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Their Last Today
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Lily sighs softly and leans back in the shade of the large oak tree behind their cottage. She is propped up on her elbows, wrapped in a lightweight cloak and watching James chase a tiny Harry around the yard as birds chirp and flutter in the trees surrounding them.
She smiles at the scene and feels utterly at peace with the world.
It's rare now, for them to get a day like this. It has been for too long, since probably the summer before their seventh year. The war has asked for sacrifices from everyone, and serenity and peaceful days without anxiety are one of the things they have all had to give up.
So she appreciates all the more deeply this day, because she knows it is likely only this day, until reality—war—comes roaring back in to the forefront of her mind.
Oh, but she can remember a time when almost every day was a simple as this one. Back at Hogwarts where they might not have been fully and truly innocent or away from the war, but where they were still blanketed in the safety and happiness of schoolchildren. The world awaiting them had seemed so big, but big was okay because they could conquer anything and change the world.
Four years. It has only been four years since then and already Lily is dreaming of the past, the 'good old days', the days before they had to hide to protect their son (and, quite possibly, the entire future) and before they knew that not everything is meant to be conquered.
It has been a long week under the Fidelius Charm and Lily can feel the edges of her mind starting to fray with the worry and stress of it all. So the blissful, glorious days like this one, full of fall colors, Harry's giggles, and James's big bellied laughs of the Gryffindor common room and inside jokes? They make her burn with a feeling of yesteryear and power, that maybe they can still beat anything, even Death. At least until they are ready to meet Him themselves.
But those thoughts aren't for today. Today, now, Lily wants to revel in the present and watch her boys playing in the leaves before her as she strokes the soft gray cat lounging on her stomach and tries her hardest not to worry. She wishes she knew Peter was all right, because other than Harry being harmed, Peter captured and tortured because of them is her greatest fear these days. The same goes for Sirius, the "bluff" as he calls himself, and Remus, all alone for his transformations, his monthly hell.
It has only been a week but the incessant anxiety of it, of this life, is eating her alive. She knows James feels it, too; his friends, his brothers are still out there on the front lines, and one of them, though he fervently denies it to be possible, could be a traitor.
She's just so tired of it all, tired of the fighting and the worry and the paranoia and the loss. She's tired of losing friends, good people, to death. She's tired of the uncertainty and the darkness and fear that now encompasses her entire life. She's tired of jumping at every little noise, every strange creak or groan making her lunge for her wand. She's terrified that this war will never end, that Harry will never be able to experience a peaceful childhood like she and James did, that nothing she does will be good enough, that Voldemort will win, that—
A clump of multi-colored leaves comes flying through her morose and on-the-verge of panic thoughts to hit her face. She splutters, surprised, and hears Harry's shrieks of laughter. She manages to piece back together enough of her scattered mind to rejoice in the sound, knowing that no one can hear it but she and James and that means they are safe. They are safe.
Well, she and Harry are, at least. James will not get off so lightly. Such an attack demands retribution, after all, and so, grinning wickedly, she quickly launches a counterattack on her husband, dive-tackling him into the large pile of leaves behind him.
They exchange a quick kiss like a salute and soon the air is littered with foliage as Lily ducks another onslaught, dances around the fleeing cat, and returns the volley, engaging in a battle to the war drumming composed of Harry's excited clapping. Barely a half-hour later, all three are wheezing on the ground with leaves tangled in their hair and cheeks flushed, perfectly happy on a beautiful Halloween day.
The sunset begins and Lily leans into James, both supported by the sturdy tree trunk as Harry toddles around the hedged-in yard, a leaf in either hand. A brilliant collage of colors lights up the sky turning the clouds purple and edging them in pink, the sky every hue of blue and orange and red.
"This is my favorite time of day," Lily sighs contently. And it is, especially now. Night is full of fear and the mornings bring dread, even more so since the prophet stopped arriving and they have had to wait for the news of which of their friends died this time from Peter (or Sirius in the mirror). Sunset means they have made it through another day. Sunrise is almost as beautiful; it means they made it through another night.
James rests his head on Lily's, snakes an arm around her waist and then swiftly pulls her to her feet and out of her dark thoughts in a move Lily is not quite sure how he managed.
"I love you, Lily." Surprised by his serious tone, Lily blinks up at him questioningly. James is very rarely serious.
"I should hope so. If you didn't, well, then the marriage would be a bit of a waste. Also, there's that whole child thing that we'd have to consider and figure out. And then I've heard that divorces are rather messy, though I could probably get quite a bit of money out of you. Also, would I get to keep the cat?" Lily continues to blink up at him, not at all understanding what the heck is going through James's head (a frighteningly rare occurrence) and covering up her confusion with her usual inane babble.
