Author's Note: All I have to say is: you guys will hate me by the end of the chapter.
Dedications: Again, I know.
My muse: I love you so much.
Chapter 15: The Second Letter
Peter made his second trip to Maison Serpent the same day Lily and James took Dinah to Diagon Alley. Shaking off his highly emotional father at St. Mungo's had taken quite some time, as he insisted that Peter spend a good chunk of the day at his mother's side, so it was nearing nighttime when he made his way to the spooky castle's entrance.
He'd barely crossed the threshold when someone yanked him by the back of his robes. That someone was Lucius and he'd chosen the same dark room as Bellatrix in which to pop up.
"Pettigrew?" Light from Lucius's wand blinded Peter. "Good. So have you given her the potion?"
Peter pulled his robes from Lucius's grip and made a show of smoothing them out with well-placed indignant glares at his fellow. "Yes. I slipped it into her juice this morning."
Lucius grinned maliciously. With the wandlight casting shadows on his face, the grin scared Peter. He shivered, twitching in place. Lucius took no notice.
"Just a few more hours, Pettigrew. I've only got a few hours left to wait now..." His grin widened and a sadistic look overtook his eyes.
"Will the Master be assisting you with your plan?" asked Peter. He'd been wondering how exactly Lucius planned to pull off the ordeal.
"Of course not," snapped Lucius, losing his zeal. "Our master has much more important things to deal with than Mudbloods. He's generously granted me use of a cell, however, and of the lower level, as well."
"Will you be the only one involved?" questioned Peter further. He knew Lucius would probably chide him for his nosiness, but he couldn't stifle his curiosity.
"The only one really involved," replied Lucius importantly. "But I'm bringing backup along in case things get out of hand. This is doubtful, of course. She'll hardly be able to make a move without my say." He gave a self-satisfied chuckle. "I think I'll go and write a letter now. I've had such a long wait on it, after all..."
Peter caught one more flash of Lucius's twisted, maniacal grin in the dim light before he disappeared within the shadows of the hallway.
Lucius's plan, from the bits and pieces Peter had gathered from Bellatrix, sounded awful. Peter would never have wished that sort of torture on anyone. He wanted to help her, not because she was any friend of his, but because of the sheer inhumanity of what was going to take place. And while he couldn't outright help Lily, he decided to offer her what little assistance he could manage.
- - -
Back in Chatham, Lily,--who had no knowledge of the horrors yet to befall her--James, and Dinah were just arriving back home, laden with shopping bags. In addition to Dinah's robes, they'd purchased bags full of sweets, several joke wands (with which Lily and James had been playing along the way), a self-dipping quill, the latest editions of both Witch Weekly and Quidditch Today, and a book entitled An Introduction to the Magical World, For Children, which Dinah deemed a must-have.
The Potters, again, were nowhere in sight upon their return, and the trio went upstairs without having bid them goodnight. The group separated in front of James's room with the intention--on James and Lily's part--of meeting up again later.
Dinah skipped over to her and Lily's bed and jumped among the covers. This hadn't been wise, as Max was sleeping on the same covers and didn't take well to his sudden awakening.
"Ow!" cried Dinah, rubbing a red mark on her finger. "Lily! Max bit me!"
Lily chuckled, plopping the bags down on the dresser. "You shouldn't have jumped on the bed."
Max hissed at Dinah in apparent agreement with Lily. Dinah hissed right back at him.
"Bad kitty," she admonished, shaking a finger at him. "You don't bite me! I could have let the mean crazy man chop you up, you know."
Lily laughed. "I would have saved him if you hadn't." She walked to the edge of the bed and scratched Max underneath his chin while he purred.
Dinah frowned and crossed her arms. "Why is he being nice to you? He's supposed to like me better! He's my kitty!"
Lily slid into a sitting position on the bed and lifted Max into her lap. He nuzzled her robes. "Maybe he'd be nice to you, too, if you didn't jump on him."
"Can I have him back now, Lily?" asked Dinah. She looked ready to spring and snatch him up at any moment.
Lily smiled, rubbing the kitten's ears. "Jealous?" she asked.
"Lily!" whined Dinah, pounding her fists into the mattress in a very over-tired way. "He's mine!" She eyed the kitten, who was stretching leisurely while Lily rubbed his belly, with jealousy.
"I'm the mother, and I can play with your cat if I want to," declared Lily, grinning at her.
Dinah glared at her. "Fine! I'll play with something of yours, then!" She hopped from the bed and marched to the night stand. Lily turned to watch, amused; she was very much enjoying Dinah's first hissy fit.
Dinah appeared to be rummaging through something beneath the night stand. She emerged with a green book the size of a diary in her hand. It was a diary--Mrs. Evans's diary.
Dinah stomped back over to Lily and waved the book in her face. "I'm going to read your book!" She laid it on the bed and opened it roughly, flipping at random. Lily didn't want her to damage her mother's diary in her fury, so she set Max down and held her hand out toward Dinah.
"I want my book."
