Chapter Text
Voldemort dodges her killing curse. Which she probably could have predicted.
He pauses, and she can’t see his face - she’s never seen his face - but she imagines there’s a look of either incredulity or sheer fury on whatever he has hidden under the darkness of his hood. She doubts that anyone has thrown an Avada Kedavra at him like that in a long while, or even ever. It sends a bit of a thrill up Lily’s spine.
“I was going to offer you the chance to stand aside,” he muses, and maybe there’s a hint of amusement in his voice, the voice that she hasn’t heard saying anything other than stand aside and Avada Kedavra. It’s a rather unpleasantly pleasant voice, rich and confident and Lily is going to kill him, new plans formulating in her mind, “But I believe I can guess what your response to that will be.”
She fires another Avada at him. Just for fun.
He dodges it again, which is a shame, then lifts his wand and fires off a killing curse of his own.
She does not dodge, which is also a shame, but her death here is rather less consequential than his would have been.
*****
It’s a revelation though, or it feels like one at least, when she wakes up again that same morning. The only way for her to get out of this miserable loop is to kill Voldemort, and so Lily dedicates herself accordingly to the task.
That evening, she puts Harry in his crib, layers as many shield spells as she can think of over it, and then steps out into the corridor to meet Voldemort before he can get into the nursery.
Unsurprisingly, she’s dead in less than a minute - duelling has never been Lily’s strong suit, and clearly it is one of Voldemort’s, so she’d never really stood a chance - but she wakes up more determined than before.
She realises that, really, she has all the time in the world. Voldemort has had a bit of a head start on the whole Dark Arts thing (no one is entirely sure how old he is, although she thinks Dumbledore probably knows, but it’s definitely older than her), but if she’s to be trapped reliving this day endlessly, then surely she could build herself up into a bit of a threat before evening - or one iteration of this same evening when Lily has exhausted all of the books she can access on the subject.
And even if her learning has no effect on the time loop or the end result of her fight with Voldemort, it at least gives her something to do during the day that isn’t actively losing her mind. It gives her a goal to work towards rather than endlessly pondering her failed plans. She grasps at the idea like the sight of a lighthouse warning her away from the rocks of that despair, steering away from numb desolation towards action and possibility.
Her first port of call is Sirius. After he taught her that blood ritual, Lily has been thinking about him, and what other things his family might have taught him, what books he might have in his flat, what knowledge he might be able to share with her.
The trouble is getting him to share it with her.
In the end, she gets herself into his flat with the Wormtail excuse she’s used before, waiting until he’s unlocked the wards on his secret cupboard before stunning him. She’s discovered that he keeps all of his more questionable belongings in there - a handful of books that dance across the line of legality, a few vials of poison and what looks like a cursed ring, and, of course, his collection of the blood of his friends/family/enemies.
The only way she’s going to do any sort of damage to the Dark Lord is if she immerses herself in the kind of spells that his Death Eaters throw out during raids, the kind of spells that she never recognises and that are almost certainly illegal. It’s Dark magic that is going to win her this fight, and maybe she’s known this since she started dabbling in blood rituals but either way she refuses to be squeamish about it.
She reads all of Sirius’ books, cover to cover, even the random one about astral magic. It’s interesting, she thinks, that Sirius would keep these books - or buy them, even, seeing as he always said he’d left home with nothing but the clothes on his back - but it’s worked out to her benefit so she doesn’t question it too much.
There are a few books on Dark hexes and curses, some of which she’s seen him trying out on Peter, a couple on blood magic - rituals and wards and the like - another couple on enchanting objects, and the aforementioned astral magic one. Useful, and certainly she can tell that she’s improved a little in her duels with Voldemort, but not enough to hurt him, not enough to make her a threat.
Maybe just enough to make her interesting.
Voldemort tilts his head to one side, hidden under the dark hood of his cloak, observing her after she’d nearly got him with one of Sirius’ nastier curses.
“Is Dumbledore teaching his precious mudblood Order members illegal spells now?” he asks her as the curse in question sizzles through the wall just behind his left shoulder - a corrosive sort of spell that she thinks resembles acid.
“I’m not precious to Dumbledore,” Lily bites out and it’s maybe a little bitter. She’d never imagined that she was all that important to the headmaster, just another soldier in his army, but she had thought that he would at least attempt to do something when faced with the knowledge that she and her husband and son were soon to die. But he had left her to fend for herself and fend for herself she had; nothing Dumbledore had taught her was going to help her to kill Voldemort, and neither is anything she’s picked up from Sirius.
His books are useful, yes, but she needs to do more than just raise questions for the Dark Lord. He still kills her just as easily after all - it’s not enough.
When she’s read through Sirius’ collection, she decides to pay a visit to an old friend of hers: one Severus Snape. Again, it’s a bit of a faff getting into his house to access his books but she manages it without falling victim to too much snivelling, and when she’s in, she realises she probably should’ve skipped Sirius and come straight here.
She should’ve remembered that Severus has likely never thrown out a book in his life (a theory supported by the presence of seven years worth of school textbooks on his shelves), and that his books, and the annotations in his books, would afford her a much more thorough education in Dark magic than anything Sirius had to offer, particularly considering who Severus tends to associate with nowadays.
His is a much broader and larger collection that starts with the basics, introductory texts, and then delves into whatever direction Severus deems interesting. There are books on duelling style, and occlumency, and necromancy, and medieval torture methods, and pureblood traditions, and healing spells, and even bloody divination alongside the expected potions ones. She decides that she’s going to read all of them.
Breadth of knowledge can’t possibly be a bad thing and she might as well try and read as much as she can now while she’s got basically all the time in the world. Luckily, she’s always been a fast reader, especially when she’s genuinely interested in a subject, and the things she’s reading now are certainly far more interesting than anything she’d learnt at school.
