Rising Darkness

I don’t own Harry Potter characters or ideas.  I’m borrowing them.  Let’s assume this to be true for the whole fic.

I haven’t been writing at all lately, I’ve been too busy with work.  But since my job is boring and this is fun, I figure of I start to post it, I’ll be inspired / forced to get back into writing in general.

This fic will cover July 31st, 1980 through November 1st, 1981. In plot terms, from the day Harry is born up until Sirius goes to Azkaban. Obviously, it will focus on James and Lily and the Marauders, Harry being just a baby.  You don’t need to have read my previous L/J fic to get this, but I will use some of the same names.  This will be darker and with less humor, as can be seen from this prologue, I know it’s short, prologues often are.

It was the best sort of fall day.  Clear and bright, with a slight breeze swirling the fallen leaves and just enough of a bite in the air to promise winter was on its way.  The sky was so blue as to be painful to look at, broken only occasionally by high white clouds that held no threat of rain.

The families of the people who died that day never got answers, and the survivors would not remember what they had seen, but the people who paused in their daily comings and goings to watch the scene unfolding still sensed the significance of what they witnessed.  In the middle of a crowded street, in the middle of the day, two men who had once been the closest of friends confronted each other.

The two men seemed unaware of the people around them as they faced each other. One of them, tall, and probably good-looking, but today his face was twisted in an expression of rage, pain, and betrayal. The other, standing only ten feet from him, wore an expression of grim satisfaction, a cold glint of contempt in his eyes that said they never should have underestimated him.

"Lily and James, Sirius! How could you?"He cried, loud enough to be heard by all. A look of confusion and disbelief passed over the other man's face, but then understanding came to him in the split second before the explosion.

The ground shook with the force of the impact, cracking the street down to the sewer. Screams tore through the air and debris rained down on people as they tried to run, and the man who had cried out disappeared in the flash of light, he must be dead, all the witnesses were sure of it. Nothing left of him, blown to pieces.

It was strange, the details that would stick in his mind later, the details that would haunt him for the rest of his life, were the smallest things.  The curly red-brown hair of a pretty girl, perhaps fifteen years old, her clear blue eyes wide and staring in death.  The way dust from the shattered street floated in the sunlight.  The screams of a little boy in a stroller that pierced through the shocked silence immediately after the explosion, before the shouts and sirens came.  A trickle of blood from his hand where a piece of concrete had grazed him.  The same hand that uselessly held his wand.

The muggles would not remember what they had seen, but the first wizards on the scene could not forget it. A crack in the street that ran ten feet deep, broken bodies of innocent bystanders and chunks of shattered cement strewn about, the heap of bloodstained robes that had been a person,and standing in the midst of the chaos and destruction, Sirius Black, shaking his head and laughing. If anyone had been close enough, they would have heard him muttering over and over "I should have known".