Marauding in the Clouds

Baby Pictures

Baby Pictures

l'Au-delà

Lily was sitting on James' old bed in the strange, silvery imitation of a Gryffindor boys' dorm room when the door opened and her husband beckoned for her to join him in the hall. She searched his eyes, though she wasn't sure what she was looking for. Grief? No, not that. They had only themselves to mourn. Hopelessness? She certainly felt hopeless. Her son was alive, but she could not reach him. She thought of the Great Hall, transformed to mirror Privet Drive, that horrible street where her sister lived with Vernon Dursely and the nephew Lily had never been invited to meet. 

What she did find in his eyes was the pain that comes of remembering things one does not want to remember and forgiving people one has been hurt by. She knew that pain intimately. Years ago, she had seen it every time she looked in the mirror. 

It looked a little different on James, and Lily thought that was probably because he was not charged with the impossible task of forgiving Severus Snape. She was glad that she had had the strength to abandon that burden.

"Lily," said James, "Regulus is here. Will you come down to the common room and say hello?"

She hesitated. Regulus Black was a death eater. Regulus Black was the principal reason Sirius had a drinking problem, as far as she knew. Regulus Black was an enemy. Right? No, maybe not, because Regulus Black was in the Gryffindor common room and there was something very familiar in James Potter's expression. Behind the pain in his eyes was love: outgrown, but nonetheless potent.

"Lily?" James repeated, and she blinked, realizing with a start that she had been staring at him in silence for upwards of thirty seconds. 

"Oh. Yes." Did you love him, once? How much don't I know about you? "I'll be down in a minute."

"Lovely." James was one of the few people Lily knew who used the word 'lovely' unsarcastically. It was like him. James saw so much goodness in every interaction that there were few words nice enough to convey his meaning. When he said 'lovely,' he meant that Lily was lovely, that her promise to join them downstairs was lovely, and that it would be nothing short of lovely to make peace where for years there had been only cut ties and frayed strings. James paused. "Will you bring some baby pictures down with you?"

"What? I don't have any baby pictures with me, James."

"Look in your old school trunk," he said, "and think about the pictures as you do. They should be inside when you open the lid." He smiled at her tenderly, then left the room.

"Would you look at that," she mumbled. Her trunk sat at the end of the next bed as if she had been one of James' dormmates in school and it belonged there. (Of course, she had been one of his dormmates in the later part of their seventh year, albeit unofficially.)

She thought of Harry's baby book as she opened the trunk, and there it was. It was a muggle baby book, firsts described in blue pen ink, pages stuck with unmoving pictures. Lily and James, so different and yet so well suited to each other, had decided early on that they wanted to raise their son in a balanced world. His mother was a spitfire, and his father spit puns. His godfather was literally a dog, so they got a cat (part kneazle, rusty orange). His godfather's werewolf boyfriend was wary of holding babies because of how fragile they looked, so everybody else gave Harry extra cuddles until Remus finally trusted himself to take a turn. Godric's Hollow was filled with muggles, but it was also home to several old wizarding families and chapters and chapters worth of wizarding history. The pictures they kept on the mantle moved, so the pictures in the baby book didn't. Balance.

Lily cradled the book in her arms as if it was a baby, as if it was her baby. She smiled, shut the lid of the trunk, and moved towards the door.

Regulus Black, she thought. What am I supposed to say to Regulus Black?

"Hello," she said, stepping into the common room, because that seemed like a good place to start.

"Hello," said Regulus, who looked painfully nervous. 

"You two have met before, yes?" James asked, glancing uncomfortably between wife and ex-boyfriend. Lily's eyes found him, found the wrinkle in his brow that said Was this a good idea?

He was not worried about old gossip or jealousy, Lily knew. That was not a factor in the strange equation of

Lily, James, and Regulus,

standing in the Gryffindor common room,

staring at each other,

waiting for the inevitable explosion.

Lily also knew that the boys fully expected her to be the catalyst of this explosion, and had no intention of letting them down.

She slapped Regulus Black across the face twice, once for Sirius, once for, well, everything else. Everyone else. Regulus Black had fallen in with the worst of crowds, and Lily Evans, whom that very crowd had targeted cruelly and incessantly, would give him hell for it.

Or, she would slap him twice across the face for it, because he was an eighteen-year-old kid who James had welcomed into the Gryffindor common room, a space made sacred by memory and friendship and chaste kisses and belonging. James worshipped the place, and cheap, undeserved forgiveness would not buy a ticket inside.

Regulus did not look surprised when she hit him. Perhaps he felt he deserved it.

"How did you die?" Lily asked him, sinking into the misted echo of a plushy armchair by the fire that she had always loved.

Regulus did look surprised when she asked that. Perhaps he felt he didn't deserve to tell the story. There was a long pause, a heavy silence, and it lasted a minute (or five) before Regulus spoke.

"I tried to kill him," he said, "and I failed." Lily watched as he stumbled over the words, noted James' unchanging expression (he already knows, then), and wondered why Black was struggling so much. Presumably, it wasn't this hard for him to tell James. He looks less surprised about what the kid is saying than he does about how he is saying it. "I drowned planting the fake locket; I... I left the real one with Kreacher, a house-elf, and told him to destroy it."

"Hang on," said James, who had evidently not heard the story in full, "what locket?"

Regulus paused again before answering.

"The Horcrux."

WHAT'S UP, GUYS? Sorry, I've been M.I.A. for a while; schoolwork (and watching rom-coms on Netflix lol) keeps me busy. I can't promise many updates until summer vacation at the earliest, but I'm pretty lazy, so I probably won't make any promises then, either. I hope you enjoyed this chapter!

Shameless self-promo: Check out my other Marauders fanfic, (AU where Sirius has a twin sister; it's called The Forgotten Marauder), and you can follow me on tiktok at the username jamaispur. (I also have a youtube channel of the same name to which I will be uploading some marauders-themed music in the next few months.