(Author Notes revised (minor grammatical & spelling corrections), 7th January, 2015.)
Further Disclaimer: For the record, Star Trek, to the original series of which there is a passing reference in a cultural context in this story, is not something that I own either.
Note: The following is something I've been working on every now and then during the UK summer of 2014. It's slightly silly, but there are character deaths. The timeline of the universe in which this piece is set has largely followed canon, up until the opening moments, but that's not to say that it has in other places... This story is rated 'M' to be on the safe side, on account of language and implied violence.
It was the thirty-first of October, 1981, and an unnatural winter had come to the village of Godric's Hollow. Out in the streets, where the drifting snow lay deep and crisp and even, a dark lord battled heroically against the elements as he struggled to keep an appointment with destiny.
Inside, in a soaring fortress of ice-and-crystal (secreted in a pocket dimension within another building under a none-too-secure fidelius charm), Lily Potter dangled in chains from the wall in a circular tower chamber close to the top of said fortress. The room was lit by weird blue-white 'light globes', and Lily Potter had absolutely no idea what had happened. One minute it had been a normal quiet evening at home with James and Harry, in hiding from a psychopathic nutcase, and the next a bloody blizzard filled their front room and she lost consciousness and then had somehow 'come to', here…
James was currently completely encased in a large block of ice, an expression that was a mixture of surprise and 'oh shit' frozen on his face as he reached for a wand which of course wasn't there. He was in some sort of magical stasis – at least Lily dearly hoped her husband was in some form of magical stasis.
Harry was very quiet in an icy crib pushed up against the wall.
Lily's current 'hostess' was currently standing in front of Lily, with silver-white hair and dressed in silver-white and grey furs of a distinctly 'lordly' cut. She had a wand which looked like it was made of ice and silver, at least two feet long, in her hands, and a thoughtful expression on her face. A crown of silver and diamonds was upon her head; and the only note of fire or of colour about her other than the lustre of the jewels of her diadem was the cold green of the eyes currently regarding Lily. It was difficult to determine her age, beyond that she was an adult woman who clearly wasn't old-and-wrinkly.
"Who are you?" Lily asked yet again. The previous six times she'd asked the question had elicited no response, but she was stubbornly persisting in the hope of eventually provoking a reply from the other.
The other blinked, and finally seemed to rise up from whatever thoughts in which she had been submerged, and deigned to answer this time.
"We both know that – or perhaps being with Potter has rotted your brain? I know that Gryffindor is traditionally the house of those who value might, but there isn't any reason why intellect has to be discarded altogether in the pursuit of it."
Which didn't make much sense to Lily – although it gave her a cold sense of fear, nonetheless, for a moment, for some reason.
"You didn't…" Lily began.
"I answered your question. You're just too afraid to know the answer right now. I'm curious. Did Trelawney ever make the prophecy in this world? 'Neither can live whilst the other survives?'"
Lily swallowed and tried not to think about that, in case this crazy woman was capable of legilimency but didn't know all of the prophecy.
"Hmm. Curious. From your reaction she apparently did – and you know of it – and yet here you are, living in mediocrity." the woman continued, and peered closely at Lily to examine her as if she were something slightly unusual. "Perhaps she made it only recently here, and you haven't yet had time to figure it out. She made it in my fifth year, in the middle of Hogsmeade, a couple of days before the exam for the defence OWL, and nobody could work out what it meant. Later – much later, naturally, by the point that it was too late to do anything about it – I realised it had applied to me. And to Severus. I've been looking about in my spare time, here and there, ever since. As you're living in mediocrity, I'm hopeful that possibly that means that you're the one due to die here, and that for once I've found a universe where Severus lives."
"If you're talking about Severus Snape, he's still alive, yeah. Joined the Death Eaters, most likely, just out of Hogwarts."
"If you knew what he was capable of, you would not use that tone." the other woman hissed, anger kindling in her eyes for a moment. "He died, for me, ungrateful witch that I was, on Christmas Eve, 1977, fighting seven Slytherins. That was the night that everything changed."
"You're… You're Lily Potter?" Lily stammered. The only thing which she could think of was that this was some counterpart to herself from some other reality, like something out of one of those weird old Star Trek episodes.
