The Next Great Adventure (A Marauders Fan Fic)

Epilogue

Epilogue

Everybody else in the country was celebrating; for Minerva McGonagall, however, seated stiffly on a wall, today was a day of mourning. She was cold and uncomfortable but this was the least she could do for Lily and James Potter, the two children who had readily sacrificed themselves for their son.

"They were too young," she had sobbed to herself when she found out and, if cats could cry, she had a suspicion she would still be crying now.

Remus arranged their funeral and it was a small, subdued affair. Somehow, however, people who had never even met either of them waited outside, laying wreaths down to commemorate them. Once again McGonagall was there, sitting on the front row and wondering whether life could ever go back to normal when a generation of innocent children had been raised in a war and trained to kill.

A few seats down from her sat Remus, dressed in the last nice suit he owned. James had bought it for him only the year before, and when he had protested he had told him that he needed to keep it so that he could get a job and stop living off Potter handouts. This was the first time Remus had put it on since then.

He wished, more than anything, that he could be inside the coffins too; the people he had loved the most were dead, and all he managed to choke out when he stood in front of the guests was, "James, Lily, I'm so sorry I-" before the tears obscured everything else he had written and strangled him. His world had been so much better than he could ever had hoped when he was growing up, and now his friends were dead, in Azkaban or insane. Remus was, just like he had always been when he was younger, alone.

***

Only the very faintest edges of the dawn were beginning to break, and it was still dark beneath the trees. It hurt, deep inside her soul, to be here in a world that she didn't belong to, but Lily didn't care. Everything in her body burned, and she imagined this was what it was like to be tortured, but she could stand it because her son was there. Harry stood in front of her, battered and bruised but alive, and that was all she had ever wanted when she had laid down her life for him. James was beside her, but James had been beside her all these years, and this was her one chance...

She tucked her hair behind her ears and stepped forward, trying to commit his face to memory, remembering how he had looked when he was still a baby in her arms; she tried to fix in her mind how it felt to be looked at properly, well and truly understood by her eyes when they looked back at her out of Harry's face, and she traced every similarity between Harry and James, transported back to her time here at Hogwarts, and she smiled, knowing that Harry had pulled through. He was perfect, even if she had had nothing to do with it.

He stared back at her just as eagerly and all she wanted to do was to hug him, to tell him to leave Voldemort to the adults and to take him away with her. If there were anything she could do, any way at all that she could stay there, with him, she would do it if it meant that she could show her son the love she had wanted to since that Halloween.

"You've been so brave," she said, and she tried to put everything that she wanted to say into those few words. She wasn't sure whether she would have another chance to do so.

"You are nearly there," said James, "very close. We are... so proud of you." He thought of everything he had seen Harry do; thought of how, even without Lily and her example, Harry was better by far than he ever was, and he wondered what he had done to deserve a son like him.

"Does it hurt?" Lily's heart hurt, a completely separate suffering to the agony of being someplace she didn't belong. She reached out, trying to pull him to her and comfort him; for a split second she wanted to encourage him, not just to reassure him, so that he would go willingly to his death and come back to her.