Chapter Text
Chapter One: Together
“Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off!” James bellowed, snatching up his wand.
For one terrible second, Lily looked as though she might obey.
Then her face changed. She intoned stubbornly, “No.”
James stopped dead. “What?”
“If I could Apparate, I would. If the Floo were open, I would already be gone. But I can’t, James.” Her voice shook once, then steadied into steel. “So it doesn’t matter. We face him.”
“Lily—”
“Together,” she said fiercely. “Like always.”
His eyes flickered toward the stairs. “Harry—someone has to stay with Harry.”
“If we separate, we die separately.” Lily’s eyes blazed, green and furious. “We’ve faced him three times before. By Merlin, we’ll face him again. And this time he’ll learn what a mistake it was to come for my boy.”
Something shifted in James’s face. The panic did not vanish, but it hardened into something older, sharper, and far more dangerous.
Lily lifted her wand.
James gave one short, breathless laugh. “Right, then. Let’s show that no-nose nincompoop why we were the brightest in our year.”
Despite everything, Lily smirked. “I still don’t understand where you get these names.”
A cold voice drifted from the doorway.
“How touching. Your final conversation, and you spend it on childish insults.”
Voldemort stepped into the room, black robes whispering around him. His pale face was expressionless, but his red eyes burned.
James’s grip tightened around his wand. His fear was gone from his face now, buried beneath a crooked, reckless smile.
“Lily,” he said grandly, sweeping his free hand toward their visitor, “allow me to introduce Joe Blake. Mr Blake, this is my lovely wife.”
Lily snorted. James’s Auror training trip to Australia had clearly expanded his vocabulary for snakes.
For one instant, anger flashed across Voldemort’s face.
Lily saw it and decided, immediately, to make it worse.
“Welcome to our home, Mr Blake,” she said. “Tea? Or would you prefer something stronger?”
“You’re welcome to use the loo first,” James grinned. “Long journey, I imagine.”
Many things could be said of James Potter, Lily thought. Coward had never been one of them.
The slits that passed for Voldemort’s nostrils flared.
“Very well,” he hissed. “If you have both abandoned the will to live—”
His wand rose and he screeched.
“Avada Kedavra!”
James moved first.
“Avis!”
A flock of canaries burst from the tip of his wand and swept into the path of the Killing Curse. Green light struck yellow feathers. The birds ignited, flame and ash exploding through the air.
Lily was already moving.
She twisted her wand, caught the fire before it could die, and drove it forward in a roaring spiral. Voldemort flicked his wand almost lazily, and the flames vanished inches from his face.
Lily rolled her eyes at the dark lord's predictable spell.
“Dramatic, much?”
James barked a laugh. “Honestly, mate, the shrieking. You sound like a sixteen-year-old chick who’s just seen someone snog his favourite boy.”
Lily wondered, distantly, whether anyone had ever mocked a Dark Lord in the middle of a duel. Judging by the vein pulsing in Voldemort’s hairless scalp, the answer was probably no. This time, he did not dignify them with an answer. He started a proper attack.
Black and crimson curses tore through the room. James shoved Lily aside as a jet of purple light split the wall behind her. Lily answered with a severing hex that forced Voldemort to step back. Glass shattered. The ceiling cracked. Somewhere upstairs, Harry began to cry.
James and Lily heard it and nodded in a silent conversation. So did Voldemort upon hearing the cry and his face twisted in a cruel smirk and hunger.
And the game changed. James moved first. Petunia’s hideous vase, displayed on the mantel only because Lily had a sentimental weakness for family obligations, twisted beneath his wand. Porcelain stretched, sharpened, and darkened into a broad-bladed axe. With a vicious flick, James banished it straight at Voldemort’s head.
At the same time, every shard of broken glass behind the Dark Lord rose silently from the floor. Voldemort summoned the tea table into the axe’s path. Wood exploded. The axe spun past him and buried itself deep in the wall. The glass came next, shooting toward him from behind like a swarm of glittering knives.
He did not turn.
A snap of his wand conjured a black, rippling shield at his back. The shards struck it and dissolved into smoke.
Lily used the moment. Her wand carved a tight golden arc through the air. Light spread from its tip, not outward toward Voldemort, but upward—into the walls, across the ceiling, through the floorboards and staircase. The house shuddered as the ward settled into place. A second charm followed, softer and thicker, sinking into the ceiling beneath Harry’s room like invisible wool. And thirdly she cast a area wide silencing charm to prevent any noise reaching upward.
