I'll Take it Shaken, Not Stirred

Chapter 25: Good Morning

History: So I own nothing. Rights to JKR.

Recap: Lily and James go into the forest, get separated, get separately kidnapped, separately escape, and then reunite. Then they're walking around and get ambushed by death eaters and... separated. But then they get reunited again... right before getting captured again. They get taken to Korcesh's ("The Foreigner") office in the Ministry where the dear dark lord (a.k.a. Santa Claus) shows up and talks a bit before ordering the death eaters to wait an hour till the building is clear, and then kill them. So yeah, their lives pretty much suck right now.

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"Fortune favors the brave." –Virgil

Fifty-three minutes, and words seemed superfluous.

They sat there in almost utter silence, except for their own breathing and the ticking of the clock on the wall. In fifty-three minutes, they were going to be dead. The death eaters had left the pair alone. Their wrists had been tied at first, but it had taken all of five minutes to get out of the ropes. It hadn't really mattered whether they were tied up or not. There was nothing in the room that could be used for an escape, and they were both wandless.

And in fifty-two minutes, they were going to be dead.

This thought resounded in James's head for several minutes, leaving room for nothing else. He was going to die. In less than an hour.

Presently, however, the power in those words began to dissipate. For a reason that James could not possibly determine—though he could only assume it was an irrational and senseless one—he did not feel like he was going to die. Perhaps it had always been some subconscious fancy of his that one could sense when the end had, at last, come, or perhaps this was an entirely new idea to his mind, but for the life of him, James could not shake it.

Now was simply not the time. He was not going to die today... not while he had anything to say about it.

Alright, so he really did not have anything to say about it, but still...

Lily's thoughts were occupied in a rather different manner.

Whether or not she was going to die had long ago passed through, for Lily was, as a general rule, sensible and quick-thinking, and she had accepted the fact that she could very well die very soon and there was very little that she could do about it. The room was locked, soundproof, and the only exit was guarded by God-knew-how-many death eaters. The odds weren't good. At best, they were minutely slim.

But while James's mind was filled with wonder and sudden certainty—for he knew today was not his death day, and no one would convince him otherwise—Lily's mind was far more troubled. The irony of the situation did not escape her. She was going to die in an office room in the Ministry of Magic; she was going to be murdered there, with James Sodding Potter.

She was simply confused.

She was going to die soon; she'd accepted it. But... what would happen to her next? She had wondered about the afterlife a few times before, but Lily's family had never been religious at all, and she had no popularly accepted view to compare with her own suppositions.

Still, Lily did believe in some sort of... retribution, some sort of afterlife. And though she had not extensively thought about where she might fit into the spectrum of "heaven" or "hell," she certainly was now. After all, there was not much else she could do.