A/N-I listed this as general because all of the stories belong in a different category. The stories do link up slightly, but they're not all chapters of the same story. They're five separate stories about the same thing. This one's a bit maudlin and over the top, but I like it. I've used a bit of artistic license, with giving Lily an order of merlin and a wax dummy, but I think she deserved it.
All sections in surrounded by ** ** are dreams or memories.
Disclaimer - Much as I wish it was, it isn't mine. Don't sue.
**Sirius jumped the low gate and strode up the quaint garden path. The neat rows of gardens were full of life. Everywhere, flowers bloomed - marigolds, gerberas, roses, daisies and of course, lilies floating in a small fishpond. There was even honeysuckle climbing the wall of the house.
The garden must have been Lily's doing. James had been infamous at Hogwarts for his ability to kill plants just by thinking about picking up a trowel. If Sirius recalled correctly their Herbology professor agreed to give James a passing grade if he kept as far away from her precious plants as possible.
Sirius didn't knock. He went straight through the wide open door and up the stairs.
Lily was in the kitchen with her back to the door. She was wearing a white t-shirt and denim jeans. Her dark red hair was pulled into a messy braid. He crept up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. "Really tight security you've got here." he chided jokingly. "If I had evil intentions you would be dead." he lifted her off the ground with ease. She was feather light, so it took no effort at all.
"Put me down Sirius." she laughed. He obeyed immediately, dropping her on the floor.
"James is in the dining room." she said, climbing to her feet. "Go annoy him." she suggested, beginning to arrange three cups of coffee on a tray.
His heart sank when he saw the dining room table. He was never treated like a guest in the Potter house. He was so like a member of their little family that he was often made to do the dishes. But the table was set with the good china and silver. There were wine glasses and napkins. Lily had even made scones, which were served on a plate they had received as a wedding gift and never used, with jam and fresh cream. They'd gone to a lot of effort. It had to be bad news.
He collapsed into a chair and fought to keep the fear from reaching his face. Lily put a cup of coffee in front of him and he wrapped his hands around it to keep them from shaking. Lily and James never cared about ceremony when they had good news. They announced their engagement calmly over dinner one day in the seventh year, in the same tone you would use to ask for the potatoes. They'd married with the same lack of fuss- Lily borrowed a white dress from her friend Arabella and they eloped on the train ride home from Hogwarts. They told Sirius and Remus they were expecting Harry over pizza and a video.
"Lunch will be ready in about ten minutes." Lily said politely.
Sirius ran a mental checklist of all their surviving mutual friends who could have been killed. Remus? No, Sirius would have been informed right away. Arabella then? Sirius wasn't that close to her. Lily and James wouldn't go to this much trouble to tell him about Arabella. Could it be Harry? No. They wouldn't be so calm and together. Lily was fond of saying that she would rather die than let something happen to Harry.
Lily sat on James' lap and sipped her coffee. Sirius had to smile, despite his worries. Looking at Lily and James, you wouldn't know that they'd been married for years. They still acted like childhood sweethearts.
They ate in awkward silence. Or at least, Lily and James ate. Sirius just pushed his chicken around his plate, wishing they would give him the bad news already.
They told him during dessert.
"Sirius, we got the Dark Mark in the mail today." James said.
Sirius was pretty sure his heart had stopped beating. This was the worst possible news they could give. Lord Voldemort owled a picture of the Dark Mark to families he intended to kill because he wanted them to try to run or hide. He enjoyed either hunting down families who tried to flee to 'safe' countries like Australia, or torturing information out of Secret Keepers.
"Are you sure its real?" He asked. Some sick people sent fake ones to scare their enemies, even though Dark Mark hoaxes carried a ten year Azkhaban sentence.
Lily nodded. "We took it to the ministry and they verified it for us."
"What will you do?" Sirius asked. A lump formed in his throat, but he blinked back the tears that filled his eyes. He wouldn't cry. Crying would make this real, and he wouldn't grieve for them when they were sitting in front of him.
"Running isn't an option. You-Know-Who always catches his prey." Lily said. She spoke in a hollow voice, as if she was trying to pretend that she was talking about someone else.
"Siriuswewantyoutobeoursecretkeeper." James said quickly, like he was getting it over and done with.
