Chapter 359: Scattering Petals
If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
I would like to thank my beta, Awdyr, for his help in this chapter.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
12 April 1995, London, England
Lily Evans knew before she even married James that she would never be a good mother. Something inside her broke in her time with the Department of Mysteries. Her parents had just died mysteriously. It could have been a Death Eater attack, only that there wasn't a Dark Mark, and it happened around the same time she started defying the department openly. She was afraid that anyone she got closer to would die as well. She practically ignored Petunia, not wanting her to be involved, not that it was hard to do because of the woman's obvious resentment and jealousy and picked James Potter to act as her shield.
It was mostly out of convenience more than anything. The Potters were firmly in Dumbledore's corner, so they were better protected from any retaliation from the department, and there was also the fact that he was still besotted with her, for some reason.
She did grow to like him. He was nice in small doses, but she always kept a few barriers out of her own protection. James was her shield, and shields had a tendency to get hurt. Still, she was planning on leaving him the moment she had a concrete plan in place to escape Dumbledore's and the department's reach.
Lily hadn't planned on marrying him, let alone birth his children, but one night, he had gotten drunk and bragged about being the subject of some prophecy being given to his father. He was babbling incoherent things about it, but that alone made her drop any plans of running away. One of her plans was to connect herself to an external dimension, and she needed to sacrifice something to have the energy release necessary for it. She had found out about it from some old tome she discovered during one of her missions for the Unspeakables.
She was assigned to clear out some old Mesopotamian ruins before the local magical government sent their own teams to investigate. Apparently, they wanted some artefact there, some kind of golden armour, and they couldn't really interfere in another country's affair without a war being declared. They were wrong about there being any armour, still, she returned with a few pieces of enchanted jewellery, but she had kept the few tomes around. Well, she called them tomes, they were old scrolls that she spent months translating into a tome.
It explained what they called 'the realms of the divine', and that a few people learned to forge a connection to and channel its magic. Apparently, they assumed it was some kind of divine entity not an actual connection to an external dimension. Still, from the feats they described, the 'blessed' were supposed to be forces of nature and she wanted some of that power. No, she needed it to be free, to help Britain achieve this freedom as well. However, she needed the energy required to replicate the feat first.
She had planned on spending years moving around the world, using blood magic to remove curses and store the magical release into a far larger curse she was creating. The breaking of her personal curse, empowered by thousands of other ones, could have technically opened a connection to a close external dimension, but a broken prophecy was just too tempting, too easy not to consider as an option. It would save her years, maybe even decades of wandering around the world, years where she could have been vulnerable, even with her prowess.
And so, Lily made her choice. She didn't particularly like it – James had grown on her a bit – but it was the better option. Still, she decided that the least she could do was to make sure his line didn't end with him, so, she got pregnant. She didn't expect to become a mother, not really. She allowed Sirius Black to be his godfather, hoping to fake her Death after the ritual. After all, the Blacks were a pretty powerful family, and Black would love and care for his best friend's son.
However, the moment her green eyes met her son's, she knew that she couldn't abandon him. She realized that she would burn the world for him. She never expected to feel something like this, not after what the Department of Mysteries had done to her. Her emotions were a bit suppressed by the cold logic that came with her intelligence boosts, but what she felt on that day, while exhausted in Saint Mungo's was unlike anything she ever experienced in her life.
She altered her plans. She was planning on disappearing together with her child. Their deaths had to be public; she needed to lay low until her son was grown. Knowing that they were being targeted by Voldemort, and also probably the Unspeakables, she saw an opportunity to get what she wanted and arranged for the ritual to leak a minuscule amount of energy, which would vaporize the house entirely, hiding any traces of rituals or corpses.
As planned, they were betrayed by Pettigrew and then attacked by outside forces. During the attack, Lily killed James, with a ritual knife that she used to suck the remaining life force of her victims in her time as the Red Witch. They were going to die anyway, and this way it benefitted her the most. After years of use, it was charged enough to potentially break a prophecy.
The ritual worked as planned, except, of course, for Sirius Black's interference. She hadn't expected him to be there, to have even realized that there would be an attack. She also hadn't counted on the weird interaction between his magical release at James' death, and the ritual. She probably should have killed him first, but he helped her prevent the Lestranges and Crouch Jr. from messing with her work. The magic must have had some kind of space-time effect, enough to destabilize the ritual entirely, the release wiping Godric's Hollow from existence, and trapping the both of them in the other side, in her dimension.
Lily had spent years treating her body and magic for this particular dimension. It was advised to do so as to prevent madness. Apparently, a few dimensions had inhabitants, developed consciousness and used a connection to their realm to possess their 'champion'. Lily was protected in the realm of fire and ash, but Sirius Black was not. He ended up being split between both worlds, in complete agony. She couldn't help but feel vindictive as she heard him constantly scream, being torn apart and put back together again and again for years, maybe even more. Time was weird in her dimension, and she didn't exactly have a way to keep track of it. Still, at least the idiot proved himself to be useful. She allowed him to express himself better in the material plane. He obviously had help from that side, but she could have stopped it if she wanted to, he made such a useful pawn. A physical manifestation meant that he could be hurt on the other side, that he could die, and she postulated that if she killed him at the exact same time, it would create a temporary connection, something that she could use to come back to the material world.
Being in that dimension was unlike anything she had ever experienced. She was trapped, yes, and yet she was free. She could make anything, everything. It was her realm, her true home. But she was lonely. She wanted to see her son, who had stayed unharmed in the warded area she put him in during the attack.
