You wish Potter : A Jily Fanfiction

Mr and Mrs Evans

James landed his broom on top of an overgrown, rubbish-strewn bank, where a line of railings separated a dirty river from a narrow, cobbled street. There was no sound apart from the whisper of the black water and no sign of life apart from an old homeless man nosing hopefully in the bin outside the fish and chips shop.

"She can't live here?" James breathed, as he stood looking across the road at rows and rows of identical brick houses, over which a towering mill chimney hovered like a giant admonitory finger. She doesn't really, he supposed, stashing his broom in a nearby thicket. Hogwarts is her home.

His footsteps echoed on the cobbles as he moved deeper into the labyrinth of houses; paint was peeling from many of the doors, and heaps of rubbish lay outside several sets of front steps. Some of them had broken windows, glimmering dully in the unforgiving afternoon sun. He stopped when he reached a house on the edge of the town, where the windows were thrown wide in the hope of tempting in a non-existent breeze. A large park, as empty as the streets, lay parched and yellowing to the right of the house, pitted with grimy sandbanks.

James let out a long, slow breath, looked up at the brilliant blue sky, and knocked on the door.

He waited. Then he heard the clatter of cutlery hitting a plate, and a curt voice snap, "I'll get it, shall I?" After a few seconds, there was movement behind the door and a thin, horsey face looked out at James through the crack.

"Yes?" said the owner of the voice. James smiled charmingly and the young woman opened the door a little wider. She was thin, and so pale that she seemed to shine in the pale light; her long, blonde hair was pulled off her face in a tight ponytail so that she might have looked startlingly like a skeleton if she hadn't been blushing.

"Hi, I'm James," he said, hoping that Lily might have mentioned his visit to her family, but the name didn't seem to mean anything to the girl. "I'm here to see Lily. You must be her sister, Tuney."

"Do you go to her school?" she asked briskly. James nodded and she gave him a look of deep disgust.

"Lily," she called into the house, but Lily's reply seemed to come from outside. "Someone from your freak school is at the door," continued Lily's sister. Then she turned back to face James. "It's Petunia," she said nastily, before leaving James standing on the front doorstep.

He ruffled his untidy black hair nervously and began to wish he hadn't ventured out to this neglected muggle town. He was sure that Lily and Snape must have been the only ones of their kind to come from such an inherently unmagical place. It was no surprise that no wizarding families lived here.

"It's not just you," said a voice from the alley along the side of the house. Lily joined James by the front door, wearing a bright yellow sundress and no shoes; her red hair tumbled past her shoulders, and James noticed that her toenails were painted orange. "Tuney's not really won over on the whole wizard and witches thing."

"She's just jealous," said James. Lily was watching him as though expecting strange symptoms to manifest themselves on his face at any moment. "I'm not going to leave, Lily," he assured her, laughing. "You can't put me off that easily."

Lily rearranged her features hastily into a shy smile. "Okay, good," she said. "Do you want to come up to my room?"

"I'd love to," said James, grinning. "But don't you think I should say hi to your parents first? Or do they think I'm a freak too?"

"No, they don't think you're a freak." Lily looked at him anxiously again. "Okay, you can meet my mum if you like. Dad's at work until tea-time though."

Lily opened the door and stood back to allow James in. They had stepped directly into a tiny sitting room, which had the feeling of a child's doll house. The front wall was almost completely taken up by the window, with its flowery curtains drawn wide; a matching sofa, a velvet armchair and a highly-polished table stood grouped together in the light flooding in from outside. The place felt empty compared to James' sitting room, which was a jumble of books, cushions, footstalls and side tables, but it was spotlessly clean and obviously well looked-after.