James Potter didn't have time to tell Lily he loved her, okay?!
It's funny, the things people later assume about James Potter's death, with empty thoughts and emptier words. That it was noble; that it was painless; that he had time to tell Lily he loved her; that he had said anything to Harry at all. If he had been alive, if he had not died, he would have been angry about it but alas, if he had been alive, there would have been no argument at all. No assumptions. No loss.
When Lord Voldemort burst through James and Lily Potter's front door on that cold October night, all logical thought, all rational speech, all hopeful wishes went out of the window. It was now; it was immediate; it was urgent. Harry and Lily had to run and James had to hold him off.
Later, people would assume he had had his wand. It was one assumption James could, perhaps, forgive. After all, his own preconceived notions of this final moment had never ended like this, with the stupidity of a forgotten wand left uselessly on a sofa. James had made the assumption he'd die straight-backed and fighting and it was only logical that people assumed the same when he died.
Because what sort of fool faces Voldemort without a wand.
All those weeks in hiding had not prepared them for the moment they were waiting for; that they should have been expecting. Tensions had risen but the fear had been dulled. Fear had become something the Potters lived with – coped with – dealt with. It was background noise. It was constant.
At least it was quick.
People assumed that because James Potter's death was quick that it was painless. But they didn't hear the start of his wife's scream seconds before he fell. They didn't know he had heard his name from her lips one last time but had not lived to hear the end. James Potter had been in pain when he died but no one liked to think of that.
At least they were together.
Perhaps the assumption that would have angered James Potter the most is the one that saved his son's life in the end. The Wizarding world had assumed Lily's death, so soon after her husband's, was inevitable, like the sequential toppling of dominoes. They never assumed Lily had had a choice to live. Her bravery was lost on them. Lily Potter, the best witch James had ever known, had fought more than her husband in the end and yet the wizarding world would not understand. Lily was their victim but they ignored her sacrifice.
People heard the tales of Lily and James Potter's death with sorrowful looks and the clutching of hearts but the assumptions they made were the cruellest. All spoke words of courage and bravery without ever knowing just how brave and courageous the sweethearts were. Because they had coped with fear for years and still managed to live. Because they married at 18 (and had a child at 20) and barely blinked an eye because they were in love. Because they faced Voldemort together three times. Because James Potter didn't have his wand the fourth time, but he faced the Dark Lord down regardless without a second's thought. And Lily Potter had a choice to live and she didn't take it, dying instead without so much as a goodbye to her son and with the knowledge that her husband was long – if long can be minutes – gone.
To assume that Lily and James Potter were afforded the luxuries of time, whether it be a quick death or a slow goodbye, was to endorse a lie.
But this was war and more importantly, the end of it; perhaps they would have remembered the Potters' deaths differently if not.
Hadn't the world had enough tragedy?
Didn't everyone deserve to be happy after eleven years?
Maybe people made their assumptions because the reality of the matter was too hard to bear. Maybe the truth was more painful than the loss of two parents; two friends. James Potter would have called them cowards and Lily would have called them human. Harry Potter, who was so much like his mother, would only think the same when, years later, he was confronted with a statue in the centre of his home town, a statue that captured all the happiness but none of the tragedy of the Potters. It would have been fairer (not that fair was ever really part of the equation) to address it – fairer to James and Lily to face the truth and the injustice of their death rather than give them a stone statue of all they had lost. But the world was made up of humans and it is too hard to think of what the young Potters sacrificed that night. It is too hard to imagine they died, afraid and defenceless, alone and without so much as a goodbye. Better to ignore; better to assume; better they have their goodbye in fiction than never at all.
James would have been furious with himself, for forgetting Moody's lesson. Constant vigilance, he said. And yet James had allowed himself to forget because it had been easier. Unable to face a lifetime of living on edge, waiting for disaster, he had embraced the feeling, allowed it to become normal. It was a cowardice he never had time to dwell on.