Three Hallows' Eve || Harmione & Jily

Chapter 6.1

Chapter Six - The Flip Side

Friday 8th July, 1983

Lily loved her husband. Really, truly, and whole-heartedly Lily loved James Potter to pieces and had done for years.

But.

He had been really making it difficult of late. More than once now, they'd had this conversation - in fact it was starting to feel like a weekly occurrence, and she was frankly sick of repeating herself. Sure, he apologised profusely every time she brought it up and said he wasn't thinking and that it wouldn't happen again, but every seven days it turned out that it had happened again and he'd be apologising again.

There was a literal human growing inside of her and she seemed to be more competent than him at the moment. And it must have been a matter of competence, for that's all it could have been after this week. Growing up, her mother had always repeated the phrase like a broken record: 'Once is a mistake, twice is a pattern, three times is a habit.' As she frustratedly circled today's date on the calendar in the kitchen, she asked herself what seven times was.

Infuriating, that's what it was. Here she was, at home, actually growing their daughter, and for the seventh week running, he'd eaten the last of the chocolate. There was none in the cupboard. There was none in the fridge even though he didn't like cold chocolate. The bar she'd left in the box of tea bags was gone, despite the fact that he didn't drink tea. He'd found the bar that she'd hidden in the jar on the bookcase. Every single hiding place she thought of, he'd found and cleared.

So, for the seventh week running, she was idly wondering whether her husband being a thieving little bastard who could sniff out chocolate a mile away was adequate grounds for divorce. She knew she wasn't really being fair on him; he'd been running himself ragged for the last two months or so.

In April, a seven year old Muggle-born girl called Alyssa had been beaten to death by her parents after a display of accidental magic. While it probably wasn't the first time, the police had gotten involved and upon their arrest, the parents had described a number of the girl's 'freakish' acts. The strangeness of the case had gotten some attention from a number of different aspects of the government, and as such the Ministry had had to get involved to avoid a massive breach to the Statute of Secrecy.

Using the risk to the Statute as a convenient basis, James had worked with Dumbledore and a handful of Wizarding lawyers to draft the '(1983-05a) Muggle-born Intervention Act', or as they were informally calling it, 'Alyssa's Law'. They proposed a restructuring of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement by merging the Improper Use of Magic Office with the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, and creating a new Monitoring of Underage Sorcery Office.

The M.U.S. would be responsible for all underage sorcery violations, and also quarterly non-invasive checks on underage Muggle-born children after their first sign of magic. Should the young wizard or witch's home environment become strained or difficult to the point where the child or the Statute could be at risk, the Office would step in and introduce the family to magic and Wizarding Britain. If the risk to the child or Statute did not decrease thereafter, the Office could intervene and help to rehome the child in the Wizarding world.

It was an extremely liberal, and therefore extremely ambitious, motion to put before the generally very conformist Wizengamot, but James and Dumbledore believed that by selling it as a means to protect the Statute of Secrecy, they had a good chance of it being successful. If so, it would be a huge boon for some of the other reforms that James had been working on and the biggest piece of law that they'd managed to get ratified so far.

On top of doing all of that, James had also been working on the nursery when he was home because Lily was useless at decorating. So far, he'd managed to paint a mural that filled an entire wall of the room, and was in the process of carefully incorporating the rune scheme that Lily had designed for protective and monitoring wards.

So she knew that she wasn't being fair to him by snapping at him when he was home, but she'd been craving chocolate for almost two months and the damn man couldn't stop himself from eating any and all chocolate products that she bought with the weekly shopping. She sighed in frustration as she passive-aggressively added 'chocolate, again' to the bottom of the shopping list on the fridge and went back to the dining table to continue the work she'd been doing on her genealogy project.

After exchanging a handful of letters with Amadeus Brotlin and having had a number of meetings with one of St Mungo's Healing Researchers, she'd managed to prove that a magical person's blood could in theory be used to trace their lineage. Brotlin had really rather kindly uncovered and shared with her the details of the blood ward used on the Salatto vaults, and she'd spent the last fortnight breaking it down and investigating the arithmancic principles to find out how it identified distant relatives of the ward's creator, but it had proven to be one of the most intricate and complicated pieces of magic she'd ever seen and as such was devilishly hard to pick apart.

A particularly strong gust of wind coming in from the open window sent some of her notes flying off of the table and onto the floor. She frustratedly blew at the hair that had been blown into her face by the draught and got up to collect the strewn parchment. Reaching for the last sheet, she froze and tilted her head. The sheet had one of the cyclic diagrams she'd drawn in an effort to understand how the different elements of the ward interacted, but viewing it upside down had her looking at it from another angle, both literally and figuratively.

Up until now, she'd been working on the assumption that the ward had been identifying something in the magical person's genes, comparable to how Muggle DNA testing checked for relationships between people, but looking at the diagram like this, it became suddenly clear that that wasn't the case all. The ward was actually identifying the traces of the person's magic in the blood, and recognising the magical legacy of the ward's creator.

Evidently, a person's magic had an echo of the magic of their ancestors. It was an idea that was kind of horrifying for society when she considered how blood-bigots could warp the meaning of that; it was one thing for them to call themselves pure-blooded, it was another level entirely for them to have proof of their depressingly straight family tree actually in their blood.

On the other hand, it was completely amazing for Lily's research. It made sense now why she had been having such problems trying to understand how the ward identified the person - she had been looking for entirely the wrong thing. She hurriedly snatched up the page and returned to the table, finding a new sheet of parchment and redrawing the diagram to reflect what she'd just figured out, then rifled through the rest of the pages to find the sections of her notes that were relevant to this new understanding.

After about an hour of re-ordering, expanding, and double checking equations while cross-referencing them with some of the warding books she'd bought, Lily finally sat back with a smile like the cat that got the cream. It turned out that she'd actually already managed to isolate most of the parts of the ward that identified and verified the person, but because she'd be approaching it wrong, she hadn't recognised key parts of it, and so it hadn't made sense. All it took was a small change in perspective and it had all ended up coming together in one of the most exciting puzzles she'd ever done.

It was about then that something caught her attention, or much rather the lack of anything actually caught her attention. Not since she would squirrel herself away in the corner of the Hogwarts library had she managed to find so much time to get really engrossed in whatever she was working on. After graduation, she'd moved straight in with James and she'd never got the peace she was used to while he was around. When he wasn't around, there'd be constant matters involving the war that would work to grab her attention. Since the end of the war, there'd been Harry, and peace and quiet didn't mix well with small children, despite how much she'd prayed for it at times.

Now she had it though, she'd come to discover that there was actually nothing more disconcerting than silence and a lack of interruptions when there was a toddler in the house. While Harry wasn't a troublesome or boisterous little boy, he was rarely still or quiet. Almost constantly the boy was either chuntering away to himself, plodding around the house playing with his toys, watching tv, or otherwise making noise. Even when he slept, he snored.