Chapter Text
Lily looks at Harry's life-path potentials as they begin to solidify, the battle still raging but the outcome becoming clear. It doesn't look good and her heart twists in anguish. It's not the war that does it, she can see that now.
No, Harry wins the war, it's the rest of Harry's life that makes her ache. What she sees is enough to make any mother cry. Right now she foolishly wishes she could cry. Wishes she had eyes and tears and physicality. Wishes she could let plump drops of salted water trail down her cheeks and drip in drops off her chin marking the ground with little puddles, or leaving wet splotches on her shirt or the shirt of her lover (James, it's always James). She wants something physical to shift this glimpse of Harry's future into something tangible. Something she can touch. Something she can change.
Tears feel like such a blessing (lost now), the ability to make emotions into physical objects. Tears are magic even the non-magical can perform; and a magic that is far from her now when she's nothing more than a tulpa. She's less than a ghost; only able to watch, on rare occasions influence Harry's dreams, and once or twice (desperate, costly, wretched) she can nudge his thoughts or emotions. She feels so powerless to do anything to stop what's coming for her precious son.
The deep depression. The devastating loneliness. The suicide.
Chances are ridiculously skewed towards him taking his own life within five years. She sees the paths in her mind like branches of a tree, but spread out on the ground in front of her. She's been watching them shift and change for Harry's whole life. Even with all the danger (so much danger), it has never looked this dire. The highest probability, a thick branch right in the center of her minds-eye, taking up three-fourths of all possibility, is Harry dead in three years from a knife to his own wrists. She knows because she reached to touch the branch and was hit with the instant image and knowledge of it as if it had just happened.
Blood dripping, light and pain fading (fading, fading, gone) from her son's sad green eyes.
(She imagines the movements her body would do now if she had one -- falling to her knees, ragged breaths leaving in a sob.
But she had no way to express her pain.)
The next thickest branch, maybe 10% of possibility, rare but possible is revealed to her touch. That one gives Harry another year before he dies in a potions explosion everyone will interpret as a tragic accident. But Lily knows the truth, intention is not hidden in her view of the future. (Neither is Harry's pain, and he's in so much pain.)
The next two even less likely potentials also lead to death but give him a whole 5 years. (Only 5, that's the best?) One death an overdose, the other a drowning. All self-inflicted.
There are others, (rarer still) but they look much the same. There are no longer lines, it all just ends.
(It can't end, it can't.)
She wants to scream. In her mind she does.
After everything he's done! She yells to the metaphorical heavens, Hasn't he given enough?! Help him, someone help him!
She hates how much has been asked of him. His whole life. She's had to watch, helpless, (the bullying, the pressure, the losses, the choices) as he struggled through it all and against the odds, lived. (So brave, my Harry, he's so brave.)
She just wants him to have a happy life. (Finally, finally, please just let him live, really live.)
But no one can see what Lily sees.
No one hears her plea.
She has to do something about this.
So she tries. She screams HELP with everything that she is.
And her guide arrives.
"Are you ready to pass over now Lily?" The angel, Yennica, asks.
Lily lives in the in-between. She made a choice when she died to go to the afterlife but instantly regretted it. Her son, her baby boy, he needed her. And so she threw herself back, into the almost-time and almost-space. To the far edge of the fourth dimension, closest to physical reality. Here she could watch over him. She's away from James, her parents, others, but she's with Harry.
Unfortunately, she made the choice too late to become a ghost, she has no visual form or way to speak. But maybe fortunately, (she discovered accidentally) she has the ability to shift to the higher realms. She's not stuck like a ghost would be. There are other "places" she can go. Beings she can talk to. She can travel to the not-time and not-space of the 5th dimension, the place of the angels. Or even higher.
Lily sees in her mind the form of Yennica, her angelic guide to the afterlife. The 8 foot feminine form has pure white skin and dark brown dreadlocks. Its hawk-like wings are folded behind it. Lily knows from experience that they are quite intimidating when extended.
When Lily made the choice to throw herself back here, Yennica arrived to answer her questions about what that meant and has been patiently waiting to guide Lily back to that heaven-like place that is to be her new home (with James) once she's ready to return.
But Lily is the farthest from being ready to return.
"Harry's going to die soon," Lily states.
She feels Yennica's attention focus sharply in response. "Are you sure? Our predictions show him living an adequately long life. He marries Ginny Weasly and has three children."
