Lily told no one about her journey to the future. As far as the rest of the world knew, she had been gone for merely twenty minutes, most of which she had spent lying unconscious on the floor in an empty room.

Life went on, but she hardly felt like she was living. Every day was just another step closer to the end. She watched history unfold before her eyes, and she went along with it like a machine. She felt like an imposter, acting out the whole travesty with a painted smile on her face as if she couldn't see the shadow of death hanging above every person she cared about. She almost wished she could have skipped the next two years and just died off without any further delay. Anything would have been preferable to this maddening anticipation.

Months passed. In September, Lily's father died of a heart attack. She knew it would happen, and that she could not stop it. When the news of his death reached her, she was so overwhelmed by her powerlessness that she could not even cry. She just felt numb.

She barely spoke to her sister at the funeral. Petunia was all anger and grief, and she kept lashing out on Lily whenever she got near her. Lily did not even attempt to resist Petunia's efforts to push her away. According to Severus, the two sisters would barely see each other after their father's death. It broke her heart to know this. Petunia was all the family Lily had left and Lily missed her, in spite of everything. She wished they could have spent some time together and cleared up the bad blood between them before her days ran out.

But it was too late for regrets. She could not fix their relationship anymore. That was not going to be a part of her story.

She tried very hard to keep herself from thinking about Severus. It did not work. Every day, she wondered where he was and what he was doing, even though she knew that they would never meet again. When she thought about him being still alive in this world and yet being unable to reach out to him, she felt like she was running out of air to breathe. All she had now were her memories of their brief time together. She replayed them in her mind over and over again and medicated herself with fantasies of what could have been.

What could never be.

She spent a lot of time thinking on the choices she had made in her life. She had not grown up to be the person she had expected to become. In her glossy teenage dreams, she had pictured herself as a renowed healer, or as a barrister, or as a journalist, or maybe as a professor. As much as she loved Harry, being an unemployed mother and living off her rich husband had never been one of her aspirations. It was disheartening to know that her life would never amount to anything more than brief motherhood.

It wasn't like she didn't want to have a family. She had always hoped that she would have a husband and many children – eventually. She had never imagined herself as one of those girls who got married and knocked up fresh off Hogwarts. There was so much she had intended to do before all that, but she had postponed her plans because of the war when fighting Voldemort had become her priority.

Now she knew that she would never resume pursuing the life she had wanted to live. She would never become a healer, or a barrister, or a journalist, or a professor. She would not last long even as a secret agent. She would just give birth to Harry and make sure that he would survive infancy; that would be the extent of her purpose in life.

In the end, it would all come down to her being able to simply die on cue.


The bathroom door flew open, and James's messy-haired head peeked in. Startled, Lily threw her arms up and crossed them over her chest, splashing soapy bath water all over the floor.

"James, don't just barge in on me like that!" she snapped and sank deeper beneath the bubbles.

He shrugged and walked straight to the laundry basket. Lily pulled her knees closer to her chest and watched him salvage a pair of socks, which he then brought to his nose. The smell made him wince, but he sat down on the toilet seat and put them on anyway.

"If you want privacy, fix the lock on the door," he said. "What's the fuss, anyway? It's not like you've got anything there that I haven't already seen."

"Doubt that," Lily grumbled under her breath.

"What?"

"Nothing," she sighed. "And it's not really my fault that this place is falling apart. Sirius is the one who broke the door. I'm not going to clean up after you two like a maid every time you wreck something."

"Yeah, yeah. We'll get an elf," James said absent-mindedly. He was going through the laundry basket again, and she could only hope that he wasn't about to fish out a pair of underwear.

She turned her face away from him and tried to swallow her anger. Lately, she had been losing her temper with him over the smallest things. Once again, she had to tell herself to be patient with him. They would not enjoy the rest of their short lives if she kept punishing him for just being himself.

"Didn't you already take a bath this morning?" James asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"Yes. That was hours ago."

He shook his head. "I don't get your obsession with water."

She did, but it was not like she could explain him. These days, silence was often the only reply she could offer him.

She remembered how she had used to take long baths all the time when she had been living in Severus's house. The place had been so cold and drafty that she had spent hours sitting in the warm tub, devicing her grand plans and sorting out her complicated feelings for Severus. The feeling of hot water caressing her skin took her back to that dumpy little bathroom, where even the wildest idea had still seemed doable and Severus had never been far from her.

James's house wasn't cold at all. Still, she was shivering all the time, and she often found herself sinking into a soothing bath, where she could close her eyes and find some warmth in her memories.

