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Petunia Evans’s wedding was under two days away, and there were no flowers.
She could acknowledge the irony of the situation, but that didn’t make it any more amusing to her. Oh yes, the flower-named girl whose botanist parents had beaten her over the head with a floral motif -–up until the day she started to flatly refuse any dress that even inched towards “flower-looking”–- was missing flowers at her wedding, very funny.
As soon as she could get her hands on some, she was going to beat the universe over the head with a bouquet of roses. See how funny it thought it was then .
“And they don’t have any that aren’t contaminated?” Petunia demanded of her mother, for the hundredth time. Mrs. Evans sighed.
“No, dear.”
“And there’s nowhere else I can get them. You don’t have any botanist friends that have roses?”
“Not five hundred of them. In January.”
“Could they give me the ones that they have? If we ask enough people, then it could add up to-–”
“Petunia, love, I highly doubt there are five hundred red and white roses in all of England at the moment. I’ve said it already, but I’m going to say it again because it warrants repeating: It. Is. January .”
A frustrated noise somewhere between a growl and a banshee cry crawled its way up Petunia’s throat. Embarrassingly, she felt the heat of oncoming tears prickle behind her eyes.
“So that’s it, then.”
“I’m afraid so,” Petunia’s mother said, sounding genuinely sorry.
“My wedding is ruined.” Petunia buried her face in her hands, pressing the heels of her palms hard against her eyes to stop herself from crying. She felt her mother move to rub comforting circles on her back “It’s all over.”
“Oh, is it then?”
Petunia wrenched her face out of her arms. Her head whipped around to glare at her sister, who was hovering on the bottom step of the stairs with an interested expression.
Lily gave Petunia a double thumbs-up. “Bully for you! That bloke was horrid anyway. Glad you had the sense to call it all off.”
Petunia’s thoughts quickly pivoted to cold-blooded murder, and Mrs. Evans hastily jumped in.
“The wedding’s not off at all, Lily Evans. Your sister’s just being dramatic.” Petunia turned her dark look onto her mother, making the woman wince. “What I mean is that her flower supplier had a parasite outbreak in its greenhouse, and now we’re short about… all of it.”
“No aisle decorations,” Petunia muttered darkly. “Nothing for the arbour. Nothing for the flower girl to scatter. No centerpieces at the reception–”
“Oh. I see.” Lily sounded distinctly less enthused than she had a minute ago when under the impression that Petunia was about to become a runaway bride. “Well, good luck with that.”
Petunia saw her sister eye the fridge, which was a foot over from the breakfast table Petunia was crying at, with the deliberation of someone wondering whether or not dinner was worth entering the battlefield. Petunia turned her back to Lily, more than happy to let her go to bed hungry, but their mother had other plans.
“Lily,” she repeated, scoldingly. “Your sister is upset.”
Lily winced. “...Okay, Mum? I’d be upset too, if I were marrying a man who makes screws.”
Petunia was going to cut her hair off while she slept. “He sells drills.”
“My mistake.”
“Like the guy you’re seeing is such a catch-–”
“ Girls ,” Their mother said exasperatedly. They quieted. “Squabbling is not productive. We need to think of a solution, and we won’t do that by being snippity at each other.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Petunia asked darkly, casting a dirty look in her sister’s direction. She’d thought she had made it rather clear that Lily was to have a true value of NO impact on the entire affair of Petunia’s wedding. Inviting her at all had been a stretch enough, having her involved in an apocalyptic crisis was simply too much.
“So true, Pet,” said Lily. “Who is this ‘we,’ Mother? Certainly not myself. Maybe it’s Vernon’s eugenicist sister. She’s Petunia’s most trusted bridesmaid, after all…”
“Get over yourself,” Petunia snapped. Was it such a crime for a bride to want her bridesmaids to be normal people only?
Lily’s expression was downright mutinous. She leaned over the railing on the stairs to glare at Petunia.
“You know I could get you as many roses as you wanted for your stupid wedding. I could fill the whole bloody church with roses. Do you want me to do that? Or are you just so far up your own arse that you’re going to stew in your own pity? I am a great witch, Petunia, and I could give you the best wedding since Princess Diana if you’d let me! But you won’t, we both know you won't. Do you wanna know why?”
“I already know why, you w–-”
“Because you’re a dick. Have a flowerless wedding.”
Lily turned on her heel and swept anticlimactically back up the stairs. Distantly, they heard a door slam.
Mrs. Evans stood up as if to go after her, but Petunia’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, forcing her mother back down into her chair.
She is not going to make this about her, Petunia thought with venom. This is my wedding. It’s about me.
“Don’t,” is all she ended up saying out loud. “Please, don’t? Just stay with me. I need you to figure this out with me.”
Her mother looked at her with something related to pity, but not quite. Mrs. Evans ruffled her daughter’s hair, and for once Petunia didn’t bat her hand away.
“Alright,” her mother said. “Let’s think.”
* * *
It sucked ass, being a good person.
