The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part One

A Poetic Twist

The next week was spent preparing. It was important, James said, to get things done quickly, but it was also important, Lily said, to get them done correctly. So, even though James spent every night that week laying in bed, worrying about whether Walburga Black had found out about the vials of werewolf venom she had stacked away in her vault at Gringott's, he didn't fight to speed up the process anymore than he felt absolutely necessary.

Every file that James worked with in Mr. Underhill's office that week, he combed through more thoroughly than he might normally before putting it away, looking for one that might contain an official Ministry of Magic search warrant. He was sure to find one, he kept telling himself, even as the days passed by and he still hadn't come across what he needed.

Then there was Frank's business of asking questions of various instructors in his level of the Auror training center, trying to glean as much information about the process of how one went about presenting a search warrant as possible.

"Merlin's tit you'd think you were plotting to go into warrant serving as a career, Longbottom!" exclaimed Edgar Bones when Frank asked him questions on it for the third day in a row.

"It's come up on an exam is all," Frank lied, and he made a mental note not to ask Edgar Bones about it again, just in case.

Every night, they all gathered in the flat in East London, discussing things they'd found out, pouring over all the information they could get their hands on about the Gringott's vaults and relying on Sirius's shaky memory of the few times he'd accompanied his mum or dad to the Black family vault when he was young. Lily and Marlene worked on gathering spells to soothe and tame dragons while Remus researched goblin lore and magic to see if there was any information contained in that realm that they needed to be privvy to before enacting their plans. Emmaline knicked a jar of burn balms for dragon singes from Mungo's during one of her shifts on the healing team there, and Peter provided the snacks to keep them all well fed while they planned and plotted their way through the piles of notes they'd all compiled.

Slowly, something resembling a plan began to form and by the end of the week, the only thing left to put into place was the manufacturing of the warrant itself.

It was the last day of the working week and James glanced up at the clock. Five more minutes left to the day and then he'd be headed home to Lily and the others for the day. He shifted in his seat and glanced up at Mr. Underhill, who was staring down at a stack of paper work he was shuffling through. He hadn't yet found a warrant through the stacks of paperwork he'd been processing and storing all week, and he was frustrated. The fact that this small bit had been the hardest part of the entire plot thus far was unexpected. He'd thought that finding a search warrant would have been easy in one of the files, considering the nature of the cases he was processing, but it had eluded him. Surely they'd done loads of warrants for all the cases Underhill had been working on in the past year. Surely he'd gone and searched somewhere for something - an attack, a murder, a suspected Death Eater...

Suddenly, it hit him.

The warrant had been sitting there in his desk the whole time.

He glanced up at Mr. Underhill again, making sure the wizard was still focused on his paperwork. Confirming he was, James bent down and opened the bottom drawer of his own desk, where he'd stowed the thick file labeled FALLENGUNDER/VEIGLER, NED.

James's hand shook as he closed his fingers around the bulk of the file. He could see the warrant in his memory, an order to search Fallengunder Castle following the death of Ned Veigler, on order of the Minister, to take custody of any remaining documents or items belonging to the Dark Lord or his army. The warrant had angered him just a short time ago, when he had first started working in Mr. Underhill's office, but now he thought it might rather turn out to be a help to their cause.