Three Hallows' Eve || Harmione & Jily

Chapter 5.1

Chapter Five - The Stork's Assistant

Wednesday 23rd February, 1983

'When should we tell Harry?'

'What would we say? He's two years old, he's hardly going to understand.'

'We need to tell him at some point, Lily.'

She huffed and glared at him. 'And you think I don't know that? I know the healer said it likely wouldn't be a problem but dark magic has lasting effects, James! We were literally killed, for Christ's sake!'

'And then came back to life thanks to Death himself giving us our lives back. I reckon that he's a pretty good authority on these sorts of things,' James deadpanned, but immediately regretted the levity when he saw the look on her face. He sat back down on the bed next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. 'I'm sorry,' he whispered, kissing the crown of her head.

Lily wiped her face and nodded. 'Me too. I'm just not feeling very optimistic at the moment.'

-oOo-

Friday 13th May, 1983

Lily frowned as she looked out the kitchen window. May was definitely supposed to be the start of summer, or at the very least the end of spring. May was definitely not supposed to be absolutely throwing it down with rain. The overcast sky seemed to permeate a feeling of discontent and uneasiness; it was almost two o'clock and all morning it had taken a conscious effort to stay busy and try to swallow the general feeling of anxiety that she'd woken up with.

Dumbledore had said to her once that Divination as a branch of magic was 'woolly at best', and Minerva didn't mince her words at all when discussing the subject. Nevertheless, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was going to go wrong today, and it didn't help her unsettled mind in the slightest that she seemed to be the only person that thought so.

James had really quite cheerfully bid her farewell in the morning as he left for work. The fact that anybody could be as chipper as he was when going to the Ministry was frankly mind-boggling to her. Not that there was anything wrong about what he did for a job - no, indeed, quite the opposite.

In the New Year following their dramatic revival (they'd agreed not to call it a survival because, well really, they hadn't actually survived), they'd had a long conversation about everything they knew now that they hadn't known before that Halloween. One topic that they'd spoken about at length was Death's reveal that Voldemort would have returned to cause even greater cruelty and tyranny before he finally died for good. They had discussed and despaired time and again just how Britain could have possibly fallen into the same trap twice in a lifetime. When the first Death Eater trials began soon thereafter, they found the horrifying answer to that question.

There had been a long delay after Voldemort's defeat before any Death Eater had been put forward for trial. The Ministry had decided that in order to put the War well and truly behind them, an effort would be made to 'clean house' first. Of course, it wasn't a decision they'd come to themselves, but after a few words here and there from themselves and Dumbledore, the fools in power had fallen over themselves in their efforts to agree. There were some uses to be had from the frankly amoral levels of fame that the British Wizarding public had thrust onto the name Potter.

Once all was said and done in the Ministry, forty-one witches and wizards had been taken into custody, most of whom had been senior members of staff. The Department of Magical Transportation had been the worst - it had lost everybody from the top three levels of their hierarchy.

Only once the Ministry had been swept of people who could have 'stopped proper justice from being pursued', in the words of Minister Bagnold, did the trials begin in earnest. It soon became clear, though, that it wasn't only the people who were Marked that caused problems in the justice system, but the general attitude of the Wizarding upper classes at large. The Wizengamot on whole voted more leniently in the first trial of a pure-blood wizard than they had for any of the three trials for half-blood wizards that had taken place previously.

The rich old bigots had been perfectly willing to accept Lucius Malfoy's defence that he'd been imperiused into taking the Mark until James very publicly called for the use of Veritaserum in British trials. The German Ministry had developed a variant of the potion that was practically impossible to circumvent and had been used throughout Europe for more than a decade. The public outcry had been so huge that the Wizengamot had little choice but to implement the change.

After seeing how effectively his lobbying had worked, James decided that he was going to get involved in 'societal reform' and bring Wizarding Britain into 'at least the 1960s, kicking and screaming if need be'. His natural charisma and leadership skills on top of the reverence that was now held for the name Potter meant that in the last couple of years, he'd made more progress than any of them could even have reasonably hoped for. That said, they'd learned that it was one thing to convince people that something needed to change, and another thing entirely to convince them that they actually wanted it changing in a timely manner.

Lily shook herself free from her melancholy as best she could and sent a heating charm to her now-cooling tea before adding the milk. She returned to the living room of their Cambridge house to find Harry in the middle of a tornado of soft plush toys. In the last year his control of magic had grown to be seemingly innate. He never really performed anything particularly focused, but it had become a common enough occurrence to find him playing with moving or floating toys that they'd had to have a tall hedgerow planted in front of their house so that the neighbours or passers-by didn't get a glimpse at the impossible goings-on in the Potter household.

She settled down into the sofa and tucked her feet up underneath her, grabbing the book she had been re-reading from the side table: My Magical Genealogy by Amadeus Brotlin. For many, it wouldn't have been a particularly gripping read, but it had turned out to be an invaluable resource for a project she'd been working on for the last 18 months. Since James had told her about his conversation with Dumbledore and the subsequent realisation that he was a descendant of Ignotus Peverell, Lily had decided to research methods of proving a magical person's lineage and had been told about Brotlin's book by an acquaintance from the Department of Mysteries.

Brotlin was an American Muggle-born wizard who had discovered through Muggle genealogical research that he was actually a distant relative of the Salotto family - one of America's oldest magical families who were thought to have died out centuries ago. The Dwarfish bank of America, Velskytte's, had kept the old Salotto vault closed for nearly three hundred and fifty years, having been quoted as saying that 'presumably extinct is not extinct'. The fact that the blood-magic locks were still in place on the vault door had backed up their insistence, which had caused them to release what Lily thought might just be the most smug press release in history upon Brotlin's claiming and subsequent opening of the vault.

The fact that the blood-magic had remained in place while the family had been dormant for centuries had Lily considering how the locks could identify such a distant descendant as a part of the family, and had led her down a fascinating avenue of research as to whether a magical person's blood could be used in conjunction with some kind of charm or enchantment to show their ancestry.

She reached across her body for her mug, not taking her eyes off the passage she was reading, but exhaled sharply when she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. Bringing her hand down to settle at her navel, she gasped again as a stabbing pain had her nearly doubling over. She brought her legs from where she had them tucked up beneath her, only to find her white linen bottoms blotted with blood. As nonchalantly as she could, she picked up her wand from the side table and cast a cleaning charm on herself while trying desperately to calm her racing heart.