When Lily opens her eyes, she is still standing in the clearing where they Apparated. But before her, in the tall grass and underbrush leading up to the semicircle of trees, stands a door that was not there a moment ago. It is soft and indistinct and so familiar, the outline trembling in time with the ring in her hands, carving a sliver of tree-lined reality away in its stead just for her.
The door is ajar, and when she steps toward it, the brush parts before her like a crowd of onlookers. She reaches for the doorknob and the door swings open of its own will to welcome her in. It's the nursery-her nursery-she painted the walls this color, picked out the crib, the mobile, the blanket, her stomach huge and James' hand in her own.
The nursery isn't empty. It's so full she might burst.
His back is to her. She's almost glad of it, that she can take him in partially before seeing his face, before everything that comes along with seeing his face might give her. The back of his neck is dark with sun and his hair is a mess, half-flattened and half sticking straight up, as if he's just woken from a nap. He's putting the baby down, making soft shushing sounds and gently rocking him back and forth in his arms. He was always better at that than her, always willing to share the burden of parenthood, always a good father, a good man, better than she deserved-
"James?"
He turns, smiling. "I've almost got him down," he murmurs over Harry's mess of black hair. "I'm so glad you've come."
A rope is coming unknotted in her chest, the cord that was supporting the terrible weight of the anchor she has been lashed to, but the feeling of rising from that weight might kill her too. "James, you're-"
"Dead, I know. No reason not to be here for you, though. You've been absolutely brilliant." He looks down, freeing a finger to adjust his glasses, and then lowers the infant into the crib.
The Stone digs in to the skin of her unscarred hand, and she steps closer. Lily can't tear her eyes away from the sleeping child. He'd be four now, but he isn't. He's still the same toddler he was when he died. His hands are tiny, chubby fists. Her blackened hand clutches the rail of the cradle so hard it trembles. She lets go for fear of waking him. She shakes her head, trying hard to hold it all back, to keep it all in. If she speaks, it'll all come pouring out.
"You don't have to feel guilty, you know. About any of it." James comes around behind her and gently, god, gentle as he always was, with his hands entirely unlike the hands she has become accustomed to, sliding around her waist. His lips press to the back of her neck. He murmurs against her hair, "You did what you had to do to survive, Lily. You've been so brave. You've fought so hard."
She tries to choke back the first sob, but it only makes the second shake her harder. Her face is wet and the tears drip from her chin into the crib, next to the sleeping child. "I didn't have to love Severus. I should have loved you, only you and-and Harry."
His hand-unscarred, beautiful, deft and gentle and gone-wraps gently around her broken and blackened one. "There's nothing to forgive. We're gone. We've been gone." He steps beside her, next to the crib, so he can watch her face. "You can stay, if you want. Let someone else finish it." He runs his thumb across the charred knuckles as if it's the hand he remembers. Perhaps it still is, somewhere beneath the ash.
"Do you want me to stay?" she whispers.
"We can't want anything," he murmurs, brushing her hair back from her shoulder. "What do you want?"
The question is a spiralling void, and she grips James' hand so fiercely she's afraid she might hurt him. But she can't. He's dead. And that's what she needs to know, more than anything.
"I still want to finish it. I still want to save everyone, to save-to save Severus. Even after everything, I still-" she chokes, turning her face away. "You must hate me for it."
"Lily," he chides, half a laugh in his voice under the whisper. "I couldn't. Never."
The tiny mobile above Harry's crib begins to rotate, gently, tiny broomsticks and snitches and stars above him. It takes more revolutions than she would like to get control back enough to speak. Her voice is rough, gasping at those words she's just said, to another man in another place. "I love you."
When James says it back, it's nothing like a knife. Lily had forgotten there was love in the world that had no blade tucked into it, no sharpness, no guilt and ownership anywhere. She can feel the words vibrating his chest, his throat. It is all she has wanted to hear for three long years: love, and forgiveness.
It is enough.
When the black stone drops from her fingers, she is standing in the underbrush of a forest once more, and another man is there-one she has felt approaching, felt like a shadow across the sun growing nearer, a creeping mist around her ankles. His eyes are on her, boring into her skin.
Lily takes her wand from her pocket and banishes the ring. There will be no more speaking with the dead. No Severus wasting away before this stone. The glinting gold thing lifts up and soars away into the trees.
Lily feels Tom Riddle tug at the magic strung between them, and the wand flies out of her fingers. She doesn't resist it.
Lily can feel him wondering what it was she sent away from them-a message? A tool? But it is gone now, and there are more important things to discuss. He dismisses it and says, "Did you send your compatriots away? I had hoped it would be a real fight."
Lily turns. "Was it Yaxley or Rosier?" she asks.