"Evans." the other corrected, the flicker of anger cooling over. "Slayer of Voldemort, Champion of the North Wind, and Empress of Winter… and you…" She fixed Lily with a particularly penetrating gazee. "You're an embarrassment, who's let friends and family die, locked up in your own precious little snow-globe fantasy world with James Potter. A Gryffindor too scared to take the steps necessary to defeat a dark lord, and scorning, by the sound of it, a man who would throw himself in front of an unforgiveable curse to spare you. You've set up home with a boy who's all bravado and braggadocio, and – to judge by the state of unpreparedness I caught you in earlier this evening – one who can't even be bothered to keep his wand on him when you're in hiding from a dangerous enemy. Severus would never be caught like that without a wand – not with a Lily of his universe in danger. I ought to kill your idiot husband in front of you, but that would be doing you a favour you don't deserve."
"Why are you here?" Lily asked.
"Apparently, tonight something very important is going to happen here, involving you. I'm hoping, very much, that it will involve you dying, at which point I can deal with this reality's version of Voldemort, and then claim Severus as my prize. 'Neither can live whilst the other survives', you see. Severus can't rise to true greatness whilst Lily lives any more than Lily can rise to true greatness whilst Severus does. We're tied together by destiny."
"Uh, I don't think our prophecy means that." Lily began. "Sybill Trelawney only gave it a year or so ago and…"
"Fool!" once more the other's eyes momentarily kindled in ire. "I have searched dimension after dimension, and though the other words have always varied, and the date that that drunken excuse for a seer has given it at has sometimes been early or over-late, 'neither can live whilst the other survives' has always been at the heart of it. The prophecy has Lily and Severus at its heart, and depends upon the death of the one of us for the other to do the things necessary to overthrow a dark lord. And so far, in every universe I have been in, it has been Severus who died."
Lily considered her options: They didn't look too good right now. She was chained in some tower of some alternate universe crazy bad-girl version of herself, if she understood correctly, said alternate universe counterpart being one who was apparently obsessed with Severus Snape. And on the subject of being chained here…
"So what am I doing here?" she rattled her chains defiantly. "What's the point of this? Why don't you just do something to me?"
"Because Severus Snape here loves you." the other sounded more annoyed now than cross. "Severus always loves the Lily of his dimension, even when Lily is too distracted or silly to notice. And if 'I' do anything to you – such as kill you – my chances of this dimension's version of Severus liking me, once you're dead, just took a steep nose-dive. You're currently my guest because a Lily as seemingly as mediocre as you is a curiosity by Lily standards, and I wanted to double-check that it wasn't some superhumanly Slytherin façade. Well, that and I have to make my mind up what to do about you if you are actually a nonentity and with that idiot that you married and the spawn which he's apparently got upon you. You're several steps up from the usual mates that frolic around contributing to the Potter gene pool. I suppose you must be the reason James Potter hasn't signed up with the Knights of Walpurgis or whatever Voldemort calls his minions here."
"James, a Death Eater?" Lily said in disbelief.
"He's a pure-blood, and if he's anything like most of the James Potters I've come across" she sounded bored now "he and a gang – usually including a werewolf, Peter Pettigrew, and some other pure-blood who's notionally rebelling against their family – have spent seven years at Hogwarts finding increasingly sadistic ways to torture other students, under the guise of 'pranking'. Once he leaves Hogwarts, James Potter is a prime Knights recruit target. And he almost inevitably signs up at once when they come calling, quite often delivering the sword of Gryffindor and the other members of his Hogwarts gang as members to the Knights, too. The werewolf's a dark creature anyway and sick of the prejudice against him or her, the pure-blood follows James' lead, and Peter Pettigrew… well what more need you say about a man whose animagus form is usually some sort of scavenging bird or rodent that lives off the detritus of society?"
Lily didn't want to believe it possible that James' friends could in other dimensions sign up with Voldemort, and was certain that they wouldn't ever betray James and Lily in the here-and-now. Well not… not Sirius, anyway. Lily gnawed her lip uncertainly, uncomfortably aware that this other Lily might have a good point about Remus or even Peter, now that she mentioned it. Maybe one of them might be less than perfect, but surely not both?
From somewhere an inhuman cry of rage and frustration reverberated around the tower room, and Lily's other self smiled to herself – a sensation that Lily found somewhat chilling.
