Chapter Text
We begin with my favorite soul.
(Is it wrong to have favorite souls? I don’t know.)
She unknowingly summoned me on a particularly stifling August afternoon. British summer alone makes one miserable, but the wretchedness of this day was compounded for Lily Evans by several factors.
It was a testament to just how much Lily hated James Potter that she forbore hexing her sister, Petunia, into a unrecognizable mass of pimples, warts, and tentacles. Lily was not a particularly patient person, and she knew the curse by heart; she was just saving it for someone special.
The sweltering heat was worsened by the fact that her family’s single fan had broken when Petunia’s lumbering boyfriend, Vernon, had kicked it in a fit of rage when Liverpool failed to save the final goal. (Sports tantrums do wonders for our numbers.) Lily wasn’t sure where Petunia had found Vernon (a maelstrom in the Bermuda Triangle, a dank cave with a collapsed entrance, and a landfill were currently her top hypotheses), but she wished fervently that Petunia would put him back.
“Why does he have to come over every day?” Lily had complained to her mother once at the beginning of summer. Lily, fresh off the Hogwarts Express, had been greeted by a sullen Petunia, an orotund Vernon Dursley, and parents who had been stuck in a car with both of them at King’s Cross. It had been a less-than-ideal homecoming.
“Give him a chance,” her mother had encouraged. “Maybe you’ll start to like him.”
“Fat chance,” Lily had muttered. “They’ve been going out, what, six months? Do you like him yet?”
“No,” her mother had admitted. “But maybe one day I’ll find something about him I don’t detest.” They had laughed then. Two months and fifty-four Vernon visits later, no one was laughing anymore (except for Petunia, in a breathless, false sort of way, when Vernon made a comment no one else had realized was a joke). Lily had heard her mother complaining to her father in an undertone that he was eating them out of house and home, and indeed, he never skipped a third helping of the Evans family dinners he rarely missed.
On this particular day, Vernon had come over at the ungodly hour of eleven in the morning. Normally he held off until at least one, but apparently today was his and Petunia’s six month anniversary, and thus a reason to inflict their happiness on the rest of the Evans clan. When Petunia ushered him into the sitting room that morning, Lily was quite certain she had heard a stifled groan from her father’s corner of the room. Sunday summer mornings had always been their ‘read in’ days - her father the Sunday Times, her mother a novel, Petunia a smattering of gossip rags. Lily had graduated from picture books to stealing the Times from her father to perusing her textbooks.
Today she was deep in study of Secrets and Serums: A Comprehensive Guide to Potioncraft in the Wizarding World, a lend from her best friend Severus, who had sworn up and down it would give her a foolproof method for brewing a Draught of Unfogging. During last year’s exams, it had been her only failure - but a memorable one: her cauldron had emitted a puff of black smoke that covered her from head to toe in soot, and then started Gregorian chanting about her worst insecurities. “Flaming hair and freckled face, to her House a great disgrace…” She could still remember the lyrics, mostly because a certain bespectacled boy had followed her around singing them for the remainder of their fourth year. That one potion had cost her the top grade in their year as well as her dignity. This was their fifth year - their O.W.L. year - and Lily was determined to beat him in everything.
Hovering invisibly near the entrance to the Evans family sitting room, I observed them: Lily’s mother, gazing fondly at her husband and daughter over a copy of Sense and Sensibility. Lily’s father, grunting under his breath about the prime minister’s stupid economic policies and even stupider face. Lily, appearing consumed by her textbook but in reality drifting into imagination. (My kind is always invisible to Muggles, of course. I’ve found a loophole that allows me to be undetectable to Wizardkind as well - more on that later.)
Lily was lost in daydreams of grinding James Potter’s smug face into the mud (perhaps not entirely figuratively - she was envisioning doing it on the Quidditch pitch after a particularly nasty rainstorm as poetic justice for the Gryffindor Seeker) when Vernon entered. This blissful distraction perhaps excuses her lapse in judgment in not immediately stowing away Secrets and Serums. She even missed her father’s quickly smothered sound of despair. (You’ll have to forgive him this rudeness. Imagine looking up and discovering a somewhat sentient, very corpulent refrigerator standing in your sitting room.) Petunia was hanging onto him like stringy moss onto a boulder.
“Morning!” Vernon boomed, looking around the room possessively. “Any coffee left over, Mrs. E?”
‘Mrs. E.’ (who deeply resented this nickname, although she would never say a word to Petunia about it) smiled politely at him. “I think so, Vernon. I’ll go look in the kitchen, shall I?” Thus she made her escape, Mr. Evans frowning after her and wishing he had thought of that himself.
Vernon took Mrs. Evans’ spot on the sofa. Petunia managed to save Sense and Sensibility just before he sat on it. “How about the PM, Mr. E.?” he said, settling himself comfortably. “Genius economic mind, I daresay. Terribly glad he’s our man.” (The PM was as much Mr. Evans’ man as Ghengis Khan (who by the way, despite all the genocide, had marvelous taste in textiles) and Mr. Evans had accidentally summoned half a dozen of us last year when he had nearly put his foot through the telly after the election results had been announced.)
