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i. the boy from spinner’s end
Until Sev, Lily had always been just too much for everyone.
It wasn’t the magic (You’re a witch, Sev had said, meaning you’re like me), although that didn’t help. It was something even more fundamental about her; something she didn’t know how to stop being. With Sev, she nearly forgot why she’d ever wanted to.
One muddy morning in the late spring, they swore eternal friendship: play-acting at magic, using sticks to draw arcane sigils in the mud whose meanings were known only to the two of them.
“Did it work?” Lily asked her best friend in the whole world, grinning ear to ear with mud smudged on her cheek.
ii. house of snakes
On the train to Hogwarts, Sev introduced himself to the other children as “Severus Prince Snape,” with an odd emphasis Lily didn’t understand until much, much later.
He refused to tell her anything about the Houses, or the Sorting. “You’ll see when we get there,” he said. “I don’t want to — influence you.”
E for Evans fell before S for Snape; Lily feigned confidence as she walked to the stool, as she put on the hat. Which house would Sev go to? She thought about the quiet defiance in his eyes when he spoke — haltingly and in few words — about his father; she thought about that first meeting, where he’d broken the Statute of Secrecy to tell her that magic was real. Sev was one of the bravest people she’d ever met.
Gryffindor, Lily thought, screwing up her face. Gryffindor!
“Are you sure?” said the Hat. “You could do quite well in Slytherin, you know. All that ruthlessness and cleverness. Gryffindor, on the other hand…”
I don’t care! Lily told it. Sev’s my friend.
The Hat said, “Well, all right, if you’re sure…”
iii. eye of newt
Finding Tuney’s letter to Headmaster Dumbledore had scared Lily more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She only wrote Mum and Dad and Tuney about the good parts of Hogwarts, not about — the pureblood boys who couldn’t stand that a Mudblood was getting better marks than them. Being spat on in the halls because she didn’t know her place. Escaping to Gryffindor Tower only to be harassed by perfect pureblooded Potter and his jolly mates.
It was all right for Lily — she was used to it — but Tuney deserved better. Tuney deserved better than a world where she would always be the upstart Mudblood girl. Lily was the bruiser; when they had been in primary school, Lily was the one who would beat up the older boys for picking on Tuney. Nothing and no-one was allowed to hurt Tuney. Certainly not the unrepentantly regressive wizarding world.
The only thing for it was for Lily to put frog spawn in all Tuney’s left shoes, and Every Flavor Beans in her schoolbag, and teach herself wandless magic — because wand usage triggered the Trace — so that she could make Tuney jump with harmless little jinxes until the whole “magic” thing lost its allure.
iv. sealed lips
Lily eyed Sev critically. His hands had been shaking since the beginning of Potions class; there were deep bags under his eyes, and he kept trying to add entirely the wrong number of porcupine quills.
“What is wrong with you?” Lily demanded, slapping his hand away from the porcupine quills for the third time. “Did you pull an all-nighter working on that Charms essay?”
“No,” Sev said, and did not elaborate despite Lily’s best efforts to get him to talk.
They both had a free period after Potions; she followed him out to the grounds. “Hey. Hey, Sev,” Lily said, in the same voice she used to annoy Tuney. “Sev. Hey, Sev!”
Sev ignored her.
Halfway to the tree by the lake that he liked to sit under, he whirled on her. “Piss off!” he snarled.
Lily, obviously, did not piss off, but even after they reached the relative privacy of the tree — even though she clutched at his shoulder while he shook apart — even then, the most she was able to get out of Sev was “That damned Sirius Black—”
v. schism
“I don’t need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!”
It would have hurt less if Sev had merely stabbed her in the back. A small crowd of fifth-years fresh out of their exams had gathered round to watch the circus; but Lily had never felt quite so utterly and completely alone. She went cold all over, eyelids falling briefly shut against — what?
“Fine,” she said, so angry she could barely speak, so angry that her voice came out perfectly, dangerously calm. “I won’t bother in future.”
Sev—Snape blanched; his skin, already unhealthily pale from too much time in the library and the Potions workroom, went entirely white. His mouth started forming a word, likely “Wait” by the shape of it.
One of her casual acquaintances from the duelling club had remarked that Lily was one of the most frightening opponents despite not being the most skilled, because when she was hurt — really hurt — her singular, overriding desire was to return that pain with as much interest as she could bring to bear, regardless of the cost to herself.
“I’d wash your pants if I were you, Snivellus,” she said: a precision strike to her already-humilated enemy. And then, before she could ruin the effect by crying, she whipped around and speed-walked back to the castle.
vi. partners in crime
Potter had been watching Lily (even more closely than usual, which was really saying something) for the past week; it made her skin itch. When he caught her, up late studying in Gryffindor common after nearly everyone else had gone to bed, she tensed, wondering if he was going to ask her out again — or, worse, force the issue.
