The Amulet

Lily could not believe the nonsense these men had pulled. Severus taking James’s place as Harry’s father, Dumbledore pressuring her to make decisions she wasn’t comfortable making and now this?

She eyed the needle warily as it was injected into Harry’s forearm, feeling him stiffen at the contact while he sat on her lap. She frowned.

Why did she need to do this again? For Severus? What did he ever do for them? Well, yes, he did just save them in a roundabout way, but the way he did it was morally ambiguous and it angered her so deeply she couldn’t discern and untangle the other emotions at the root.

Lily calmingly hushed Harry as he fussed. The elderly matron, Madame Pomfrey, did her due diligence to quickly finish drawing his blood for a paternity test. Harry’s cries fueled Lily’s anger, her magic crackling and manifesting as sparks.

“Done,” said the matron, looking just as irritated as Lily by the end of it as she healed Harry with a wave of her wand.

Lily hastily left soon after, not even attempting a mock farewell as she hurriedly raced through the castle and back to the Headmaster’s Tower. When she arrived at the Headmaster’s Office, it was predictably empty, and the witch dropped to the couch, protectively holding Harry’s head to her chest as he nuzzled into her. Lily sighed, suddenly exhausted. Leaning her head back on the sofa, she just sat there, allowing her mind to empty itself of everything.

She was hungry, tired, and irritable. It was the dead of the night, and having lost her husband mere hours ago still left her in shock. She didn’t even have time to process Peter’s betrayal nor James’s death before she was hit with Severus’s confession and Dumbledore’s “clever” plan.

Her heart ached at the memory of their last moments together, and she wondered if she armed her past self with the knowledge of James’s death, would she have treasured him more? She was at a standstill. She recalled when they first went into hiding, James made a joke out of everything in an attempt to cheer her up, but within weeks he was highly irritable and was prone to pacing angrily in the middle of the night, listening to the radio for any familiar names and writing letters to other Order Members to gauge how the war was doing. Every news of someone’s death took a toll on James. It didn’t matter how well he knew them, he would react harshly and mourn deeply for their losses. He felt he could have somehow prevented their deaths if he had been in the Order’s battles.

There were days in the beginning when she felt that James resented her because she refused to go into hiding alone without him, and he felt pressured to stay home. It was as if Lily had shackled James to the house, and she found herself often rethinking the what-ifs. What if James was in battle and managed to save countless lives, would his death and self-sacrificing nature soften the length of her mourning? Was it a crime to want James safely by her side, like he wanted her to be?

Lily numbly stroked Harry’s raven-black hair, trying to ignore the unease at its unfamiliarity. Her thoughts delved even deeper refusing to acknowledge Harry’s differences and instead focused on James and what could have been, her confusion and why it hurt so much that he died. She reminisced about the break in the monotony of their day-to-day life of a family in hiding. There were good moments that contrasted with the dark ones, like James learning to cook certain dishes to help out while she took care of Harry or taking charge when she needed to do a chore or take care of her ablutions. He was sweet and sometimes flirted and joked around with her to cheer her up when one of her dormmates from Hogwarts died. The good times with James reminded her of funny Gobstone matches during the day and swaying to a non-existent song in the evenings where they were so absorbed in their own world it was just each other.

She missed those days, but they were rare.

Whether it was being cast into a waging war straight out of school or the realities of both their parents dying shortly thereafter, there was no guidance on how married life was supposed to be nor how to parent. All they could do was remember how their own parents treated each other and recall their own upbringing as a rough draft in how to parent. Lily found it shocking how different it all was. James’s mother was extremely submissive. Whether it was due to her old age or the way things were within the wizarding community, it was drastically different from the dynamic of her parents' relationship. Her parents both led. Not one sole person was in charge over the other and they seemed to know their own roles well, it suited each of their strength and weaknesses. There were many reasons why Lily had a hard time passing the baton over to James. Just to name a couple, he wasn’t very considerate when tasked with something and didn’t do things as diligently as she would have. One glaring pet peeve of hers was that James was too prideful to ask for help. Regardless of how unprepared he was in any situation, he would stay firm in his resolve and never accepted her assistance and often undermined her. She had the sneaky suspicion that had to do with her gender, whereas a female, her word meant little compared to one of his ignorant friends. It put her in an awkward spot a lot of the time because James would often withhold information on how bad things were when it came to stocking up for food and supplies or doing research for the wards, it wasn’t until Sirius or Remus would comment about it that she would learn of it.

Before she knew it, James had spent over half his fortune on the war efforts and preparations to go into hiding to make the transition run smoothly. He had prepared for her and Harry to go into hiding, but not himself. When Lily found out, there were a lot of arguments and guilt-tripping on her part. She didn’t fully understand why James, who had supposedly prioritised the family’s protection, didn’t include himself as part of it. What made him so different that he warranted the exemption? Lily eventually did her own preparations, annoyed that she had to do it in secret to not get into another row with James, and went to Gringotts to set aside a small trust fund for Harry for his education before all the money depleted due to the predictable longevity of the war. It was her first time setting up a trust fund and the goblins were unhelpful. The process took weeks of planning and timing her visits and preparing documentation without assistance but she experienced a sense of accomplishment. Initially, Lily felt guilty because she was managing James’s money and she didn’t make a habit of manipulating it in any way but in her opinion, her actions this time were justified. James wasn’t thinking about the future. James was thinking about the present and panicking.

