A Little Bit of Luck

Lily Potter had had a very long day. Peter Pettigrew was coming that night so that they could finalize the Secret Keeper ceremony, and James was off at the pub drinking with Sirius Black, (much to her displeasure) so she had to clean the house herself, while keeping an eye on the baby.

So at six in the afternoon, when she should have been resting, Lily put baby Harry in a carrier and got to work, doing the dishes and mopping the floor and trying to organize and stack up the reams of paper that covered every available surface, as she was on maternity potions and was not supposed to use cleaning spells. Baby Harry kicked at her chest with chubby little legs, and pulled at her dangling earrings and hair whenever she leaned over, until at last she unstrapped the carrier and took Harry out, putting him in a nest of soft blankets on the sofa with a few Wizarding toys, until she could finish up, making sure to keep an eye on him at all times.

She was almost finished, and at this point she was very frustrated. Let James do the Damn laundry! He's the one who always suggests to buy a house elf whenever his nursing wife complains about having to clean the house muggle style! She glanced back at Harry, who was occupying himself with chewing on a teething ring, and got to work dusting the artefacts and the china shepherdesses and the broken sneakoscopes that covered the mantal piece and the tops of the bookshelves. And then she ran across something she'd almost forgotten.

She'd won it in sixth year, in Slughorn's potion class, and she'd given it pride of place every house she'd lived, saving it for when she would really need it. James kept trying to convince her to let him have it- "Oh, C'mon, I really want to win this bet, Lily Flower!" but she'd never given in to his puppy dog eyes. It was as though all the opportunities which had closed for her when she'd married were bottled up in that little vial of golden potion, and while she wasn't unhappy with her marriage, she always wanted to remember what she had been before; what she could be again. She paused to admire the light filtering through the golden Felix Felicis, and then she set it down on the coffee table to dust behind it.

A childish gurgle had her whirling around in concern, and then in anger. Baby Harry had the bottle in one dimpled hand, and had just finished sucking the last drops out, priceless golden potion dribbling out of the corners of his mouth.

"Harry, no!" She shouted, disentangling the bottle from his hands. He promptly started crying, and nothing would quiet him, even when she in agitation shoved the bottle back into his grip.

At that moment, the doorbell rang.

"Oh, thank God you're here, Peter," she said, once she'd affirmed that it was actually him. "James and Siri are out at the pub, and Remmy has his little furry problem, so it's just us until the Fidelius ceremony; sorry about that. I gotta go change Harry; just help yourself to whatever's in the fridge."

She went to the bathroom to change Harry's nappy, but he was dry, and he wasn't hungry either when she tried to feed him. At last, worn out from the wailing, she practically shoved baby Harry into Peter's arms. "Please just take this baby for me for a second!" she said. "I can't deal with it anymore!"

Peter rather reluctantly stretched out his arms, but as he did so, his left sleeve hiked up, revealing a tattoo. A very particular tattoo, too; one in the design of a hideous skull, with a snake coming out of its mouth. A tattoo she had only ever seen once before, on the arm of her onetime friend Severus Snape. In a heartbeat she'd snatched Harry back and stunned the traitor, thanking Merlin that she'd discovered the treachery before they actually made Peter their Secret Keeper.

Before ten minutes had passed, she had her head stuck in the floo, calling for the aurors. Pettigrew'd be in custody before James even sobered up enough to come home.

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Meanwhile, while doing a routine check of the Lestrange vault, goblin teller Goldtoe felt the aura of a very nasty artefact. It felt like a horcrux. But it couldn't be, could it? It was against both Wizarding and goblin law to make, own, harbor, or sell horcruxes, and it broke several important treaties to keep one in a Gringotts vault. Goldtoe sent an urgent memo to his superior, Tornlid, who came rushing right out of a meeting with the senior director, bringing a decontamination squad with him.

"Where is it?" Tornlid snapped. "So help me, if this is a false alarm...!"

Goldtoe assured him that it wasn't, and led him to the locked glass case in the back of the vault, where the smoldering goblet, heavily layered with wards and traps, reposed on a pumpkin-orange velvet cushion. Tornlid cursed for seven minutes straight, in as many languages, and then had the decontamination squad pick it up with long poles and dragonhide gloves, and pack it away in a warded box for transportation, sending a low-level teller to have it registered and the fines and fees taken from the Lestrange family vault, while he himself went to speak to Ragnok.

