Lily Potter and a Small Circle of Friends

I was lucky enough to have Pippin as well as Lee Gold beta-read this for me. Anything which is screwed up is something on which I didn’t follow their advice.

* * * * *

Chapter 8: Summer Solstice

Summer Solstice was approaching and James and Sirius were arguing about their plan to prevent Voldemort from adding Fernabrant’s powers to his own. They’d re-visited Sealand with a lot of curse-breaking equipment, and found no way to even touch the spell in the rock wall, never mind break it. On that occasion, they’d left behind one of Lily’s amulets to notify them of any more visitors to the not-a-cave. Therefore, James knew perfectly well when Sirius had taken Remus there by night to get his opinion: it would take a wizard significantly more powerful than Fernabrant to smash the spell by brute force. Perhaps it was a good thing that there had been no other visitors: maybe no one on the Dark Side had been able to decipher the book.

"I suppose he’ll Apparate to the exact spot at the exact moment," said Sirius, "so the light touches him faster than we can throw a curse at him."

"I suppose he’ll arrive sooner than sunrise, because I doubt he has any way to know the moment without being there; we didn’t find any spy spells but our own. I suppose he’ll send one of his nasties ahead of him, to check whether it’s a trap. I don’t suppose that cursing Voldemort is as easy as cursing some run of the mill wizard: do you have a plan what to do if the curse just bounces off?"

"If his point man buys the farm, that shows it’s a trap, so he won’t walk into it, and we’ll have done our job, plus one more Death Eater down."

"Maybe he will walk into it, but fling some curses ahead of him. What is the point of making a plan that depends on the other side being stupid?"

* * * * *

Their eventual plan included shoving enough dirt and what-have-you into the rock pile to block the hole that the light came through, putting a good-sized boulder in front of the rock wall so that no one could Apparate to the exact spot, and lying there in wait all night, hidden under the Invisibility Cloak.

The sky was lightening with dawn and Voldemort hadn’t yet Apparated to the not-a-cave. No one except them had Apparated to the not-a-cave. There were streaks of pink and gold on the horizon where the sky was turning blue to welcome rosy-fingered Aurora opening the doors for Helios Apollo’s fiery chariot. Maybe no bad guys were coming today.

One lone wizard landed on a broomstick. It couldn’t be Voldemort; surely he wouldn’t be flying a broomstick. If it was his point man, wasn’t he kind of late?

They recognized Lucius Malfoy. Sirius’s urge to kill him right away (maybe no one would even know he was dead, in this out of the way island) was defeated by his urge to find out what was going on.

The beam of sunlight shot through the dim air of the not-a-cave and hit the rock wall as strongly as if it hadn’t been blocked at all. As the patch of light slid down the wall, their boulder dissolved into mist, revealing rainbows and gold sparks moving on the surface of the rock wall like waves on a pond, overlapping concentric circles from several thrown stones, but very obviously magical.

Lucius dashed toward the dancing lights on the wall. As the streak of light entered the area of the light show, it was no longer a streak of light, but rather a real, three-dimensional sword made of light.

Lucius grabbed at the sword, and James flung himself across the light show at Lucius. With the quick reflexes that had made him a star athlete, James knocked Lucius off his feet and the sword off the wall. Both were on the floor in an odd kind of wrestling: Lucius trying to reach his hand to the sword and James trying to prevent him.

Sirius very quietly called James some very bad names, for jumping Malfoy instead of throwing a curse or a disarming spell, and now Sirius couldn’t even curse Malfoy, because James was in the way.

"Accio!" Sirius summoned the sword, and was much surprised when it flew toward him as if it were an ordinary object rather than a weird looking magical artifact. Malfoy, seeing this, screamed something which must have been a curse (did he somehow have his other hand on his wand? Then why hadn’t he summoned the sword?) because a green fireball was headed at Sirius.

Sirius ducked, and the fireball hit the sword in mid-air and both skittered off the edge of the cliff.

Lucius screamed again, and somehow a sudden burst of strength let him throw James off. Grabbing his broomstick on the way, he rolled off the edge of the cliff also, clearly intending to mount the broomstick in mid-air.