"I should kill you where you stand."
Severus' mouth moves in her memory: he cannot be lied to. She has kept him out of her memories in desperation, but there is no reason to tempt fate. There is one last move to the plan, and a lie is thing he can win with.
She tells the truth. "You won't. I'm too valuable to you." It's not said coyly; it comes out flat, free of affect, an undeniable fact. "Yaxley or Rosier?"
The creature who was once Tom Riddle tilts his head, and then-deciding visibly to be amused-he smiles. "Yaxley, naturally. He said it was Rosier's mistake. It is useful to sow dissent and mistrust even among the loyal. But perhaps you have guessed that much." He begins to move closer, a snake sliding through the frosted grass. "And you are correct, I would prefer not to kill you. I believe I may have underestimated you, Lily Potter."
"You have." And if she's very lucky and very smart, he won't realize how badly until it's too late. "I have something for you."
He goes on as if she hasn't spoken, gesturing benignly with her wand and his own, one in each hand. "What can you possibly offer me that I do not already possess?"
She extends her unscarred hand: in it, the third vial, the one so shattered it catches every fragment of light, looking like smoked glass, shattered and repaired and shattered in repaired with the wand in his hand. "This is for you. From Severus, and from myself. It is what we have been working toward together for months."
And none of that is really a lie.
"The basilisk venom," he guesses, and she nods, swallowing-also not a lie. "And something else, I can hear it in your voice. Is this a peace offering? Surely you know a potion, no matter how clever, will not buy your freedom or his life."
"I know," she says.
Tom Riddle gestures broadly, the bemused smile becoming sharp. "Then what is this? A request for clemency?" He's only a few steps away, now, but he halts. "A request for this?" He tucks his own wand away and holds up hers.
Lily bought her wand when she was eleven, Severus at her side. She was astonished at every beautiful thing in Diagon Alley, but her wand was the most beautiful. When the gold sparks had fallen from the tip it had been a miracle, Severus' promise made under the treetops kept. When she won it back from Severus so recently, it had performed exactly as it had before: easy and joyful and strong, the way magic should be.
Lily knows what he's going to do before he begins, and her fingers close over the vial convulsively, but she doesn't draw her hand back. She watches the willow wood gleam in the dawn light for a moment before the Dark Lord places the tip in his other hand. The wood bends, and bends, and bends-
It snaps like a twig.
She would rather he had broken one of her own bones.
"I am not so crude as to break your bones for my own pleasure," Tom Riddle says, catching onto the power and pain of that thought and casting her broken wand aside. "I hope you understand that this is not personal. I am merely correcting an error in the judgement of my servant." He closes the distance between them. His own wand moves and an inexorable force pries her fingers back open, and Tom Riddle-Lily's breath catches in her throat-plucks the vial from her palm and holds it, opaque glass glittering, to the light. "But I will take what you have brought me all the same. Perhaps to end Severus' life with." And with an ease she had not dared hope for, he tucks the vial into the breast pocket of his robes, just above his heart.
It is all she needs, and better than she'd dared hope. Her scarred hand goes to her pocket for the final vial, to complete the end she has planned. She thinks of Harry and James and then, shielded by them, the poison she has chosen. It is quick, sure, and painless. It is one of Severus' own design. It is fitting, Lily thought when she filled the vial. The poison for Beauxbatons started all this; another poison should end it. And hidden in the very heart of her Occluded mind, she knows it will not hurt so much as the venom will hurt Tom Riddle, nestled where it is in his breast pocket. She takes comfort in that, at least.
Before her fingers can dip into the fabric of her pocket, Tom Riddle grasps her wrist and lifts it to the light. The pain of their contact is deaded by Severus' work to contain the curse, but it burns still with a faraway kind of ache.
"A curse scar," he says, his voice growing suspicious. "One of my own design. Tell me, where did you acquire such a curse?"
Somewhere in his mind, the golden thing, flying away from her. Was there a glint of black inside of it? Could it have been-
She tugs her wrist-once, twice-but his grip is firm and the curse scar has weakened her. Magic sparks from her fingertips. At first just futile half-efforts, weakened and unfocused without her wand, but it cascades. Like an overflowing cabinet, the magic falls through her. Lily has the upper hand for the moment out of sheer surprise at her resistance, and Lily does not care if magic is ripped free of the Death Eaters. No-it is more than that-she knows Regulus will understand, knows Severus would willingly give her his power if he could. She pulls harder than Tom Riddle is willing to, drawing more magic between them.
