't cancel your wedding over this" Sirius said heaving himself onto a chair at the little kitchen island. "She'd hate that, she'd come back and throw pigs blood on your wedding dress Lil. Have the biggest, baddest, booziest wedding that you can, life is far too fucking short, bout time that we started living what we can out of it"

He took the coffee (Sirius was a coffee drinker had been since he was twelve—another way of pissing off his family or so he had told James) and James suddenly knew he needed to ask.

"Did you hear me when I told you about Reg—"

"Reg has been dead to me for a long time James" Sirius said flatly his dull grey eyes meeting his.

"I buried my brother a long time ago. I just…my mother will take this very hard" he said and James and Lily both exchanged a look with that one. James didn't know what to make of that. He could count the number of times that he had heard Sirius mention his mother on one hand (at least since he had left home—or been thrown out depending on whose version of the story you listened too)

"You got that champagne that she brought for Christmas?" Sirius said finally and James nodded.

"Open it…we should…we should open it tonight. Toast her properly, you know that is what she would have wanted us do rather than have us all sit here moping. She'd want us to celebrate. James can you speak to Dumbledore and get us Remus back for just one night? I know that we can get Peter here as well, we deserve to send her off in style. Just us. You know?"

He said this very fast but Lily's eyes were burning with tears and suddenly James was sobbing into his hand. Lily looked at him in surprise and shock but she hopped off her chair immediately coming round to warp him in a hug. One of his hands was resting on the counter and Sirius looked at it as if he wanted to reach out and touch it was just like he couldn't bring himself to do it.

Instead he just watched his grey eyes dull.

It was the first time James Potter had allowed himself the luxury of tears over Marlene McKinnon. It would not be the last. Not for her, not for Gideon and Fabien, Edgar Bones (though they didn't know that was coming) or Benji and Caradoc (again they didn't know that one was coming either). The point was he allowed himself to cry.

He knew that if there was something beyond this big life then Marlene was there with Mary waiting for them, he knew that they would see each other again and he knew that this was just the first step on the hard path to a closure that he wasn't sure he was ever going to get.

But right there and then he didn't want to think about that.

Right there and then he didn't think about that.

Right there and then he just wanted to miss his friend.

And so he did the only thing that made sense in that moment.

He cried.

And there you go, see you next time.

Next Chapter-The Wedding of James Potter to Lily Evans, for better or for worse, until death do them part.