James summoned his own broomstick and mounted it in more conventional fashion, flew and dived after Malfoy, who was diving after the sword, which was falling unnaturally slowly, or perhaps it was James’s perception of time that had gone awry.

Sirius, seeing that the sunbeam was gone, grabbed his broomstick and followed James.

Lucius, now hanging by his knees from his broom, had caught the sword in his hand. He’d had quite a reputation as Seeker for Slytherin in his day. Is simply having the sword enough to get the power, without the rest of the ritual? If simply touching the sword is enough, we’re too late.

James tucked his head down and flew, fell, threw himself at Lucius, like a human Bludger. Maybe Lucius couldn’t steer out of the way while hanging upside-down by his knees: James crashed directly into him, with a loud noise and a shower of two broken broomsticks, one shining sword, and two humans. Well, James had succeeded in separating Malfoy from the sword.

Sirius went into his own mad dive, in desperate hope of scooping up James.

Sirius caught James by his robe — that must have been a miracle — and tried to pull his broomstick out of its steep dive. It overbalanced, falling ass over teakettle, nose down, tail down, nose down, tail down. Sirius was trying to keep hold of James, trying to keep hold of the broomstick, trying to steer it out of its skid.

He was tremendously surprised when they hit the water. It hurt, like falling heavily on a hard surface, but nothing seemed to be broken. Except his broomstick. They were still plunging down, well below the surface: why weren’t his lungs filling painfully with water?

Their descent slowed, and stopped long before they reached the bottom, and seals swam toward them.

Seals blew bubbles at them, bubbles that surrounded them and merged (with little popping sounds) so that they were enclosed in one big bubble of air. That eased Sirius’s concern about breathing, enough so that he noticed a good-sized blotch of wet blood on the front of James's robe. "What happened there?" he asked, pointing at the blood.

"It's really weird," James began. "You're not going to believe this, but Malfoy gut-stuck me with that sword… He must have put everything he had into pointing it at me so I that impaled myself with the force of the collision. And it absolutely hurt like hell when it went in, and the blood came out, but when the blood touched that sword, it just dissolved and the wound closed right up." Seals swam upward, pushing the big bubble with seal noses.

"Yeah, right," said Sirius. "All this happened in one or two seconds, while you were falling through mid-air."

"I said you wouldn't believe it," James replied cheerfully. He didn't try at all to argue the matter, which made Sirius suspicious. It wasn't like James to give up so easily. The bubble reached the surface, distracting Sirius from James's unlikely story. Seals pushed the bubble to shore, where it vanished.

"What the fucking hell?" both men asked.

One seal took off her skin. As a human, she had long dark-brown hair and big dark-brown eyes and a nose whose tip turned up in a humorous-looking way. She was much chubbier than Sirius had imagined from seeing her with dog-vision. She kept tight hold on her sealskin, and said: "I was hoping you would explain that to me."

James was looking completely dumbfounded. That may have been why Sirius resisted the temptation to joke about "fucking hell" and "fucking heaven". He wanted to explain the situation to James, but first he wanted to be sure he understood it himself. "That was you? At Full Moon?" he asked the girl. She nodded.

"I guess I owe you an apology, then," Sirius continued. "I’d thought there weren’t any people on this island, so it would be safe." James must have gotten the idea by now, but just in case, Sirius turned to him: "I did take Moony up here, despite what you said, and we did have a great time, until he scented this young lady…."

"You saved me from the werewolf, which is why, when I saw you falling, I called my friends to help catch you in a net of magic bubbles. There had never been a werewolf on this island before. Who is Moony? Why is there all this human activity on this peaceful island?"

James had a question of his own: "What happened to Malfoy?"

"The other man who fell? Others of my friends broke his fall also, by spreading magic bubbles. But then he went away."

"Went away?"

"Like that," she explained, first snapping her fingers and then shrugging her shoulders. The shrug made her large, bare breasts do interesting things (which admittedly would have been more interesting if she’d had a waist). Both men felt a need to resist being distracted.