"And there sounds the hunting cry of a really rather frustrated specimen of the species of wizard dark lord ridiculens." the other mused. "I imagine that out there he's tearing the place where you were staying apart, right now, looking for you. You know that gives me a rather interesting idea for what to do with you all…"
She made her left hand into a fist, and drove it into Lily's stomach, causing Lily to whuff out a steaming breath of pain and surprise into the frigid air, or at least as much of a breath as her whole dangling-in-chains situation allowed. The next moment, the other's wand was tracing idly through the air around the exhaled breath, doing something involving trapping and converting it to sparkling ice motes that hung there dancing in the air. In between whatever-she-was-doing, she took a couple of steps back, and casually diverted a wand-flick in Lily's direction, which caused her restraints to dematerialise, resulting in Lily toppling forward to sprawl on the floor. Lily raised herself to her hands and knees, and glared at the other's fur-trimmed boots, a short way out of reach, trying to recover and get some proper feeling back into her arms. Occasionally, the other was actually muttering some phrase or incantation, which Lily couldn't quite catch, around the ever-expanding cloud of dancing ice crystals.
Lily looked up, across at Harry's crib, gauging the distance, and gathering the strength to maybe get up, and trying to work out what the other was up to or would do if Lily made a sprint for Harry – well as much of a sprint as she could make on this treacherous, icy, floor.
Or she could just make a lunge and grab for the other's ankle, to try and pull her off balance…
A flick of the other's wand, and Lily was dragged abruptly to her feet – it felt as if she was being pushed and buffeted and dragged by the very air around her. Her right arm jerked out, and her hand was dragged open, and then something icy cold with an awful freezing burning sensation that made her screw her eyes shut in pain was slapped into the palm before her fingers were forced shut over it.
After a few moments, she blinked away the stinging tears and opened her eyes to find she was equipped with what looked like a wand of ice, though not one as long nor as fancy-looking as the other held.
"You want to duel me?" Lily whispered, trying to ignore the just-about-tolerable dull ache in her right hand and to look the other 'her' in her mirthless eyes.
"No. I expect you to do what you would have done otherwise, this night, and fight for your own life and your family. I don't have time to find whatever you use as a wand out there" she vaguely waved out a tower window, with her off-hand, "so I've equipped you with something I might use in a pinch; with a core of your own breath in it, it ought to serve you well enough. Have fun."
And then there was a swirling sensation and Lily was somewhere else.
Lily was back in the middle of the snow-choked front-room of the house-in Godric's Hollow – only now it looked like a troll had rampaged through it recently, smashing and burning things. There was a soft pop and Harry in the icy crib was added in one corner, and James, free of the ice cube, standing between Lily and the doorway to the hall.
There was a sound of something blowing up elsewhere in the house, and the ceiling of the front-room shook.
Voldemort, Lily realised. Voldemort or at least one of his followers was in the house. The fidelius had, for whatever reason, failed.
Lily glanced at the fireplace, with the secure floo connection to Hogwarts, but the fireplace was cracked and smashed; the fire out; the floo powder smeared unusable across the snow and wreckage on the floor.
With the floo out, and all the anti-apparition and counter portkey effects which had been installed on the house for their own protection, the only way out right now was probably out the front or back door.
Maybe they could sneak out whilst whoever it was was… busy… upstairs.
Lily desperately tried to shush James with a finger of her free hand to her lips, whilst trying to think of a stealth spell. No point to invisibility, with the snow as a giveaway to movement, but anything quietening…
"Lily: What's going on?" James asked, looking around and ignoring her frantic attempts to signal for him to be quiet. "What happened to us, with that blizzard? Why are you holding a strange wand? Is that…"
He finally cut himself off, eyes widening as the devastation in the room at last registered, a moment before there came an ominous creak on the stair-tread; whoever it was who had been upstairs had evidently overheard James, and realised that he or she had company.
Lily thought that instead of just shushing him, she should have stunned James, or snapped off a wordless silence charm straight away. James was starting to panic right now, his mouth opening and closing and his eyes frantic as the arithmetic of the situation rapidly summed up to an obvious crisis in his head. He started to turn to the door. Just a few more seconds, and he'd pull himself together enough to be able to do something…
"Well, well, wherever they've been hiding, the little mice have returned."
The jerk of the door to the hallway on its hinges presaged the arrival of Lord Voldemort, his eyes gleaming with cruelty. "Avada Kedavra."
James fell, an expression of desperation and horror on his face, as Lily stood there, momentarily paralysed in her turn by the overwhelming catastrophe of the seemingly inevitably unfolding situation.
