Chapter Text
Lily likes to think that her convictions are the strongest things about her. The ironclad pillars on which she’s built her current life; that she (and all other muggleborns) are as worthy of magic as anyone else; that through magic, nothing is truly impossible, no matter how much everyone might pretend it is; that she loves her son more than she’s ever loved anything else in the world, including her husband, including magic, including her own life.
And she knows without a shred of doubt that she will not just stand aside and allow this man to murder her son. It’s simply unthinkable.
“Stand aside, girl,” Lord Voldemort says for the third and final time.
Lily Potter does not move.
The sickly green light of Avada Kedavra hits her square in the chest and her world goes black.
*****
Lily Potter wakes like she does every morning, to her wand buzzing under her pillow to tell her that Harry is awake. She doesn’t feel like she’s slept at all but she drags herself out of bed because if her son’s awake then she must be too. Yawning and pulling on a dressing gown as she leaves the room, she casts a longing glance back to where her husband is still fast asleep in their bed.
That man would sleep through the end of the world if she let him, and she does try to let him most mornings. The few times that she’d shaken James awake and told him to go and check on their son, he’d returned several minutes later looking harried with a screaming Harry in his arms and so she inevitably had to wake up anyway. It isn’t worth the hassle and besides it’s not like James doesn’t pull his parenting weight elsewhere.
It isn’t until she’s reaching down to lift Harry out of his crib that she realises that something's wrong, green-tinged memories rushing back to the forefront of her mind.
She’s dead.
You-Know-Who killed her, swift and easy like a guillotine coming down on her neck, like a swish of the scissors cutting the thread of her life, her only comfort the fact that, with her death, she was leaving Harry more protected than he would’ve been were she alive.
Lily had a plan, and it was a plan that was going to succeed, goddamnit, never mind the fact that it hinged on her own death. Harry would live and that was all she really cared about.
Some crushed unicorn horn, a runic array made from blood and ashes, and just a little tiny bit of human sacrifice, and Harry would be protected. The kind of protection that Lily puts far more stock into than a Fidelius Charm with Peter bloody Pettigrew acting as Secret Keeper, than the idea that either she or James could best the Dark Lord in any kind of wandfight. She isn’t the best at thinking on her feet, at the high stakes improvisation that duelling requires. Lily is a planner and a problem-solver; she knew You-Know-Who would be coming for her son, so she set about devising another way to ensure his safety, when sooner or later their other defences failed. Even at the cost of her own life.
But Lily isn’t dead.
Neither is Harry which can only be a good thing, but Lily had definitely died. She shouldn’t be able to wake up and get out of bed, or pick up her son and lift him out of his crib.
In what one might describe as a mild case of confused, terrified panic, Lily goes through the motions of the morning; getting Harry dressed and ready for the day, calling for James to wake up on her way down to the kitchen, setting out the things for breakfast. The same routine she’s followed nearly every day since they went into hiding. She can do it without even thinking while her mind spins, flicking rapidly through theories of what could’ve happened, mentally going over all the speculation she’s ever encountered about life after death. Dumbledore always says that death is but ‘the next great adventure’ - but surely said adventure should feel less like a completely ordinary day, surely there’d be more of a sign that something had changed between this life and the next.
She’s floating two cups of coffee over to the table when James finally appears, still looking less than half-awake, as is usual anytime before noon, running a hand through Harry’s already messy hair and smiling widely at him, “Big day today, Prongslet! It’s Halloween, and -“
The coffee finds a new home for itself on the white-tiled kitchen floor, the cups smashing to pieces on impact and hot liquid spilling everywhere.
Lily stands, stricken, looking at the mess because she can’t find it within herself to look at her husband or her son.
Halloween.
The day she died.
Except she hadn’t died.
Except it’s still Halloween, or Halloween again, and she and James and Harry are all alive and she doesn’t understand what’s happening.
“Alright, Lily-flower?”
James’ voice snaps her back to herself and she swishes her wand through the motions of Reparo and Evanesco, putting the mugs back together and cleaning up the spillage.