The last few months were James’s more irritable months. With little to no contact from anyone, the Marauders turned on each other, accusing the other of being spies. James finalised the purchase of the Dumbledore home in Godric’s Hollow. Only a select few were granted entry to their home by way of Fidelius Charm, a spell that protected the location of their house in the soul of a trusted individual. It was very lonely, and their only saving grace was their neighbour, Bathilda Bagshot, and her crazy stories of the Dumbledore family and their relationship with a renown dark wizard, Gellert Grindlewald. When they first moved to Godric’s Hollow, Bathilda frequently visited for tea, but as James’s mood began to sour, she scarcely stopped by.

James, by that point, stopped being helpful and became more of a burden. Sometimes, he slept the day away and didn’t even do the bare minimum in hygiene. He obsessed over preordered Defense Books, memorising spells and preparing himself for a future encounter with Death Eaters. He researched He-Who-Must not be named and his origins trying to find some weakness or clue to defeat him or dismantle the Death Eater group. Lily couldn’t afford to fall into the debilitating depressive state that James had immersed himself in. She made sure food was cooked, laundry was done and tended to Harry’s needs but Lily found herself easily annoyed with James and was aggravated by how unhelpful he had been in helping her around the house.

The few times she confronted him about it, she noticed how unhinged and volatile he was and tried not to engage him. Lily often refrained from saying anything she thought would upset James almost daily even though she wanted to scream in indignation at how stifling and unappreciative he was to her efforts. She realised that, at some point, she had emotionally anchored herself to James. How good a day would turn out would depend on James and his rollercoaster of emotions. Lily found she couldn’t rely on him anymore and they weren’t the team she envisioned them potentially being before they married. Their marriage may not have been how she expected. Still, she loved him enough that initially, she was more than willing to compromise and make things work, except that going into hiding with James felt like being imprisoned or trapped. Any positive changes were one-sided on her part. During their time in hiding, Lily found a haven in Harry’s nursery which James once frequented when Harry was a newborn but over the months, stopped and emotionally disconnected almost entirely from the family.

There were small things that helped Lily stay emotionally afloat that she would feel guilty about later, like sending letters to Sirius and Remus and venting to them. She would rewrite a lot of the letters before sending them off because, at the end of the day, the Marauders were James’s friends and it wasn’t wise to talk badly about him even though she had hopes that they could do something to fix James’s foul moods. Every letter Lily sent and every picture hinted at the problems in their family, but no one pointed it out and no one really came to help. The last thing Lily did was make a party for Harry but she felt it was more for her than for him.

She needed a break from the repetitiveness of James’s anxious depression and wanted something to liven her life. Harry’s entire birthday was booked with morning tea parties that lasted hours with Bathilda Bagshot and mid-afternoon to late evening a party with Sirius and Remus, where they set their differences aside for the day and spoiled Harry rotten. When she informed James of the party the week before Harry’s birthday, it was like a light flickered to life in his eyes. She took lots of pictures to remember the moments fondly before she lost James again to his funks days afterwards. That was the last time they had a visitor and James withdrew completely once more. When Harry was sick, it was Lily who had to prepare the ingredients and brewed the potions. It was Lily who still managed to cook, clean, and take care of Harry, juggling everything to exhaustion. There weren’t enough hours in a day! She would wake to a cold bed in the middle of the night almost daily to find James listening to the news on the radio, and doing research on spells and new curses, the Death Eaters or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named himself. There were days when he felt creative enough to attempt to invent a spell but it never proved fruitful. Lily often wondered what became of her marriage. If there was no war, would James have eventually turned into the shadow of a man she had known her entire marriage or would he have become the charming, optimistic, headstrong man she thought she knew?

As Lily sat on the Headmaster’s loveseat, rubbing circles on Harry’s back while he deeply slept, she pondered the origins of the bitterness towards her husband’s death. Yes, she was sad that he was dead, but she was also angry because he left her without his support. She didn’t have the optimism to think that things would get better for them if only the war were over, all these negative thoughts still festered unresolved and James wasn’t here to work with her through it. He wasn’t there to give her hope for a happy, long, fruitful marriage. James was dead, and these feelings still stayed. She couldn’t help but feel guilty for feeling it. She should feel sad and although she did, Lily still felt her anger override the sadness. She felt so robbed. It made the sacrifices she made during their time in hiding seem worthless, and she wondered if it would have been better if James never went into hiding with them. James dictated her life when they were hiding through his actions, and James may be gone but it seemed both Severus and Dumbledore took his place.

Lily didn’t want to feel trapped again, she wanted to be free and in charge of her life. While Dumbledore gathered evidence to help Severus, Lily had other plans. She needed to feel in control. She didn’t know how long she eyed the floo powder on the mantle but eventually, Lily transferred Harry to the loveseat and warded him from falling and grabbed a handful of floo powder and threw it in the pre-existing fire. She knelt in front of the hearth and called out, “Number thirteen, Brooding Place!”

Lily stuck her head in when she heard the floo call connect and searched the empty foyer.

“Sirius!” she called out. “I need help!”