Previously in the Darklyverse: Death Eaters killed Marlene and her family. Sirius became the Potters' Secret-Keeper when they went into hiding. Snape requested a meeting with Lily, who refused.

xx

August 30th, 1981: Lily Potter

By the end of the month, they've lost not only Marlene but also Fabian, Gideon, and Eddie. Losing Eddie hits James particularly hard: he was a year below them in school, on the Quidditch team with James, and James always felt protective of him. Lily, on the other hand, can't look Dorcas in the face when she drops by the Potters' house with the news about Fabian and Gideon. Why did Lily and James get to stay safe and protected when five Death Eaters went after the Prewetts? How does Lily get to see her husband every day when Dorcas's boyfriend is gone, just like that?

"I just miss him," Dorcas admits, and Lily studies her hands as they shake while gripping her teacup. "Hell, I even miss Gid, even though he hated me."

"Gideon didn't hate you, Dorcas."

"Yes, he did. He absolutely hated me ever since I became Head Girl at Hogwarts—no, before that, since we were first years and I got Sorted into Slytherin. Gideon wasn't my friend, Lily. He never was."

"Maybe not, but he respected you. Not at first, but eventually. He never blamed you for setting us up for the confrontation that got Millie and Liz killed—if he really hated you, he would have pinned that on you in a second."

"And now I'll never have the opportunity to repay the favor somehow," says Dorcas, sighing.

"It's not worth it to think like that. Right now, we need to be focusing on the good memories of the people we've lost, not getting caught up what we regret."

"Is that what you did when Marlene died? Remembered the good parts?"

"No, I can definitively say that is not what I did, and I'm that much worse off for it," says Lily. "Marlene wouldn't have wanted me to torture myself, just like Fabian wouldn't have wanted that for you."

"Okay, then I won't just sit back and let regret consume me," says Dorcas. Lily is about to congratulate her on this when Dorcas adds, "I'm going to get to the root cause of all this. I'm going to kill Voldemort."

Lily balks. "You can't just kill Voldemort. Even if we had a way of tracking down his location, they say he's immortal, and he has a whole legion of followers who are probably surrounding him at all times to keep him safe from people like us who might go after him."

"I don't care. Fabian is dead. Gideon is dead. And it's his fault. I'll find a way to track him down, and I'll do it."

"Dorcas—"

"I have to go," she says, and she Disapparates.

With Harry in his arms, James takes a few steps forward toward where Lily is left sitting in the living room. "Clearly, she's taking it well," he says.

"I mean, I want to do the same thing for Marlene, but you can't just go after Lord Voldemort, and you and I can't even leave this house."

"Do you think she'll find a way to do it?"

"To hunt him down and corner him? Maybe. She probably won't be able to get him away from his followers, but she might get to a group with him in it. But do I think she'll find a way to kill him? No. No, I don't."

James pats Harry on the back a few times. "If Voldemort can't be beat, then what the hell are we all doing here?"

"I don't know," says Lily. "Sometimes, I really don't know."

Mary stops by a few hours later with her face all blotchy like she's been crying. "Sorry I haven't come around in a while," she says in a thick and nasally voice. "I was… you know."

"Oh, no, you're fine," Lily says. "By the way, Dorcas was over here earlier. It turns out there have been more deaths—the Prewett twins this time."

"Poor Dorcas," says Mary.

"Poor Gideon and Fabian, more like."

"Them, too. God, we've had a month, haven't we?"

"Listen, I wanted to talk to you about Marlene," says Lily.

James mutters something about giving the two of them space and leaves the room with Harry. Mary loses her composure for a moment, but she rubs a hand down her face and steels herself. "Okay."

"One of the last things she ever said to me the last time I saw her before she died—uh—she said she regretted not trying harder to keep you in a meaningful place in her life. She regretted that things worked out so that she had to pick her best friend and couldn't find a way to keep us both."

It feels weird and wrong to be saying this to Mary, given that Lily herself was the third party in Mary's complicated relationship with Marlene. She shouldn't be apologizing on Marlene's behalf for picking Lily over Mary—she's worried it's making Lily sound like she's the winner and she's lording it over Mary or something, and that's not what Lily wants, not at all. "I just thought you'd want to know that you matter a lot to her," she adds. "Well—mattered."

"God, this is unreal," Mary says, covering her nose and mouth with her hands. "Unreal. I can't believe I'm never going to see her again. Hell, I'd give anything to see her one more time, even if all we did was fight. I don't care if it's good. I just need her here."