Nothing short of Fiendfyre would easily reach the nursery now. Satisfied, Lily turned back just in time to see a bone-breaking curse streak toward James’s exposed neck.
“Protego!”
Her shield cracked under the force of the curse, but it held. James ducked, eyes flashing gratitude and irritation in equal measure.
“I had that.”
“You absolutely did not.”
“Marriage really has ruined your faith in me.”
“Focus, Potter.”
Voldemort’s red eyes shifted fully to Lily. The temperature in the room seemed to fall.
“So,” he said softly. “The Mudblood has teeth.”
Lily smiled. Then she showed them.
Three charms left her wand in brutal succession. The first stole the air from a two-metre circle around Voldemort. The second struck the floorboards beneath him and turned them molten, not with heat, but with a wet, boneless softness that dragged at his footing. The third snapped outward like a net of living shadow, fastening itself to his robes and trying to pin him in place.
For one sharp second, Voldemort was forced to move, not glide, not loom but actually move. His expression emptied. Then he retaliated.
His wand blurred. Curses came like a storm breaking all at once: a shield-breaker, a spear of blackness so dense it seemed to swallow the candlelight around it, and behind both, just for sake of existence came a bright and terrible, Killing Curse.
Lily’s first shield shattered instantly.
“Ventus!”
The gale struck the black spear from the side and bent its path back toward its caster. Lily threw herself sideways as the green curse tore past her and reduced the cupboard of special-occasion cutlery to glittering splinters. “Damn those were expensive,” Lily mused.
Voldemort extinguished his own returning spear with a contemptuous slash. By then James was already in motion. Broken brick, plaster, and wood rose from the ruined wall. Under his wand, the rubble folded into shape—first a stag, antlers lowered and proud, then a great black dog with jaws of jagged stone. The stag charged and the grim circled.
Voldemort’s eyes narrowed. He fired two Blasting Curses in quick succession. The stag leapt aside with impossible grace. The grim twisted beneath the second curse, claws tearing through the floorboards as it lunged for his wand arm.
For the first time since he had entered their home, Voldemort looked wary. James and Lily used the opening to catch a single breath. This was not a duel to be taken lightly. Already, Lily could feel the strain burning through her wrist and shoulder. James’s breathing had grown sharper, though his wand hand remained steady. They both knew the truth of the room.
They were not winning.But still they had made one thing clear. If Lord Voldemort wanted victory tonight, he would have to earn it. He would have to earn it against the best Transfiguration and Charms prodigies of their generation. Against two front-line fighters of the Order. Against two parents standing between death and their son.
Voldemort blasted the stag apart just seconds before it was about to impale it with its antler, then the grim leapt forward straight towards his jugglery. But Voldemort was not a simpleton who would lay back and die; he sidestepped and with an arc of his wand blasted the grim as well. Then he tore fragments into finer pieces and flew through the room, already caught in his magic and hurled back toward them.
James stepped closer to Lily.
“Lily,” he whispered, not taking his eyes off Voldemort, “time to combine attacks. Properly.”
Lily nodded once. It was time to improvise, and show why they were a deadly duo.
Her wand snapped up. A long, elastic net of silver light unfurled between them and the incoming debris. The stones struck it and sank into the glowing mesh, held there for a heartbeat, trembling with gathered force.
James’s wand moved through the air with surgical precision. Stone sharpened, wood hardened., bits of plaster stretched into iron spikes.
Lily held on for the time being, then released the net. The debris shot forward with unnatural speed, a storm of transfigured metal and stone aimed straight for the Dark Lord.
Voldemort created a black dome which magnetically repelled all the debris and even before they destroyed the wall behind him, answered with three spells of his own, each faster than thought. James intercepted the one towards Lily first.
“Protego Maxima!”
The blood-boiling curse hit his shield hard enough to drive him back half a step, but it did not reach Lily. Lily saw the second.
“Oppugno!”
One of the stones veered out of formation at her command and flung itself into the path of the Cruciatus Curse meant for James. The stone exploded into dust.
The third curse slipped through. A bone-breaker grazed James’s left arm. It did not strike cleanly. If it had, the arm would have shattered. James hissed, and took up a more defensive stance. And Voldemort, watching him remain standing, began to understand that the Potters, unlike many before them, were not just going to roll over in his terror and die.