The Next Great Adventure (A Marauders Fan Fic)

Chapter Seventy Three

Chapter Seventy Three

Lily woke up suffocated by the gloom, her mouth open in a silent scream. For a moment she lay staring at the ceiling, wondering if she was still dreaming, wondering if this had all been some horrible nightmare, but then James shifted in his sleep and she realised that she was awake.

Once this truth set in, she shut her eyes tightly and wrapped herself up in what was left of the duvet - James had claimed most of it, as per usual, another fact which convinced her that this was real. Shutting her eyes, however, didn't work; in fact it made it easier for her mind to replay the morning a few days ago when she had opened The Daily Prophet like usual - the last one she had received before Dumbledore had cast the Fidelius Charm and the owls, clever as they were, had stopped being able to find the cottage - and had seen the news.

Maybe if she hadn't checked the last page this wouldn't have happened, she thought, but then she could trace its causes far further back than that. Maybe if she hadn't done this, or hadn't done that... it didn't particularly matter because, not only had it happened, but in the back of her mind she knew that nothing she could have done or not done would have prevented it. When Lily first read Cassie's name in the list of confirmed deaths she thought she had misread it. "James," she had called, before her brain had really processed it, "I just found someone else called Cassiopeia."

By the time he reached the kitchen Lily was crying, and the glass which she had knocked over somewhere along the way had smashed on the floor, letting pumpkin juice soak into her socks. He crouched down, ignoring the sticky juice seeping into the knees of his pyjamas. "Oh Lily," he said, "what's wrong?" He received no answer for at least ten minutes, by which point his t-shirt was also drenched, although in Lily's tears, not more juice.

She felt exhausted, and it took all of her limited energy to get up in the morning. The past couple of days she had spent the whole day sitting listlessly on the sofa, with James bringing her tea every now and then when he had a break from looking after Harry. Even Harry had picked up on the mood in their house, and his cries seemed more mournful than ever before.

Since she found out, she had been so useless, and that made her feel even worse. It was James who had been looking after Harry, James who had been feeding all three of them, James who had been comforting Sirius though the mirror, James who had told Peter than they wanted him to be their Secret-Keeper and that what they had done to Cassie meant he had to go into hiding, and James who had spoken to Dumbledore when he had come to offer his condolences and to tell them that this time he really was casting the Fidelius Charm that evening. All Lily had done was lie on the sofa and cry, or lie on the sofa and not-cry, and she could tell that James was at a loss for how to comfort her. He too had been crying, and she had pretended that she couldn't hear him when he had sobbed under the shower that first evening. Dumbledore had tried to comfort her too, but what could her old headmaster really say when her best friend had been murdered.

If she had to have a teacher visit her, she wanted it to be McGonagall, but she could hardly say that to his face.

McGonagall, for her part, had barely been able to finish reading the paper - she had developed the habit of reading the back pages first so that she could catch the students and tell them in a more private place than in the Great Hall - and had treated herself to the whole top layer of the chocolate biscuits that she kept for the students who had been bereaved. She hoped, but with far less conviction than she had used to, that the newest group of first years would enter a world where they didn't have to die for their beliefs when they left Hogwarts.

All Sirius' thoughts of going into hiding had vanished - he couldn't contemplate the idea of leaving the apartment for an hour, let alone for an extended period of time and, although he hadn't told James and Lily this, he didn't much care if Voldemort and his Death Eaters came for him anyway.