"I know. I miss her, too."

"You didn't love her like I love her," says Mary. Lily doesn't answer—she's not sure whether or not Mary is alluding to being in love with Marlene, and she doesn't want to embarrass her by revealing that she knows if that's not what Mary's trying to say. But then Mary resolves Lily's confusion by saying, "I know she told you. What I felt for her, I mean."

"How did you—?"

"Because of course she did. That's what best friends do," Mary says bitterly.

Lily feels a rush of annoyance and shame mixed at the same time. "I never asked to replace you, you know. I never tried to stop Marlene from being close to you, not once. I made you my campaign manager because I respected you. This is exactly what Marlene was talking about—it was never supposed to be a competition. Maybe she screwed up and made it into one, but no one ever wanted it to be that."

Mary sort of deflates at that. "I know," she says. "I'm sorry. I'm just really messed up about this. I feel like I can't stop crying, you know?"

"I know," says Lily, because she feels the exact same way.

xx

Dorcas's vendetta to avenge Fabian's death does indeed end up getting her killed, but not before Benjy dies, too: Alice tells Lily that they only ever find bits of him scattered across his bedroom where Death Eaters attacked him. By mid-October, that's Rosalie, Marlene, Eddie, Gideon, Fabian, Benjy, and Dorcas—seven people dead in the span of four months. "They're going to pick us all off one by one, aren't they?" says Lily to James and Mary one night, and no one answers her, probably because no one wants to admit that she's right.

Finally, one day, Sirius comes to visit only to tell Lily, "Get James. There's something I want to talk to you both about."

So she gets James out of the bedroom and carries Harry down the stairs into the living room, where Sirius is waiting on the sofa. "I think we should recast the Fidelius Charm," he says immediately, without so much as asking them how they are.

"Recast it? But—it's working just fine."

"They're killing more and more of us as time goes on," Sirius points out. "It's only a matter of time before they go after me—probably as soon as they figure out that I'm your Secret-Keeper. They're going to torture me for information, and Lily, James—I would rather die than betray your location to Voldemort, but what happens if I do die protecting you? Then everyone who knows where you are becomes a Secret-Keeper, which means everyone in the Order—including the one who's Voldemort's mole—has the ability to give away your location to the Death Eaters. I don't want to leave that up to fate."

"Then who do we choose as the new Secret-Keeper? Surely anyone we choose would end up in the position you're in now, at such a high risk of being murdered."

"Not if we choose Wormtail," says Sirius.

"Wormy? But…"

"Think about it," says Sirius, sounding slightly manic. "He's never been the best at magic out of all of us, and he's small and slight and quiet and not confrontational. Besides, everybody knows I'm your best mate—nobody is going to assume or believe that you'd choose Wormy over me."

Lily and James look at each other, and James says, "I mean, it makes sense."

"Give us a few days to think about it," says Lily. "This is all happening a bit fast."

"A few days is fine, but if we're going to do this, we should do it as soon as possible," says Sirius. "With the Death Eaters closing in like this, it's like we're running out of time. We should be able to just transfer the charm from me onto Wormtail, and everyone who's already in on the secret will still know it, so he won't have to make the rounds and tell everyone over again."

"Give us a week or two to think about it and to talk to Wormtail," Lily says. "I'm assuming you've already talked to him? But I'll want to talk to him, too."

"Yeah, we talked," says Sirius. "He's on board. I'm sure he'd be happy to talk with you both about it first, though."

So she sends Peter an owl, and he stops by on Saturday, looking more worried than normal. "Relax, Wormtail," says James as he claps Peter on the back in greeting. "We don't have to go through with this if you don't want to, you know."

"No, I—I can do it. I should do it. It's the best way to protect you and Lily, and we all know it."

"Nobody will even knows it's you," says James. "We won't tell a soul. The whole rest of the world can think it's Sirius, and nobody will come after you."

"Yeah, but that's not why I'm worried."

"Then why are you worried?" says Lily gently.

Peter looks from James to Lily back to James again, his mouth making an anxious "O" shape. "I'm not. I mean, not about this specifically. I'm just—they're picking us apart one by one, and I don't want to know who it's going to happen to next."

"Anyone who's worried can go into hiding just like we are," Lily says. "That is, if you don't mind playing double duty as Secret-Keeper a few times over."

"Let's just start with you first," says Peter faintly.

"All right. Is that a plan, then?"

"Yeah, it's a plan."