Yennica explained it to her once. How the angels used to see all the life-path potentials but that as the world started getting more complicated, more interwoven, and more likely to change instantly and drastically, their view got foggy. Like looking at the surface of the Earth from an airplane when the skies are cloudy. It is especially difficult to see the future for people who let the world in, who let it help them grow and change.
People like Harry.
So they supplement their clouded vision with intensive detailed simulations. Simulations that can be flawed. Like now.
Lily can see Harry's life-paths when they can't because she's not in an airplane, she's right on the ground with him. She has seen that the girl, Ginny, is too weak, too young, and too innocent, to pull Harry out of his darkness and that she cannot embrace the darkness in herself well enough to stay with him through his. Lily knows Ginny isn't enough. Harry needs something more.
"Your calculations are wrong," Lily says, surety strengthening her words. "I've seen it. He dies. We need to fix it."
"You have seen the paths yourself?" Yennica asks.
"Yes." Lily had kept this a secret. She has reason not to trust them.
Yennica looks surprised. "I did not know you could do that."
"It's only him that I can see," Lily admits. "And I didn't see a reason to mention it since I didn't need help before. But now I do. He dies, he kills himself, in every one of his futures. He has less than 5 years of life left. I can't let that happen."
"Lily, you know we do not interfere in that way."
"Yes you do! What about the prophecy?! That disastrous message came from you, you told me yourself!"
Yennica nods in assent and does not look ashamed.
Lily wants to scream but she takes the equivalent of a deep breath and tries to Slytherin out a solution, like Severus would. She gets an idea. The angels are obsessed with improving their models. Maybe if they see it themselves, in their own predictions, if they see how he dies, maybe they will want to change it too.
"I think you should recalculate your predictions. You aren't correctly factoring the depression that is coming for him. Look deeper at his darkness and recalculate."
"We will do as you say," Yennica nods. "But Lily, please do not get your hopes up. We do not like to interfere. Especially for something as small as one man taking his own life."
And so she yells then. "He deserves a chance to be happy! It was your prediction, your desire to save the world from Voldemort's tyranny, that put all the weight on my son's shoulders and it's going to kill him. It will be your fault! Please just help him!"
Yennica looks at Lily sadly and then severs the connection. In Lily's view she can see the angel one second and in the next it's gone.
So Yennica may not be able to help her, that much is clear. But Lily isn't done trying. She has a friend.
She sends her consciousness higher then, several dimensions up. She's not supposed to be able to do this either, but she can. In her physical life many were pleasantly surprised by what she could do when she put her mind to it. Excellence has it's benefits, even in death.
She travels up and up, outside of time and space and into a realm of pure knowledge. The seventh dimension. The Akashic Library.
She deposits her consciousness right into the office of her friend, a librarian. Lily calls her friend Liyah because she doesn't have a name that Lily can correctly think (let alone pronounce). It is beyond words. And from Lily's perspective her friend closely resembles a famous woman with the same name.
"My dear Lily," Liyah says with a smile. "I'm so happy to see you."
In Lily's minds-eye the room looks like an office. Liyah sits behind a large oak desk and smiles at her. The higher being looks to be around 7 feet tall with ebony skin and silky black hair. Her warm, sweet smile always comes easy.
Liyah has explained that all of that is just Lily's human mind translating universal concepts into visuals. That they aren't in a physical place and that Liyah does not have a unique form. She says, from her perspective, she has no body at all. Regardless, Liyah is one of the most beautiful beings Lily has ever seen.
"Hi," Lily says, the warmth from her friend helping ease her. "I missed you too. But this isn't a social visit. I need your help. Harry is going to die and I can't stop it without you."
Liyah's eyes widen and she leans forward. "What did you see?"
Lily knows the rules, outsiders are not to interfere, but she also knows Liyah is more flexible with what "outsider" means. In Liyah's eyes Lily is an insider and Liyah is allowed to help Lily in her journey as long as it feels right for Liyah to do so. Liyah is even the one who taught Lily how to see the life paths.
Lily touches the tips of her fingers to her forehead and imagines she tosses the image of the life-path potentials onto the wall of Liyah's office with a flick of her hand. They show up like they always do as if through a projector. Now Liyah can see them too in all their devastating truth.
"Oh, Lily," Liyah says, a hand covering her mouth, and Lily is soothed to see her pain reflected in her friend's eyes.
"What can we do?"
