The autopsy said Vernon Dursley had died of a heart attack, despite his relatively young age. Most who knew him talked about unhealthy life style and the mix of bad temper and high blood pressure. Lily Potter, when she saw the obituary in the Little Whinging Bugle, wasn't so sure. She'd seen deaths like that before, deaths that didn't leave a mark a single mark behind them.

James had set out his invisibility cloak to send to Dumbledore, who'd asked to examine it. Lily picked it up and apparated. The Bugle was only a weekly paper had taken a few days to reach Godric's Hollow. When she arrived at St. Photini's in Little Whinging, the funeral was already underway. Lily waited till it was done and the crowds had slipped away before stepping out of the cloak and approaching her sister. Petunia's lips had pursed together and her arms tightened around the infant dozing in her arms when she saw Lily. But, there were no hysterics.

"I don't believe it was a heart attack," Lily said quietly.

"I didn't either," Petunia said, and that was really the end of the debate. There were a few more things to be said, and Lily showed her a slip of paper written out in Peter's very bad handwriting, The Potters are hiding in Potter Cottage. Then, she took them away.

James didn't want her there, but knew better than to argue. "She can stay for now," he conceded grudgingly. "We'll work something out with Dumbledore."

But, Dumbledore was busy. Days, even weeks could go by when they heard nothing from him. All Lily could do was send him an owl and hope for the best. As they sometimes said in the Order, important wasn't the same as urgent. Urgent things were happening everywhere these days. Two Muggles hiding in what might be the safest house in Britain might be important, especially to Lily, but they could wait.

Lily let Petunia and Dudley have Harry's room, setting up an extra bed. James, always good at transfiguration, changed an old chair into another crib. He was irritated when Lily insist they use the one he'd made for their son, but she knew Petunia would feel better knowing her son was in a "normal" crib.

Petunia simply nodded and accepted the arrangement. There was a tired emptiness in her eyes Lily had seen in far too many faces lately, but she still hadn't learned what to say to that broken silence. All she could do was show her sister to the room and help her settle Dudley in his crib. Then, she went downstairs with Harry.

She looked on the mantel and saw the spot where the vase Petunia had given her had stood till Harry broke it. Lily had put the pieces in a box, along with a few other odds and ends. She should have thrown it out—it was a hideous vase—but for some reason, maybe because Petunia had given it to her, she had put it away, promising to fix it someday instead. Lily managed all right with the simplest mending spells—a torn sleeve here or a frayed hem there—but the more complicated ones had a tendency of getting away from her. Melding one piece of ceramic to another, blending paint and glaze was more complicated than telling a needle to patch up a hole. As for James, he was much better at transfiguration but he was also addicted to practical jokes, especially when they involved people he didn't like. She could just imagine what he would have done if she asked him to put it back together.

Suddenly, it seemed very important that the vase be back where it belonged on the mantel, that her sister should get up the next day and see her gift where it belonged, cracked but pieced back together where everyone could see it. She took Harry with her, partly because he was sleepy and settling down in her arms, partly because, since she'd seen Vernon's coffin lowered into the ground, she'd been reluctant to let him go too far from her.

She'd found the box and was looking around for some glue when she heard the door crash open upstairs. Harry started in her arms, screwing up his face in the beginnings of an angry cry. Lily pulled out her wand and quickly cast a silencing charm over both of them.

It was what she would always remember. Her first instinct had been to hide, to keep still. She heard James' shouts suddenly silenced. She stood there in the basement, hand tight around her wand, waiting for the enemy, waiting to fight.

She didn't go upstairs. She didn't charge to the rescue. How could she? Dumbledore had warned her in no uncertain terms. Voldemort, he'd told her, would try to kill Harry. He hadn't told her why—couldn't tell her, so he said. But, it was true. She didn't need to be a legilimens to see the truth of it in his eyes. Voldemort had come for one thing, and, even when she heard the sudden silence that meant her husband was dead, Lily Potter could only stand there, frozen in the dark, waiting for what she knew would come next.

It wasn't till she heard new screams that she realized how wrong she was.

She hadn't known, she hadn't thought. Or had she? That was the question she would ask herself over and over again in the following years. Had she known? Had some corner of her mind realized the truth and recognized the trade she was making?

The screaming stopped as quickly as it had begun, and the world exploded around her.

X

They found Petunia's body among the rubble. Dudley's forehead was bleeding, but he was alive.

The Dark Lord, in an error Lily was sure he would have cursed on principle even without the disastrous result, had mistaken a Muggle for a witch.

A simple, stupid mix-up? Maybe. James had been killed going up the stairs. Had he forgotten she was in the basement? Or . . . had he been trying to lead him away? To give her and Harry a chance?

Had he thought about Petunia and Dudley upstairs in Harry's room?

Voldemort, stepping around James' corpse, had gone to where he expected his target to be. Once he was there. . . . The Evans sisters looked alike, everyone had always told them that growing up. Voldemort hadn't known them. Maybe he'd never even seen a picture of Lily. She didn't know. He'd found a woman and a child where he expected them to be. The room would have been dark. If the Dark Lord couldn't be bothered to conjure a light, maybe, impossible as it seemed, that was all there was to it.

James hadn't had his wand. Controlled wandless magic was hard outside the simplest spells. But, even children managed outbursts of uncontrolled magic, magic that generally followed innate talents and the burning desires of their hearts. That's how Lily had learned how to fly. And James had always been good at transfiguration.

If James had cast a final spell, just some minor changes to Petunia's appearance or a touch of illusion that traded gold hair for red and put a green cast on blue eyes, that was all it would have taken.

It was a horrible thing to think, horrible even to imagine, that James had spent his last moments making sure her sister died in her place. Lily tried to push it away, to blank it out of her mind as if it had never been, but it kept creeping back, along with the suspicion that she had chosen to stay hidden while her sister died.

They buried her alongside her husband. Lily, who had always told herself she didn't care about neighbors the way Petunia did, heard the whispers as she sat through the service (Voldemort was gone, there was no reason for her not to attend openly), how sudden her sister's death was, how she couldn't live after her husband's death even though she had a child who needed her. Her hands knotted into fists, and she said nothing.

The magic of a mother's love, that was how Dumbledore (who could be terribly trite sometimes) explained Dudley's survival. Voldemort had offered to spare Petunia if she would just step aside.

The gash healed into a lightning shaped scar. Somehow, everyone in the wizarding world seemed to know about it, though Lily had tried to give the poor boy some privacy. He kept crying, first for his mother, then for his father. Unlike the Dark Lord, Dudley never confused Lily with them.

She went back to the house at Little Whinging. At first, she'd only meant to stay there a day or so, however long it took to start boxing things up and putting them away (the pieces of her sister's life, like a broken vase, trying to put them back together now it was too late). But, Dudley slept better in his own bed and, hearing Lily coming to check on him, would usually only give a hopeful, "Mum?" before settling down to sleep again.

And that was the story, the story of Lily and Harry and a boy who lived. And the story of the ones who didn't. If the ending is ragged and leaves questions unanswered, that is what death does. Things that are broken are left unmended. The people on one side can only go on with the pieces that are left.

X

Note: This story started when someone joked about what would have happened if Voldemort somehow mistook Dudley for Harry. I swear, I started this trying to write a humorous story.