"Great," says James. "Let's all get together, say, in about a week? Maybe Monday after next? It'll be Halloween, but it's not like we'll be taking Harry out trick-or-treating."

"Saturday sounds good," Peter says, nodding a few times as if to convince himself.

"Hey. Wormy," says Lily. Peter stops and looks back at her with fearful, round eyes. "It's going to be okay. This war can't go on forever."

"It won't," says Peter, and he seems to be steeling himself for something. "I won't let it."

xx

Doc stops by later in the week. Ever since Marlene and the McKinnons' deaths, he's looked like a hollowed-out version of himself the couple of times that he's come by the Potters' cottage to visit. "I told the Order," he says now, accepting the strong cup of tea that Lily makes for him. "That Marlene was my daughter. I couldn't take one more person telling me they're sorry for my loss without understanding that… I mean, she was my child. I didn't raise her, but I loved her. I loved her more than I ever have or will love anyone in this life. And it's not like she has a reputation to maintain anymore, so…"

"I think she would have been okay with you letting the secret out," says Lily, grabbing his free hand and squeezing. "She loved you, too, you know. I know she absolutely loved these last few years living with you. I know it doesn't make up for lost time, but it meant so much to her."

"It meant a lot to me, too," says Doc. "Obviously. I just… parents aren't supposed to lose their children. It's supposed to be the other way around."

"It's not fair."

"And she lost the whole rest of her family. I hope she didn't have to watch them die. I hope they killed her before she could see what would happen to them."

"We can't bring her back. We can't bring any of the McKinnons, any of the Order, back. I know it feels wrong, but we have to go on living."

Doc smiles, though his eyes are sad. "Speaking of going on with life, have you at all reconsidered Snape's request to meet with you? I heard him mention it again to Dumbledore at our last meeting."

Lily rolls her eyes. "The answer is always going to be no. He's obviously only joined our side because he wants to keep me alive, not because he sees anything wrong with the Dark Arts or being a Death Eater. I don't care how many times he apologizes. There's something terribly wrong with him if the only thing keeping him light is some sort of twisted loyalty to the woman he wants to sleep with."

"Lily, you're not just—"

"That's really what it's all about, though, isn't it? He doesn't just want me to be safe. He wants to get something out of me. If it were about keeping me safe, he wouldn't keep asking Dumbledore for permission to talk to me; he'd accept my wishes that he stay away from me and, well, he'd stay away."

"For what it's worth, he doesn't seem self-serving to me. I've seen evil, and it's not that man."

"Maybe not when he's sitting in Order meetings reporting on Death Eater activity in the roundabout hopes of saving my life, but what about all those years he was one of them, killing and torturing Muggle-borns and Muggles for fun? What about the man who fought back against James and Sirius when they bullied him by using spells that drew blood?"

"In his defense, James and Sirius were bullying him, weren't they? Maybe Snape just became—a product of the expectations everybody else placed on him."

"What about the expectations I had for him? That he was a good kid who would grow up to be a good man? Someone who would protect the defenseless and make the right choices in life? He sure as hell didn't grow into those, that's for sure."

Doc puts up his hands. "I'm not here to pick a fight over this, Lils. I just thought you ought to know he still cares enough to ask, that's all."

But it bothers her all through the rest of the night and the following day, enough so that James asks her what's wrong when they put Harry down for his afternoon nap. "It's nothing," she says, smiling. "I don't want you to worry."

After all, there's not a thing that Lily feels she ought to tell James but hasn't. If she dies tomorrow, she'll die secure in the knowledge that James knows her and loves her for all of it, even the parts of her that still get conflicted about Severus, whatever she may have said to Doc about it. James knows that Lily still has love somewhere for an oily traitor of a man who has probably killed Muggles and Muggle-borns for sport, and he never tries to stop her or take it away from her, and for that, Lily will always love him and, more than that, choose him.

That's what relationships are all about, isn't it? Not just the love, but the choices we make because of it—or in spite of it.

xx

A/N: Replying to you here, KatnissJeanPrior, since I can't respond directly to guest reviews! (Thank you so much for your support :3) I've written up to and including Chapter 187 as of today, and I'm still writing; yesterday's chapter was just an extra bonus because it originally didn't exist until I added it real quick and shifted all the subsequent chapter numbers by 1. I'm not entirely sure how long this fic is going to go-definitely over 200 chapters, but I don't know how much over. (It spins off into an AU starting at Chapter 137.)