She can feel his suspicion grow, and finally there is a thin thread of fear strung between them. His eyes bore into hers, searching for something so specific it flies past her plans, past the poison, past the trap she has set-
Everything lurches, seizes, trying to serve their two conflicting desires: his to grasp and hers to pull free. It contorts, shifts, struggles, each of them pouring more and more strength into their efforts, so much it begins to warp the air like heat rising from pavement in summer. It's hurting every Death Eater, somewhere out there-she knows, she can feel them shaking with it. It might be hurting them terribly. She can feel the spiderweb of power crumbling, points of contact flickering, Marks going out-
Tom Riddle, clawing through her mind, finds what he has been looking for: the gold of the ring, slipping onto her finger. His horcrux, its curse, the Resurrection Stone.
But that leads straight to James, and Harry, and her ironclad will, and that is all the opening she needs. Lily shuts the nursery door on him. She will not allow him to pollute that for her, not here, not now. With all the will inside of her and a surge of energy so strong it warps the air around them, Lily pulls her hand free. Tom Riddle stumbles back, his fingernails leaving oozing tracks in the half-cursed flesh of her wrist.
Lily can't be sure if he knew it before, but he knows now that she draws magic from the same deep well as he. And-she can see it, she can hear it inside his mind-suddenly her life is not so valuable anymore. Not when compared to the uncontrollable danger she represents.
Her fist closes around the vial in her pocket, but he is faster, has more practice wielding this kind of power, and her advantage in surprise is spent. When he slashes at her with his wand, roaring in fury, there is no defense: Lily feels herself flying before she can even try to pull up a wandless reflecting charm.
All the breath comes rushing out of her on impact with the tree, fifty paces away from where she stood. Something snaps, sickeningly, inside of herself; another rib broken badly, maybe more than one, but it doesn't matter, can't matter, the pain is someone else's and belongs to another body, another life. Her wrist is at a funny angle and the bones grind as she struggles to pull the vial from her pocket with numbed and scarred fingers. Not broken, please, not broken-
It's whole, and full, and Lily pushes her feet beneath herself.
When Lily first understood death as a child, she had thought it would happen to her the way it happened her grandmother: it would come in peace, while she was surrounded by her family and so loved it could not be named a tragedy. During the war, that dream burned; every day was a gasping miracle, every battle they escaped alive a triumph so bright and bubbling she could pour it in a glass and toast with it. After James and Harry died, death had been her constant companion-a secret doorway in every room, a circling vulture. The memory charm had shot that bird from the sky, and that had been the entire point. After the charm broke, she had only sighted it once more, in Severus' arms. And in that moment she had chosen life and him in its stead, no matter how much pain it brought her.
Now, the gulf between simply dying and dying for something is an ocean she has crossed, and this is no suicide. She can die on her feet and proud, protecting the world she loves and the man still alive to live in it.
The man who calls himself the Dark Lord is stalking through the underbrush where the nursery was toward her, speaking something foul-perhaps I shall transfigure you into the dagger I will slit your filthy half-blood lover's throat with-but she can't hear it, can't muster fear for him anymore. Nothing he says or does matters. Everything is in place. Lily has the time and the tools she needs to make the end she has wanted, to use the weapon she has carved from her life.
Lily thumbs the cork from the vial and lifts it to her lips. The sun glints through the crystal and Lily's movements are smooth, precise, unhesitating as she drinks it down. The poison is sweet on her tongue, sweet as cold water in summer, sweet as a kiss, sweet as falling in love, sweet as a sudden weakness that pushes all the pain from her body and the weightlessness of falling-
.
.
.
Lily Potter is dead before her body hits the ground.
A man who calls himself the Dark Lord breathes deep once, twice, in triumph. The woman crumpled to the ground in the brush where he's going her had chosen an end, perhaps, more merciful to herself, but why? Surely she had known that any life at all was better than-
His hand presses to his breast pocket, where he has felt something shatter with a chime of broken magic. The hand comes away bloody, and hissing with the steam of dissolving flesh.
When a wizard or a witch dies, all the magic they have wrought goes slack, like a cut thread. And Lily had shattered the vial and repaired it over and over and over. It does, truly, contain the last of the basilisk venom. One drop had been enough to destroy some of the most powerful dark magic of the age. This quantity is enough to destroy entire city.
It is more than equal to the task that Lily has left for it.
The venom is so corrosive it has eaten through his robes before he has even noticed and has begun to work upon his skin, turning it to lace and sheeting his front with blood. His wand twitches once, twice-two instinctive countercurses that do nothing, and the momentary impediment of ribs are eaten away, leaving it to ravage the softer flesh within. He stumbles, crumples, tries to inhale to howl or speak another spell but finds himself with nothing left to draw breath with. It takes only moments to burn straight through him to the grass beneath his body, searing the shape of him-the last mark he would leave-into the dirt.