They might or might not be pressing charges against the entire Wizarding ministry.

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In an entirely different part of England, while all these aforesaid things were going on, Junior Unspeakable Lynx was in Little Hangleton with her mentor, studying the locally infamous Riddle Manor. Having searched all through the house and finding almost no traces of magic at all except for a little killing curse residue, she went across the street, to that "creepy old shack", as the townspeople put it, hoping to find a few clues to the mysterious killer of the Riddle family. What she found would get her an instant promotion.

She cut her way through the high, rank weeds, Unspeakable Minkin following close behind, in case she ran into a trap. At last, the old Gaunt shack came into view, not more than a construction of rotted beams, with a window that had had all the glass broken out years ago, and a snake skeleton nailed over the door. She shivered under her hood. Just a creepy, haunted muggle hut.

At the door, however, she cast a sensing charm- just in case- and recoiled with a surprised hiss. There was a crude blood ward covering the door. She turned to her mentor.

"Should we go on?"

Unspeakable Minkin nodded. "This is field work, not a simulation. Follow your gut and try not to die. I'm right here with you."

With this dubious reassurance, Unspeakable Lynx cast a cutting curse on her hand, and let a few drops of her blood sizzle against the wards in "payment". The magical locks eased up, and the two of them entered, one following the other.

The shack had been abandoned for years, and decay was plain in its every timber. Dust coated surfaces and lined pots thick as volcanic ash, and any food that might have been there had rotted to nothing before they arrived.

Unspeakable Lynx cast another sensing charm. The hut was layered with weak dark magic, the residue of a love potion caking one of the smaller pans. And then-

"Holy Mother of Merlin!" Unspeakable Minkin burst out. "Do you feel that?"

Unspeakable Lynx nodded with a shudder. It was very Dark, very evil magic, and every atom in her oversensitized body was vibrating with the aura. It was coming from beneath a loose floorboard in the corner. Hesitating, she cast a number of strong protective spells, slipped on her rune embroidered basilisk skin gloves, and wrenched up the floorboard with a rusty poker she'd found by the fireplace.

Underneath the board, there was an ivory box, carved with Egyptian protective hieroglyphics. With trembling and sweating hands (carefully concealed by her gloves) she opened it.

And that was when she very nearly fainted. It wasn't just the obviously nasty curses and compulsions on the ring in the box. It was the fact that said ring which was currently winking up at her malevolently like a vulture's eye, was the holy grail of her entire department, a storybook ring that allowed contact with the dead. The second Deathly Hallow. The Resurrection Stone. It also seemed to be a horcrux, judging by what she could feel of its magic.

"Unspeakable Journeyman Minkin, we need to get this back to headquarters. If this is what I think it is, we are so promoted." She called.

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Halfway across England, but in the same general time frame, there was a cave of horrors. While there is nothing particularly peachy about a drippy, miserable wet sea cave, this cave was particularly nasty because it was full of the evilest of magic, and there, in the misty green halflight, a disillusioned Death Eater, one Regulus Black, lay dying, a poisonous emerald green substance trickling from his lips, while his house elf desperately shook him with one hand, the other holding the silver chain of a cursed locket dangling from his fingers.

"Master Black!" He shouted desperately.

"W...water?"

The house elf ran to the edge of the subterranean lake, washing and filling the goblet which had until that point held poison. As he ran back to "Master Black's" side, the water began to churn and froth, pale withered hands clutching at the dying man and his slave. Blank, dead eyed, soulless creatures they were, invested with a semblance of life only through the most horrible of witchcraft; there, then, were the guardians of the cave.

The house elf, busy pouring the liquid down Regulus' throat, did not react until the shambling soulless things grabbed at him; then, panic stricken, he called out "Master!" for a house elf can only do what his or her master commands. In another life, Regulus might have simply died in the cave, only living long enough to tell his elf to run, but, be it the nobility of the Blacks or be it luck, Regulus gasped and raised himself on one elbow, finding a few vestiges of strength to go on.

"Kreature," he gasped. "Get...us...out...of...here! Take...locket...goblins...they w-will...k-know...St. Mungo's...I...take me..."