"He must have Disapparated," said James.

"The bastard got away again," said Sirius.

"Why are all you people getting violent on our island?" asked the girl.

"This is a very long story," said Sirius. "I’m sitting down." And he did so. James and the girl followed suit, but the naked girl sitting cross-legged only increased the level of distraction. Sirius stubbornly stared above her head as he confessed that the werewolf who had chased her was his friend.

 

Chapter 9: The Echo Plant

Lily was in a mood. "I feel like Mrs. Peel!" she snapped at James.

He was bewildered by that statement. "Who is Mrs. Peel?"

Lily quickly rejected the idea of trying yet again to explain television to James. "She's a Muggle. That's why you don't know her."

"Okay. Why did you say you feel like her?"

"Because she works as partners with a man and he is called a professional and draws a salary, but she's called a talented amateur and lives on what her late husband left her. Like us."

"It isn't possible that it's money you're upset about," James was thinking aloud to her. "You know that everything I have is yours, and anyway I don't draw a salary either — just a Sickle a year for the formalities."

"It isn't the money; it's the acknowledgement," Lily sighed. "You're always going to League meetings, but they don't want me there. I'm not good enough for them until they want something from me. And then they summon me like ringing for a bellhop."

"Oh, honeybunch," James put an arm around Lily to match the endearment and his cooing tone. "You know you're a valuable member of the team. Where would we be without your talent at amulets? It's just a political thing that we can't put your name on the payroll. Remus is in the same situation."

"What a really comforting thought: I'm not treated any worse than a werewolf. Oh, never mind. I'll get my cloak and hat and let's go."

* * * * *

The meeting was in Dumbledore's office at Hogwarts and it wasn't a meeting of the League. For one thing it was a lot smaller. Sirius and Remus were there and Francis Bones. After Lily and James had taken chairs, Brodhart Brathwaite arrived with a lady heavily veiled in black. As best one could guess through all that fabric, she was short and stout. "Well, we're all here," Dumbledore smiled at them.

Lily stepped to Dumbledore's desk on which was waiting an object not usually found on a desk: a flowerpot already filled with moist, rich, dark soil. Beside it was a tiny box. Lily opened the box, took out the sesame-seed object that had been put into and taken out of Malfoy Manor, and planted it in the flowerpot. She drew complicated figures over it with her wand, and a plant grew up as fast as the eye could follow it, put out buds, and unrolled the buds into white flowers shaped like Archangel Gabriel's trumpet. Lily tapped a flower with her wand ("Clamoré!") and it began repeating everything it had heard. All listened attentively, and Remus wrote it all down in shorthand. From time to time, Lily stroked the flower with her wand, to improve the sound.

The echo began with thumping and rustling sounds — that was the building of a bonfire, of which Lucius Malfoy's voice said "Adequate." Then the sound of a group of people entering the room together, and apparently some of them needed help to find their proper places. A ritual occurred, then loud cries of exultation and horror were followed by a horribly inhuman voice: "Well-met, my Death Eaterss." That must be Voldemort. The Death Eaters chanted in praise of Voldemort, while Voldemort ranted in praise of darkness.

Then Voldemort's utterly cold voice somehow grew even colder. "Luciuss, my pet, why iss it that Sskelton Boness is sstill alive?"

The listeners in Dumbledore's office, unlike those who had listened in person, let a giggle or two escape them as Malfoy, not entirely able to conceal the fear in his voice, made implausible and inadequate excuses. Voldemort cut him off. "You have no excusse. You were a fool. You may be harboring a sspy. You have a brain, Luciuss, and you are no usse to me if you don't use it." Then Voldemort did something frightening and painful (judging from the gasps and whimpers) to Lucius, but only momentarily. "That wass only a reminder." Malfoy babbled thanks in a voice which left all listeners certain that he had fallen to his knees before his master, while Voldemort turned to another follower.

"Nott! Report on Goyle'ss recruitsss!"

