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The first time that Harry saw his mother, at least that he could remember, wasn’t with the Resurrection Stone in the Forbidden Forest as he walked to his death. No, the first time he saw Lily wasn’t the shade he called with a turn of the stone.
He saw his mother in the Mirror of Erised that first wonderful-lonely Christmas at Hogwarts. He saw her red hair, her green eyes, her kind smile. He was too young at the time to realize just how very young she was; no wrinkles at the corners of her eyes proving a life filled with laughter, no smile lines at the corners of her mouth.
When Hagrid gave him the photo album, he was too captivated by the image of his mother, too new to this fantastical world, to recognize the worry behind her eyes. Eyes, he realized, that matched his just as much as everyone had always said.
The first time he met Lily, the real Lily, not just a reflection or a photograph of her, he didn’t remember. When Harry confronted Quirrell over the Philosopher’s Stone, when Lily’s protection rose through his blood and down his arms and through his fingertips to burn away the hatred and the evil that threatened her son, everyone believed that Harry simply fainted away, that the magic was too much for his eleven year old body to bear. They were partially right. The magic was too much for his body, the body that had been half starved for food and love his entire life. The magic was too much, and so he met his mother in the afterlife, beyond the veil of death.
When Harry saw Lily, in the place that looked so very much like King’s Cross, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His mother, who had been aware of his life in the way that those who leave us are, wasn’t terribly surprised to see him, if disappointed and frustrated and terribly sad for her baby.
“Mum?” He had asked, his green eyes large and watery and too big for his face behind his broken glasses.
“Harry,” she had said, her voice full of affection in a way that had never been directed towards him in his entire memory. She opened her arms, and he ran to her, sooty and tired and scared, and the stone still heavy in his pocket.
“Mum!” He said again, his voice trembling and muffled against her stomach. His hands wrapped clumsily around her, fingers clutching at her shirt. His inexperience with hugs was apparent, and her heart broke further. Her hands wrapped around him, one palm covering the back of his head protectively, even though she knew that she couldn’t really do anything to protect him the way a mother ought to be able to.
“Harry, my love,” she murmured into his hair. “I love you so much, but you can’t stay here. It’s not your time yet.”
“I- I can’t stay?” He peered up at her, the cracked glasses lenses doing little to obscure his eyes.
“No,” she said, then bit her lip. She knew what it meant to send her son, her baby back out to the living world. She knew her life wouldn’t be easy, knew it hadn’t been easy. She wanted to keep him here, with her, but she wanted him to live even more. “No, you can’t stay here, but never forget how much I love you, Harry. So very much.” She pressed his head back to her for one last hug, before she let go and backed away. Her eyes welled with tears as she looked at her son staring at her with confusion in his eyes, and then he slowly faded away.
When Harry woke up in the hospital wing, it was with the vague recollection of a warm hug and a golden snitch in his mind. He couldn’t remember anything that happened after Quirrell burned.
The second time that Harry saw his mother, Harry would have sworn he had also just seen his father. He swore to Hermione that it had been his father standing at the edge of the trees, that it had been his father that cast the patronus he saw before he passed out.
When Lily saw Harry this time, she wanted to scream at the injustice of it all. Voldemort, she thought, was one thing. Dementors sent after her husband’s best friend, his brother in all but blood, her child’s godfather who was wrongfully accused of a murder he would never commit- that was another thing entirely, one that she was powerless to stop. She had done all she could to protect Harry from beyond the grave, but it only worked against humans, particularly Voldemort, though she doubted his humanity. She could do nothing against dementors, nothing but watch as her son’s soul was almost ripped from his body in a gross miscarriage of justice.
As she met Harry in King’s Cross, her son, who was a little older and a little taller and a little more wary than last time, still ran to her as quickly as he did when he was eleven, and if he was a little less hesitant with his hug this time, then she was glad for it.
“Harry, my darling boy, you’ve been so brave,” she whispered into his hair. “I love you so much, Harry.”
Harry said nothing in return, but she didn’t expect him to. Already she could feel him fading, his form becoming a little less solid as his soul returned to his body, the dementors likely having been driven off by someone’s patronus. She clutched at him as tightly she could until she was grasping nothing but air.
When Harry woke in the hospital wing, he figured the warm feeling he had was from the patronus that he saw, or maybe some charm or potion from Madam Pomfrey. If he had an odd memory of red hair and green eyes, then maybe it was just something triggered by the dementors, even if the cold feeling of dread he usually associated with that memory was absent.