James lopsidedly smiles back down at her—she distantly remembers second year when she was taller than him—and clarifies not at all helpfully, "I love you, have loved you since fifth year. I want to tell you that every day I am alive, and even after that."
Lily is still shocked by the sudden gravity in his voice and fights down the trickle of icy cold fear rising in her stomach (What could this mean?). James just chuckles at her curious expression. Bristling at being laughed at, she smacks his arm and mutters a grumpy, "Toerag."
He only laughs harder and refuses to elaborate on his sudden burst of sincerity and solemnity. Their eyes meet, green and hazel, and Lily feels the fear disappear as her favorite of his features draws her in. Her eyes start to fall to half-mast as she leans up for a kiss, only to find herself falling backwards into the too thin soft bed of leaves covering a too hard landing on the ground with James clutching his sides in absolute hysterics.
That didn't last long, she thinks sourly, leveling her best glare at the unfortunate bloke she chose to marry.
He childishly sticks his tongue out at her and annoyance at the trick begins to filter through Lily. Quickly, she rises to chase him, leaping out of the multi-colored pile with an agility born of living with James and Harry. Annoyingly clever troublemakers, they are. Her irritation flickers all the more strongly when she finds James holding Harry and smirking victoriously at her.
"Using Harry as a shield, that's low even for you, James Potter," Lily accuses, fixing a mock-glare on him as she walks over and sharply tugs a piece of his unkempt hair. Harry takes up the game eagerly and it is Lily's turn to smirk as James winces. She flounces away, cackling over her shoulder.
"Enjoy it now, Lily-kins." Oh, she hates that nick-name and he knows it! She can practically hear the grin in his voice at her cringe.
"Enjoy it now. It's your turn later, my dear." Lily pouts, unable to deny the truth in that statement, but giggles again as she sees that Harry has tried to chew James's hair, coating a large section of it in slobber, unbeknownst to James himself.
James seems startled at her sudden humor and glares suspiciously at her. Lily just grins broadly and shakes her head, innocently picking leaves out of her hair. James shrugs a reply and blithely places their fifteen-month-old son on his shoulders. Together, the small family strides back inside where Lily begins to cook dinner and James fiddles with the wireless.
A rare feeling of safety wraps itself around Lily's shoulders, easing ever so slightly the spark of worry buried in her gut. Peter, though it doesn't always seem like it, knows how to take care of himself. They just have to trust the others to check up on him as well as her, James and Harry. She reminded Sirius to do exactly that the other day when he dropped by to visit.
It had been lovely to see him, but she knew the war was getting worse as he and James conversed in hushed tones while she fed Harry. He wouldn't be around for some time, he had said. Something about a mission for the Order and making sure he didn't come to a non-existent house too often. That would look suspicious. The three of them had laughed rather uneasily at that.
There was more to it than that, Lily knows, though she had made no comment at the time. Sirius was in hiding, too, after all. And no one had heard from Remus for a long time.
Celestina Warbeck fills their kitchen and chases away any ideas Lily had that her husband is even partially sane.
Turning around to deliver the appropriate sarcastic and mocking remark, Lily stops short at the endearing sight her James makes dancing around the kitchen with a smiling Harry.
Awwwww. That's adorable.
Peering closer, Lily notices that James is mouthing along to the song. In time. With all the right words. She barely manages to choke back her laughter, absolutely refusing to make fun because he is just making it way too easy. James then catches her watching and waggles his eyebrows at her in invitation.
Instead she just shakes her head and points towards the stairs, the order clearly meaning for James to go get Harry in his pajamas. James apparently understands her silent message because he comes to attention, saluting her, before marching upstairs to disappear into the nursery.
Lily is entirely unable to hold in her laughter at this and lets it drown out the warbling still loudly playing in the kitchen as she turns to finish their meal.
In her opinion, Celestina Warbeck deserves to be shot. Twice.
Dinner goes by quickly with little incidence other than Harry throwing some food at James and Lily stupefying him before he could retaliate and throw food back. At a one-year-old. James is going to teach Harry awful habits.
A light rain sounds outside for a short time, but the clouds are scattered and moonlight beams brokenly down upon Godric's Hollow. Their neighborhood is quiet except for the wind whistling through the streets and Lily imagines the sounds of the Muggle children trick-or-treating just a block away.
She remembers a time when she and Petunia and Severus used to go out together, but that train of thought leads to feelings of bitterness and betrayal so instead she looks forward a year to when she and James will take Harry out on Halloween for the first time, because they will make it until next year. Just a little longer and the war will be over. Just a little longer and Voldemort will be gone.