And she finds that breadth of knowledge really does help her, when she’s read a random selection of the books. Her brain has more avenues it can draw from when she’s trying to think on her feet and it makes her feel a bit less like she’s grasping at straws whenever she’s duelling, less like she’s ten steps behind her opponent and alive only by sheer dumb luck.
She starts to feel a little bit powerful. Dark magic is a heady thing, seductive and dangerous and ever so freeing - not just in the sense that she’s loosening herself from the bounds of magical society’s laws (most of which she does still think are likely in place for good reason with regards to some of the singularly nasty curses she’s picked up), but deeper in the core of her, in her magic.
Often when people speak of Dark magic, the first thing they think of is the Unforgivables, supposedly the three worst spells in existence - though Lily can think of worse ways to die than the Killing Curse, and she’s sure that many would forgive her for using it against Voldemort. The reason they are classed this way, Lily learns, grouped together like a trinity of temptation for wanna-be Dark wizards, lies in the nature of them, in their basis in intent, in how badly the caster wants it.
The majority of people could cast a killing curse and it wouldn’t even stun a fly - for an Unforgivable to be effective, the caster has to mean it. Lily is yet to cast the Cruciatus, but she knows, like she knows she won’t be harmed when she leaps from swings at the peak of their arc, that if Voldemort hadn’t dodged, her Avada Kedavra would have been entirely effective.
And she knows that her Imperius works nicely when she starts using it to make Severus let her into the house, rather than having to deal with speaking to him and remembering to reapply stunners.
It’s about intent. And control - not just over the mind, body, or soul of another, but over the self, over one’s own thoughts and magic and the intersection of the two. It’s about trusting oneself and one’s magic - self-assuredness and belief.
It’s a vast abyss of power that Lily finds incredibly attractive, gradually sinking down into it, an inviting pool of possibilities, as she builds on these basics.
It’s a much less traditional form of spellcasting, fundamental to Dark magic, and she supposes to more advanced Light magic like the Patronus too, but it can be seen perhaps at its bluntest in those three spells, so far removed from the fiddly wand movements of Hogwarts classrooms.
One book, battered and without a title, discusses how wands can act as a hindrance to magic and she isn't all that surprised by the theory. She had felt much freer, her magic had felt like it could do more, limitless, when she was a girl who wouldn’t know Ollivander from Adam.
The idea is that wands, in the modern wizarding world, function as a short-cut, drawing the magic from the core and into specific shapes in an almost scientific way. They act as a crutch, a constraint, stopping sorcerers from exercising their cores and reaching the full extent of their powers.
Magic that is hard-won, that takes effort and time and appreciation, is naturally stronger than magic that comes neatly packaged with instructions, a specific pronunciation and flourish of the wrist to guide it. Magic that is free, and honest, and individual, is more powerful than the magic that they’re taught in school. The basis of a vast amount of Dark magic is dedication to the craft. Lily supposes that’s why Severus became so consumed by it when they were at school, and she can tell that she’s becoming similarly consumed now.
Voldemort often casts silently, because magic does not need to be directed by words when the force of his willpower is so absolute and indomitable. She imagines he could probably do it all wandless too, but, as she reads further in this book, once a sorcerer has moved beyond the bounds of a wand, once it is no longer needed, a wand can function once more as they were originally intended, as a conduit, a focal point, that adds a white-hot precision to the heightened power of magic wielded by one who has full control over it, one who has worked to master it in its basest form.
The book notes that the widespread usage of wands and the introduction of schools that teach wand-based magic as a rule is a way to make the general public weaker, a way to restrict and control them. Severus’ notes in the margin inform her snidely that the use of wands nowadays also functions as a way to not unduly terrify the weak-minded masses who have the collective brain capacity of a Hufflepuff second year and view wandless magic as an impossibility.
And it’s true that society at large seems to think that only exceptionally powerful wizards like Dumbledore or Voldemort could possibly be capable of wandless magic. She’s never understood that point of view, and she’s a little pissed off that Severus’ annotations appear to be agreeing with her now when during their friendship he’d always insisted that her making dead flowers bloom again was just accidental magic, rather than the focused, purposeful, wandless, wordless magic that she now knows it was.
Lily knows that nothing is impossible with magic.
And so she reaches towards the full extent of her powers.
She meditates. A lot. A lot more than she thought she might have to when she decided she was going to kill the Dark Lord. It’s meant to help her connect with her magic, that innate ebb and flow that she was tapped into as a child, that she’d learnt to push aside when she started learning ‘proper’ magic at Hogwarts.
She finds it soothing, to embrace it once more, grounding and welcoming and a solid base to build her new knowledge on, to make her belief and her control unbreakable.
Lily works steadfastly, reading and meditating and practicing her magic. It’s almost unbelievable that none of this is taught at Hogwarts when she can feel that it’s helping her immensely even just in her day-to-day magic, magic that’s classified as Light and good and acceptable, magic that’s boosted by these supposedly taboo techniques. She thinks that Dumbledore almost certainly knows this too, knows how much more solid magic feels when it comes from the core and not the wand, and for some reason he still restricts his students to the easy, weaker path. Perhaps it lies in the fact of ease, and the fact that most students wouldn’t have the motivation to do the work, most students don’t love magic like she does or like Dumbledore does or like Voldemort does.
She wonders sometimes what Voldemort was like in school, and she imagines him almost concerningly similar to herself, if not far more intense and less held back by rule-following. She imagines he’s just as meticulous, as rigorous, as she is when she dedicates herself to a task, and that’s why his magic feels like a tsunami, like a wall of force that she fears she may never be able to climb or match.
But she’s not starting from scratch, already having something of an innate understanding of harnessing the magic in her core from her childhood, and she’s always been incredibly thorough, sometimes to her detriment, because she knows the value of unshakeable foundations, and if something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing well.