A crease forms between Liyah's eyebrows as she stands to start touching each path to see more details but before she's even seen the second she says, "Wait, Lily, it's changing. Your intention to change it, it's revealing new possibilities. This one." She points to the thin line on the far right.
Lily looks at the new little presence as it fades in and out like a dying light. She reaches out to touch it and sees...
"Severus"
Wonder fills her as she watches Severus turn to smile a crooked smirk (familiar, similar, beloved once) at Harry and Harry's face lights up with a smile to match. It crinkles the corners of his eyes and then he bites his lip like he's trying (failing) to hide it. He has a soft fond look of happiness in his eyes. He's older, a little gray woven through his raven black locks. (He lives. He lives.)
It's everything she let herself hope for.
But she saw Severus die? She watched his death alongside Harry. She ached for him, her lost best friend, and noted with surprise that Harry had ached too. (His emotions, his aura, are like scents in the air to her, she always knows how he is feeling, even when he doesn't know himself.)
"In this one Severus lives?" Lily asks, "And that saves Harry? How? Why?"
"I'm not sure why it makes such a difference. Let me look closer..... Oh," she says in soft surprise.
"What?! What is it?"
"A Perfect Mirror," Liyah says, awed, which means nothing to Lily. "Severus is Harry's Perfect Mirror."
"Severus is something important for Harry? How? Liyah, I don't know what a Perfect Mirror means."
"Well, it is quite rare. Unlikely that you would have heard of it. Let me try to explain." She taps her finger against her pretty lips. "You know how you and James are soulmates? How every time you reincarnate you plan to meet each other and how everytime, without fail, you fall in love? You and James are a specific kind of soulmate called a twin flame. You are two halves of the same soul. You are forever paired and you can't help but love each other."
"I know, but are you saying Harry and Severus are…" she is quite frankly alarmed at the thought. Severus would be a very difficult soulmate to have, and the difference in their age! Her friend and her son! Hopefully not!
"Not at all. Harry has no soulmate," Liyah says instead and Lily instantly regrets her thoughts as that sentence feels even worse. "Neither does Severus," Liyah continues, "If you looked in their past lives you would probably see lifetimes of loneliness. But sometimes the Universe notices a match, two unpaired souls that reflect each other so perfectly that if you can get them to really look at each other, to let each other in, they can't help but love the other and more importantly to help each other love themselves. It's like looking into a mirror for the first time in your life and discovering that, actually, you are beautiful. It's a really special kind of connection. I'm so happy that Harry has this. This is a huge blessing on a Universal scale."
"But Harry doesn't have it," Lily states. "Severus and Harry hate each other. And Severus dies. Liyah, how can they have this if Severus dies?"
"Well, there is one path where they connect and Severus is an enchanted portrait." Liyah points out the line and Lily can now see there are actually two small new threads, not just the one she saw first. "But the more appealing one is this," Liyah points to the treasured new line that is getting steadily thicker and brighter. "It is the one they'd both prefer."
Lily takes a deep breath and bravely dives into some tricky questions. "Okay, so with this Perfect Mirror, is that an in-love kind of connection? Like a soulmate usually is?"
"Usually, yes, but not necessarily. It could be a friendship, mentorship, or any other kind of relationship. Do you... have a problem with it if it is an in-love relationship, Lily?"
"I... uh..." and then she feels silly. Liyah and she have discussed before how there is less and less judgment about relationship types as you move up in the dimensions, partly because differences fade away until they have no meaning, like blood-status, age, gender, social standing, and partly because everyone is so connected it's like everyone is related, almost inside each other's heads. It becames pointless to judge. Besides, they don't have an analog for sex anyway. Liyah isn't judging this at all. And does Lily? Honestly when it comes down to what really matters, this doesn't rate. "No. If it makes Harry happy, then I'm fine with it." (And if it goes that way she will just make sure to give them lots of space. Severus would never forgive her anyway.)
Liyah smiles at her. "Good, because you're going to help make it happen. Fortunately the angels will be on your side."
"They'll help me?"
"They have to," Liyah says, looking a little smug. "A Perfect Mirror is a choice from the Universe, a type of destiny. It is above angelic authority. Once they become aware of it, which it looks like they have," she points to the line again which is completely solid now, "they have to do everything in their power to make space for the opportunity. Which means Severus must live. Lily, they are creating a miracle to save him."
Lily touches the line again and sees a hundred flashes of Harry, laughing, smiling, happy. Living.
"What do I have to do?"