The Next Great Adventure (A Marauders Fan Fic)

Chapter Sixty Four

Chapter Sixty Four

Dumbledore arrived early the next morning bearing Trelawney's prophecy and prepared to add hundreds of charms to the existing ones on the cottage.

"You should be safe here," he said as they sat in the sitting room, "but it would be a good idea not to leave the village unless absolutely necessary. I would also suggest that you limit the number of visitors you have - these charms will only do so much, and you could well be in danger of being attacked by someone you trust."

"We barely have any visitors anyway," Lily sighed.

"Be careful," he warned them. "Voldemort will not be willing to let either of you go if he finds you now; your escape last night was incredibly unlikely."

"You said," James interposed, "that the prophecy could also apply to Frank and Alice."

"I did."

"Then how do you know that it will be us he comes for?" he asked.

Dumbledore paused and looked at his hands for a moment before answering. "The prophecy was overheard, as I told you earlier, but only part of it. I do not know that he will come for you but I think I have made, what they call, an educated guess. It seems to me that, by making the decision to find the child referred to in this prophecy, Voldemort will fulfil it. He does not know this however, and he will never do so. Frank and Alice's son will be pureblooded but your child, or rather your son, will be a half-blood, much like Voldemort himself; that is why I believe that it will be you he decides are the threat. I find that the things we fear the most, and the people we hate the most, are those that reflect our own selves and our weaknesses."

James and Lily sighed in unison and reached for the other's hand. "I suppose," James muttered, "that we will have to go down fighting then."

Dumbledore agreed, heading outside while they put their coats on.

"This was really not the way I wanted to find out the gender of our child," Lily joked.

"I suppose it'll narrow down the number of names we have to consider. I mean, it's obvious that we'll call him James so..."

"Over your dead body James Potter."

"You-Know-Who would probably love to arrange that." Lily glared at him and he smiled blithely. "Although I suppose that it still leaves Ebenezer..." Lily shook her head mutely and James tried again. "Ichabod?" Another shake. "Jebediah?"

"No James! Why are these all Biblical anyway?"

"Because the men in the Bible had some cracking names. We could call him Ethelred though, if you're opposed to religious names. Or I mean if you want to be alternative I guess... Chimera?"

"He'll sound like a Quidditch team."

"Chimera Potter though!"

"No James."

"Zoopzoop?"

"That's not even a name."

"Charlemagne?"

"I'm not talking to you anymore," she said as she wrapped her scarf round her neck.

"On the bright side, at least we had that New Year's Eve party last year."

"I have absolutely no idea why that's a bright side to this," she replied.

"Because we're definitely not having one this year," he grumbled. "Come on, let's go get protected." As he opened the door he winced and exclaimed, "Bloody hell! It's April! It's not supposed to be this cold!"

"Pull yourself together James. Protection is important."

"I know that," he muttered as he followed her. "It's a lack of protection that got us into this mess." Ahead of him Lily cracked a smile and suppressed a snort of amusement. "Oh Lily," he said as he fell in beside her. "I just had a thought: if he's supposed to defeat You-Know-Who, he's kind of a Saviour right?"

"You're treading on very dangerous ground here Potter and I'm not sure anyone wants to hear the end of that thought."

"So we could maybe call him Jesus?" he suggested. Lily whacked him with the glove she hadn't yet put on and shook her head vehemently. "Or not, because that's a terrible idea," she replied as she had an image of years of jokes about him being the Son of God and, as such, James being God. "And it completely undoes all that time that we spent deciding on names."

"Not even as a middle name?"

"No."

Once they had finished a few hours later, Dumbledore took his leave with some final words of warning, and headed to the Longbottoms. James and Lily, divested of their coats, warmed up and ate supper before leaving for Cassie and Sirius' flat to tell them in person what had happened.

That evening Dumbledore returned to his study in Hogwarts and found an owl perched beside Fawkes. As he unfolded it, he sucked idly on a lemon sherbet and, by the time he had finished the sweet, he had reread the few words on the parchment multiple times. It wasn't signed but he recognised the handwriting from various other unsigned notes which had found their way, mysteriously, into his possession. The meetings that they summoned him to usually consisted of warnings and threats from Voldemort, conveyed through his favourite mouthpiece, Severus Snape, and he doubted that this would be any different.

When the allotted time came round, he looked out of the window and sighed. "It's such awful weather for this," he muttered to himself before he Disapparated. Reappearing, he muttered "Lumos," and saw Snape standing in front of him, just as he expected. "Well, Severus? What message does Lord Voldemort have for me?"

"No - no message - I'm here on my own account!" Snape looked worse than Dumbledore had ever seen him look before, but it didn't take long for him to understand why. Once Snape had explained, he asked levelly, "If she means so much to you surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?"

"I have - I have asked him -"

"You disgust me," Dumbledore spat. Even if Voldemort had agreed to spare Lily, Snape did not deserve her; he highly doubted whether she would have agreed to join Snape anyway. In order to do so, she would have to give up her opposition to the very people who would have murdered her family, and who wanted to exterminate her like vermin. The other option was, of course, that Snape left the Death Eaters, but Voldemort would never allow him to do so when he had done so much for him. If it weren't so repulsive, it would almost be laughable that Snape thought getting rid of James was enough to have Lily. "You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child?" He was half tempted to name them, to remind Snape that her husband was not a stranger or an unknown quantity, but James Potter. However, he did not; he was angry but he was not, he hoped, cruel.

He left Snape promising to do anything in exchange for keeping the Potters safe, and returned to Hogwarts. As he paced back and forth that night, wondering whether he ought to place the Fidelius Charm on them, he mused on how useful it would be to have a spy within the Death Eaters. Dumbledore knew that Snape would never have come to him if it had been anyone else, and he muttered to himself under his breath as he tried to follow the events to their logical end. Voldemort had underestimated the lengths Snape would go to in order to try to keep Lily safe, and Dumbledore wondered whether he would make other oversights in the future.

"Leave the Fidelius Charm for a while," he decided, murmuring it to himself under his breath. They would be safe for the moment, and he could monitor Voldemort's efforts to find them through Snape. For now, however, he had other matters to attend to, and other people to try and keep alive.

James and Lily, for their part, were both amused and saddened by the force with which Cassie and Sirius swore that they would do whatever they could to keep them safe. Their loyalty was heartening, and more than once they found themselves about to cry - even if James pretended he had an eyelash in his eye instead. In the end however, when they had returned home, Lily and James had to face the truth, which was that they were stuck, alone, in their house until an unforeseeable end.