Every day she progresses, thrilling over each new discovery, working her way through Severus’ bookshelves.
Every night, she returns home and duels Voldemort, her growing strength making her last a little bit longer with every iteration, especially when she realises that she can make Severus duel with her or even just try out some spells on him beforehand and he won’t remember it the next day. And even if she breaks the loop and he does remember, she doesn’t think she particularly cares - they were on terrible terms when they left school and seeing him in close quarters again hadn’t particularly warmed her heart towards him. It’s rather freeing, realising again, like she had when torturing Peter, that she doesn’t care.
Besides, practice really does make perfect, or, if not perfect, at least alive for more than the embarrassingly short amount of time she’d lasted when she first started down this new path.
She realises that Voldemort is using wandless magic as they fight and it’s part of the reason why she can’t seem to land a hit on him. In addition to his wandcast spells, he’s holding some sort of shield charm up, one that makes her spells glide off him like the magic just can’t bear to touch him. It must take vast amounts of concentration and power but he learnt to do it once, and therefore Lily can too.
Now, as she reads or meditates or practices casting, she forces Severus to fire off random spells at her, to test her shields. They never seem to hold up nearly so well against Voldemort so it’ll take a while for her to rely fully on the strength of her shield, but if she doesn’t have to duck and dodge or cast shield charms with her wand mid-fight, it frees her up to focus more on the offence.
It’s good for her stamina as well, and it exercises her magical core in a way that’s tiring on a level she’s never quite experienced before, but it's deeply satisfying too, success like a warm, quiet bath after a long day.
Lily feels herself slipping towards something, or away from something. She spends her days drowning in information, draping herself in that seductive darkness, a siren song pulling her down into depths she never imagined she’d reach. She isn’t sure anymore, how long she’s been reliving this same day, but she feels like something has to snap soon and she’s hungry for the change.
*****
One night, Lily manages to knock back Voldemort’s hood.
Their duels have progressed to something that is probably more worthy of the title. She stays alive for longer and they volley spells back and forth at increasingly fast paces. Even so, Voldemort probably isn’t using the full extent of his skills, stretching out their duels slightly just to mock her with her eventual, inevitable demise, to amuse himself, or perhaps just because he’s curious, because he wants to test her limits. Because she knows that she’s getting more powerful, and she knows that Voldemort is never expecting it, and she can work it to her advantage even if she doesn’t yet have a chance of winning.
Lily isn’t expecting the face that’s revealed as Voldemort’s hood falls back.
She’d imagined a monster, hidden in the shadowy dark, but instead she sees a man. He’s slightly on the gaunt side, paler than is probably healthy, near translucent even, but he might still be one of the most classically handsome men Lily has ever seen. Wavy, dark hair falling just so over his forehead, cheekbones so defined that, with the way his skin appears paper-thin, they seem to be just on the verge of cutting through.
There’s something ethereal about him, about how eerily beautiful he is, about the angelic curve of his lips. It’s almost celestial.
His eyes though, are a bright, menacing scarlet, like how she’d always imagined the fires of hell, widened slightly with surprise when his hood falls back but quickly narrowing as he watches her observing him.
After a second, his lips split in a wide, sharp, dangerous grin, delighted by whatever it is he can read on her face. Then, he lifts his wand again (and when did he lower it? and when did she lower hers?) and then Lily is dead.
*****
She takes that day as a personal victory: a milestone and a challenge. She knows now that she can knock back his hood, and if she can do that, she can surely knock back the other barriers that stand between them, that stand between her and the end of this time loop, between her and the end of the Dark Lord.
It’s been God only knows how long since she first lived this day and Lily has settled quite thoroughly into this new routine. She isn’t sure when she last actually spoke to James; when she started disappearing every day on her fevered quest to learn Dark magic, she’d tried to appease him each evening upon her return. He’d pester her with questions about where she’d been all day (and reasonably so, a quiet part of her brain insists), and she’d gone through round after round of exhausting lies and fights and disasters.
It was enough to almost make her wish she was still coming home with Sirius in tow. At least then it was Sirius that dealt with the explanations, and James was always far more happy to see him than he was her.
Nowadays, she just tweaks his memories a little bit, makes him think she’d spent all day with him, playing with Harry and being a perfectly happy married couple, makes him think they’ve laughed over dinner and he’d shared his plan to make Harry happy for Halloween.
She makes Harry’s costume and carries him upstairs to put it on. She listens to Voldemort killing her husband and then steps out into the hallway to meet him, curses tripping off her tongue with the confidence that her reading and her training has given her.
Dark magic makes her feel terribly, terrifyingly powerful - it seems to come almost naturally to her, leaning into the wild, free magic of her childhood, soaking up spell after spell and honing her intent.
There’s a different tension to their duels, now that Lily knows what the Dark Lord looks like. She finds herself trying to knock back his hood again, so they can fight face to face, so she can look into his eyes as he eventually kills her, look into his eyes as she surprises him with the skills she’s learnt, the power she now holds and wields.
It gives her a bit of a perverse thrill every time, those red eyes, the Dark Lord’s white-hot attention, focused entirely on her.
And she has his attention, she knows, every night when she fights back, when she engages in a duel with him and holds her own, even if he always kills her in the end. Perhaps it’s her lack of fear of him; she doesn’t think she’s been afraid of him since she and Sirius first tortured Pettigrew.
Voldemort is death, plain and simple, but Lily has learnt there are worse things than death, primarily the monotony of living the same exact day time and time again, the futility of trying to change anything about that day, to escape it.
Voldemort is a merciful death. Even when they duel and he curses her, it’s never torture - not like the endless reliving of the last day of her life, not like what she’s done to Pettigrew.
But Voldemort is more than just death, Lily comes to realise, as she starts to spend more time with him, if she can describe their fights to the death that way.
