Thanks to J for being a wonderful beta!
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The Lady | ||||||
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Category: Girl Talk Challenge (2010-3), Girl Talk Challenge (2010-3) Characters:Harry/Ginny, James Potter, Lily Potter Genres: General Warnings: Spouse/Adult/Child Abuse Story is Complete Rating: PG-13 Reviews: 55 Summary: ** Winner of New Skills and the People’s Choice Award in the Girl Talk Challenge ** For protecting their son in the face of certain death, James and Lily Potter are given a wonderful gift: the chance to help their son succeed. James chooses the girl that Lily will train. Unfortunately, the girl is stubborn, willful and doesn't trust the Lady in her mind. Hitcount: Story Total: 25622; Chapter Total: 3785 Author's Notes: |
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23 May 1990 To the dead, time really mattered little. While it was different for the Potters and their guide, as they had come to call the girl, due to how much time they spent communicating with the living, days, weeks, months and years didn’t mean much in their little station. The only time when time meant anything was when they were “working.” After the disastrous episode when Ginny had accidently injured her brother, the red-head girl refused to listen any longer to Lily. Lily was able to enter the girl’s dreams still, but the cold reception she received made her decide she needed to step away until Ginny was more mature and capable of handling the truth. She had been in Ginny’s mind, after all, and knew for a fact that the child was not yet able to understand what her training really meant. Instead of focusing on Ginny, Lily began to assist James in his monumental task. Sirius had been easy for James to work with; he had always been a pragmatic man, after all. His opinion was that anything that kept him from losing his sanity while he sat surrounded by Dementors was perfectly fine and who was he to question the how’s and why’s? Remus, however, was much more difficult. He was guilt-ridden over his friends’ deaths. First reason being, because he had sensed changes among the four friends years before, but had never said anything because he had not been able to pinpoint what the changes were. Hindsight was twenty-twenty; apparently Sirius had been going dark under their very noses. Second, because he had been acting more secretive himself due to the undercover work he had been doing for the Order. ‘If only I had been open with them.’ His thoughts were clear to James and Lily in his dreams. ‘They may have trusted me rather than Sirius. I would have been glad to die to protect them.’ This was not exactly a happy thing to know that their friend was thinking. Remus had always been wary of any good fortune; he doubted that his friends would want to remain his friends for many years. It had been Lily who had finally convinced him that he was worth friendship. After all, if she could be friends with Severus Snape, befriending a werewolf was nothing. That’s how James had put it, anyway. So she began to enter Remus’ dreams and converse lightly with him about things of a studious nature. While they had both excelled in different areas: Lily in Charms and Potions, while Remus had been top of the class in History and second only to Sirius in Defence Against the Dark Arts, both were more scholarly by nature. He took to Lily’s gently prompting that he continue his studies and apply for tutoring positions better than he had to James’s reminiscing. It had bothered James that this was case, mostly because he believed that Remus had fancied Lily. After some time, however, James had finally discovered the sort of woman Remus was inclined toward and he spent a great deal of time laughing about it inside Remus’ dreams and outside of them. This is what finally led Remus to realize that his dreams weren’t from his own mind. “...and here we were, all this time, believing that either there just weren’t sophisticated enough witches in Hogwarts, or that you didn’t prefer girls!” Both James and Lily were in Remus’ dream, speaking with the werewolf. Remus was more relaxed than he had been in years, mostly due to the dreams, but also due in part to a successful date with a rather...spunky young woman. Lily couldn’t understand why she had so many piercings and tattoos, but Remus seemed to find them attractive. “Bugger! Peter was convinced you’d only love another werewolf and Sirius thought you had a thing for McGonagall during fifth year!” James was laughing so hard that Lily thought he might fall to the floor, but after chuckling initially, Remus’ face took on a look of shocked comprehension. Lily quickly extracted herself, landing gracefully on her feet outside of the Ineosieve, but James didn’t notice the warning signs of their living person waking up. He was painfully ejected as Remus awoke with a start. “Those aren’t normal dreams!” They watched him exclaim. Lily nodded at James, who rubbed his backside and then nodded back. With a deep breath, she plunged back into the Ineosieve and locked eyes with Remus. This was the part that made conversing with a conscious person so difficult; they had to know and acknowledge her presence. Only Sirius