“Think someone’s a little overexcited about the occasion,” He continues in a conspiratorial stage whisper to his son. It’s horrible.
She supposes she’d always thought that the whole ‘life flashing before her eyes’ thing would happen before she died, and also that it would start at the beginning of her life, and also that it would be more of a montage than a slow, second-by-second reliving of what otherwise could have been an entirely normal day.
The important part, the part that made this day stand out in any way from the monotony that her life had become, hadn’t happened till the evening. Perhaps it’s a kind of torture from whatever powers-that-be are in control of her afterlife, knowing exactly what’s going to happen and being unable to stop it. But then that begs the question of how she was able to drop the coffee cups.
If this is hell, or the wizarding version of hell - although Petunia would likely call them one and the same, with all wizardkind burning in the fires of muggle hell like their ancestors burnt at the stake in the Witch Trials - surely she shouldn’t be able to effect any form of change, no matter how minor. She should be trapped within her body, going through the motions of the day identically to how it had originally happened. Stuck unable to save her husband and son and herself from the fate that awaited them when night fell. She shouldn’t be able to drop cups of coffee and stand staring blankly at the floor and throw them all completely off-script.
Although who is she to try and dictate what the laws of the afterlife should be.
Lily blinks back into the present moment to find James waving his hand in front of her face.
“Helloooo? Anyone home?” He’s saying in an exaggerated voice, grinning at her like this is a hilarious joke.
“Hi,” she says back, trying not to be annoyed because this is a man that doesn’t know that he has less than twenty four hours left to live.
“There she is!” James cheers, turning to look at Harry as if this has all been some sort of performance for his benefit. Lily swishes her wand again to start making two new cups of coffee.
What, exactly, is she meant to do with the knowledge she has?
“Your mother seems like she’s in a bit of a mood today,” her husband is saying to their son. Then, he glances at her, something sharp glinting in his eyes that clashes against his now gentle, caring smile, “I’ll take care of Harry today if you want to lie down or whatever.”
Lily sighs. One thing she used to love about James was that he was never afraid to be a little mean, or a lot mean. For a long time it was the only thing she used to even like about him, the only thing that felt real about him.
When she was friends with Severus, when she was defending him and offended on his behalf, she still couldn’t help but be amused by some of the things James would say, the quips he’d come out with when tormenting people.
She liked when he mocked his friends or when he teased her; most of the time it was just his way of showing affection. She liked when his pranks just tiptoed over the line into genuine cruelty; it made him more interesting to her than when he was being charming and utterly superficial. It was something she’d never quite been able to figure out - why she enjoyed that side of him - but eventually it drew her in, made her want to get to know him, set her on the path to finding other qualities she liked in him.
After over a year in hiding, she didn’t love it so much anymore. The lack of other targets and the general frustration built by their situation meant he was turning this mean side on her more often than not. Of course, Lily can give as good as she gets, and she certainly had, but there’s only so many passive aggressive comments one can take before the irritation turns to full-blown arguments, only so many screaming matches one can get into before there’s nothing new with which to hurt each other.
James being cruel used to make Lily excited, make her feel a little more alive. Nowadays, it just makes her tired.
So when he looks at her with that glint in his eyes, when he oh-so-kindly suggests that he can take Harry - the only thing that makes either of them truly happy at the moment - for the rest of the day, she sighs, and lets him. It’s not like she can properly pick a fight when he’s wearing his mean little veneer of kindness, acting like he only wants to help her when they both know that he’s being selfish.
“That would be great,” she smiles at him, although it’s probably more of a grimace. She’s aware that she shouldn’t hate the player, and that she’s just as guilty, just as mean, if not meaner, than him most of the time, but it’s not like hating the game will make a difference. Not that hating the player makes much of a difference either - not that she hates James, he’s her husband and the father of her son and she loves him, she does, and, when they get out of the stifling cage that their home has become, they’ll sort through all the problems they’ve been having, and they’ll be stronger than ever, and the fact that she occasionally has thoughts about smothering him in his sleep will be nothing but a footnote in their love story.