He’s an incredible duellist, obviously, and it’s so clear in the way that he duels that he absolutely adores magic. She realises that his wand isn’t so much a conduit but a conductor’s wand, gently directing, caressing, his great symphony of magic, the strength of it rolling off him in swathes, each thread of his intent blending in perfect, deadly harmony. And he’s so curious, so interested in magic, one of those dark aristocratic eyebrows raising as she chains together spells like daisies in a way that she hasn’t learnt from any book.
Sometimes, he talks to her, his voice smooth and precise and slightly addicting if only because of the fact that she’s never entirely sure how their interactions are going to go or what he’s going to say.
“Now wherever did a mudblood like you learn a nasty spell like that?” He says on one occasion as he dispels a spell that would have flayed him.
“Travers’ book on the re-education of enemies.” Lily replies, flinging out another spell from the book that basically just covered various ways to torture people.
Voldemort looks at her with those eyes the colour of blood, “Interesting.”
Then he kills her.
Sometimes she starts the conversation, just out of curiosity and because she may as well, she’s going to die anyway, “Why did you decide to become a Dark Lord?”
He stares at her again, head tilted to the side even as their duel continues on.
“You know, you’re the first person to ever ask me that,” he muses, “I’d say a mixture of spite and hunger. Lots of anger too, of course, but I suppose it was mainly just because I could.”
Lily doesn’t know why she expected any other answer even as it’s slightly sickening. This man has waged war on people like her for approaching a decade now, innumerable people slaughtered and tortured at his command, just because of a fucking whim.
“You certainly can.”
Voldemort smiles that delighted, deadly smile again, “I certainly can.”
Then he kills her.
“Are you not afraid?” he asks her one time.
It’s her turn to smile, a tired thing, no danger in it, “Not anymore. Not of death at least.”
“You don’t have to die tonight,” he suggests, for the first time since she’s started duelling him before he can get a word in edgeways.
“Not entirely true,” Lily replies, “Standing aside and letting you kill my son would be worse than death.”
She isn’t sure anymore whether the lurching fear that comes from the thought is because of the previously completely debilitating concept of living in a world where she hasn’t given absolutely everything to try and protect her son, or because of the unknown of what would lie beyond letting her son die. One thing that remains the same in every single time loop, no matter if she’d been hunting Dumbledore around the Scottish lochs or running away to Australia, is that Lily will not let her son die while she still has breath in her. She’ll kill Voldemort before she finds out what happens if she lets go of that conviction.
“As you wish,” He bows his head towards her like a fucking nobleman gracefully accepting her rejection of his offer to dance with him.
Then he kills her.
*****
There are smarter ways that she should be going about this, Lily realises one day, ways that play more to her strengths.
She’s never been a strong duellist, not quick enough at thinking on her feet and not confident enough in her wandwork. Obviously she’s been improving, especially as she works on using other avenues of magic, but it’s not quite quick enough for her. They’ve been duelling every night for what must be at least a month and she’s still never once even made him bleed, not even a scratch.
Lily opens up Severus’ copy of an ancient-looking book that simply says ‘Rituals’ across the front of it and she begins to plot.
She knew, even before the wretched time loop, that she wouldn’t be able to rely on her duelling skills to save herself from Voldemort. The distraction of learning new magic and the rush of power that comes with it has faded slightly and now she can remember that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, more than one way to kill a Dark Lord, and she in particular has always been more adept at runic arrays and mildly illegal rituals than one-on-one skirmishes.
Case in point her crushed unicorn horn and runes made from blood and ashes and attempted human sacrifice. She’s still convinced that it would work, her plan, in one way or another if only she could get her own death to stick.
Severus’ book is enlightening, as all his books are, and his store cupboard is stocked with more things than she might need for a ritual.
And Lily is going to kill Lord Voldemort.
*****
The first thing she tries is a ritual that should trap Voldemort in one spot so that she can Avada Kedavra him without the possibility of him dodging.
It’s fairly easy to set up, really, and, as Dark magic goes, rather harmless - although Lily’s sure that many would argue the very act of practicing Dark magic is harmful, which is absurd, in her opinion, because some of it can be so beautiful. It only takes about half an hour to set up - runes carved into the doorframe that she laced with a mixture of salt and bowtruckle eyes and splinters of willow and cedar. Lily uses the time in which James thinks she’s making Harry’s Halloween costume to do it, then she goes and collects Harry, and lies in wait.
When he blasts open the door to the nursery, Lily is ready, the tip of her wand already starting to light up green as she watches Voldemort get stuck in the doorway. She doesn’t account for the fact that Dark Lords don’t get to be Dark Lords without having survived a few assassination attempts, and this, as an incredibly easy ritual (that could probably even be replicated without dipping into Dark magic), is likely something for which he has contingency plans.
Contingency plans like summoning Lily to him so that she takes the killing curse instead of him, the hurricane force of his magic getting her there before her curse hits, simultaneously bringing her closer than she’s ever been to him before her world goes black.
*****
Her next few attempts get gradually more experimental, focussing her reading specifically on Severus’ books on rituals, planning ways to weave various rituals together that don't end in disaster. She tries out a few, to catastrophic (read: explosive) results but she’s always been good at learning from her mistakes, when it comes to academics at least, and so she tries and tries again.
At first, she attempts, alongside the ritual that keeps Voldemort trapped in the doorway, adding in another one, with a rose thorn base, that she uses on herself and Harry to prevent them from being summoned. Naturally, Voldemort just summons something else to take the curse for him, Harry’s plush dragon toy, or his little bookcase, or the door that he’d just blasted open. She realises that clearly it doesn’t need to be a living being that takes a killing curse, and that it’s likely just a bit of showmanship on Voldemort’s part that makes that his first instinct - besides it’s a neat way of killing off the threat without too much fuss.