Dinah stuck her tongue out at her in a most childish manner. "I knew it would make you mad, too."
"Yeah, well I wasn't being rough with your cat," snapped Lily, and she brushed Dinah away from the diary. She felt as though she was having a heart attack when she saw that Dinah had torn one of the pages.
The child's eyes grew wide and she backed away. Lily turned to the section with the ripped page and breathed with relief when she realized that the protruding bit wasn't a torn page at all. It was a white envelope identical to the one holding Mrs. Evans's letter.
At first, she shrugged it off. The letter had just become wedged within the diary during all the jostling the bag had undergone. She pulled it out and went to her open duffel bag to replace both the letter and the diary, but when she pulled the flap open, she saw another white envelope nestled among the bag's contents. She set the diary aside and reached for the other envelope. It, the one from the bag, had been opened before. Lily could see where she'd tucked the flap back in.
What was in this second envelope? There was no clue; the envelope bore no markings. She warned herself not to get her hopes up. Her mother probably wrote the letter years ago. It wasn't for her.
However, she couldn't shake the urge to open it. Fingers trembling, she slit the letter open. Dinah didn't dare move or say a word.
Lily frowned upon first seeing it. It was in her mother's handwriting, all right, but it looked as though someone had tampered with it; many letters had been scratched out so that it read as so:
Before sealing my ackage, I thought of anothe pice of adice that shuld offer yo:
Sometime there are things in ife that require more examinaion han on passing glance o a quick read or their true meaning or purpose to be understod.
Once, or pehaps twie, in your life tim you coul come in contct with a piece of writing that holds ore beneth the surface (ike facts) than the reader frst expected.
If conceied writing such as I hav described isn't exained, the things (nd people) we hold near and dear to our hearts mght be lot frever.
Nobody wats omething lik that to happen. I'm sue a erson lik you would't, righ?
"What's that, Lily?" asked Dinah timidly, taking a few steps toward the bed. She still worried she'd be yelled at.
Lily continued to stare at the letter, pondering. Surely the letters hadn't been marked out at random...
"Lily!" came a cheerful voice from the doorway. Lily and Dinah turned their heads and saw James coming toward them, a spring in his step and a letter in his hand. He seemed not to notice Lily's letter in his excitement, and knelt beside where she was kneeling.
"Look," he whispered, tapping his letter, which he held in front of them. "It's the file and Dumbledore's note." Lily was in no mood to care about Maynard Golly's file; she scowled, though James didn't notice. "I knew my parents would give it to us. So, should we tell Din--"
She stomped on his foot to silence him and sat with her back against the side of the bed. James rubbed his bare, throbbing foot (Lily hadn't yet removed her shoes) and snapped,
"Just because you've got the painters in doesn't mean you can--"
Lily shoved her letter in his face, startling him out of speech. At such a short distance, the letter was blurred to James. He took it from her, held it at a visible distance, and began to read. Upon seeing the scratches-out, a faint line appeared between his eyebrows.
"Lily, what is this?" He met her eyes. "Why's it all marked on? Who sent it?"
"Nobody sent it," replied Lily. "I found it stuck between the pages of my mother's diary." James looked even more confused and Lily pulled the green diary, along with her mother's other letter, from her duffel bag.
"What's that letter?" he asked, pointing at the other envelope.
"My mother's first letter to me. I received it after she died," she explained.
"Can I see it?" He extended his hand toward her.
"Yes, here." Lily removed the letter from its envelope and passed it to him.
Because this letter was considerably longer than Mrs. Evans's first, James took a couple minutes more in reading it. His first facial reaction resulted from the first paragraph--in which Mrs. Evans mentioned the rape. James looked ready to break something. To the rest of the letter, he didn't have much of a reaction. He only seemed to be taking in the letter's contents. But after finishing, the crease between his eyebrows returned, and he stared at the letter as though it were praising the intelligence of a member of the Bush family.
Lily leaned eagerly toward the letter. "What is it? What have you found out?" She scanned over the letter as though expecting something new and interesting jumbled with her mother's words.
James tried several times to voice his exact thoughts on the letter, but found no way of doing this to suit his needs. He went for a more succinct approach, instead.
"This...doesn't make a whole lot of sense, love."
"What?" Lily didn't know exactly what she'd expected him to say, but telling her the letter didn't make sense definitely wasn't it.
James held the letter at arm's length and stared at it with the same expression he'd worn when trying to decide how to word his thoughts before. He knew exactly what to say in his head, but had trouble converting the ideas to speech.
"Well, Lily...no offense to your mother, or anything, but I think she may have been a bit...loony."
Lily was outraged. Her hands balled into fists and began to shake with repressed fury. Even Dinah, standing uncertainly in the corner, understood his mistake.
"How," Lily began, failing to keep her tone friendly, "in the world did you come to that conclusion?" Although she was furious with James, she was close to tears at the same time. How dare he insult her dead mother? All of her affection for James vanished. She wanted to beat him over the head with his broomstick.