"Lily?" he said warily, and Lily snapped backed into reality. She had drifted off again, and James had noticed. She hoped that he wasn't going to ask her whether something was wrong. She had been living in constant dread of questions she would not be able to answer since her return. So far, he hadn't said anything, but she could tell that he suspected that something was going on.

"Well, yes, you wouldn't get bathing, would you?" she said and faked a smirk. "Hygiene still seems to be a great mystery to you. Are you honestly still confused about the purpose of the laundry basket, or do you just have a massive problem with the ideology of it?"

But James wouldn't play along. The anxious look remained on his face, and he left the room without replying to her quip. Maybe he was afraid too – afraid that she would tell him why she looked so sad all the time, and that he wouldn't like the answer. Perhaps he was starting to suspect that she was about to leave him – which she wasn't, of course, but Merlin was she tempted to.

Not only did she have to look him in the eyes day after day knowing that he would die soon, but she also had to pretend that nothing had changed between them. She tried to smile at him, kiss him, and laugh with him like she had used to, but nothing seemed to help her recapture the carefree affection she had one felt for him. She was not the same Lily who had fallen for him, and her feelings had changed too.

No, that was not true. Her feelings for James were pretty much the same. She still had a fondness for him, and she reckoned she could have still been amused by him and his jokes, had the awareness of their shared fate not dragged her down all the time.

The problem was that what she had grown to feel for Severus made everything she had ever felt for James seem petty and shallow in comparison. The illusion had shattered, and now all she had was the bleak, depressing truth.

She didn't love James. She never had.

She looked back and recalled the early days of their relationship, and tried to figure out why she had mistaken her feelings for something greater. It had all started with vanity, that much she could tell. She could remember how flattered she had been by his attention, how she had reveled in how delightfully uncomplicated he had been. After her messy fight with Severus, James had felt like a much-needed vacation – like a gentle Pacific breeze after a raging tempest. Everything had been so easy with him. He had carried none of the controversial baggage Severus had been loaded with, and she never had to make an effort to maintain his interest. He had been all fun and thrills and idle comforts, and she had fully indulged herself with the luxuries and the liberties his wealth had brought her.

Lily had enjoyed the sweet life they had had together, but now she wondered if she had mistaken comfort for affection. Although she had never been after James's money, she wasn't sure whether she would have been quite as happy with him had he been penniless. Without his money, James couldn't have kept offering her the gifts and the adventures and the other distractions that kept her from stopping to think how she really felt about being with him. She felt like she had been to a wonderful party and enjoyed herself so much that she hadn't even realized that she didn't really care much for the host.

Now she was certain of something she had only vaguely acknowledged before: she had never been truly in love with James, and she couldn't imagine ever being genuinely happy with him. She was ashamed of herself, and she felt sorry for James. She was sure that his feelings for her were true. It wasn't his fault that she hadn't known what her heart really wanted.

Either way, the damage had already been done. She was doomed to live with the consequences of the choices. This was the man she was going to marry. Even if she hadn't loved him before, she would have to love him now.

Sex with James was an awkward, joyless necessity. Harry had to be conceived, so it had to be done, but it was impossible for her to relax and enjoy herself with so many hidden truths screaming inside of her. Sometimes she passed the time by counting them all when she squirmed under James's sweaty frame, faking moans of ecstasy to keep him under the impression that everything was fine – that she loved him, that she didn't love Severus, that she hadn't seen tomorrow, that this wasn't their final hour. One, two, three, four – four lovely little lies, all slithering merrily inside her mouth like worms, making everything taste rotten.

Sometimes, she thought of Severus while they were at it, and felt dirty when she did it. Sometimes she warmed herself up by thinking about his kisses when she kissed James, using the fading memories to reach the release she needed to keep herself sane. She distracted herself with orgasms, feeling like she had betrayed them all – Severus, James, and herself – when she finished.

It hadn't stopped her from getting pregnant, though.

"Yep," she had said cynically to herself on one fine morning when she had found herself emptying the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl. "The eagle has definitely landed."

In spite of everything – the infernal morning sickness included – Lily found comfort in the knowledge that she was expecting. Whenever she was so sad and lonely that she felt like she could not take it anymore, she thought about the child growing inside of her. At least her son would survive. The war would claim many, many lives, but in the end Harry would stop Voldemort, and all would be well. Right?