And it doesn’t matter how close to the door she stands, waiting for his arrival, trying to give him less time to summon his protection. He’s always, always quicker than her, which she supposes comes from living life as a man that many would quite like to kill.
Lily watches the explosion of the poor, beloved toy and the bookcase and the door under the force of her killing curses. Then, she watches Voldemort vanishing the remnants that he’d been hit with on impact, imagining a bit of a disgruntled scowl on his face under his dark hood. Then, she watches as he raises his own wand and kills her.
*****
She decides on a new avenue, having found a ritual that acts somewhat similarly to the killing curse, insofar as a ritual can work similarly to a spell.
The Killing Curse, simply put, works by severing the soul from the body with the sheer strength of the caster’s intent. The ritual Lily finds is a bit less neat, less focussed, than that, because naturally the very medium of rituals is muddled by ingredients and preparation and all sorts of things that separate it from the pure, magical intent of its creator. In some ways, it’s actually better than casting the curse; she doesn’t have to rely on her reflexes, and Voldemort won’t be able to dodge it, or summon someone or something else to take its effects in his place. She can weave her intent viciously into each of the ritual’s individual components so theoretically it might even be stronger too, or more reliable.
Lily guesses that more people don’t use it simply because of the fact that not many people are in a position of waiting, specifically in one place, for someone to come and kill them, of knowing when and where a threat is going to appear - it’s not immediate like the spell, taking her half a day, as well as several days of research and planning, to set up.
It's soul magic too, and, though Lily has lost all of her compunctions about dabbling in it, on the contrary finding herself entirely fascinated by it, it’s still far more obscure than the Killing Curse, still probably far more frowned upon, despite the spell already being unforgivable.
When Voldemort comes into the nursery the evening after she’s finally confident about the ritual, she’s stood in front of the crib with her wand in hand, just in case things don’t go to plan.
And they certainly don’t go to plan.
Lily imagines the ritual a bit like a kind of invisible guillotine, coming down swift and sharp and cold like vengeance on the neck, the bridge that connects one’s soul and one’s body. Voldemort steps through the doorway and directly into her ritual circle as she planned. It flares up with an almost blinding white light, as she’d expected, but when she blinks the spots from her eyes, Voldemort is still standing there, alive, which is not at all as she’d expected.
He’s taken his hood down and is examining the parts of the ritual he can see, wand held loosely in his hand but still very much a threat. Lily can feel the power emanating from him, as she always can, magic converging around him. Why the fuck is he still alive?
“Interesting,” Voldemort says at length, looking back at her. “That probably would’ve worked on anyone else… And our esteemed headmaster certainly wouldn’t condone such methods.”
Then he laughs, not the high, monstrous laugh she hears every evening when he kills James, but a genuinely amused laugh, warmer than anything she’s heard from him thus far, “Why, you could’ve killed someone, Mrs Potter!”
This is said in an almost uncanny impression of Dumbledore’s grandfatherly disapproval, complete with wagging finger.
“That was rather the point,” she replies, confused, her mind elsewhere trying to figure out what had gone wrong with her ritual and her mouth moving of its own accord.
Voldemort laughs again, seemingly delighted, “Yes, I suppose it was.”
He looks around the room again, perhaps surveying the place for further traps, and then looks back at her once more. The weight of his eyes is a heady thing. She raises her wand to his chest.
“Going to try again?” he comments, still horribly amused, his own wand still at his side, “If at first you don’t succeed and what not.”
Lily isn’t really sure what to say to that, but as she looks at him, at him looking at her, not a single spell comes to her mind or her wand.
He tilts his head to one side, curious, “Shy now, are we? You’re a puzzle, Mrs Potter.”
She doesn’t speak, observing him back, the way there’s just a hint of a dimple in his cheek, the way he’s almost boyish now, gaunt and pale but something almost lovely in the sparkling scarlet of his eyes. And her head is reeling, distracted by him and distracted by her failure, still frantically going over the intricacies of the ritual. She had been so sure it would work this time.
“Would you like to join me for a drink?”
Lily’s thoughts stall, “Pardon?”
Voldemort smiles, and it's charming this time, so different from the terribly sharp smile she’s seen before. This is the kind of smile she’s sure has swept many a woman off their feet. She thinks she prefers the other one.
“I wondered if you might like to accompany me to a bar - it’s not yet 8 o’clock and I know of several fine establishments.”
He’s insane, she thinks, and finally, finally, her mind snaps back to the situation at hand.
“You’re insane,” she tells him, falling into a duelling stance and finally, finally engaging him in a duel like she should have done the second she realised the ritual hadn’t worked.
“Pity,” Voldemort says, and then neither of them speak, focussing on the duel. It’s thrilling, invigorating, completely enrapturing, until he eventually kills her.
*****
She’s shaken, the next day, when she wakes up in her bed. What the actual fuck had that been about? Had Lord sodding Voldemort, the Dark Lord currently terrorising Great Britain, actually asked her, Lily Evans Potter, mudblood, out for drinks?
She’d tried to kill him, and, according to him, nearly succeeded, and he wanted to go for drinks with her. He’d never acted like that before, and she’d certainly tried to kill him many, many times.
Although, she supposes, she’d never attempted rare, deadly soul magic rituals on him - this was quite a few steps beyond the Killing Curse, despite its should-be identical outcome, and all the other curses she’s used on him in their duels. Beyond even the other attempts at ritual magic she’d made - perhaps barring her original plan, of unicorn horns and bloody runes and human sacrifice, but she doesn’t think he’s ever found out about that.
And Voldemort clearly adores magic, no matter how dangerous. It stands to reason that he might wish to pick her brains about her research, her preparation - academic interest and probably a healthy dose of self-preservation too, trying to find out her skill level, her threat level.
