I wasn’t ready to watch his face vanish amongst the crowds, into a summer’s rest, into a summer of separation. I wasn’t ready to see him and Sirius vanish into the distance, leaving me, standing alone by a train that I wished would turn around, take me back. I wasn’t ready to join my anticipating family, my sister and her fiancee, my parents and their excitable questions. I wasn’t ready to kiss my friends on the cheek and say goodbye. To get in the car and drive to a Muggle house on a Muggle street, where I was vulnerable, unprotected, and missing James.
I was hardly ready to admit to anyone, sitting there in the back of a Mazda, watching hippies and punks congregating on London street corners in angst and protest, each of them bearing a target, a title, “Muggle.” They didn’t know what I knew. What my friends knew. What my family tried to understand, and frequently forgot. These kids, my age, my peers, hardly my equals, thought their only thing to fear was the government.
I knew better.
*****
I was sitting up reading a book, in my Surrey Secondary sweat pants and a thin v-neck, the ceiling fan in my room spinning so fast each blade was a blur into the next. My owl, Cleopatra for the coloring around her eyes, was watching and fluttering her wings in the summer heat. My sister and parents had gone into London to check out yet another catering company.
The book was a study of genocide, in the form of historical fiction. It was macabre and morbid and perfectly Muggle, perfectly ignorant. The author seemed to think that our world was turning into a utopia of peace and tolerance. Within the first few chapters I was shocked at how little he seemed to know or guess.
A letter from Remus sat by my hip. Peter Pettigrew’s father, a clerk in the Auror office in the Ministry, had gone missing a few weeks after the end of term. I was devastated. This attack was the closest to home yet. A letter to Peter sat beneath the desk light, which seemed to grow brighter as the outside world grew darker. Streetlights started to come on, and the sun became a memory. My eyes grew more and more weary, and soon the book had fallen onto my lap, and my head sank onto my pillow, and I was out, the stifling heat numbing my mind and making it easier to forget the fact that being a Muggleborn made me a possible target. That I was marked for death. And virtually unguarded . . .
“Lily, Lily, Lily,” the voice hissed, low and serpentine.
I sat up in bed, my hair mussed, the desk lamp out, the moon where it would be for two a.m. rather than ten p.m., which is when I recalled dozing off. My book was on the floor. My owl was gone. I was sweaty, my pajama bottoms sticking to my legs, my bangs sticking to my face. A man with a black cloak on sat opposite me, his red eyes staring at me from the other side of his hood, his white skin opaque beneath the mask. The mask had no spot for a nose or nostrils. I knew he had none.
“Your parents are dead, Lily. Your sister is dead, Lily. James is dead, Lily. Die, Lily.”
A flash of green light illuminated my room and the deepness of pupils, and then awoke, my face hotter than it had been in my dream.
The light was on. The sky outside was the pearly gray of a foggy morning. Cleopatra’s head was beneath her wing. And my mouth was open in a scream that I knew I had imagined, but still rang around my childhood space without inclination to cease.
*****
My father was making pancakes, and looked exhausted. I suspected he’d been up late, drowning his disapproval of Tuney’s impending union in a bottle of Grandpa’s last Christmas present. My mother was chatting aimlessly about flower arrangements. Petunia and Vernon were, mercifully, nowhere to be seen. I marched in, my hair pulled back, my shirt wrinkled, the sweatpants gathered around my bare ankles.
“Sleep well, hon?” Mum asked, her voice feminine and strong. I was pulled back to my first day at primary school, to boarding the train at Hogwarts, to the first time I’d come home in rapturous pleasure and excitement, only to lose the only sister I’d ever had, and ever would have, to a prejudiced beast.
“Oh, totally,” I lied, shivering. Voldemort couldn’t reach me here, I tried to believe. Dumbledore wouldn’t let him, I told himself. Dumbledore was wise, I knew.
“Fantastic! I wouldn’t want you sleepy for dress day!” she gushed, and I knew the tentative mother-ness was a thing of the past. Now she was happy happy wedding mum, and I was going to wear whatever monstrosity of a bridesmaid gown she and my sister agreed to put me in.
I groaned audibly and slammed the fridge door, pulling a carton of orange juice to my mouth and guzzling. Hogwarts house elves didn’t know the value of cartons. You can’t guzzle unladylike from a pitcher. “That’s today?” I gasped, wiping my mouth.
“Yes it is! Tuney is at the shop already, getting fit for hers. She wants us there in less than an hour! So hurry!”
I grabbed a blueberry hotcake off the top of the stack, swiped it through a puddle of maple syrup, and hurried back the way I’d come. It took me a half-an hour to pull my hair up more tidily, apply makeup to the dark circles, and dig through my clean laundry to find something that had already made it out of my trunk. My hand swiped the Quidditch shirt I’d stolen from James’ dorm, and my heart shivered, bringing me back to the feelings that had begun mid-April, feelings of vulnerability, and the love those feelings had grown into.
I chose a white blouse and some denim cutoffs, some sandals and a silver headband of a lily that James gave me a Christmas present fourth year. (He still thought I’d buried it under pile of owl droppings behind the Owlery and burned the pile.) Then I climbed into shotgun and prepared myself to despise what my sister chose, deciding to maintain thoughts of James and the safety of Hogwarts when it came time to look in the mirror.
The Stag and the Doe by grangergirl35
Story Notes:
I'm not Jo, shocker? :) However, I am taking this world and using it for fun, intending no infringement, etc . . . :)
Chapter Notes: An introduction :)
Chapter Endnotes: I love Reviews :) Like a lot :)