She will make sure of it.
Oh Merlin, she wishes she could believe that as much as she wants to.
Lily wipes her hands on the towel she has been using to dry the dishes (much more soothing when done the Muggle way) and she waves her wand to send the clean plates to their respective cupboards (much less annoying when one was a witch).
Their cat, Dare, streaks between her legs and darts out the small cat flap built into the door. Lily watches her go with trepidation; Dare hates water and cold, so to see her sprinting out into the chilly night like a bat out of hell is disconcerting.
Lily ignores the feeling, refusing to be dragged into the fear tonight—the cat is absolutely mad anyway, a by-product of living with James and an infant who now owns a broom—and trails her hand across the rough wood of their kitchen table, leaving her wand behind. She pauses just before the door, listening to Harry's giggles harmonize with James's deep chuckles.
The world is alright.
She smiles contentedly and pushes open the door to their sitting room to take in the endearing sight of her husband lying on the floor making puffs of smoke for Harry's entertainment. Her smile stretches to a grin and she tucks stray hair behind her ear, wondering how she could have ever worried if James would be a good father.
"He's never going to sleep if you keep distracting him like that," she warns playfully. "Before you know it, he's going to try stealing your wand to make those things and blow up the house. Family trait, you know. On the father's side. Now it's your bedtime, right, Harry?" She coos at her son as James laughs and stands, scooping up the baby who is still giggling happily in his soft blue pajamas.
Lily extends her hands and James easily deposits Harry into her arms for safekeeping. As she watches, he throws his wand onto the sofa and stretches his arms above his head, yawning.
"Merlin, is he energetic. And I thought Padfoot was bad back in school. This one never runs out of energy," James quips, making faces at his miniature doppelganger.
Lily laughs and marvels, not for the first time, at the fact that they are raising this amazing little boy. She hefts Harry more securely in her arms and turns to go up the stairs, pausing for a moment as James yawns again; there is more than simply Harry that has her husband exhausted, worry draining him as well as her, but they are fine, Sirius is fine, Peter is safe, and Remus is not a traitor.
A weary sigh breaks free from her mouth and Lily acknowledges that she is living in denial. Oftentimes, though, denial is the only thing (other than hope and Harry and James) that gets her through the day.
Sometimes, much more rarely now than before Harry, she wishes they could just go back to the time when they were kids in school—because, really, they are still just kids—and that everything was big again, if only for a little while.
But time doesn't slow for anyone, Lily knows that and, when James sprints into the hall where the door has just been blown inward, Lily also knows somewhere deep down in her gut— oh my God I don't want to die—that this is it. There will be no sunrise and she's not ready. She'll never be ready.
But she has no choice because reality is catching up with her thoughts and crashing through her front door. The world is not alright and James is shouting and Harry looks ready to cry and sick laughter is ringing in her head as green flashes in front of her eyes and she's running running running because James (James!) is probably dead and she needs to protect Harry, needs to hide him, needs to save him.
And James…James. Oh Merlin, James! No. She can't think about James right now. She has to focus only on Harry, just Harry, protectHarry.
There's no where no freaking where she can find to hide him and fuck! What happened? They were safe! Where's Peter, what happened to Peter? Why do swears seem to accurately convey everything except moments like this freaking one? No, no time, what the hell is she even thinking? She needs to focus!
She's in the nursery and Harry is in her arms and she doesn't know how they got up here but there are footsteps coming and they are not James, she's knows James and James never walks slowly like that, light and slithering. James is loud and boisterous and swaggering in everything he does and if he is quiet that means that he is—
NO! She realizes she is screaming and forces herself to stop. Her throat is raw and painful and some emotion she could not begin to name even if she had the time to waste is threatening to overwhelm her.
I've already wasted so much time!
Tears continue to slide silently down her face and Harry tugs on her dark red hair, his favorite plaything. She chokes on sadness and fear and inescapable knowledge and pushes it all away, putting Harry on the floor and wishing insanely that Dumbledore hadn't taken James's invisibility cloak and that the roaring sound she heard filling the distance was Padfoot on his psychotic bike and not Death rushing to claim her family.
Lily, take Harry and go! It's him!
James's words—his last words, she thinks briefly, wretchedly—echo in her ears but it's too late and she needs to block the door, needs to lock it, but she has no wand and she wants to laugh (choke, sob) because she used to be so good at wandless magic back before she even knew what real magic was.
Go! Run! I'll hold him off— Tears well in her eyes again as she realizes that James didn't have his wand either.
How could they be so stupid?
