The Last Days of Godric's Hollow

Author's Note: The idea for this fic was born after I re-read, for about the hundredth time, the wonderful Shoebox Project and also for the hundredth time wished that we had got to see those versions of the Marauders further on in their story, i.e. see Lily and James get married and have Harry, see Peter after he joined the Death Eaters, and see more of Remus and Sirius' relationship, which remains the only non-canon pairing I ship. So although this is a fic of book-canon events, the characterisation of the Marauders and Lily, and the version of their time at Hogwarts, is that of the Shoebox Project. Basically, this is a fic of a fic as much as it is a fic of the books themselves, and I recommend that you read it, not just because it is my inspiration for this but also because it is by miles the best fanfic I've ever read, and now to a great extent shapes how I see the characters involved when I re-read the books.

27th October 1981

Early morning sunlight streamed in through the window. It lit up the rings of tea scattered stickily across the table, and made beams of dust appear, hovering with a tranquility that was maddening to the young man sitting at the table, elbows planted squarely in the midst of the tea-rings and glasses sliding down his nose. In this light, the piece of parchment in front of him looked even more stubbornly blank than it had already.

There was a rattling sound from the corner of the room. James Potter's head jerked up, his body twisting to face the threat head-on, to see the portly grey shape of Horace the cat slide through the cat flap.

Just the cat. Good. Everyone- and everything- was still safe. Safe as safe as safe.

Good old safety.

Looking back down at his blank piece of parchment, James realised that his hand had gone instinctively to his wand. More out of irritation than anything else, he whipped it out with a flourish and spun in his chair to point it at the wall.

'Stupefy!'

He hadn't meant to say that out loud. The spell bounced off the wall and towards the draining board, knocking a saucepan to the floor and making Horace flee the room with unprecedented speed. He stowed his wand back into his pocket, and as he went to pick up the pan he had a thought of exactly the kind he had been trying not to let himself have-

That was probably the only proper magic you'll get to do all day.

Filled with a childish desire to prove himself wrong, he put the pan back on the floor and levitated it, very slowly and not without dropping it twice, back onto the draining board. It landed on top of a pile of spoons, slid sideways and fell into the sink in a shower of cutlery.

James turned back to his parchment, trying to repress a desire to make more noise, perhaps by banging two saucepan lids together like he hadn't done since he was nine. Another loud noise would break the aggravatingly sedate and cosy atmosphere in the kitchen, it was true, but it might also wake Lily or Harry, and they both looked wonderfully peaceful when asleep. He didn't like to admit it to himself, but he felt slightly jealous of their tranquility, and it was not worth feeling immensely guilty all day for the brief second of childish glee disrupting them would give him. And he knew he would feel guilty all day. That was the thing about staying in one very small cottage all day long- small things, like waking up a tousled and probably bad-breathed redhead and a moody toddler suddenly took on huge importance. Instead, he grabbed his quill and, spraying ink blobs far and wide, scrawled two words across his parchment, so large that there would be no room for a date-

Dear Padfoot,

Then he stopped again. He looked around him, to see if anything would show him what to write, but nothing seemed to have changed in centuries. There was a copy of Which Broomstick?, which Harry had smeared with pureed carrots so that the preening young man on the Nimbus 1000 had flown away in indignation. There were innumerable cold cups of tea he had made out of sheer boredom and then realised he didn't want. There was Harry's high chair, one of the legs nearly completely chewed through before they had thought to buy Harry a rubber bone of the sort given to dogs. And there was the drying rack, over which was slung nearly his entire collection of moth-eaten T-shirts, as well as Lily's green gingham bra. Only the very last of this catalogue seemed at all interesting, and he sincerely hoped that it wouldn't be of interest to Padfoot.

Dear Padfoot,

How goes whatever top-secret, ultra-sexy manly mission you're on? I'm fighting the good fight here on the home front, beating hordes of Death Eaters away from our door daily, and I expect Lord Voldemort himself will turn up to duel me to the death any day now. I've been practicing my best moves on any Death Eaters still foolish enough to try and menace chez Potter, and I don't want to brag but in all honesty I think I could take him.

