Oh, enough with the good deeds.

Not mine etc. and so forth.

"Please try to be reasonable, James," Harry called tiredly, peeking through a lattice of cold iron. Enchanting his own voice had been trying, and it had taken some time before negotiations could proceed beyond gurgles and coos.

"What have you done with my son, Voldemort?" James shouted from inside the study behind his own transfigured barricade, desperately trying to unravel a moderately unpleasant curse he'd been clipped with earlier, which had resulted in this lull in hostilities.

"Again, I'm not Voldemort-"

"Bullshit!"

"I've already told you, James. I'm here to help. I need to kill you and Lily so that I can break the prophecy," Harry explained patiently. This was a point that James seemed to be having trouble with.

"You're fucking crazy!"

"James, please. Just step out here so I can kill you for a little while. You won't feel a thing, and before you know it I'll have you up on your feet and wondering why you were so upset in the first place."

Harry frowned as he heard James either snap and begin to gibber to himself or start reciting more ancient family magic. How much such magic did James know? Too bloody much, in his opinion.

"Have I ever lied to you?" he wheedled, "have I ever demanded that you change clean nappies? I assure you that I have been raised to be a baby of character and integrity. I wouldn't ask this of you if it weren't absolutely necessary."

If Harry wasn't mistaken, James was now just about ready to have another go at him. This was most vexing. His mother had been easy enough, he'd managed to kill her with her own wand in the kitchen. Then, taking pains not to be noticed, he had dragged and levitated her cooling body into his play room for safe keeping. His father, unfortunately, had a sixth sense for danger and had survived all attempts on his life since waking. Including the poisoned coffee.

He'd been certain the poisoned coffee would do the trick. Damned Potter luck.

"James, if that's another brass lion you're transfiguring in there I will be very cross with you." Harry sing-songed, hearing the distinctive clack of metal on wood.

An ear splitting roar sounded through Godric's Hollow, and an entire pride of brass lions clawed their way through the halls of the Potter residence, all of them heading directly for his warded and heavily transfigured playpen.

"Oh, fiddlesticks." Harry muttered, and with a gurgling coo he levitated his pen and ran as fast as his stubby baby legs could carry him.

"Bloody brass-" DONG "-bloody lions-" BONG, CRASH! "-James-" BONG! "-bloody Potter," Harry groused, watching the constructs scrabble at the entrances they'd torn through the walls and ceiling of his newly fortified playroom. They were making headway, but he had enough magic left to erect physical shields to stop them.

"Besieged by my own father in my own house, on the day of my own attempted assassination. Just bloody brilliant."

"Had enough, Voldemort?"

I am not Voldemort, you twit! I'm here to help!" he shouted.

"Avada Kedavra," he tossed out the doorway after having said his piece, and heard his father shout something unkind in return before the spell fizzled audibly. Probably a wall, but perhaps he'd gotten lucky.

"Oi, are you dead? Are you finally dead?"

"I will end you!" James replied spiritedly.

Harry groaned in disappointment and performed a counter transfiguration on one of the brass lions, turning it into a confused brass stag.

"Serves you right," he said viciously, listening of the squeak of brass teeth and claws on brass fur.

A warning shimmer followed by a deafening bang cause him to duck unnecessarily under a rune carved cannon ball that shot through the doorway at waist height and blew clean through his crib and the far wall, destroying the wards he'd placed in the process and forcing Harry to begin casting in earnest to defend himself from the lions that slipped through.

He managed to eject the last lion from his perimeter and reactivate the bulk of his defenses just in time, as James, -no doubt, he thought, sitting cozily behind his own hastily erected wards- had followed up by turning the house into a flour bomb and setting it off.

The explosion was tremendous, and when the smoke wafted away both Potter Senior and Junior were left staring at each other from what remained of their chosen bastions. Harry, using his mother's corpse to prop himself up higher to look through a lion induced hole in his wall, and James, glaring through a portion of his study that was probably just enchanted to be transparent. Neither of their rooms had ceilings any more, a sign that they'd both failed to account for concerted attacks from above.

"That was completely unnecessary, James," Harry chided him, wiping soot from his face.

"Fuck you!"

Harry made a mou of distaste at his father's cripplingly small lexicon. Even as a student he'd never felt the need to resort to such banal obscenities.

"Now, as I mentioned earlier, Lilly will be fine. She's just dead, not lost in the nether dimensions. I can bring her back as soon as you just come out into the open and take your Avada Kedavra like a man."

James watched the green spell shoot toward him and expire on the very much enchanted wall in front of his face.

"Sorry, that was low. But I had to try," Harry apologized, "we're running short on time and you've made this awfully difficult."

