Chapter 1
They say when you die you see yourself going towards a light. But lily sees no light. No she sees a wand pointed at her head. She sees her son sobbing for his mother and that man. If he can even be called that, she sees his sinister grin. His sadistic pleasure at her murder. And after that she sees darkness. She sees Harry alone. She sees his suffering. She sees Remus be told that her baby, the most important person in her life is gone and she sees him nod defeatedly. She sees Sirius hand her son over to Hagrid. And for what? So that he can say that he killed Peter Pettigrew. She feels no remorse as she watches him be dragged to Azkaban. There is no James in the afterlife. Lily is sure she could find James if she tried. She doesn’t try.
Three months pass and Harry’s second birthday approaches. The celebration is vastly different from his first birthday in that there isn’t one. There is no cake. No presents. There is nothing. And at the end of the day Harry sits in his cupboard and he shivers. Lily wants to shiver with him but she can’t, she doesn’t have skin or blood anymore. It’s at this moment that she realized, nobody’s coming. Nobody can save her son but herself. So she plots. It takes everything in her to walk away from her son to walk away from her only way to see him but she does.
“James.” Lily’s piercing green eyes bore into his soul. He raises his eyebrows as if to ask a question his tongue will not allow him to say. Lily’s tongue is braver, “we need to find Harry.”
Too escape death one must go through the veil. There is no certainty of going home theoretically one could go to any number of alternate universes. The fear of this consumes lily. The fear of doing everything in this world for her son and still failing him.
Searching for the veil is like searching for a star in the dead of night. Or maybe one of those where’s Waldo books, lily thinks humorously. There are many steps for her and James to take if they want to escape. Well let’s see there’s the digging and the long tumultuous walks searching for a sign. A sign of life. They encounter many dead witches and wizards during this time. Lily feels ashamed to admit the things she’s threatened to do for information. It’s not like she could act on them anyway. After all they’re already dead.
They begin to lose hope… until. Lily feels no relief staring at the mirror in front of her. She feels nothing but hatred and a burning desire for vengeance. Time is nonexistent in death and she has no idea how long she’s been gone. For all she knows Harry could be a grown man by now. But still she dares to hope. She turns to James and for the first time feels a glimmer or life ignite in her body like a flame. “Ready,” she asks. James frowns “ready as I’ll ever be.”
She grabs his hand and for the first time in a long time they move as one as they jump through the veil.
Lily feels panic and constriction. She looks around her and sees nothing but black. She forgot what it was like to breath. What it was like to need air, to be so dependent on something every single second. But she knew one thing she couldn’t breath. There was no air.