What if... (Harry Potter One Shots)

Jily - The Flash of Green

"AVADA KEDAVRA!" 

I watched in slow motion as the green glow enveloped me in its frozen embrace and a scream was ripped from my lips. The pain was instant and yet gone before I could properly register it. I stumbled away from Him, putting myself in front of Harry until I was pressed up against the bars of his cot and I raised my hands in supplication. 

"No. Not Harry! Please! Not Harry!" I begged him again but this time he ignored me. 

He seemed to be staring through me and confused, I glanced down at his feet as he seemed to take an overly excessive step towards us. Realisation hit me like a train travelling at one hundred kilometres per hour; he wasn't taking a large step over air, he was taking a large step over my body. The air was sucked out of me and I folded in half with an soundless cry at the sight of my empty body staring at the ceiling blankly. In a sudden, heady rush, my air whooshed back into my lungs and I sprang up straight, glaring at Voldemort. I might be dead but I wasn't going to let him kill my baby. I was all that was left to protect my beautiful boy and I would do everything and anything to stop him for getting hurt. 

I faced him resolutely and growled, "You will not hurt my Harry!" 

"AVADA KEDAVRA!" Another flash of brilliant green painted the walls of Harry's bedroom in a perverse light. 

Strangely, unlike last time when I felt nothing, it felt like I was draining away. Like I was being sucked down the pipe when you pull the plug in the bath. Darkness fell and it was not unlike the end of the world but perhaps it was just the end of mine? 

~o~

"Lily? Lily? What happened?" it was fitting that my world would be brought back from the end by the man who had saved me all those years ago.

"James? Oh, Merlin! James!" his face came first and then the colours of the rest of the world came back. He was kneeling beside me, his hands cradling my face as his eyes searching me for any injuries. 

Everything came surging back as I drank in his face. I gasped with the pain of the memories. "Harry! He's got Harry!" 

Regret and pain flashed behind his eyes before he shook his head softly, a strange, small smile on his face. He gently turned my face to the left and I let out a cry, both relief and pain at once. Harry was hanging onto the the bars of his crib with silent tears tracing their way down his cheeks. His teary gaze was on something just beyond us and I knew instinctively it was my body he was watching. I turned back to James to see tears of his own sliding from his eyes and he lifted his hand, not to wipe them away but to wipe away the ones I hadn't noticed, pouring down my own. 

He kept his palm pressed against the side of my face and I leaned into him, tracing his tear tracks with my thumb. He closed his eyes at my touch but they snapped open as a fumbling announced itself on the stairs outside Harry's demolished bedroom. He reached for his wand, forgetting that it was still in his pocket...still with his dead body. We both stood up, facing the door and instinctively stood before our baby boy. Neither of us relaxed, even when Severus stumbled inside and collapsed by my body with an anguished cry of unparalleled grief. I relaxed slightly against Harry's crib as I watched my former best friend utterly destroyed at my death. Perhaps there had been good in him somewhere. 

He picked up my body, holding my to his chest and rocked us back and forth. James stiffened and I glanced at him. Was he somehow jealous of this? 

He glanced at me, something broken in his eyes. He whispered to me, "He betrayed us." 

I wanted to round on him and ask what he meant but I already knew. We had placed the responsibility of our safe keeping to one person; a person we had both trusted with our lives. I could see the betrayal in James' eyes as realisation dawned on him. His best friend had betrayed him to Voldemort. The man he had known since he was eleven had and considered more than a brother had betrayed him. Had betrayed us.