"And now, my dear, I have no interest in slaying a mere mudblood tonight…" Lord Voldemort began, seeming to discount her presence as trivial as his eyes roved… and then fixed hungrily upon the crib holding Harry.
With a scream of elemental fury and of despair, Lily raised the unfamiliar wand and cut loose.
The wand actually worked better for Lily once she stopped simply trying to cast spells that she actually knew with it, and simply poured her heart and soul into trying to cut down the murderer of all-too-many of her friends – and now even of her husband – who stood before her. It dragged itself in unfamiliar patterns through the air, as Lily fought desperately to kill the monster that threatened her and her son. This freezing cold shaft of ice certainly surpassed in utility in this crisis, she suspected, her own willow wand – lying useless in the kitchen, unless something had happened to it since dinner-time.
In the end, though, she was as much surprised as Voldemort was, when the relentless barrage pouring out of her overwhelmed his defences and his pathetic attempts to counter-attack, and put him down, his scarlet blood splattering the snow as her brutal rain of spells tore him apart.
And then, as she stood over his corpse, her fury exhausted, the treacherous words of her other self of a short while earlier trickled back to her, echoing in her memory…
"…You're an embarrassment, who's let friends and family die… A Gryffindor too scared to take the steps necessary to defeat a dark lord…"
Could she have stopped Voldemort, sooner, if she'd made an effort? Could Lily Potter, if she'd made an effort, have really shortened this war?
She shivered, and it was not just with the cold, or with the weariness seeping through her.
Then she remembered her son and was about to go and check on Harry, who had apparently somehow slept through the whole fight (was the crib charmed against disturbances?) when a voice cut in:
"It's easy, isn't it? Putting Voldemort down when he's not expecting or ready for someone like us? He has difficulty understanding the nature or dangers of raw passion. 'Power he knows not', perhaps…"
Lily turned slowly around to find her other self had appeared from somewhere; an inscrutable expression on her face, she plucked a snow-globe of a white castle up off the mantelpiece, where it had somehow avoided any ill-effects from Voldemort's earlier destructive efforts wreaked upon the room, and dropped it into a pocket of her queenly robes.
Lily was too exhausted, physically and emotionally, to initially respond. The events of the past quarter of an hour or so had abruptly smashed the equilibrium of her life.
"Well, now that that's all settled, I shall go and collect Severus and be on my way." the other her continued. "I've carried out a couple of basic divinations and established that he's currently still alive and well in this universe. Maybe 'neither can live whilst the other survives' is supposed to count for something different here…"
"Oh no you don't." Lily said, hauling herself together sufficiently to determinedly stare her counterpart in the eyes. "Not so fast. I'm down one 'idiot husband', as you called him, which puts me back in the 'unattached and footloose' category in the mating game." She hated herself for doing this, but she hated her other self considerably more, right now. "Since you make out that Severus is such a good catch, I think that I might angle for him, or at least the version that I know."
"You wouldn't." the other stared at her in something approaching disbelief.
"I'm you. You just let someone I cared about snuff it, and I'll bet you hung around somewhere to watch me fight desperately for my own and my child's life without so much as twitching a finger to intervene. If our positions were reversed, you'd do exactly the same."
"You don't even care about him. You'd do this to spite yourself?"
"Yep." Lily grinned, the grin of a mad-woman.
"I see." The other 'her' narrowed her eyes in a fashion which Lily didn't at all like. "Of course, to spite me you might be bluffing. Swear by the seven leaves of The Tome of the Arctic Night and by the threefold veils of the aurora borealis that you intend to take Severus Snape, as you know him, as your husband and to your bed – to know him intimately as a lover. Swear it, if you wish to convince me, or… I will not kill you, but there is something you have not yet lost, that I will take from you."
Crap. Of course, she'd threaten Harry. Lily should have realised she'd have thought of that, although it seemed that the other 'her' was apparently genuinely unable to currently bring herself to kill herself. Lily would have done so the other way around like a shot, if she could, but she suspected that she was seriously outclassed in the whole magic department by her counterpart self, and that any spell fight would go rather rapidly and humiliatingly to the other. And best not to start another spell fight with Harry in the room.
So instead she broadened her grin, and swore exactly as the other had outlined, enjoying watching the disbelief in the other's eyes as she did so. She didn't know if all those fancy words would be binding on her, but maybe they wouldn't, and even if they were, right now she'd do all that stuff simply to spite herself.