James screwed up the letter, then lobbed it into the air and shot a spell at it. He missed by several inches; instead, it burnt a hole in the sofa while the crumpled parchment fell to the floor unscathed.

Looking around once more, his eyes fell on a photograph hanging on the wall, high enough to have escaped the puree redecoration that every object less than three feet from the floor had suffered. It showed four boys, laughing at the camera with boyish overconfidence, arms around each other. He had always thought of this photo as perfectly representing the Marauder days, all four of them laughing together as one huge, raucous concentration of Boy. But looking at it now- Remus wasn't laughing quite as hard as everyone else, that wasn't surprising, but he wasn't looking at the camera either. Why had he never noticed that before? He and Sirius seemed to be sharing their own joke, or rather Sirius seemed to be laughing at Remus and Remus was pink-faced with embarrassment and suppressed laughter. But he, James, remembered that photo being taken and they had been laughing all together, he was sure. It was their last week at Hogwarts. They were celebrating their final prank, an extravaganza involving their last twenty Dungbombs and Filch's office. They had nearly been caught and had been split up, and he and Pete had been waiting by the tree for twenty worrying minutes for Sirius and Remus, during which time Lily turned up with a huge camera and a determination to put to film every last second of their final week. The photo itself had been taken when Sirius and Remus, oddly red in the face both and laughing wildly, had come sprinting down the lawn and flung themselves into the all-boy melee, while Lily laughed and sighed and managed to make them arrange themselves into what could loosely be described as a line, rather than a heap.

The laughter, in James' memory of that brilliant day, came from relief at no one having been Filched and joy at the inherent funniness of Dungbombs and the thought of Filch's expression. Pete was laughing with him, he could see, peering over the tops of Sirius' and Remus' heads, but he kept wobbling in and out of the frame, jostled along so that he was frequently almost completely excluded. Had it been like that? He didn't want it to have been, didn't want those days to be the least bit different from how he remembered them. Especially not now, when everything- and everyone- seemed to have changed.

Dear Padfoot,

Pete came round on Wednesday, I don't remember if I already said. If I'm honest it was a bit awkward, we don't seem to know what to say to one another anymore. I suppose it's different now we're not Us Four all the time anymore, but it has been four years, you'd think we'd have got used to it by now. Anyway, he looked awful for some reason, all pale and ill. Pete pale, I know! But that isn't even the amazing part! Padfoot, Pete's belly is GONE! Or shrunk a lot, anyway. He looks weird and unPeteish without it, especially because the skin where it used to be still hasn't shrunk to fit it. He was acting really strange, too. When Lily came in with Harry he wouldn't stop staring at him for ages, and I swear his hand started shaking. Maybe it's because it's weird for him- and all of us, actually, I still can't believe it- that I have an actual son, I mean he's seen Harry before but back then he was more of a pink squirmy little sea-monkey thing and now he's almost like an actual little person! Don't tell Lily I said that, she would kill me. Not to get all gushy and parenty, because I am after all still a young buck with my life ahead of me and not some old geezer in a cardigan, but he looks more and more like me, especially now he has actual hair I am pleased to report that it will NOT lie down, just like his old man's. Oh, but he does have Lily's eyes. I'm just happy that her eyes will survive another generation, because Lily's eyes have always been one of my favourite things about her (beyond the obvious fnar fnar). Right, sorry, I've finished being all gooey. Back to Pete. I hoped that it might be shock and awe at my outstanding virility to produce such healthy, hearty and charming offspring, but when Harry tried to climb him he looked like he might be sick and practically jumped out of his chair. Maybe it was just jealousy, we all know he's always wanted to have my lovechildren. Or maybe because Harry was chewing his trousers, who can tell?

Anyway, I felt a bit guilty because I realised I don't really know how to talk to Pete without you and Moony. Which wouldn't be so bad except that it isn't that way with you or Moony, I mean here I am blithering away to you right now. Is it like that for you with him? Pete, I mean? I don't remember any of us doing stuff with just him, and the rest of us did stuff in pairs all the time, I mean you and Moony spent the whole of the last term or so sneaking off together, to plot a mutiny or make passionate love or- what did you two get up to, anyway? But I hate remembering this because when I think of the Marauder days it ought to be all four of us, one for all and all for one and so on. And this spoils it because when I was rummaging around trying to think of something nostalgic to reminisce about none of the bits I could remember involved Pete. I mean, he was there, but I can't remember anything he actually did. I still can't actually. Maybe I'm going senile.

