Lily Evans Potter is twenty-one when she dies.
Her old muggle friends are still at uni, spending the night getting plastered and blowing off classwork. She has a thin gold wedding band on her finger, battle scars etched across her body,a baby curled on her chest, and the ever-present ache of a war and two worlds weighing heavy on her shoulders. She is an orphan and a war hero, a wife and mother. Her face is heartbreakingly young, but she stopped being a child long ago.
\You-Know-Who is at her doorstep, his toenails scratching her honey wood floors. James shouts - Lily, he begs and demands, take Harry and go!
She wants to laugh, wants to scream. Go? How can she go? After all this time, James never ceases to infuriate her.
Never ceased. She hears his body hit the threshold that he carried her over when they first married, on their three day honeymoon from the war. The place where she buttons Harry’s little coat and pulls him close under the Invisibility Cloak, once every other week, and strolls him over to old Bathilda Bagshot’s even though her hands shake every time they step outside of the Fidelius. She hears it even while screaming, hurling herself against Harry’s dresser in a useless attempt to bar the door.
Peter, she realizes. Peter had bought them that dresser, had helped her choose the color of the nursery walls. Peter had been so careful when he held their son, almost as careful as Remus, and his eyes had gone all watery when they announced the pregnancy.
And now Peter had damned them, betrayed them and killed James, killed her and Harry-
Harry. He’s frightened, babbling from the floor where she had all but dropped him. You-Know-Who is taking his time with it, slow in his ascent up the stairs, enjoying the sounds of her panic. Lily has the tiniest breath of time left with her son. She rushes over and scoops him up, the best little weight in the world, warm and steady and alive. She buries her face in his shock of black Potter hair, even softer than James’, and forces herself to stop sobbing.
She sits him down in his bed, his small safe crib that she picked out and the boys put together and James painted the muggle way. He looks up at her, big green eyes all his own, and she is resolved.
James is dead. She may as well be. Harry will not die tonight. She will not let her son die tonight.
Lily sinks to her knees, unsteady without his anchoring weight in her arms. She presses her face between the slats of the crib, and Harry giggles and rests his hands on her nose. She can feel the tears falling, hot and stinging salt, but as she grips the little wooden bars she can’t bring herself to care about dying with dignity.
It won’t be easy for him, her perfect little boy, even if she can keep him safe tonight. It will be so difficult, to face the prophecy and the world without them. And she won’t be there for any of it, not really, and it hurts. The grief is worse the cruciatus - Lily would know.
But this isn’t about her. And she needs him to hear it, even if he won’t remember. He needs to know. She gathers her strength, throws the whole of herself into the most primal magic she’s ever cast, and chokes it out.
Harry. Mumma loves you. Daddy loves you. Be safe, Harry. Be strong.
It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done.
And then the doorknob is turning, and she is on her feet and begging, hands outstretched over Harry’s crib because that’s all she can do. Take me instead, over and over, as if it will work, because it has to work.
Step aside, he hisses, you need not die tonight. She shakes her head blindly. This husk of a creature cannot understand. There is no choice here - there is only love. She will die, she must die, a thousand times over. A million. And she will have to pray that it matters, that it does something, that it is enough to save her son.
As the green light fills the room, green like her mother’s eyes and Harry’s, Lily thinks Not Harry. Me, James, but not Harry, never my Harry.
It is enough.