She knew she would have to tell James about the baby soon, but she found herself postponing the announcement week after week. Frankly, the thought telling him made her feel sick, because she could already picture how it would go down.

James would be overjoyed. Shocked, perhaps, but insanely happy anyway. He would ask her whether she was sure, and she would say yes, and then he would ask how it was possible, and then she would point out the link between unprotected sex and pregnancy, and then he would give it a minute to sink in before taking Lily into his arms and telling her how excited he was before finally asking her to be his wife.

He would tell Sirius, Remus, and Peter immediately, and then he would probably throw a party full of alcohol and fireworks. He would fall asleep that night drunk on sparkling wine and happiness, dreaming of the day he would teach his son (for he would naturally wish for a boy) how to walk, and how to talk, and how to fly a broom, and how one day he and Lily would see their little boy begin his first year at Hogwarts.

And Lily would cringe at his joy, and fight back tears of sorrow, pity, and rage, knowing that James would never walk Harry to the Hogwarts Express because he'd be long dead by then, just like Lily. Neither of them would see their son grow up, and they would only get to spend a little more than a year together as a family. Harry would grow up fatherless and motherless, and he would be forced to start fighting the war far too soon. How could she tell James and witness his reaction without starting to scream, knowing that the birth of Harry marked the beginning of a series of tragedies?

Lily stroked her curved belly, which she had hidden carefully underneath the bubbles when James had entered the room. The bump was still small, but it was definitely there. Soon, her pregnancy would become glaringly obvious to anyone who saw her, and then she would have to tell him.

This is pointless, really, she thought. I should just get this over and done with.

But she didn't. When she finally got out of the tub, she covered her body in a thick robe and went straight to the bedroom. She quickly changed into her pajamas and slipped under the covers, thinking up new excuses to turn down James's advances. Now that she was expecting, there was no need for her to sleep with him anymore.

Moments later, James entered the bedroom in his finest robes. She could smell his cologne all the way to the bed.

"You're going to bed? Already?" he asked with a frown.

"I'm really tired," she said, and she wasn't even lying; these days, she felt exhausted all the time. "I'm feeling a bit under the weather. I think I should just sleep it off. Are you going out with Sirius again?"

"No, I'm going out with you," he replied scornfully. "We were supposed to go to that party at the Ministry of Magic tonight. Remember? The Valentine's Day Ball? We talked about this the other day."

"Shit!" Lily cursed, slapping herself in the forehead. "I completely forgot."

James threw his hands up in the air in dismay. "I can't believe this!"

"Well you haven't even mentioned the whole bloody party once all day! How was I supposed to remember?"

"You're not a goldfish! I didn't expect you to simply forget that we had plans!" James groaned. "Get changed. Quickly! Sirius is ready to go, and so am I. Remus and Peter are probably already at the party."

"Can't you just go with the lads?" she said Lily. "You're just going to leave me by the punch bowl and clown around with Sirius anyway. Does it really matter whether I'm even coming with you or not?"

James scowled.

"I guess it doesn't," he said sourly.

He slammed the door shut. She turned off the lights and decided not to feel guilty for hurting James's feelings. He just didn't understand. How could he? He didn't know what the world looked like through her eyes. That party was bound to be full of dead people, and she would have not enjoyed being near them.

Death, death, death. It was all that she saw wherever she turned. Dead people walking, dead people talking, dead people smiling at her and expecting her to smile back. A dead face looked back at her in the mirror. She was like a mute Cassandra, seeing all the destruction that lay ahead and not being able to warn anyone.

She wasn't sure how long she had slept when she suddenly woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the bedroom door. She instantly knew it couldn't have been James and Sirius. They never knocked.

"Who is it?" she called out, and looked for her wand in the dark.

"It's Peter," came a frightened, shaky voice.

"Peter?" she said, and raised her eyebrows. She glanced at the clock – it was two in the morning. What was he was doing in their home in the middle of the night?

She went to the door and narrowed it warily. For some reason, she felt inclined to keep her guard up whenever she saw Peter. It was futile. He was going to betray her and James eventually, but what bad could he do in the meanwhile? With the date of her death already set, she knew she was going to survive everything until that day, and that included every encounter with Peter.

She gasped in horror when she saw the state he was in: every inch of him was covered in a combination of dust and blood, and he looked absolutely terrified. She wasn't sure whether to feel concerned or scared – was the blood his?

"Peter! What happened to you?"

"I - I was told to come here and get you," he stuttered, and his voice was heavy with fear and stifled tears. "There has been a terrible accident."