had done it so far. He’d been convinced of his own insanity at the time, so he hadn’t really questioned it. James landed beside Lily and Remus swung astonished eyes to his old friend. He was sitting up in his bed, but scrambled backwards until he was against the wall. “B-b-but h-how are you h-h-here?” Lily sighed and looked at James. He was far better at explaining things than she was when it came to something this sensitive. “Remus, mate, it really is Prongs and Lils. We’re not here to scare you,” James’s eyes narrowed at the dismayed face in front of him. “Or to cause you any grief or guilt.” He put extra emphasis on the last word. “Moony, we’re here to ask you to stop feeling guilty. We’re here because death doesn’t make the dead stop caring for their living friends any more than it makes the living stop caring for the dead. We’re worried about you.” He paused for a moment, but seemed to decide it was not the time for bringing up Sirius’s innocence. “That is one reason why we’re here and have been visiting you for nearly ten years. The other reason is that one day, you’ll be able to help our son.” He looked at Lily and nodded, seeming to feel that this was Lily’s area of expertise. Lily felt wholly inadequate. A lecture on the merits of fresh herbs over dried when creating healing potions? No problem. Arguing over the equal rights of all creatures in the magical community? She wouldn’t bat an eye. Sticking up for someone being bullied by a toerag? Just point the toerag out! But when it came to things she was unsure of herself, Lily found that she was at a loss for words. Such was the case when she was confronted with trying to explain what they were doing to Remus. “I...er...um...It’s really...Well, in the interest of...I can’t really...I’m not sure...AH!” She growled and then snorted and before turning to face her husband with clenched teeth, only to find him chuckling at her. “You do it then, if you’re so smart!” The snort of laughter from the bed made her whirl around to face Remus, an angry retort dying when she saw how relaxed he had become. When he finally stopped laughing, he looked at the two people in front of him with slightly misty eyes. “It really is you, isn’t it? That’s exactly how Lily reacted any time Professor McGonagall would ask her, er, you, to explain something in Transfiguration.” And then Lily understood. James had been trying to prove it was really them, not put Lily on the spot. After that, James took over explaining why Harry was special, without being too specific, and some of what he and Lily were doing. He left out Sirius and the name of the girl that Lily was supposed to be training, as well as the full prophecy. Remus, being the intelligent man that he was, didn’t need all of the information to make the connections. Instead, he began that following morning to apply himself with all his capabilities at learning everything he could about Defence Against the Dark Arts and gaining the credentials he needed to become a professor. It seemed to him, and to the Potters, that using Remus’ natural gift of teaching to train Harry was the best thing the werewolf could do. GMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMWGMW GMWGMWGMWGMW 25 August 1992 Ginny awoke with a start, gasping for breath. The Lady had visited her again last night, begging Ginny to let her back into her life. The eleven year old would have none of it, of course. She still had nightmares about Ron hurtling through the air and hitting the garden wall. At night, however, the thunk was a very wet and crunching sound, and Ron stared up at her with glassy blue eyes. ‘No, I can’t trust her,’ she thought. But tonight, something had struck her oddly about the Lady. There was something familiar about her that Ginny had never noticed before. There were a few things, like her high cheek bones, her manner of speaking (quiet until she became worried or angry, and then louder and with hand gestures) and how she held herself. Ginny couldn’t think of why these things stuck out at her, but after a few moments of comparing the Lady to everyone she could think of, she shrugged and gave up. With a little happy sigh, she remembered her new diary. ‘Perhaps if I tell Tom he’ll be able to help me remember what I’m missing.’ Tom, however, was just as stumped as she was. He was very interested in her dreams of the Lady, asking Ginny all kinds of questions. She was a little taken aback by this, at first. After all, either the Lady was some sort of evil being that had tried to manipulate Ginny into hurting her brother, but couldn’t hurt anyone herself, or she was a figment of Ginny’s own imagination. She had wondered, often, if she had dreamt up the Lady as what she wished she could look like. The Lady, though a red-head, had not one freckle and her blush was only a light, pink tinge, rather than a bright red beacon. Her hair was simply beautiful, unlike the unruly, horrid colour Ginny had been born with. But her hesitancy quickly faded and she poured all of her memories and thoughts about the Lady and the dreams into her diary, watching them soak up and being confident that Tom would never betray her. Unlike the Lady, he was trustworthy. |
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