Then, she’s struck with a realisation that makes her nearly kick herself. Of course he hadn’t been actually asking her out for drinks and she’s a fool for thinking that was the case, even if she’d been entirely bewildered by it. He really just wanted to get her out of the house, get the two of them out of the house, away from any other traps she might have prepared for his arrival during her time in hiding.
Then he could kill her, and Harry too, she supposes, without having to worry about any other tricks she might have up her sleeve. Paranoia makes far more sense than any actual interest in her - after all, he seemed to recognise the ritual, he wouldn’t need her input on the matter.
In fact, he seemed to know a fair bit more about it than she did, namely why it didn’t fucking work.
She puts the issue of her conversation with Voldemort out of her mind and throws herself back into obsessing over the ritual, poring over the books she’d learnt it from and double-checking every single one of the ingredients as she sets it all up again.
This time, it’ll be perfect.
This time, when it fails again, she doesn’t let Voldemort speak before she starts firing spells at him.
*****
Lily tries it several times over, growing more and more frustrated each time her fool-proof calculations fail her. Once, she tries it out on Severus too and he dies immediately like he’s fucking supposed to and Lily doesn’t understand why it won’t work on Voldemort, but eventually she gives up on it and goes back to the drawing board.
Back to basics, she thinks, something less flashy and esoteric. She goes back to the other ritual as she works on coming up with something, the one that keeps Voldemort trapped in the doorway, even if it doesn’t ever stop him from blocking her killing curse and then killing her in turn.
She thinks, one time, with Harry strapped to her back, everything else in the nursery vanished somewhere and Voldemort conjuring up items to take the unforgivable in his place, that surely there’s a simpler way to do this. One with less moving parts, or less removal of moving parts.
When it comes to her, she nearly kicks herself again. This time loop is making her stupid even as she’s learning so much, she thinks, because how did it take her so long to remember that she could just stab him.
The good, old-fashioned, muggle way.
With a kitchen knife.
Petunia would be proud.
That evening, she lunges at him the second he blasts the door out of the way and steps into her doorway trap. He doesn’t fall backwards when she crashes into him, and she doubts he would mainly because of the magic keeping him in the doorframe, but also because she can feel a quiet strength under her hand where it rests on his chest, despite how pale and gaunt-looking he is. She stabs him several times, as hard as she can, before Voldemort catches her hand, the one holding the knife, in a tight grip.
“Very creative, Mrs Potter,” he’s saying, the sound of his voice sort of floating above her, “It’s been years since someone last tried to stab me.”
Lily hears his words distantly, too focussed on the way his blood is darkening sections of his black robe to pay attention to what he’s saying. She can see little glimpses of his pale skin around the sides of where she’d stabbed him. She can see inside of him where blood is gushing out of the messy wounds she’s made over his chest and stomach.
He’s bleeding - vulnerable - and it makes her own blood sing. The power of it is unlike anything she’s ever felt, this great man cut open because of her. She feels almost drunk with it, mesmerised watching the blood flow.
Then, before her very eyes, the blood stops flowing, the wounds start to close up, and the stains and holes in his robes vanish.
She finally looks up, when there’s no remaining sign of her attack, but the knife in her hand - now also clean - and the fact that his cloak has fallen completely back. His robe in contrast is rather tight to his torso and she has one hand on his chest, over his heart, which is still beating, steady and even despite the fact he’s just been stabbed.
Their eyes meet, scarlet red on emerald green, a clash of jewels and danger and surprise.
His wand is pressed into her stomach and his other hand is still tight around her wrist when he kills her.
*****
The next idea she tries stems from the realisation that as long as Voldemort can use magic, with or without his wand, she won’t be able to overpower him. Several times, she’s succeeded in stabbing him but, again, several times, he’s simply healed himself and then killed her, give or take a bit of conversation and eye contact.
She won’t be able to kill him if he has access to magic.
Probably a conclusion she should have come to quite a while ago but she’s always been rather stubborn and single-minded. She goes back to scouring Severus’ books and plotting, drawing a lot of diagrams and taking a lot of notes that all frustratingly disappear the next day.
Eventually, things start to come together.
It’s complicated, and she’s also sure it’s fairly perverse, diverting the course of nature and magic’s will, but it might just work.
There’s a ritual, long and involved and incredibly painful for those on the receiving end of it, that will permanently cut the magic out of a sorcerer, rendering them a squib - or oftentimes, dead. Now, while Lily thinks that would be a fitting fate for Voldemort, a man who loves magic so very much, she really doesn’t have the time that it requires. It takes at least a day to set up, with ingredients harvested at precise points in the lunar cycle - it’s an incredibly intentional act of magic that Lily would be unable to pull off in the roughly thirteen hours she has from waking till Voldemort’s arrival.
She turns back to the ritual that imitated the Killing Curse, severing soul from body instantaneously, pondering whether she could twist it just slightly to sever the magic from the body instead. It’s difficult, Lily concludes, after several days of pacing around Severus’ library like a two-bit detective, but not impossible, and the secret lies in defining for herself where the boundaries between one’s soul and one’s magic and one’s body lie. The definition doesn’t necessarily have to be one which everyone would agree with but all magic rests on a basis of personal belief, particularly Dark magic, and Lily believes wholeheartedly that nothing is impossible with magic.
Where the other ritual she’d found had the purpose of cutting the magic out of someone, Lily only intends to cut Voldemort off from his magic, which is another thing entirely and far easier. It’s different from the Killing Curse too in that it doesn’t even have to be a permanent severance of magic from body. Rather than a guillotine coming down to cut off the bridge between the body and the soul, Lily envisions a cage, impermeable and as near to indestructible as she can make it, wrapping around Voldemort’s magic and blocking off the pathways that allow him access to it.