"what?" Sirius asked.
"We want you to be our Secret Keeper." Lily repeated.
Sirius' first instinct was to say no. Everyone knew that to agree to be a Secret Keeper was a death sentence. If Voldemort couldn't torture a person's location out of one, he would kill them instead as a consolation.
But then he looked into Lily's wide, frightened emerald eyes. He thought of little Harry and found himself nodding. "Of course I will."**
Sirius woke howling. He threw his shaggy black head back and howled out his terrible, soul destroying grief.
When he had fully awoken and calmed down he looked around, trying to make sense of his new surroundings. He was curled up on the floor of a children's playroom. He stood up and stretched. He shook himself, from his head to his tail, to try to shake off the feeling the dream left. It had a happy ending, but to Sirius' guilt racked mind the possible happily-ever-after it had dangled in front of him was an unattainable what-if that pained him.
It was almost exactly the way that he remembered the conversation they had had fifteen years earlier. Except for the end. At the end of the real conversation, instead of looking into Lily's eyes, he'd looked at the newspaper on the seat next to him. At the headline "Mutilated Body of Loyal Secret Keeper Discovered in Thames"
So he'd thought quickly to find reasons to convince the Potters (and himself) that it was better if Peter Pettigrew did it. Because no one would expect their secret keeper to be Peter. Instead of saying yes he said -
"Not me. I'm too obvious. If you keep your secret keeper a secret, you'll be safer. Why don't you ask Peter?"
Sirius padded into the hallway, skirting a baseball and a barbie convertible that had been left on the floor. He knew where he was now- in the home of the Kelleys. Their son, Edward, found him asleep on a bench in the park. (in dog form of course.) He'd named him 'Butch' and begged his parents to let him keep him. They had given in, so Sirius or 'Butch' had a warm place to sleep and regular meals. The downside was that he had to play fetch and he lived in fear that the Kelleys would take him to be neutered.
He went into Mr. Kelley's office, to confirm what his internal clock was telling him by looking at the desk calendar. Mr. Kelley was as regular as clockwork where his desk calendar was concerned. Every morning he got up, got dressed, combed his hair, had a nutritious breakfast, brushed his teeth, changed the date on the desk calendar and went off to his job as an accountant at a shoe factory. So there could be no doubt about the date. It was February the tenth..
The fifteenth anniversary of the Potter's death.
Fifteen years to the day since his cowardice killed two of his best friends.
"Why don't you ask Peter?"
He nosed open the front door and walked out into the harsh morning light. Edward Kelley would be sad that his dog 'Butch' had run away, but Sirius suspected that Mr. and Mrs. Kelley would be glad to see him go.
He put his nose to the ground and started walking, going wherever his nose took him. He was in an unfamiliar suburb, but his senses of smell and hearing were exceptional.
His sense of hearing had come in handy on the day of Lily and James' funeral. Because everyone thought he had been their Secret Keeper, he couldn't turn up at their funeral without any obvious sign of having been tortured for the information. Instead, he'd curled up in the bushes under an open window to hear the goings on inside.
**The priest, one of the few that would serve the wizarding world, was an old man, made older by having to bury too many young people cut down in their prime simply for being who they were. The tiny chapel was packed, with over three hundred mourners attending. James and Lily were very popular in life, and some people attended just because they were Harry Potter's parents.
Everyone there was dressed to the nines. With people attending an average of one funeral about every two months, it was considered a good investment to spend upwards of a thousand galleons on a set of designer mourning robes..**
When he looked around, he wasn't surprised to find that his nose had led him to the church that their memorial service was held in.
Lily and James weren't really religious people, but Petunia had jumped up and down and screamed that her sister was not going to be buried in the unhallowed ground of the wizards graveyards. Sirius didn't really understand why she did that. Maybe she wanted to get her revenge finally by denying Lily her right to be laid to rest as a witch. In the will it stipulated that James wanted to be buried next to Lily, but he never specified that he wanted to be buried in the Potter plot. So they both wound up in St Jeanne's on Picklesby Rd.
Sirius had to change back to human to get to their grave. The grave was the highlight of just about every ghost tour that ran in the city. A high fence had to be build around them because some tourists didn't think it was distasteful to take a handful of dirt or a flower as a souvenir.