Except they don’t make it out of Godric’s Hollow.
You-Know-Who kills them both, and maybe their son too, and Lily is now maybe dead, and James might as well have one last nice day with his son because she isn’t sure that Harry could even succeed in making her happy today, knowing what she knows. Maybe she’s also being selfish, depriving her son of one last day with his mother.
“Did you hear that, Harry?” James turns back to his son, “We’re going to have the best day ever.”
Lily sips her fresh cup of coffee.
She tries to remember what she’d originally done during the day, but their whole time in hiding has blended so seamlessly into one endless swirl of silence and restlessness and arguments and boredom. The only memorable parts of this slow, miserable avalanche are Harry - his first steps, his first words, his first accidental magic, and hundreds of other firsts besides.
It’s likely that if Harry weren’t there, she and James would’ve killed each other or perhaps themselves long before Halloween. It’s also likely that if Harry weren’t there, she and James wouldn’t need to be in hiding in the first place. They could be out, fighting in the war, or even just walking down Diagon Alley, all the problems in their marriage just flickers of annoyance that could easily be ignored in favour of the distraction of actually living out in the world.
Lily pushes these thoughts aside. They’re not worth dwelling on when she knows she’s going to die before the day is out.
Again.
Or for the first time.
She still isn’t at all sure what’s going on.
Loath as she is to follow James’ suggestions these days, she finds herself heading back up the stairs to their bedroom for a lie down. Perhaps the quiet will help her organise her thoughts and figure out whether she’s dead or not.
Is this the afterlife?
It certainly wasn’t the pearly gates and choirs of angels that her Sunday school teacher used to gush about, but then again she hadn’t ever expected that for herself.
Even as a child, before she’d met Severus, with her unexplained special powers that Petunia said she got from the devil, she’d never been all that concerned by the fact that she would likely end up in hell. Maybe because she’d already known on some subconscious level about the wizarding world. Or maybe because the Sunday school teacher had unknowingly made hell sound incredibly cool to a seven-year-old girl who enjoyed playing with matches a little too much.
But then this didn’t really align with common conceptions of hell either - it was certainly nothing like how Jane from St. Leonard’s Church in Cokeworth had described it.
No fires, no screaming, no torture.
Unless the torture is just more psychological than anyone had envisioned it to be. Trapped in the house that had become her prison, not knowing whether her son is actually dead or alive, not knowing whether she is actually dead or alive, eventually going insane with the endless lack of certainty. Cursed to spend the rest of eternity living through the unending bleakness of life in hiding, knowing that the sword hanging over all of their heads is soon to fall and helpless to stop it, even with all crushed unicorn horns and bloody runic arrays and human sacrifice in the world.
Lily supposes the powers-that-be have had rather a long time to come up with refined forms of cruelty. She can almost admire the layers to it.
If this actually is the afterlife and she actually is being tortured via her own pitiful existence. The situation she’s found herself in could always be something else entirely.
She’s never thought particularly deeply about life after death. It isn’t really something she’d ever thought she’d need to concern herself with, even when she knew there was a target on her back. She’d always thought if she was dead, she’d be dead, and if she’s alive, there’s no point worrying about what would be waiting for her on the other side.
Obviously she’s more than aware of the Christian views on the matter, but she hadn’t been particularly convinced by the religion and its beliefs even before she’d found out that it clashes fundamentally with such an intrinsic part of who she is. There’s no room for witchcraft in the Church of England, no matter how some muggleborns try to reconcile the two.
Wizardkind’s view of the afterlife is more aligned with ideas of reincarnation, an eternal soul that is reborn into various new lives or iterations after the death of the body.
Were Lily to take that line of belief and reasoning, it would follow that this is not the afterlife. Because this is certainly not a new life. This is exactly the same life - in fact, it’s not even a new day in her same repetitious, restricted life.