"My lord. Goyle and Crabbe and two friends, Evan Rozier and Danoto Wilkes, killed a Mudblood girl for amusement and left the corpse for the Muggles to find. The evidence they left on the scene would have been meaningless to the Muggles, but that interfering Mugglelover Dumbledore stuck his long nose in, sending a forensic wizard to investigate. The identity of the killers was turned over to DMLE. I removed the report relating to Goyle and Crabbe as usual. Rozier and Wilkes are eager to serve you, especially if their report is also removed from DMLE."

"That's Aylward Nott, Supervisor of Records for DMLE," said Sirius, while Voldemort's voice cruelly purred. "Goyle, Goyle, Goyle. Crabbe, Crabbe, Crabbe." The voices of the two big men blubbered apologies and "I can't help being stupid, sir. I just am."

Voldemort's voice summoned "Melanie". "Melanie" had apparently failed in some task, and the voice in which she grovelled sounded female: "My lord, I have failed you. I am unworthy to serve you. Do with me as you will." There was no more giggling as he applied the Cruciatis curse to her. She must have been strong-willed, as it was some time before her tears turned to screams. It had gone on longer than enough for everyone by the time Voldemort turned off the curse. A voice too damaged to be sure it was "Melanie" struggled to say what sounded like "Thank you", but Voldemort commanded: "Silence!" Presumably he was speaking to some other follower when he said: "Take her away and do what you like, as long as she is at work tomorrow."

The echo went wearisomely on, through more Death Eater meetings, more Death Eaters being punished for failure by application of the Cruciatis Curse, Rozier and Wilkes giving their oaths of allegiance, and finally Voldemort calling Malfoy a "bad little lapdog. You tried to make a plan without me, and naturally you failed, didn't you? Oh yess, I know your motive for conssealment — you believed you could increasse your powerss by Fernabrant’ss sspell, and come to rival Me." Malfoy was protesting that he'd intended only to become a more useful servant when Voldemort did something that caused Malfoy to suddenly scream in pain, just once. "Jusst a reminder, little lapdog Luciuss."

* * * * *

The listeners in Dumbledore's office thought it was all very disgusting ("It's a sadomasochism thing," Sirius speculated. "They get off on being whipped by their master"), but made a list of all names and voices they'd identified. Two priorities were obvious: to protect the Skelton Bones family and to get Nott arrested or at least removed from his position at the Ministry. Lily mentioned her idea of inventing an amulet that could be invisibly attached to a document and track who removed it from a file.

"Ideally," said Francis, "it would recognize when the removal was unauthorized and Portkey the miscreant to a magic-proof prison cell."

Brathwaite suggested, "If the document itself were a triggered Portkey, invisibility would not be needed."

"It can't be triggered just by touch," protested Remus, "as there are people who will touch it in the normal course of their jobs."

"Make it triggered by the touch of a Death Eater. Even if he touched it legitimately, he's still a Death Eater," said Sirius. "Evan Rozier and Danoto Wilkes were Slytherins in our year, and you know who they hung out with? Snape!"

"How will it recognize the touch of a Death Eater?" asked Lily, firmly ignoring the reference to Snape.

* * * * *

Lily hadn't yet solved the problem of Nott when the Marauders had their next get-together in her parlor. Sirius arrived with a piece of gossip that he considered so amusing that he had to tell it over again to each person. "Frank Longbottom's sister Susan, the one they call Soupy, you know she just finished school? Her parents were expecting her to come home to them, but she didn't — she just went straight to Francis Bones's flat and moved right in! I wonder if she even told Francis that she was going to live with him, because she didn't tell anyone else. Frank said their mother threw a fit about it, and Soupy just said that she was going to look after Francis because he's not fit to look after himself."

"That's true enough," Remus pointed out. "He's already been bewitched by the Death Eaters once, and Soupy was his tutor in remedial Defense Against Dark Arts."

"Maybe they'll get married," laughed Peter. "Then they'll be Francis Bacon Bones and Soupy Longbottom Bones. Soupy Bones, what a name!"

"No point in making fun of her name," said Lily, who was putting out snacks. "Every girl knows she might have to have a horrible name in order to get a good man. Even me, I wasn't exactly thrilled to get a name that sounds like I spend my time transplanting bulbs!"

