The Fateful Night (VERY long)

[darrin_burnett]

No: HPFGUIDX 42255

Grey wolf wrote: (I snipped almost everything, because I find almost 
everything else reasonable.) :)

> 
> Voldemort then goes into the house, with the intention of paying 
Peter > for being a traitor: giving him Lily. However, he's a 
profesional evil  overlord, and thus knows rule #78. <I will not tell 
my Legions of  Terror "And he must be taken alive!" The command will 
be "And try to take him alive if it is reasonably practical."> and 
thus, when after several warnings Lily fails to get out of the way, 
she is summarily AKed (rules #4. <Shooting is not too good for my 
enemies.> and #6. <I 
> will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.>).
> included.


I really don't think V-Mort tried all that hard to spare Lily, based 
on what we know, which of course is pretty sketchy. In fact, I'd 
argue that he doesn't even meet the reasonably practical standard. 

And doesn't canon really only give us one warning, maybe two? I keep 
coming back to the fact that warning or no warning, there were other 
options at V-Mort's disposal besides AK. 

More circumstantial, it seems that in the big Wormtail pleading for 
his life scene in PoA, wouldn't he bring up that he "tried to have V-
Mort save Lily?" even if, in a bit of spin doctoring, he'd leave out 
that he wanted Lily for himself?

I believe Lily was never meant to be spared and the V-Mort simply 
wanted to kill Harry first because that was his primary mission and 
he had a reasonable assumption that Dumbledore would figure out what 
was going on fairly quickly.

At best, V-Mort would have left Lily alone because she's not worth 
his notice, which explains Riddle's "Your mother needn't have died," 
routine, which may or may not be true.

But in the end, I believe a specific bargain to spare Lily doesn't 
wash.

Darrin
-- UNLESS we go back to the "Lily diving in the way of a blast at the 
last second" theory.