He did neither.
“I need your help,” he said bluntly. “Dumbledore’s given me this special assignment. It’s to do with — with fighting You-Know-Who, and—”
“I’ll do it,” Lily interrupted. “What do you need?”
The tension left Potter’s body in one enormous rush.
In the weeks and months that followed, Lily helped Potter — helped James — with a number of “special assignments”. She waited all the while for the part where he’d give her that look: that she was too much. It never came, although James looked at her all kinds of other ways (conspiratorial friendship, delight, something she couldn’t bring herself to label awe). Lily couldn’t think of any other boy she could say that about, other than maybe Se—Snape.
They spent a week and a half working at a countercurse for a tricky, triple-layered runic evocation to flay the skin off of someone’s body — working at it on their own, trading their notes back and forth in surreptitious hallway meet-ups. When they finally got together in the library to combine their efforts of course they cracked it immediately, and Lily got so overexcited she kissed James square on the lips.
And then, mortified, ran off to hide in a closet until he went away.
vii. three-point perspective
When Lily found out from Remus what precisely Sirius had done to Snape during their fourth year, she didn’t speak to any of the Marauders except James for a month — and to James she spoke only in monosyllables.
viii. the serpent’s tongue
In combat usage of ritual magic, it was generally a given that one would go to great lengths to conceal the precise details of one’s newly invented ritual circles. A circle that was known to one’s enemies was a circle that could be understood, and analyzed, and countered.
Voldemort never made the slightest effort to conceal his circles; he flaunted them, traced them out in flamboyant lines of fire on the ground or in the air, and for all of that nobody had ever succeeded in developing a counter or even a basic runic analysis, because the runes were nothing anybody had ever seen. Dumbledore had spoken to a number of researchers on the subject. Theories varied: it could be an old, terribly obscure alphabet or syllabary, or a new one created by and known only to the self-titled Lord. Among the rarefied circle of Light-aligned ritual magic researchers in the British Isles, it was an ongoing and galling mystery to absolutely everyone with the sole exception of Lily Evans Potter — although not, she could admit, due to any especial brilliance of her own.
Her secret was known to nobody: not her parents, nor Dumbledore, nor even James. Nobody, that is, save for Severus Snape, who had received it in a whisper from Lily’s nine-year-old lips (Sev, I can talk to snakes) and never, to Lily’s knowledge, once shared it with another living soul.
He might yet; the thought kept Lily awake, sometimes. It would be sure to win him status amongst that crowd. But if he had, then Voldemort would surely no longer be drawing his circles of flame.
To a Parselmouth, the characters of the snakes’ script were no obstacle to runic counter-analysis, and that made the project of developing counter-rituals tractable, albeit still far from simple. On the concrete floor of her laboratory, an abandoned warehouse that had been gently shunted outside of consensus reality, she finished inking the last careful hook of the last character.
“Get in here, James,” she called. Obviously she’d tested it on herself first, just to make sure it worked, but other than that, to whom else would she most want to give the best, most thorough anti-Voldemort protective magic she could design?
James came running round the corner, and stumbled to a stop when Lily shoved him away from stepping on and smudging the product of the past hour of work.
“Lils,” he began trepidatiously, “is this…”
Lily smiled sweetly up at him. “Shut up and get in the blood pentagram, dear.”
ix. pyrrhic victory
“Not Harry — please — not Harry,” Lily sobbed. It was one thing to design a completely new, untested ritual; to carefully paint her own blood and her son’s under the floorboards in every room of their meticulously warded house; to transmute her magic and her soul into the power source for the protection spell that would keep her Harry safe. It was entirely another to stand up to a bloody great Dark wizard invading her lovingly decorated nursery.
Voldemort so plainly didn’t belong among the gaily wallpapered walls, with their pattern of rubber ducks. “Stand aside, girl!”
Lily gulped back her tears, and enunciated, quite clearly, for the third time, “Not Harry!”
It is critical to understand that Lily Potter was not, in this moment, begging.
With the threefold abjuration complete, she felt the protection ritual hook into her magical core and wrench at it. It was primed; the gunpowder only awaited the spark—
Voldemort lifted his wand. “Please,” Lily begged, urging the Dark Lord to hurry, to strike the steel against the flint.
As the green light struck her in the chest, she screamed. The death-spell in itself was painless; but the burning-up of her own magic for power was not. Perhaps the only mercy was that it wouldn’t last for very much longer.
And then: oblivion.
x. a reckoning
Entirely against her own expectations, Lily opened her eyes.