"The Echo Plants seem more useful," smiled Remus.

"What Echo Plants?" demanded Peter, and the other Marauders were enthusiastic about answering him. Lily, who had already heard the stories, slipped out of the parlor.

Peter and Remus were sitting on the sofa pulled up to the coffee table, and James was sitting in his big overstuffed armchair with his feet on the coffee table. (Lily had reached the point of wincing only a little at seeing his feet on her coffee table, but not yet the point of putting her own feet there.) Sirius was roaming about the room, as if his storytelling needed to be accompanied by foot movement as well as hand gestures.

Sirius was most enthusiastic about his dramatic rendition of the sunrise battle with Malfoy, but he didn't stint on the dramatic rendition of Voldemort chastising Malfoy: "Little lapdog Lucius!" Everyone laughed at Sirius’s cruel but only slightly exagerated imitations of Voldemort hissing and Malfoy blubbering excuses. Peter laughed so hard he couldn’t stop.

Peter’s helpless laughter turned into choking and Sirius, standing behind the sofa, helpfully thumped him on the back. Peter hadn’t been expecting the blow and, under its force, he fell forward onto the coffee table.

Peter landed with his head in the big bowl of popcorn, which in turn skidded off the table, which caused Peter to fall farther. He let out a shout of pain as his knees thumped into something, at the same time that the coffee table overturned, dropping the other snacks and three open bottles of beer on the floor.

Remus quickly stepped over to kneel by Peter, asking: "Are you okay? Sure? You shouldn’t try to stand up if there are any broken bones" and then giving Peter a hand up. Meanwhile, James had pulled his wand to clean up the mess. He was domesticated enough to start with a Dessication Charm and a Deodorize Charm on the spilled beer. Then he waved his wand to start the fallen snacks rolling into their fallen bowls. Sirius helped out by going to the kitchen to get three more beers.

"It’s really no big deal," insisted Peter. "The last time I did anything this stupid, I fell on the burners on the stove, and burned myself so much that my mum had to owl the Emergency Magic Service. They sent two healers to fix me up, wrap me in bandages like a mummy, and I had to have a nurse to look after me for a week. Special prescription potions and everything. Fortunately, my cousin Phanette is a nurse, and she didn’t mind doing two patients for the price of one, as it’s family: my mum is her Aunt Phoebe."

"You didn’t do anything like that when you cooked breakfast for us," Sirius inquired.

Peter barked a short laugh: "Believe me, I have had a lot of practice cooking since then."

Everyone felt the need of a change of subject, and Remus provided it. "Did you get a new broomstick yet, James?"

"No. I went to Quality Quidditch, and Blondie was telling me about two new models that will be out in September." For centuries, the Qualitys had named all their sons Quill and all their daughters Queenie, so the family members went by nicknames. "The Thunderbolt people are coming out with a new top of the line model, named Thunderhammer, and Blondie says the rumors about it are really impressive. They’re trying to get one as a demo."

"That’s one. You said two." Remus prompted.

"It’s a Sunbeam —" James began.

"Sunbeams are wimps." Sirius interrupted him. "All prettiness and no-o-o power."

"They want to change that reputation," James said. "So they’re bringing out a model named the Raycer, and Blondie said her dad told her that one of the test flyers told him that it was a joy to fly. I think I might just rent something until the new models are out."

"Sirius hasn’t gotten a new broomstick yet, either," Remus smiled at Sirius. "I keep telling him that he can pick up parts in junkyards and make a new one exactly like the old one."

Sirius scowled at Remus. "You wouldn’t have said that if you didn’t know I can’t throw a fireball at you in Lily’s parlor … because she’d kill me."

 

Chapter 10: Peter in a Pickle

When Peter had been in his sickbed with those burns, the medimages had prescribed him a whole swamp of potions: three different pain numbing potions, one potion to regrow damaged muscle, one to regrow damaged skin, one to regrow damaged nerves, one to prevent scarring, and MotoSavvy Potion to keep the regrown muscles, nerves, and skin in sync. The dosages were like a story problem in Algebra ("if the dose of Potion A is twice the dose of Potion B, and the dose of Potion C is three times the dose of Potion B, and the dose of Potion A depends on the weight of the patient"), and Peter had been quite content to let Phanette take care of giving him his medicine. He had figured that he was doing his fair share simply by forcing himself to swallow things that smelled and tasted so hideous.