Lily ponders this until her brain hurts. Better that than thinking about the sound of her husband’s dead body falling to the floor as he gave his life to protect her and their son, but by late afternoon she hasn’t reached any sort of conclusion. Logic is always safer than emotion when it comes to these sorts of things, but it still means that she’s worked herself up into a state of useless, directionless panic, lost most of the day to lying in bed following labyrinthine trains of thought, and missed lunch.
She wonders what James has been doing with Harry all day - probably something stupid with that stupid broom Sirius got him for his first birthday.
Sirius is great. He’s James’ best friend (his soulmate, they’ve been known to say), he’s charming when he wants to be, and Harry clearly adores him and has missed him a lot in the week that’s passed since they enacted the Fidelius and no one has been allowed to visit.
It drives Lily insane.
He’s rash, reckless, and, quite frankly, fucking rude, and he pushes James to be these things too in a way that Lily doesn’t like. He’s a fight that Lily can’t pick because James will always be on Sirius’ side over literally anything or anyone else, even his own wife. He doesn’t like Lily, and that’s enough for her to just dislike him on principle, but it doesn’t help that he also blatantly undermines her in her own marriage.
Lily had said ‘no flying until he’s at least four’ and James had agreed. Then Sirius had bought the stupid training broom and suddenly it’s ‘best to start teaching him young, Lily’, and ‘perfectly safe, Lily, don’t worry about it’, and ‘just because you never liked flying, Lily, doesn’t mean you have to spoil it for the rest of us’.
Lily has been flying for as long as she can remember, but she trusts herself and her magic far more than she trusts any kind of broom or flying carpet. But she won’t say that to James.
And she won’t win the argument because the second Sirius got involved the matter was settled.
And she isn’t sure whether it’s best to save her strength for arguments where the outcome is more important for her and her son’s lives, or to fight each little losing battle to try and get it into James’ thick head that she’s the mother of his son and should therefore be first port of call for decisions about Harry’s welfare.
And then she remembers that there aren’t going to be any future arguments, because they’re both going to die before the day is out and God knows what will become of their son.
And then she remembers that the only reason they’re going to die is because of another argument, one that she’d obviously lost, wherein she’d tried to convince James and Sirius that Peter was not the best choice for Secret Keeper. They’d completely steamrolled her entirely reasonable reservations and look where it fucking got them - Peter hadn’t even lasted a week before ratting them out.
Lily sighs. It’s not like she can do anything about it now anyway. She gets out of bed and goes down to the kitchen to start making dinner.
There’s a moment, standing in the doorway, when she realises that she can’t even remember what she’d made for dinner the first time round. That her life is so bleak and unremarkable that she can’t even remember what her death row meal was. Then she decides that it doesn’t actually matter - if she can drop coffee cups and spend all day in bed, which she certainly didn’t do last time, she’s sure she can make fish fingers and oven chips instead of sweet potato and pumpkin soup or whatever the fuck it was. It seems pointless to spend so much energy on dinner when it’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
She sits at the kitchen table and sets her magic to the task of cooking, while she instead stares at a whorl in the wood and wonders if her son will live to one day have his own house with its own big kitchen table.
When the dinner is ready, James comes in with a laughing Harry in his arms and the three of them sit and eat together, the very picture of a happy family. Lily almost wishes You-Know-Who would come and kill them earlier.
It would hurt less if, before she has to listen to him die (standing in the way of the fucking Dark Lord in order to protect her and her son), she could cling onto thoughts of how much she hates James sometimes, rather than being reminded of how good he is with Harry and how kind he can be when he wants to be and how much she loves him.
Lily picks miserably at her dinner as James sets about entertaining Harry and feeding him and generally parenting him in a way that she doesn’t think she’s capable of under the circumstances. As he kisses her on the cheek and finally asks her if she’s okay, with such genuine concern in his eyes, and tells her of an idea he had to make Halloween a bit special for Harry, despite the circumstances.
