Marauders - Always - Part One

I'm Taking Him Back

"Please," James sobbed, "Please no more, please --"

How many times had this been done?

How many times had James faced these monsters?

They shuffled ever on without coming any closer, like apparitions maintaining a threat designed specifically to torture him slowly, over a long period of time... unstoppable, always coming, keeping him in a suspended state of fearful panic.

"James," Lily said and she was there again, breaking into the memory, kneeling beside him on the floor of the cell. "James, listen to me, this isn't real. Those aren't real. They're - they're images in your mind, they're games that You Know Who is playing with you. Look - I'm right here, see, look at me." She lifted his chin to look into her eyes. "I'm right here. So I can't be one of those - those things over there, can I?"

Tears poured from his eyes. "Lily," he said, voice strained and his lower jaw trembled with fear as he stared up at her...

She stood up and she turned to the inferi. She waved her wand and started cutting through them, magic slashing at the figures coming toward her. She forced out of her mind the fact that they looked like Remus and Charlus, that they looked like Alice and Frank and Sirius and Dora, like Fabian and Gideon, like Dorcas and Minnie and Derek Bell and Bilius Weasley. She forced herself not to see Maryrose Jenkins or Regulus Black or any of the other likenesses that dragged their feet across the floor but to remember they were figments, lies, bits of memory and dreams that had been twisted and turned and made into nightmares designed by the sick mind of a hideous tryrant.

One by one, the inferi fell into smoke as she blasted them, fought them, pushed them away, defended James Potter with every ounce of herself... Each one was shouting some horrible thing to him, screaming something of James's insecurities to him.

"My real brother's dead and it should've been you instead!" Sirius was shouting.

"You're so weak you let me go and defend you and left me to die at the hands of the Dark Lord while you ran away," Maryrose was snapping, "You never came for my body, you never cared that I was gone. You let them keep me until they used me and hid me in a morgue. You would've left me there if it wasn't for Sirius!"

"You could've stopped Dolohov," Fabian Prewett said.

"You could've kept us both alive," Gideon Prewett agreed.

"I only favored you because I knew you needed it the most. You were so thick, so slow, so stupid. You only passed because I didn't want to look bad failing you," McGonagall was saying.

"We wanted our first son back," Charlus was saying, staring at James coldly.

"Instead we got you," Dora said.

"You're inadequate," laughed Jasper Odair. "If you'd let me and Lily alone she would have happily married me and she'd have all the babies she could want because at least I would have been able to give her that."

Lily shook her head, "None of them would say these things, James, you know they wouldn't, if you really looked into your heart! You know they don't think poorly of you." Lily was shattering each one as it came, her heart beating wildly, seeing James's fears and insecurities so vividly displayed, so viciously attacking his mind. "They wouldn't, James. This isn't real! This isn't how any of them feel! They're lies!"

"Are they lies?" hissed Voldemort's voice from the dark as she cut down the last of the inferi-ghosts.

"They are," she said. "Lie and words that were never truly spoken."