Sirius wrapped his hands around the smooth iron of the fence and hoisted himself upwards. During his schooldays he had been forced to learn to climb fences, trees and even the astronomy tower once to escape irate teachers or vengeful prank victims. He landed on the soft grass on the other side. Treading lightly so that he wouldn't horrify the wizarding world by leaving footprints.
In death, as in life, there was really nothing to mark where Lily ended and James began. They were buried in one large double grave that was edged with a bed of lilies. The headstones were real black marble. They were erected by the ministry when they discovered that Petunia intended to mark them with a brass nameplate nailed to a brick.
To muggle eyes, the stones said very little about Lily and James. Lily's simply said her name (Lily Potter, nee Evans) and a quote that brought tears to the eyes of every mother that read it. "I would rather die than let something happen to my son"
But in a circle around the words, her achievements were written in a language only a wizard would understand.
First was a silver Hogwarts crest. Then there was a Head Girl badge. The crossed broomstick symbol of a Quidditch player. Lily had stepped in to play a single game when the Gryffindor chaser was injured in a brawl. There was no substitute, and they would have forfeited if they didn't find a Gryffindor girl who fitted into Sydney Egan-Kirk's Quidditch robes.
Next to that was a replica of her post-humous order of Merlin medallion. The real medallion temporarily resided in the chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum with Lily's wax likeness. There was an entire room (inaccessible to muggles) devoted to Lord Voldemort and his more notable victims.
The final symbol would have been funny if it hadn't been so heartbreakingly tragic. It was a small silver baby's bottle. Lily had been named Mother of the Year a month after her death.
Movement to the left made Sirius panic. He turned back into a dog and laid low behind the tombstones.
It was just a young woman walking down the road. She was slightly built and had a halo of fiery red hair, and for one crazy second he thought that it was Lily. He jumped up and barked excitedly, trying to attract her attention.
She turned and shielded her eyes, her pretty face puzzled. Sirius came crashing back to reality. She was far too young to be Lily. Besides, how could Lily be strolling down the street if she was buried not half a foot away from him?
Sirius lay down beside the graves, smelling the sweet smell of the lilies, wallowing in his own guilt.
"Why don't you ask Peter?"
All sections in surrounded by ** ** are dreams or memories.
Disclaimer - Much as I wish it was, it isn't mine. Don't sue.
**Sirius jumped the low gate and strode up the quaint garden path. The neat rows of gardens were full of life. Everywhere, flowers bloomed - marigolds, gerberas, roses, daisies and of course, lilies floating in a small fishpond. There was even honeysuckle climbing the wall of the house.
The garden must have been Lily's doing. James had been infamous at Hogwarts for his ability to kill plants just by thinking about picking up a trowel. If Sirius recalled correctly their Herbology professor agreed to give James a passing grade if he kept as far away from her precious plants as possible.
Sirius didn't knock. He went straight through the wide open door and up the stairs.
Lily was in the kitchen with her back to the door. She was wearing a white t-shirt and denim jeans. Her dark red hair was pulled into a messy braid. He crept up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. "Really tight security you've got here." he chided jokingly. "If I had evil intentions you would be dead." he lifted her off the ground with ease. She was feather light, so it took no effort at all.
"Put me down Sirius." she laughed. He obeyed immediately, dropping her on the floor.
"James is in the dining room." she said, climbing to her feet. "Go annoy him." she suggested, beginning to arrange three cups of coffee on a tray.
His heart sank when he saw the dining room table. He was never treated like a guest in the Potter house. He was so like a member of their little family that he was often made to do the dishes. But the table was set with the good china and silver. There were wine glasses and napkins. Lily had even made scones, which were served on a plate they had received as a wedding gift and never used, with jam and fresh cream. They'd gone to a lot of effort. It had to be bad news.
He collapsed into a chair and fought to keep the fear from reaching his face. Lily put a cup of coffee in front of him and he wrapped his hands around it to keep them from shaking. Lily and James never cared about ceremony when they had good news. They announced their engagement calmly over dinner one day in the seventh year, in the same tone you would use to ask for the potatoes. They'd married with the same lack of fuss- Lily borrowed a white dress from her friend Arabella and they eloped on the train ride home from Hogwarts. They told Sirius and Remus they were expecting Harry over pizza and a video.