This is something that Lily does remember from the night before: how sweet she had thought James’ little plan was, how warm it had made her feel, the two of them working together to make happy memories for Harry. The plan was for Lily to dress him up in a little costume and then go ‘trick-or-treating’ with him. James was going to give Harry sweets as they knocked upon each of the various doors in the house, apparating between each room as the two of them went along the corridor.
Then, You-Know-Who had shown up as she was taking Harry into the nursery to change and then James had been killed and Lily wasn’t warm anymore.
But still, it is a sweet idea, and she doesn’t want James to go to his death frustrated with her and her reluctance, so she agrees to the plan with an attempt at a smile.
There are problems in their marriage, glaring problems that feel almost insurmountable at times but he’s her husband, and she loves him, and when all is said and done, he dies for her and her son. The least she can do in return is try to make the two of them happy before the end.
As she had done the first time she lived this day, Lily goes up to the nursery to charm and transfigure some of Harry’s clothes into a suitable costume. She determinedly focuses on her spellwork and her creation (a kind of shimmering unicorn one-piece that she remembers feeling quite proud of), rather than letting herself think of how You-Know-Who is probably somewhere out there preparing himself for a triple homicide.
Eventually, as the time before, Lily heads downstairs to pick up Harry. She wonders if she’s running on the same schedule, if she’s finished making the costume at the same time that she had before, if You-Know-Who is outside of their house at that moment or if he’s already coming down the garden path or if he’s still only halfway down the street.
James smiles conspiratorially at her when she comes into the sitting room and Lily forces herself to smile back, picking up Harry and making a bit of a show of how it's time for him to go to bed. Harry fusses a little as they start heading up the stairs but the only thing Lily can think of is that surely You-Know-Who should have arrived by now.
Surely he should have blasted their door in by now, she thinks, as she sets Harry down and continues the charade of putting his ‘pyjamas’ on (another charm she’d added to the costume). Surely he should have killed her husband by now, she thinks, as she finishes getting Harry dressed and feigns shock at the sudden reveal of what he’s actually wearing (I suppose we’ll just have to go trick-or-treating now, won’t we, duck?).
Surely he should be forcing aside her feeble attempts at barricading the door by now, she thinks, as she picks Harry up and heads over to said door to take him back downstairs again.
There’s an absurd moment of hope there, her hand on the doorknob, her excited son on her hip. Perhaps the whole experience of that tragic Halloween had just been a nightmare, made realistic by her stress and fear, and You-Know-Who hadn’t actually come and perhaps wouldn’t, at least for a while yet. For a second, ridiculously, she almost feels bad for thinking so ill of Peter.
Then she hears their front door crashing open and that hope plummets as quickly as it had risen. And her hatred for Peter returns tenfold.
“Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off-“
Cold laughter and Avada Kedavra and the sound of a body hitting the floor, just like the time before.
Numb shock and horror cloud her mind, even as she’s been expecting this the entire day, and she stumbles backwards further into the room. She puts Harry down into his cot because that was where he was when she died the first time and tries frantically to remember whether anything else was different. She has one hysterical moment to wonder if Harry’s unicorn outfit will stop her runic ritual from working after her death and then You-Know-Who is standing in front of her again.
“Not Harry,” she says, physically shielding her son with her body.
“Stand aside, you silly girl,” You-Know-Who orders, like he had done the time before, “Stand aside, now…”
As if she would ever just step off to the side and let her son be murdered in front of her.
“No,” she shakes her head, a little desperate now that she’s looking her death in the face again, “Not Harry, take me, kill me instead -“
“This is my last warning -“ the Dark Lord takes a step closer and Lily takes an instinctual step back, ankle colliding with the cot where Harry is. She wants to look at him one last time before she dies.
“Not Harry,” Lily insists. She thinks she begged a little the time before, but it hadn’t made any difference so she won’t lower herself to it this time.
“Stand aside-“ You-Know-Who is a little frustrated now and Lily knows what’s coming next, “Stand aside, girl”
She turns around to look at her baby, his wide green eyes meeting her matching ones just as the rest of the room lights up in green too.
Avada Kedavra.