Mr. Evans merely grunted and buried himself deeper in his newspaper. Mrs. Evans had reprimanded him in the past for not being friendlier to Vernon, but he found that grunting was as friendly as he could be at present.
Thankfully, Vernon regarded grunting as a superior form of conversation. Satisfied he had established himself as a great political mind to his girlfriend’s father, he turned his attention to the unfortunate Lily, who had lapsed back into happy reveries of smearing mud into Potter’s artfully ruffled hair.
“And what are you reading?” he inquired. Vernon considered himself extremely well-read, having skimmed the back cover of A Tale of Two Cities at the bookshop once. Lily did not answer; she had tuned out the world, a soft smile playing across her lips as she imagined taking a Beater’s bat to Potter’s broomstick. Petunia scowled at her sister, but before she could snap at her, Vernon had crossed the room and torn Secrets and Serums from her hands.
“Secrets and Serums: A Comprehensive Guide to Potioncraft in the Wizarding World,” he read aloud. He snorted, the tiny ratlike hairs on his upper lip quivering tremulously. “What the devil?”
Petunia let out a hiss from between her teeth. Lily’s eyes went wide. “It’s a novel,” she said quickly.
“Looks like a load of rubbish,” Vernon proclaimed, now flipping through the book. “What are these - illustrations? Like a kid’s book?” (Despite usually confining his newspaper reading to the comic section, Vernon looked down on illustrations due to his contempt for artists.) The illustrations were in fact complex diagrams on how to brew potions, but Lily wasn’t about to tell him that. I watched as her soul darkened from its usual silver to a gunmetal gray. (Souls have colors, if you didn’t know. Petunia’s was a buttoned-up brown, and Vernon’s was mucus yellow.)
“Sure,” she said, voice deceptively calm. “Illustrations. Can I have it back?” Vernon ignored her, continuing to flip through the book.
“The rubbish that gets published these days,” he barked. “The education in this country is going downhill, I tell you. Utterly disgraceful.” Over the top of his newspaper, Mr. Evans was watching Lily. Although he couldn’t see her soul as I could, he could see the tip of her nose reddening - a warning sign that pressure was building.
“Right,” she said. “If I could have it back?”
Once again, Vernon ignored her. “Not that you’d know, I suppose - don’t you study abroad somewhere? Pet said your parents ship you off to America, or some weirdo foreign country?” He chuckled. “I suppose they’re embarrassed you can’t read without pictures, eh?” Believe it or not, Vernon did not mean this maliciously. As the youngest of three equally large brothers, he had been raised to believe that if it wasn’t tough, it wasn’t love. In his own way, he was trying to connect with Lily.
Unfortunately for him, Lily had been conditioned to see teasing as bullying for nearly five years now. She shot to her feet, face nearly as red as her hair. Without warning, the pages of every book, newspaper, and magazine in the room flew open and began ripping themselves out, coalescing into a huge, amorphous ball in the center of the room.
Petunia shrieked; Vernon’s eyes bulged. Lily’s father shouted something impossible to hear over the tearing sounds of the paper. The pages began re-forming themselves into the shape of a gigantic mouth. The mouth promptly descended on Vernon and devoured him. Petunia screamed and slumped into a dead faint.
Lily’s father sighed. “Well, I suppose points for poetic justice. Dear?” he called into the kitchen. “I win.”
Lily’s mother came rushing out. “Lily!” she chided. “Just one more month and I would have won five quid off your dad.” Lily, breathing hard, stared wildly between the two of them.
“What?” she choked out. Her father looked rather smug. “We figured it was only a matter of time before you exploded on him. If you hadn’t, one of us might have anyways.” As the mouth collapsed into drifting scraps of paper, Vernon’s form became discernable beneath the growing mound of white. Petunia stirred weakly. Their mother sat on the floor beside her and began patting her back.
Lily looked at them, aghast. “You saw this coming? And you didn’t - I don’t know, tell me to keep it together? Keep me away from him?” I saw tears pricking at her eyes.
“It’s all right, dear,” her mother soothed. “You told us, remember? Your Ministry will come and sort him out. No lasting harm done. Anyways, we were all getting a bit tired of - ”
“But I could have hurt him!” “You wouldn’t have, though,” her father said confidently. “Not our Lily.”
“I could have! And now I could be expelled!” The tears came hot and fast now. She could barely see her parents, now frowning at each other.
“What do you mean, expelled? Surely it’s just a misunderstanding?”
“You know I can’t use magic outside of school!”
Her father looked uncomfortable. “But surely there are exceptions to be made? They can’t possibly hold a teenager accountable for losing control of their - "
Lily let out a howl of frustration, turned, and left the house, slamming the door behind her. Her parents’ voices chased her, but childlike, she held her hands over her ears until she had left the house far behind.
I was torn on who to stay with. On the one hand, Vernon was coming to, and a Ministry wizard had indeed just Apparated right outside the Evans home. I was curious to see if a Memory Charm would have any effect on the color of his soul. On the other hand, I had a feeling I knew where Lily Evans was going. I tracked her angst in the air like a bloodhound.