Chapter Text
James Potter dies.
Or, he knows he will. He knows he will, because there’s a snap and a lull in the air as though magic’s being siphoned out in one go, and the halfway decent not decent enough wards pulse and panic at the feeling of an approaching malicious force. James thinks, I’m going to die, and he thinks, I can’t believe it’s Peter, and I fucking knew it, and this is going to kill Sirius— and he thinks, with all the urgency that adrenaline and fear offer him, I need to give Harry and Lily a chance at survival.
James says, “It’s him! Lily, take Harry and run! I’ll hold him off!”
And James knows — oh, he knows — that there’s not a chance he’s getting out of this alive. His wand’s rolled under the sofa in his hurry, and he hasn’t got the time to fish it out, and as Lily runs up the stairs with a frighteningly quiet Harry in her grasp and James stumbles to a stop in the entrance hall he knows that the only thing he can offer his child and his best friend is precious few seconds that can make all the difference.
The front door is blasted open so powerfully that the handle hits the wall with a sickening crunch of wood. Then He steps through, shoulders broad and wand twirling between his fingers, and James knows he’s looking his future murderer in the eye.
The first Unforgivable misses him just barely. James jumps out the way for the next, and the one after that. Voldemort calls him a fool, an idiot, a child, aims curses in a manner that could be called playful if it wasn’t so sickening.
James straightens and sneers and smiles. There’s an amused cackle, a bored twist of the wrist; the incantation is spat out like it’s filthy and that curse hits the mark.
And so, just like that, James Potter dies.
He dies because he’s panicking, just a little bit. He dies because he hasn’t got his wand where it ought to fucking be. He dies because Peter is the spy, because Voldemort knows their location, because they shouldn’t have hidden in an old property in Godric’s Hollow under a Fidelius and should’ve hidden behind ancient war wards instead.
He dies because of inevitability, in hindsight. He was dodging the flashes of green and staring right into the shadowed face of a hooded figure, knew he was taking his final breaths just to buy his family some time, and one curse landed and he died and it’s bloody inevitable.
James Potter dies. He dies before he even hits the ground, after taking the Unforgivable he was expecting to the chest; he dies and his murderer shakes off the mild effort of facing a wizard who would have been a formidable opponent if he hadn’t been wandless, steps over the corpse like it’s a questionable puddle, and absentmindedly taps his wand against his thigh as he climbs the stairs and listens to terrified whispers of a mother.
And somewhere, buried deep behind protective curses and endless books and thirty-five years of loyalty, three separated objects seem to blink.