After that week, he was freed from his bed, his bandages, and most of the nasty potions. He returned to his normal life, but for the first week was prescribed daily doses of a new potion, one that tasted like grass and leaves, and of the old MotoSavvy Potion. After that, he was his normal self in his normal life, except he didn’t feel so good; he felt cranky, and dissatisfied, and burdened by his clumsiness. Every time he saw Phanette, he complained to her about not feeling good. Over time, she switched from telling him "This is convalescence; you’ll get over it" to telling him "This is your normal self; you should be used to it by now."

Finally, she told him: "If you’d really rather feel good than be healthy, I can get you some stuff. But it’s illegal, and it costs money, and it really is not good for you." Peter didn’t care about her descriptions of dependency and shortened life expectancy, nor about the money. When she brought the "stuff", it turned over to be more MotoSavvy Potion. As a medimagical professional, she could get it without going through the prescription process.

Peter loved his MotoSavvy Potion. It changed his clumsiness and frustration to agility, dexterity, and a euphoric sense of accomplishment and confidence. He cooked, gardened, kept house, and did household repairs — small successes that filled him with delight and self-respect. Unfortunately, it also required gradually increasing dosages to achieve the same effect, and by this time, Peter was spending all of the annuity his father had left him on MotoSavvy Potion.

A day without a dose made him more clumsy than he’d been before the accident, and each additional day without the potion increased both his clumsiness and his general physical pain, to the accompaniment of Phanette’s cheerful explanations that this was his nervous system rotting away, and he’d be paralyzed, blind, and deaf before dying. This made Peter determined to keep buying his MotoSavvy.

So Peter was constantly worried about money. He couldn’t ask James for money, because James would find out why and put him in St. Mungo’s to dry out.

Peter had wanted to be in good shape for that nostalgic Marauders’ expedition (even though it would have been more fun if Prongs had come along), so he had gotten an advance on his monthly annuity payment to buy potion before the outing. That meant, when the rest of that payment arrived at the usual time, it wasn’t enough to buy enough potion for the month.

He’d been trying to stretch it out by taking half doses, but could feel himself falling more and more apart. That humiliating exhibition he’d put on at James’s house, falling on his head into the popcorn, was the same thing he’d been doing at home: it took him half an hour to walk down the stairs, because he had to cling tightly to the wall, staggering like — no, worse than — a drunk. It was quite clear that he needed more potion, and to get it he needed money….

Eventually, Peter thought of his mother’s harp. She hadn’t played it (as far as he knew) since he’d been born, but it was still in the attic, wrapped in Preservative Charms and gathering dust. Back when his father was alive, she would sometimes say dreamily that if she ever had a little girl, she would teach her to play that harp. Other things she’d said about it suggested that it would fetch a pretty penny. Besides, it would be being used, and making some player happy, and keeping it lying around the attic was just selfish….

Peter sold his mother’s harp to a wizarding musical instruments dealer and owled Phanette to bring him more potion, and everything was fine until he ran out of money again.

* * * * *

Lily and James and Sirius were talking in the Potter parlor. Lily’s usual feeling that the kitchen was the coziest place to chat was outweighed by the fact that, in the kitchen, she and James couldn’t sit together on the sofa. If "sit" was the word for Lily lying down with her head pillowed on James’s thigh. Sirius wondered, as often before, whether they were deliberately putting on a display of marital bliss for his sake. Not that he had any objection to an arrangement that let him sit in the big armchair and put his feet on the coffee table. Despite appearances, they were talking business.

"That Crouch." James shook his head. "Thinks he’s such a hero, but he doesn’t even know what’s going on in his own department."

"He really won’t believe that files are going missing from his department?" Sirius’s questions were half rhetorical. "He really said Crabbe and Goyle had never had files, even after you reminded him that we captured them attacking the Bones?"

