The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix Part Three

The Deepest Love - Part One

"Lily!" 

"That's right! That's Lily!" Mrs. Evans smiled and laughed, her eyes dancing merrily as she sat on the floor, her twin daughters playing beside her on a blanket spread out on the ground in the garden. She turned to the slightly younger of the two daughters - Lily. "Lily honey. Can you say Petunia? Pe-tuuuu-nia," she sounded it out, looking expectantly at her daughter. 

"Tuney!" Lily giggled.

Mrs. Evans laughed, "Pe- tuuuu-nia!"

"Tuney!"

Well, Lily would grow into being able to say her sister's name at one day, Mrs. Evans thought.

And grow they did.

Sirius watched as they grew, like flowers in the garden - a Lily and a Petunia - shooting up from the ground where they'd been babies with their mother, growing into toddlers and young children and on...

Tuney was laughing... they were friends... they were so close, they were inseparable, they were proper twins, twins who finished each other's sentences, who brushed each other's hair, who sang songs and danced to the radio, who held tea parties for their Barbie dolls and stuffed animals every day and held hand when they were nervous. They shared secrets. They were exactly alike but different, fraternal twins not identical, Tuney's face more pinched with lovely tresses that had natural body and curl to it, with clear, pale skin and a classic Hollywood beauty, while Lily's face was heart-shaped, ruddy, freckled, her ginger hair straight. Tuney was graceful and elegant, Lily rough around the edges, clumsy, and boyish in that she didn't care if she got dirty, only that things were a lark. Tuney's things were pink and Lily's were green or yellow or even brown - more earthy to Tuney's delicate. They completed each other, like together they made up a whole, they learned from each other, fulfilling elements the other lacked.

"Tuney! Keep up!"

"I can't keep up, you run too bloody fast!" 

Lily laughed, ducking through the trees that lined the north side of the park, her hair catching brambled branches and leaping over log and splashing through a shallow puddle, her lacy white socks and white patent leather shoes getting muddy as she went, red hair flying wildly behind her head, half fallen out of the braid Mrs. Evans had put it into that morning. 

She laughed and laughed, and the scene melted until she was flying... flying... pumping her legs sooo hard until she was kicking up at the sky, the swing beneath her soaring so high... She was shouting for Tuney to go ahead and do it, too, and Tuney was laughing and shouting no, no she'd get hurt, and to be careful!

"What's Georgie Pringle doing now?" Tuney demanded in a snobbish voice from the ground.

"Georgie Pringle is a great prat, someone ought to put that kid in his place. Deserves a detention, he does - always going around bullying other kids all over the school," Lily was saying - an echo of another day - like a voiceover as she slowed her swing, dragging her feet on the ground, dust kicking up 'round her as she did... She stared across the park.

A brutish boy and his mates were encircling a park bench like a skulk of angry foxes, and on the bench sat Severus Snape - though Lily didn't know him yet, Snape's features were too familiar to Sirius not to be easily recognized. This memory - it had to be sometime before his eleventh birthday - the summer before, judging by the weather and the greenery of the plants all about... Snape was about the stature and weight he'd been when Eileen Prince had brought him to visit Number 12 Grimmauld Place... begging for help.

Help that Walburga had not extended.

Help that he, Sirius, and Regulus had laughed at Snape for.