She decides that once the ritual is in place, she’ll kill him with her knife, partly because she worries slightly that even if Voldemort is cut off from his own magic, he’d somehow be able to harness ambient magic in the air from any spells she cast, but mainly because she thinks it will be the most satisfying way to watch him die.
It all comes together quite smoothly in the end. She spends several hours layering angelica and ash from a phoenix’s Burning Day and petals made from her pure intent
on top of her trap ritual in the doorframe, carefully carving more runes around the others she’s placed there, pouring her blood and her determination into the curves of each sigil.
Then, she lies in wait.
That night, when Voldemort blasts his way through the nursery door as usual, Lily lunges at him again with her knife. And this time when she crashes into him and knocks back his hood, she looks at his face rather than at where she’s stabbed him, drinking in the emotions that flash across those blood red eyes.
Shock and confusion and then a sharp fear that’s almost painful to look at. She feels a twinge of pity, somewhere deep inside her - she can’t imagine being cut off from her magic, something that’s such an intrinsic part of her and that she adores so much - but it’s drowned out by the victory burning through her, the power.
He should be scared.
“What have you done?” He whispers, almost child-like in his horror, as he realises that he can’t heal himself, he can’t use his magic to hurt her, he can’t move from the doorframe.
She smiles up at him, a smile that’s likely just as sharp and dangerous as the ones he used to give her.
He has his hand around the wrist of the hand that has the knife in, having grabbed it after she’d stabbed him several times, like he always does. Now, he tightens his grip, crushing her wrist painfully and reaches with his other hand for the knife, clearly not yet ready to give up and die, which she had never expected from him.
What follows is a bit of a tussle wherein Lily quickly finds that she might be overpowered, even with Voldemort in his severely weakened state without his magic. He snatches the knife, viper-quick and deft like someone who knows their way around a knife fight (and what had he said the first time? It’s been years since someone last tried to stab me), slicing her hand open as he takes it from her.
Lily retaliates with the nastiness she’s learnt from years of physical fights with Petunia, punching him in the stomach, quite hard, right where she’s just stabbed him. He doesn’t release the knife though, pain flashing across his features alongside a grim determination that just makes him tighten his grip and shift so he’s poised to stab her.
She clutches at his hand with both of hers, pushing the knife away from where he’s aiming it at her chest and trying to twist it out of his grip with little success. Her hand is smarting where he’s cut it open and she’s sure she’s getting her blood all over him, making her grip tacky and uncomfortable, but she manages to hold firm.
Then Voldemort yanks at her hair with his free hand, almost cradling her skull and tugging painfully at the roots. She gasps as her head is pulled backwards, her eyes watering, and he grins cruelly down at her while she keeps struggling to move the knife away from stabbing her.
She’s staring into his eyes when she reaches with her magic, for the first time during their entire confrontation, not seeing any other way out, and wandlessly, wordlessly vanishes the knife from his hand.
He shudders bodily at the feel of it, the magic in the air brushing against his hand where it closes around nothing, the grin falling from his face, as she falls against him from the sudden lack of resistance to her pushing. There’s something unexpectedly heartbroken in his eyes which reawakens the twinge of pity and guilt that she’d felt earlier, particularly with his hand in her hair, particularly as she’s pressed against his chest looking up into his eyes in a facsimile of a lover’s embrace.
She can hear Harry crying in the crib behind her but she doesn’t move an inch.
“What have you done?” Voldemort repeats, devastated this time and it almost breaks her own heart in turn.
“I’ve won,” she whispers, and she’s shocked to feel tears starting to slide down her cheeks.
He moves his other hand, covered in her blood, to cup her face, wiping away her tears. He’s just a man now - a man who has done terrible things, who has been monstrous, but a man all the same, and a dying one at that.
“A great victory,” he says softly, “Many have tried and failed, but I think perhaps you are worthy of killing Lord Voldemort.”
Lily wonders whether he’d still think so if he knew that she’d tried and failed to kill him over a hundred times. She moves her hands, where they’ve come to rest on his chest, sliding them up to start undoing the buttons of his robe, wanting to see him bleeding out. She thinks she’s earned that after all her failed attempts, after all the endless cycles.
The end is in sight now, she thinks, and that sight is the stab wounds on the Dark Lord’s torso. He doesn’t stop her as she unbuttons his robe and pushes the fabric to the side, watching her almost curiously - she wonders when someone had last touched him like this, like he’s a man rather than a monster, a human being rather than a god.
There are three stab wounds across his torso, blood flowing freely from each of them, painting his pale skin blood red, like his eyes, like the hellfire of his eyes is spreading through his body and consuming him from the inside out. Experimentally, she slowly presses one of her fingers into one of his wounds, wanting to feel it, to reach inside him and pull his insides out herself. He watches her, allows her, twitching slightly at her touch.
“Fascinating,” he says after a while, after an uncountable period of time spent feeling the blood flowing from him, applying pressure to each of his wounds in turn, widening them, hurting him, placing a hand over his heart to feel the slowing pace of his heartbeat.
Lily looks up at his face, paler than it’s ever been, nothing of heaven about him now, “What?”
She can’t read him, something in his eyes that scares her a little, determined and too charged with life for a man who’s slowly slipping from it.
“We will see each other again,” and it’s as much a threat as a promise. Lily wonders for the first time if the time loop has something to do with him and isn’t just some inexplicable twist of fate, but she pushes the thought away. She’s sure things would have gone very differently were he caught up in this loop with her. These are just the last attempts at injury from a cruel man, attempts to scare her as she’s scared him, to reassert his power over her.
He’s dying, and she will never see him again.
He pulls her face close and presses a kiss to her forehead, and she feels it searing through her like a burn, hellfire and scarlet and white-hot powerful focus. When she pulls away, his eyes are flickering shut, his hands going slack in her hair, dying, dying, dead.