"Lunch will be ready in about ten minutes." Lily said politely.
Sirius ran a mental checklist of all their surviving mutual friends who could have been killed. Remus? No, Sirius would have been informed right away. Arabella then? Sirius wasn't that close to her. Lily and James wouldn't go to this much trouble to tell him about Arabella. Could it be Harry? No. They wouldn't be so calm and together. Lily was fond of saying that she would rather die than let something happen to Harry.
Lily sat on James' lap and sipped her coffee. Sirius had to smile, despite his worries. Looking at Lily and James, you wouldn't know that they'd been married for years. They still acted like childhood sweethearts.
They ate in awkward silence. Or at least, Lily and James ate. Sirius just pushed his chicken around his plate, wishing they would give him the bad news already.
They told him during dessert.
"Sirius, we got the Dark Mark in the mail today." James said.
Sirius was pretty sure his heart had stopped beating. This was the worst possible news they could give. Lord Voldemort owled a picture of the Dark Mark to families he intended to kill because he wanted them to try to run or hide. He enjoyed either hunting down families who tried to flee to 'safe' countries like Australia, or torturing information out of Secret Keepers.
"Are you sure its real?" He asked. Some sick people sent fake ones to scare their enemies, even though Dark Mark hoaxes carried a ten year Azkhaban sentence.
Lily nodded. "We took it to the ministry and they verified it for us."
"What will you do?" Sirius asked. A lump formed in his throat, but he blinked back the tears that filled his eyes. He wouldn't cry. Crying would make this real, and he wouldn't grieve for them when they were sitting in front of him.
"Running isn't an option. You-Know-Who always catches his prey." Lily said. She spoke in a hollow voice, as if she was trying to pretend that she was talking about someone else.
"Siriuswewantyoutobeoursecretkeeper." James said quickly, like he was getting it over and done with.
"what?" Sirius asked.
"We want you to be our Secret Keeper." Lily repeated.
Sirius' first instinct was to say no. Everyone knew that to agree to be a Secret Keeper was a death sentence. If Voldemort couldn't torture a person's location out of one, he would kill them instead as a consolation.
But then he looked into Lily's wide, frightened emerald eyes. He thought of little Harry and found himself nodding. "Of course I will."**
Sirius woke howling. He threw his shaggy black head back and howled out his terrible, soul destroying grief.
When he had fully awoken and calmed down he looked around, trying to make sense of his new surroundings. He was curled up on the floor of a children's playroom. He stood up and stretched. He shook himself, from his head to his tail, to try to shake off the feeling the dream left. It had a happy ending, but to Sirius' guilt racked mind the possible happily-ever-after it had dangled in front of him was an unattainable what-if that pained him.
It was almost exactly the way that he remembered the conversation they had had fifteen years earlier. Except for the end. At the end of the real conversation, instead of looking into Lily's eyes, he'd looked at the newspaper on the seat next to him. At the headline "Mutilated Body of Loyal Secret Keeper Discovered in Thames"
So he'd thought quickly to find reasons to convince the Potters (and himself) that it was better if Peter Pettigrew did it. Because no one would expect their secret keeper to be Peter. Instead of saying yes he said -
"Not me. I'm too obvious. If you keep your secret keeper a secret, you'll be safer. Why don't you ask Peter?"
Sirius padded into the hallway, skirting a baseball and a barbie convertible that had been left on the floor. He knew where he was now- in the home of the Kelleys. Their son, Edward, found him asleep on a bench in the park. (in dog form of course.) He'd named him 'Butch' and begged his parents to let him keep him. They had given in, so Sirius or 'Butch' had a warm place to sleep and regular meals. The downside was that he had to play fetch and he lived in fear that the Kelleys would take him to be neutered.
He went into Mr. Kelley's office, to confirm what his internal clock was telling him by looking at the desk calendar. Mr. Kelley was as regular as clockwork where his desk calendar was concerned. Every morning he got up, got dressed, combed his hair, had a nutritious breakfast, brushed his teeth, changed the date on the desk calendar and went off to his job as an accountant at a shoe factory. So there could be no doubt about the date. It was February the tenth..