James responded by launching the magical equivalent of a mortar shell at his room. The spell bounced off a purple dome of energy and went careening off the property to explode somewhere in the valley. Harry, at least, had been prepared for such an eventuality.

"You know," Harry shouted in exasperation, "if you'd fought Voldemort this hard the first time around I wouldn't have found it necessary to do this!"

James began to swear at him in German.

"If it makes you feel any better, you'd have died today anyway. Peter is a death eater!"

German gave way to Gaelic, and Harry felt a sinking feeling in his stomach when he noticed a number of his father's damned brass lions slinking back out of the darkness, quite unharmed by the explosion.

Perhaps it was just gas, he considered. Had his mother burped him properly that morning?

No, no, it was definitely despair, he decided, seeing more lions unearth themselves from the rubble.

His little baby body just didn't have room for the magical power he was accustomed to, and he was paying for it. James had, for the most part, fought with the intention of preserving his child and wife's bodies. Had he not, Harry wouldn't have been more than a smear, and now James had cornered him.

He stepped off his mother's corpse and regarded it unhappily.

This was not going well.

Perhaps he should have killed her second. He really hadn't thought that James had been much of a fighter, considering the poor showing he'd exhibited against Voldemort on their final meeting. So much for hindsight. This must have been an off day.

Click, clack.

The pride of brass lions, plus one visibly distraught stag, surrounded his wards.

"Nothing smart to say, you bastard?" James asked.

"Your pea mash was disgusting!" Harry retorted, after some thought.

And with that brilliant comment, Fort Harry came crashing down.

Harry looked at the stars sourly from between the frozen paws of a lion as he listened to the steady crunch of his father's approaching boots. His mother's wand was now well out of reach, this was no ambush.

This was a stupid plan from the start, he decided. He had no one but himself to blame. Still, if he was plenty lucky his father would cast the killing curse at him and that would be that. Not quite as neat as what he'd intended, but it could do. He wouldn't be around to ensure everything didn't go entirely sour, but at least the prophecy's protections would be out of the way.

That counted for a lot. Without the prophecy the world wouldn't have just one potential hero. It would have millions. The Fates might even burst into tears and leave everyone alone for once.

Crunch, crunchity crunch.

The man who came into view was a wreck. His face was bloodied, gaunt and sunken, and his robes were tattered. He stooped over Harry like a wraith.

"Why?" he croaked. "Why did you take my son?"

Harry smiled toothlessly. "Because he couldn't win."

James' eyes flared incandescent, and he grabbed the body of his child by the throat and hoisted it aloft.

A red light illuminated them both, and James dropped like a puppet. Harry landed painfully on his arm, wheezing.

"I never took James Potter for a kinslayer, but here we are," Lord Voldemort murmured to himself, stepping over a ridge in the rubble to observe them.

'Oh bloody hell, thought Harry, here we go. Please have missed the talking baby bits. Please have missed the-

"I think I'll let you live, Potter," Voldemort said almost jovially, "for however long you have, after creating so many marvelous beasts of war in your insanity." He patted one of the unmoving brass lions admiringly and walked toward them.

-thank bloody goodness. He'd missed the talking baby bits. Pity he hadn't killed James properly while the man was distracted. A fine pickle this was.

"But the child must die."

Harry caught his father's glazed eyes. The man was stunned, but not quite completely insensible.

He thought it would be safe to say goodbye.

"Dada," he said fondly, and marveled at the look of love that his father gave him, thinking his baby boy had returned somehow. It would have been so nice to live with this man, but now they were both going to die for sure. A pity.

So it was that when Voldemort cast the first killing curse, James Potter moved to block it for the sake of his only son.

Harry's only consolation, as he used some of his last magic to clumsily carve open Lilly's body with a lion's dislodged claw, was that he really could bring them back. At the trivial expense of one floating rib apiece, even! . . . And maybe some insignificant portion of their souls.

The latter half of the journal he'd cribbed the ritual from hadn't been terribly legible and made frequent mention of "The Eyes That Watch" or some similar nonsense. Presumably the author had been driven mad. Harry wasn't impressed. He had eyes that watched too. In his head. If matters somehow devolved into a sort of bizarre optical pissing match he could always acquire more and wear them as a necklace.

Harry sighed, and the brass stag nuzzled him as gently as a transfigured war machine could, which wasn't very. He kept hacking away at her flesh. This would have been much easier if James hadn't gone and blown the kitchen, and all the knives, into low orbit.

Actually, "Accio steak knife."

Fie. And he couldn't afford to waste the energy to transfigure or conjure a knife, either.

The things he put up with for the sake of family.

Damn the Potter luck that had kept his father alive long enough to bugger up his plans.

A drop of water landed on his nose, causing him to scrunch it up at the sensation.

Now it was bloody raining, too?

AN

This is silly. I make no excuses!