And Kreature did. The goblins, appalled at both the story and the horcrux, decontaminated the locket at once, at no charge, when the house elf popped in, babbling hysterically about "Good Master Regulus," and "soul lockets". Regulus himself recovered in time, in a private warded room at St. Mungo's, though he was never quite as well as he'd been.

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On the exact same night that all these things were coming to pass, another house elf was cleaning in a grand old manor in Wiltshire. Now, no one short of a pureblood fanatic could say that Dobby the house elf was exactly well treated. It was, unfortunately, quite the opposite. Dobby's long ears hurt from having shut them in the oven, and his eyes were blurred from lack of sleep, and his hands were shaking from years of work, and it was thus that Dobby committed the unpardonable sin of losing focus.

He had been cleaning and organizing the hidden room beneath Malfoy Manor, full of taxidermy thestrals and peculiarly nasty Babylonian statuettes loaded with impotence curses, and skulls (human or otherwise) and mummified monkeys' paws, and candles made from hangman's grease, and all the other things that any self respecting Dark pureblood family would keep around, and he was in the middle of sorting through the more...restricted potion ingredients Mr. Malfoy kept locked in a cabinet for private experiments or gifts for his friend Severus- things like human glands and pickled cross sections of hideous undersea beasts, and exotic venom and such, when his trembling fingers slipped on the smooth cut crystal of a small phial, and it fell and shattered, spilling translucent greenish yellow venom and shards of clear crystal all over a little black journal. Which sizzled and began to scream.

Dobby jumped back, squeaking in horror, and began to pound his head against the basement wall, while all the while the diary screamed on and on. The sound, of course, woke an exceedingly angry Lucius Malfoy, who had aching muscles from the last bout of crucitus, and an aching head from too much firewhiskey consumed at the last Dark Revel.

Malfoy stomped downstairs in a rage, and seeing the carnage, got even madder. He aimed a vicious kick at Dobby, missed, and threw both his slippers at the elf's head.

Most elves would be distraught at this, as slippers were too close to clothes for the sensibilities of most, and for a house elf to receive clothes is the worst dishonor, because it means that his or her services are no longer wanted. Dobby, however, would die to be free...and he was happy to get out on a technicality.

"Master gave Dobby a slipper!" Dobby shrieked, staring at the black and maroon slipper clutched in both his hands.

"What?" roared a confused Lucius Malfoy.

"Master threw a slipper...and Dobby caught it! Master gave Dobby a slipper! Dobby is free!" And with that, the jubilant elf popped away.

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Last but not least, in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a Ravenclaw seventh year was out after hours. Now, even in a magic school, it is not unusual for students to sneak out after curfew, but what was unusual about this particular girl was that she was not headed towards the kitchens, or the Quiddich pitch, or the prefects' private spa bath, or a broom closet. Instead, she was looking for a room that she'd overheard the other upper years talk about, a room that could be whatever you needed it to be at any given time. Specifically, she needed it to hide a bag full of questionable reading material, as Blood Rituals for Everyone, Moste Potente Potions, Demonology, and A History of Darkness were not exactly on the Hogwarts reading list. Even if it was a strictly academic interest.

She wandered the halls, narrowly avoiding Snape's patrol and Flich with his skinny cat Mrs. Noris, until at last she reached the corridor on the seventh floor, where there was a stylized tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy trying to teach trolls to dance the Sugarplum Suite from the Nutcracker. The room she had heard about wasn't there. Frustrated, she began pacing, as though that would make an entrance appear. All at once, as if called into being by her anxious thoughts, a door melted out of the wall, and with a grin, she pulled it open and walked into the Rooms of Come and Go.

It was a vast, soaring, cathedral-like room, completely full of student contraband, like a colossal rummage sale. Brooms, Dark arts books, broken gadgets, molding sandwiches, wizard porn glamored to look like copies of the Hogsmeade Review, fanged frisbees, biting silverware, mangy-looking flying carpets, worn old invisibility cloaks with cloudy patches and threads hanging off the hem, broken wands, one-winged snitches flying in miserable erratic circles, and stolen necklaces, lying about in heaps. Curious, she started to explore, climbing over years worth of completely random stuff. And then something glinted in the corner of her eye. She walked over to get a closer look...

"Oh my gods!" She shrieked. "Is that what I think it was?"