She roughly shakes her head, banishing thoughts, regrets, and fears, and she pushes everything she can find in front of the door and it's still not enough, but she picks up Harry and prays that it is even as an invisible force begins to sweep all the boxes and chairs and blocks and protection away.
Colloportus. Colloportus. COLLOPORTUS!
She is shrieking the spell inside her head, but her wand is down in the kitchen where it is bloody useless and the spell won't work (won't work!) without it. She just wants to squeeze her eyes shut and find this is all a nightmare, this is not happening but she can't shut her eyes, she can't block this out, she can't, and a child's faint laughter reaches her ears and the moon is lighting the room in a soft, ethereal glow.
The world shouldn't be ending on a night like this, she thinks desolately and why oh why can she freaking think of words like desolate and ethereal when she can't even remember her wand when of course she needs it most.
Tears of rage, frustration, sorrow, fear, and helplessness course down her face and why didn't they plan for this? Why did they let their guard down? Why didn't they practice and scheme and Moody is going to have the ultimate "I told you so" after this and why is she wasting time joking, she needs to stop this from happening!
Voldemort appears in the doorway, barely filling the space and Lily can't help the horrified gasp-scream that crawls out of her throat as she simultaneously fights the crazy urge to laugh hysterically—the man the entire Wizarding world is terrified of is anorexic and translucent and missing a nose and the ugliest fucking man she has ever seen.
No.
All hilarity flees as the evil, vile, fucking thing in front of her looks at the child in her arms and she hastily and gently places Harry in the crib, no thought left in her mind but the mantra of . She throws her arms wide to shield him as anger and desperation begin to set in. This bastard doesn't deserve to even look upon her son.
No. Not Harry. Not Harry, please not Harry.
Her rage and anguish lace her words as she yells, screams, shrieks for the man in front of her to leave her son alone because even if Voldemort's not human now, he once was and has to have some sense of pity, of mercy left.
He's telling her to move out of the way, telling her to stand aside, calling her silly and she wants to hex him into oblivion and doesn't even think about taking his offer, thinks only of running up and ripping what's left of his ugly fucking face off. Seriously? Silly? Who the fuck calls anyone silly except maybe her Muggle grandmother? Why is she thinking of that, she needs to do something!
But she can't do anything, she has no wand, no James, nothing, she can only beg for Harry's life at the cost of her own, beg out of the utter love for her son currently bursting through every pore in her body that he be spared.
Don't kill him. Don't kill my son.
She knows that it is fruitless but she hasn't lived this long (it's not even long, she's only twenty-one!) in the war by giving up whenever it seemed impossible and Voldemort is uglier than the first three times she and James (oh God James) saw him and they've escaped him before, why not now? Why not Harry, too?
The green light rushes toward her and flashes around the room and Lily can only stare death in the face, glaring accusingly at the bastard who has caused so much misery, and she hopes beyond hope that she will be able to see James again very soon and Harry not for years, decades, centuries later. She hopes she pissed Voldemort off or even just annoyed him a little bit, the arsehole.
And as time slows down as she had thought it never did just minutes ago, only minutes have passed, and as she wished it would just that afternoon (that perfect, blissful, last afternoon of her life) Lily lets the tears drip down her face and whispers so only Harry can hear, "I love you, baby. Always."
And with a flash of emerald the color of her and Harry's eyes but infused with something twisted and entirely wrong, Lily takes one last gasping breath before the world goes impossibly, irreversibly black.
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Author's Note: Well, I'm rather proud of this. I've been a fan of Harry Potter and written fanfiction for so long, yet this is my first posted story. Please don't let that ruin your perception of it.
Anywho, I have to give credit to a few authors that helped inspire this fic, even if they don't know it. Veranda and her story "Contacts" put the plot bunny in my head for the first part of it, and Tanuki-dono's "We Are Not Okay" pretty much blasted me with the format and an idea of how to make it a complete story. A final credit to a tiny, miniscule part goes to AnotherDreamer, known around here as brainchild. I stole the name of the cat from her story "Prelude to Destiny" because that has been my favorite fic since its posting and I felt the need to put a tribute to it in here.
Obviously, many parts of the last scenes, starting when Lily leaves the kitchen, are based entirely on the information given in all 7 of the HP books, especially the 3rd and 7th books. The rain, their actions, some of the dialogue, they all are JKR's, just expanded and elaborated upon by yours truly to fit Lily's POV.
And that roaring? Feel free to imagine it is in Lily's head or that it is, in fact, Sirius on his bike. I enjoy the bike myself, but even I don't know what it's really meant to be.
Hope you enjoyed and thanks for reading!
Also, I own none of this. JKR is just letting me play in her fantastically fun sandbox for now.