Lily paced around her room, drafted half of a letter to nobody at all, crumpled it up, then paced some more. Her brain was doing that annoying thing where it endlessly replayed the argument in her head, unhelpfully supplying minor adjustments and better word choice to make it all the more cutting. Not that she thought she’d done too shabby with the ultimatum she’d ended up with, but she couldn’t turn it off.
However, as she wore tracks in the ground, her whizzing brain ended up careening off the path of righteous anger and into the far more annoying territory of: was I too harsh? It is her wedding… should I do something to help?
Should I do something to help?
Should I…
I should…
I should do something to help.
Click! Went her mind, and the idea was locked in. She should do something to help, even though Petunia didn’t want her to.
Shite.
Lily groaned out loud, but she was already cycling through ideas in her mind. What she’d said was true: it would be the easiest thing in the world to grow Petunia a truckload of flowers. There were a million ways to do it; transfiguration spells were always easy, and Lily was pretty good at keeping them to stay transfigured for extended periods of time. She could also just find one single rose and speed up its growth and reproductive process exponentially, then change half of the harvest into red or white (whichever the original rose hadn’t been).
There was so much she could do with magic, and the result would certainly be better than whatever stunted greenhouse flowers her sister had ordered. But, since she knew her sister–- or at least knew this about her with a horrible certainty-– Lily knew that any flowers with even a hint of magic behind them would be tossed straight into the bin.
So… not that, then. Lily couldn’t come up with any feasible ideas on how to get real, non-magic roses at this time of the year (though the idea of apparating to somewhere with a warmer climate, buying the roses, and apparating back did briefly flit through her head before it was dismissed as too close to magically sourced,) so she turned to alternate ideas for decor. From what she knew about the wedding planning, which was admittedly not much, Petunia was going for an über-traditional wedding. That ruled out some of the cooler centerpieces (glitter), so Lily had to run through the list of Traditional Things That Grandma’d Like in her head.
Candles? Too boring. Maybe if they were paired with something else… She’d come back to them later.
Fruit? Kind of gross. Also too few fit the red/black/white colour scheme. No.
Pearls or other red/black/white gemstones? Who the hell had enough money for that? No.
Ornate books? This was Petunia. No.
Origami? Too small. Although…
Lily brightened. She was already grabbing her purse and swinging out the door by the time her idea fully cemented in her head.
She had this in the bag. Of course she did! She was Lily Evans.
Now, just to find a store that was open this time of night.
That ended up being the most difficult part of her plan, in fact. Not too many arts and crafts stores kept their lights on past midnight, much to Lily’s annoyance. She eventually managed to coalesce enough collective resources from several different 24-hour supermarkets to be satisfied, though by the time she did it was past four in the morning.
Energy still running high, Lily returned home with elation that had to be tamped down as she entered through the front door, aware that the rest of her very sensible family would be sleeping. As quietly as possible, she pulled out a chair at the table Petunia had previously been sobbing on, spreading her several bags of bounty across its circular surface. After taking a moment to appreciate herself (Wow, I’m GOOD good), she sat down and got to work.
Petunia had better really fucking appreciate her.
* * *
Petunia felt like she hadn’t slept a wink all night.
She’d tossed and turned and cried, cursed her sister’s existence, then cried some more. By the time 5:30 rolled around, she had been staring at the clock for fifteen straight minutes, just waiting for an acceptable time to get out of bed and put an end to the torture.
The acceptable time had arrived. It was officially the day before the wedding.
The sun wasn’t even up, but Petunia plodded down the stairs anyway. Maybe she’d say that this was practicing being a wife, getting up before the rest of the house to make breakfast. Her dad wouldn’t like that, though, he really wanted to make her a special last-day-as-an-unwed-innocent-girl breakfast type thing. She wouldn’t take that away from him, but maybe she could make herself a very small something..? Just to tide herself over until he woke up…
Petunia stopped at the bottom of the stairs with one hand on the railing and stared. At the kitchen table, in an unnerving mirror of Petunia herself last night, sat Lily. And… what appeared to be several metric tonnes of tissue paper.
“What.” Petunia said out loud, causing Lily to jump violently and drop the something she’d been holding.
“Oh! Pet! Good morning!” Lily glanced at the clock as if to verify that it was, indeed, morning. “I was just–- wow, it’s early. Or late for me, I suppose. I’ve been u–”
“What are you doing?” Petunia interrupted, slowly making her way into the kitchen. Strewn across the table were various shades of red, white, and silver tissue paper, mixed in with what looked to be pipe cleaners. As Petunia entered the room fully, she noticed a pile of oddly shaped lumps behind Lily.
“Ah, well.” Lily turned around in her chair to look at the pile with Petunia. “I’ve been making you your flowers.”
Petunia’s gaze snapped sharply to her sister, making her hold up her hands in the universal woah, nelly gesture.
“The muggle way, the muggle way,” Lily reassured her. “I’m making you paper roses, aren’t they pretty?”
Petunia bristled. “I told you not t-–”
“I know, I know, I know. But! Look!”
Lily took one from the pile and thrust it into Petunia’s hands. Petunia, still glowering, looked down at it.