The fifteenth anniversary of the Potter's death.
Fifteen years to the day since his cowardice killed two of his best friends.
"Why don't you ask Peter?"
He nosed open the front door and walked out into the harsh morning light. Edward Kelley would be sad that his dog 'Butch' had run away, but Sirius suspected that Mr. and Mrs. Kelley would be glad to see him go.
He put his nose to the ground and started walking, going wherever his nose took him. He was in an unfamiliar suburb, but his senses of smell and hearing were exceptional.
His sense of hearing had come in handy on the day of Lily and James' funeral. Because everyone thought he had been their Secret Keeper, he couldn't turn up at their funeral without any obvious sign of having been tortured for the information. Instead, he'd curled up in the bushes under an open window to hear the goings on inside.
**The priest, one of the few that would serve the wizarding world, was an old man, made older by having to bury too many young people cut down in their prime simply for being who they were. The tiny chapel was packed, with over three hundred mourners attending. James and Lily were very popular in life, and some people attended just because they were Harry Potter's parents.
Everyone there was dressed to the nines. With people attending an average of one funeral about every two months, it was considered a good investment to spend upwards of a thousand galleons on a set of designer mourning robes..**
When he looked around, he wasn't surprised to find that his nose had led him to the church that their memorial service was held in.
Lily and James weren't really religious people, but Petunia had jumped up and down and screamed that her sister was not going to be buried in the unhallowed ground of the wizards graveyards. Sirius didn't really understand why she did that. Maybe she wanted to get her revenge finally by denying Lily her right to be laid to rest as a witch. In the will it stipulated that James wanted to be buried next to Lily, but he never specified that he wanted to be buried in the Potter plot. So they both wound up in St Jeanne's on Picklesby Rd.
Sirius had to change back to human to get to their grave. The grave was the highlight of just about every ghost tour that ran in the city. A high fence had to be build around them because some tourists didn't think it was distasteful to take a handful of dirt or a flower as a souvenir.
Sirius wrapped his hands around the smooth iron of the fence and hoisted himself upwards. During his schooldays he had been forced to learn to climb fences, trees and even the astronomy tower once to escape irate teachers or vengeful prank victims. He landed on the soft grass on the other side. Treading lightly so that he wouldn't horrify the wizarding world by leaving footprints.
In death, as in life, there was really nothing to mark where Lily ended and James began. They were buried in one large double grave that was edged with a bed of lilies. The headstones were real black marble. They were erected by the ministry when they discovered that Petunia intended to mark them with a brass nameplate nailed to a brick.
To muggle eyes, the stones said very little about Lily and James. Lily's simply said her name (Lily Potter, nee Evans) and a quote that brought tears to the eyes of every mother that read it. "I would rather die than let something happen to my son"
But in a circle around the words, her achievements were written in a language only a wizard would understand.
First was a silver Hogwarts crest. Then there was a Head Girl badge. The crossed broomstick symbol of a Quidditch player. Lily had stepped in to play a single game when the Gryffindor chaser was injured in a brawl. There was no substitute, and they would have forfeited if they didn't find a Gryffindor girl who fitted into Sydney Egan-Kirk's Quidditch robes.
Next to that was a replica of her post-humous order of Merlin medallion. The real medallion temporarily resided in the chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum with Lily's wax likeness. There was an entire room (inaccessible to muggles) devoted to Lord Voldemort and his more notable victims.
The final symbol would have been funny if it hadn't been so heartbreakingly tragic. It was a small silver baby's bottle. Lily had been named Mother of the Year a month after her death.
Movement to the left made Sirius panic. He turned back into a dog and laid low behind the tombstones.
It was just a young woman walking down the road. She was slightly built and had a halo of fiery red hair, and for one crazy second he thought that it was Lily. He jumped up and barked excitedly, trying to attract her attention.
She turned and shielded her eyes, her pretty face puzzled. Sirius came crashing back to reality. She was far too young to be Lily. Besides, how could Lily be strolling down the street if she was buried not half a foot away from him?
Sirius lay down beside the graves, smelling the sweet smell of the lilies, wallowing in his own guilt.
"Why don't you ask Peter?"