*****
Lily Potter wakes like she does every morning, to her wand buzzing under her pillow to tell her that Harry is awake, and promptly rolls over to scream into her pillow.
She’d had one look at him, completely still in death, still standing upright in the doorway, trapped by her various rituals. Then she’d blinked and opened her eyes on Halloween morning once more.
Voldemort was dead though, she had felt his heart stop beating, and she should be free from this.
Lily sets up her ritual again, determined to kill him better this time. She doesn’t allow herself any of the sentimentality that had slipped in last time, no tears or touching - she simply slashes him open and then darts back to the other side of the room to watch him bleed out, not replying to his questions or comments.
He dies just the same without her comfort or further torment. In the muggle world, it would be a rather honourable death, standing up and not just accepting defeat, for he’d certainly fought as hard as he could against it, but Lily imagines his followers would be disgusted to know that he’d ended this way - murdered by a mudblood using a muggle kitchen knife.
It doesn’t stick anyhow.
She kills him over and over and over; sometimes watching coldly from across the room; sometimes with her hands in his wounds, exacerbating them; sometimes just holding him, like she hasn’t held her son in a long time.
She wakes up time and time again.
There is victory, and then there is frustration, and then there is hopelessness, resignation, defeat. There is something hard and horrible coagulating in Lily’s gut and having Voldemort’s guts spilling out onto her doesn’t make her feel better because it doesn’t change anything.
Nothing she’s tried has changed anything.
Not dying, not getting help, not running away, not fighting back, not killing the man who has been the most permanent fixture of this nightmarish cycle.
Except that’s not quite true.
There’s someone who has been there more than even Voldemort has been.
There’s one thing she hasn’t tried.
*****
Lily Potter wakes like she does every morning, to her wand buzzing under her pillow to tell her that Harry is awake.
Lily Potter wakes and knows (hopes, dreads) that this morning will be the last time she ever wakes like this, her heart cold with the resolve of it. She stays in bed longer than she has in a long time, since she was last overcome with a bout of hopelessness before she started duelling Voldemort - but it’s not hopelessness that makes her linger under the covers this time.
It’s intention. It’s conclusion.
She can’t remember the last time she properly looked at James, the husband lying next to her in bed, the husband who has died for her and her son countless times. She can’t remember the last time she properly held Harry, the son who’s just woken up in his crib next door, the son she has died for countless times.
She can’t remember the last time she didn’t think of either of them without a steadily mounting resentment, trapped in this time loop, trying everything she can think of to get out the other side with Harry alive, and neither of them are any the wiser.
It’s just a perfectly normal Halloween morning, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to forgive them for it. Or if she’ll ever be able to forgive herself.
The day is busy, purposefully. Lily wraps herself up in her plans and her thoughts and her studious avoidance of her family. She’s being selfish, she knows, and she already feels pre-emptively guilty for even entertaining the idea but she needs to get out of this loop, before she goes insane - if she hasn’t already - and she’s fast approaching the end of her tether, the end of caring about anything other than herself - if she hasn’t already reached that point. The need to get out now far eclipses anything else she’s ever felt.
Besides, it doesn’t have to be permanent - nothing is impossible with magic, and certainly she knows that now more than she had before the time loop, magic expanding past the boundaries of Hogwarts as she sat in Severus’ library devouring his books, as she stood in the nursery and weaved spells together or mapped out rituals. Once she gets out of the cycle of endlessly reliving the same day again and again, she’ll be able to make plans, long term ones that won’t fall to nothing before midnight like she’s a miserable version of Cinderella without any fairy godmother left to help her.
Lily is the only one who can help her, save her, and she will not apologise for doing the only remaining thing she can think of, after having systematically worked her way through every other option she had and failing. This has been a thought in the back of her mind, growing stronger with every failed attempt despite how much she tried to push it away, to distract herself from it.
But there are no walls to hide behind now, all of them have been burnt down with the repetition and the futility and maybe there are other things she could try, maybe, but she’s tired. She’s so, so tired, exhausted, and she has been for a long time, and she knows, deep down, that this is the only way out for her.
And if it isn't, what has she got to lose by trying, if all that will happen is she’ll wake up again in the morning and no one but her will ever know what she’s done.
When Voldemort blasts his way into the nursery that night, there are no rituals waiting for him (apart from the one she’d set up before the accursed time loop - unicorn horns, and runes made from blood and ashes, and human sacrifice). There are no knives, no curses, nothing lying in wait except for Lily, standing in front of the crib, her wand in her pocket and her mind set.
“Stand aside,” Voldemort says, his hood obscuring his face and his wand in his hand.
Lily once would have said that her convictions are the strongest thing about her, and that certainly hasn’t changed entirely, hasn’t changed quickly or unpainfully. But there are hard times, like being stuck in a house with one’s husband and son while war rages around them, waiting uselessly for the Sword of Damocles to fall on their necks, and then there’s the endless reliving of the day of her death, cycle after cycle. There’s dying again and again, trying and failing to convince people who should have protected her to come and help them, to run away with her; there’s soul-deep exhaustion seeping into her bones, rusting the ironclad pillars on which she’d built her previous life, twisting her into someone new.
Voldemort repeats himself, “I said stand aside.”
She is not the Lily Potter that she was the day before Halloween, in fact she feels almost closer to the Lily Evans she was before Hogwarts, before Severus and James, before Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix and the war that is ravaging their nation. Her magic feels freer than it has in years, younger, more expansive - and she feels freer too, for all that she’s trapped, likely in more ways than one.
“Stand aside, girl,” Lord Voldemort says for the third and final time.
Lily Potter stands aside.
The Dark Lord steps further into the room, coming to stand next to her by the crib, and the two of them watch as a flash of sickly green light hits her son square in the chest.
Avada Kedavra.