Her first reaction was that it was quite tacky. It was a flower made out of tissue paper and pipe cleaners, of course it was tacky. And Petunia Evans did not do tacky.
Her second reaction, however, was that it might also be pretty.
Lily had folded each flower into swirls; some solid coloured, some with silver or red or white layered on top of each other. Some were bushy like hydrangeas, others were small and neat like the roses she’d wanted. There was a great variety amongst them, but they all had silver pipe cleaners for stems and leaves.
Petunia looked up from the one in her hands to her sister.
“How long have you been making these for?”
“Hm? Oh, um. I don’t know, an hour? Hour and a half?”
“There’s…” Petunia trailed off, eyeing the pile. “A lot of them.”
“I work fast,” Lily said smugly. Then, catching Petunia’s wary glance: “No magic, swears.”
“Hmm,” Petunia said. She dropped her gaze to the paper rose she was holding and twirled it in between her fingers.
When Lily spoke again, it was hesitant.
“Do you… like them? You’d better,” she added, but it lacked bite.
“They-–” Petunia cut herself off with a sigh. “They’ll look good. At the wedding.”
Somebody kill her, she was actually going to have to use these.
Lily looked like someone had just told her Father Christmas was actually real. (Maybe he was, honestly. From what she’d overheard Lily say, it wasn’t out of the question.)
“Of course they will,” her sister chirped. “Wanna learn how to make them? It’s pretty easy. It’ll go faster with you helping, too.”
Petunia tilted her head to study Lily pensively. Her green eyes were bright and open with no obvious ulterior motive behind them, and– well. Petunia really needed decorations for the wedding.
After a moment, Petunia slowly lowered herself in the chair across from Lily’s.
“Sure, you can show me,” she said, and tried to ignore the way her sister looked nearly moved to tears.
“Right,” Lily said. “Yeah. Sure. What type do you want to do? There’s the roses, the bushier ones, and I’ve been experimenting with making tulips and smaller flowers, though I don’t know if those’ll hold up to your standards.” Lily held up one that did, frustratingly, hold up to Petunia’s standards.
“No lilies or petunias?”
Lily shuddered. “Mer-– God no.”
Petunia snorted. “Cheers. Show me how to do the rose ones.”
“‘Kay.” Lily took two new sheets of red tissue paper and handed one to Petunia. “So for this one you need glue; I guess you could use tape if you really wanted, but I think glue gives it more stability…”
It took a few tries for Petunia to produce a flower that she was satisfied with, but she was surprised to find that her sister was actually quite a good teacher. Her innate bossiness, which was grating under regular circumstances, made for a direct and clear-cut instruction style. After Petunia had mastered the roses, Lily offered to teach her how to make the rounder ones, which ended up being infinitely easier and glue-less.
This was how they spent the better part of three hours, mostly in seldom-interrupted silence, until Petunia broke it to ask something she’d been distantly wondering about.
“How’d you learn how to do this, anyway?”
Lily looked up from her tissue paper.
“Hm? Oh. From a friend from Hogw-– er, from school. Mary MacDonald. Her older sister got married last summer, all of us wanted to help out, so we were tasked with making these.” Lily held up her half-finished flower.
“Ah.” Petunia wrinkled her nose at her own flower and deeply regretted asking. “I’d have thought your kind would use winged monkeys as wedding decoration.”
Lily looked at her sourly. “Mary’s muggle-born; her family’s all normal. I thought I told you that at some point.”
Petunia lifted a shoulder. “I didn’t think it mattered.”
Lily scoffed.
“Hm! If only!”
Petunia squinted at her. “Sorry?”
Lily shook her head, still looking bitter. “Nothing. Anyway, that’s where I learned. Quite therapeutic, isn’t it?”
Petunia looked back down at her flower, fluffing up the last row of petals. “Maybe if I wasn’t working overtime trying to get them all finished before my hen do.”
“Eh, I’ll work through your party if we don’t get it done by then. I’ll take them up to my room.”
Petunia frowned and tilted her head. “Are you not coming?”
Lily blinked. “What, to your hen do? I wasn’t invited.”
“The invitation was implied,” Petunia snapped, offended. (Even though it wasn’t.)
“It wasn’t,” said Lily. (Dammit.)
“Well.” Petunia coughed. “You’re invited, I suppose.”
Lily exhaled slowly. “...Thanks.”
“Sure.”
They fell into silence again until half an hour later, when their father descended the stairs in order to prepare breakfast. There were many exclamations over the pile of paper flowers on the kitchen floor, but to Lily’s credit, she only ducked her head and deflected most of her dad’s effusive praise until it became directed towards the woman that was actually getting married. Petunia plastered a smile on her face when Mr. Evans came towards her for a hug, and when he pulled her into his arms, she caught her sister’s eye over his shoulder.
Lily held up one of the flowers and winked at Petunia, before fitting the fake plant behind her ear. It was but a shade lighter than her hair, and it looked... nice.
Thank you, Petunia thought in her sister’s direction, and hoped that mind-reading was one of the things witches were capable of.
She sure as hell wasn’t going to say it out loud.