It was a battered silver coronet, set with emeralds and sapphires and wadded carelessly into a red silken cloth, then stuffed into a partially melted cauldron. She pulled it out and carefully unwrapped it, staring at the crown in her hands in awe. She'd seen the replica of it on the bust of Rowena Ravenclaw in her common room every day for six and a half years, but this was the real deal, complete with the famous engraving "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure."

It was the diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw. The diadem, not just any old crown.

The seventh year hurriedly dumped the Dark Arts books out of her bag to make room for it, promising herself to get right back to them, then wrapped it up again to carry it to her head of house, Filius Flitwick, in the morning. Luckily she knew better than to put it on.

No sooner had said head of house seen the diadem when he immediately took it out of her hands, thanking her for bringing it to him instead of keeping it and trying to wear it. Being born in the goblin nation before 1980, he had actually fought in the Last Goblin War, in the course of which the goblin king, Ragnar Lothbrok, was possessed by a Wizarding horcrux belonging to the then general of the Wizarding army, Maenus Mcnair (one of the many bits not mentioned by Binns in his history classes) and knew how to recognize a horcrux.

Ragnok would have a lot of paperwork.

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All this, all over Britain, happened in the same night. Other things happened too, things lucky for some and not for others. Of these happenings there were too many to tell or count, some directly and some indirectly connected with all the others.

The goblins pressed charges, and Cornelius Fudge found himself without a job, while his loyal Dolores Umbridge was stricken by a mysterious and incurable wasting illness. The new minister, which, surprisingly, was Arthur Weasley, did a great job rooting out corruption, and the magical law enforcement department became truly a force to be reckoned with, rather than a plaque on a door at the ministry. Rights for non-humans and non-magicals were passed and implemented, and the new cure for lycanthropy invented by one Severus Snape, youngest potion master in the British isles, did much to help the movement. It was really quite unfortunate that up-and-coming star Gilderoy Lockhart met with a tragic accident while interviewing him...

{Insert wavy flashback lines here.}

"It's such a shame," Lockhart commented, leaning lazily on the counter of Snape's private lab. "But we can't have a Death Eater invent a lycanthropy cure."

"Are you threatening me?" asked Severus silkily.

"No. Just stating a fact. Obliv-"

He was cut off by the Potions Master slamming him back into a wall. "My life's work is not going to be just another foot note in your poorly-written books!" He smiled grimly, then bound him in conjured robes, calling the aurors. "And just a bit of advice: never obliviate an occlumens." If his head hit the wall a little too hard, well, oops.

{Insert end-of-flashback lines}

These changes, and more, swept across Britain, bringing important technological advancements and bringing peace. In five months, when Voldemort finally tracked down the Potters, he walked right into a trap orchestrated by Lily Potter, and was met head on by a squad of aurors and by Snape, who broke cover to defend the family. James took down ten Death Eaters all by himself, and Lily herself got another four, while carrying the baby. When Voldemort tried to kill her and Harry, James lunged in front of them, dying like a Gryffindor to save his family. Then Voldemort, laughing, cast a killing curse at the desperate mother and her baby. And then a miracle happened. The killing curse bounced off, and hit Voldemort in the chest, killing him in the same moment he realized something was wrong.

Oh, how the Wizarding world celebrated! Lily and her baby became instant celebrities, and she found herself drowned in marriage proposals even before James' funeral. However, she mourned for a year and a half before even thinking about dating again, and then she only did so So her baby would have a dad. In the end, she married her friend Severus (with much opposition both from her husband's friends and Albus Many-Names Dumbledore) who was the only person who loved her because she existed and not because she was a giant celebrity.

In the end, however, the marriage was accepted: it was never proven that Snape had been a Death Eater, and no one had the mark anymore. And really, is marrying a world-famous potions genius really a bad thing? Of course, Sirius Black was not at all happy; it took Lily locking him in a room with his nemesis, and Remus patiently explaining that even if Snape was a slimy snake, he was also Lily's husband and the creator of the lycanthropy immunization to get him to stop verbalizing his frustration. Snape was annoyed with Black too, but he could tolerate it. After all, he'd gotten the girl in the end.

After all this chaos, no one really thought to consider why. Lily herself, and the last remaining Mauraders were the only ones who knew about the bottle of Felix Felicis, and no one, not even those who knew about it, considered it the salvation of the Wizarding world. But there's no denying that a little bit of luck goes a long way.