Her plan worked and Black's death allowed her to fully follow him to the other side, but she found herself cut off from her home. It felt wrong. She felt weaker and emptier than she ever had before, and she vowed herself that she would redo the ritual, and have her connection to her home once more.
And she achieved this, at the expense of almost killing her son. She hadn't planned on it. She temporarily worked with Dumbledore because she needed to utilize his broken prophecy and leveraged her assistance to protect her son from the former headmaster. The ritual was supposed to be it. She would have asked Harry to not participate in any of the other tasks, maybe even move back to Britain, hoping that they could reconnect once more. She would have gotten everything she'd ever wanted, her son, her home, forever. She would have convinced him to forge a connection of his own to her dimension as well, and they would be together for all eternity, untouched by Death and the machinations of the Light and Dark. They would have been free.
Looking back at it, she should have spoken to Harry, even knowing that he'd probably refuse. In the end, they fought, and her son paid the price. When he asked her to take his place, to sacrifice herself in his stead, she was just so frozen. It was like the world took a deep breath and she just couldn't do it. She wanted to, but something primal inside of her just stopped her, and she ran away, knowing that her son would perish for her own mistake.
The months she spent mourning her decision were the worst in her life. She tried to distract herself by trying to fight Voldemort, by taking her rage and self-loathing and channelling it at the monster in human flesh, while she burned from within. The connected to her dimension was faint, sluggish, and a bit underwhelming. She assumed it was because it was newly formed, that it would grow in time, and she would obliterate Voldemort from existence, but it wasn't the case.
When Harry returned, which she found out by complete accident while going to see Daphne for one of their lessons, his words cut her. They hurt her in a way that no spell, no curse, had ever done before, but even then, she couldn't be happy to see him alive, to know that she hadn't caused him to die. She didn't know what happened to him in the past few months, but he seemed relatively unhurt.
And then Harry proved to be his mother's child by being petty enough to blow her connection to bits and destroy her last tether to her home, making her slowly lose it the more she relished it. It was cruel, it was brutal, and it was fitting. However, with her very home being threatened to be destroyed she needed to act. She needed to fix her connection, to patch the hole in her dimension, to stop it from slowly withering into nothing as its energy was swallowed up by the void between worlds.
Unfortunately, it wasn't working. Whatever Harry had done to her connection, it didn't seem to be stopping. She had no idea how to fix a damaged connection and so, she turned to the largest collection of dimensional magic books she had access to, the Department of Mysteries.
And after weeks of searching, trying to find any scrap of potentially useful information, the result was very clear. She yelled as she threw another book onto the pile on the other side of the room, "Fucking useless!"
Severus entered the room hesitantly, "I don't suppose you found a solution yet?"
"No shit, Severus. Believe me, you'll know if I find a way to fix this mess."
"I could be a bit more productive if you told me what you're looking for. Other than 'dimensional magic' you didn't explain exactly what you're researching. It will save you enough time if I look for relevant books, not just some obscure field of magic."
The redhead glared at him, even if he had a point. Very few people knew about Lily's issues, probably just Harry, Daphne, and herself. She didn't see the point in telling Severus, because while he was a brilliant potion master, he knew next to nothing about the magic she was researching. And as devoted as Severus was, she couldn't bring herself to fully trust him, not after Harry used her connection to her dimension as a weakness.
Thankfully, the potion master raised his hands in surrender, "Alright, alright, fine. But at least try to be discreet, I've gotten more than enough questions from the Unspeakables complaining about you taking over the library."
Lily groaned. Even after almost a year, Snape still impersonated Saul Croaker. The department was a very nice resource, even if the Severus' position was a bit of a thankless job. He did a good job with it so far, and he had signed off on more than a few operations that ended up with high-profile Death Eaters dead before Voldemort could recruit them once more.
If only Remus could be this successful. Lily had given him everything he ever asked for. The werewolf race was almost extinct, only the Lycans remaining in Britain, and after the mess with Voldemort was over, she was planning on getting the new and improved Wizengamot to vote in a law giving them the exact same rights as a wizard. It wasn't like they could even be a threat anymore since they couldn't reproduce, but that was far in the future.
However, Lupin, while fully devoted to her, did not know how to manage his forces. He didn't discipline his fellow Lycans, considering them to be part of the 'pack', which of course, translated to enhanced aggression during missions. A lot of the innocent deaths in the country could be traced down to just him. She was tempted to get rid of him, but he was such a useful pawn.
Either way, she stopped caring about Britain when she realized that her true home was in danger. She needed to find a way to fix her connection because if she didn't, she would have no choice but to make a new one. And that would take another broken prophecy and another ritual. Considering the mess that happened last time, she wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect. Then again, Greece was beautiful at that time of the year.
This will require some thinking. She couldn't make a decision like this in a rush, but with the sixth task of the European Tournament approaching, she was quickly running out of time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
AN: So, I decided to finally make a proper Lily POV. I wanted it to show her as an unreliable narrator, that she was warped by her own thinking, justifying herself on how everything went wrong. I'm not sure if I pulled it off, and I don't mind rewriting it according to your feedback. It was honestly like someone made everything that could go wrong, happened at the same time, in both work and my personal life, and I had to frantically deal with it. At least, things have calmed down, so I can take my time writing chapters a bit more. As usual, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr
I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.
Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.