James appeared to think the answer was obvious. "It's just...Dumbledore writes to her about your rape and she composes a letter speaking of her and your father's deaths a week later? She's even left you and your sister things."
Lily was so suddenly confused she couldn't process anything. "Well--"
"And that's not all," James continued. He held the letter so she could see and indicated the first paragraph. "When she wrote this, it was a week after your rape. Why would she have written a letter then about dying?"
Lily struggled to defend her mother's sanity. "M-maybe the news scared her into writing a will."
James sighed, rolling his eyes. "Can't you see it, Lily? There is something very fishy about this letter."
Lily snatched it from him, tearful and incensed. "There is nothing fishy about a farewell letter!" She smoothed out the creases in the paper, which she'd spread across her arched knees.
Something else sparked in James's memory. "Let me see that letter again."
Lily pulled it out of his reach. "No. You'll only mock my mother more."
James sighed again. "I'm sorry I called your mother a loon. Now can I have the letter?" He reached for it.
Lily pulled it farther from his reach. "That was not sincere."
James's eyebrows came together in annoyance and he leaned over her to snatch the letter away; Lily cried out in outrage.
"Stop acting like a child," he chided before looking to the bottom of the page. He smiled proudly when he found what he was looking for. "You found the second letter inside of the green diary, right?"
Lily furrowed her brow, forgetting her anger for the moment. "Yes...and?"
James continued to stare at the bottom of the letter, grinning. "I take back what I said about your mother, Lily. She wasn't loony at all. In fact, she was quite brilliant."
James had succeeded in puzzling Lily further. "What in Merlin's name are you going on about?"
"Well, Lily"--James gestured to the letter, alight with pride--"it says right here, plain as parchment 'look to my diaries--especially the green one.'"
Lily tugged the page in her direction to double check. This still didn't do much for her.
"That other letter tells me nothing." She looked up at his grinning face, trying to discern a meaning.
James mock tutted. "Lily, Lily, Lily"--she noticed he seemed to think this all to be a clever game at which he was quickly gaining points--"have you never studied cryptology? This letter is very important." He gestured to the second letter. "See, the first letter points to the second; it tells you where to find it. I expect she only included the loony business with the dates to catch your attention."
"My mother was no cryptologist," objected Lily. "You're reading too much in to this."
He arched his eyebrows, amused. "Am I?" He picked up the second letter and held it between them. "If you ignore all of the scribbles, the letter's got a very important message. It's saying that reading in to things"--he nudged her pointedly with his elbow--"is essential, otherwise you could lose things that're very important to you."
"Like what?" replied Lily bitterly, folding her arms. "What more am I going to lose?"
James kissed her cheek unexpectedly, lifting her mood somewhat. "I think we should take a closer look at the letters she's marked out. They seem to be intentional."
Lily leaned to pull a pen from her duffel bag. "We can fill in the blanks as we go," she explained.
James nodded his approval. "Good thinking." He cleared his throat. "All right, the first scribble is in front of 'ackage'."
"Package," aid Lily at once, marking a 'p' above the scribble. "The diaries were in a box."
"And the second"--he took the pen from her hand and set the tip to the paper--"is 'another' rather than 'anothe'." He wrote an 'r' above the second scribble.
"The third is 'piece'," said Lily, growing excited. "Mark an 'e'. Then 'advice'; that's a 'v'."
"I know, Lily, I know," he mumbled, filling in the letters.
They went through the entire letter guessing at the incomplete words and filling in the scribbles. The letter, now whole, read as follows:
Before sealing my package, I thought of another piece of advice I should offer you:
Sometimes there are things in life that require more examination than one passing glance or a quick read for their true meaning to be understood.
Once--or perhaps twice--in your life time you could come in contact with a piece of writing that holds more beneath the surface (like facts) than the reader first expected.
If conceived writing such as I have described isn't examined, the things (and people) we hold near and dear to our hearts might be lost forever.
Nobody wants something like that to happen. I'm sure a person like you wouldn't, right?
James had been right. Mere minutes before, she'd put his theory down as ludicrous, but after reading the letter properly, her mother's true meaning became startlingly clear. Lily couldn't believe she'd put such little thought into reading her mother's original letter the first time through. It only happened because she was distraught; she would have noticed the letter's oddity right off, otherwise. She was sure of it.
Mrs. Evans hadn't bothered to conceal much in her second letter to her younger daughter. The whole thing was a big, flashing banner advertising a very obvious meaning. However, the meaning, though so straightforward, made Lily skeptical. Reading her meaning was like learning, as a child, that Santa Claus is a cruel creation of adults. Only much, much more shocking.
She gazed down at the collection of filled in letters above the scribbles and many things happened at once. A feeling similar to a chill on a warm summer's day engulfed her. Her heart began to beat alarmingly fast. Her palms started sweating. Then, as sudden as the lunge of a cobra, dizziness overtook her and the rough message swept through her mind before she passed out.
previous letter forced am alive maison serpent
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