"I see." the other said when Lily was done. "We are more alike than I thought." And she locked eyes with her for just a moment. "At least, the knowledge that somewhere there is a me, with a Severus, will console me in my search. Keep the wand. You'll need it. Voldemort almost invariably has horcruxes." And then, just like that, she was gone, leaving Lily alone in the room with the corpses of the two men, and her living son, and the unpleasant sensation of burning cold ice in her hand; with the prospect of Severus Snape at some point in the future, and a burning question as to what, exactly, was a 'horcrux'?
Author Notes:
'Empress-of-Winter' Lily is somewhat unhinged, on account of some of the things that she's done for power, and the countless frustrations that she's had to date, trying to find a universe where there's a surviving adult Severus. Whatever it is that she's doing to 'hop' into universes with a Severus she hopes she can abduct (once Voldemort's gone) she keeps landing in ones where he's generally expired (quite often on account of her, as in her own 'home' universe). Severus Snape is something of an obsession of hers. Voldemort hunting (and extermination) is more of a hobby and point-of-principle (not that the counterpart selves she usually runs into actually need much assistance on the whole Voldemort-snuffing front).
The snowstorm in Godric's Hollow (heavy snow in October is a bit early for the west country of the UK) is the fault of Empress-of-Winter Lily. At the time of writing of these notes in September, 2014, I'm in two minds whether it was intentionally created by her, to make herself feel more at home (or possibly a known side-effect of whatever magic she uses to hop universes), or whether she's become something of a supernatural entity, to the extent that she simply impacts whatever environment that she's in by bringing about winter conditions there, unless she makes a conscious effort not to do so.
Empress-of-Winter Lily breezed in on James and Lily Potter at a point when neither had a wand on their persons; given that Voldemort's been held up by the snow, it's conceivable that she arrived at about the time in canon that Voldemort similarly interrupted completely wandless Potters. The giant ice-cube trapping James is some form of stasis/suspended animation containment. Empress-of-Winter Lily's uninterested in holding any kind of conversations with him – he's James Potter after all, and the James Potters that she generally encounters have very little to recommend themselves to her.
Empress-of-Winter Lily's knowledge of Lily Potter is partly assumed from encounters in other universes, partly determined by a few basic divination techniques (which she's mastered) beforehand, partly uncovered during conversation (by means including legilimency) and partly simply guessed (not always completely correctly in this latter case).
In Empress-of-Winter Lily's universe, Sybill Trelawney wasn't a teacher at Hogwarts (or had even interviewed for the position) when she delivered that universe's prophecy about Voldemort's defeat.
My information at the time of writing these notes (in September, 2014) on the protections on the canon Potters' hiding place in Godric's Hollow is somewhat sketchy, beyond the usage of the fidelius charm. For this universe I've assumed a fidelius plus some anti-portkey and anti-apparition measures. I've also assumed a floo-connection in the front-room to (and only to) a location at Hogwarts for the convenience of communication with and access to Albus Dumbledore. (Had Voldemort's raid of canon, as narrated in the 'Bathilda's Secret' chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, taken place against the Potters in these circumstances, the floo would have been useless between the complete surprise of Voldemort's attack allowing James no time to use it and Lily and Harry being out of position to gain any benefit from it, being upstairs.)
'The Tome of the Arctic Night' and 'threefold veils of the aurora borealis' are the most magically binding things, at least in her experience, that Empress-of-Winter Lily can think of to swear something by. As far as I know, they are not Harry Potter canon, as neither for that matter are the roles/titles of 'Empress of Winter' nor 'Champion of the North Wind'.
Regarding Lily Potter's attitude to Severus Snape at the end, there's rather more of dog-in-a-manger and spite to it than any positive feelings. She's just lost one of the loves of her life, James, she blames her other 'self' for it, for not doing more (utterly discounting in the emotional turmoil of James' death and the fight with Voldemort the wand she was handed), and it's basically a case of 'if I can't have James then you're not going to have Severus, or not this one, if I have any say in the matter'. This story is a one-shot, and I don't know if, in the wreckage of the months which follow, this universe's Lily Potter would actually derive any happiness from the oaths which the other had her swear to by threatening Harry. The tip about horcruxes, coming this soon after his 'demise' is almost certainly sufficient to guarantee that the version of Voldemort appearing in this story has had it, however, likely in the next half dozen years and before he gets anywhere close to a successful attempt to 'come back'.