James nodded confirmation, which was Sirius’s signal to shake his head over Crouch’s stubbornness, as James continued: "He said I was over-enthusiastic and under-experienced. He said everyone in his department had passed a stringent security check. His security check must leak like a sieve: that new clerk he just hired, C. R. Avery, is best buddies with Rozier and Wilkes, and we know they're Death Eaters."

"Cash Avery, another school buddy of Snape," Sirius added. (Back in those days, he had written a rude verse about that Slytherin clique, with the line Cassius’ arse is even rosier dan Wilkes.) "Remember when he tried to steal my Arithmancy homework with just a Summoning Charm, so I tied a Dungbomb to it and let it go, and it went off in his face?"

"I’ve been trying to think how to get solid evidence," said Lily. "What would work to catch Nott walking into the file room and taking a file out of the file cabinet wouldn’t work to catch him if he somehow disintegrates it from a distance. It would be great to catch him in possession of stolen files, kept for blackmail or something, but he’s just as likely to have destroyed them…. Muggles wouldn’t have to worry about spells from a distance, they’d just put a hidden camera in the room to photograph everyone who opened the file cabinet."

"We can put a hidden camera in the file room, in case it helps," said Sirius, and glanced at James: "Remember the camera in the Gryffindor girls’ shower?"

"James! You didn’t!" shrieked Lily, who hadn’t know about that prank. James blushed. Sirius laughed at them: "Yes, he did. But only on condition that he got to look through all the photos first, to take away all pictures of you to keep for himself. But that’s okay, we got this picture of Carrie Weasley washing her hair…" and he jumped up to demonstrate how she’d had both hands on her head, obviously lathering her hair, but co-incidentally stretched into a chest-up pose perfect for the cover of a men’s magazine.

Even Lily laughed at that reminiscence of the good old days, but then they all fell into gloom, remembering that Carrie was dead in these bad new days: she and her two babies had been in a candle shop at the time it was blown up by Death Eaters. The Ministry had been much more concerned about finding and Memory Charming any Muggles who had seen the Dark Mark or the wreckage than about trying to identify the perpetrator. Carrie’s poor husband, Donny Huffington, who had no Auror training at all (he was a broomstick maker, carefully tying on twigs and applying Charms that other people had invented), was determined to find out who had killed his wife and children, and somehow was effective enough that his tortured and dismembered body parts were found one morning strewn on the marble front steps of the Ministry of Magic building.

"Old Barty's not a total fool," James dragged them back on topic. "DMLE's offices are swept for spells every day at sunset and sunrise. We'd have to place the camera after the sunset sweep and take it away before the sunrise sweep. It'd be quite a lucky co-incidence if the one night the camera was there were the one night that Nott did something interesting."

"Not one night. There has to be a good pun there, about not Nott's night. We have to have the camera there for however long it takes, and just move it aside during each sweep," Sirius corrected him.

"You can't keep sneaking in and out at every sunrise and sunset," objected Lily. "You can't Apparate there; you'll have to go through the lobby. Someone will notice you eventually, going in and out the doors, even with the Invisibility Cloak." She didn't need to mention that if the lobby guard (reception witch or wizard) caught them sneaking into the Ministry building in an Invisibility Cloak, they'd be arrested, and if Barty or one of his personally loyal Aurors caught them sneaking into DMLE offices, they'd be killed on the spot.

"Peter can do it," Sirius stated. The other two uttered exclamations of surprise and disbelief. "As a rat," Sirius deigned to explain to them. "He can grab the camera before the sweep wizard comes to the file room, run through the walls to someplace else, then run back to the file room after the sweeper leaves. No one will ever notice one more rat in the walls. The advantage of being a little twerp."

"Yes, but he can't live in the DMLE offices for days on end," objected James. "He has to look after his mother." Lily made a face: she still didn't believe that Peter was doing anything useful for his family. Sirius ignored her opinion and answered James: "Bet you there are rat highways in the walls all the way from Florean Fortescue's to Barty-boy's private office. He can commute."