Lily flinched at the shrieking shatter of the next layer of house-wards.
The commotion on their block had started early in the evening. With the fidelius over the house they'd believed themselves safe, so they'd finished dinner in silence and cleaned up to the horrible crackle of magic along the streets of Godric's Hollow.
When they'd felt the wards first shudder against spellfire, an anti-apparition field was already up and they weren't going anywhere.
Lily had hoped the clever traps in her layer of the wards would stop them. But looking out the window there lay four dead and seven more held at wandpoint by Bellatrix as Voldemort looked on impatiently.
Two layers left. Hers and Alice's.
James put on his battle-robes as Lily charted runes in her own magically preserved blood around Harry's crib again and again. Her runes would protect Harry even in death. Perhaps especially, with their attunement to her life force. Who knows what such an instantaneous release of it, like her own death, would do?
Though it would, of course, be far better if she was around to raise him. So she pulled on her own protective robes, a gift from Sev when he was less of a wanker, and went to the front door. Then, with the rest of her preserved blood, and some fresh blood when she ran out, she layered runic sectumsempuras and bombardas and piercing charms in concentric semicircles, facing the door, as James poured power his patronus charm, which continued to run to warn Sirius.
Then Lily ran to the pantry to grab the bucket of ball bearings next to their slingshot, which she then poured in front the bombarda runes. Then she flipped the rug back in place over them.
Wizards often forgot or forwent their physical shielding charms in battle. Protego only blocked magical attacks. She had only killed five death eaters with it so far, but if magical healing weren't quite so effective, she would have killed dozens more.
If they wanted an honorable fight between wix, they'd have to make it to her husband.
The penultimate ward layer shattered to the screams of dying men. Lily glanced out the window in time to watch her once-frozen fiendfyre burn through three of Voldemort's men and crisp Bellatrix's left arm before she managed to get off a countercurse.
That left a bit of a vicious smile on her face.
She turned on her heel to face James, who was sitting in the leather wingback chair by the fireplace, facing the door, with an angry scowl on his face.
She sauntered up to him and tilted his head up to look deep into her eyes.
"Fight them off for me? You know I'm no good in a duel. I'll run last resorts up with Harry."
He gave a her terribly pained smile and said "I know. I love you."
She kissed him deeply, one last time.
Then she began up the stairs. The last wards broke when she made it to the landing. The death throes of yet more of her enemies echoed with the slice of cutting charms as their feet betrayed them. In the blast of that runed bombarda there was only silence.
She walked to Harry's crib and stared at the door, willing herself to find yet more ways to protect herself and her son from the coming spectre of death.
Then an epiphany popped into her head. Sev had left her a potion in these robes. He'd said only to use it if she was truly about to die.
It was a dark, cloying black. It seemed to pull the light around it out of the room. Something shriveled and fleshy floated in it. It sat thick in an ornate syringe with runes of preservation covering the metal. There was something written in black letters on the glass, but she couldn't tell what they said in the moonlight. It was spring loaded, ready to stab deep into her body in an instant.
She pulled the cap free, set it primed in her hand and against her thigh, and waited.
She heard the pained cackle of Bellatrix Lestrange outside her house and peered out the window as Voldemort finally walked forward into the Potters' house.
She heard the sounds of violence echo up the stairs, with bright colored light flashing out the doorway below.
Then the light turned blinding white-green and everything but the sound of sharp footsteps stopped.
The door slid open.
"Stand aside, foolish girl."
"I won't."
As he raised his wand, Lily clenched down hard with her jaw and stabbed herself with the strange black potion.
She could feel herself wither. Her face became gaunt and skin an ashy grey.
She watched the color bleed from the world around her, but for the white-green light rushing towards her and the shattered glow of Voldemort's soul.
The green-white light crashed against her, bleeding through her body, tearing the bonds of her soul and body apart. She began to float from her newly-dead body in a silver-blue mist. The blood wards behind her flashed burning red.
But some inexorable pull dragged her back down to her shriveled and dying body, so strong that it lifted her body up towards her. A shock of her hair fell across her face as Lily reentered her body. It was bright white.
The syringe clattered to the floor, text clear without the black liquid obscuring it.
*Polyjuice - Dementor*
She was *hungry.*
And a meal sat, stunned and confused, right in front of her.
She floated forward and grabbed Voldemort by his face, the starving pit within her yawning open, driving her forward, kissing him, drinking him.
The blue-silver light poured from his eyes and mouth and flowed deep into Lily's new soul-stomach. His body slumped to the ground, but the soul was tied here, like a too-long noodle.
It kept flowing. She swallowed and began to slurp, pulling with a terrible suction until yet more soul-flesh poured into her mouth. And again, and again, until eight disparate pieces collected in her soul-stomach, full.
Her hands had regained a bit of their rosy life, and her hair regained flecks of blood red interspersed in the bone-white locks.
Sated, she sat down in the chair in the corner of her baby's nursery and rested, falling asleep to the red glow of blood wards.