Oh blimey I'm being gooey again and talking about FEELINGS, so you've probably got bored and wandered off to blow stuff up or break into Gringotts or something. This is what happens when young bucks like me live in a house where the only other males are a toddler who can only say 'B'oom' (meaning toy broom, a present that we appreciate very much although it means he can now break higher-up objects and smear puree an extra few feet up the walls, but at least he seems to have inherited his father's Quidditch prowess so we may make a Seeker of him yet) and a cat. I need to talk of MANLY THINGS, otherwise I will take to wearing lipstick and you will have to start calling me Jamesina. Oh God, I just realised that you are bound to find that image sexy in your boundless lust for me. Stop it now, I'm a married man.

Write back SOON with details of your manly exploits, or I might just take to reading romance novels and watching those soppy Muggle films Lily likes with the blokes in tight trousers.

Prongs

P.S. I know you can't give details, sorry. But a general gist of manliness might be enough to tide me over.

P.P.S. Write back fast enough, Monsieur le Padfoot, and I might send a photo of me in a bra. There, that should get you going (ooer).

Lily woke early to a chorus of crashes from the kitchen and lay still for a while, staring at the ceiling. According to the alarm clock by the bed, it was only six thirty, but it wasn't unusual for James to be up by now. He had been getting up earlier and earlier lately, which seemed counterproductive because the confines of the cottage only frustrated him. But then, he wasn't the sort of person who could lie in bed for any length of time once awake. She stretched luxuriously, pointing her toes as far as they would go into the air and then letting them fall with a whumph onto the duvet, as far apart as possible so that, starfish-like, she took up the whole bed. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that James didn't like lie-ins.

He was bored, though, she could tell, although she tried not to take it personally. It wasn't because of her, she knew that, it was because all his friends were off fighting the forces of evil while he tried to get baby food out of the upholstery. And for some strange, male reason, he seemed to actually want to risk his life dancing around under Voldemort's nose. Was it selfish of her to be glad that he wasn't risking his life anymore? Even if he was bored, at least he was alive. And what was more, she knew where he was, and that he was safe. She didn't think she could bear going back to waiting at home, with nothing but occasional letters and no guarantee at all at any given moment that he hadn't just died or been horribly injured. Lily curled up into a ball, forehead pressed against her knees. She tried not to think about when he had been injured, on a mission with Sirius, because just the memory made her feel ill. She didn't care if it was selfish; she just needed to know that he was safe, and nearby, and not dead.

The quiet was broken by a snuffling noise from the next room; Harry was snoring. With enormous relief, Lily reverted to worrying about small, motherly things. He had had that cold for several weeks now, maybe he should see a Healer. But getting to St Mungo's presented a problem in itself because it probably qualified as unsafe, they'd need to clear it with the Order and maybe get security, and then what if it turned out to be nothing? Could you get Healers to come to you? She had no idea. They wouldn't be able to tell anyone where they were; only Peter could do that, but having a stranger come into the house probably qualified as a security risk too. She groaned, rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow. Suddenly, James' frustration seemed to make a bit more sense. Parenting was complicated and disorienting enough without being stranded in the middle of nowhere and having to arrange for convoys of sombre, bulky men to follow them around whenever they wanted to go anywhere.

Horace the cat bounded suddenly into the room, taking a flying leap and landing, paws-first and with incredible accuracy, on the small of her back. Lily flipped over in shock at the sudden weight, dislodging him onto the duvet where he turned round and round on the spot several times before collapsing into a huge bag of loose skin, purring smugly and looking remarkably like his namesake. Wrapping the pillow around her head to drown out his earth-shaking rumbling, Lily closed her eyes firmly. It wasn't even seven yet; there was plenty more time to sleep.