A year later, in the graveyard, Lily came to the living world instead of Harry coming to the afterlife. It wasn’t a nice reunion, although none of them have been. Harry doesn’t remember the other times they’ve met, and Lily is fine with that; she would rather her son didn’t remember that he had died twice before the age of fourteen. And still, here he is in front of her, or rather here she is in front of him. He’s taller and bloodier than the last time she saw him, and his eyes are warrier and full of pain and fear and determination. He’s so brave, her son, even though she wishes he didn’t have to be. She’s glad that he hasn’t died again, although tonight had had numerous close calls. She aches to hug him, to keep him safe, but she can do neither of those things. She listens as James tells their son what to do, as Cedric asks Harry to take his body back to his father, his poor father, and when it’s time, she calls out to him.
“Let go. Sweetheart, you're ready. Let go! Let go!”
Harry looks at her, and then does as they told him to. As he breaks the connection between him and Voldemort, as they fade away, she sees him run to Cedric and the cup, and breathes a sigh of relief that he has escaped. She knows that life has just become infinitely more complicated and dangerous for Harry, but at least in this instance she was able to help keep him safe.
Were Lily not his mother, she may have lost track of all the times Harry flickered into existence at King’s Cross station, only to flicker out again seconds later. But she is his mother, and so she remembers every one of her son’s close calls with death. The snake at Bathilda Bagshot’s house caused him to appear in King’s Cross numerous times, but only once with the locket around his throat as he dove into the ice covered pond.
Those, however, were all accidents. It was an entirely different matter to be whirled into existence, James, Sirius, and Remus by her side, to learn that her son, her baby, was planning on walking to his death.
Harry looked up at her, stone in hand. His eyes were tired and sad and brave. Her heart was full and broken all at once, to see the product of her son’s life written on his face and in his eyes. She opened her arms to him, but unlike at King’s Cross, when he goes to touch her hand, his hand passes through her body. She is a shade here amongst the living, and the living cannot touch the dead.
“You’ve been so brave, sweetheart,” she tells him. Harry looks at her, and perhaps for the first time he notices just how very young she looks. He glances around at all of them.
“Why are you here? All of you?” He asks, his voice desperate and sad.
“We never left, dear,” Lily answers. She tries to be brave, to not let her lip tremble as she listens to Sirius tell her baby how easy it is to die. She feels a certain kinship with him; here he is, only a few years younger than her when she died, giving her life so that her son may live. And here he is, about to give his life so that his friends, his classmates, his teachers, everyone might live. She is so unbearably proud of him, but likewise so unbearably sad.
“Stay with me?” He asks, his big green eyes, so like hers, searching her face.
“Always,” she tells him, which is truer than he knows.
And so his parents trail after him through the Forbidden Forest, even as the Stone drops from his fingers to be lost amongst the roots and leaves. They follow him, silent guardians as they wanted to be and should have been all his life, until they reach the clearing in the woods.
And Harry, in his bravery and fear and love for everyone, tears off the invisibility cloak, and meets Voldemort’s spell head on. As Harry falls to the floor of the Forest, his soul leaving his body, so do Lily, James, Sirius, and Remus leave the land of the living, as no living soul controls the stone. Lily’s heart keeps breaking into a thousand pieces, as a mother should not have to witness the death of her son. Here is Harry, seventeen years old and meeting his death head on with courage in his eyes and love in his heart. And here was Lily, dead at 21, who met death with her back turned in a last ditch effort to protect her son, whose heart was broken but full of courage.
And here is Harry, who makes the difficult choices no one his age should have to make, who leaps from Hagrid’s arms and continues the fight when he had the choice to stop and rest, to leave the fight to others. Here is Harry, her son, her brave child, who has faced things no one else can claim to face, who has accomplished things no one else has done or could do, who greeted death like an old friend.
And here is Harry, younger and older than her in turn, who casts the spell that ends the war, that ends the senseless bloodshed that she died for, who snaps the Elder Wand and drops the Stone and keeps the Cloak as the family heirloom he treats it as, who is braver and more fearless than most, who loves with his whole heart and will die for that love.
And so Lily waited for Harry, whose life wasn’t easy but wasn’t as dangerous as it used to be, who married and loved his children wholeheartedly, whose hair grew gray but stayed just as wild.
And when it was finally his time, when he was old and had a life well-lived, Lily met her son in King’s Cross. His eyes, brighter and more lively than the last time she had seen him, met hers, and then he ran to her arms just like he had when he was eleven, thirteen, seventeen.
“Mum,” he laughed, and this time his arms were well-practiced in giving and receiving hugs.
“Harry, sweetheart,” she said, tightening her arms around him. Then she pulled away to look at his face. “You’ve been so brave.”
He smiled, and looked over her shoulder to where James, Sirius, and Remus were waiting anxiously.
“Will you stay with me?” He asked.
“Always.” She smiled at him, and together they boarded the train.